Bones of Betrayal

by Jefferson Bass

  Somehow, despite the narrowness of the toilet stall, Mary Alice managed to turn and swing one leg over me, so she was straddling me—one leg on either side of the toilet—facing me, her chest in my face. She reached down and took my hands in hers, lacing her fingers through mine. I felt her mother kneel between my knees. “All right, easy does it,” she said. “If you can relax, that’d be good. If you can’t, you hold real still. This be over before you know it.”

  I felt something cold and sharp pierce me to the core, and I heard a scream burrowing its way out of my throat and through the knot of fabric. My knees jerked up and my shoulders strained forward as my body fought to curl itself into a ball. “By God, white girl, you hold still. If you want to stay alive, you hold still,” she said. “Mary Alice, you got to hold her good.”

  My nose closed from my tears, and the handkerchief filled my mouth. I could not breathe, and I began to gasp and gag. Everything started going black—everything except for the white-hot flame of pain. Then, just when I was sure I was dying, I felt the fabric yanked from my mouth, and I could breathe again and see again. “Done,” I heard Mary Alice’s mother say. “Done. Lord forgive us, it’s done.” I felt my belly cramping, and every spasm felt as if I were clenching shards of glass or slivers of metal deep within me. “I got to put these rags inside you,” she said. “Catch the blood. You wait till tomorrow evening to take ’em out.” I gasped when she prodded at me again, but it was a duller pain this time.

  Mary Alice let go of one hand and swung her leg back across me, so she was beside me again. She gave my shoulder a squeeze. “You done just fine,” she said. “You’ll be all right now.” I shook my head and cried.

  I heard water running in the sink, and a moment later Mary Alice’s mother stepped into the stall again, holding two damp cloths. She handed one to Mary Alice, who mopped my face; with the other, she bent down and swabbed my blood-smeared thighs and bottom.

  Suddenly there was a series of raps on the door. I nearly cried out with fear; the two black women exchanged swift, worried looks. More knocking, louder now. “Mary Alice? Miss Beatrice?”

  “Yes, what is it?” Mary Alice said.

  “Y’all about done in there? Y’all just about ready to get your picture took?”

  I started to call out—I have no idea what I would have said—but luckily Mary Alice laid a hand over my mouth. “Just about,” she said. “One more minute.” She hauled me to my feet. “You splash some water on your face and comb your hair and put on this lipstick,” she said. “Then we got to get out there and act like everything is fine.”

  In a daze—the cramps searing and my head buzzing—I rinsed my face and dabbed on lipstick. Then Mary Alice took my hand and led me out the restroom door. It was as if I had walked on-stage in a play: a card table in front of us glowed in a pool of light, and as Mary Alice and I stepped forward dozens of faces watched. Most of the faces were black, but several were white, and I recognized the uniforms and black armbands of MPs.

  A few books were stacked on the table, and one lay open, its spine broken. It was the Bible, and it was open to the story of Adam and Eve. Westcott stepped toward us and ushered us into two chairs, which were angled at one corner of the table. “Ladies, you look lovely,” he said, though he looked at me closely, with what appeared to be concern. “Lean forward over the book a little, Beatrice. You, too, Mary Alice, and point to a word, like you’re asking Beatrice what the word is.”

  Mary Alice’s index finger—blue-black skin, with a pink, pearly nail—traced a wavering line down one page, then came to rest beneath a verse. “What this Bible verse say right here, Miss Beatrice?” Her voice was a singsong caricature—like a darky in a Hollywood film—and I wondered if it was me she was mocking, or Westcott, or the segregated city and nation in which we lived and worked.

  I looked, and I read the verse aloud: “The tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”

  “Amen,” said Mary Alice as the flash blinded me.

  The MPs—sent by the bus driver, apparently, to make sure the white woman wasn’t set upon by sex-crazed black men—stayed while Westcott packed up his his camera and lights and loaded them back into his jeep. Mary Alice and I had remained seated while the gear was packed. When everything was loaded, I stood up to go, and when I did, I felt my dress sticking to the metal folding chair. I looked down, and the seat was sticky with blood. Mary Alice glanced at the chair, then quickly stood beside me, an arm around my waist. With her free hand, she signaled to her mother, who came and stood close behind me. We walked that way, the two black women and I, out of the building and into the night. Mary Alice helped me onto the bus, and as I stepped up into the enveloping darkness of the bus, I heard one of the MPs say something to the other.

