Once they were settled at a corner booth, Serena emptied the contents of the collapsible briefcase onto the table. There were about ten musty notebooks, several old manila folders, and clutches of loose papers. Mercer, Harry, and Cali started leafing through the notebooks. It was clear from the eager look on her face that Serena wanted to help but had little to add. “There isn’t much I can tell you. I looked through some of this in my office but I’m afraid it didn’t jog my memory. As I told you over the phone, I wrote the book a long time ago and Chester Bowie wasn’t a very big part of it.”
“How did you first hear about him?” Cali asked over the top of a brittle notebook.
“My father-in-law went to Keeler. He was the one who told me about him when I was working on the book. Even though he vanished sometime in the 1930s, students still talked about Bowie the booby when my father-in-law was a student. I just contacted the school and told them I was writing about Bowie. They sent me everything they had in their archives.”
Cali continued to press. “You hadn’t come across his name in any other source?”
“No, sorry.” Serena sipped at her soft drink. “What is this all about?”
Mercer set aside the notebook he was thumbing through. “We found a canteen in a small village in Central Africa that once belonged to Chester Bowie. An old woman there remembered him from her childhood. She also told us that shortly after Bowie left, other white men came and killed a number of people.”
“My God, that’s awful. Why would they do such a thing?”
Mercer just shrugged, since she didn’t need to know about the uranium mine. “We don’t know. We hoped that this material might provide a clue.”
Serena bit her lower lip. “Are you two looking into this for yourself or is this some kind of government thing?”
“I work for the government,” Cali replied. “I’m sorry I can’t tell you in what capacity. Mercer’s a civilian consultant.”
Mercer tried to suppress a smile. Cali had put just the right hint of intrigue in her voice for Serena Ballard to make her own inference and also to make the offer without being asked. “I was going to let you keep this stuff overnight so I can return it to Keeler, but if this is something official you should keep it until you’re done with it. Just get it back to me so I can forward it.”
Mercer gave her his best smile. “I’ll do you one better. I’ll send it to Keeler myself, with the promise that we’ll keep you informed as best as we’re able.”
Serena beamed at being included. “I can’t ask for anything more.” She stood. “Oh, and good to my word I got you some rooms compliments of the Deco Palace Hotel. You should be in the system already. Just give your names to one of the receptionists.”
“And don’t you worry,” Harry said, shaking her hand, “the hotel will more than make up the cost by the time I’m through tonight.”
After Serena had gone, they received their room cards at the reception desk. Harry dumped his overnight bag on Mercer with the vague promise to be back before they left Atlantic City in the morning. He gave his cane a jaunty wrist flick with each pace as he headed for the craps tables. Their rooms were on different floors, so Mercer gave Cali half of the documents Serena had provided and kept the other half for himself. They made arrangements to meet for dinner at eight.
Mercer decided against a quick shower and instead sat himself in a club chair in his room and began scanning Chester Bowie’s notebooks. After leafing through just a dozen pages he was convinced that Jody, the alumni receptionist at Keeler College, was correct. Bowie was a whack job. His writing style rambled from subject to subject with no discernible pattern. In one paragraph he railed against Sir Arthur Evans’s work on Minoan culture at Knossos and in the next he gave scientific reasons why the sun couldn’t have melted Icarus’s wax-and-feather wings. He wrote that the boy must have blacked out from hypoxia and crashed into the sea, as if the mythological story was fact.
Once he’d established in his mind that the bones of ice age creatures were the basis for demons and monsters, Chester Bowie treated all the ancient myths as if they were real and sought to explain them logically. Or at least as logically as he could. He believed that the famous Gordian knot was simply a hedge maze at the entrance to Phrygia and Alexander the Great merely chopped it down with his sword.
Mercer was well into the third notebook when the phone rang. “Hello?”
“I forgot what room you are in,” Cali said breathlessly.
“1092.”
“I’ll be right up. I found it.”
A minute later he opened the door to Cali’s insistent knock. She blew into the room, her eyes alight. She’d removed her blazer and he could see the shape of her small breasts and how they moved under the silk of her shell. “Chester Bowie was certifiable but he was also a genius.”
Mercer found himself immediately caught up in her enthusiasm. “What did you find?”
“Adamantine.”
“Huh?”
She threw him a teasing smile. “Not the geologist you thought you were?”
“Always suspected I wasn’t,” Mercer replied. “What’s adamantine?”
“In Greek stories of creation, after the gods had fashioned the earth,” she glanced at a note card, “Epimetheus and his brother were given the job of fashioning all the animals. Some were given wings, others claws, some got speed, some got strength. Unfortunately Epimetheus gave out all the best attributes, so when it came to man he had nothing left in his bag of tricks and he asked his brother for advice. The brother told him what would make an appropriate gift to man so Epimetheus went up to the heavens and lit a torch from the sun and bestowed fire to man, making him superior to all creatures. As you might imagine this wasn’t what Zeus, chief god of all the gods, had in mind. In anger—”
Mercer finished the story. “In anger Zeus had Epimetheus’s brother, Prometheus, chained to a mountain where birds ate his spleen.”
“Exactly.” Cali checked her card again. “It was Mount Caucasus and it was his liver, actually. The chains were reportedly made of unbreakable metal called adamantine that Jupiter himself had mined. Only Hercules’ strength was enough to break the links and free Prometheus.”
“So what does this have to do with Bowie?”
“Don’t you see? Through his research he thought he had found Jupiter’s secret adamantine mine. He went to Central Africa to prove that adamantine really existed, just one more step in proving that everything about ancient mythology was real. But instead of some legendary metal he discovered a vein of naturally enriched uranium.”
Mercer shook his head. “Hold it. He trekked into the most remote part of the world because he thought he’d found the mother lode of an imaginary metal.”
Cali grinned at his skepticism. “I’ll do you one better. He got a grant from Princeton in the fall of 1936 to go looking for his adamantine mine.”
“Princeton? Princeton backed this lunatic?”
“To the tune of two thousand dollars. Not large by today’s standards but in the 1930s that’s not chump change.” She handed him a memo on Princeton letterhead. The letter, from a Professor Swartz at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, stated that indeed Bowie had been given two thousand dollars to pursue his work on procuring ‘the elemental metal you outlined in your grant request.’ Mercer read the short note a second time, as if not believing his first reading. He looked up. Cali had a smug look on her face.
“Why the hell would someone fund this guy? He was off his rocker.”
“Apparently this Professor Swartz didn’t think so. Since I found our link, you’re buying dinner.”
Mercer didn’t acknowledge her. There was something about the date that struck a chord. Princeton in the 1930s. What was happening at Princeton in the 1930s?