A Fierce Radiance (38 page)

Even as she and Tony hurried away, she continued to imagine this medication—someday, when Düsseldorf wasn’t a firestorm, when the
Eastern Front wasn’t a thousand miles of Russian defeats—as the subject of a cover story on the penicillin cousins.

A
round 5:00
AM
, Tony and Claire reached the approach to the access road of the Holland Tunnel. Dawn was breaking behind the New York City skyline, silhouetting the Woolworth Building and the Singer Tower in magenta. The air was cool and sweet, even here, amid the intersecting roads of New Jersey. Claire felt elated, invigorated, after her work through the night.

“Pull over, Tony, would you?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am, you’re the boss.”

He pulled to the side, out of the flow of traffic. Claire took her Leica from the backseat and climbed onto the roof of the car. Her city. Her entire life, spent here. And still, on a morning in July, it was to her the most beautiful and exciting place in the world, as she captured the evolving colors of dawn behind and upon the skyscrapers.

They drove the rest of the trip in silence. Through the Holland Tunnel, north on Sixth Avenue, across on Waverly, along the narrow streets of the Village. Striped awnings were unfurled on the town house windows, to keep out the sun and the heat during what would be a sweltering day.

Stars, stars in the windows of town houses and tenements alike, everywhere Claire looked. There was the Castagnaro apartment, with three blue stars. That would be for Harry, Bob, and Bill. She remembered them from stickball games she’d dodged on her way to the grocery store or the subway when she was in college. Over there was the home of the O’Shea family, with one blue star. That would be for Peter, her fifth-grade beau. She’d lost track of him years ago. He must have joined up, too old to be drafted. In the window of a ground-floor tenement, a gold star. Mr. Martowski lived there. A widower. The star had to be for his son Harvey, just nineteen. She remembered Harvey peering into Charlie’s perambulator, when she’d come downtown to
visit her mother shortly after Emily died. Harvey always seemed to have a penny string of red licorice hanging from his fist. His trousers were patched, his sweater had a hole in the elbow. Harvey Martowski, a boy whose mother had died young. Constance once told her that the other mothers on the block looked after him. Now he, too, was dead.

Tony pulled up to her house, and Claire got out, retrieving the equipment. She had another assignment later, and she was happy to have a few hours to herself, a rare occurrence. With Charlie away, she’d given Maritza time off. She looked forward to a little luxury, a long bath and a lingering breakfast in the garden, cool beneath the thick canopy of trees, sunlight dappling through the shadows. She had thirty-two rolls of film in her bag. Tomorrow she’d take the film to Barnett’s fake New York office, which masqueraded as an importing and exporting firm near Union Square. The office wasn’t open now, and her next assignment might go late this evening. In the meantime she’d stash the film in her basement darkroom to keep it cool.

She paused at Tony’s open window. “Thanks, Tony.”

“Yeah, exciting night. Working with you isn’t as bad as I thought it would be,” he said.

Lack of sleep made her emotional, unable to respond with a lighthearted rejoinder. “Thank you for saying that.”

“No, thank
you
.” He too seemed moved. She thought of him as a younger brother, or a nephew. She wanted to say more. She wanted to say, come in for a cold drink. But as they looked at each other, she sensed the gap between them, of background, education, and position. What the military called rank, which stopped them both from saying anything more. So they simply said their good-byes.

T
hat afternoon, Claire stood on the deck of a navy cruiser docked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. She was doing a fashion shoot with three models and a stylist to assist. The fashion item in question was a small, round khaki hat with an all-around brim that could be turned up or worn down. The Johnny Jeep hat, it was called, inspired by army hats.

