Ice Cold: Tales of Intrigue from the Cold War

MISS BIANCA ^{BY SARA PARETSKY}

Abigail made her tour of the cages, adding water to all the drinking bowls. The food was more complicated, because not all the mice got the same meal. She was ten years old, and this was her first job; she took her responsibilities seriously. She read the labels on the cages and carefully measured out feed from the different bags. All the animals had numbers written in black ink on their backs; she checked these against the list Bob Pharris had given her with the feeding instructions.

“That’s like being a slave,” Abigail said, when Bob showed her how to match the numbers on the mice to the food directives. “It’s not fair to call them by numbers instead of by name, and it’s mean to write on their beautiful fur.”

Bob just laughed. “It’s the only way we can tell them apart, Abby.”

Abigail hated the name Abby. “That’s because you’re not looking at their faces. They’re all different. I’m going to start calling you Number Three because you’re Dr. Kiel’s third student. How would you like that?”

“Number Nineteen,” Bob corrected her. “I’m his nineteenth student, but the other sixteen have all gotten their PhDs and moved on to glory. Don’t give the mice names, Abby: you’ll get too attached to them, and they don’t live very long.”

In fact, the next week, when Abigail began feeding the animals on her own, some of the mice had disappeared. Others had been moved into the contamination room, where she wasn’t supposed to go. The mice in there had bad diseases that might kill her if she touched them. Only the graduate students or the professors went in there, wearing gloves and masks.

Abigail began naming some of the mice under her breath. Her favorite, number 139, she called “Miss Bianca,” after the white mouse in the book The Rescuers. Miss Bianca always sat next to the cage door when Abigail appeared, grooming her exquisite whiskers with her little pink paws. She would cock her head and stare at Abigail with bright black eyes.

In the book, Miss Bianca ran a prisoner’s rescue group, so Abigail felt it was only fair that she should rescue Miss Bianca in turn, or at least let her have some time outside the cage. This afternoon, she looked around to make sure no one was watching, then scooped Miss Bianca out of her cage and into the pocket of her dress.

“You can listen to me practice, Miss Bianca,” Abigail told her. She moved into the alcove behind the cages where the big sinks were.

Dr. Kiel thought Abigail’s violin added class to the lab, at least that’s what he said to Abigail’s mother, but Abigail’s mother said it was hard enough to be a single mom without getting fired in the bargain, so Abigail should practice where she wouldn’t disturb the classes in the lecture rooms or annoy the other professors.

Abigail had to come to the lab straight from school. She did her homework on a side table near her mother’s desk, and then she fed the animals and practiced her violin in the alcove in the animal room.

“Today Miss Abigail Sherwood will play Bach for you,” she announced grandly to Miss Bianca.

She tuned the violin as best she could and began a simplified version of the first sonata for violin. Miss Bianca stuck her head out of the pocket and looked inquiringly at the instrument. Abigail wondered what the mouse would do if she put her inside. Miss Bianca could probably squeeze in through the F hole, but getting her out would be difficult. The thought of Mother’s rage, not to mention Dr. Kiel or even Bob Pharris’s, made her decide against it.

She picked up her bow again, but heard voices out by the cages. When she peered out, she saw Bob talking to a stranger, a small woman with dark hair.

Bob smiled at her. “This is Abby; her mother is Dr. Kiel’s secretary. Abby helps us by feeding the animals.”

“It’s Abigail,” Abigail said primly.

“And one of the mouses, Abigail, she is living in your—your—” the woman pointed at Miss Bianca.

“Abby, put the mouse back in the cage,” Bob said. “If you play with them, we can’t let you feed them.”

Abigail scowled at the woman and at Bob, but she put Miss Bianca back in her cage. “I’m sorry, Miss Bianca. Mamelouk is watching me.”

“Mamelouk?” the woman said. “I am thinking your name ‘Bob’?”

Mamelouk the Iron-Tummed was the evil cat who worked for the jailor in The Rescuers, but Abigail didn’t say that, just stared stonily at the woman, who was too stupid to know that the plural of “mouse” was mice, not “mouses.”

