A Fierce Radiance

by Lauren Belfer

  Of course growing green mold in a basement wasn’t illegal. Now that he thought about it, Kreindler was surprised more people weren’t doing it.

  “Detective Kreindler.” Andrew Barnett was hurrying down the stairs, striding across the room, all good spirits, bow tie in place, coming to shake his hand. “Good to see you again.”

  Kreindler couldn’t stand this guy. “Wonderful to see you, too.” They shook hands on their mutual admiration.

  “So, what have we got here?” Barnett said, as cheery as if they were out at Belmont for an afternoon at the races.

  “As you see.”

  Barnett looked around, and then he did see. His right foot, clad in a well-polished leather shoe, was one inch away from a puddle of blood. He stared at the tarps. He realized what was under them. He registered the garbage and the evidence of rats and the green mold in milk bottles in racks along the walls. His face fell. Kreindler had sometimes wondered what that phrase meant; now he saw it happen right in front of him, cheeks down, lips down, eyelids drooping.

  “I’m thinking black market,” Kreindler said jovially, allowing himself a moment to enjoy Barnett’s distress. “You agree?”

  No response.

  “So what’s your best guess about what this stuff is selling for on the black market?”

  Still no response. Well, he didn’t want the guy to pass out. That wouldn’t do anyone any good.

  Abruptly Barnett was in the corner with the dry heaves. Kreindler prayed he wouldn’t actually throw up.

  While Barnett tried to get control of himself, Kreindler briefed him on the story, as a way of pretending he didn’t notice what a hard time Barnett was having. “Here’s what we’ve got…” He went through the entire thing, right through to the strongman’s dead wife, because that’s how long it took Barnett to come out of the corner.

  “A hundred dollars,” Barnett said, wiping his forehead with his handkerchief. The guy was in a cold sweat, but otherwise he seemed okay. “To the best of our knowledge, penicillin is selling on the black market at a hundred dollars per dose. I’ve heard about these…facilities, but this is the first one I’ve seen.”

  “Well, I’ve seen about enough. You?”

  Barnett nodded.

  “I’ll give the men upstairs the go-ahead to start taking out the bodies. You and I can go somewhere to get a cup of coffee or green tea or whatever they serve in this neighborhood.”

  Barnett blanched at the mention of coffee. “I need to catch a train back to D.C.”

  “Then I’ll walk you to the subway.” Kreindler figured Barnett was a taxi kind of guy and couldn’t resist needling him.

  “What’s the best place to get a taxi?” Barnett asked.

  Just as he thought. “Probably the Bowery. I’ll walk you over there.” They’d have a few minutes, at least, to talk, and that was all that Kreindler needed.

  Upstairs, Kreindler’s orders were sharp and quick. The men got to work.

  As Kreindler and Barnett walked across Pell Street toward the Bowery, Barnett was uncharacteristically quiet. Kreindler wished he knew what this guy was thinking. But, none of his business and just as well.

  However, he had to go forward: “I’ve got some news for you, Dr. Barnett.”

  “What kind of news?”

  Good, Barnett must be feeling better. He sounded more like his usual arrogant self. “I identified a German spy at the Rockefeller Institute and informed the FBI. They’re running him now as a double agent. Probably you know him. He studies sewage. Sergei Oretsky.”

  Barnett looked at him sharply. He was caught off guard, clearly. Took him a minute to catch up. Then he looked relieved. “Oretsky’s got nothing to do with my projects. Completely different department. Outside my jurisdiction.”

  “Glad to hear it.” Kreindler said nothing more, making Barnett work for the next piece of news.

  “Anything else?” Barnett finally asked.

  “Yes. We’ve been questioning Oretsky a good deal, and pretty much getting nothing but nonsense. Then a few days ago, out of the blue, he starts telling a story.” Why a suspect would sit on information for a month or two or three and then blurt it out, Kreindler never understood, but sometimes it went that way.

  “What kind of story?”

