Body Farm: Bones Of Betrayal Part 10

"No offense," I said, "but you don't look so hot."

"I look a lot better than I feel," she said. I was alarmed-was she developing symptoms of radiation sicknesss?-but she read my expression and swiftly waved a hand to let me know her problem wasn't medical.

"You want to talk about it?" It seemed a safe question, since she'd shown up at my door, but as fragile as she seemed, I wanted to go easy.

"Some of it," she said. "The ideas part. Not the boy-girl part."

I wasn't sure what she meant. "The ideas?"

"The ideas. The ideals. The people. Patriots and traitors. Hard choices and h.e.l.lish compromises."

"Maybe we should send out for pizza," I said. "And a six-pack of philosophers."

She plunked down into the chair with a sigh. "In a way, the problem all boils down to the difference between Groves and Oppenheimer," she said. "And it's all written in their eyes." I furrowed my brow at her. "Groves was like the ultimate can-do guy," she said. "The steamroller of the Manhattan Project. Get it done, get it done, get it done. No matter what. He and his secret project had so much power. Groves had the authority to take whatever he wanted, build whatever was necessary. Not enough copper to make the Y-12 calutrons? No problem; we'll just take fifteen thousand tons of silver from the U.S. Treasury. Not sure the calutrons can make enough uranium? We'll build a gaseous-diffusion plant, too, the biggest factory in the world. Not sure uranium's the ticket? Let's make plutonium, too. He hedged all his bets, but in the end, all his bets paid off." I nodded; to lessen the risk of failure, Groves had indeed pursued multiple paths to the bomb, and all of them succeeded. "But look at him, Dr. B."

She pulled a photo of General Groves from a folder she'd brought with her and laid it on the desk. It was a famous photo, one I'd seen countless times since cutting Novak from the ice. The picture showed Groves studying a map of j.a.pan. No, not studying it, exactly; more like burning a hole in it with his eyes. The general's belly was doughy and his jowls were flabby, but his eyes were like lasers locked on a target. "That man's horizon didn't extend one inch beyond j.a.pan," she said. "Build the bomb; drop the bomb."

"He was a good fit for the job," I said.

"Now look at Oppenheimer," she said, slipping another photo from the folder. The physicist was wearing the porkpie hat that had been his trademark, much like the battered fedora of Indiana Jones. A cigarette hung from Oppenheimer's lips, and a wisp of smoke wafted up the left side of his face. A skinny tie was cinched around a scrawny neck-no flabby jowls on Oppenheimer-and the nubby collar of a tweed jacket gapped open above bony shoulders. At the center of the image was a pair of haunted, haunting eyes. They were staring straight into the lens, but they seemed to be focused on something far beyond it. "Do you see? Those are the eyes of a man who's been chained to a rock; a man staring at eternity," she said. "Where's the border between America and j.a.pan, or America and Russia, when you're staring at eternity?"

"Are you sure he can see that far, Miranda? And are you sure you can see into his soul?"

"Come on, Dr. B. When the Trinity test worked, this guy didn't say 'yee haw' or 'hot d.a.m.n' or even 'oh s.h.i.t.' This guy said, 'I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' He agonized. He tried to rein in nuclear weapons after the war, and he was painted as a traitor for that."

"He did try," I said. "But not until after the war."

She frowned. "I know," she said, "and that's part of what's tragic about him. He built the bomb, and then he hated what it did, and hated the arms race it triggered. And then he was destroyed for opposing the arms race. Meanwhile, look at Werner von Braun. Von Braun was the brains behind the V-2 rockets that rained down on London during the war, but he became an American hero because he started building rockets for us instead of Hitler. Which brings me back to Klaus Fuchs, sort of. Was he a patriot or a traitor?"

"Traitor," I said. "No question. He sold atomic secrets to our enemies."

"But he was Jewish," she said. "To him, the ultimate enemy was. .h.i.tler. And if the enemy of your enemy is your friend, that makes Russia your friend. Besides, they were our ally. In theory, at least."

"Big difference between theory and practice," I said. "Stalin was a tyrant and a butcher-before the war as well as afterward."

"He was. But what's the only nation on earth to have ever used weapons of ma.s.s destruction in an act of war? The United States. Twice."

"We did it to save lives, Miranda," I said. "Not just U.S. lives; j.a.panese lives, too. We fire-bombed Tokyo one night in March 1945. The firestorms destroyed fifteen square miles of the city and killed a hundred thousand civilians. Firebombing Tokyo didn't move j.a.pan to surrender. It took the symbolic power of the atomic bomb to end the war."

