A Fierce Radiance (30 page)

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.”

Well, at least Barnett turned out to be who he said he was. “In other words, you’re exploiting Mr. Luce’s trust and generosity by recruiting me to do a little spying.”

“Your words, not mine.”

So this was how it was done. She’d often wondered. Over the years, she’d heard rumors about various agencies of the government approaching her colleagues, asking them to take a look around here and there overseas. She didn’t like the idea. And yet…Bush was offering her the opportunity to walk the corridors Jamie walked, to meet the people he met, possibly to work with him directly. She’d be documenting the creation of treatments that might one day save the next Emily.

Bush misinterpreted her silence. “I’m afraid you don’t really have a choice in this matter, Mrs. Shipley. You photographed that story, you befriended James Stanton, you’re already too deeply involved to refuse. You already know too much. And I must tell you, I could make things rather unpleasant for you and your family if you decide not to help. You may not realize—children seldom do—that your father is a very prominent businessman. You yourself have had a rather successful career, in a short period of time. In my experience, everyone has a skeleton in his, or her, professional closet.”

How hard-pressed he must be, to threaten her so blatantly. A tactical error. As for her professional closet, she didn’t doubt that Bush could easily fabricate a skeleton or two if he put his mind to it. Bush was trying to bully her, but he didn’t succeed. She regarded him dispassionately, from a far distance, as if he were part of a chess game she was playing for reasons that had nothing to do with him. “Really, Dr.
Bush, there’s no need to put it in those terms. I was prepared to offer my cooperation before you threatened me.”

He laughed heartily, pleased with himself and the world. Fine. They each had an agenda and would pursue it. He stood. She stood. He put out his hand. “So we begin.” They shook hands. “Welcome aboard,” he said. “Andy will brief you downstairs.”

D
ownstairs at his desk in his makeshift office, behind a partition in the rotunda of the Carnegie Institution, Andrew Barnett awaited Claire Shipley’s arrival. He already knew his boss’s plan for her. Barnett had made himself scarce when she was
shooting
the boss (unlike some of his colleagues, he liked Vannevar Bush, so he didn’t wish him dead, but the double meaning amused him), but now he was more than prepared to greet her.

This partitioned office didn’t exactly suit his image of himself. At Stanford he’d had a view across the quad. He appreciated, however, that he was luckier than his three colleagues across the way who didn’t even have partitions. They worked desk to desk, no privacy at all.

He tried to stay in the narrow path of the breeze from the inadequate floor fan. No air-conditioning in this bastion of power. The damned skylight or dome, whatever it was called, made the heat worse, as did the full occupancy of the rotunda, eighteen men exactly like him perspiring in their obligatory coats and ties in pursuit of glamorous war work.

His younger brother, Mark, was in the Pacific, God alone knew where. Barnett worried about him. Not just for Mark’s sake, but for their mother’s. “You stay out of the military, Andy,” his mother wrote to him on the day Mark’s ship left San Diego. “You keep yourself safe.”

How could he respond? I’ll try, Mom. I’ll try.

On Barnett’s desk were index cards of suspects in the possible murder of Lucretia Stanton. Because he was meeting with Claire Shipley today, he felt compelled to review this problem again. He was painfully aware that he was out of his depth. Making a fool out of himself.
Getting overdramatic, the way he had with Mrs. Shipley after the memorial in New York.

The problem was that Dr. Bush, without any evidence whatsoever, was convinced that Tia Stanton had been murdered. Although Bush would never make his suspicion public, he wanted to learn the truth, so that he could deal with it privately. Barnett was supposed to “pick up the pieces, cross all the
T
s,” according to the boss. The fact that Barnett wasn’t trained to pick up pieces or cross
T
s in a murder case didn’t seem to matter.

Patting the sweat off his forehead with his handkerchief, Barnett tried to focus on the three-by-five cards. He didn’t dare tell the boss that he couldn’t handle this. If he did, he might end up in the Pacific after all.