  What he said was, “Nigger lover.”

  CHAPTER 37

  BEATRICE TURNED TO LOOK AT ME. IT HAD COST HER some pain to tell me the story, I could tell.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “You must have been desperate to have risked so much. You could have died. Or gone to prison.”

  “Prison comes in all shapes and sizes,” she said. “So does death.” She turned and looked out the windows. “How did you know to ask me about that?”

  I probably wasn’t supposed to say, but I felt I owed her a disclosure in return for what she’d just told me. “The FBI is looking at old files,” I said, “trying to figure out why Novak was killed. A doctor at the hospital reported that he suspected you’d had an abortion.”

  “That son of a bitch,” she said. “I knew him for forty years, and I never could stand him.”

  I realized I had no right to ask, but I asked anyhow. “Whose baby was it, Beatrice?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “That’s another reason I had the abortion.” She sighed. “Novak was traveling out to Hanford a lot in the spring and summer of 1945,” she said. “The big plutonium production reactors out there were coming on line, and there were technical problems to solve. It turned out that trace amounts of boron were absorbing neutrons and slowing down the chain reaction. ‘Poisoning’ it, that’s the term they used. Novak had to solve the mystery of the boron poisoning. He’d be gone for a week or ten days at a time, and I got into the habit of going down to the Rec Hall at night, to pass the time.”

  “You were lonely when he was gone,” I said.

  “I was lonely when he was here,” she said. “Maybe lonelier. I think I was the loneliest when he was sleeping in the same bed with me, twelve inches away but beyond reach. When he was gone, at least I could do something about the loneliness. Sometimes I even brought a man home with me. I’m sure I was indiscreet; I’m sure the neighbors talked.”

  Or snitched, I thought. “I should go,” I said.

  “Where? Home? Do you have a good woman waiting for you, Bill? Or a good man?”

  “No. I have work waiting for me,” I said. I stood to go. Something on the end table beside her chair caught my eye. Resting atop a stack of opened mail was a small, rectangular piece of white paper with blue lettering.

  “Good God,” I said.

  “What?” She followed my eyes. “Oh, that,” she said. “What a jerk.”

  The lettering read, “I know your secret.”

  AMAZING,” I SAID TO EMERT. I had called him when I left Beatrice’s house to share what she’d told me about the note. Thirty minutes later, as I sat in his office, he had already gathered a remarkable amount of information. “So this guy was just on a random fishing expedition? Trying to trick Oak Ridge geezers into spilling whatever beans they had to spill from the bomb project or the Cold War?”

  “Espionage-flavored beans,” said Emert. “He was pitching a documentary to the History Channel. Atomic Secrets, he called it.” Emert waved a one-page printout—a bad photocopy of a fax, or a really good photocopy of a really bad fax. “This is a one-page treatment he’d faxed to the History Channel. He didn’t have a deal for
it yet, though—it was just a proposal.”

  I read the subtitle. “No wonder he didn’t have a deal,” I said. “Get a load of that subtitle. How Soviet Spies Pierced the Heart of the Manhattan Project. How clunky is that?”

  “Yeah, well, Ken Burns he wasn’t,” said Emert. “But you gotta love the irony of ‘pierced the heart,’ considering how he died. Apparently he was hoping to dig up something juicy in Oak Ridge, something that would hook the History Channel.”

  “How’d you get this so fast?”

  “I’ll never tell,” he said, holding a finger to his lips, like the World War II billboards that reminded Oak Ridgers to keep quiet.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Oh, all right, I’ll tell,” he said. “Right after you called from Beatrice’s driveway, I got a call from a desk clerk at the Double-tree, who saw the sketch in the newspaper. The secret-sniffing guy—Willard Clarkson was his name—checked into the hotel seventeen days ago, on January ninth. On the tenth, he faxed this to New York. He also asked for extra chocolate-chip cookies.”

