Bones of Betrayal

by Jefferson Bass

  “Lenses?” I hadn’t known the atomic bomb involved optics.

  “Not really lenses,” he said. “That was the term they used for wedges they formed out of conventional high explosives. The lenses surrounded the spherical core of plutonium. The theory was, when the lenses exploded, they’d create a very focused shock wave, which would compress the plutonium enough to cause critical mass.”

  “And kablooey?” The edge on Miranda’s question was so fine as to be nearly invisible. I noticed it, but Thornton didn’t.

  “Kablooey,” he said, with unfortunate cheerfulness. “But the wedges, the lenses, had to be machined with incredible precision—like, accurate to zillionths of an inch. Nobody thought Kistiakowsky could do it, including Oppenheimer. In fact,” he went on, warming to the story, “one reason they did the Trinity test with a plutonium bomb was because they were confident the uranium bomb would work but afraid the plutonium bomb would be a dud. Poor Kistiakowsky was already being set up as the scapegoat for failure. He finally got so fed up with the skepticism that he bet Oppenheimer a whole month’s pay—against just ten bucks from Oppenheimer—that it would work. And of course it did.”

  “So Kistiakowsky got his ten bucks,” said Miranda, “and Nagasaki got vaporized.” Her voice dripped sarcasm. “A real win-win.”

  “Could’ve been worse,” said Thornton, finally punching back. “Fermi could’ve won his bet.”

  Oh hell, I thought, here we go.

  “And what was Fermi betting,” she snapped, “that maybe we’d come to our senses and not use the damn thing on innocent civilians?”

  “Guys, guys,” I said, trying to de-escalate the conflict, but the chain reaction had gotten out of hand.

  “No,” shot back Thornton. “Fermi was betting the bomb would ignite the atmosphere. He was taking side bets, too: Would it incinerate the whole world, or just New Mexico?”

  “Jesus,” said Miranda. “That is sickening.”

  “You. Weren’t. There.” Thornton’s voice was quiet but hard as steel. “How dare you judge them? How dare you? You and I are part of the most sheltered, pampered generation ever to walk the face of this earth. These scientists, a lot of them, were refugees, Jewish refugees, from Europe—the land of Hitler, the land of the Holocaust, remember? Six million Jews murdered, just for being Jews. Tens of millions of other civilians killed just for living in the wrong place, the wrong time, the wrong politics. If those scientists felt the need for a little gallows humor, who can blame them? The gallows was casting a shadow over the whole damn world at the time. How dare you sit there in your privileged, liberal smugness and pass moral judgment on them?”

  Miranda drew back as if he’d slapped her. “Excuse me,” she whispered. She stood up, and before I knew what was happening, she was gone, the steel door of the bone lab banging shut behind her.

  Thornton and I sat staring at each other. “Well, shit,” he finally said. “I just scorched the earth, didn’t I?”

  “I should’ve stopped you somehow,” I said. “Kicked you under the table. Clobbered you with a femur.”

  He rubbed his face with his hands. “The hell of it is, I really like her,” he said. “I thought maybe she liked me, too.”

  “She did,” I said. “And she’s notoriously picky.”

  “Crap.”

  “Oh well,” I said. “You’ll always have Paris. Or Verona. Or Venona. Was there anything else about Venona or Novak or—I don’t know, about anything—you’d planned to tell us, before you went stomping across the minefield of Miranda’s opinions?”

  He sighed. “A little,” he said. “Nothing concrete yet; just some tantalizing possibilities. There are lots of code names in the Venona transcripts that have never been deciphered—hundreds of Soviet spies in the United States back in the forties that have never been identified. We’re hoping, if we sift back through the transcripts again, maybe we’ll get lucky; maybe find something that ties to Novak.”

  “Not to be too negative,” I said, “but if they threw thousands of people and millions of dollars at this back when it really mattered, isn’t it likely to be a dead end by now?”

  “Not necessarily,” he said. “New things still bubble up. Just a couple years ago, we got some new insight on one of the few spies who infiltrated Oak Ridge. A health physicist, guy named Koval, who worked at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos and Hanford during the war. His job was checking radiation levels, so he got a look at all the crucial process equipment for creating weapons-grade uranium and plutonium, and nobody suspected him at the time, even though he’d lived and studied in Russia.”

