CHAPTER 9
For sixty-five years, Leonard Novak lived atop Black Oak Ridge — the ridge John Hendrix had prophesied about and the ridge that later inspired the city’s name. Like thousands of other workers who descended on the wartime city-in-the-making, Novak had moved into a mass-produced house that had been knocked together in a matter of days. The walls were made of “cemesto,” structural panels formed from cement and asbestos sandwiched around a fiberboard core. Such carcinogen-laden building materials would never pass environmental muster these days — in fact, renovating or demolishing a cemesto house these days was considered riskier than living in one. But Oak Ridge was born of wartime urgency, and cemesto houses — trucked to Tennessee in modules that could be quickly connected — allowed the Manhattan Engineer District to build the city in record time. Local lore held that children walking home from school during the war years often got lost, because whole new neighborhoods would have sprung up during the hours between the Pledge of Allegiance and the end-of-the-day bell.
The people in cemestos were the lucky few. Shared dormitory rooms, small trailers, camplike “hutments,” and flimsy “Victory cottages” were far more common. The cemestos were reserved for the people higher in the scientific or managerial or military food chain, and the higher your rung on the ladder, the higher your house on the hill. “Snob Hill,” those who lived down in the valley called it.
As I followed the curves of Georgia Avenue up the ridge, I noticed that a few of the houses still showed their original cemesto exteriors. Most, though, had been modernized with siding and thermal-pane windows; many sported carports or garages or additions, small or large. Novak’s house was sided in gray clapboards, with white shutters and a bright red door. The house was on the north side of the ridge, and as I parked in front and walked down the steps, I caught a glimpse of daylight and the distant mountains behind the house.
Emert, Thornton, and two forensic techs were already inside; so was Art Bohanan. Emert had taken the ten-week training offered by the National Forensic Academy — a cooperative program of UT and the Knoxville Police Department — and when Art had come in to teach the academy’s two-day session on fingerprinting, Emert had impressed him with his conscientious attitude and meticulous work. It had taken a bit of administrative diplomacy — including an informal request from the FBI, which also knew and respected Art’s work — but Emert had managed to persuade KPD to allow Art to assist with fingerprinting at Novak’s house.
As I walked into the living room, Emert handed me a pair of gloves to wear, so I couldn’t inadvertently muddy the waters. I didn’t plan to touch anything, but just to be on the safe side, I donned the gloves. They’d been at it for over two hours by the time I got there; they’d begun right about the time my nine o’clock Human Identification class was getting started, the students shedding their coats and fortifying themselves with long swigs of mocha-hazelnut-latte-cappuccinos, or Irish coffees, or whatever it was they had in those quart-size Starbucks cups.
The first thing that struck me about Novak’s house was how spectacular the view out the back was. The interior of the house had been opened up by knocking out several walls, and while a brick fireplace remained to hint at the original boundary between living room, dining room, and kitchen, the rest of the space flowed around that fireplace like water around a small island, and the flow seemed to empty out a large bank of windows across the back. Twenty miles north, the Cumberland Mountains — still dusted with a snowfall from the prior week — sparkled in the midday sun. The view was framed by a pair of blue spruce trees, sixty or eighty feet tall, which must have been planted shortly after Novak had moved into the house. A long, low built-in desk ran along most of the back wall, with glass-doored bookcases tucked beneath most of its length. An elegant black spindleback chair was pushed back slightly from a yellow notepad that lay at the center of the neat desk; the lettering on the notepad read “Opp,” “GK,” “Frank,” “JJ,” and “Alex.”
On either side of the notepad were several books. I bent down to check the titles. Two by Richard Rhodes: The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. A gray-and-tan textbookish tome titled The New World: A History of the United States Atomic Energy Agency, Volume 1. Three books whose titles contained a word I mistook for Verona, the city in Italy, but then realized was actually “Venona” instead. Their subtitles promised shocking revelations about Soviet espionage and atomic spies.
I wandered back around the fireplace, where Emert and Art were studying a glass display case on the mantel. Thornton had migrated to the kitchen with one of the techs. The display case, roughly a foot square and several inches deep, contained two beautiful knives. One had a handle of horn or ivory, intricately carved with Moorish-looking patterns; the other’s handle was laminated, layered with many exotic woods, their colors ranging through all the hues of the spectrum. The most remarkable thing about the knives, though, was their blades: the steel had swirls and patterns as rich as red oak, as complex as burled maple. “Fancy knives,” I said. “What’s that swirly, grainy kind of steel called? Da Vinci?”
“Close,” said Art. “Damascus steel. Actually, if you want to split hairs, it’s called ‘pattern welded.’ It’s like the baklava of steel — the way you make it is by folding the steel over on itself lots of times, and forging all the layers together, like pastry with zillions of thin layers.”
“The baklava of steel? You never cease to amaze me. How do you know this weird stuff?”
Art shrugged. “I’ve got a cousin in Nashville who’s a blacksmith. He makes stuff like this, when he’s not shoeing horses for rich country singers who never actually ride.”
“So despite the aesthetic beauty of these two knives,” said Emert — he emphasized the words “aesthetic beauty,” either to make sure we didn’t miss his highbrow vocabulary or to let us know he was making fun of the pretentious phrase—“what I find more intriguing is the third knife.”
“What third knife? I only see two,” I said.
“My point exactly,” he said.
I looked at the case again. The knives were each supported by a pair of wooden pegs, one peg under the handle, the other under the edge of the blade. A third set of pegs stood in the center of the case, empty.
“Lots of dust on the case,” said Art, “but see there, and there?” He pointed to two smudges on the glass. “Looks like it’s been opened fairly recently. How’s about I dust that? See if it was Novak or somebody else who did the opening?”