  “The Doubletree makes a damn good cookie,” I said.

  “Yeah, but you’re only entitled to one cookie, and only at check-in,” Emert said. “This guy went back for seconds. He thought the regular rules didn’t apply to him.”

  “What are you, the cookie police? You’re saying he deserved to die because he went back to the desk clerk and said, ‘Please, sir, could I have more?’? Hell, I’ve done that.”

  “Never do it again,” he said. “Look where you could end up.”

  “Clearly the desk clerk had sufficient motive,” I said. “So, this bush-league documentary guy—”

  “Sapling,” said Emert.

  “Sapling?”

  “Bush-league’s a little harsh,” he said. “Clarkson had already done some other History Channel shows. Things about World War II aircraft carriers and fighter planes and bombers. Not bad. Some glitzy stuff for A&E, too. But as I was saying—”

  “Before you were so rudely interrupted?”

  “Before I was so rudely interrupted,” he echoed. “The afternoon of January tenth, he sends the fax and asks for illegal seconds on the cookies. And then nobody at the Doubletree ever sees him again.”

  “They thought he’d skipped out?”

  “They just thought he was weird, or reclusive. He’d said he’d be staying for several weeks. They had his credit card on file, and the DO NOT DISTURB sign was hanging on the door. They were leaving him alone.”

  “January tenth,” I said. “That was right before East Tennessee turned into Antarctica, if I remember right.”

  “It was,” he said. “It was also one day after Leonard Novak checked out those library books about the Venona Project.”

  EMERT HEADED TO THE DOUBLETREE, to lead the search of Willard Clarkson’s room. I headed down the hill once more, to the library. I was hoping that perhaps Isabella was back by now, her father’s health improving, but the substitute at the Reference Desk dashed my hopes. She dashed my fallback hope as well: no, she didn’t have any further details about how he was doing, or where I might send a get-well card, or when Isabella might be back. I tried to mask the frustration and embarrassment I felt; I must look like either a stalker or a fool, I realized, to be pursuing a woman who didn’t consider me worth turning to in a crisis.

  “I was hoping to do a bit of history research today,” I said. It wasn’t true—it was a flimsy excuse for my presence here—but she unlocked the Oak Ridge Room for me, and I found it soothing, somehow, to be there. I looked through the notebook of photos from ORNL, and saw the Graphite Reactor take shape on a hillside, against the backdrop of a wooded ridge. I saw the immense U-shaped structure of the K-25 plant, which separated a gaseous form of uranium. The K-25 plant was the last to be completed but the largest in capacity, like some lumbering uranium freight train finally gathering momentum. I saw the oval racetracks of Y-12, their D-shaped calutrons linked by thousands of tons of silver borrowed from the U.S. Treasury. And I saw Beatrice, perched on her stool, one hand forever poised on the controls, altering the trajectory of uranium atoms and human history.

  Looking through a binder labeled “Life in Oak Ridge,” I saw men and women lined up for cigarettes, boys and girls decked out in Cub Scout and Brownie uniforms, football players in helmets and pads, baseball teams in caps. I saw two pretty young women—one white, one black—looking at a book together, the black woman pointing a finger at the page as the white woman read aloud. The white woman’s eyes looked glassy.

  I saw musicians playing and couples dancing. And among the dancing couples, I spotted Beatrice yet again. She was a photogenic young woman; if I were a photographer in wartime Oak Ridge, I’d have taken her picture every chance I got, too. In this photo, she was dancing with a handsome, smiling young man—a man who was not Leonard Novak. I checked the date on the photo: August 1, 1945. The Trinity test had shaken New Mexico two weeks before; in five more days, the city of Hiroshima would be decimated, and in eight days Nagasaki would share its fate. And at some point in the days or weeks after the photo was taken, the smiling young man would be shot at point-blank range and buried in a shallow grave, along with hundreds of pages of typescript. Were the pages a manuscript for posterity, or secrets for the Soviets? Or were they both?

  I dialed Emert’s number and the call rolled immediately to his voice mail. “I’m at the library,” I said, “and I’m looking at a picture of Beatrice dancing with Jonah Jamison on August 1, 1945.”