  “I thought you said security in Oak Ridge was tight. They turned a Russian loose with a Geiger counter?”

  “His parents were Russian immigrants, but Koval was an American, actually—born in Iowa, and christened George. Millions of European and Russian immigrants came to the U.S. in the early part of the twentieth century—the ‘huddled masses yearning to breathe free,’ remember? Koval’s parents were among them.”

  One of the notations on Leonard Novak’s yellow notepad popped into my head. “George Koval?” Thornton nodded. “Novak wrote the initials ‘GK’ shortly before he died, and he was reading books about Venona at the time. Maybe he knew about Koval. Maybe they collaborated. Can you guys interrogate George, see if our guy Novak was one of his comrades?”

  “George is outside our jurisdiction,” Thornton said dryly. “Moved to Moscow in 1948, died in 2006. After he died, Vladimir Putin awarded him Russia’s highest medal.”

  “Damn,” I said. “Well, between the Acme Credit Corporation and the Venona transcripts, maybe something will turn up.”

  He gave a rueful smile. “Unlike Kistiakowsky, I wouldn’t bet a month’s pay on it,” he said. “Hell, I wouldn’t bet ten bucks. But we’ll keep digging.” He thought of something. “You still in the good graces of the woman in Oak Ridge?”

  I blushed. “The librarian? Isabella?”

  He shook his head. “No, the old lady. Beatrice. The one that married Novak without having done due diligence about his sexual orientation.”

  “Ah. No, I haven’t talked to Beatrice since she outed Novak as gay, but it’s not like she and I have had a spat.”

  “Lucky you,” he said. “Listen, since you seem to bring out the gift of gab in Madame Beatrice, how about chatting her up some more, see if she thinks Novak was giving secrets to the Soviets?”

  “If she snitches on him, should I send a note to the Acme Credit Corporation?”

  “Sure,” he said. “We check the P.O. box twice a day.” He pushed back from the table. “I reckon I’ll slink back to my office now,” he said. “I’ve done enough damage here for one day.”

  “You mean Miranda?” He nodded. “Surely you’re not throwing in the towel so soon,” I said. “I thought you G-men never gave up. ‘We always get our man’—wasn’t that an early FBI slogan?”

  “Nah, that was the Canadian Mounties,” he said. “They had a better sloganeer than we did. Besides, this thing with Miranda, it’s outside my field of expertise. The bad guys, they’re pretty easy to figure out, Doc. It’s the great women that are truly mysterious.”

  “I know, Chip,” I said. I walked him to the door of the lab. “That’s what makes them great.”

  CHAPTER 21

  FOUR HOURS AFTER THE BLOWUP IN THE BONE LAB, AS I was about to head to Oak Ridge for another stroll through the past with Beatrice, I heard a light tap on my door. Looking up, I was surprised to see Miranda; normally she just barged right in, her arrival accompanied by a wisecrack—usually one at my expense. Her eyes were red and she looked off-balance. I pointed to an empty chair that was shoved against the radiator under the window.

  “No offense,” I said, “but you don’t look so hot.”

  “I look a lot better than I feel,” she said. I was alarmed—was she developing symptoms of radiation sicknesss?—but she read my expression and swiftly waved a hand to let me know her problem wasn’t medical.

&nbs
p; “You want to talk about it?” It seemed a safe question, since she’d shown up at my door, but as fragile as she seemed, I wanted to go easy.

  “Some of it,” she said. “The ideas part. Not the boy-girl part.”

  I wasn’t sure what she meant. “The ideas?”

  “The ideas. The ideals. The people. Patriots and traitors. Hard choices and hellish compromises.”

  “Maybe we should send out for pizza,” I said. “And a six-pack of philosophers.”

  She plunked down into the chair with a sigh. “In a way, the problem all boils down to the difference between Groves and Oppenheimer,” she said. “And it’s all written in their eyes.” I furrowed my brow at her. “Groves was like the ultimate can-do guy,” she said. “The steamroller of the Manhattan Project. Get it done, get it done, get it done. No matter what. He and his secret project had so much power. Groves had the authority to take whatever he wanted, build whatever was necessary. Not enough copper to make the Y-12 calutrons? No problem; we’ll just take fifteen thousand tons of silver from the U.S. Treasury. Not sure the calutrons can make enough uranium? We’ll build a gaseous-diffusion plant, too, the biggest factory in the world. Not sure uranium’s the ticket? Let’s make plutonium, too. He hedged all his bets, but in the end, all his bets paid off.” I nodded; to lessen the risk of failure, Groves had indeed pursued multiple paths to the bomb, and all of them succeeded. “But look at him, Dr. B.”

