What he said was, “Nigger lover.”
CHAPTER 37
Beatrice turned to look at me. It had cost her some pain to tell me the story, I could tell.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You must have been desperate to have risked so much. You could have died. Or gone to prison.”
“Prison comes in all shapes and sizes,” she said. “So does death.” She turned and looked out the windows. “How did you know to ask me about that?”
I probably wasn’t supposed to say, but I felt I owed her a disclosure in return for what she’d just told me. “The FBI is looking at old files,” I said, “trying to figure out why Novak was killed. A doctor at the hospital reported that he suspected you’d had an abortion.”
“That son of a bitch,” she said. “I knew him for forty years, and I never could stand him.”
I realized I had no right to ask, but I asked anyhow. “Whose baby was it, Beatrice?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “That’s another reason I had the abortion.” She sighed. “Novak was traveling out to Hanford a lot in the spring and summer of 1945,” she said. “The big plutonium production reactors out there were coming on line, and there were technical problems to solve. It turned out that trace amounts of boron were absorbing neutrons and slowing down the chain reaction. ‘Poisoning’ it, that’s the term they used. Novak had to solve the mystery of the boron poisoning. He’d be gone for a week or ten days at a time, and I got into the habit of going down to the Rec Hall at night, to pass the time.”
“You were lonely when he was gone,” I said.
“I was lonely when he was here,” she said. “Maybe lonelier. I think I was the loneliest when he was sleeping in the same bed with me, twelve inches away but beyond reach. When he was gone, at least I could do something about the loneliness. Sometimes I even brought a man home with me. I’m sure I was indiscreet; I’m sure the neighbors talked.”
Or snitched, I thought. “I should go,” I said.
“Where? Home? Do you have a good woman waiting for you, Bill? Or a good man?”
“No. I have work waiting for me,” I said. I stood to go. Something on the end table beside her chair caught my eye. Resting atop a stack of opened mail was a small, rectangular piece of white paper with blue lettering.
“Good God,” I said.
“What?” She followed my eyes. “Oh, that,” she said. “What a jerk.”
The lettering read, “I know your secret.”
Amazing,” I said to Emert. I had called him when I left Beatrice’s house to share what she’d told me about the note. Thirty minutes later, as I sat in his office, he had already gathered a remarkable amount of information. “So this guy was just on a random fishing expedition? Trying to trick Oak Ridge geezers into spilling whatever beans they had to spill from the bomb project or the Cold War?”
“Espionage-flavored beans,” said Emert. “He was pitching a documentary to the History Channel. Atomic Secrets, he called it.” Emert waved a one-page printout — a bad photocopy of a fax, or a really good photocopy of a really bad fax. “This is a one-page treatment he’d faxed to the History Channel. He didn’t have a deal for it yet, though — it was just a proposal.”
I read the subtitle. “No wonder he didn’t have a deal,” I said. “Get a load of that subtitle. How Soviet Spies Pierced the Heart of the Manhattan Project. How clunky is that?”
“Yeah, well, Ken Burns he wasn’t,” said Emert. “But you gotta love the irony of ‘pierced the heart,’ considering how he died. Apparently he was hoping to dig up something juicy in Oak Ridge, something that would hook the History Channel.”
“How’d you get this so fast?”
“I’ll never tell,” he said, holding a finger to his lips, like the World War II billboards that reminded Oak Ridgers to keep quiet.
“Okay,” I said.
“Oh, all right, I’ll tell,” he said. “Right after you called from Beatrice’s driveway, I got a call from a desk clerk at the Double-tree, who saw the sketch in the newspaper. The secret-sniffing guy — Willard Clarkson was his name — checked into the hotel seventeen days ago, on January ninth. On the tenth, he faxed this to New York. He also asked for extra chocolate-chip cookies.”
“The Doubletree makes a damn good cookie,” I said.
“Yeah, but you’re only entitled to one cookie, and only at check-in,” Emert said. “This guy went back for seconds. He thought the regular rules didn’t apply to him.”
“What are you, the cookie police? You’re saying he deserved to die because he went back to the desk clerk and said, ‘Please, sir, could I have more?’? Hell, I’ve done that.”
“Never do it again,” he said. “Look where you could end up.”
“Clearly the desk clerk had sufficient motive,” I said. “So, this bush-league documentary guy—”
“Sapling,” said Emert.
“Sapling?”
“Bush-league’s a little harsh,” he said. “Clarkson had already done some other History Channel shows. Things about World War II aircraft carriers and fighter planes and bombers. Not bad. Some glitzy stuff for A&E, too. But as I was saying—”
“Before you were so rudely interrupted?”
“Before I was so rudely interrupted,” he echoed. “The afternoon of January tenth, he sends the fax and asks for illegal seconds on the cookies. And then nobody at the Doubletree ever sees him again.”
“They thought he’d skipped out?”
“They just thought he was weird, or reclusive. He’d said he’d be staying for several weeks. They had his credit card on file, and the DO NOT DISTURB sign was hanging on the door. They were leaving him alone.”
“January tenth,” I said. “That was right before East Tennessee turned into Antarctica, if I remember right.”
“It was,” he said. “It was also one day after Leonard Novak checked out those library books about the Venona Project.”
Emert headed to the Doubletree, to lead the search of Willard Clarkson’s room. I headed down the hill once more, to the library. I was hoping that perhaps Isabella was back by now, her father’s health improving, but the substitute at the Reference Desk dashed my hopes. She dashed my fallback hope as welclass="underline" no, she didn’t have any further details about how he was doing, or where I might send a get-well card, or when Isabella might be back. I tried to mask the frustration and embarrassment I felt; I must look like either a stalker or a fool, I realized, to be pursuing a woman who didn’t consider me worth turning to in a crisis.
“I was hoping to do a bit of history research today,” I said. It wasn’t true — it was a flimsy excuse for my presence here — but she unlocked the Oak Ridge Room for me, and I found it soothing, somehow, to be there. I looked through the notebook of photos from ORNL, and saw the Graphite Reactor take shape on a hillside, against the backdrop of a wooded ridge. I saw the immense U-shaped structure of the K-25 plant, which separated a gaseous form of uranium. The K-25 plant was the last to be completed but the largest in capacity, like some lumbering uranium freight train finally gathering momentum. I saw the oval racetracks of Y-12, their D-shaped calutrons linked by thousands of tons of silver borrowed from the U.S. Treasury. And I saw Beatrice, perched on her stool, one hand forever poised on the controls, altering the trajectory of uranium atoms and human history.