Bones of Betrayal

by Jefferson Bass

  And then the boy let go of my hand, and I was skating by myself. It was terrifying and thrilling—I’m sure I was just inching along, but it felt so daring and grown-up, and I couldn’t wait to circle back around and see Mother’s face when she realized I was doing it without any help. But her face wasn’t there. The fat man in the red scarf, who had been standing right beside her, was still there; so was the nun who had been on the other side. But she was gone, and the space where she had been standing was already closing up behind her.

  I slid past the fat man and the nun—I was confused, and I also didn’t know how to stop—and went around the rink once more. The second time I came around, I ran into the rail to stop. I was still a few feet away from the two faces I recognized, so I pulled myself along the rail, my feet sliding out from under me again and again. I remember people laughing and pointing every time I caught myself on the rail and then hauled myself back up. By the time I got to the fat man and the nun, my heart had turned to ice, and I could feel tears running down my face—not because people were laughing at me, but because I knew something was wrong.

  Our suitcases were both still there, wedged up against the railing right where she’d been standing. The nun told me my mother had needed to run to the restroom, and would be back in a few minutes. But somehow I knew she wouldn’t be.

  After I’d stood at the railing crying for half an hour, the nun helped me change out of the skates and back into my shoes, then she took me over to a policeman who was standing near the entrance to the rink. I told him what had happened, and I could see him sizing me up—a scrawny girl from the sticks, with a tear-streaked face and a dripping nose and a cheap cardboard suitcase. He got this sad, weary look on his face, and that’s when I knew I’d never see my mother again.

  On the cab ride up from Penn Station, Mother had tucked a big envelope into my coat pocket. She’d made a big production about how Aunt Rachel’s address and phone number were in the envelope, along with a five-dollar bill and a Christmas card for Rachel and Uncle Isaac. “You hang on to this for me,” she’d said. “You’re such a big girl now, and you know how I lose things. This way, when we get in the taxi for Brooklyn, the address and the cab fare will be right there, safe in your pocket.” As she said it, she patted the pocket.

  When I told the policeman about Aunt Rachel and the envelope, he had me take it out and open it up. The Christmas card contained two letters. One was to Aunt Rachel, explaining how Mother had met a man she loved and wanted to be with, but the man—she didn’t even say what his name was—just couldn’t take on a thirteen-year-old. She was going away with him to South America, she said, where he would be working on a big construction project. She apologized for the unexpected Christmas present—me—and asked Rachel to please be kind to me.

  The other letter was to me. She told me she loved me, and always would, and she hoped I could understand and forgive her someday. I never could, and I never did.

  I don’t know how Mother afforded the train tickets, but two possibilities occurred to me years later. Maybe she embezzled the money from the hotel where she worked. Or maybe the man she abandoned me for gave her the money.

  I don’t know whether she actually went to South America with the man. She might have just said that to throw us off the scent. Maybe she and her man settled down in Schenectady or Cincinnati. For that matter, I don’t even know if there really was a man; maybe she made that up, too, as a plausible reason for turning her back on a child. All I know is that I never saw or heard from her again.

  Aunt Rachel helped me get an after-school job in a Wool-worth’s five-and-dime in Brooklyn. It didn’t pay much, but my little paychecks helped me feel like I was less of a burden to them. The summer after I graduated from high school, I got a job at the Grumman aircraft factory on Long Island. Grumman built fighter planes for the navy—the Wildcat and the Hellcat, which became famous for their toughness against the Japanese—and I helped build the instrument panels for them.

  Aunt Rachel never said so, but I could tell I’d long since worn out my welcome, so as the summer went on, I mentioned that it might be time for me to get out on my own. New York was expensive, though, so I worried about how I’d manage. She mentioned her other brother—my father’s brother, the one my mother had never liked. This uncle, Uncle Jake, lived in Knoxville, and he’d written Rachel to say that every girl in Tennessee was being hired for war work near Knoxville.

  I stepped off the train in Knoxville in September of 1943, and a week later I started helping build the bomb, atom by atom.

  CHAPTER 24

  I WALKED INTO THE BONE LAB AND SAW MIRANDA bent low over a lab table in concentration. It was a posture I’d seen her in so many times, for so many hours on end, that it sometimes surprised me to see that she was capable of standing, or even sitting up straight, rather than bending over bone fragments.

