Bones of Betrayal

by Jefferson Bass

  “Thanks, Joe. ’Preciate you. Sorry I woke you. Safe travels. Sleep fast.”

  Two hours later, Peggy forwarded a call from Pete Rossi, an investigator at CILHI. “Our database turned up two deserters in East Tennessee in the summer of 1945,” Rossi said. “One was a guard from Camp Crossville, a prisoner-of-war camp up on the Cumberland Plateau where German and Italian officers were held. The guy from Camp Crossville was caught in Kentucky three months later and court-martialed. He claimed he was AWOL, not a deserter, and said he was gonna report back once his mama got well. He must have been convincing at the court-martial, because he got off with a two-year sentence and a dishonorable discharge.”

  “And the other deserter?”

  “The other was a corporal named Jonah Jamison,” said Rossi. “He was assigned to the Special Engineer Detachment—the military unit associated with the Manhattan Project—and posted to the Clinton Engineer Works. Never caught; vanished without a trace.”

  “Clinton Engineer Works,” I said. “That was the army’s name for the Oak Ridge complex. That’s got to be our man.”

  “Sounds like it,” Rossi agreed.

  “How soon you reckon we can get his army dental records?” As soon as I said it, I remembered. “Oh crap. That might be a problem, huh?”

  “Might be,” said Rossi. “Like the Pope might be Catholic.”

  What I’d suddenly remembered was the fire. The National Archives stored tens of millions of military service records in a huge repository in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1973, a fire broke out on the sixth floor of the building, which contained two-thirds of the military files. By the time the blaze was extinguished, the files of seventeen million soldiers had been destroyed, singed, or soaked. To keep the waterlogged files from molding, archivists had put them all in refrigerated storage. Some of the damaged records were being reconstructed, by scanning their soggy pages to create duplicate files; however, progress was excruciatingly slow, and many records had been lost altogether. On two previous occasions, I had sought military dental records from the St. Louis facility. In one case, the records I needed had survived; in the other, they hadn’t. Eighty percent of the records from the 1940s had been destroyed, Rossi said, so he wasn’t optimistic about finding a dental record that would tell us whether or not it was Jonah Jamison’s skeleton laid out on a table in my bone lab.

  “But I’m actually in St. Louis right now,” Rossi added, “looking through some Vietnam era records for Cusick. I’ll see if Jamison’s personnel file survived the fire.”

  Statistically, the odds weren’t good—just one in five. But then I remembered Emert’s words. “Things come in threes. You’ll find it.”

  Bless him: Emert was right. Jonah Jamison did want to be identified.

  JAMISON MUST HAVE BEEN a scientist or technician of some sort,” I said to Thornton. “Isn’t that the kind of folks who were in the Special Engineer Detachment?”

  “Most of them were,” said Thornton. The agent was on a three-way call from New Iberia with Emert and me. “Jamison was different, though. He was a writer.”

  “A writer? What the hell was a writer doing in a scientific and technical outfit?”

  “Immortalizing the great endeavor,” he said. “General Groves had one eye on Japan and the other eye on history. Or fame.” I thought back to the photograph Miranda had shown me, and her comments on how narrowly the general’s horizon was drawn compared to Oppenheimer’s. “Groves had still photographers and cinematographers scurrying around all over the place, capturing everything on film,” Thornton was saying, “but apparently he wanted the story set down on paper too, and in style.”

  The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. If the Manhattan Project succeeded, it would clearly play a pivotal role in human history. If it didn’t succeed, well, having the costly failure detailed on film and in print would likely be the least of the general’s worries. “So Jamison wrote for the Knoxville paper before the war?”

  Thornton laughed. “Not exactly. Groves was aiming for greater glory,” he said. “Jamison was a New York Times reporter before the war. After he was drafted, he was assigned to write scripts for training films—how to clean your rifle, how not to get VD, that sort of thing—when Groves reached down and plucked him from the basement of the Pentagon.”

  “How do you know all this stuff,” I asked, “when we didn’t even know who he was until twelve hours ago?”

