A Fierce Radiance (39 page)

“You are?”

“Why not?”

“Oh, hearing Charlie’s voice surprised me.”

“Okay, we have an ulterior motive. The chocolate-covered caramel festival is the day after tomorrow. We’re wondering if we can stay an extra day. Wouldn’t want to miss that.”

Was her father really so wealthy that he telephoned long-distance
when anyone else would have sent a less-expensive telegram? “Of course you can stay an extra day.”

“Thanks.” A pause. “So, everything okay there?”

Should she tell him what had happened? He was away, and he could do nothing to help her. Charlie was right next to him, no doubt listening to every word. “Fine. Everything’s fine here.”

“You sure? You sound a little, I don’t know, tense.”

“No, no, I’m fine. Just tired. Too busy. As usual. And the heat is terrible.”

“I thought we’d give you a little treat by calling instead of sending a telegram. Glad we found you at home. I was worried you might not be home.”

He seemed to be pressing her for something, Claire didn’t know what. “I had a late night last night—worked straight through till morning.” She made herself sound lighthearted.

“So you’re relaxing. Good. You should relax more.” Claire heard Charlie’s voice. “Charlie has a question, so I’ll pass the phone back to him.”

“Hi, Mom. How’s Lucas?”

“He’s fine, honey. I gave him a bath with the garden hose. It’s so hot here. The bath cooled him off.”

“I want to give him a bath with the garden hose.”

“When you get back, we will.” She heard her father speaking to Charlie in the background.

“We have to go now, Mom. Hot-chocolate tasting. Don’t worry, I’ll bring you back some chocolate-covered caramels, too. Grandpa says to tell you bye from him.”

“Tell him bye from me, too. Remember that I love you.”

“Love you, too.”

They hung up. Claire felt more alone than before. All sense of practicality, of forward motion, faded. And yet hearing her son’s voice and knowing he was safe and well, hearing her father’s voice and knowing
that he cared about her…she felt consoled for all she did have: her boy, her father, Jamie in the back of her mind, as always.

With a jolt Claire landed on a possibility too disturbing to assimilate: her father owned the Hanover company, and although he’d told her that he wasn’t involved with the day-to-day operations, could he in fact have ordered the violation of her home? Was he responsible?

Immediately everything within her rose up to say
No
. Never. That was impossible. He wasn’t that kind of man. He’d never do this to her.

Right then Lucas was beside her, pressing his still-damp head against her hand and reminding her that it was time for his dinner.

T
his was some smarmy guy. Why hadn’t he noticed that before? After all, Kreindler had been studying the man’s habits for weeks. Kreindler walked along First Avenue in the Sixties, the suspect on the other side of the street doing his usual errands amid the small grocery stores and pharmacies, the Greek shoe repair shop and the Chinese laundry. Old ladies peered out the tenement windows, kids played ball on the side streets. All the typical stuff going on. The summer was almost over, thank God. He’d had enough of the heat. He’d spent August biding his time, following this guy around, waiting to see what was what.

Nothing out of the ordinary, so far. No strange meetings, no suspicious behavior. No visits to Central Park at off hours to put pieces of paper in trees, no doodling with blue chalk to set up meetings. This guy was turning about to be a tremendous bore. Kreindler had three men rotating in the watch (one of them, a young fellow in training for the FBI, was right now twenty feet behind), and they were going out of their heads with the boredom.

Maybe Fritz was wrong about him. It was unlikely, though, that Fritz would even know the man’s name if there wasn’t something going on. Or maybe Fritz had deliberately given Kreindler incorrect information. Fritz had already (by his own account, confirmed by Kreindler’s contacts at the bureau) sent the FBI on a wild goose chase, so possibly he’d do the same to his dear old friend Marcus Kreindler.
At any rate, Kreindler was working with the bureau on this
evolving situation
, as he thought of it. If Kreindler learned anything about Tia Stanton, he would, of course, inform Andrew Barnett. The bureau could take care of everything else: espionage was their job, after all. Kreindler knew how to play the turf game when it suited him.

Sergei Oretsky. The perfect choice, if you were choosing a spy. Fritz knew all about him. A Russian refugee, his family trapped in France. The Germans had imprisoned the family in a camp, their survival dependent on the cooperation of poor Sergei in America. They weren’t Jewish, Fritz was very clear about that. Scared shitless, nonetheless—this reflection was accompanied by stentorian laughter, Fritz proving to himself how successful he and his Teutonic compatriots were at terrifying some harmless chump and his family.