  When I ended the call, my phone beeped to tell me I’d received a voice mail. While I’d been leaving the message for Emert, the detective had been leaving one for me. “Maybe our dead documentary guy was after a big fish after all,” his message said. “We’re in his hotel room, and he’s got a fat file of transcripts from the Venona Project.”

  As soon as I hung up, my phone rang. It was Emert again, live and in person this time. “Clarkson made some interesting notes in the margins of these Venona cables,” Emert said. On July 22, 1945, someone whose code name was “Chekhov” had traveled from Oak Ridge to Hanford; the cable added that “Pavlov” had found the way to “Chekhov” and would soon submit a detailed account of the project. Clarkson had highlighted “Chekhov” and written “Novak?” in the margin. He’d also highlighted “Pavlov” and scrawled a pair of question marks.

  “I think we should go see your friend Beatrice together,” he said, “and ask her some more questions about her husband and her boyfriend.”

  CHAPTER 38

  BEATRICE STUDIED THE COPY OF THE PHOTOGRAPH I’D duplicated at the library. She looked from my face to Emert’s and back again.

  “Jonah was a handsome man, wasn’t he? Yes,” she said, “I had an affair with him.” She turned to me. “That’s why I had to have the abortion. How could I have a baby whose father had shot himself because of me?”

  The casual way she said it stunned me, but Emert just shook his head. “I don’t believe you,” he said. “Why would he shoot himself over you? Why didn’t you call the MPs when it happened? How’d you get the body way the hell out by that uranium bunker?” The man did like to fire off multiple questions.

  Now it was Beatrice shaking her head. “Don’t you see, if I’d reported it, the scandal would have ruined Leonard’s career, and that would have destroyed Leonard. Leonard buried the body. To protect us both.”

  I felt ten steps behind, struggling to catch up. “But Leonard was deeply conflicted about working on the atomic bomb anyhow,” I said. “It might have been a relief to be forced off the project.”

  “No, you’re wrong,” she said. “Leonard’s moral pangs about the bomb were his own private pain. Public humiliation would have been intolerable to a sensitive man like Leonard.”

  “So let me see if I understand this,” said Emert. “You’re saying he was too sensitive to face embarrassment, but not too sensitive to bury a body in the woods?”

  “Absolutely,” she said. “Leonard was used to keep
ing secrets, and he was used to self-recrimination. He had a streak of martyrdom in him—but he wanted to be the one to nail himself to the cross, rather than be nailed there by anyone else. There was an edge of arrogance on his finely honed sense of guilt.”

  Something was nagging at me. Something written in four words on a small piece of paper. “Beatrice, did you talk to Novak after you heard from the man making the documentary about atomic secrets?” She looked startled.

  “I…I don’t think so,” she said. “I really can’t remember.”

  “The phone company’s computer can tell us if you two talked by telephone recently,” said Emert.

  “I might have,” she said. “Wait, yes, I did. Briefly. Leonard called and asked if I had said anything to that dreadful television man about…anything. I told him no. I told him not to worry—that the man was just a TV muckraker. But Leonard was very upset. He said the man had all but accused him of giving the Russians information about the bomb during World War II.”

  Emert leaned forward. “And did Leonard give the Russians information about the bomb?”

  “Leonard? Heavens no,” she said. “But it wouldn’t surprise me if Jonah did. I wasn’t his only girlfriend, you know. He spent far too much money on women and whiskey. I don’t see how he could afford his vices on a corporal’s salary.”

  Emert stared at her stonily. “Lady, I think you’re lying to me. I want you to come down to the police station tomorrow afternoon and give me a statement. I’ll be asking you to take a poly-graph test, too, unless you’re afraid it will incriminate you.”

  What she did next startled both Emert and me. Beatrice laughed. “Afraid? Detective, I believe every word I’ve said. Why on earth would I be afraid of a lie detector.” Suddenly her head nodded forward, then jerked upright again. “Oh my, this has all been quite exhausting,” she said. Her voice quavered a bit. “Would you gentlemen mind if an old woman goes to bed now? It sounds like I have a grueling afternoon in store for me tomorrow.”