  “Well, as you may know, Sergei Oretsky spends a lot of time at the waterfront, collecting samples, I think he calls them, from the sewage outlets. He told us that on one of the days last May when he was out doing his collecting, he happened to see Dr. Nicholas Catalano walking on the path along the cliff with Lucretia Stanton. Resumed going about his business, then when he looked back, Lucretia Stanton was at the bottom of the cliff and Catalano was nowhere to be seen.”

  Barnett stopped walking and turned to Kreindler. He waited for a handful of teenage girls in school uniforms to amble past. Then he spoke in a harsh whisper, his rage barely controlled. “You’re using the confession of a suspected German spy to accuse a man at the forefront of the government’s program in—well, in one of the most important programs the government is running? Is that what you’re doing? Be careful, Detective, be very careful, before you start making accusations that you can’t prove against Dr. Cat—against a man like that.”

  “I’m ready to bring Catalano in for questioning.”

  “You do that and you will lose your job. You’re not on this case—remember? I’ll handle this.”

  Abruptly, Barnett strode ahead to the Bowery. Lots of taxis, traffic not too bad, Kreindler noted. “Good day to you,” Barnett said over his shoulder as he stepped into the street to hail a cab.

  “And to you.” Kreindler watched Barnett get in the taxi and take off in the wrong direction for Penn Station, proving either that he didn’t know any better or that he was eager to escape.

  So, Kreindler was back to watching, and waiting. He had plenty of time. The war couldn’t last forever. When the war was over, Kreindler would still be here, but Andrew Barnett would be back teaching economics at Stanford. There was no statute of limitations on murder.

  In the taxi, Barnett leaned his head back against the seat, filthy as it probably was. He opened the window and let the city sounds wash over him. The driver turned on Worth, heading to the West Side, making a zigzag uptown, trying to avoid the worst of the traffic.

  He’d handled the conversation with Kreindler pretty well, Barnett complimented himself—the part of the conversation regarding Nick Catalano, that is. The basement, okay, Barnett couldn’t be expected to do better with that, he’d never been to a murder scene. The existence of the black market was no surprise to him. After the success in Boston following the Cocoanut Grove fire, penicillin was out of the bag. Black market manufacturing sites were popping up all over. Dr. Bush had decided against trying to control them. The civil health authorities would have to deal with the problem. After all, penicillin wasn’t Dr. Bush’s only project, and it wasn’t Andrew Barnett’s only project, either. All scientific endeavors in the interest of the war came under Bush’s jurisdiction. Penicillin was important, but it was second to their most important project, which was the atomic bomb. In the context of the bomb, this business in Chinatown was nothing but a distraction.

  Still, Barnett couldn’t help but wonder: Nick Catalano. Could Sergei Oretsky’s accusation possibly be true? It was awful, of course, and Barnett hated to think he might be working with a murderer who could strike again. But if word about Catalano started going around, how was Barnett supposed to deal with that? Dr. Bush wouldn’t appreciate Catalano as the solution to the problem of Lucretia Stanton’s murder. Dr. Bush might be so unhappy about it that he’d shoot the messenger, as it were, and send Barnett to follow in his brother’s footsteps in the Pacific.

  On the penicillin front, things had been going so well recently. From all reports, the penicillin trials in North Africa were a great success. The companies were developing penicillin without patents for the military, while researching other substances in the background: Claire Shipley had proven
this, although in retrospect Barnett wished he hadn’t revealed quite so much satisfaction about it when she called to tell him. Dr. Bush’s approach was brilliant, Barnett had to give him that.

  The taxi approached West Thirty-first Street. In the winter’s early dusk, Pennsylvania Station loomed before them with its shadowed monumentality.

  Nick Catalano, accused of murder. No, no, that could never be allowed. Catalano’s work was essential to the war effort, especially with Stanton out of the picture. A pity about him. A real loss.

  A murderer to be brought to justice in the winter of 1942/1943? The entire undertaking was ridiculous.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Claire.” Should he have referred to her as Mrs. Shipley? Nick wondered. The exigencies of address still confused him sometimes. They’d been intimate: that entitled him to use her first name, didn’t it? “It’s Nick Catalano.”

