“Amen,” said Mary Alice as the flash blinded me.
The MPs—sent by the bus driver, apparently, to make sure the white woman wasn’t set upon by sex-crazed black men—stayed while Westcott packed up his his camera and lights and loaded them back into his jeep. Mary Alice and I had remained seated while the gear was packed. When everything was loaded, I stood up to go, and when I did, I felt my dress sticking to the metal folding chair. I looked down, and the seat was sticky with blood. Mary Alice glanced at the chair, then quickly stood beside me, an arm around my waist. With her free hand, she signaled to her mother, who came and stood close behind me. We walked that way, the two black women and I, out of the building and into the night. Mary Alice helped me onto the bus, and as I stepped up into the enveloping darkness of the bus, I heard one of the MPs say something to the other.
What he said was, “Nigger lover.”
CHAPTER 37
BEATRICE TURNED TO LOOK AT ME. IT HAD COST HER some pain to tell me the story, I could tell.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You must have been desperate to have risked so much. You could have died. Or gone to prison.”
“Prison comes in all shapes and sizes,” she said. “So does death.” She turned and looked out the windows. “How did you know to ask me about that?”
I probably wasn’t supposed to say, but I felt I owed her a disclosure in return for what she’d just told me. “The FBI is looking at old files,” I said, “trying to figure out why Novak was killed. A doctor at the hospital reported that he suspected you’d had an abortion.”
“That son of a bitch,” she said. “I knew him for forty years, and I never could stand him.”
I realized I had no right to ask, but I asked anyhow. “Whose baby was it, Beatrice?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “That’s another reason I had the abortion.” She sighed. “Novak was traveling out to Hanford a lot in the spring and summer of 1945,” she said. “The big plutonium production reactors out there were coming on line, and there were technical problems to solve. It turned out that trace amounts of boron were absorbing neutrons and slowing down the chain reaction. ‘Poisoning’ it, that’s the term they used. Novak had to solve the mystery of the boron poisoning. He’d be gone for a week or ten days at a time, and I got into the habit of going down to the Rec Hall at night, to pass the time.”
“You were lonely when he was gone,” I said.
“I was lonely when he was here,” she said. “Maybe lonelier. I think I was the loneliest when he was sleeping in the same bed with me, twelve inches away but beyond reach. When he was gone, at least I could do something about the loneliness. Sometimes I even brought a man home with me. I’m sure I was indiscreet; I’m sure the neighbors talked.”
Or snitched, I thought. “I should go,” I said.
“Where? Home? Do you have a good woman waiting for you, Bill? Or a good man?”
“No. I have work waiting for me,” I said. I stood to go. Something on the end table beside her chair caught my eye. Resting atop a stack of opened mail was a small, rectangular piece of white paper with blue lettering.
“Good God,” I said.
“What?” She followed my eyes. “Oh, that,” she said. “What a jerk.”
The lettering read, “I know your secret.”
AMAZING,” I SAID TO EMERT. I had called him when I left Beatrice’s house to share what she’d told me about the note. Thirty minutes later, as I sat in his office, he had already gathered a remarkable amount of information. “So this guy was just on a random fishing expedition? Trying to trick Oak Ridge geezers into spilling whatever beans they had to spill from the bomb project or the Cold War?”
“Espionage-flavored beans,” said Emert. “He was pitching a documentary to the History Channel. Atomic Secrets, he called it.” Emert waved a one-page printout—a bad photocopy of a fax, or a really good photocopy of a really bad fax. “This is a one-page treatment he’d faxed to the History Channel. He didn’t have a deal for it yet, though—it was just a proposal.”
I read the subtitle. “No wonder he didn’t have a deal,” I said. “Get a load of that subtitle. How Soviet Spies Pierced the Heart of the Manhattan Project. How clunky is that?”
“Yeah, well, Ken Burns he wasn’t,” said Emert. “But you gotta love the irony of ‘pierced the heart,’ considering how he died. Apparently he was hoping to dig up something juicy in Oak Ridge, something that would hook the History Channel.”
“How’d you get this so fast?”
“I’ll never tell,” he said, holding a finger to his lips, like the World War II billboards that reminded Oak Ridgers to keep quiet.