A Fierce Radiance (52 page)

W
hy his thoughts went to Tia Stanton at the end, Nick didn’t have the energy to figure out. He was bleeding to death, slowly, and there wouldn’t be any rescue. The ship was sinking. A clearly marked hospital ship, attacked from the air. For a while, he’d been conducting his clinical trials on the ground, at a field hospital just back from the front lines, hidden in the jungle. That location had quickly proven too dangerous. The ship was supposed to be safer. Probably the pilot of the plane was returning from an island raid, spotted the hospital ship, and, having a few bombs left, just couldn’t resist.

When Nick was a student and a young physician, he often wondered what dying felt like. Now he was finding out. He didn’t feel pain. Instead he felt a pleasant drifting. As though he were floating. He was dimly aware of activity around him, the uninjured fleeing, struggling to escape. Their struggles had nothing to do with him.

Those months after Tia’s death—could he have done something else, made some other decision? He didn’t see how. Nonetheless he played the events through in his mind once more. By chance he was in town, and he was free for lunch. He’d gone to her lab, hoping to persuade her to have lunch with him. The lab was open, but no one was there. Nonetheless, he went in; Tia always made everyone welcome. In the cousins’ room, her work was laid out. He sat at her bench, in her place, and read through her notes. Out of boredom.
Out of interest. As a way to fill the time. Nothing more. Nothing less.

He was shocked. Yes, yes, she’d mentioned now and again that she was on to something. Told him she was excited. But he never would have dreamed how far along she was, how spectacular the results were.

So peaceful. He hadn’t envisioned that death would be so peaceful. This type of death, at least. He felt weaker and weaker. He wished he could write down his reactions, for the benefit of those after him. Where was Margot, his nurse? She might be interested. She could write it down for him. Too many women, he’d had. Even Claire Shipley. He couldn’t bring himself to look his best friend in the eye after that rousing episode. After Jamie returned from the dead, he seemed to suspect something. Did Claire confess? Here was the kicker: Jamie came home after all, and he, Nick, would not.

The story of that afternoon, running through his brain like a movie, resumed. He read Tia’s notes. Examined the petri dishes, beakers, and test tubes relating to the substance. Saw the mice receiving the medication and the mice acting as the control group. Number 642, she called it. He recognized what she had done: she had made a remarkable discovery. He would congratulate her when she returned to the lab. He continued reading, following the story lines of other, less successful substances.

He heard footsteps. Someone had come into the lab, walking quickly toward him. “Tia?” he called out, so she wouldn’t be startled to see him.

But instead of Tia, Sergei Oretsky was at the doorway. Oretsky looked shocked to see Nick there, and he paused, as if thinking through what he should do or say. “She’s dead,” Oretsky finally shouted, like a taunt. He was red-faced. Sweating and panting in such a way that his clothes looked too small for him.

“Who’s dead?”

“Mademoiselle Stanton. Mademoiselle Stanton is dead.”

“What? That can’t be right.”

“I am right.”

Nick couldn’t fathom this. “Calm down, Oretsky. You’re not making sense.”

“She’s fallen from the cliff. An accident.”

Nick heard police sirens in the distance.

“Go see for yourself, if you don’t believe me.”

The sirens were louder now. Closer. Oretsky glanced toward the windows, as if he could see the sound of the sirens.

Nick stood. He wondered where to go, to find out what was going on. The sirens were very loud now. And then he realized, the last place
he
would go, to find out what was going on, was here, to the lab. What was Oretsky doing here? What did Oretsky want? Oretsky was shifting from foot to foot, nervously swaying, as if waiting, desperately, for Nick to leave.

The truth was, Nick had never really trusted Oretsky: Oretsky was Russian, after all. So foolish, these prejudices, Nick realized. Often enough, people had mistrusted Nick because his family was Italian. Often enough, he’d felt the sting of that mistrust. Because his family was Italian, and poor, he’d always had to be ten times as smart as the others, work ten times as hard, to be allowed into their schools. To date their daughters. To achieve the pinnacle of his field: a position at the Rockefeller Institute.

But despite the prejudice Nick himself had experienced, there it was: Nick didn’t trust the Russian Oretsky. Besides, Oretsky didn’t really belong at the Institute. He’d come here on a one-year fellowship, and in an act of charity, Dr. Rivers had allowed him to remain when the war broke out. Whereas Nick had been on the staff of the Institute for over a decade now.

Nick wouldn’t leave the Russian interloper Oretsky alone in Tia’s lab.