“This is Elena,” Bob told Abigail. “She’s Dr. Kiel’s new dishwasher. You can give her a hand, when you’re not practicing your violin or learning geometry.”

“Is allowed for children working in the lab?” Elena asked. “In my country, government is not allowing children work.”

Abigail’s scowl deepened: Bob had been looking at her homework while she was down here with the mice. “We have slavery in America,” she announced. “The mice are slaves, too.”

“Abigail, I thought you liked feeding the animals.” Dr. Kiel had come into the animal room without the three of them noticing.

He wore crepe-soled shoes which let him move soundlessly through the lab. A short stocky man with brown eyes, he could look at you with a warmth that made you want to tell him your secrets, but just when you thought you could trust him, he would become furious over nothing that Abigail could figure out. She had heard him yelling at Bob Pharris in a way that frightened her. Besides, Dr. Kiel was her mother’s boss, which meant she must never EVER be saucy to him.

“I’m sorry, Dr. Kiel,” she said, her face red. “I only was telling Bob I don’t like the mice being branded, they’re all different, you can tell them apart by looking.”

“You can tell them apart because you like them and know them,” Dr. Kiel said. “The rest of us aren’t as perceptive as you are.”

“Dolan,” he added to a man passing in the hall. “Come and meet my new dishwasher—Elena Mirova.”

Dr. Dolan and Dr. Kiel didn’t like each other. Dr. Kiel was always loud and hearty when he talked to Dr. Dolan, trying too hard not to show his dislike. Dr. Dolan snooped around the lab looking for mistakes that Dr. Kiel’s students made. He’d report them with a phony jokiness, as if he thought leaving pipettes unwashed in the sink was funny when really it made him angry.

Dr. Dolan had a face like a giant baby’s, the nose little and squashed upward, his cheeks round and rosy; when Bob Pharris had taken two beakers out of Dr. Dolan’s lab, he’d come into Dr. Kiel’s lab, saying, “Sorry to hear you broke both your arms, Pharris, and couldn’t wash your own equipment.”

He came into the animal room now and smiled in a way that made his eyes close into slits. Just like a cat’s. He said hello to Elena, but added to Dr. Kiel, “I thought your new girl was starting last week, Nate.”

“She arrived a week ago, but she was under the weather; you would never have let me forget it if she’d contaminated your ham sandwiches—I mean your petri dishes.”

Dr. Dolan scowled, but said to Elena, “The rumors have been flying around the building all day. Is it true you’re from Eastern Europe?”

Dolan’s voice was soft, forcing everyone to lean toward him if they wanted to hear him. Abigail had trouble understanding him, and she saw Elena did, too, but Abigail knew it would be a mistake to try to ask Dr. Dolan to speak more slowly or more loudly.

Elena’s face was sad. “Is true. I am refugee, from Czechoslovakia.”

“How’d you get here?” Dolan asked.

“Just like your ancestors did, Pat,” Dr. Kiel said. “Yours came steerage in a ship. Elena flew steerage in a plane. We lift the lamp beside the golden door for Czechs just as we did for the Irish.”

“And for the Russians?” Dolan said. “Isn’t that where your people are from, Nate?”

“The Russians would like to think so,” Kiel said. “It was Poland when my father left.”

“But you speak the lingo, don’t you?” Dolan persisted.

There was a brief silence. Abigail could see the vein in Dr. Kiel’s right temple pulsing. Dolan saw it also and gave a satisfied smirk.

He turned back to Elena. “How did you end up in Kansas? It’s a long way from Prague to here.”

“I am meeting Dr. Kiel in Bratislava,” Elena said.

“I was there in ’66, you know,” Dr. Kiel said. “Elena’s husband edited the Czech Journal of Virology and Bacteriology and the Soviets didn’t like their editorial policies—the journal decided they would only take articles written in English, French, or Czech, not in Russian.”

Bob laughed. “Audacious. That took some guts.”

Abigail was memorizing words under her breath to ask her mother over dinner: perceptive, editorial policies, audacious.

