A Fierce Radiance

by Lauren Belfer

  No, he decided. He wouldn’t add his suspicion of Tia’s murder to their last evening together. He had to organize his thoughts first, make certain he wasn’t allowing himself to be pulled into a web of paranoia. He didn’t like withholding his suspicions from Claire, but he had to be more sure of himself before he endorsed the notion by discussing it.

  He disengaged from her again, removing her arms from his body as gently as he could. He stood at the windows, moonlight surrounding him. To Claire, he was silhouetted in the moonlight.

  He couldn’t predict the future. He could only try to make his small corner of the world secure. There was no statute of limitations on murder. That was the law, right? He needed to get one or maybe even two full nights of sleep, so that he could be certain he was being rational. He wanted the hours he and Claire had left together to be about each other.

  Looking out the window, looking into the moonlight, he said, “I have something for you.” He turned to the chair where he’d piled his clothes.

  “What is it?”

  “A gift.” He rummaged among the clothes, found his shirt, took from its pocket a carefully folded handkerchief. “It’s the engagement ring my father gave my mother. I want you to have it. To keep you company while I’m away. I’ll feel better knowing it’s safe on your finger. It’ll protect you.” That was a ridiculous thing to say, he realized, but he meant it. “If you ever need protection.”

  Had he kept the ring there, in his shirt pocket, over his aching heart, all evening? Claire wondered. Through dinner, dessert, and coffee, through Lucas’s walk on Hudson Street to Morton and back on Bedford Street? She felt a pressure in her chest, what she could only describe as an ache of her own heart. Her being reached out to him. She pulled him close even though she didn’t move.

  He sat beside her on the bed. He made a joke, even as he tried not to cry. “This way, you won’t forget me while I’m away.” Now he was crying. For Tia, for Claire, for the war that was transforming their lives and the lives of everyone he knew.

  “I’ll never forget you.”

  She sounded close to tears, too, as she caressed his hair and consoled him.

  He took her left hand, placed the ring upon her finger. “I can’t see the future,” he said. He was unhinged by a sense that he wouldn’t survive the war. “But at least you’ll have this.” He turned and they kissed, bodies intertwined. “Someday, I hope, we’ll get married.” He couldn’t manage to bring himself to ask a question that would have a yes or no answer. Besides, he didn’t need to ask the question to know what her answer would be.

  “I know we will,” she said.

  She placed her hand upon him, brought him to life once more.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Are you finished?” growled Vannevar Bush, his voice echoing against the marble rotunda of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C. He wielded his pipe like a weapon, cutting it through the air to express his displeasure.

  In order to endow his small frame with the classical monumentality of the space around him, Claire had posed him leaning over the balustrade of the rotunda’s wide circular staircase. She stood below on the ground floor, lucky to have found an empty spot. A haphazard collection of desks, partitions, and filing cabinets filled the rotunda. Telephone and electric lines crisscrossed the marble floor. More than a dozen young men in suits, their ties loosened in the heat, worked around her. Soft light filtered through the skylight, however, and she created the illusion that Bush was alone. To capture the details, she used a large-format Linhof camera on a tripod. She was careful to avoid reflections on his thick glasses.

  “No, I’m not finished,” she growled back, trying to bring out his fierceness. She didn’t want a smiling, unctuous, standardized portrait. She wanted to capture who he really was and reveal the force and energy driving him to achieve his goals.

  “I’ve had enough.”

  “Too bad.”

  “I’ll walk away.”

  “You want your backside in Life magazine?”

  His expression became especially nasty, and she knew she had the shot she wanted. “Finished. In this location, at least.”

  “Good. Come up to my office, I want to talk to you,” he ordered.

  “Yes, I do believe your office is next on my list.”

  In his wood-paneled office, Vannevar (rhymed with beaver, according to the magazine’s research department) Bush sat at the far end of a long conference table. He probably thought the long table made him look intimidating. To Claire, it made him even smaller. She had to resist the urge to make fun of his pretensions. As usual, the magazine was trying to create an American hero. Vannevar Bush, president of the Carnegie Institution. Renowned engineer from MIT. Now he led the government’s innocuously named Office of Scientific Research and Development. Claire knew his concealed wartime portfolio by rumor only: radar, penicillin, new weapons of staggering force.

  Reviewing and signing documents, he worked while she worked. This assignment was personal, too, because he was Jamie’s boss. After she’d taken a half-dozen shots, Bush said, “Stop what you’re doing and have coffee with me.”

  “Not a very appealing invitation.”

  “Mrs. Shipley, would you care to join me for coffee?”

  Her assignment was simply a portrait, and she had more than enough coverage. “Why yes, thank you. How kind of you to ask.”

  Ordering his secretary to see to the coffee, he led Claire onto a balcony overlooking a lush garden, rhododendrons in bloom, peonies coming on, beds of snapdragon and iris in a cacophony of color. The sky was deep blue. The air smelled sweet. Closely planted trees, dense with leaves, blocked the view of the city. The buzzing of insects provided the only noise.

