tting Novak from the ice. The picture showed Groves studying a map of Japan. No, not studying it, exactly; more like burning a hole in it with his eyes. The general’s belly was doughy and his jowls were flabby, but his eyes were like lasers locked on a target. “That man’s horizon didn’t extend one inch beyond Japan,” she said. “Build the bomb; drop the bomb.”
“He was a good fit for the job,” I said.
“Now look at Oppenheimer,” she said, slipping another photo from the folder. The physicist was wearing the porkpie hat that had been his trademark, much like the battered fedora of Indiana Jones. A cigarette hung from Oppenheimer’s lips, and a wisp of smoke wafted up the left side of his face. A skinny tie was cinched around a scrawny neck — no flabby jowls on Oppenheimer — and the nubby collar of a tweed jacket gapped open above bony shoulders. At the center of the image was a pair of haunted, haunting eyes. They were staring straight into the lens, but they seemed to be focused on something far beyond it. “Do you see? Those are the eyes of a man who’s been chained to a rock; a man staring at eternity,” she said. “Where’s the border between America and Japan, or America and Russia, when you’re staring at eternity?”
“Are you sure he can see that far, Miranda? And are you sure you can see into his soul?”
“Come on, Dr. B. When the Trinity test worked, this guy didn’t say ‘yee haw’ or ‘hot damn’ or even ‘oh shit.’ This guy said, ‘I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ He agonized. He tried to rein in nuclear weapons after the war, and he was painted as a traitor for that.”
“He did try,” I said. “But not until after the war.”
She frowned. “I know,” she said, “and that’s part of what’s tragic about him. He built the bomb, and then he hated what it did, and hated the arms race it triggered. And then he was destroyed for opposing the arms race. Meanwhile, look at Werner von Braun. Von Braun was the brains behind the V-2 rockets that rained down on London during the war, but he became an American hero because he started building rockets for us instead of Hitler. Which brings me back to Klaus Fuchs, sort of. Was he a patriot or a traitor?”
“Traitor,” I said. “No question. He sold atomic secrets to our enemies.”
“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
My father died when I was ten. My mother was a night auditor for a hotel in Chattanooga, so I got used to being alone at night at an early age. Getting used to it’s not the same as liking it, though. My father was gone for good; sometimes it seemed like my mother was, too.
The Christmas I was thirteen, Mother took me to New York on the train. My Aunt Rachel and Uncle Isaac lived there — Aunt Rachel was my father’s sister — and Mother said she wanted to visit them and show me the sights of New York for Christmas. We changed trains in Raleigh about lunchtime on a Friday, and we rode all night to get to New York. We shared a bunk in a sleeper car, and I remember falling asleep with my mother’s arms wrapped around me, which was something that hadn’t happened in years.
We got to Penn Station — this was Old Penn Station, mind you, which was spectacular, a lot grander than Grand Central — late in the afternoon on Christmas Day. From there we took a cab across town to Rockefeller Center. The outdoor ice-skating rink there had just opened, that very day. It was December 25, 1936. It was so beautiful it made my heart ache — all those Christmas decorations and lights, and everybody dressed up in their best winter clothes.
The country had just begun to cr
awl up out of the Great Depression, and that Christmas night in Rockefeller Square, I think people weren’t just celebrating the birth of Jesus, they were celebrating the rebirth of America. Mother and I waited in line for hours to skate, dragging our battered little suitcases with us. I didn’t mind the wait; I was giddy with the sights and sounds and glamour of it all. Finally, when we got up to the front of the line, Mother told me that she wasn’t going to skate; she would stay with our suitcases and just watch me. She asked a boy in line behind us if he’d help me get the hang of it. He was about my age, maybe a year or two older. Old enough to be interesting to me; not so old as to be scary. He held my hand and pulled me along, wobbling and shrieking and laughing. Every time we made a lap past the place where Mother was standing beside the rail, she’d wave and yell something encouraging.
And then the boy let go of my hand, and I was skating by myself. It was terrifying and thrilling — I’m sure I was just inching along, but it felt so daring and grown-up, and I couldn’t wait to circle back around and see Mother’s face when she realized I was doing it without any help. But her face wasn’t there. The fat man in the red scarf, who had been standing right beside her, was still there; so was the nun who had been on the other side. But she was gone, and the space where she had been standing was already closing up behind her.
I slid past the fat man and the nun — I was confused, and I also didn’t know how to stop — and went around the rink once more. The second time I came around, I ran into the rail to stop. I was still a few feet away from the two faces I recognized, so I pulled myself along the rail, my feet sliding out from under me again and again. I remember people laughing and pointing every time I caught myself on the rail and then hauled myself back up. By the time I got to the fat man and the nun, my heart had turned to ice, and I could feel tears running down my face — not because people were laughing at me, but because I knew something was wrong.