“Perhaps not so good idea. When Russian tanks coming last year, they putting husband in prison,” Elena said.

“Well, welcome aboard,” Dr. Dolan said, holding out his soft white hand to Elena.

She’d been holding her hands close to her side, but when she shook hands Abigail saw a huge bruise on the inside of her arm: green, purple, yellow, spreading in a large oval up and down from the elbow.

“They beat you before you left?” Dr. Dolan asked.

Elena’s eyes opened wide; Abigail thought she was scared. “Is me, only,” she said, “me being—not know in English.”

“What’s on today’s program?” Dr. Kiel asked Abigail abruptly, pointing at her violin.

“Bach.”

“You need to drop that old stuffed shirt. Beethoven. I keep telling you, start playing those Beethoven sonatas, they’ll bring you to life.” He ruffled her hair. “I think I saw your mother putting the cover over her typewriter when I came down.”

That meant Abigail was supposed to leave. She looked at Miss Bianca, who was hiding in the shavings at the back of her cage. It’s good you’re afraid, Abigail told her silently. Don’t let them catch you, they’ll hurt you or make you sick with a bad disease.

Rhonda Sherwood’s husband had been an account manager for a greeting card company in town. His territory was the West Coast. When he fell in love with a woman who owned a chain of gift shops in Sacramento, he left Rhonda and Abigail to start a new life in California.

It was embarrassing to have your father and mother divorced; some kids in Abigail’s fifth-grade class made fun of her. Her best friend’s mother wouldn’t let her come over to play any more, as if divorce were like one of Dr. Kiel and Dr. Dolan’s diseases, infectious, communicable.

When her husband left, Rhonda brushed up on her shorthand and typing. In May, just about the time that school ended, she was lucky enough to get a job working for Dr. Kiel up at the university. Rhonda typed all his letters and his scientific papers. Over dinner, she would make Abigail test her on the hard words she was learning: Coxiella burnetii, cytoblasts, vacuoles. Rhonda mastered the odd concepts: gram staining, centrifuging. Dr. Kiel was not a kind man in general, Rhonda knew that, but he was kind to her, a single mom. Dr. Kiel let Rhonda bring Abigail to the lab after school.

There were eight scientists in Dr. Kiel’s department. They all had graduate students, they all taught undergraduate classes at the university, but Abigail and Rhonda both knew that none of the other scientists worked as hard as Dr. Kiel. He was always traveling, too, to different scientific conventions, or overseas. Rhonda hadn’t been working for him when he went to Czechoslovakia three years ago, but she was making travel arrangements for him now. He was going to Washington, to San Francisco, and then to Israel.

Even though Dr. Kiel had an explosive temper, he had a sense of camaraderie that his colleagues lacked. He also had an intensity about his work that spilled over into the lives of his students and staff. His students and lab techs were expected to work long hours, do night shifts, attend evening seminars, but he took a personal interest in their families, their hobbies, took his male students fishing, brought his female students records or books for their birthdays. When he went to New York in August, he brought Rhonda back a scarf from the gift store in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Dr. Kiel had a wife and five lumpy, sullen children: Abigail met them when Dr. Kiel had everyone in the department out to his house for a picnic right after school started. He never seemed to think about his children the way he did about his staff and students.

It was Dr. Kiel who suggested that feeding the animals might make Abigail feel that she was part of the team. He seemed to sense her loneliness; he would quiz her on her classes, her music. He knew better than to tease a ten-year-old girl about boys, the way Dr. Dolan did.

When Rhonda worried about the diseases the animals were infected with, Dr. Kiel assured her that Abigail would not be allowed in the contamination room. “And if some Q fever germ is brave enough to come through the door and infect her, we keep tetracycline on hand.” He showed Rhonda the bottle of orange pills in one of his glass-doored cabinets. “I’ve had it, and so has Bob Pharris. Watch out for a high fever and a dry cough, with aching joints; let me know if either of you starts having symptoms.”

“High fever, dry cough,” Abigail repeated to herself. Every day when she went in to feed the animals, she checked Miss Bianca for a fever or a cough. “Do your joints ache?” she would ask the mouse, feeling her head the way Rhonda felt her own head when she was sick.

