The Physicists' Daughter, page 29
Justine noticed that he had said a lot of words, but none of them was his real name. She studied the fading pink blotch on her arm. “So would an identifying scar disqualify me from this job you want me to take? The one that I haven’t accepted yet?”
“No, but you would spend your whole career trying to hide it. So keep some ointment on it and keep it out of the sun.”
He took her arm, rolled her blouse sleeve down, and focused on buttoning the cuff. She wondered if he had any idea how long it had taken her to decide what to wear for a casual walk with a man she wished she knew better. In the end, she’d borrowed the celery green blouse he was buttoning from Georgette, tucking it into a pair of wide-legged black pants that billowed in the river breeze.
The necklace she was wearing, an intricately carved circle of forest-green malachite hanging from a fine gold chain, came out of Gloria’s jewelry box. Her godmother had tenderly clasped it around her neck and told her to keep it as a souvenir of her adventure. With her next breath, she had told her that a silly necklace was nothing to cry about, even as she wiped away Justine’s tears.
All told, Justine thought that Georgette’s blouse and Gloria’s necklace looked quite nice with her billowy trousers, but Charles gave no sign of noticing. She guessed that his diffident courtship and his jealous rage over her date with Martin had all been an act.
Never fall for a spy, she told herself.
She wasn’t ready to talk about this career he wanted her to have, so she deflected.
“What do we know about how Martin came to be here, trying to blow us all up?”
“The Germans have been using U-boats to drop off agents on our shores for years. We know this because we picked up two groups of them in 1942 in New York and Florida. The government told the newspapers that we’d caught them all, but that wasn’t quite true. Even before Pearl Harbor, we knew that the Germans were working to put agents here and they never stopped. Logic says that they haven’t all been caught. We heard in early 1941 that Martin had come ashore in Florida, and we’ve been on his trail ever since. Jerry and I are here because our organization’s intelligence said that the missing spy—the one we know as Martin—was assigned to infiltrate the Higgins plants. Unfortunately, we were missing important information like who he was or what he looked like or even which plant he was targeting. We might have figured out that Martin was the man eventually, but he wasn’t even our top suspect until we saw the way he went after you. He wanted you as an agent the same way that we did. And he needed you bad, since he was working alone.”
“Is that why you behaved so terribly at The TickTock?”
“He was getting too close to you. I needed time to gain your trust.”
“By trying to start a fight with my date? I never wanted to see you again after that night.”
He chuckled. “Unscrupulous men use tactics like that to attract women all the time. They do something that scares their target, then they make a big apology and say that they can’t help themselves when they’re so much in love. If you alternate affection, anger, and lies long enough, you can confuse someone until they don’t even know what they feel.”
Justine had no doubt that she’d been confused by both of her volatile suitors, and this had left her off-balance and vulnerable to seductive dreams of romance and escape. Apparently, alternating affection, anger, and lies was a winning strategy. When she realized how perturbed this made her, she said, “You’re doing it now, aren’t you?”
“Maybe. But it’s harder with you. You see through me. Which brings me back to the topic of this conversation—you’d make a great agent. I knew it for sure when you stopped a bar fight with one foot and a table leg, unarmed.”
She brushed away his attempt to flatter her and change the subject, simultaneously. “You didn’t think it was possible that Martin just wanted me…you know…as a woman, instead of as a super-secret espionage agent?”
There was the crooked grin that had first drawn her to him. “The two things are not mutually exclusive.”
He looked away from her, which deprived her of the chance to read his face.
Now he was looking at her again, and the disarming grin was back. This was a man who didn’t say everything he was thinking. And he said none of what he was feeling.
“Jerry and I were sure that there was something about Martin that just wasn’t right. We were hearing about Carbonites who were suspicious about all the equipment failures and missing tools around them. You only knew about the ones you were called to fix, but there were more.”
“I heard those rumors, too.”
“Yep. There were lots more. Something wasn’t right, and everywhere we turned we saw Martin. And you. I had identified you as someone who could be very useful, but who would be very dangerous under the enemy’s control. So had he. Once I realized that, I knew I had to move fast, but it was as if I were competing with my own reflection. When I trailed you, there he was. When I tried to get your attention…um…romantically, there he was. Sometimes, an agent’s instincts are the only tool he’s got left in his bag, and those instincts said that the muscle-bound, not-real-smart custodian wasn’t what he seemed to be.”
“Then maybe you’re right that I would make a great agent. There was something about all three of you that just wasn’t right, but I couldn’t figure out which one of you was the spy. As it turned out, all three of you were.”
He shot her an appraising look. “We would be interested in you just for that. Your instincts are impeccable.”
“How did you know I read braille?”
“Once I knew who your parents were, it took me one chat with the secretary of the Tulane physics department to learn about your mother’s eyes. The hardest part was finding a way to get over there. We have an agent at the City Park plant who’s in charge of custodial services. Whenever I needed to do some legwork, like go to Tulane, he called my supervisor here and asked him to send me over there to help out. You’d be amazed at how much freedom that’s given me to do spy stuff.”