For want of any other viable approach, he’d written one name on each card, with relevant facts and suppositions. He also had a card for Tia Stanton herself. For suicide or accident, despite Dr. Bush’s suspicions. Barnett pushed the cards back and forth, weighing the motives. The cards offered him no insights.

Maybe if he just gave up on it, after a few months the boss would forget about it. Thousands were dying around the world every day, what was one death more or less? Suicide, accident, murder—in the long run, what did it matter? Maybe Tia Stanton’s death actually helped the Allied war effort, who could say? Morality was a tricky commodity in wartime. An indulgence.

The index cards made for an intriguing intellectual puzzle, however. He especially liked the thought of Chief Nurse Brockett as a murderer. He’d always loved puzzles. He rearranged the cards yet again. Barnett tried to put himself into the mind of New York City detective Marcus Kreindler. What would the detective think of Sergei Oretsky as a murderer? Or Dr. Jacob Lind?

Lucretia Stanton must have been half insane, in Barnett’s personal opinion, but with the kind of sublimated insanity that often did a lot
of good in the world. How else could you account for somebody working seven days a week testing soil samples? The traditional economic model of each person working toward his or her maximum utility was not directly relevant in this case. He had an insight: the successful development of antibacterials would provide a useful case study in economics. Generally workers displaced by technological change were reabsorbed into the workforce. Antibacterials, however, constituted a technological advance that permitted workers who otherwise would have died, and therefore left the workforce permanently, to survive. What were their employment prospects?

Alas, no time for that question now. Maybe Patsy Reese, the widow in the early penicillin test, did Tia Stanton in. Her husband had died under the Stantons’ care, so she had a reason for revenge. Maybe one of Tia Stanton’s suitors, jealous of her attachment to mold, had let his passion get the better of him. Her appointment book, which Andy had stashed in a locked desk drawer, listed an array of engagement parties, as well as an intriguing schedule of drinks and dinner dates with Jeffs and Neals and Joes. Sadly for Tia Stanton, no name appeared more than once or twice.

Barnett had been engaged, years ago. His fiancée died in a car accident three months before their wedding date. Janice. They’d met when they were in college. Her family was upper middle class, her father the manager (not the owner) of a neighborhood bank. The bank failed during the Depression, but that was later, after the engagement. After the accident. Her sister was driving. Janice was in the passenger seat. They were going to a fitting of bridesmaids’ gowns. Janice was killed instantly. The sister walked away unscathed. Afterward Barnett moved from the Midwest to California and took the job at Stanford to start over, in a place with no memories.

Barnett had to be careful: in another minute he’d get choked up, and this absolutely was not the time or the place to get teary. No privacy here. Zero. Every time the guy in the next cubicle uncrossed and
recrossed his legs, Barnett heard the creak of his chair, the brush of his trousers.

What about the Germans, the Japanese? A Soviet threat, perhaps? Russia and America were Allies now in the war, but the Communists remained enemies still. Or—and this was trickier—a spy could be English, or French. He wrote out cards for each possibility and added the cards to his collection. Espionage would make for an easy explanation, and in fact the boss favored it. Apparently a Fifth Columnist had approached Lucretia Stanton on the street a few years before the war, trying to buy yellow fever virus for a Japanese lab. Dr. Rivers had told Barnett about this at the memorial. Just thought he should know, Dr. Rivers said. The Japanese were notorious for using disease as a weapon, even dropping grain mixed with plague-infected fleas from planes flying over the starving people of China.

If only he could come up with a suspect who had a vested interest in sulfa drugs and didn’t want penicillin jeopardizing his profits. Barnett wrote out a card for the disgruntled sulfa producer. Barnett liked this choice. In his experience most people were willing to do almost anything for money. The practical side of the study of economics. Okay, maybe not Lucretia Stanton, but she was the exception that proved the rule. On the other hand, he’d heard that murder was most often personal. A crime of passion. Love, revenge, greed, jealousy. Passions were harder for him than puzzles. He was a fan of Hitchcock films. He loved the circular play of trickery. The unpredictable and yet completely natural turns of plot. Most of all the sense of menace lurking behind otherwise mundane events. He thought of Claire Shipley as a dark-haired version of Madeleine Carroll in
The 39 Steps
. He himself could be Robert Donat, the Everyman enmeshed in a maze of intrigue.