Elena Mirova’s arrival unsettled the lab. She was quiet, efficient, she did whatever was asked of her and more besides. She worked with Bob and Dr. Kiel’s other two graduate students, often giving them suggestions on different ways to set up experimental apparatus, or helping them interpret slides they were studying.

“Czech dishwashers know more science than ours in America,” Bob said one day when Elena flipped through the back pages of the Journal of Cell Biology to show him an article that explained apoptosis in Rickettsia prowazekii.

Elena turned rigid, her face white, then hurriedly left the room, saying she heard the autoclave bell ringing.

“It’s the communists,” Rhonda explained to her daughter, when Abigail reported the episode to her.

“It was so weird,” Abigail said. “It was like she thought Bob was accusing her of a crime. Besides, she was lying, the autoclave bell didn’t ring.”

“The Russians put her husband in prison,” Rhonda said. “She’s afraid that they’ll try to find her here.”

That frightened Abigail. Everyone knew how evil the communists were; they wanted to take over America, they wanted to take over the whole world. America stood for freedom and the communists wanted to destroy freedom.

“What if they come to the lab to get Elena and kill you instead?” she asked Rhonda. “Are the mice safe? Will they want the mice?”

Dr. Dolan came into Dr. Kiel’s office at that moment. “Of course they want the mice; the mice are our most important secret.”

Abigail rushed down to the animal room to make sure Miss Bianca was still safe. The mouse was nibbling on a piece of food, but she came to the front of the cage as soon as Abigail arrived. Abigail was about to take her out when she saw that Bob was in the contamination room.

Instead, she stroked the mouse’s head through the cage door. “I wish I could take you home, Miss Bianca,” she whispered.

When Bob came out and went into the back room to scrub himself down in the big sink, Abigail followed him.

“Do you think Elena is a communist spy?” she demanded.

“Where do you come up with these ideas, short stuff?” Bob asked.

“Dr. Dolan said the communists want our mice, because they’re our most important secret.”

“Dr. Dolan talks a lot of guff,” Bob said. “There’s nothing secret about the mice, and Elena is not a communist. She ran away from the communists.”

“But she lied about the autoclave. She didn’t like you saying how smart she was.”

Bob stopped drying his arms to stare at her. “You’re as small as the mice, so we don’t notice you underfoot. Look: there’s nothing secret about our mice. We get a grant—you know what that is? Money. We get money from the Army, so we do some work for the Army. The disease Dr. Kiel works with can make people very sick. If our soldiers got sick in Vietnam, they wouldn’t be able to fight, so Dr. Kiel and I and his other students are trying to find a way to keep them from getting sick.”

“But he has that drug, he showed my mom,” Abigail said.

“That’s great if you’re already sick, but if you’re in the middle of a battle, it would be better not to get sick to start with. It would be hard for the Army to get enough of the drug to our soldiers out in the jungles and rice paddies while the Vietcong were firing rockets at them.”

“Oh,” Abigail said. “You’re trying to make a shot, like for polio.”

“And the mice are helping us. We give them some of Dr. Kiel’s disease, and then we study whether we’ve learned any way to prevent them from getting sick.”

After Bob went back to the lab, Abigail took Miss Bianca from the cage and let her sit in her pocket, where she had a lump of sugar. “Even if the mice can help win a war with the communists, I think it would be better if you didn’t get sick.”

She practiced her violin for half an hour. The scratchy sounds she got from the strings sounded more like the squeaks the mice made than Bach, but neither she nor the animals minded. When she finished, she took Miss Bianca out of her pocket to ride on her shoulder. When she heard voices outside the animal room door she crouched down, holding Miss Bianca in her hand.

“Mamelouk is here,” she whispered. “Don’t squeak.”

It wasn’t Mamelouk, it was Dr. Kiel with Elena. Elena’s face was very white, the way it had been when she first came into the lab. She fumbled in her handbag and produced a jar with something red in it that Abigail was sure was blood.