  “Because the FBI has files, too,” he said, “and ours weren’t stored in a firetrap in St. Louis. And because Jonah Jamison was considered a potential security risk.”

  “A security risk?” That made no sense to me. “If they didn’t trust him, why didn’t they get somebody else to write about the project? Why take the chance?”

  “Well, he looked like a red-blooded American risk,” said Thornton. “His Achilles’ heels were booze and women. And Groves really wanted him. Jamison had written some flattering pieces about Groves in 1942, when Groves spearheaded the construction of the Pentagon. That was the Army’s biggest project before the Manhattan Project, and apparently the stories made Groves look brilliant. Jamison was drafted at the end of ’42, and Groves had him posted to Oak Ridge in early ’43. He was reported AWOL on August 4, 1945—two days before Hiroshima.”

  “And he disappeared without a trace?”

  “Until you dug him up,” Thornton said. “Him and that thick stack of pages.”

  “I sure wish we could read what was on those pages that were in the grave,” said Emert.

  “I sure wish we knew who killed him for writing it,” I said. “Anything in his security file shed light on that?”

  “Unfortunately, no,” Thornton said. “But speaking of security files, your storytelling gal pal turned up in two of the snitch reports to Acme Credit.”

  “Beatrice?”

  “Yup. One came from a neighbor, anonymous, who wrote, ‘That woman has the morals of an alley cat.’”

  I couldn’t help it; I laughed at that. It was impossible to imagine Beatrice, her silver hair and wrinkled face, behaving scandalously. “The bad girl of AARP,” I said.

  “Maybe not now,” he said. “But maybe back then. The other report came several months after that first one. An army doc at the Oak Ridge field hospital wrote that she came in bleeding and running a fever. She claimed she’d had a miscarriage. But the doctor suspected she’d had an abortion.”

  CHAPTER 36

  WE WORE BADGES EVERYWHERE IN THOSE DAYS—NOT just to work, but to the grocery store, the post office, even church. Heaven forbid you should try to gain access to Jesus when your clearance was only for Yahweh. MPs ranged everywhere checking badges. The black section of town, Colored Town, was practically fenced off. If the face on your badge wasn’t black, a guard or MP sitting in a jeep beside the road into Colored Town might wave you over and ask what business you had in there.

  The business I had in there was an abortion.

  A year after I married Novak, I realized I was pregnant. This was not happy news. For one thing, I was working with radioactive materials.

  We know a lot more now than we knew then about radioactivity and birth defects. I was working with equipment that flung atoms of U-235 and U-238 all over the place. In theory, the calutrons were collecting all the uranium, but in practice, it wasn’t so neat and tidy. It was probably like one of those big movie-theater popcorn poppers, the kind with the pot suspended up high inside a glass box. It’s designed to contain the popcorn, but if you look at the floor back there behind the concession stand, you’ll always see stray kernels that have ricocheted out through a gap in the gizmo. The calutrons were like that. At the end of every shift, they would run Geiger counters over us as we were leaving, and sometimes they’d find a stray particle or two of U-235 on somebody’s coveralls, which they’d remove with a magnifying glass and tweezers. It wasn’t that they were concerned about our health; it was that the uranium was so precious, they couldn’t afford to let a speck of it slip out the gate
.

  Today, they won’t let you have an X-ray in the doctor’s office if you’re pregnant. Back then, though, there were thousands of young women of childbearing age working in areas filled with radiation sources. It amazes me there wasn’t a whole herd of babies with birth defects born in Oak Ridge in 1944 and 1945.

  But the reason I needed an abortion wasn’t because I was worried about birth defects. The reason I needed an abortion was because the baby wasn’t Novak’s. After twelve months of marriage, we’d still never consummated it. Leonard Novak was many things—smart, funny, a brilliant scientist, a great jazz pianist—but heterosexual wasn’t one of them. At least not with me.

  I had done my best to seduce my husband. At bedtime, I would undress in front of him. Sometimes I’d brush my hair out, a hundred strokes, sitting in my slip in front of the mirror. I’d get him drunk, hoping that would lower his inhibitions. Once the lights were out and we were under the covers, I would press myself against him. None of it worked, ever.