"Highly debatable," she said. "The j.a.panese sent out surrender overtures in late July, before Hiroshima. But we brushed them aside, because by that point we'd tested the bomb. We knew it worked, and we wanted to drop it. Not just to cinch the victory over j.a.pan, but to intimidate the Russians, because we could already tell they were going to be our next big problem."

"But they weren't all that intimidated," I pointed out. "Because by then they had blueprints of the bomb from Fuchs in Los Alamos. And descriptions of uranium-enrichment equipment from George Koval. Who knows, maybe they even had plutonium reactor blueprints from Leonard Novak."

Miranda groaned. "Dammit," she said. "Is. A. Puzzlement." It was a line she often quoted from an old Broadway musical-The King and I-and it made me smile. If she was up to quoting show tunes, her angst had eased. "Okay," she sighed, "I know it breaks your heart to hear this, but I need to go home and feed Immanuel Kat now."

"Does this mean we're not sending out for pizza and philosophers?"

"Not tonight," she said. "Maybe tomorrow, when we take up the problems of genocide and starvation in Africa."

"I can hardly wait," I said, as she disappeared through the doorway.

She leaned her head back around the frame. "So, um..." She trailed off.

"Ye-e-s-s-s?"

"Thornton," she said. "A shame. I was kinda liking him."

I suppressed a smile. "I think he was kinda liking you, too. And I hear he's notoriously picky."

"c.r.a.p," she said, and disappeared into the hallway again.

Then she reappeared once more. "The fundamental moral and ethical problem," she said, "is this. I suspect Thornton's a Republican. I could never sleep with a Republican."

"Heavens no," I said. "That would be a h.e.l.lish compromise."

CHAPTER 22.

AS I PARKED AT BEATRICE'S CURB AND HEADED TOWARD her door, I noticed that I felt eager, almost as eager as if I were heading to a death scene to recover a skeleton. I told myself that this was natural; I was returning, after all, at the request of Emert and Thornton, who hoped I might extract more information from her than they had. But that wasn't it, or wasn't entirely it; her stories had shed a few glimmers on Novak, but mostly it was Beatrice herself who occupied the limelight of her stories. I knew better than to push her too hard about Novak; the one time I'd tried it, she'd all but played the senility card, just as she'd done with the law enforcement officers. But there was another reason I let her ramble on about herself, rather than demanding answers about Novak. The truth of the matter, I realized as I entered her house and poured her vodka, was that I'd fallen under the spell of the old woman and her stories, just as I'd fallen under the spell of the black-and-white photos and films in the museum and the library. The images gave me vivid glimpses of another time, when men and women toiled desperately in secret cities, and when science attained tragic greatness. Beatrice's stories gave those images a human face and a human voice.

It was that reflective mood, I suppose, that prompted me to say, "It's odd, isn't it, that I'm sitting here again, back for another story?"

"No, not at all," she said. "It couldn't be any other way. Each moment of your life is the sum total of all the prior moments. There's not a single thing that happens to you that doesn't leave its mark; doesn't redirect your course somehow; doesn't make you more fully who you are. It took every single step-even the steps you took as life dragged you by the hair of your head-to put you exactly where you are. When I was a girl, life dragged me from Tennessee to New York and then back to Tennessee."

"Tell me about that," I said. "Tell me the story."

CHAPTER 23.

MY FATHER DIED WHEN I WAS TEN. MY MOTHER WAS a night auditor for a hotel in Chattanooga, so I got used to being alone at night at an early age. Getting used to it's not the same as liking it, though. My father was gone for good; sometimes it seemed like my mother was, too.

The Christmas I was thirteen, Mother took me to New York on the train. My Aunt Rachel and Uncle Isaac lived there-Aunt Rachel was my father's sister-and Mother said she wanted to visit them and show me the sights of New York for Christmas. We changed trains in Raleigh about lunchtime on a Friday, and we rode all night to get to New York. We shared a bunk in a sleeper car, and I remember falling asleep with my mother's arms wrapped around me, which was something that hadn't happened in years.

We got to Penn Station-this was Old Penn Station, mind you, which was spectacular, a lot grander than Grand Central-late in the afternoon on Christmas Day. From there we took a cab across town to Rockefeller Center. The outdoor ice-skating rink there had just opened, that very day. It was December 25, 1936. It was so beautiful it made my heart ache-all those Christmas decorations and lights, and everybody dressed up in their best winter clothes.

