Atomic Love

by Jennie Fields

  “I was going to tell you the day we went to Grant Park. But Ava was there. And being with you and Ava—I was so happy that day.”

  “Me too.”

  She’s astonished to see his eyes glassing with tears.

  “And after that, I couldn’t seem to get it out. I started to tell you a few times. That time you came for dinner and we had a tiff over Clemence’s letter . . . I meant to tell you that night too. Couldn’t find the words. But now, time means more to me. And I want to spend all the rest I have with you.”

  She’s so moved, she can hardly speak. When she does, her voice is filled with air and regret.

  “Can they do anything for you?”

  “I hear they’re experimenting with chemical therapy to kill tumors. I’ve read some of the papers. But half the time the chemicals kill the patients. It’s essentially poison. They lose their hair, can’t keep food down. Suffer. It doesn’t save very many. I can’t think of why I’d want to live that badly.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Call me a coward. I don’t want to suffer. Mostly, I wake in the night in a panic wondering how you can ever forgive me. I know what happened to you when I left. I want to say it’s not my fault, that I didn’t choose to do what happened, leaving you like that. Hurting you. They forced me to write that report. But the fact is I didn’t have the backbone to fight it. I thought I was made of sterner stuff. We all think that, don’t we? Until we’re tested . . .”

  “But why would they want to hurt my career anyway?”

  He shakes his head, looking distant and disturbed.

  “It’s . . . so damn . . . complicated.” She frowns at him, wondering how a young female scientist who had less information about the making of the bomb than Weaver could ever have mattered to a cabal of Russians.

  He reaches out and cups her cheek in his hand. His touch still wakens her skin, her heart. “The worst of it is, I’m still dragging you into my mess. People breaking into your apartment, bugging it, for God’s sake. It’s unspeakable. They’ll never leave me alone. They’ll always want more.” He shakes his head, drops his hand, then looks out over the water. With a sigh, he picks up the Scotch and slugs it back. Until it’s gone.

  * * *

  Charlie takes Sondra home in a taxi. At the restaurant she’d begun to gesture wildly, mix up her words, snort with laughter. He paid before they’d finished their dinner. People were staring as he steered her out of the restaurant. He had to grab hold of her flouncy skirt to keep her from wandering off when he flagged down a taxi. She was far too unruly to bring home on the L.

  Quiet, dignified Sondra. Until tonight, he never would have guessed she so much as lifted an alcoholic beverage to her lips. Peggy will ask for details. Blame him for the failure of the date. On one hand, he hates to betray Sondra to his sister. Peggy can be unforgiving. On the other, it explains all the other dates Peggy arranged that came to naught.

  Now in the cab, Sondra is finally silent, dazed, slack-jawed, leaning heavily against him. Her black-and-white dress ripples up between them in a froth of lost hopes. He’s terrified she’ll get sick in the cab. This is too reminiscent of escorting Stash home. Is this his lot in life? The Boy Scout who ferries ruined people to safety? Liquor doesn’t fix anything. It brings a person to the edge and lets them dangle between dignity and shame.

  A world of lonely people, scarred by the war, wishing for the security and joy they no longer have. Finding bleak comfort in drink or imposed distance from those they once loved. Or suffering quietly, making others around them suffer too. He thinks of Linda in her nightgown reaching out to say she still loves him while Stash was in the bathroom, vomiting up his fifteen beers. Since the war, the world seems such a mangled place. No one has been left untouched. No one feels entirely safe. Sitting in the taxi beside Sondra, the lights of the city streaking by, he sees a world rebuilding itself higher and mightier every day—to prove what? That America’s survived. Every skyscraper a desire to forget and look to the future. All built on scars.

  At that moment, Charlie wants to look to the future too. He’s tired of feeling unmoored. Unlovable. Irreparable. Didn’t he suffer enough in the jungle and at Mitsushima? Doesn’t he deserve a future of kindness, maybe even love? He’s got to find the courage to reach out for it.