  “Crap,” she said. “I’m too stupid and klutzy for this.”

  “What are you working on?” I leaned around, expecting to see tiny bone fragments and a bottle of Duco cement. The skull of the North Knoxville skeleton had been crushed into dozens of pieces, some the size of rock salt. Instead of the drabness of bone, though, I saw a splash of vivid color: a small piece of fuchsia paper, creased into a bristling profusion of small triangles. “Is that origami?”

  “It’s supposed to be, but it’s not. Dammit!” In frustration, she crumpled the paper and tossed it at a waste can beside the table. It missed, landing on the floor atop a heap of other wads of fuchsia.

  “This might be a dumb question—” I began.

  “Wouldn’t be the first,” she said.

  “But if this is so frustrating, why are you doing it?”

  “Because of a girl named Sadako,” she said. “And a friend named Eddie.”

  “Sadako,” I said. “Neighbor? Daughter of a neighbor?”

  “No. Sadako was a two-year-old living in Hiroshima in August of 1945. She was a mile and a half from the epicenter of the bomb blast. Sadako survived, but when she was twelve, she was diagnosed with leukemia.” Miranda slid another square of paper from the package on the table and folded it into a triangle. “Someone who came to visit her in the hospital told her that if she folded a thousand paper cranes and made a wish, her wish would come true. She made it to six hundred and forty-four, and then she died.”

  Miranda folded the triangle in half again and again, into smaller triangles, and then gave the paper an angry yank that almost created wings, but not quite. I was formulating a logical response to her story about the girl—I thought of the dead in Pearl Harbor, the hundreds of thousands raped and slaughtered in China, the million projected to die in the assault on the Japanese home islands—when I noticed the misshapen wings begin to flutter. Miranda’s hands were shaking, and as I looked at them, I noticed that three of her fingertips, the three that had touched the iridium pellet in the morgue, were red and blistered. “Jesus, Miranda, we need to get you to the ER and get your fingers examined.”

  She shook her head. “I went early this morning,” she said. “Dr. Davies met me there, and he talked to Dr. Sorensen on the phone. If the pain gets bad and the tissue gets necrotic, they’ll give me painkillers and ointments and antibiotics. But for now, there’s nothing to be done except ‘watchful waiting.’ Watching and waiting to see if my fingertips die or heal. Watching and waiting to see if Eddie heals or dies.” She studied her fingertips. “The necrosis has started in his hands.” She said it calmly, but then the shaking got worse. The tremor traveled up her arms to her shoulders, which began to quake. She said “dammit” again, very softly, and I knew she was not cursing the complexities of origami now. “Why,” she said, “God in heaven, why?”

  “I don’t know, Miranda. I can’t think of anybody who deserves this less than you and Eddie.”

  “Oh, Dr. B.,” she cried, “I’m not asking ‘why’ about Eddie and me. I’m asking ‘why’ about everything else. Everybody else. All the horror we’ve inflicted on one another.
”

  I’d known Miranda for years now; she could be as tough as cheap steak about her own hurts, but her heart bled freely for others. By “everybody else,” I figured she meant the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and maybe even more than those: maybe also Dresden and Auschwitz, Gettysburg and Shiloh, Rwanda and Darfur and Baghdad. I laid one hand on her shoulder; with the other, I reached behind me and retrieved a Kleenex box from the desk. The paper bird fell from her hand, fluttered to the floor, and lay still. “Fucking war,” she whispered through clenched teeth. “God damn it to hell.”

  “Yes,” I said. “God damn it to hell.”

  I set the Kleenex box on the table, gave her shoulder a squeeze, and eased out of the bone lab. I hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the knob, locked the door behind me, and retreated to my office at the far end of the stadium. There, I locked my own door and unplugged the phone. I did a quick search of the Internet and clicked on a link that filled my computer screen with purple squares and triangles, crisscrossed with dotted lines. “Best Origami Crane Folding Instructions,” the caption read. I took a sheet of paper from the printer tray and folded it diagonally. I creased it between my fingertips until the edges were sharp as a blade.