Oretsky gave Nick a peculiar look, as if he wanted something from Nick but was reluctant to ask. “Go. Go see for yourself,” Oretsky said softly. Nick could barely hear him for the shrieking of the police sirens down below, in front of the hospital and also, presumably, at the bottom of the cliff. Abruptly, the sirens stopped. The police cars had arrived. “She is there. By the cliff. I am right.”

The two men stared at each other.

Nick was determined: he would never leave Oretsky alone here.

“All right, you two, that way. Jenkins, you come with me…” The urgent, raised voices of the police officers in front of the hospital reached the two men.

Abruptly, Oretsky turned and left. In fact, he ran, although Nick couldn’t imagine what he was running away from, or what he was running toward. These Russians, so emotional and unpredictable.

Nick looked down at Tia’s work on the table before him. No matter what had happened to her, he couldn’t leave her work here, for anyone who happened by to stumble upon. Oretsky could come back. Anyone could come in here. Nick didn’t have a key to the lab, so he couldn’t lock the door behind him. Jamie was out of town. Jamie would want Nick to protect his sister’s work.

Nick felt a surge of energy. Quickly he searched. In a lower cabinet, he found a Bergdorf Goodman shopping bag in the shape of a shoe box. Methodically, he gathered all the materials relating to number 642 and placed them in the shopping bag. In the desk drawer, he found a razor blade, and he cut the pages from Tia’s notebook. Taking the back stairs, he brought the bag to his residence rooms. Placed the bag under the bed, for safekeeping.

Then he went to the hospital cafeteria, a general gathering place, to find out what was going on. His colleagues were there already, talking in tight clutches. The police were there, too. Oretsky was with his phage research group, looking through some notes, his earlier upset seemingly forgotten.

Nick learned that Lucretia Stanton was, indeed, dead at the bottom of the cliff, just as Sergei Oretsky said.

Drifting…how long did it take, to bleed to death? Well, that depended on the type of injury. Nick felt no pain, and he wasn’t precisely certain where he’d been wounded. The shoulder, maybe. His left shoulder felt pleasantly warm, perhaps from blood. He was so tired now. Soon, he would fall asleep.

After Tia’s memorial, when he found Jamie in the lab, he’d almost said to him, I have Tia’s great discovery upstairs in my rooms. I kept it safe for you. The Institute will develop it now, for the good of humankind. That was the Institute’s motto, after all.

But Nick found he couldn’t say anything to Jamie. Tia was dead. He, Nick, was alive. Jamie had been raised in wealth. Nick had not. The things he could do with the money he’d make from selling the substance…not simply for himself but for his family. For his parents. For the children he might himself someday have. There was no reason to say anything to Jamie about the substance. No reason at all.

Tia was dead, and she couldn’t be brought back to life.

For some reason, Nick’s grandmother came into his mind. His mother’s mother. She took care of him when he was young and his parents were at work. In the image that came into his mind, she gave him that secret smile of hers that said, now we’re going to do something that your mother would disapprove of. Like buying ice cream cones on a regular afternoon instead of saving the ice cream money for a birthday or a holiday. Sometimes they’d spend even more money to take the trolley to Syracuse’s lake. They’d buy their ice cream cones by the lake (he, chocolate; she, strawberry), and they’d sit on a bench at the lakeshore and enjoy their ice cream.

His grandmother was from a small village in the Dolomite mountains of Northern Italy. When Nick was very young, three or four, she still kept a loaf of stale bread on the kitchen counter, as her own mother had, as everyone in their village had. The bread was moldy—
he had told Tia about this when he was trying to court her. The story made her happy. When anyone in the family had a cut or scrape, his grandmother would slice off the end of the bread, press the moldy side against the wound, and wrap a bandage around to hold the bread in place for a few days. No one in their family ever developed a wound infection. The mold was
Penicillium
. But this was old-country medicine, and, until recently, scientists never took it seriously.

Eventually Nick’s mother got rid of the stale bread, calling it a disgusting holdover from the country they were never going back to, good riddance.

Nick saw his grandmother once more, saw her smile, as if she were coming to staunch the wounds he now suffered.

Silence, all around him. He was floating. Life, death…he was floating in between. Again he wished he could tell someone how peaceful he felt. But no one was nearby to listen.

E
dward Rutherford stood at the window of his office, high up in the tower of 20 Exchange Place. You could see a long way from here. Feel like you were on top of the world. The window faced north, and he could see all the way to the Empire State Building.

He’d returned to town this morning, on the sleeper from Chicago. The train was overcrowded and arrived two hours late. That was the war. He didn’t even have time to go home to change. He had a new project: two guys with revolutionary ideas about semiconductors. Nothing might come of the project—or their ideas might change the world. Rutherford was going to support them for a few years and see what happened.