Life
was creating a fashion fad. The models who displayed the hat were slender, buxom, and…
bold
was probably the word for their poses. In the ninety-five-degree heat, they wore tight thin sweaters that revealed their brassieres beneath. In this context, a visible brassiere, generally considered tasteless, became de rigueur. This fashion story was really about catching the models in cheesecake poses, a favorite combination for Mack and managing editor Billings—who, Mack hinted, was already thinking
cover story
for this cruiser caper. The hat was army-inspired, but the story was being photographed on a ship because stories about the navy sold more copies than stories about the army and also because here in New York City, ships were more readily available than tanks. Claire did wonder about the provocative poses the models might have exhibited on a tank.

“Okay, ladies,” Claire instructed Bernice, Martha, and June, “how about you lean over the railing, and I’ll lean over the railing, and we’ll do these hats justice.”

“You got it,” Martha said.

The girls knew precisely what was expected of them, and they delivered, with salutes, winks, and over-the-shoulder grins, all performed in their exaggerated,
bold
posture. Come to find out, there were dozens of ways to photograph buxom girls modeling small hats on a navy cruiser. Some shots included the highly evocative skyscrapers of Manhattan in the background. Claire even got several particularly suggestive poses of the girls astraddle the ship’s smokestack.

The session broke at five, earlier than Claire expected. Toward the end, her eyelids were starting to get heavy. Staying up all night to work didn’t suit her as well as it had ten or fifteen years ago.

By the time she reached home, it was almost six. These long summer days…the light was still strong, the humid heat heavy and draining. Her skin was damp.

When Claire put the key in the lock of her front door, she was surprised to find that the door hadn’t been bolted. It locked automatically when it closed, but she and Charlie always bolted it for extra protection. She was certain she’d bolted it when she left, but of course she’d missed a night’s sleep. Tom, the dog walker, would have been in and out to walk Lucas at three, and he must have forgotten to bolt it.

She entered the front vestibule, slipping the heavy bags off her shoulders and onto the floor. Her arms had a slick of sweat. Gin and tonic, that’s what she needed to revive herself.

With the shades down and the windows closed to keep out the summer heat, the house was shadowed. She gazed through the parlor and the dining room to the French doors in the back. The doors opened onto a balcony that overlooked the garden. The soft light of late afternoon filtered through the shades. She felt as if she’d entered a soft-focused photograph by Edward Steichen or Clarence White from early in the century.

The house felt strangely quiet. No one home. And yet someone was home, or should be. She felt a pang of anxiety. No paws were padding upstairs from the kitchen, no wagging tail was thumping the wall in
pleasure at her return, no damp muzzle pressing into her palm. Lucas always came to greet her. Early this morning he’d been standing just inside the door when she came in, as if to say, where were you all night?

“Lucas?”

No response.

“Lucas?” She called more loudly.

She went to the French doors and pulled up the shades. The dog door in the laundry room gave him access to the garden. When Lucas slept in the garden in the summer, he stretched out on the cool flagstones beneath the maple tree. But the garden was empty. If Lucas were in the house, he’d stay where it was coolest, which meant the ground-floor kitchen. She walked through the hall to the stairway that led downstairs, glancing into her photo office as she passed.

That’s when she realized. The filing cabinets of negatives and contact sheets were open, the contents searched and tossed over the floor. Her mind flew—what work did she have at home? Photos of Charlie and Emily, the portraits she’d done of the neighborhood kids years ago, the newspaper and commercial work she’d done before she went to
Life
. None of this would be valuable to a thief.

Where was the film from the Hanover shoot? The basement darkroom, where it would be cool.

Then she heard the muffled scratching and barking. It came from downstairs, somehow from inside the stone foundations of the house itself. Panicked, she ran down the steps. She slipped on the edge of the carpeting and gripped the banister to stop herself from falling. And she realized: someone could be in the house still. Someone could be waiting for her at the turn of the stairs. But she had to reach Lucas. At the bottom of the stairs, the crying and scraping were louder, coming from behind the cellar door. A chair was pushed against the door to keep it closed. She kept the basement door locked to prevent Charlie from wandering into the darkroom and getting into the darkroom
chemicals. A quick glance showed her the marks in the wood where the lock had been forced.