  Silence. So, his call was unwelcome.

  Finally: “Nick, hi.”

  Not even a how are you? Or, good to hear from you. She was more stalwart than he thought. More stalwart than he was. Tougher. Well, he’d put himself forward this far, he might as well continue: “I’m in New York for a few days. I thought we could have”—he’d intended to ask her to dinner, but in view of her reaction—“coffee together. This afternoon, maybe?”

  The call surprised her. But, she thought, how could she not agree to see him? She wasn’t cruel; she certainly didn’t think of herself as cruel. And she’d made love with him, after all, although it had counted as nothing. Did that make her cruel? Or just mean that she lived her life the way, well, the way the typical man lived? The shock would be if that night had actually meant something to Nick, Nick with his presumably well-earned reputation for enjoying, so to speak, the company of many women.

  Still…he was Jamie’s best friend. Maybe she misjudged this call. Maybe he needed comfort as much as she did.

  In the weeks and then months that had passed since the Cocoanut Grove fire, when she’d learned that Jamie was dead, she’d forced herself to live from day to day. One day, then the next day, then the next. Christmas came, and she and Charlie were with her father. They were among the most fortunate people in the world, she knew as they gathered around the tree on Christmas Eve: it was December 1942, and they were together. A family. Then on New Year’s, she thought the same: January 1, 1943, and we’re together. What else could she do or think? She couldn’t let Charlie see her collapse in grief.

  Nick was waiting for her response. “Yes, Nick, we should have coffee.” She thought through the options. “How about the café at the Hotel Lafayette, at University and Ninth?” That was a good choice, popular and bustling—and several blocks from home.

  “In an hour, say?” He tried to be lighthearted about it. He didn’t want to sound desperate. He felt immensely needy. He sensed a great emptiness inside himself, and he didn’t know how he would ever fill it. He couldn’t help but feel the sting, that Claire had deftly arranged for them to meet at the café instead of inviting him to her home.

  “Well,” she hesitated, running Charlie’s schedule through her mind. He and Ben were at the movies with Ben’s older brother, so she had a few hours free. “Yes, in an hour would be good.”

  “I’ll see you then.”

  They hung up. The day was cold but sunny, and she’d enjoy a brisk walk over to Ninth and University. She could do some chores on the way back.

  He had reached the café before she did. When she walked in, he was already at a table against the wall. The café’s well-dressed patrons, almost all smoking, were reading newspapers, playing chess, or arguing about one philosophical or political point or another. The café at the Hotel Lafayette was known as a gathering place for intellectuals, a term that Claire always thought of in italics, the same way she thought of artists, remnants of the old, self-conscious Bohemianism of the Village. Seeing Nick there, watching a chess match at the next table, she thought he looked forlorn. She regretted the instinctive desire she’d felt to avoid him, to push him away. He was probably suffering as she was. Doubly so, on account of Tia and Jamie both.

  She slipped into the seat opposite him. “Hello, Nick. Good to see you.”

  He stared at her for a moment. He thought, Jesus, this woman, so easy on the eyes, and so intelligent…had Jamie truly known how much he had?

  The waitress came over. “Just coffee,” Claire said.

  “The same,” Nick said.

  Once the waitress had left, Claire leaned toward Nick. “I wonder what kind of coffee it will be,” she whispered with a touch of mischief. Rationing continued to make good coffee almost impossible to find. “Moderately real? Just barely real?” Maybe this way, with banter, she could find a felicitous connection with him. Allow him, somehow, into her heart. Maybe she owed that to Jamie’s memory.

  Nick laughed at this, but he couldn’t think of any appropriate response. He’d once had a good deal of banter at his command. He could recall charming many a girl at many a bar. But Claire Shipley wasn’t a girl.

  The coffee arrived. Claire sipped it. “It’s truly terrible.” She sipped it again. “I’m going to give it the award for worst coffee in New York City.”

  “That sounds a little extreme.” Nick took a sip, then another. “No, you’re too charitable. I’d have to give it the award for worst coffee in history.” There, he’d managed it: he was bantering. Claire, with a slight smile, sat back in her chair, as if suggesting that she was, after all, pleased to be with him.