The country had just begun to crawl up out of the Great Depression, and that Christmas night in Rockefeller Square, I think people weren't just celebrating the birth of Jesus, they were celebrating the rebirth of America. Mother and I waited in line for hours to skate, dragging our battered little suitcases with us. I didn't mind the wait; I was giddy with the sights and sounds and glamour of it all. Finally, when we got up to the front of the line, Mother told me that she wasn't going to skate; she would stay with our suitcases and just watch me. She asked a boy in line behind us if he'd help me get the hang of it. He was about my age, maybe a year or two older. Old enough to be interesting to me; not so old as to be scary. He held my hand and pulled me along, wobbling and shrieking and laughing. Every time we made a lap past the place where Mother was standing beside the rail, she'd wave and yell something encouraging.

And then the boy let go of my hand, and I was skating by myself. It was terrifying and thrilling-I'm sure I was just inching along, but it felt so daring and grown-up, and I couldn't wait to circle back around and see Mother's face when she realized I was doing it without any help. But her face wasn't there. The fat man in the red scarf, who had been standing right beside her, was still there; so was the nun who had been on the other side. But she was gone, and the s.p.a.ce where she had been standing was already closing up behind her.

I slid past the fat man and the nun-I was confused, and I also didn't know how to stop-and went around the rink once more. The second time I came around, I ran into the rail to stop. I was still a few feet away from the two faces I recognized, so I pulled myself along the rail, my feet sliding out from under me again and again. I remember people laughing and pointing every time I caught myself on the rail and then hauled myself back up. By the time I got to the fat man and the nun, my heart had turned to ice, and I could feel tears running down my face-not because people were laughing at me, but because I knew something was wrong.

Our suitcases were both still there, wedged up against the railing right where she'd been standing. The nun told me my mother had needed to run to the restroom, and would be back in a few minutes. But somehow I knew she wouldn't be.

After I'd stood at the railing crying for half an hour, the nun helped me change out of the skates and back into my shoes, then she took me over to a policeman who was standing near the entrance to the rink. I told him what had happened, and I could see him sizing me up-a scrawny girl from the sticks, with a tear-streaked face and a dripping nose and a cheap cardboard suitcase. He got this sad, weary look on his face, and that's when I knew I'd never see my mother again.

On the cab ride up from Penn Station, Mother had tucked a big envelope into my coat pocket. She'd made a big production about how Aunt Rachel's address and phone number were in the envelope, along with a five-dollar bill and a Christmas card for Rachel and Uncle Isaac. "You hang on to this for me," she'd said. "You're such a big girl now, and you know how I lose things. This way, when we get in the taxi for Brooklyn, the address and the cab fare will be right there, safe in your pocket." As she said it, she patted the pocket.

When I told the policeman about Aunt Rachel and the envelope, he had me take it out and open it up. The Christmas card contained two letters. One was to Aunt Rachel, explaining how Mother had met a man she loved and wanted to be with, but the man-she didn't even say what his name was-just couldn't take on a thirteen-year-old. She was going away with him to South America, she said, where he would be working on a big construction project. She apologized for the unexpected Christmas present-me-and asked Rachel to please be kind to me.

The other letter was to me. She told me she loved me, and always would, and she hoped I could understand and forgive her someday. I never could, and I never did.

I don't know how Mother afforded the train tickets, but two possibilities occurred to me years later. Maybe she embezzled the money from the hotel where she worked. Or maybe the man she abandoned me for gave her the money.

I don't know whether she actually went to South America with the man. She might have just said that to throw us off the scent. Maybe she and her man settled down in Schenectady or Cincinnati. For that matter, I don't even know if there really was a man; maybe she made that up, too, as a plausible reason for turning her back on a child. All I know is that I never saw or heard from her again.

Aunt Rachel helped me get an after-school job in a Wool-worth's five-and-dime in Brooklyn. It didn't pay much, but my little paychecks helped me feel like I was less of a burden to them. The summer after I graduated from high school, I got a job at the Grumman aircraft factory on Long Island. Grumman built fighter planes for the navy-the Wildcat and the h.e.l.lcat, which became famous for their toughness against the j.a.panese-and I helped build the instrument panels for them.

Aunt Rachel never said so, but I could tell I'd long since worn out my welcome, so as the summer went on, I mentioned that it might be time for me to get out on my own. New York was expensive, though, so I worried about how I'd manage. She mentioned her other brother-my father's brother, the one my mother had never liked. This uncle, Uncle Jake, lived in Knoxville, and he'd written Rachel to say that every girl in Tennessee was being hired for war work near Knoxville.