  She pulled a photo of General Groves from a folder she’d brought with her and laid it on the desk. It was a famous photo, one I’d seen countless times since cutting Novak from the ice. The picture showed Groves studying a map of Japan. No, not studying it, exactly; more like burning a hole in it with his eyes. The general’s belly was doughy and his jowls were flabby, but his eyes were like lasers locked on a target. “That man’s horizon didn’t extend one inch beyond Japan,” she said. “Build the bomb; drop the bomb.”

  “He was a good fit for the job,” I said.

  “Now look at Oppenheimer,” she said, slipping another photo from the folder. The physicist was wearing the porkpie hat that had been his trademark, much like the battered fedora of Indiana Jones. A cigarette hung from Oppenheimer’s lips, and a wisp of smoke wafted up the left side of his face. A skinny tie was cinched around a scrawny neck—no flabby jowls on Oppenheimer—and the nubby collar of a tweed jacket gapped open above bony shoulders. At the center of the image was a pair of haunted, haunting eyes. They were staring straight into the lens, but they seemed to be focused on something far beyond it. “Do you see? Those are the eyes of a man who’s been chained to a rock; a man staring at eternity,” she said. “Where’s the border between America and Japan, or America and Russia, when you’re staring at eternity?”

  “Are you sure he can see that far, Miranda? And are you sure you can see into his soul?”

  “Come on, Dr. B. When the Trinity test worked, this guy didn’t say ‘yee haw’ or ‘hot damn’ or even ‘oh shit.’ This guy said, ‘I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ He agonized. He tried to rein in nuclear weapons after the war, and he was painted as a traitor for that.”

  “He did try,” I said. “But not until after the war.”

  She frowned. “I know,” she said, “and that’s part of what’s tragic about him. He built the bomb, and then he hated what it did, and hated the arms race it triggered. And then he was destroyed for opposing the arms race. Meanwhile, look at Werner von Braun. Von Braun was the brains behind the V-2 rockets that rained down on London during the war, but he became an American hero because he started building rockets for us instead of Hitler. Which brings me back to Klaus Fuchs, sort of. Was he a patriot or a traitor?”

  “Traitor,” I said. “No question. He sold atomic secrets to our enemies.”

  “But he was Jewish,” she said. “To him, the ultimate enemy was Hitler. And if the enemy of your enemy is your friend, that makes Russia your friend. Besides, they were our ally. In theory, at least.”

  “Big difference between theory and practice,” I said. “Stalin was a tyrant and a butcher—before the war as well as afterward.”

  “He was. But what’s the only nation on earth to have ever used weapons of mass destruction in an act of war? The United States. Twice.”

  “We did it to save lives, Miranda,” I said. “Not just U.S. lives; Japanese lives, too. We fire-bombed Tokyo one night in March 1945. The firestorms destroyed fifteen square miles of the city and killed a hundred thousand civilians. Firebombing Tokyo didn’t move Japan to surrender. It took the symbolic power of the atomic bomb to end the war.”

  “Highly debatable,” she said. “The Japanese sent out surrender overtures in late July, before Hiroshima. But we brushed them aside, because by that point we’d tested the bomb. We knew it worked, and we wanted to drop it. Not just to cinch the victory over Japan, but to intimidate the Russians, because we could already tell they were going to be our next big problem.”

  “But they weren’t all that intimidated,” I pointed out. “Because by then they had blueprints of the bomb from Fuchs in Los Alamos. And descriptions of uranium-enrichment equipment from George Koval. Who knows, maybe they even had plutonium reactor blueprints from Leonard Novak.”

  Miranda groaned. “Dammit,” she said. “Is. A. Puzzlement.” It was a line she often quoted from an old Broadway musical—The King and I—and it made me smile. If she was up to quoting show tunes, her angst had eased. “Okay,” she sighed, “I know it breaks your heart to hear this, but I need to go home and feed Immanuel Kat now.”

  “Does this mean we’re not sending out for pizza and philosophers?”

