“Czech dishwashers know more science than ours in America,” Bob said one day when Elena flipped through the back pages of the Journal of Cell Biology to show him an article that explained apoptosis in Rickettsia prowazekii.
Elena turned rigid, her face white, then hurriedly left the room, saying she heard the autoclave bell ringing.
“It’s the communists,” Rhonda explained to her daughter, when Abigail reported the episode to her.
“It was so weird,” Abigail said. “It was like she thought Bob was accusing her of a crime. Besides, she was lying, the autoclave bell didn’t ring.”
“The Russians put her husband in prison,” Rhonda said. “She’s afraid that they’ll try to find her here.”
That frightened Abigail. Everyone knew how evil the communists were; they wanted to take over America, they wanted to take over the whole world. America stood for freedom and the communists wanted to destroy freedom.
“What if they come to the lab to get Elena and kill you instead?” she asked Rhonda. “Are the mice safe? Will they want the mice?”
Dr. Dolan came into Dr. Kiel’s office at that moment. “Of course they want the mice; the mice are our most important secret.”
Abigail rushed down to the animal room to make sure Miss Bianca was still safe. The mouse was nibbling on a piece of food, but she came to the front of the cage as soon as Abigail arrived. Abigail was about to take her out when she saw that Bob was in the contamination room.
Instead, she stroked the mouse’s head through the cage door. “I wish I could take you home, Miss Bianca,” she whispered.
When Bob came out and went into the back room to scrub himself down in the big sink, Abigail followed him.
“Do you think Elena is a communist spy?” she demanded.
“Where do you come up with these ideas, short stuff?” Bob asked.
“Dr. Dolan said the communists want our mice, because they’re our most important secret.”
“Dr. Dolan talks a lot of guff,” Bob said. “There’s nothing secret about the mice, and Elena is not a communist. She ran away from the communists.”
“But she lied about the autoclave. She didn’t like you saying how smart she was.”
Bob stopped drying his arms to stare at her. “You’re as small as the mice, so we don’t notice you underfoot. Look: there’s nothing secret about our mice. We get a grant—you know what that is? Money. We get money from the Army, so we do some work for the Army. The disease Dr. Kiel works with can make people very sick. If our soldiers got sick in Vietnam, they wouldn’t be able to fight, so Dr. Kiel and I and his other students are trying to find a way to keep them from getting sick.”
“But he has that drug, he showed my mom,” Abigail said.
“That’s great if you’re already sick, but if you’re in the middle of a battle, it would be better not to get sick to start with. It would be hard for the Army to get enough of the drug to our soldiers out in the jungles and rice paddies while the Vietcong were firing rockets at them.”
“Oh,” Abigail said. “You’re trying to make a shot, like for polio.”
“And the mice are helping us. We give them some of Dr. Kiel’s disease, and then we study whether we’ve learned any way to prevent them from getting sick.”
After Bob went back to the lab, Abigail took Miss Bianca from the cage and let her sit in her pocket, where she had a lump of sugar. “Even if the mice can help win a war with the communists, I think it would be better if you didn’t get sick.”
She practiced her violin for half an hour. The scratchy sounds she got from the strings sounded more like the squeaks the mice made than Bach, but neither she nor the animals minded. When she finished, she took Miss Bianca out of her pocket to ride on her shoulder. When she heard voices outside the animal room door she crouched down, holding Miss Bianca in her hand.
“Mamelouk is here,” she whispered. “Don’t squeak.”
It wasn’t Mamelouk, it was Dr. Kiel with Elena. Elena’s face was very white, the way it had been when she first came into the lab. She fumbled in her handbag and produced a jar with something red in it that Abigail was sure was blood.
“I hope is sterile. Hard job doing self. Myself,” Elena said.
Abigail bent her head over her knees, so Miss Bianca wouldn’t have to see such a dreadful sight. After Dr. Kiel and Elena left the animal room, she stayed bent over for a long time, but finally went up to the floor where the labs and offices were.
Her mother wasn’t in the outer office, but the typewriter was still uncovered, which meant she was either taking dictation from Dr. Kiel or in the ladies’ room. The door to Dr. Kiel’s inner office wasn’t shut all the way; Abigail walked over to peer through the crack.
Dr. Dolan was there. He had a nasty look on his face. The vein in Dr. Kiel’s forehead was throbbing, always a bad sign.
“I got the library to order copies of the Czech Journal of Virology and Bacteriology, and no one named Mirov is on the editorial pages.” Dr. Dolan said.
“I didn’t know you could read Czech, Patrick,” Dr. Kiel said. “I thought you moved your lips when you read English.”
Abigail wanted to laugh, it was such a funny insult. Maybe she could use it the next time Susie Campbell taunted her about her parents’ divorce.
“Don’t try to change the subject, Kiel,” Dr. Dolan said. “Are you or aren’t you harboring a communist here? What kind of background check did you do on your protégée before you let her into a lab doing sensitive work for the government?”
“I met her husband in Bratislava three years ago,” Dr. Kiel said coldly. “We were correspondents until the tanks rolled in last year and the Soviets put him in prison as an enemy of the state. Elena came here in danger of her life.”
“Correspondents? Or lovers?” Dr. Dolan sneered.
Abigail put a hand over her mouth. Lovers, like her father and the new Mrs. Sherwood out in California. Was Elena going to turn Mrs. Kiel into a single mom for the five lumpy Kiel children?
“Maybe you grew up in a pigsty,” Dr. Kiel said. “But in my family—”
“Your communist family.”
“What are you, Dolan? A stooge for HUAC?”
“The FBI has a right to know what you were really doing in Bratislava three years ago. You work with a weapons-grade organism, you speak Russian, you travel—”
“The operative word here being work,” Dr. Kiel said. “If you worked on listeria as energetically as you do on spying on my lab you’d have won the Nobel Prize by now.”
Mother came into the outer office just then and dragged Abigail to the hall. “Since when do you eavesdrop, young lady?” she demanded.
“But, Mom, it’s about Elena. She’s lying all the time, her husband didn’t work for that magazine in Czechoslovakia, Dr. Dolan said. He says she’s stealing Dr. Kiel away from Mrs. Kiel, like that lady who stole Daddy from us. And Elena just gave Dr. Kiel something funny in the animal room. It looked like blood, but maybe it’s a magic potion to make him forget Mrs. Kiel.”
Rhonda stared down at her daughter in exasperation, but also in sadness. “Abigail, I’m not sure it’s such a good idea for you to come here after school. You hear things that are outside your experience and then you get upset by them. Elena is not going to break up Dr. Kiel’s marriage, I promise you. Let’s see if I can find someone to stay with you after school, okay?”
“No, Mom, no, I have to come here, I have to look after Miss Bianca.”
Elena came into the hall where they were standing. She’d been in the lab but they hadn’t seen her. Rhonda and Abigail both flushed.
“Sorry,” Elena murmured. “I making all lives hard, but I not understanding, why is Dr. Dolan not like me?”