“But he was Jewish,” she said. “To him, the ultimate enemy was Hitler. 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 mass destruction in an act of war? The United States. Twice.”
“We did it to save lives, Miranda,” I said. “Not just U.S. lives; Japanese 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 Japan to surrender. It took the symbolic power of the atomic bomb to end the war.”
“Highly debatable,” she said. “The Japanese 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 Japan, 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.”
“Crap,” 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 hellish 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