Red Mercury Blues

by Reggie Nadelson

  “This produces nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, hair loss, lesions, cataracts, anemia, that’s short term. Long term? Cancer, leukemia, depending on length of exposure. Trauma from being irradiated can mimic the same symptoms. Massive opportunity for infection.”

  I shivered slightly. “Like AIDS?”

  “Like AIDS,” he said.

  Bingo! I thought: radiation sickness looks just like AIDS. Lev didn’t have AIDS. He was dying from what he had in that suitcase!

  “Terrible burns, so bad you have to peel off skin. Enough? You know a terrorist doesn’t love even the idea of this?” Federov’s voice rose with enthusiasm for his subject.

  “From what? From plutonium?”

  “Plutonium if you burn it and it gets in the air. Plutonium if you breathe it in. Strontium 90 replaces calcium and presto, bone cancer. There’s cesium, a nice little killer if it’s uncontained. Plenty of things.”

  “What if there’s no bomb?”

  “Even with samples you can make trouble. Poison air vents, water supplies.”

  I lit up and leaned back and closed my eyes for a second; the sun was warm. “What do you know about red mercury?”

  “Why?” Federov’s posture changed. His flabby body went taut with intensity. He got up and started down the hill. “Let’s walk. Maybe I will show you my lab,” he said. “So, red mercury? You have it?” He was walking fast. What the hell was the hurry?

  “Possibly.”

  “You don’t know what you have, do you? You don’t know that red mercury as toxic powder can be irradiated to form liquid, then implanted with rare isotope to make red mercury 20 20. That it can help exploit the hydrodynamic flow properties of a heavy liquid to design a nuclear trigger. Possibly, it’s a neutron emitter.”

  “In plain English, OK?”

  “In English, it is very toxic, highly radioactive. In liquid form, you can use it to make bombs, to make paint that makes planes invisible—stealth technology. In English, it is very deadly. More than plutonium. Heavier. I’ve never heard of any on the international market. Never. It is the most closely guarded of all secrets.”

  Reaching into his baggy shorts, he pulled out two tennis balls and juggled them casually. “I’ll show you in English. Two tennis balls of red mercury in a nuclear bomb the size of, let us say, a salad bowl and bye-bye Long Island.”

  He knew what he was talking about. I knew for sure that Andy Feder was still military. He had been walking steadily towards a wire fence that surrounded some of the lab buildings; security was low key, but even I could spot the muscle.

  “What else?”

  He grew evasive. “I don’t know,” he said, but he did. Much more. As a kid, Federov was a lousy chess player. His face told you everything. “You ever go home these days, Artie?” he asked.

  “My home is New York,” I said stiffly.

  “You never change.” Federov put his hand on my shoulder. “Come on, Artie. Let me show you labs. We can meet some real chipheads, real computer nerds who can maybe help you.”

  “I think I better get going,” I said. “You’ve been a real help.”

  “Do you have the red mercury?” Federov edged towards the lab as I backed off. He grabbed my sleeve. “Please, Artyom, I must have it. For years I have wanted to see this. For years. Please!”

  The old paranoia swilled around me. I didn’t wait to find out why he wanted me inside the lab. We Sov boys love institutions, he said. He loved them, he meant, and I wondered who Andy Feder worked for these days.

  “Be careful,” he called out in Russian as I ran for the train. “It will kill you.”

  7

  “He’s been fried. Fried. I’d say he’s so hot, you could pull his chain and he’d glow in the dark.” The medic switched off his Geiger counter, zipped up the body bag and pulled off his green rubber gloves with a snap as if he’d just finished the dishes. He looked down at the bagged body that lay on the platform in Perm Station. “I don’t know what he’s got, but it’s plenty radioactive,” he said. “Get him out of here now,” he added and a squad of men in moonsuits carted the bag out. A second team started hosing down the platform; I thought of the trains to the death camps.

  I didn’t see the dead man when I first got into the station. I was pissed off; the train from the island had stalled near Jamaica for half an hour. After my visit with Federov, I was nervous, half expecting someone on my back, but it was only a dead dog some idiot threw on the tracks. By the time we got in, it was rush hour.

