Bones of Betrayal

“Okay,” I said.

 

“Oh, all right, I’ll tell,” he said. “Right after you called from Beatrice’s driveway, I got a call from a desk clerk at the Double-tree, who saw the sketch in the newspaper. The secret-sniffing guy—Willard Clarkson was his name—checked into the hotel seventeen days ago, on January ninth. On the tenth, he faxed this to New York. He also asked for extra chocolate-chip cookies.”

 

“The Doubletree makes a damn good cookie,” I said.

 

“Yeah, but you’re only entitled to one cookie, and only at check-in,” Emert said. “This guy went back for seconds. He thought the regular rules didn’t apply to him.”

 

“What are you, the cookie police? You’re saying he deserved to die because he went back to the desk clerk and said, ‘Please, sir, could I have more?’? Hell, I’ve done that.”

 

“Never do it again,” he said. “Look where you could end up.”

 

“Clearly the desk clerk had sufficient motive,” I said. “So, this bush-league documentary guy—”

 

“Sapling,” said Emert.

 

“Sapling?”

 

“Bush-league’s a little harsh,” he said. “Clarkson had already done some other History Channel shows. Things about World War II aircraft carriers and fighter planes and bombers. Not bad. Some glitzy stuff for A&E, too. But as I was saying—”

 

“Before you were so rudely interrupted?”

 

“Before I was so rudely interrupted,” he echoed. “The afternoon of January tenth, he sends the fax and asks for illegal seconds on the cookies. And then nobody at the Doubletree ever sees him again.”

 

“They thought he’d skipped out?”

 

“They just thought he was weird, or reclusive. He’d said he’d be staying for several weeks. They had his credit card on file, and the DO NOT DISTURB sign was hanging on the door. They were leaving him alone.”

 

“January tenth,” I said. “That was right before East Tennessee turned into Antarctica, if I remember right.”

 

“It was,” he said. “It was also one day after Leonard Novak checked out those library books about the Venona Project.”

 

 

 

EMERT HEADED TO THE DOUBLETREE, to lead the search of Willard Clarkson’s room. I headed down the hill once more, to the library. I was hoping that perhaps Isabella was back by now, her father’s health improving, but the substitute at the Reference Desk dashed my hopes. She dashed my fallback hope as well: no, she didn’t have any further details about how he was doing, or where I might send a get-well card, or when Isabella might be back. I tried to mask the frustration and embarrassment I felt; I must look like either a stalker or a fool, I realized, to be pursuing a woman who didn’t consider me worth turning to in a crisis.

 

“I was hoping to do a bit of history research today,” I said. It wasn’t true—it was a flimsy excuse for my presence here—but she unlocked the Oak Ridge Room for me, and I found it soothing, somehow, to be there. I looked through the notebook of photos from ORNL, and saw the Graphite Reactor take shape on a hillside, against the backdrop of a wooded ridge. I saw the immense U-shaped structure of the K-25 plant, which separated a gaseous form of uranium. The K-25 plant was the last to be completed but the largest in capacity, like some lumbering uranium freight train finally gathering momentum. I saw the oval racetracks of Y-12, their D-shaped calutrons linked by thousands of tons of silver borrowed from the U.S. Treasury. And I saw Beatrice, perched on her stool, one hand forever poised on the controls, altering the trajectory of uranium atoms and human history.

 

Looking through a binder labeled “Life in Oak Ridge,” I saw men and women lined up for cigarettes, boys and girls decked out in Cub Scout and Brownie uniforms, football players in helmets and pads, baseball teams in caps. I saw two pretty young women—one white, one black—looking at a book together, the black woman pointing a finger at the page as the white woman read aloud. The white woman’s eyes looked glassy.

 

I saw musicians playing and couples dancing. And among the dancing couples, I spotted Beatrice yet again. She was a photogenic young woman; if I were a photographer in wartime Oak Ridge, I’d have taken her picture every chance I got, too. In this photo, she was dancing with a handsome, smiling young man—a man who was not Leonard Novak. I checked the date on the photo: August 1, 1945. The Trinity test had shaken New Mexico two weeks before; in five more days, the city of Hiroshima would be decimated, and in eight days Nagasaki would share its fate. And at some point in the days or weeks after the photo was taken, the smiling young man would be shot at point-blank range and buried in a shallow grave, along with hundreds of pages of typescript. Were the pages a manuscript for posterity, or secrets for the Soviets? Or were they both?