  Do you have any idea what it’s like to be a woman whose husband shows absolutely no desire for her? Never makes any move to touch her? I knew enough by this point to know that I liked sex. Needed it, too. Maybe it was because my father died and my mother abandoned me when I was still young. Whatever the reason, I craved affection. Or maybe I just wanted sex because I was a healthy, fertile young woman surrounded by healthy, virile young soldiers and construction workers.

  Within a week of marrying Novak, I knew I’d made a mistake, and within six months, I was getting restless and flirting with other men. Around noon every day, while Novak was off making plutonium at the Graphite Reactor, I’d walk down the hill to the recreation hall and strike up a conversation with some guy at the soda fountain. Sometimes we’d just talk for a while and then I’d catch the bus out to Y-12 for my evening shift at the calutron; sometimes the guy, whoever he was, would take me to a dorm room or a car or a trailer. It felt furtive and dirty, but it took away some of the loneliness. It gave me something to look forward to—and something to remember—during those long afternoon hours in a factory filled with vacuum pumps and invisible atoms and magnetic fields that pulled the bobby pins out of my hair. And it gave me something to cling to in the long, empty hours at night, when my husband gave me a peck on the cheek and rolled to the far side of the mattress.

  Novak had to know I was being unfaithful to him. He was a smart man, after all; how could he not notice that the woman who’s been throwing herself at him, night after night, suddenly isn’t anymore? Did his relief that I was letting him off the hook make it easy for him to keep quiet about whatever he was noticing or wondering or suspecting? I can only guess that it must have. And I chose to interpret his silence as tacit approval, in some way.

  But a baby: I knew a baby would change everything. A baby would have forced us to confront the issue, if you’ll pardon the pun. I couldn’t do it. And so it was I found myself one Saturday night—a night when I was pregnant and Novak was away—on the bus into Colored Town.

  I wasn’t alone. I was riding with a young black woman from Y-12. Mary Alice was a cleaning woman in my building. That was the only sort of job they gave black people during the war—manual labor or janitorial work. I’d gotten to know her during smoke breaks and I liked her. Her mother, she said, was a sort of midwife, nurse, and healer. And an abortionist. When I found out I was pregnant, it hadn’t been hard for me to come up with a pretext for catching a bus with Mary Alice to Colored Town. I would sneak in by posing for the cameras.

  When I became the calutron poster girl, I’d gotten chummy with the photographer, Ed Westcott. Nothing improper, not with him, but anytime he was taking pictures in my building, he’d stop by and chat for a minute. And when I found out that Mary Alice and her mother could help me out of my dilemma, I came up with an idea. Westcott was always looking for human-interest pictures—kids playing in a swimming hole, cub scouts learning to build campfires, cars stuck in the mud. Once he shot Santa Claus being frisked by security guards. Christ, we thought, if even Santa’s getting checked for contraband, who are we mere mortals to complain?

  Westcott was famous, in a way. As the project’s photographer, he was free to come and go pretty much wherever he pleased, and he’d been ranging all over the townsite and the plants since the very beginning. Most of the guards would motion him right through checkpoints, smiling and waving; some of them would stop him just long enough to strike a pose and ask him when he was going to take their picture. Occasionally he did, which earned him all sorts of goodwill.

  Anyway, what I suggested to Westcott was a picture showing me giving reading lessons to Mary Alice and some of the other girls in Colored Town. “I think it could be a good civic project,” I said. “Maybe if you did a picture and the paper ran it, we’d drum up some interest and some volunteers.” He liked the idea, and he agreed to meet me at the colored recreation hall. So when the bus driver asked me why a white woman was heading into Colored Town on a Saturday night, I told him Mr. Westcott was coming to take a picture of me teaching colored girls to read. That seemed to be a good enough reason.