  The way Penn Station is set up I didn’t notice anything, the extra cops, the frantic security men, not at first. To get to the trains, you have to go down separate flights of stairs from the main terminal to the various platforms. You want to get from one platform to another, generally you have to go up and down again. I knew Penn pretty well; I’d done a case there once.

  Anyhow, by the time I got upstairs from the platform where my train came in, the terminal was heaving with bodies. People pushed at the crowd, like swimmers among schools of unfriendly fish. I got half a dozen elbows in my side. A woman in spikes ground her shoe on my foot.

  “Watch it,” I shouted.

  “Lick your dick,” she screamed back.

  The terminal was in permanent chaos, renovations never finished, loose electricals dangling like evil weeds. I was hyperventilating. I could feel the weight and heat of the bodies. The noise was relentless, that low-level insistent din that comes sometimes just before a crowd panics. Maybe it was my imagination.

  At a Dunkin’ Donuts, I stopped to get a Coke. There were too many cops around. Next to the donut shop, I spotted a transit cop with enough flab on him to fuel Times Square. Brenner, his name tag said.

  “What’s going on?” I said and Brenner yakked at me, trying to be pally with me, but his eyes drifted to donuts sizzling in a bucket of fat. I went and got him half a dozen. He talked. He pointed to the entrance to one of the platforms, maybe a hundred yards away.

  “Something going on,” he mumbled, lips covered with pink sugar.

  At the entrance to the platform, I found a cop I knew slightly. “I don’t know what it is. They just told us no one goes in. We had a bastard of a time clearing off that platform. Maybe they’re holding some perp down there.”

  God knows why I was interested. Maybe I didn’t want to go home. Maybe I already knew. I got the cop to let me through. I went down the stairs into the semi-dark of the platform. Above me, the noise from the terminal surged like quadraphonic surf, then receded. That’s when I heard the medic say “He’s fried.”

  The platform was almost empty. I squinted in the gloom. A couple hundred yards along were a few Bomb Squad guys in dark blue jackets; others from Hazardous Materials squads were zipped into protective gear, some with gas masks. The TV pictures of the Japanese subway disaster came back to me, people in the train station dying like flies from Sarin, the nerve gas.

  I wasn’t completely surprised to see Roy Pettus.

  “Poor sonofabitch.” Roy, holding a gas mask in his hand, stared at the dead man on the ground. One of the Haz Mat guys, the chief I guessed, took Roy aside. He let me listen.

  “I’m not sure and I wouldn’t guess for anyone except you, Roy, because I know you got that obsession. This time you were right. This is some kind of radiation thing.”

  “Christ,” Roy said and I thought I saw him cross himself.

  “The package we found with the dead man? I got a pretty high reading. I won’t know for sure until the lab calls, but if I was gonna guess, I’d say he was fried by something very hot that works very fast. Something like cesium. I want to evacuate this place. Fast. You want to keep that mask on.”

  “Wait for the call,” said Roy.

  “We can’t wait.”

  “Where’s the guy who found him?”

  Pettus waved at a black kid so young there was down on his upper lip. He wore a knitted hat with a red pompom.

  “You live in Level Three?” Pettus asked politely.

 
“Yessir,” he said. “In Three.”

  The caves under the tracks at Penn Station were the last stop for a bewildered tribe of the homeless, nomads chased from parks, from doorways, even public toilets. A friend in Transit took me down once. It was like some Orwellian housing project; the levels even had numbers.

  “You knew him?” Pettus gestured towards the man on the ground.

  “He was a regular. He came to use the washing machine. We liked him. We saved the puzzle for him.”

  Beggarman, homelessman, I thought.

  “Puzzle?”

  “He liked to do that Times crossword puzzle. He knew a lot of stuff.”

  “Did he have a name?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t say. He liked drinking and the puzzle. Sometimes he looked around in the lockers upstairs, see if there was anything interesting, he said. Sometimes he found interesting stuff. When he stumbled in half dead, I figured it was his heart. That’s why I got hold of a conductor.”