  * * *

  “Now that I’ve got the damn cancer out of the way, it’s time to talk about the people who broke into your apartment,” Weaver says. “I don’t want to tell you too much yet. I don’t want to endanger you more. However, I will tell you—”

  “No, Weaver.”

  “No?”

  She still needs to know what he’s done. But not now. At this moment, the news of his cancer is all she can absorb. Knowing he may only have a few more years left, does she want him to spend them in jail? On the other hand, if he helps the FBI, might he absolve himself before he dies? My God, how is she supposed to handle any of this?

  “Roz, I need to tell you, to confess before I can’t. It’s a poison that needs draining.”

  She shakes her head. “We’re not draining it tonight.” All her life, she’s been driven by curiosity, asking too many questions. It was part of what made Louisa so impatient with her. But for the first time she can remember, answers feel dangerous, pose too many moral choices. And she is sure that whatever he tells her will make her furious. She needs time to think. To plan. To talk to Charlie too . . .

  She reaches for Weaver’s face, turns it so she can kiss him. Again, his lips are burning hot. Now she knows why. But those fevered lips are lips she loves, despite herself. She should hate him. She can’t. She doesn’t. This is the man who first made her feel like a woman, showed her she was worthy of love. “Let’s go home and make love. Let’s not care that they’re listening.”

  “No. You don’t want that,” he says. “You’ll freeze knowing it.”

  “Or your place.”

  “If your place is bugged, surely mine is too.”

  “Then a hotel. Let’s go to a hotel. And let’s make love. All night.”

  “Are you trying to kill me?”

  “We’ll endeavor to keep you alive for a few more years at least.”

  His lips curl into a gentle smile. “What a naughty girl I turned you into.” He points to the neon sign across the water, the hotel that juts out at East Lake Shore Drive. “How does the Drake sound?” She watches the pink neon sign sizzling against the dark blue sky. It’s only a few blocks away. Surely they’ll have one room still open?

  “Leave the glass,” she tells him. “We’d never be able to explain it to the desk clerk. Besides, I got it at the supermarket in a box of laundry detergent.”

  “What a classy girl you are,” he says. “Naughty and classy.”

  Laughing in the dark, he links his arm in hers. As they walk toward the neon, she briefly thinks of the FBI agent who is supposed to sit in her hall starting at ten P.M. Hopefully, he won’t be too concerned when he knocks on her door and no one answers.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Just before dawn, blue light fills the hotel room like a perfect chord. And with waking comes a pain Rosalind hasn’t felt since Weaver left her—grief. Listening hard, she lays her hand on Weaver’s back to test the rise and fall of his breath. Someday, sooner than it should, his breathing will stop, like a clock that’s run out its winding. How much will he suffer? How much will he change as the cancer explodes inside his body? In the dark, anxious months after he left her in ’46, Rosalind learned that the hour before dawn is when she felt the most despair. They say it’s the time of day when heart attacks seize seemingly healthy people and ill people succumb to their maladies. The hour when the grim reaper stands in the curtain folds waiting to collect his quota. Not yet. Not yet.

  She moves closer to Weaver, nestles into his feverish body. Will she be strong enough to survive losing him yet again? And what on earth will
she do about Charlie? These last few days, Charlie’s been her savior. And how utterly she’s been drawn to him. Honest. Good. Kind. Now Charlie is waiting for her to come to him with information that will convict Weaver. Information that will send him to jail, or even the electric chair.

  Weaver breathes out a contented sigh. In his sleep, he’s forgotten that something dark waits to claim him far too soon. If the cancer doesn’t kill him, she fears, inadvertently, that what she ends up sharing with Charlie might.

  * * *

  Charlie opens his eyes to the sound of Peggy calling down the stairs to him, “Telephone.” In his baggy T-shirt and pajama pants he trudges up the steps, sighing. After his date last night, he sat up until too late drinking beer on the back stoop. He feels like hell.

  “Szydlo.”