  Colored Town was officially called the “colored hutment area” on the map. Hutments were shabby, prefab plywood shacks, sixteen feet square. They were trucked in by the thousands and shoehorned together, about ten feet apart. There was a hutment area for whites, too, but the white hutments were better. The colored hutments didn’t even have real windows, just screened-in openings covered with hinged panels of plywood. If the people inside wanted daylight, they’d swing up some of the hinged panels and prop them open. That might have been okay in decent weather, but when it was cold, the choice was between warmth and light, and even the warmth wasn’t all that warm—every hutment had a cast-iron coal stove in the middle of the room, but as drafty as the buildings were, and as scarce as coal rations were, people in the hutments were miserably cold in the winter. The other thing about the colored hutments was that there were men’s hutments and women’s hutments, four people per hutment. Black couples who were married got split up so the army could cram four people into every one of those dreadful little shacks.

  Colored Town had its own rec center, too, and the story there was the same—it was cheaper and crummier than the white people’s version. No Ping-Pong tables or pool tables or piano; just a few tables and chairs. Even so, when Mary Alice and I walked in that night, the place was crowded and lively. Couples sat at some of the tables playing bridge; groups of men with poker chips at others. At one end of the room, somebody had a radio, and couples were jitterbugging to the music. The instant I walked in the door, the noise died down and every head turned in our direction. Thousands of black people crammed in a shabby ghetto, and in walks a lily-white woman.

  “You in the wrong place, white girl,” said a man just inside the door, but then Mary Alice called him by name and told him to mind his business. “She’s all right,” Mary Alice said. “She’s with me.” She led us to a distant corner of the room where a middle-aged man and woman sat in straight-backed chairs angled toward each other. “Mama, this here is Beatrice, that I told you about.” Her mother looked me up and down. The man looked away, as if to give us a measure of privacy, and I was grateful.

  “You sure this is what you got to do?” I nodded. “You got the money?”

  “Yes ma’am,” I said, and took two ten-dollar bills out of my skirt pocket. She smoothed and folded them, then tucked them into her blouse.

  “Mary Alice,” she said, “you come with me and this white girl.”

  She led us through a doorway into the women’s restroom. The restroom held one sink and three toilet stalls, none of them with a door. It smelled like it hadn’t been cleaned lately. She must have seen the look of revulsion on my face, because she said, “You want a nice doctor’s office, you come to the wrong place, white girl. You want to change your mind about this?”

  “No ma’am,” I said. “I’m just scared.”

  “Ought to be,” she said. “Th
is is scary business. Sad, too. How come you not want to have this child?”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I just can’t.”

  “Course you can, baby,” she told me. “You just won’t. ‘Can’t’ not the same thing as ‘won’t.’” She pointed at the third stall. “You need to pull off your panties and raise up your skirt. Sit on that toilet and scootch up to the front of the seat. You got to spread your knees wide and hang your bottom off the front edge so I can get in there. But you ought to pee first, if you can.”

  I stared from her to Mary Alice and back again. “It’s all right,” said Mary Alice. “She’s done this a hundred times. She knows what she’s doing. I’ll be right there beside you. You go on and use the bathroom, and I’ll come in when you flush.”

  I sat down on the toilet and bent over to hide my face while I peed, then reached back and flushed the toilet. Then I pulled off my underpants, and Mary Alice squeezed into the narrow space between the toilet and the wall.

  “Now scoot on up here and open up your legs,” said Mary Alice’s mother. “I know you know how to do that.”

  “Mama!” Mary Alice sounded shocked.

  “Mary Alice, don’t you start with me,” she said. “I know you’ve been opening yours for a while now, too. Women been gettin’ told to open their legs since the fall of man. That’s one part of the Lord’s curse. This here’s another part.”

  She pulled a small bottle from her apron pocket, uncorked it, and handed it to me. “Here, drink this down. Absinthe. Help you relax.” The liquid in the bottle smelled like licorice, but it burned like whiskey going down. Within seconds I felt the heat in my stomach, then felt it spread through my belly and out into my arms and legs, and my head began to hum. Next she took a handkerchief from her apron and tied it into a fat knot. “Open your mouth,” she said, and when I did, she jammed the knot between my teeth. “Now you bite down hard. This gonna hurt some.” I clenched my jaws, and felt the knot begin to flatten under the pressure. “Mary Alice, you get ready.”