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“Scan away,” I said. “That would be a big help.”
“If I find it, then what?”
“Then maybe I could buy you dinner,” I said, “to say thank you.”
“Oh,” she said, looking flustered and turning red. There was an awkward pause before she added, “I meant, then should I call or email you?”
“Ah,” I said, taking my turn to blush. “Calling is better. I’m not big on email.” I handed her one of my cards, which contained my office number and my home number.
She glanced at the card, then up at me. She paused again. “When I call to say I’ve found it, do you want the details over the phone? Or over dinner?”
I felt myself smile. “To tell you the truth,” I said, “I’m not all that keen on the telephone, either. How about over dinner?”
She did that half-second pause again, then nodded, and I left the library — walking or floating, I couldn’t have said which. This time, when I cranked the truck’s ignition key, the engine sounded not like aimless spinning, but like power and energy, awaiting my direction. I shifted out of park, pointed the wheels toward the east end of Oak Ridge, and gunned the gas. The vehicle surged forward, and I thought, Now we’re getting somewhere.
Then I thought, In your dreams, and laughed at myself.
CHAPTER 18
From the library, I headed east on Oak Ridge Turnpike, then meandered up the winding street to Beatrice’s house. I had set up another visit with her — Miranda and Thornton called it a date — in hopes of learning more about Leonard Novak, her not-so-happily-ever-after marriage to him, and the secret that had gotten him killed in such bizarre fashion.
I called her on my cell phone to make sure she was still expecting me. “Of course I’m still expecting you,” she said. “My dance card’s not exactly full these days. I’ll leave the door open for you. Just let yourself in and pour me a vodka.”
“Yes ma’am,” I laughed.
She must have made the tea and filled the ice bucket after she hung up the phone, because the tea was still steaming and the ice had not yet melted when I made her drink and sat down in what I had begun to think of as “my” chair.
“I drove past the Y-12 Plant on my way into town today,” I said. “I thought about you in there at the controls of your calutron.”
“What a tedious thing to think of,” she said. “My calutron is only interesting thanks to the hindsight of history. It helped make the bomb, so we’ve decided it was important and fascinating. But it was bloody boring to operate, I can tell you that. Like working on a Detroit assembly line, but without the satisfaction of seeing the car take shape. Without even seeing the conveyor belt move. We weren’t making a goddamn thing, as far as we could see. So even though we were cheered on every day by patriotic billboards and PA announcements, the inspiration wore pretty thin after a few hours of staring at those damn dials and needles. Only time things were interesting was when they went wrong.” Her lips twitched upward slightly at a memory.
“What sort of things went wrong?”
“Well,” she said, looking arch, “one evening in late 1943, when I was working the 3-to-11 shift, there was a bit of a commotion, and I glanced around and saw General Groves and Colonel Nichols and two civilian men, fairly well dressed. The officers were being very deferential to the civilians, especially the good-looking one in the expensive suit. He looked around, then came over to my cubicle — I was the best-looking girl working that evening — and asked my name. When I told him, he said, ‘Beatrice, would you mind if I borrow your calutron for a moment?’ I looked at my supervisor, who practically fell over himself to pull me away from the controls. ‘This is far too low,’ the man said. ‘You’ll never produce enough at those settings.’ He fiddled with the controls till the needles were practically off the scale. ‘There,’ he said, ‘you’ll get a lot more…product…at those settings.’ They turned and left. I said to my boss, ‘So who was that fancy guy?’ My boss, looking all starstruck, said, ‘That was Ernest Lawrence, the inventor of this machine.’ Five minutes later, we heard a boom. My calutron had exploded.”
I laughed. “That’s a great story,” I said. “Is it really true?”
“Mostly true,” she said. “Ninety-nine percent of the time it was mind-numbing work. You shouldn’t think of me running a calutron. You should think of me singing or painting or playing Beethoven or writing poetry instead.”
“You can do all those things? I’m impressed.”
“I didn’t say I can do them, Bill. I just said you should think of me doing them. Where’s your imagination, man?” I laughed. “Now Leonard, he could do all those things. And brilliantly.”
“But he couldn’t be a brilliant husband to you.”
Her head snapped up at that. “Is that why you’re here? To grill me about Leonard’s failings?”
“Beatrice, we’re trying to figure out how he ended up with a pellet of iridium-192 in his gut,” I said, “and whether other people might be in danger, too. Not his failings. His vulnerabilities, maybe.”
She looked out the window for a long time. “All right,” she said finally, still looking outside. “I don’t suppose there’s any virtue in guarding his secret any longer.” She turned to face me. “Leonard was a fairy. ‘Gay,’ it’s called these days. Queer as a three-dollar bill.” I wasn’t sure which I found more surprising, the fact that he was gay, or the fact that she expressed it so coarsely. She must have seen the startled look on my face. “Today, nobody cares, but things were different then,” she said. “It was considered a perversion. He’d never have been able to keep his security clearance if they’d known.”
She was probably right about that. “I don’t mean to be indelicate,” I said, “but how could you not have realized that before you got married?”
“I told myself that he was being a perfect gentleman,” she said. “That he had set me on a pedestal and didn’t want to risk sullying my reputation.” She looked down. “Or maybe I was so thrilled to have caught a big fish, I chose to ignore the warning signs.”
“If he was gay, why did he ask you to marry him?”
“Maybe to protect his secret,” she said. “Or maybe he actually hoped he could overcome it. People thought that back then, you know. But he couldn’t overcome it, of course. On our wedding night, he kissed me on the lips, but it was the sort of kiss you might give a sister or an old friend — a quick peck with pursed lips. Then he pulled away and looked at me, and his eyes were full of shame and sadness. ‘Oh, Beatrice,’ he said. ‘What have I done to you?’ Then he turned his back to me and cried. My bride-groom — the brilliant, sparkling wonderboy of the Manhattan Project — wept because he did not want me, and he never would. We didn’t talk about it. You just didn’t, in those days, unless you were Oscar Wilde. We entered into a pact of silence, without even speaking about the pact. Even the pact was a secret. He carried his burdens alone; I carried mine alone. After the war, after the bomb, I asked him
for a divorce.” She fell silent, and I let her sit with her thoughts awhile.
When she finally turned and looked at me, I said, “I’m sorry. That must have been painful for you both. I’m not sure it sheds any light on his death, but I appreciate your trusting me enough to share that with me.”
She shook her head. “What difference could it make now? He’s dead, and I will be soon. Who on earth could possibly care?” She drew a deep breath. “There was one other burden Leonard carried.” From the end table beside her chair she lifted a creased, yellowed piece of paper. “This was an entry in his laboratory journal from November of 1943,” she said. “He wrote it right after the Graphite Reactor went critical. Then he started to worry that if the military snoops read it, he’d be considered unpatriotic, so he cut it out.” She handed me the paper. As I unfolded it, I worried that the creases would tear completely through the fragile paper. The ink was fading, yet the words, written in small, precise script, seemed to leap off the page as I read them.
November 4, 1943
It is thrilling. And it is horrifying.
We have built the world’s first plutonium production reactor, and it works. It is a huge leap, technologically, beyond the Chicago pile. It is far bigger in scale and far more complex than Fermi’s simple, can-we-do-it? experiment. It has been built to operate not for a few experiments, but for many years.
And it has been built with the dreadfully single-minded purpose of making implements of wholesale death.
Fermi’s makeshift reactor had the rationalization of research attached to it. It was a scientific gamble, and no one knew whether it could sustain a fission reaction. We all had the luxury of being eager and excited when it succeeded.