Kreindler remembered Fritz at dinner, on his third
Pils
and finally getting to the point. “The thing is, Marcus, the Reich needs the medications. The Reich needs penicillin. It needs whatever else the scientists are finding. These are weapons, Marcus. I know it’s hard to believe. But they
are
weapons.”

Kreindler did believe him. “So this guy turn anything over to you?”

“Nothing. Back in the spring, he said he was close to something, but poof—it evaporated. We’re getting impatient with him. He says he can give us promising sewage, as much as we want, anytime—but that’s Russian stuff. It’s madness.” Fritz shook his head at the monumental stupidity of Russians. “Not the solid results we want. But we’re putting the pressure on him. He’ll come through.”

“And if he doesn’t?” Kreindler asked.

To that, Fritz had bellowed with laughter once more. The answer was obvious.

Now, watching Oretsky across the street, Kreindler almost felt sorry for the poor sod, caught up in this business, his life spinning beyond his control. Just another pawn in the great tournament of his
tory. Kreindler wanted to know if Oretsky had been down by the river collecting sewage when Tia Stanton went for a walk along the cliff with a companion.

Kreindler crossed First Avenue and walked behind Oretsky for a block, ignoring the FBI rookie. At the streetlight at the corner of First and Sixty-fourth, Kreindler picked up his pace. “Dr. Oretsky,” he said when he was beside him. “You remember me?” Kreindler had interviewed him right after Tia’s death. Kreindler automatically took out his identification to make everything official.

Oretsky looked up at him, eyes wide. He was surprised, and frightened. Good. Kreindler had caught him off guard. Kreindler had chosen carefully, not approaching him at work, not at home, but here, on the street, to see if he would run, and to see if anyone else was watching. He planned to walk with him over to the river, take a nice stroll in the cool, late-day breeze on the East River Drive promenade. Nothing like a little visit to the scene of the crime to jostle the nerves.

“Let’s go for a walk, shall we?”

Oretsky slowly nodded his head.

E
dward Rutherford stood beside a laboratory bench at Hanover & Company. Holding a test tube up to the light, he examined the fluid within it. The fluid was the most beautiful blue he’d ever seen. Transparent. Uncanny. He’d waited so long while the scientists did their work. Now it was late-October 1942, although in retrospect the time had passed in a flash.

Didn’t scientists say that truth was beautiful? He’d read that mathematicians believed that you knew a proof was true if it was beautiful. He himself had heard many scientists remark on the ugly brownish yellow of penicillin. By contrast his medication had a clarity that gave him faith in it.

Penicillin development was still moving forward in the opposite wing of the lab. The troops would have their penicillin, yes they would; Vannevar Bush would have no cause to threaten Hanover & Company. Even so, the number of military guards in the penicillin lab had been increased because of thefts at other companies. The guards were armed.

No military guards for this medication, however. This belonged to him, and he now had his own reliable and discreet private security force in place. No one was going to steal this, not the substance itself nor any information about it. What happened at Claire’s house was unfortunate, to say the least. It could have been handled more neatly: step in when the house is empty, take the materials, the end. But no,
the freelance guys he’d been using seemed to think they needed to make a point. Well, he’d made a point, too, and he’d fired them and hired replacements.

Claire had never mentioned the incident (brave girl that she was—his daughter, of course), but sure, she must have been shaken up by it. No lasting harm done, however. And in the end, he was protecting Claire, guaranteeing her future and Charlie’s, by taking back those photographs. He absolutely could not let word get out. He could not lose control of this.

He wished he could figure out a way to describe that blue. He’d collected art for decades without really looking at it. He’d only collected it because that’s what men like him were supposed to do. You went to a colleague’s house, or he came to your house, you looked at the art, you eased your way into conversation by revealing where you got this or that painting and hinting at how much you paid for it (the eternal competition), and before long you were discussing business. The paintings kept your secrets. He’d never, however, talked about what he believed was called the
aesthetics
of the art he collected.

Only now, examining this extraordinary blue, did he understand why a man might devote his life to the study of art. And the best part was, this blue was worth far more than any painting.

The scientists continued to work around him, on this and other substances. They never paid attention to what he was doing. He was the boss, after all. This special medication had a large team working on it, continuing the testing protocols on mice. Experimenting with increasing the yields. So far, the results had surpassed even his own high expectations. The substance worked against every bug they’d thrown at it, gram-positive and gram-negative, even TB. Still another team was trying to synthesize it chemically, so they wouldn’t have to worry about growing mold to produce it: synthesis would truly be hitting the jackpot.