“I hope is sterile. Hard job doing self. Myself,” Elena said.

Abigail bent her head over her knees, so Miss Bianca wouldn’t have to see such a dreadful sight. After Dr. Kiel and Elena left the animal room, she stayed bent over for a long time, but finally went up to the floor where the labs and offices were.

Her mother wasn’t in the outer office, but the typewriter was still uncovered, which meant she was either taking dictation from Dr. Kiel or in the ladies’ room. The door to Dr. Kiel’s inner office wasn’t shut all the way; Abigail walked over to peer through the crack.

Dr. Dolan was there. He had a nasty look on his face. The vein in Dr. Kiel’s forehead was throbbing, always a bad sign.

“I got the library to order copies of the Czech Journal of Virology and Bacteriology, and no one named Mirov is on the editorial pages.” Dr. Dolan said.

“I didn’t know you could read Czech, Patrick,” Dr. Kiel said. “I thought you moved your lips when you read English.”

Abigail wanted to laugh, it was such a funny insult. Maybe she could use it the next time Susie Campbell taunted her about her parents’ divorce.

“Don’t try to change the subject, Kiel,” Dr. Dolan said. “Are you or aren’t you harboring a communist here? What kind of background check did you do on your protégée before you let her into a lab doing sensitive work for the government?”

“I met her husband in Bratislava three years ago,” Dr. Kiel said coldly. “We were correspondents until the tanks rolled in last year and the Soviets put him in prison as an enemy of the state. Elena came here in danger of her life.”

“Correspondents? Or lovers?” Dr. Dolan sneered.

Abigail put a hand over her mouth. Lovers, like her father and the new Mrs. Sherwood out in California. Was Elena going to turn Mrs. Kiel into a single mom for the five lumpy Kiel children?

“Maybe you grew up in a pigsty,” Dr. Kiel said. “But in my family—”

“Your communist family.”

“What are you, Dolan? A stooge for HUAC?”

“The FBI has a right to know what you were really doing in Bratislava three years ago. You work with a weapons-grade organism, you speak Russian, you travel—”

“The operative word here being work,” Dr. Kiel said. “If you worked on listeria as energetically as you do on spying on my lab you’d have won the Nobel Prize by now.”

Mother came into the outer office just then and dragged Abigail to the hall. “Since when do you eavesdrop, young lady?” she demanded.

“But, Mom, it’s about Elena. She’s lying all the time, her husband didn’t work for that magazine in Czechoslovakia, Dr. Dolan said. He says she’s stealing Dr. Kiel away from Mrs. Kiel, like that lady who stole Daddy from us. And Elena just gave Dr. Kiel something funny in the animal room. It looked like blood, but maybe it’s a magic potion to make him forget Mrs. Kiel.”

Rhonda stared down at her daughter in exasperation, but also in sadness. “Abigail, I’m not sure it’s such a good idea for you to come here after school. You hear things that are outside your experience and then you get upset by them. Elena is not going to break up Dr. Kiel’s marriage, I promise you. Let’s see if I can find someone to stay with you after school, okay?”

“No, Mom, no, I have to come here, I have to look after Miss Bianca.”

Elena came into the hall where they were standing. She’d been in the lab but they hadn’t seen her. Rhonda and Abigail both flushed.

“Sorry,” Elena murmured. “I making all lives hard, but I not understanding, why is Dr. Dolan not like me?”

Rhonda shook her head. “He’s jealous of Dr. Kiel, I think, and so he tries to attack the people who work for Dr. Kiel. Try not to pay attention to him.”

“But Dr. Dolan said your husband’s name wasn’t in—in the Czech something, the magazine,” Abigail piped up, to Rhonda’s annoyance.

Elena didn’t speak for a moment; her face turned white again and she clutched the door jamb for support. “No, he is scientist, he reading articles, deciding is science good or not good? He telling editor, but only editor have name in journal, not husband.”

Dr. Dolan stormed out of Dr. Kiel’s office, his round cheeks swollen with anger. “You were quite a devoted wife, Elena, if you studied your husband’s work so much that you understand rickettsial degradation by lysosomal enzymes,” he said sarcastically.