“Like talking to gossipy department secretaries? Miss McCann knows all and sees all. And she likes handsome men.”
“She misses nothing. And thank you.” He stopped, picked up a pebble, and overhanded it into the water.
Shoving his hands in his pockets, he jingled his change. Was this because he was nervous? Or was it a secret agent trick to make her think he was nervous? Justine could see that taking this job would mean being surrounded by people who never let anybody know where they stood. She let him jingle for a moment before asking her next question.
“Was the message poked into that window screen a test?”
“You got it. If you solved it in time to meet me at the appointed time and place, then I’d know you had crackerjack skills. And I’d also know that you were properly cautious. Suspicious, even.”
“Because I wouldn’t have had time to do that unless I copied the message before you stole it.”
He chuckled and changed the subject without admitting to breaking into her room. “Sniffing out three agents hidden among thousands of people—that’s a real achievement. If it weren’t for you, those bombs would have caught us flatfooted.”
“And Georgette.”
“Yes, Georgette saved a lot of people with her quick thinking. But without you, the German spy among us would have gotten away.”
“Was he really German?”
“Born and bred.”
“Then he was quite brilliant with languages. I never heard a word out of him that wasn’t unaccented and perfectly idiomatic English.”
“He was quite brilliant in a lot of ways.”
“Is your German unaccented and perfectly idiomatic, too?”
“My mother was German. My father brought her home from the last war and married her. It wasn’t a match made in heaven. I saw my pop often enough to get my fill of his drinking, and that’s it. Most of the time, it was just my mother and me. We spoke German at home until I went to school.”
“You miss her.”
“Yes, but I’m glad she didn’t live to see this war. She was so proud to be an American citizen. Seeing her new country at war with Germany again would have killed her.”
He launched another rock into the river and changed the subject again.
“We learned a lot when we searched Martin’s house. You wouldn’t believe the skill and ingenuity that he put into those bombs. If Georgette hadn’t set off the sprinkler system that ruined most of his timing devices, things would have been so much worse. People would have died.”
We would have died.
“Mavis did die.”
Justine had to believe that Mavis had never intended to put her many, many coworkers in danger, because why then would she have given up her life for just five of them? Mavis had done the things she did based on Martin’s lies, and Justine was well aware what a consummate liar he had been. She grieved for her friend.
His eyes were sad. “I would give anything to go back and find a way to save Mavis. She was in over her head. Jerry and I should have seen it. Mr. Higgins is torn up over what happened to her. He’s put money in an account to help Mavis’s mother take care of the kids, so they’ll always have the things they need. They’ll never know that her death was anything but an accident. But they won’t have their mother, and that tears me up.”
And then he maneuvered the conversation back toward a discussion of what a spiffy spy he thought she’d make. “Without you, Mavis wouldn’t have been the only one who died. The plant would have been badly damaged, maybe beyond repair. It might have burned down completely. Thanks to you, it mostly just got wet. I’m sure you know how much the Allies need those boats and planes.”
And apparently they need some oddly shaped contraptions made out of metal and carbon, but nobody wants to talk about those.
“But I don’t think he was targeting the boats and planes,” she said. “They were there and he was happy to blow them up, but the sabotage I knew about was all focused on the Carbon Division. Was I right? Are we building parts for some kind of atomic device that will—”
He held up a hand. “I don’t think you should tell me about that. My clearance doesn’t cover it. There are going to be some very high-level people investigating how Martin knew the importance of the Carbonites’ work.”
“We were locked behind closed doors. We took oaths of silence. They flew our products out by airplane. It wasn’t hard to figure out.”
“Not for you. The Carbon Division will barely miss a beat, thanks to you—”
“And Georgette and Mavis.”
“Thanks to all of you, the Carbon Division—the whole factory, really—was barely touched by Martin’s sabotage. It’ll take a little effort to put everything back in shape after the sprinklers wet it all down, but the plant will be back online in days.”
Charles/Mudcat cleared his throat and added, “We’ve also got people with higher clearances than mine poring over every one of the many, many papers Martin left behind in his house. They’re encrypted, of course, but my superiors believe that Martin lost touch with Germany shortly after the Normandy invasion last June. After that, he kept gathering information on Higgins’s operations, and he continued with the sabotage he originally was sent to do while he decided what to do next. We think that sabotage included the incident that killed Cora Becker and wounded Al Haskins and Yolanda Bergeron. In the end, I think he was doing exactly what I’d do if I were ever marooned behind enemy lines. I’d try to stay alive and undetected. I’d find a way to communicate with people who might be able to help me, even if it meant blowing up a prime target to let them know I was alive. And I’d try to create a life I could live with if I never got to go home again. My guess is that Martin saw you as someone who could help him make that life worth living.”