  THAT NIGHT I HAD A DREAM. In my dream, Garcia and Miranda reached out to me for help, but their outstretched hands crumbled before my eyes, leaving bloody stumps at the ends of their wrists. Then the dream shifted, and I was speaking to a large crowd in an auditorium in Oak Ridge. I realized I was talking to them about the atomic genie their city had helped loose from the bottle, and I realized I was distraught. I heard myself say to them, “Was anyone ever helped by it?” There was a stunned silence when I said it; even I, who dreamed the words, was shocked by them. Then, near the back of the room, I glimpsed movement. A woman rose slowly to her feet and stood. Her head was wrapped tightly in a scarf, in the manner favored by women who have lost their hair to radiation or chemotherapy. The woman didn’t speak; she didn’t move; she simply stood, holding that space, a calm answer to the bitter question I had posed.

  Heads had swiveled in her direction when she stood, and the atmosphere in the dream-room suddenly felt alive and electric, the way the Tennessee air prickles just before a summer thunderstorm. Then a second person stood, and soon a dozen other people were on their feet, all bearing silent witness to cures effected, diseases diagnosed, homes heated, pipelines and airliners made safe.

  The last person to stand was directly in front of me. He rose slowly, as if it cost him some pain to stand, and his head was bowed. He raised his head slowly, and I found myself staring into eyes that were both haunted and hopeful. I found myself staring into the eyes of Robert Oppenheimer.

  When I awoke—or dreamed I awoke—I seemed to see the world through such eyes myself.

  CHAPTER 25

  THORNTON HAD SENT A PEACE OFFERING TO MIRANDA—a dozen stems of iris, not yet unfurled, looking like green artists’ brushes dipped in indigo paint. Seven small sunflowers were tucked amid the blue tips, blazing like a week of summer days. Miranda wasn’t in the lab when I saw them; I knew they were from Thornton by the business card lying beside the vase, bearing his name, the FBI logo, and the word “Peace?” The man had flair, and he seemed smart and spunky, so maybe he was still in the game.

  But he wasn’t ready to risk a personal appearance just yet, so I agreed to pick him up at the Federal Building, in downtown Knoxville, for our trip to Oak Ridge National Laboratory. I’d come up with an idea about how we might search for the dead man shown on Novak’s film, and Thornton wanted to talk with someone in the Lab’s radioisotopes program, so we decided to ride-share.

  Once we crossed the Solway Bridge, we headed west on Bethel Valley Road, a long, straight, prairie-flat ribbon of two-lane leading to the research complex. Five miles out Bethel Valley we stopped at a security checkpoint, where an armed guard consulted a clipboard and my driver’s license, then nodded slightly at me. He practically genuflected at Thornton’s FBI shield. Not that I was jealous or anything.

  The road beelined along another two miles of valley floor, lined on either side by pines and hardwood. It grazed the end of a frozen cove on Melton Hill Lake, then entered the sprawling laboratory. Oak Ridge National Laboratory—known as “the Lab” to most of the scientists who worked there, as “ORNL” to the acronym-inclined, and as “X-10” to the blue-collared hourly workers—was the only research facility created in Oak Ridge during the Manhattan Project. The Y-12 and K-25 plants had been huge production facilities staffed by hourly workers like Beatrice. The wartime Lab, though, had a higher ratio of physicists, chemists, and engineers. The Lab had been built around the Graphite Reactor—a much bigger version of Fermi’s makeshift Chicago reactor—so that Leonard Novak and his colleagues could devise the means to create and purify weapons-grade plutonium.

  As Thornton and I turned off Bethel Valley Road and entered the research complex, we found ourselves surrounded by gleaming new buildings of glass and steel. Although the Lab was owned by the federal government—the Department of Energy—it was jointly operated these days by UT and Battelle, a research institute with billions of dollars in government contracts. Clearly the partnership had been a fruitful one, at least architecturally speaking.

  After parking, Thornton and I threaded our way past the new buildings, and I began to recognize the massive Cold War buildings I remembered from a prior visit, years before. The old buildings hadn’t been replaced by the new buildings; they’d simply been supplemented and screened from initial view. We walked down a one-lane alley between two looming buildings, labeled 4500 NORTH and 4500 SOUTH, and then entered a metal doorway set in the vast brick wall of 4500 South. Just inside, a staircase led down into a basement and upward to two additional floors of offices and labs. We climbed one flight, then entered a hallway labeled H CORRIDOR. I knocked on the open doorway of the first office—the office was dark, which made me worry that I’d somehow gone astray—but a voice called, “Come in.”