I stepped off the train in Knoxville in September of 1943, and a week later I started helping build the bomb, atom by atom.

CHAPTER 24.

I WALKED INTO THE BONE LAB AND SAW MIRANDA bent low over a lab table in concentration. It was a posture I'd seen her in so many times, for so many hours on end, that it sometimes surprised me to see that she was capable of standing, or even sitting up straight, rather than bending over bone fragments.

"c.r.a.p," she said. "I'm too stupid and klutzy for this."

"What are you working on?" I leaned around, expecting to see tiny bone fragments and a bottle of Duco cement. The skull of the North Knoxville skeleton had been crushed into dozens of pieces, some the size of rock salt. Instead of the drabness of bone, though, I saw a splash of vivid color: a small piece of fuchsia paper, creased into a bristling profusion of small triangles. "Is that origami?"

"It's supposed to be, but it's not. Dammit!" In frustration, she crumpled the paper and tossed it at a waste can beside the table. It missed, landing on the floor atop a heap of other wads of fuchsia.

"This might be a dumb question-" I began.

"Wouldn't be the first," she said.

"But if this is so frustrating, why are you doing it?"

"Because of a girl named Sadako," she said. "And a friend named Eddie."

"Sadako," I said. "Neighbor? Daughter of a neighbor?"

"No. Sadako was a two-year-old living in Hiroshima in August of 1945. She was a mile and a half from the epicenter of the bomb blast. Sadako survived, but when she was twelve, she was diagnosed with leukemia." Miranda slid another square of paper from the package on the table and folded it into a triangle. "Someone who came to visit her in the hospital told her that if she folded a thousand paper cranes and made a wish, her wish would come true. She made it to six hundred and forty-four, and then she died."

Miranda folded the triangle in half again and again, into smaller triangles, and then gave the paper an angry yank that almost created wings, but not quite. I was formulating a logical response to her story about the girl-I thought of the dead in Pearl Harbor, the hundreds of thousands raped and slaughtered in China, the million projected to die in the a.s.sault on the j.a.panese home islands-when I noticed the misshapen wings begin to flutter. Miranda's hands were shaking, and as I looked at them, I noticed that three of her fingertips, the three that had touched the iridium pellet in the morgue, were red and blistered. "Jesus, Miranda, we need to get you to the ER and get your fingers examined."

She shook her head. "I went early this morning," she said. "Dr. Davies met me there, and he talked to Dr. Sorensen on the phone. If the pain gets bad and the tissue gets necrotic, they'll give me painkillers and ointments and antibiotics. But for now, there's nothing to be done except 'watchful waiting.' Watching and waiting to see if my fingertips die or heal. Watching and waiting to see if Eddie heals or dies." She studied her fingertips. "The necrosis has started in his hands." She said it calmly, but then the shaking got worse. The tremor traveled up her arms to her shoulders, which began to quake. She said "dammit" again, very softly, and I knew she was not cursing the complexities of origami now. "Why," she said, "G.o.d in heaven, why?"

"I don't know, Miranda. I can't think of anybody who deserves this less than you and Eddie."

"Oh, Dr. B.," she cried, "I'm not asking 'why' about Eddie and me. I'm asking 'why' about everything else. Everybody else. All the horror we've inflicted on one another."

I'd known Miranda for years now; she could be as tough as cheap steak about her own hurts, but her heart bled freely for others. By "everybody else," I figured she meant the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and maybe even more than those: maybe also Dresden and Auschwitz, Gettysburg and Shiloh, Rwanda and Darfur and Baghdad. I laid one hand on her shoulder; with the other, I reached behind me and retrieved a Kleenex box from the desk. The paper bird fell from her hand, fluttered to the floor, and lay still. "f.u.c.king war," she whispered through clenched teeth. "G.o.d d.a.m.n it to h.e.l.l."

"Yes," I said. "G.o.d d.a.m.n it to h.e.l.l."

I set the Kleenex box on the table, gave her shoulder a squeeze, and eased out of the bone lab. I hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the k.n.o.b, locked the door behind me, and retreated to my office at the far end of the stadium. There, I locked my own door and unplugged the phone. I did a quick search of the Internet and clicked on a link that filled my computer screen with purple squares and triangles, crisscrossed with dotted lines. "Best Origami Crane Folding Instructions," the caption read. I took a sheet of paper from the printer tray and folded it diagonally. I creased it between my fingertips until the edges were sharp as a blade.