He prayed no one was catching up with him. The simultaneously
wondrous and dreadful fact about these medications was that you could find the stuff they were made from in anybody’s garden. You could think you were onto something special, only to discover that the guy down the block had found it, too, the exact same thing, and was far ahead of you in the testing protocols.

This was the medication that Nick Catalano had brought him. Catalano had been right about its potential. Maybe he really did find it while visiting his parents in Syracuse. Maybe he didn’t. He’d paid Catalano off, and so, in the unlikely event it came up, he could rest easy on the competitive question of
provenance
, to borrow a term from art collecting.

Soon his worries about being first would be over. Yesterday he’d filed for patent protection. An underling went to Washington, D.C., with the papers. An official at the patent office took the papers. No one uttered a word of protest. Rutherford purposely sent an underling, to show how routine the submission was. Just dropping off the papers. The development of these medications necessitated complex research and chemical modifications, and thus they should henceforth be considered invented rather than natural—that’s what he’d say if anyone challenged the process, but he was confident that no one would, because he’d fully comprehended the game. The troops would get their penicillin, the companies would patent the cousins.

The blue substance was almost ready for human testing, and he needed a name for it. A number wasn’t good enough anymore. A number didn’t have poetry. The right kind of poetry had the ability to sell products. From his confidential contacts throughout the industry, Rutherford knew the names of other antibacterial medications making their way through the research protocols: Fumigacin, Clavacin, Patulin, Flavacidin. Absurd names. Who would ever want to say to his wife, “I’m heading over to the pharmacy to buy some Patulin”? It sounded like a laxative.

He wanted to name his medication after Charlie. He also wanted to
include some reference to the color. He believed that an old-fashioned name would inspire confidence. For a small fee, he was consulting with a classics professor up at Columbia. Betty, Rutherford’s secretary, had made the original contact. The professor turned out to be an obsessive who’d been sending Rutherford letters about medical linguistic precedent and about the etymology of
penicillin
, how the word came from the Greek for
mushroom
or
fungus
and the
pen
part meant
fan
and the…a trove of useless information.

Rutherford did, however, learn from his professor that Latin had a word specifically for the blue of the sky:
caeruleus
.
Cerulean
, in English. Rutherford praised the wisdom of a language that had a word specifically for sky blue. Furthermore,
Carolus
was the medieval Latin for
Charles
, which was the English name borrowed from the French, which came from the Latin…the professor could write a book about this, and it would sell one copy. To himself.

Caeruleus
and
Carolus
. Similar in appearance and sound. He’d have to add the required
-mycin
, or
-illin
or plain old
-in
at the end. Apparently a scientific reason determined each particular ending, but Rutherford wouldn’t let that guide him. He found an unused pad, turned over the first page, and played around with some combinations. Finally he landed on it:
Ceruleamycin
.

It was a little odd, but people would get used to it. Five years ago, who’d ever heard the word
penicillin
? Only a bunch of scientists. Ten years ago, who’d ever heard of sulfanilamide or sulfathiazole?

Rutherford wanted people to think of the sky whenever they heard the name Ceruleamycin. Penicillin was a hideous brownish yellow, so you could promote it only on its effectiveness. Rutherford grasped his advantage: his medication had beauty
and
effectiveness, and now a marvelous name. The advertising plan took shape in his mind:
Think blue
. Once the medication caught on, he’d use some of the profits to set up a foundation for medical research, just like old man Rockefeller. He knew that would make Claire happy.

Okay, he still had some problems to deal with. The medication had never been tested on humans. It could cause an allergic reaction, severe side effects, anemia, cancer, death. All his hopes might come to nothing. But at least his scientists were confident that the medication was ready for human testing. The next step was to find people to test it on. He needed to do mass trials, on many diseases, in a contained population. He’d heard rumors of imprisoned criminals volunteering for various types of medical tests, to do their part in the war effort. He’d also heard rumors of conscientious objectors to the war doing the same. And there were rumors of clinical trials being done at insane asylums or homes for the retarded; to Rutherford, this was going too far: he wouldn’t sully his medication by testing it on the retarded or the insane. In due course, he’d find the right group of critically ill patients to test it on.

Staring at the test tubes filled with liquid blue, Rutherford felt a deep stirring within him, as if he were gazing into a crystal ball that showed him the secret of life itself.

And when his secret was ready, he was going to sell it.