She could see that he’d given thought to the unimaginable. What would it be like to be trapped behind enemy lines forever?
“I’m authorized to tell you that we found paperwork dated 1941 ordering him to…” His voice grew softer. “The Germans had identified your parents’ research as particularly dangerous. Eliminating them gave the Axis scientists more time to catch up with what our research program was doing. We have to presume that he did something—sabotaged their brakes or, more likely, crowded them off the road—to cause their deaths. I’m very sorry.”
Justine knew that it was wrong to be happy that someone was dead, but she was going to choose to be wrong about this one thing.
“We found more than bombs at his house, you know. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you, because it changes nothing, but his passion for you was real. He had one of these”—Charles slipped a tiny camera out of his sleeve, just for a moment, then slid it back where it had come from—“and he used it. He had folders full of photographs of the spots where he planned to place his bombs, but a lot of his other photographs were of you. In the plant. Getting on the bus. Walking down the street. Just you.”
The thought of someone unseen watching her move through the world left Justine chilled.
“They were beautiful photos, really.” Charles’s voice was kind. He took a close look at her face and said, “You look pale. Let’s sit.”
She didn’t need to sit, but she let him lead her to a quiet wooden dock where they could dangle their feet over the water.
Settling herself on the old boards, she said, “I’m fine. I’m just…disturbed…by the idea of somebody following me around with a camera.” She whipped her head around to face him. “Wait. Did you follow me around with a camera?”
“No, of course not.” He looked down at her, blue eyes smiling through his wire-rimmed spectacles. “Well, okay, I did a little following, and I took a picture or two, but I didn’t need to do much of that. I knew who you were. I knew who your parents were. By the time I’d spent five minutes with you, I knew that we needed someone like you.” He stopped himself. “No, not someone like you. We need you. The combination of your science knowledge and your initiative and your curiosity and…heck…you even speak German. And you weld. We need you, Justine.”
“For what? Sniffing around munitions factories and hoping it will be obvious if there are any spies hanging around?”
“No, not factories this time. We get a constant flow of encrypted messages from both the European and Pacific theaters, and it seems like our enemies change their codes on a daily basis, just to keep us on our toes. You’d fit right in as a codebreaker. We’ve got a job already lined up for you.”
“Don’t you people believe in training? You’re planning to just drop me into an assignment and see if I survive?”
“In wartime, we do what we have to do. Somebody will be looking out for you.”
“You?”
“Maybe.”
His refusal to be pinned down on anything was infuriating, so she just pressed her lips together and stared at him. If he wasn’t going to say anything useful to her, then she’d be damned if she’d do more than that for him.
After a few breaths, he broke the silence. “Jerry said you were cooler under fire than anyone he’d ever seen. And Jerry’s seen a lot.”
“The wheelchair’s a fake, isn’t it?”
He shook his head. “No. Why do you say that?”
“He keeps his lunchbox and thermos on the top shelf in his shed. There’s no way he can reach it sitting down.”
“You have the eye of an agent. No, Jerry’s not faking it. If he was, there’d have been two bullets in Martin’s heart, but his gun was on the ground when the moment came and he couldn’t get to it. He can stand when he needs to, but that’s about it. And not for long. He has braces and crutches he uses now and then to get around, but mostly he’s in that chair. Do you remember the long metal beam hanging across his shed?”
“The shop crane?”
“Yes. Jerry uses it as a chin-up bar. You know, to keep his upper body in shape. He puts things like that Thermos bottle on the top shelf because it gives him an excuse to do one-armed chin-ups when he needs to get them back down.”
She made him wait for another few breaths while she thought about what she wanted him to tell her. The breeze brought scents from cargo that had been shipped in from all over the world and other cargo that was on its way out. Bananas. Fish. Cinnamon.
“What about your ear? Can you hear out of it or was that a lie?”
“Nope. It wasn’t a lie. Can’t you tell?”
She looked at the way his head was canted in her direction. The asymmetry carried all the way through his body, starting with his crooked smile. One shoulder was lower than the other. He stood with his weight on his left leg. And all of it was so that he could hold his right ear closer to her lips.
“I do see it now.”
“I had a bad ear infection when I was a kid. It perforated my eardrum and I can’t hear a thing on that side. I tried to bluff my way into the Army, but they caught it and sent me home. The next day, there was a man on my doorstep who said, ‘Son, we’re very interested in your scores on those tests you took at the enrollment center. We think you’re smart. We think you’re sneaky. We think you’d be a helluva codebreaker. We think we can use you.’ I had to make the same decision I’m asking you to make. I said yes. I also told them about my friend Jerry, a mechanical genius whose legs had kept him out of the Army. The rest is history.”
“Do you get a commission when you recruit an agent?”
He laughed. “No, but I gain a colleague who just might keep me alive. And I gain somebody who can help make our efforts successful. I do believe in what I do. Will you join us?”