She pushed the chair aside and opened the door. Lucas bounded out and leapt to her with frantic joy. As she held him and rubbed her face into his fur, she smelled the acrid odor of darkroom chemicals. He was wet with them, parts of his fur soaked through. She forced herself to smell his breath and caught the stench of vomit. Vomit mixed with chemicals.

“Lucas, come,” she said sharply to make him listen. Gripping the loose skin on the scruff of his neck, she led him through the laundry room, out the back door, and into the garden. She uncoiled the hose and turned it on. She hosed him down. The water was frigid against her palms even through the rubber hose. Lucas loved it—they were playing a game, the best game in the world for him, his gloomy hours in the basement forgotten in the thrill of jumping through the rainbow-reflecting waterfall. He leapt through the stream, pushed his face into the spray, captured the droplets on his tongue.

After he was entirely soaked, she hosed down the flagstones, washing the garden, forcing the chemicals down the drain. She turned off the hose. He shook himself once, twice, water cascading in all directions, a splash from the end of his tail hitting her chin. She didn’t get a towel to dry him. She didn’t want to take the time, and besides, the damp would keep him cool.

“Lucas, stay.” He was rolling on the flagstones, his wet fur making patterns like snow angels. If someone was in the house, he, or she, had most likely used Lucas’s bath time to escape.

Claire closed the laundry room door behind her and latched the dog door shut, to keep Lucas in the garden. Turning on the low-wattage overhead light, she went down the shadowy, narrow stairs to the basement. The room opened before her. After the heat outside, she shivered in the basement chill. The enlarger was overturned on the floor. The printer paper, some of it soaked, was emptied from its boxes
and strewn across the room. The bottles of chemicals were opened and overturned. She spotted Lucas’s vomit in two puddles in the corner. The fix or hypo must taste sweet. He must have lapped it up until it made him sick—luckily made him sick, before he lapped up enough to kill him. The table where she’d left the bag of film from the Hanover shoot—bare.

Of course. She’d been warned by John Smith at the Dodgers game. This was her punishment for ignoring the warning. Thank goodness Charlie wasn’t here. Thank goodness she’d given Maritza the day off, and that Tom hadn’t stumbled in while this was going on.

She sat down on the basement steps. She tried to catch her breath. She felt foolish. And violated and exposed, as if her body itself had been ransacked. What an easy target she was.

Who could have done this? Who knew she’d been to Hanover, or even who she was? Who was watching? Who had followed her home?

She couldn’t let herself think about that now. The possibilities were too upsetting. Instead, she needed to get to work: this mess would take hours to clean up. Best get started. First, though, she should let someone know, to prevent something worse from happening later. Whom to call? Barnett? Luce?

She walked up the stairs to the kitchen, closing the basement door behind her. She’d need to phone the locksmith to repair the lock. She checked on Lucas. The dog had stopped his rolling and was lying stretched out on his back with his four legs spread in the air. She un-latched the dog door, so he could come in when he was ready.

From her purse she retrieved the calling card Barnett had given her after Tia’s memorial. She sat at the round table in the corner that held the kitchen telephone. She placed the long-distance call, person-to-person collect, and waited for the call back.

“Carnegie Institution,” the receptionist answered.

“Mrs. Claire Shipley from New York for Dr. Andrew Barnett,” the long-distance operator said.

“Hold on, please.” Several moments pause. “Barnett here.”

“Dr. Barnett. Claire Shipley.”

“How can I help you, Mrs. Shipley?”

His severe formality put her off. She needed a touch of sympathy to begin telling this story. But she forced herself to plunge in. “Last week, I went to a baseball game with John Smith of Pfizer.”

“I know who John Smith is,” he said harshly.

She was taken aback. “Yes, of course you do.” Did he really think she was passing judgment on his competence? “At any rate…” She resumed the story, beginning with the baseball game and ending now, at this moment. He didn’t interrupt again. “I assume no one’s in the house,” she said finally, letting a small part of her anxiety show, even while knowing that she would never get reassurance from Andrew Barnett.