Enough fantasy. Barnett said a prayer for his dead girl, Janice. He hadn’t been involved with anyone since then, not in an emotional way. He also said a prayer for his brother. Their mother was a devout Cath
olic, but Barnett had left the church when he left home. He’d kept his Catholic heritage secret at Stanford and here in Washington. Prejudice against Catholics was strong in the Protestant bastions where he was trying to make his way. Nonetheless, after Mark shipped out to the Pacific, Barnett started going to Mass again. Started going to confession, and taking communion.

He touched the rosary in his suit jacket pocket. He said a few Hail Marys. He felt more settled after the prayers. More clearheaded. Claire Shipley would be downstairs any minute, and he had to stay alert.

“Here she is.” The boss was at the entrance of Barnett’s cubicle, having made the sacrifice of escorting Claire Shipley downstairs himself. A rare honor. Bush must be placing more value in Claire Shipley than he’d let on. “She’s all set and ready to go.”

Bush was talking about her as if she were some kind of wind-up doll. Barnett was almost offended on her behalf. She looked as if she wore a mask; she was past being offended by a mere Dr. Vannevar Bush. Barnett stacked his cards together and turned over the pile. He stood. “Mrs. Shipley, welcome. Good to see you again.” They shook hands. “I’ve got the conference room reserved, so we can talk privately.” He retrieved his file, the one with her name on it.

As to the Lucretia Stanton murder investigation…a murderer to be brought to justice in the spring of 1942? The entire undertaking was ridiculous.

A
half hour later, outside the Carnegie Institution on Sixteenth Street, the canopy of leaves was so thick Claire thought she’d entered a tunnel. The air itself glowed green. Unexpectedly for Washington in June, the heat and humidity weren’t oppressive. The breeze carried an undercurrent of coolness. Her next assignment was at 2:00
PM
, with Secretary Morgenthau at the Treasury Department, near the White House. Another portrait. Her typed schedule, prepared by Frieda, called for lunch now, but she didn’t feel like eating.

After her meeting with Andrew Barnett, Ph.D., she needed a walk. Barnett combined condescension and self-doubt in a way that she found irritating. She didn’t relish the idea of working with him. Nonetheless, she didn’t want to make an enemy of him, so she played along. At least his questions were innocuous, and he clearly knew the answers already.

Within a block, she realized that the tripod and Linhof were too heavy for a long walk. She hailed a taxi and took it to Lafayette Square, across from the White House. At least she could enjoy her break outside on this lovely day.

At the square, she entered a scene that was like a manicured garden. Claire thought of Manet’s
Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe
, minus the naked woman. Office workers eating sandwiches reclined on the thick grass beneath the trees. The light filtered yellow through the leaves, outlining the greenery. She imagined Jamie walking here at lunchtime, enjoying the shade during his visits to Washington. She took pleasure in the image, even as it made her ache. She missed him so very much. Sometimes the missing of him was like a physical presence that pressed hard within her chest. A few days ago, she’d received a postcard from him, mailed from Portland, Oregon, and showing a picture of Mount Hood. The card gave no news, simply recounted that despite a long visit, he’d never seen the sun once due to relentless rain. She twisted the ring on her finger.

On the benches along the paths, men in suits read newspapers, a rhythm of headlines down the row. Big, bold typeface: Cologne, Essen, the Ruhr…RAF bombing raids, 1,000 planes setting cities afire. With the Leica she kept in the pocket of her vest (today, her summer-weight hunter’s vest), she framed and shot a photo. How lucky she was. Jamie wasn’t a crew member on one of those planes. She and Charlie didn’t live in a city set aflame.