  “Anyone else around?”

  “It was the middle of the day. Most everyone out working the streets, you know?”

  Pettus nodded. “Everyone out?” he said to the Haz Mat chief.

  “What about him?” The chief pointed at me.

  Pettus handed me one of the masks and said, “Put this on. And tell me what you are doing here?”

  “I was passing. Who’s the kid?”

  “He lives down in Three. He tells a conductor on the platform some old man is dead. He talks about a package. One smart cop goes along and figures there’s something funny. They clear off the platform, God knows how, close it down, call Bomb Squad in. You heard the rest.”

  The chief was talking into a portable phone. “It’s the lab, Roy. It’s hot whatever the fuck it is. Real hot, like I figured. I want this place fully decontaminated. I want it shut down. I want everything and everyone monitored. I want to know the extent of contamination. Ventilation systems. It gets airborne, we’re in trouble.”

  “Worst case?”

  “A lot of sick people. Some dead. Panic. You hear me, Roy? I want this place decontaminated.”

  “What place?”

  “The whole goddamn station and all the trains, if I had my way. If there’s one package, there’s another. There’s always a second package.”

  Roy said, “Give us half an hour. If this gets out, the panic will be worse than the thing itself. You quarantine ten thousand people, you got global panic. I mean global.”

  The chief looked down the platform. A little group of men in moonsuits worked with Geiger counters and hoses.

  “What choice I got?”

  Lev had been in here. Of course he had been here. Had he followed me earlier when I left for Long Island?

  “I want to see,” I said to Pettus.

  “See what?”

  “Where they found it.”

  “No.”

  I pushed Roy a few feet from the others. “I need to see. I need to know. This is about me.”

  He went and mumbled to the chief and came back. “Let’s go,” he said and a guy from Haz Mat gave us hot-suits that felt like wrinkled toilet paper when you put them on and rubber gloves. The face masks smelled of camphor, the gas masks that went over them smelled of rubber. It was hard to breathe.

  The black kid said, “Let me come too. I know how the old fellow hid his things.”

  “No,” Pettus said.

  “He was my friend,” the kid said simply.

  Pettus looked at me and someone fitted out the kid with a suit. We stood on the deserted platform huddled together for a minute. Then Roy Pettus grabbed a walkie talkie from one of the guys. “Let’s go.”

  An officer from Haz Mat picked up a Geiger counter.

  “Ten minutes,” the chief said. “Not more. You understand?”

  We went through a rusty iron door that led to a tunnel underneath the tracks. Pettus went in first. I could smell rust, the sewage; I could hear the complicated sounds of the subterranean city and trains overhead in every direction.

  “Be careful, detective.” Pettus’ voice echoed back at me inside the tunnel; I realized he always addressed me by a title because Roy Pettus was a shy formal man and didn’t know what else to call me.

  The sound of our feet on the metal rungs banged into the musty darkness. We climbed past a series of underground storage centers, then emerged into one of the cavernous chambers. Light came from a couple of bulbs that hung from a metal crossbeam. Steampipes hissed out warm dank air; a washing machine had been hooked up to one, and above it was a laundry line neatly hung with jeans, T-shirts, underpants and a pair of stockings. A rat scampered across someone’s cardboard bed. The homeless had set up housekeeping, and even through my mask, the smell was potent, a dank, Dickensian smell. The Geiger counter chattered softly.

  “They found him here,” Pettus said briefly.

  We searched the cave as best we could. “Nothing,” Pettus said. “Goddamn it. Nothing at all. I’ll have to let them evacuate.”

  “Wait a minute.” The kid was on the floor. He crawled under one of the makeshift beds. Cunningly inserted under the mattress was a flat box. He opened it. Inside were some scraps of paper. He gave it to Pettus who looked through the crumpled paper and gave me a single sheet. “You read this stuff?”

  I nodded. “Yes, I read it.”

  “Anything?” the chief said when we got back to the platform.

