“And the other deserter?”
“The other was a corporal named Jonah Jamison,” said Rossi. “He was assigned to the Special Engineer Detachment — the military unit associated with the Manhattan Project — and posted to the Clinton Engineer Works. Never caught; vanished without a trace.”
“Clinton Engineer Works,” I said. “That was the army’s name for the Oak Ridge complex. That’s got to be our man.”
“Sounds like it,” Rossi agreed.
“How soon you reckon we can get his army dental records?” As soon as I said it, I remembered. “Oh crap. That might be a problem, huh?”
“Might be,” said Rossi. “Like the Pope might be Catholic.”
What I’d suddenly remembered was the fire. The National Archives stored tens of millions of military service records in a huge repository in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1973, a fire broke out on the sixth floor of the building, which contained two-thirds of the military files. By the time the blaze was extinguished, the files of seventeen million soldiers had been destroyed, singed, or soaked. To keep the waterlogged files from molding, archivists had put them all in refrigerated storage. Some of the damaged records were being reconstructed, by scanning their soggy pages to create duplicate files; however, progress was excruciatingly slow, and many records had been lost altogether. On two previous occasions, I had sought military dental records from the St. Louis facility. In one case, the records I needed had survived; in the other, they hadn’t. Eighty percent of the records from the 1940s had been destroyed, Rossi said, so he wasn’t optimistic about finding a dental record that would tell us whether or not it was Jonah Jamison’s skeleton laid out on a table in my bone lab.
“But I’m actually in St. Louis right now,” Rossi added, “looking through some Vietnam era records for Cusick. I’ll see if Jamison’s personnel file survived the fire.”
Statistically, the odds weren’t good — just one in five. But then I remembered Emert’s words. “Things come in threes. You’ll find it.”
Bless him: Emert was right. Jonah Jamison did want to be identified.
Jamison must have been a scientist or technician of some sort,” I said to Thornton. “Isn’t that the kind of folks who were in the Special Engineer Detachment?”
“Most of them were,” said Thornton. The agent was on a three-way call from New Iberia with Emert and me. “Jamison was different, though. He was a writer.”
“A writer? What the hell was a writer doing in a scientific and technical outfit?”
“Immortalizing the great endeavor,” he said. “General Groves had one eye on Japan and the other eye on history. Or fame.” I thought back to the photograph Miranda had shown me, and her comments on how narrowly the general’s horizon was drawn compared to Oppenheimer’s. “Groves had still photographers and cinematographers scurrying around all over the place, capturing everything on film,” Thornton was saying, “but apparently he wanted the story set down on paper too, and in style.”
The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. If the Manhattan Project succeeded, it would clearly play a pivotal role in human history. If it didn’t succeed, well, having the costly failure detailed on film and in print would likely be the least of the general’s worries. “So Jamison wrote for the Knoxville paper before the war?”
Thornton laughed. “Not exactly. Groves was aiming for greater glory,” he said. “Jamison was a New York Times reporter before the war. After he was drafted, he was assigned to write scripts for training films — how to clean your rifle, how not to get VD, that sort of thing — when Groves reached down and plucked him from the basement of the Pentagon.”
“How do you know all this stuff,” I asked, “when we didn’t even know who he was until twelve hours ago?”
“Because the FBI has files, too,” he said, “and ours weren’t stored in a firetrap in St. Louis. And because Jonah Jamison was considered a potential security risk.”
“A security risk?” That made no sense to me. “If they didn’t trust him, why didn’t they get somebody else to write about the project? Why take the chance?”
“Well, he looked like a red-blooded American risk,” said Thornton. “His Achilles’ heels were booze and women. And Groves really wanted him. Jamison had written some flattering pieces about Groves in 1942, when Groves spearheaded the construction of the Pentagon. That was the Army’s biggest project before the Manhattan Project, and apparently the stories made Groves look brilliant. Jamison was drafted at the end of ’42, and Groves had him posted to Oak Ridge in early ’43. He was reported AWOL on August 4, 1945—two days before Hiroshima.”
“And he disappeared without a trace?”
“Until you dug him up,” Thornton said. “Him and that thick stack of pages.”
“I sure wish we could read what was on those pages that were in the grave,” said Emert.
“I sure wish we knew who killed him for writing it,” I said. “Anything in his security file shed light on that?”
“Unfortunately, no,” Thornton said. “But speaking of security files, your storytelling gal pal turned up in two of the snitch reports to Acme Credit.”
“Beatrice?”
“Yup. One came from a neighbor, anonymous, who wrote, ‘That woman has the morals of an alley cat.’”
I couldn’t help it; I laughed at that. It was impossible to imagine Beatrice, her silver hair and wrinkled face, behaving scandalously. “The bad girl of AARP,” I said.
“Maybe not now,” he said. “But maybe back then. The other report came several months after that first one. An army doc at the Oak Ridge field hospital wrote that she came in bleeding and running a fever. She claimed she’d had a miscarriage. But the doctor suspected she’d had an abortion.”
CHAPTER 36
We wore badges everywhere in those days — not just to work, but to the grocery store, the post office, even church. Heaven forbid you should try to gain access to Jesus when your clearance was only for Yahweh. MPs ranged everywhere checking badges. The black section of town, Colored Town, was practically fenced off. If the face on your badge wasn’t black, a guard or MP sitting in a jeep beside the road into Colored Town might wave you over and ask what business you had in there.
The business I had in there was an abortion.
A year after I married Novak, I realized I was pregnant. This was not happy news. For one thing, I was working with radioactive materials.
We know a lot more now than we knew then about radioactivity and birth defects. I was working with equipment that flung atoms of U-235 and U-238 all over the place. In theory, the calutrons were collecting all the uranium, but in practice, it wasn’t so neat and tidy. It was probably like one of those big movie-theater popcorn poppers, the kind with the pot suspended up high inside a glass box. It’s designed to contain the popcorn, but if you look at the floor back there behind the concession stand, you’ll always see stray kernels that have ricocheted out through a gap in the gizmo. The calutrons were like that. At the end of every shift, they would run Geiger counters over us as we were leaving, and sometimes they’d find a stray particle or two of U-235 on somebody’s coveralls, which they’d remove with a magnifying glass and tweezers. It wasn’t that they were concerned about our health; it was that the uranium was so precious, they couldn’t afford to let a speck of it slip out the gate.