  “Your chicken seems to have flown the coop.”

  “What? Who is this?”

  “Gray. I knocked on Miss Porter’s door when I arrived at ten P.M. and she didn’t answer. I figured maybe she’d gone to bed early. So I stayed out in the hall. Knocked this morning. Nothing. I just called her from the lobby phone. No luck.”

  “Did she go off with Weaver? To his place?”

  “You didn’t tell me she was going to.”

  “Jesus, Gray. Am I your mother? Who’s on as her day man?”

  “Lawrence. He’s here now.”

  “Since we don’t know where she is, tell him to go to Field’s after it opens and make sure she shows up at the antique jewelry counter. Then have him call me.” Charlie runs his hand over his face. The dimwit. “All right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Now he’s worried. While the best outcome is that Rosalind spent the night at Weaver’s, the thought of her making love to that traitor chokes him. And by God, he put her there.

  “Everything okay?” Peggy asks as he hangs up the phone.

  Charlie shakes his head with anger. “All the damn vetting the FBI does doesn’t work. Making sure every agent has a law degree or CPA certificate—what a joke. There are idiot lawyers and CPAs too.”

  “You need coffee? Breakfast? You’re looking awfully prickly. How was your date last night?”

  He shakes his head. “Don’t have time. I’ve got to get to work.”

  Peggy presses her lips together and shakes her head as he goes by. He feels her eyes searching him, evaluating. Disappointed again.

  * * *

  Later, at his desk, he waits for that call from Lawrence and isn’t happy when the phone rings and it’s Doug Higgins.

  “Szydlo? I was going through a bunch of reports on my desk and we found something in Fullersburg Woods yesterday afternoon that might interest you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Someone reported to the police they found a lot of blood, matted leaves, a bullet casing, and a bullet in a tree. It could be someone shooting rabbits or something else benign. Then they found a handkerchief completely soaked in blood embroidered with initials.”

  “I’ll bite.”

  “CW. Isn’t that the alias of the Spenard woman?”

  Up until now, he’s imagined Victoire Spenard must be in hiding, or that the Soviets have shipped her elsewhere. He hadn’t thought of her dead. And he appreciates that Higgins actually read his report and saw that Victoire Spenard has been going by the name Clemence Weaver.

  “Anyone see anything?”

  “No. Some kids with a dog came upon the scene and their parents called it in.”

  Charlie shudders at the idea of children out for a walk stumbling upon a scene like that.

  “You check the morgues? Unidentifieds?”

  “Nothing in the DuPage County Morgue. No one fits her description. Checking hospitals too.”

  “Is Fullersburg Woods near where she lives in Hinsdale?”

  “No more than two miles. We also found a broken necklace. A long gold chain.”

  “Did you take a picture of it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Share it with me? So I can show her landlady?”

  “Yeah, I’ll put it in the pouch. You’ll have it by morning.”

  “Thanks.”

  Hanging up the phone, Charlie sits back with a queasy feeling. If someone attacked or even killed Victoire Spenard, what does that say about Rosalind Porter’s safety? Still, it doesn’t feel like the Soviets. They wouldn’t leave a scene with blood, a handkerchief, a necklace. Could Weaver have seen his wife as some kind of barrier to Rosalind’s good graces and needed to get rid of her himself? Would he ever hurt Rosalind? He might. If he found out she’s in cahoots with the FBI.

  * * *

  Rosalind stands at her counter trying to persuade a customer that a pair of 1930s diamond earrings are a fine investment at a good price. If the woman only realized the serendipity that went into creating every diamond: the impeccably clean carbon source, the 725,000 pounds per square inch of pressure, temperatures over twenty-two hundred degrees Fahrenheit. And then the hundreds of millions of years it took to create a stone like this. It’s mad that there’s a single diamond available in the world. And here are two perfectly matched specimens.

  “But the thing is . . . they’re used,” the woman says. Ring-ring.

  Damn. It’s her phone.

