LEONARD NOVAK’S FINAL RESTING PLACE was barely a stone’s throw from his death scene. The funeral was held in the United Church—called the Chapel on the Hill by every Oak Ridger I heard refer to it—the small, historic church perched on the hillside just above the Alexander Inn. It seemed a fitting place to memorialize one of the pivotal scientists of the Manhattan Project. Although Novak had long since retired, and although Emert had said the scientist wasn’t a churchgoer, the parking lot beside the church was packed, and even the faded asphalt down beside the derelict hotel was filling fast, with more than a few spots occupied by television news vehicles. Novak’s retirement had been a quiet, almost obscure one, according to Emert, but his bizarre death had thrust him squarely into the posthumous spotlight.
I parked in front of the old hotel and made my way up a sidewalk and a long flight of steps to the front door of the chapel.
One of the first public buildings erected during the city’s wartime construction boom, the Chapel on the Hill had done its part for the war effort by hosting services of multiple faiths and denominations. Methodists, Baptists, Catholics, Jews—they’d all held weekly services here during the war, each group distributing their prayer books or hymnals just before their appointed hour in the building, then gathering them up again at the end of the service. Church buildings often sit empty and idle most of the time, but not this one. During the war, it would have been hard to find an hour of the day when someone wasn’t preaching or praying or practicing on the church’s pump organ. I would like to have seen a time-lapse video—one compressing a week’s worth of comings and goings into, say, sixty seconds—just to watch the church’s doors open and close, the building rhythmically inhaling and exhaling streams of worshipers.
The chapel’s interior was packed; three television cameras rested on tripods at the back, and every seat seemed taken. I scanned the pews, seeking any open space, but I didn’t see one. In a moment, though, an usher came up the center aisle from near the front of the church and motioned me forward. There were no rows reserved for family—Novak had been married, briefly, as a young man, the newspaper obituary had said, but he had no children—and I found myself shoehorned into the front row, in a slot better suited to someone half my size. The elderly man on my left—I guessed his age at seventy—pretended not to notice me, even as he drew himself in tightly and scooted, fussily but with no noticeable increase in room for me, away from me. To my right, an even older woman—she must have been eighty or more—nodded slightly as I sat down, then surprised me by turning to speak to me. In a stage whisper that could probably have been heard three rows back, she said, “Well, thank God somebody here is under sixty. We’ll be lucky if three or four of us don’t kick the bucket during the service.” I wanted to laugh—she might be old, but she seemed sharp and funny—but I managed to limit myself to a smile, since laughter didn’t seem to suit the setting or the occasion.
There was no coffin; instead an unadorned brass urn rested on a simple wooden altar. Within hours after the FBI had whisked the iridium source out of Knoxville, Garcia had phoned the state medical examiner’s office and they had sent a pathologist from Nashville to complete the autopsy so that Novak’s body—which was not getting any fresher—could be removed from the morgue and cremated. It had taken three people—Garcia, Duane Johnson, and Dr. Sorensen—to convince the Nashville pathologist that Novak’s radiation-ravaged body was no more hazardous than any other corpse. I had heard Johnson explaining the physics of it over the phone. “Think of the gamma source like a really strong magnet sitting on your desk,” he had said. “There’s a powerful energy field emanating from it—a magnetic field surrounding the magnet, gamma radiation around the iridium-192. If the magnet’s too close to your computer, your hard drive is gonna be toast. If the gamma source is too close to your body, well…” He’d trailed off then, probably regretting his use of the word “toast,” given our concerns about Garcia’s hands. “Anyhow,” he went on, “once you get rid of the source, it’s gone. There’s no smear of magnetism lingering on your desk, waiting to trash your new hard drive; there’s no radioactivity in the sink or the cadaver.”