  They sat on cushioned chairs at a glass and cast-iron table. A striped awning protected them from the sun. As Claire looked around, she suspected that Washington must be filled with such hidden gardens, the enclaves of the powerful. This garden was completely separate from everyday life. From her everyday life, at least. Working here, seeing this classical edifice and glorious garden day after day, you could end up with a warped view of the world. Lose sight of what life was like for people like her and Charlie, Maritza and her family, the common citizens you were supposedly trying to aid and protect.

  The secretary brought a formal coffee service and cookies on a silver tray. Bush poured. Claire added cream, took a sip. The coffee was strong and full flavored. In the nation outside these walls, good coffee was hard to find. Price controls were now in effect, shortages were rampant. Claire and Charlie counted among their most prized possessions their yellow ration books, filled with coupons, issued by the Office of Price Administration. As a gift, her father had given her a purple suede pouch, embossed RATION BOOKS, to store and protect them. Charlie and her father had planted a victory garden on the Fifth Avenue terrace. They were growing tomatoes, spinach, and carrots.

  “Sugar?” Bush offered, gesturing to the sugar bowl filled to the top, almost overflowing. His gesture indicated that she could have as much as she wanted. At home, they carefully limited the sugar they used—when they could buy sugar. Sugarcane was used to make explosives, and sugar was strictly rationed.

  “No, thank you.” Claire didn’t take sugar in her coffee anyway.

  “Since I’m making an effort to be polite, I’ll tell you that I’m glad Harry Luce sent you for this assignment. I wanted to meet you.”

  “Why?”

  “You did a fine story on penicillin a while back.”

  “That story never ran.”

  “No, but I was fortunate enough to see the—what do you call it, the mock-up? The layout?”

  “Close enough.” She’d never heard of an outsider seeing the layout before a story ran.

  “Impressive. So impressive I told Harry it couldn’t be published. It gave away too much. And to make matters worse, the patient dies. How does that make the government look, backing a secret project in which the goddamned patient dies right in the pages o
f Life magazine? Even though you know and I know that with a project like this, you’re bound to lose a few along the way.” He gave an unpleasant laugh. Claire steeled her face to impassivity. “However, not too long ago Harry telephoned with an intriguing idea.”

  He waited for her to respond. She gave in. “Did he? Mr. Luce didn’t mention anything to me.”

  “No, we decided, or rather I decided, that I was the one to do the mentioning. Once I’d had a chance to meet you. To evaluate you. Although he had every confidence that I would find you—how shall I put this?—trustworthy.”

  She continued to sip her coffee. She studied a white butterfly flitting through the garden. It met up with another, and they became a team, flying in tandem, one above, one below, switching places, back and forth in an airborne dance. If Bush was trying to throw her off balance, she wouldn’t let him. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. She said nothing.

  “Let’s not waste any more time, Mrs. Shipley.” His abruptness told her that she’d played him correctly. “Harry felt, and I happen to agree, that the government’s program to develop penicillin needs to be documented. At some point in the future, the brilliance and heroism of the men and women involved must be revealed and celebrated. Scientists and businessmen working together to bring this life-saving medication to our selfless troops. A credit to our great nation. At least that’s how Harry sees it. And as he sees it, so will the country. You did such a terrific job with the test story,” this said with heavy irony, a bid to downgrade her, “that when Harry proposed you for the job, I happily concurred. Of course the story won’t be told until, well”—no one, not even Vannevar Bush, could foresee the end of the war—“until the time is right. But when the story can be told, Harry will have exclusive rights for his magazines, and everyone on the project will receive the recognition he, or she, deserves. I can’t guarantee that the commercial companies will welcome you with open arms, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they succumb to the temptation of Life magazine. At any rate, I’ve made similar arrangements for a number of my projects, and it works out well. When the right people are involved.”

  So Luce had followed through on her meeting with him. And yet she sensed something was not quite right. The attempt to bribe her with good coffee and unlimited sugar. Bush’s impatience, out of proportion to the context. Something else had to be at stake.

  “Of course you’ll need to pass a security check before you can work for me.”

  “And vice versa.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You and Mr. Luce may have devised this project, but I’m not sure I’m signing on to it.”

  “Sounds like a damn good opportunity to me.”

  “Well, you would see it that way, wouldn’t you?”

  He sighed, showing how put-upon he was. “Have some shortbread cookies, Mrs. Shipley. A personal favorite of mine.”

  “Thank you.” She took a cookie. It was crisp and crumbly. Freshly baked. Sweetened with plenty of sugar. She liked it.

  “If I may be so bold, what gives you pause about this terrific opportunity we’re giving you?”

  “I have the feeling there’s more to it than you’ve shared with me.”

  He chewed his cookie slowly, although he didn’t appear to enjoy it. “Let me ask you something,” he said, as if bringing up a different topic entirely. “I happen to know from my security man, Dr. Barnett, that you and James Stanton have become close. Has Dr. Stanton ever mentioned to you drugs that might be better than penicillin? Has he ever indicated that his rather remarkable sister might have stumbled upon something better?”

  “No,” she said, caught off guard. Had Tia found something better? And if she had, did Vannevar Bush know about it, or was he only speculating?