  “Loved,” Rosalind argues. “Beloved, I imagine.”

  “So why wouldn’t the owner pass them on in a will? How did they end up here?” Ring-ring.

  “Maybe she only had sons.” Ring-ring. “Excuse me.”

  She lifts the receiver.

  “Antique Jewelry.”

  “Where were you last night?”

  “Oh . . . Charlie.” She’s surprised by his proprietary tone. Like a jilted lover.

  “The agent assigned to you was worried. He made me worry too.”

  “I’m sorry. He introduced himself to me here this morning. Mr. Lawrence.”

  “That’s your day guy. Gray will be there tonight. You went to Weaver’s?”

  “No, we . . .” She hesitates. She doesn’t want to tell Charlie they went to a hotel. Why? He’s the one who’s encouraged her to become intimate with Weaver. And how’s she going to handle the news of Weaver’s illness? She doesn’t want to have this discussion on the phone. “Look. I’m with a customer,” she says. “I really can’t talk now.”

  “Sorry. Can you call me back, then?”

  “They frown on that here.” She hangs up. God, just hearing Charlie’s voice, his concern, moves and unsettles her. If Weaver is still sharing secrets with the Russians, and she has the power to stop him, mustn’t she still do it even if he’s dying? Last night, she loved Weaver more than she ever has. It was gorgeous and all encompassing. She let herself feel everything for him. Blocked out her doubts. Charlie’s voice has jolted her back to reality.

  The woman is rolling one diamond stud between her fingers, staring at it.

  “You ought to try them on,” Rosalind says. She hears an anxious waver in her words. “I know you’ll fall in love when you see the sparkle against your skin. Your dark hair. You’ve just the right complexion for diamonds. Hold it up to your ear. Here’s the mirror.” She’s talking too fast.

  “I . . . no.” The woman pushes the tray with the earrings back toward Rosalind. “It bothers me too much that they were worn by someone else. I don’t feel good about that. I’m not a secondhand kind of woman.”

  “But that’s what makes them affordable. Otherwise . . .”

  The sound of the woman’s high heels echoes against the terrazzo as she walks away.

  “Well, I’m proud to be a secondhand kind of woman!” she shouts too loudly at the woman’s back.

  Jesus. She needs to get ahold of herself. Even if she is desperate for a commission to pay the rent. She takes a deep breath, recalling the conversation she and Weaver had this morning as they dressed.

 
; “I had a will drawn up last week . . . ,” he said. He looked so good this morning, rested, handsome. Impossible that he has cancer. And yet, there he was talking about his will. “I’ve set money aside and it’s all for you.”

  “But you’re married. The money belongs to Clemence.”

  “I’m leaving it to you, Roz.”

  “She’ll contest it and win.”

  “She won’t.” There was an off-putting certainty to his statement that threw her.

  “Any wife would contest. You’re still married, right?”

  “She won’t contest it. I can assure you of that.”

  * * *

  The rest of the afternoon, she feels like she’s going to jump out of her skin. And it’s slow in the store. Nothing to distract her. Just Ronnie coming up with a new case of jewels that nobody will buy. Late in the afternoon, just when she’s counting the minutes to closing up her till, she spots the man with the empty eyes. She’s starting to see a pattern: He comes around noon, or like now, near the end of the day, hoping, she supposes, that he can get her alone when she steps outside of Field’s. She looks around for Agent Lawrence, who’s been walking around the floor for hours. But now, when she needs him, he’s nowhere to be found. Her stalker is standing at a counter just down from hers, pretending to peer at wristwatches. Now and then, he glances her way. Again, the expensive clothes. Fabrics like a successful businessman. A dandy with empty eyes and fake hair. She reaches beneath the counter for the miniature camera, looks down to straighten it, and nonchalantly sets it on the glass. She turns it slightly this way and that, tilts it back, hoping to capture him, snapping the shutter again and again. She doesn’t have much to give to Charlie, but she would at least like to hand him a full roll of film.