THAT NIGHT I HAD A DREAM. In my dream, Garcia and Miranda reached out to me for help, but their outstretched hands crumbled before my eyes, leaving b.l.o.o.d.y stumps at the ends of their wrists. Then the dream shifted, and I was speaking to a large crowd in an auditorium in Oak Ridge. I realized I was talking to them about the atomic genie their city had helped loose from the bottle, and I realized I was distraught. I heard myself say to them, "Was anyone ever helped by it?" There was a stunned silence when I said it; even I, who dreamed the words, was shocked by them. Then, near the back of the room, I glimpsed movement. A woman rose slowly to her feet and stood. Her head was wrapped tightly in a scarf, in the manner favored by women who have lost their hair to radiation or chemotherapy. The woman didn't speak; she didn't move; she simply stood, holding that s.p.a.ce, a calm answer to the bitter question I had posed.

Heads had swiveled in her direction when she stood, and the atmosphere in the dream-room suddenly felt alive and electric, the way the Tennessee air p.r.i.c.kles just before a summer thunderstorm. Then a second person stood, and soon a dozen other people were on their feet, all bearing silent witness to cures effected, diseases diagnosed, homes heated, pipelines and airliners made safe.

The last person to stand was directly in front of me. He rose slowly, as if it cost him some pain to stand, and his head was bowed. He raised his head slowly, and I found myself staring into eyes that were both haunted and hopeful. I found myself staring into the eyes of Robert Oppenheimer.

When I awoke-or dreamed I awoke-I seemed to see the world through such eyes myself.

CHAPTER 25.

THORNTON HAD SENT A PEACE OFFERING TO MIRANDA-a dozen stems of iris, not yet unfurled, looking like green artists' brushes dipped in indigo paint. Seven small sunflowers were tucked amid the blue tips, blazing like a week of summer days. Miranda wasn't in the lab when I saw them; I knew they were from Thornton by the business card lying beside the vase, bearing his name, the FBI logo, and the word "Peace?" The man had flair, and he seemed smart and s.p.u.n.ky, so maybe he was still in the game.

But he wasn't ready to risk a personal appearance just yet, so I agreed to pick him up at the Federal Building, in downtown Knoxville, for our trip to Oak Ridge National Laboratory. I'd come up with an idea about how we might search for the dead man shown on Novak's film, and Thornton wanted to talk with someone in the Lab's radioisotopes program, so we decided to ride-share.

Once we crossed the Solway Bridge, we headed west on Bethel Valley Road, a long, straight, prairie-flat ribbon of two-lane leading to the research complex. Five miles out Bethel Valley we stopped at a security checkpoint, where an armed guard consulted a clipboard and my driver's license, then nodded slightly at me. He practically genuflected at Thornton's FBI shield. Not that I was jealous or anything.

The road beelined along another two miles of valley floor, lined on either side by pines and hardwood. It grazed the end of a frozen cove on Melton Hill Lake, then entered the sprawling laboratory. Oak Ridge National Laboratory-known as "the Lab" to most of the scientists who worked there, as "ORNL" to the acronym-inclined, and as "X-10" to the blue-collared hourly workers-was the only research facility created in Oak Ridge during the Manhattan Project. The Y-12 and K-25 plants had been huge production facilities staffed by hourly workers like Beatrice. The wartime Lab, though, had a higher ratio of physicists, chemists, and engineers. The Lab had been built around the Graphite Reactor-a much bigger version of Fermi's makeshift Chicago reactor-so that Leonard Novak and his colleagues could devise the means to create and purify weapons-grade plutonium.

As Thornton and I turned off Bethel Valley Road and entered the research complex, we found ourselves surrounded by gleaming new buildings of gla.s.s and steel. Although the Lab was owned by the federal government-the Department of Energy-it was jointly operated these days by UT and Battelle, a research inst.i.tute with billions of dollars in government contracts. Clearly the partnership had been a fruitful one, at least architecturally speaking.

After parking, Thornton and I threaded our way past the new buildings, and I began to recognize the ma.s.sive Cold War buildings I remembered from a prior visit, years before. The old buildings hadn't been replaced by the new buildings; they'd simply been supplemented and screened from initial view. We walked down a one-lane alley between two looming buildings, labeled 4500 NORTH and 4500 SOUTH, and then entered a metal doorway set in the vast brick wall of 4500 South. Just inside, a staircase led down into a bas.e.m.e.nt and upward to two additional floors of offices and labs. We climbed one flight, then entered a hallway labeled H CORRIDOR. I knocked on the open doorway of the first office-the office was dark, which made me worry that I'd somehow gone astray-but a voice called, "Come in."