  “Not tonight,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow, when we take up the problems of genocide and starvation in Africa.”

  “I can hardly wait,” I said, as she disappeared through the doorway.

  She leaned her head back around the frame. “So, um…” She trailed off.

  “Ye-e-s-s-s?”

  “Thornton,” she said. “A shame. I was kinda liking him.”

  I suppressed a smile. “I think he was kinda liking you, too. And I hear he’s notoriously picky.”

  “Crap,” she said, and disappeared into the hallway again.

  Then she reappeared once more. “The fundamental moral and ethical problem,” she said, “is this. I suspect Thornton’s a Republican. I could never sleep with a Republican.”

  “Heavens no,” I said. “That would be a hellish compromise.”

  CHAPTER 22

  AS I PARKED AT BEATRICE’S CURB AND HEADED TOWARD her door, I noticed that I felt eager, almost as eager as if I were heading to a death scene to recover a skeleton. I told myself that this was natural; I was returning, after all, at the request of Emert and Thornton, who hoped I might extract more information from her than they had. But that wasn’t it, or wasn’t entirely it; her stories had shed a few glimmers on Novak, but mostly it was Beatrice herself who occupied the limelight of her stories. I knew better than to push her too hard about Novak; the one time I’d tried it, she’d all but played the senility card, just as she’d done with the law enforcement officers. But there was another reason I let her ramble on about herself, rather than demanding answers about Novak. The truth of the matter, I realized as I entered her house and poured her vodka, was that I’d fallen under the spell of the old woman and her stories, just as I’d fallen under the spell of the black-and-white photos and films in the museum and the library. The images gave me vivid glimpses of another time, when men and women toiled desperately in secret cities, and when science attained tragic greatness. Beatrice’s stories gave those images a human face and a human voice.

  It was that reflective mood, I suppose, that prompted me to say, “It’s odd, isn’t it, that I’m sitting here again, back for another story?”

  “No, not at all,” she said. “It couldn’t be any other way. Each moment of your life is the sum total of all the prior moments. There’s not a single thing that happens to you that doesn’t leave its mark; do
esn’t redirect your course somehow; doesn’t make you more fully who you are. It took every single step—even the steps you took as life dragged you by the hair of your head—to put you exactly where you are. When I was a girl, life dragged me from Tennessee to New York and then back to Tennessee.”

  “Tell me about that,” I said. “Tell me the story.”

  CHAPTER 23

  MY FATHER DIED WHEN I WAS TEN. MY MOTHER WAS a night auditor for a hotel in Chattanooga, so I got used to being alone at night at an early age. Getting used to it’s not the same as liking it, though. My father was gone for good; sometimes it seemed like my mother was, too.

  The Christmas I was thirteen, Mother took me to New York on the train. My Aunt Rachel and Uncle Isaac lived there—Aunt Rachel was my father’s sister—and Mother said she wanted to visit them and show me the sights of New York for Christmas. We changed trains in Raleigh about lunchtime on a Friday, and we rode all night to get to New York. We shared a bunk in a sleeper car, and I remember falling asleep with my mother’s arms wrapped around me, which was something that hadn’t happened in years.

  We got to Penn Station—this was Old Penn Station, mind you, which was spectacular, a lot grander than Grand Central—late in the afternoon on Christmas Day. From there we took a cab across town to Rockefeller Center. The outdoor ice-skating rink there had just opened, that very day. It was December 25, 1936. It was so beautiful it made my heart ache—all those Christmas decorations and lights, and everybody dressed up in their best winter clothes.

  The country had just begun to crawl up out of the Great Depression, and that Christmas night in Rockefeller Square, I think people weren’t just celebrating the birth of Jesus, they were celebrating the rebirth of America. Mother and I waited in line for hours to skate, dragging our battered little suitcases with us. I didn’t mind the wait; I was giddy with the sights and sounds and glamour of it all. Finally, when we got up to the front of the line, Mother told me that she wasn’t going to skate; she would stay with our suitcases and just watch me. She asked a boy in line behind us if he’d help me get the hang of it. He was about my age, maybe a year or two older. Old enough to be interesting to me; not so old as to be scary. He held my hand and pulled me along, wobbling and shrieking and laughing. Every time we made a lap past the place where Mother was standing beside the rail, she’d wave and yell something encouraging.