  Arpad Vass emerged from the dimness to shake my hand and turn on the light; the fluorescents were bright enough to hurt my eyes at first, and I could understand why Arpad might prefer the dark, at least for computer work.

  Arpad was one of the most innovative graduate students I’d ever had. Rather than focusing on physical anthropology—bones, essentially—Arpad’s Ph.D. research had focused on chemicals. Specifically, he developed a way to interpret the chemicals of decomposition like a clock, one that told the time since death.

  For the past five years, Arpad had been collecting and analyzing the gases given off by bodies as they decomposed. In one corner of the Body Farm, he’d buried four bodies in graves of varying depths. He threaded the graves with a grid of perforated pipes leading to the surface of the ground. Every two weeks since burying the bodies, he had collected air samples from within and above the graves, and had run the samples through a gas chromatograph—mass spectrometer, a sophisticated analytical instrument that isolated individual compounds from the smelly samples. Over the course of the experiment, Arpad had identified nearly five hundred separate compounds given off by bodies as they decay. Many of the compounds were common, found virtually everywhere in nature; however, he’d found about thirty key compounds that—collectively—could be read as the fingerprint of a buried body. More specifically, as the fingerprint of a buried human body, rather than as the rotting remains of, say, a deer or dog or pig.

  But Arpad wasn’t just analyzing the chemical fingerprint of a buried body; he was also developing a gizmo that could detect that fingerprint out in the field. The gizmo, which he called “the sniffer,” was a mechanical version of a cadaver dog’s nose, and it was designed to find clandestine graves. The last time I’d seen him, Arpad was testing a prototype of the sniffer.

  After shaking hands with Arpad, Thornton closed the door to the office. Arpad—a dark-haired, brown-eyed man of Hungarian descent—raised his eyebrows in an unspoken question. At Thornton’s request, I hadn’t told Arpad what we w
anted to see him about; only that an FBI agent and I wanted to consult him about a forensic case.

  “This is fairly sensitive,” said Thornton. “We have evidence that a murder occurred in the vicinity of the Laboratory back during the Manhattan Project. We also suspect that espionage—spying for the Soviets—may have played some part in the murder.”

  “Interesting,” said Arpad. “What’s the evidence?”

  Thornton nodded at me. I opened the manila envelope I’d brought with me and slid out the photographs, laying them on Arpad’s desk. As he studied the images of the body and the shallow grave, he smiled. “That looks like pretty good evidence,” he said. “This evidence has just come to light?” I nodded. “This body was never found?” I nodded again.

  Arpad smiled again. “Very interesting,” he said.

  “Tell me about this sniffer you’re working on,” Thornton said. “How does it work—and how well does it work?”

  If I hadn’t known Arpad well, I probably wouldn’t have noticed the flicker of impatience in his eyes. It lasted only a split second, and then—almost like flipping a switch—he was in presentation mode, pitching himself and his work to the agent. “The research is funded by the Department of Justice,” he said. “We’ve been exploring two technologies for detecting clandestine graves. One is a simple off-the-shelf technology; the other is something more sophisticated, which we’re creating from scratch for DOJ.” He walked around the desk and picked up a pistol-shaped device from a bookshelf that lined the long wall of the office. In the place of a metal barrel, though, was an eighteen-inch black rubber tube, with a metal tip on the end. “This is a TopGun H10X commercial Freon detector,” Arpad said, “just like air-conditioning technicians use to check your central air for leaks.” Thornton looked puzzled, and I was pretty sure I did, too, as I hadn’t heard this part of Arpad’s pitch before. “It turns out,” Arpad went on, “that among the thirty key compounds a decaying body gives off, three are Freon compounds. So this is an easy way to do a crude search with existing, cheap technology. Here, I’ll show you.” Arpad opened up a file cabinet and removed a small glass vial sealed with a rubber stopper. Inside was about a teaspoonful of something that looked like garden-variety dirt.