  He said nothing for a long moment. “You see, Mrs. Shipley, and I will tell you confidentially, since we’re speaking honestly with each other”—again the irony—“I’m having a bit of a problem with my erstwhile colleagues in the pharmaceutical industry, heroes though Harry Luce would have them be. I’ve drafted them into mass-producing penicillin and ordered them to cooperate with one another in the interest of the war effort. To facilitate this, I’ve suspended antitrust restrictions and patent protections on the means of production. Or to be more precise, the government will take the patents when the companies come up with some means of production, to codify their methods. No one will profit from those patents. When the companies have their penicillin ready for distribution, the military will buy it from them at a generous price, which seems to me like a good deal all-around. I happen to be giving away quite a lot of money to people doing research on this project, but recently the pharmaceutical companies have refused to take my research money, citing their patriotism. You’d almost think they don’t want to be beholden to me.

  “Now I happen to know they’re making progress on penicillin. They’d make even more progress—a lot more—if they’d share their discoveries with one another, but that’s exactly what they don’t want to do. They’re like children: no matter how often I tell them no, they still hold out the hope that someday they’ll be able to patent their individual means of production and make a fortune.

  “Which brings me to my next concern: what’s to stop them from devoting themselves to some other, similar drug? A drug for which they might be able to gain patent protection from the beginning, and I mean patent protection for the substance itself, leaving poor penicillin behind? I daresay, if certain people thought they could get hold of an antibacterial substance they could actually patent commercially, they might even steal for it. They might even kill for it.”

  “I was under the impression that this class of drugs couldn’t be patented because they’re made from natural products.” She had a faint recollection of Jamie explaining this.

  “Patents on natural products. Now that is an interesting question, Mrs. Shipley. We’d need the opinion of the experts at the patent office to get to the bottom of it.”

  “Or your opinion.”

  “Yes, there is that. The jury is still out on my opinion.”

  “Keeping your options open?”

  “I’m glad we understand each other. There are two issues at stake: the natural product itself, in this case penicillin, produced by a mold, and the means of production to turn the mold-product into a medication. There will never be a patent on the naturally occurring substance called penicillin, and as I said, the government will control the patents on the manufacturing techniques that turn that substance into a mass-produced medicine.”

  “Remind me why you chose to back the green mold?”

  “Right now, it’s the only viable antibacterial drug we have. The only one. It’s damn difficult to produce, but it’s systemic and completely nontoxic. There hasn’t been a single allergic reaction reported in all the testing done thus far. Remarkable. It does have its limitations, however. So far, it’s proven impossible to synthesize. And it’s effective only against gram-positive bacteria, the ones that take the purple stain, as you may or may not have learned in high school. Sometimes the stain is blue, but I won’t quibble about that. We’ve still got to do clinical trials, but we’re hoping it will work against gas gangrene, syphilis, meningitis, pneumonia, the list goes on. It also works against gonorrhea, even though that’s gram-negative, but I’m not complaining. Syphilis, gonorrhea, gas gangrene—those are the enemies of any military force. Penicillin doesn’t work against TB, tularemia, typhus, and something called atypical pneumonia, another one of the diseases that follows along in the troop train. I tell you, I feel like I’ve had to get a Ph.D. in biology to do this job.”

  He sat forward. “So the question remains, what if the pharmaceutical companies were to stumble upon a better drug? Discover it for themselves, or locate it in some academic research lab? It would be a valuable commodity. Invaluable. A drug that was gram-positive and gram-negative effective, say, and equally nontoxic, and easier to produce or chemically synthesize—although they might need years to fi
gure out how to mass-produce it and get it to the front lines. If there were another drug, who’d want to go forward with penicillin? Despite the war and all the talk of patriotism, who’d have a vested interest in it? Why pursue penicillin when there’s a chance for something better just around the corner, with the possibility of commercial patent protection to boot?”

  “Why don’t you just set up another team of researchers and companies to work on other antibacterials?”

  “Because, Mrs. Shipley,” he said impatiently, “we’d be starting from scratch. The troops need these medications now, today, this instant, not five years from now. At least with penicillin, we’re moving forward. We’ve got some baselines. But we’re still far from mass production, and the situation is desperate. Every research hour should be devoted to penicillin, not to other, pie-in-the-sky possibilities.”

  He poured more coffee. His silver spoon tinkled against the cup as he stirred in the sugar.

  “I have a proposal for you, Mrs. Shipley: I’ll let you pursue your penicillin story for Harry Luce, and you’ll keep me up-to-date on what our friends at the pharmaceutical companies are doing. Our enemies, too, if you meet up with any. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Herr Hitler and company were attempting at this very moment to crack the code of these medications, working side by side at the lab bench with our very best young men.” He gave her a thin smile. “This would be your personal contribution to the war effort. Your work is a perfect cover. You must see a lot in the course of a day, Mrs. Shipley. I expect people tend to forget you’re around. I expect you pride yourself on people forgetting you’re right beside them.”

  How well he’d read her.

  “Any glimmers you pick up on nonpenicillin research, any hints here and there, anything indicative of the Krauts or the Japs or a little home-grown intrigue, you pass it along to my security man, Andrew Barnett, who’ll pass it along to me.”