  Roy handed him the piece of paper from the box the kid found. They muttered together.

  “OK, I’m gonna take your word, Roy. I’m only gonna close down these holes, this platform, but it’s on your head. You tell your people to keep their mouths shut. No media. Nothing.” He looked at me. The kid with the hat hung around now aimlessly; he had lost his home.

  “Come with me,” Roy Pettus said to him. “We’re going to get you looked after now.”

  “Was I good?” he asked and I saw how young he was, less than twenty, this skinny black kid with faint down on his lip who lived in a hole in the ground.

  “Yes,” Roy Pettus said. “You were a hero. Thank you.”

  We made our way to the street through one of the tunnels. In the street, all of us squinting like bats, the chief herded us into a van that was waiting. We took off the protective gear. The chief said, “Everyone gets checked out, OK? I’ll be in touch with phone numbers.”

  “Let me see the note again,” I said to Pettus.

  “Keep the gloves on,” he said and handed the note back.

  I had to make sure. The ransom note was written in Russian. The package in the station locker was a warning, it said. There was more. He wanted to sell. Wanted money. It was from Lev, but I had known all along.

  “Ten grand,” I said. “All he wants is ten grand in a locker in the station. He says he’ll give you the stuff. Give him the money, Roy, for God’s sake. We’re never going to find him. He’ll go to ground. He’ll hide the samples. No one in Brighton Beach will talk. Get me the money and let me do it.”

  Pettus said, “We don’t do that. We give it to him, it never ends. It goes on and on.” There was something he was holding back.

  “What brought you into the station today, detective?” Pettus asked and I told him.

  “You took the train going out to the island, too?”

  “Yes,”

  “Who knew you were going?”

  I thought of Ricky. “No one. You think someone followed me?”

  “Is that a possibility?”

  “Yeah, sure. Anything’s possible. Why not?”

  “How come you took the train?”

  “My car’s bust again.”

  “Gimme a smoke,” Pettus said.

  “I thought you quit,” I said. I gave him one, he lit up and gulped the smoke like it was manna. “You trying to tell me something?” I said.

  “OK. The package we found with the old man?”

  “Yeah?” I stripped off the rubber gloves.

  “It had your name on it, detective,” s
aid Pettus.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The package was addressed to you.”

  8

  Considering the old dead guy got a package addressed to me, I figured I owed him something, so I went to his funeral. I had gone home from Penn Station and stood under the shower on and off for an hour, feeling as if my body was electric. I was scared. A month ago, I never thought about nukes. Now everywhere I went, there was a connection—the dead bum, Federov. All I could do was keep moving forward. I sent all my clothes to the cleaners.

  I fixed a sandwich out of some prosciutto I found in the back of the icebox, made coffee, put Gerry Mulligan doing “Round Midnight” with Monk on the CD to remind me there was life out there and grabbed the phone, working a bunch of old contacts until I got what I wanted. Which is how I found out they were probably going to plant the bum from Penn Station in the next two or three days in a public graveyard.

  Prisoners from city jails work the burial detail at the public cemeteries, and I let one of them bum some cigarettes off me. He leaned on his shovel, enjoying the smoke and the clean fall day. “That’s the second one like that we’ve buried the last couple of months. The second one they wanted a hurry-up special delivery stick ’em in the ground job for. Usually with them John Does they take their time on the autopsies, so what’s going on?” he said.

  I didn’t answer. I got in Dorothy Tae’s station wagon that I had borrowed because I’d had it with trains, and I broke all the speed limits on the FDR until I got to Brooklyn and Roy Pettus’ office.

  “You want to tell me what’s going on?” I said to Pettus after I banged into his office, bullying my way past Eddie the guard and Pettus’ secretary.

  Four agents who sat in the room with him, suit coats hung neatly over the chair backs, muscles straining at their pants, looked up from their paperwork. They had crewcuts and midwestern faces. Bland as mashed potatoes, they stared at me with distaste. New York, their expressions said. Pinko liberal faggot Jew, they were thinking.