“Well, well,” he said. She couldn’t be certain across the long-distance line, but he seemed to be amused. “Well, well.”

“That’s all you can say?”

Indeed, he was laughing. “This is very useful information, Mrs. Shipley.”

“How so?”

“Confirmation of what we already suspected and hoped. Greed as the ultimate motivator. Dr. Bush leaves nothing to chance. Things are moving forward on all fronts. Thank you. Thank you very much.”

“And my personal risk?”

“All in a day’s work, I should think. Beats the Pacific, after all. By the way, if there are any questions, we don’t know you. In fact, I don’t believe you and I have ever met. Good-bye.” He hung up.

He was like a caricature of himself, Claire thought. She couldn’t begin to absorb the intricacies of what he’d been trying to tell her. At this moment, her needs were simpler. She was trembling still. She needed to find some way to steady herself. Should she phone Mr. Luce? He was the one who’d sent her to Hanover. It was Saturday. Most likely he wasn’t in the office, or if he had been in, to supervise
Life
’s Saturday
close, he’d probably left by now. Nonetheless, she was alone, and she needed to hear an understanding voice. The company switchboard put her through to his office. After five rings, he answered his own phone. Gruffly.

“Mr. Luce, it’s Claire Shipley.”

A pause.

“Good to talk to you, too, Mr. Luce. I’m afraid I have, well, a story to tell you.” She related the events of the evening.

“I’ll send down a cleaning crew.”

“No, that’s all right. I can manage.”

“You have better things to do with your time. Miss Thrasher will make the arrangements. Thank you for briefing me. Keep on with the good work.”

“Mr. Luce, as I mentioned the other day, I don’t think—”

“No jumping ship midvoyage, Mrs. Shipley. When Miss Thrasher returns, I’ll tell her to phone you back.” He hung up without saying good-bye.

The evening loomed before her, hours to fill, without Charlie, without Jamie. She felt lost. Well, she had to fill the evening with something. It was dinnertime. She didn’t feel like eating. The quiet of the house pressed against her. Since she was alone, she had to make a new routine for herself. Again her practical side took over: gin and tonic, that’s where she’d left off, wasn’t it?

As she stood to go to the refrigerator to retrieve the tonic and lime, the telephone rang, startling her. Miss Thrasher, calling back so soon? “Hello?”

“Long-distance,” the operator said, sounding as if she was speaking in a static-filled drum. “Hold the line, please.” She heard the sounds of the call being put through.

“Mom, it’s me, Charlie!”

Charlie? Long-distance? Immediately her heart was pounding. Immediately she feared disaster. “Are you okay, Charlie?”

“’Course I am. It’s great here. I wish you were here. I’ve got two bags of Hershey bars to give you.”

This telephone call couldn’t be about Hershey bars, could it? “That’s wonderful, darling. Thank you. What have you been doing?”

“Well, the first day we slept late and had lunch for breakfast. Then yesterday it was really hot and we went to the swimming pool. I made Grandpa go in the water even though he doesn’t swim and he’s scared of the water. Guess what: we have chocolate for every meal. At breakfast they put chocolate in the bread. Even my clothes smell of chocolate!”

Charlie sounded so good, so happy. After the initial shock of the call, coming on top of Claire’s already jittery nerves, Claire now felt soothed and cheered by Charlie’s enthusiasm for these unthreatening activities. Bill Shipley was absent, Jamie was away: thank goodness, Claire thought, Charlie had his grandfather.

“Is Grandpa there?”

“Sure. Want to talk to him?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, but I’ll talk to you again afterward. Here he is.”

The phone was passed.

“Claire, is that you?” Rutherford spoke too loudly, as older people often did on long-distance calls, somehow believing that because of the distance, they had to speak more loudly to be heard.

“Yes, it’s me. Everything okay there?”

“Terrific. We’re just calling to make sure you’re all right.”