  “Charlie went to the movies.” She didn’t know why she forged on with this tangent. Talk of children was an easy gambit with other parents—parents were always able, if not eager, to talk about their own and other people’s children—but Nick wasn’t a parent. Now that she’d begun, though, she had to finish. “Der Fuehrer’s Face, starring Donald Duck. Last Sunday we went together to see To Be or Not to Be. We liked that. It’s very funny. Have you seen it?”

  Nick felt totally thrown by this woman. Haltingly, he murmured, “Look, Claire, I want to say—” That was as far as he got. He couldn’t go on.

  She reached across the table and placed her hand around his. “What is it, Nick?”

  She was concerned for him, he could see that. Her lovely eyes upon him, her expression taking him in, all of him, not just the surface.

  He wasn’t in love with her. He just wanted to say that he couldn’t rule it out for the future. They had so much in common. Dead friends, that was what they had in common, but even so. They’d made love to each other, so they also had that, although he realized it wasn’t exactly love they had made.

  “Claire, I was thinking we should get to know each other better.” There it was, presented in the most innocuous way he could muster.

  She let go of his hand and leaned back in her chair. Her look was more sad than angry. Her look was certainly not encouraging.

  “I’m sorry, Nick. I’m so sorry.” And she was sorry. She could offer him so little. She’d given everything to Jamie. But she couldn’t hurt Nick. No, she would never set out to hurt someone. “It’s too soon, for me. To think about getting to know any man better.”

  “But we’ve already been close,” he said, a touch of anger, or perhaps simply indignation or disbelief, slipping into his voice.

  She didn’t need to defend herself, and she wouldn’t. “Those were terrible circumstances.”

  “Maybe we got off to a bad start.”

  She smiled at this, and he smiled also.

  “We can start over,” he said, his tone lighter. Soon he would be leaving for the Pacific, to continue the clinical trials for penicillin. But he didn’t tell her this. He didn’t want her to agree to see him out of a sense of duty.

  “I wish we could, Nick. Maybe someday.” They sat for a time in silence, sipping the awful coffee and abstractedly watching the chess game at the next table. “I have to go,” Claire said abruptly after glancing at her watch. “Charlie will be home soon.” She opened her purse to pay
for the coffee.

  “My treat,” Nick said.

  “Okay, thank you. You’re going to stay?”

  “Yes. I’m thinking of taking up chess.” They both knew it was just a pleasantry, but at least it let them part amicably.

  Out on the street, Claire’s sadness mixed with an unexpected sense of well-being. The sun was shining, Charlie would be home soon, they’d have a quiet dinner, just the two of them, and take Lucas for a walk. On her way home, she bought some groceries. A good day, all told. She could be happy with a string of such days.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  How are you?” asked Dr. Knowles, the neurologist.

  The man opened his eyes. He tried to focus on Dr. Knowles, round and balding, a volunteer, like so many aging physicians at the front. This was a real hospital, albeit one taken over by the American military. He had a vague memory of someone, sometime, saying this hospital was in Algiers. Maybe it was. When he looked out the window he saw palm trees.

  “I’ve got a headache. As usual.”

  The doctor laughed at him. That’s what came from being a wounded doctor: the other physicians found their entertainment in you. The patient tried to be good-natured about it, even though they were constantly accusing him of being demanding, high-handed, and overly sure of himself. No matter what he said, they accused him of giving them instructions instead of waiting for them to dispense their better wisdom. All this was part of a long tradition, and he didn’t object.

  Some time ago, before the patient could really comprehend, Dr. Knowles told him that he’d come through the attack with a bad concussion. Only one bomb had hit the hospital, and the damage, relatively speaking, was slight. Miraculously, the blast had thrown him under a steel surgery table, and the table protected him. Superficial cuts and bruises, an insignificant shrapnel wound in the shoulder. But he must have hit the floor hard, because his memory was gone for a while. His hearing was still weak from the force of the blast. He had trouble concentrating. Reading was almost impossible.