Betty, his secretary, buzzed him. He went to his desk and pressed the intercom button. “Your daughter to see you, sir.” Before he could respond, Claire had walked in the door.

Rutherford understood the instant he saw her. She was dressed up, high heels, tailored suit, full makeup and a perfect hat. She was ready to do battle. This was probably what she called her Henry Luce outfit.

“Sweetheart, what a surprise! You look terrific!”

She didn’t respond. Not a good sign.

“I’m just back from Chicago. Sit down, sit down.” He ushered her into a chair, one of four surrounding a coffee table in the corner. The office was designed in the Art Deco style, very sleek, to match the building. “How’s everything? What are you up to?”

“Nothing much.”

Nothing much.
He knew that phrase from months past, when they were first getting to know each other.
Nothing much
covered everything that she didn’t want to tell him. Everything that mattered in her life. He wasn’t happy to hear it, and it told him how upset she must be.

“Shall I tell Betty to bring some coffee?”

“No, thank you.”

“Well, then.” He smiled at her. He put on an eager, probably fatuous look that said, I’m ready to hear absolutely anything you have to say.

She seemed to need a moment to compose herself. Then:

“James Stanton was right, wasn’t he? You did order the murder of his sister.”

“
What
, young lady?”

No,
no
. He mustn’t take this tack. He must not. He knew how to conduct this battle. He had to state the facts as he knew them, without pushing or prodding, without overpleading or pressing his case in any way. “No,” he said calmly, “I did not order the murder of Lucretia Stanton.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Whether you believe me or not is irrelevant. Your accusation is false.”

“So how did your company just happen to have her discovery to develop?”

“That’s very simple. Nicholas Catalano sold it to me. He said he found it in his hometown. Whether this is true or not, I don’t know.”

“And since he’s dead anyway, you can’t ask him.” Jake Lind had sent Claire a note about Nick.

Rutherford had no answer to this.

“You also colluded in the death of Bill Shipley.”

He just barely stopped himself from laughing. “For your sake, I might have been tempted to get rid of him, but no. The word on the street, as they say, is that government security did the job.”

Barnett: just as she thought. Part of her wanted to believe everything her father said. To walk out with him to lunch, uptown at the Cloud Club, the businessmen’s club in the spire of the Chrysler Building. They’d discuss Charlie’s latest letters. Plans for Charlie’s schooling in the autumn. They’d discuss how to break to Charlie the news of his father’s death.

No, she didn’t want to fight with Edward Rutherford. But she made herself press on. “You knowingly injured innocent Japanese prisoners by authorizing the testing of your new drug in the camps in the West.”

“My staff worked hard to find the best place to conduct clinical trials.” He made the tactical move of meeting her halfway: “I suppose that reasonable people might differ on this, but I truly believe that we did those people a great deal of good and only trivial harm.”

She didn’t know what to say to this. Was deafness trivial harm?

Now she’d arrived at the ransacking of her home. She paused.

He misinterpreted her silence as a partial victory. He made a step toward her: “I know I could have done better, darling. All these years. Everything we talked about when Charlie was in the hospital. But I’m not a murderer. My people aren’t murderers.” He was about to compare himself favorably in this regard to certain other robber barons and their ilk, but he restrained himself. “Like anyone, I have regrets.”

“Did you order my home ransacked?”

“The men went overboard, I found out later. They got carried away. They were stupid, and they were fired. But that photo shoot of yours was a security breach, and I had no choice but to get the film back as soon as possible. I needed to protect my property. The government didn’t have the right to see those photos. I phoned you as soon as I heard, remember? To make certain you were all right.”

Had she heard him correctly? She was astonished. Apparently he could rationalize anything, in the name of business.

She looked at him for a moment. Then she stood up and walked out, slamming the office door behind her.

Rutherford stared at the door for a long while. Then he listlessly returned to the window to look out at the city…. Thunderstorms were coming on, fat gray clouds behind the skyscrapers to the north. The clouds made the skyscrapers glow silver. How beautiful this city was. By definition, man-made. Skyscraper technology was incredible. What was the next step in skyscraper technology? What did you need, to allow structures to be built higher and higher yet? New types of flame retardant, maybe. Stronger glass. New types of steel? If buildings were constructed of glass and steel instead of stone, they would be lighter. Lighter meant higher. He’d do some research. Someday this war would end. A new age of glass and steel skyscrapers would begin. Looking out the window, he imagined the skyline transformed. When the time came, he would be ready.

He let Claire back into his mind. He wanted his family to be together. That was truly what mattered most. He already had more money than he could ever use. He’d figure something out. He’d make this up to her and gain her forgiveness.

Nothing much.
He never, ever, wanted to hear that phrase from her again. Not ever.