“I married many years, I learning many things,” Elena said. “Now I learning how live with husband in prison. I also learn acid rinse glassware, forgive me.”

She brushed past Dolan and went down the hall to the autoclave room, where the pressure machine washed glassware at a temperature high enough to kill even the peskiest bacterium.

Over the weekend, Bob and the other graduate students took care of the animals. On Monday, Abigail hurried anxiously back to the lab after school. Bob was in the animal room with a strange man who was wearing a navy suit and a white shirt. None of the scientists ever dressed like that: they were always spilling acids that ate holes in their clothes. Even Mother had to be careful when she went into the lab—once Bob accidentally dripped acid on her leg and her nylons dissolved.

“But she has access to the animals?”

Bob was shifting unhappily from one foot to the other. He didn’t see Abigail, but she was sure the man in the suit was talking about her. She crept behind the cages into the alcove where the big sinks stood.

Bob was putting on a mask and gloves to go into the contamination room, but the man in the suit seemed to be afraid of the germs; he said he didn’t need to go into the room.

“I just want to know if you keep it secure. There are a lot of bugs in there that could do a lot of damage in the wrong hands.”

“You have to have a key to get in here,” Bob assured the man, showing him that the door was locked.

When the two men left, Abigail went out to the cages. Miss Bianca’s cage was empty. Her heart seemed to stop. She had the same queer empty feeling under her ribcage that she’d felt when Daddy said he was leaving to start a new life in California.

A lot of the cages were empty, Abigail realized, not just Miss Bianca’s. Bob and Dr. Kiel had waited until the weekend so they could steal Miss Bianca and give her a shot full of germs while Abigail wasn’t there to protect her.

Dr. Kiel had given Mother a set of keys when she started working for him. Abigail went back up the stairs to Dr. Kiel’s lab. Mother was working on Dr. Kiel’s expense report from his last trip to Washington. Abigail pretended to study Spanish explorers in the 1500s, sitting so quietly that people came and went, including Bob and the man in the suit, without paying attention to her.

Dr. Kiel was in his lab, talking to Elena as they stood over a microscope. The lab was across the hall; Abigail couldn’t hear what anyone said, but suddenly Dr. Kiel bellowed “Rhonda!” and Mother hurried over with her shorthand notebook.

As soon as she was gone, Abigail went to the drawer where Mother kept her purse. She found the keys and ran back down to the animal room. She didn’t bother about gloves and masks. At any second someone might come in, or Mother would notice her keys were missing.

There were so many keys on the key ring it took five tries before she found the right one. In the contamination room, it didn’t take long to find Miss Bianca: slips of paper with the number of the mouse and the date of the injection were attached to each cage door. 139. Miss Bianca. The poor mouse was huddled in the back of her cage, shivering. Abigail put her in her pocket.

“I’ll get you one of those special pills. You’ll feel better in a jiffy,” Abigail promised her.

When she got back upstairs, Mother and Dr. Kiel were inside his office. He was talking to her in a worried voice. Elena and Bob were in the lab. Abigail got the bottle of pills from the cabinet. The bottle said four a day for ten days for adults, but Miss Bianca was so tiny, maybe one tablet cut into four? Abigail took ten of them and put the bottle away just as Mother came out.

While Mother was preparing dinner, Abigail made a nest for Miss Bianca in a shoebox lined with one of her t-shirts. She took a knife from the drawer in the dining room to poke air holes into the box, then used it to cut the pills into four pieces. They were hard to handle and kept slipping away from the knife. When she finally had them cut up, she couldn’t get Miss Bianca to take one. She just lay in the shoebox, not lifting her head.

“You have to take it or you’ll die,” Abigail told her, but Miss Bianca didn’t seem to care.

Abigail finally pried open the mouse’s little mouth and shoved the piece of pill in. Miss Bianca gave a sharp squeak, but she swallowed the pill.

“That’s a good girl,” Abigail said.

Over dinner, Abigail asked her mother who the man in the suit had been. “He was with Bob in the animal room,” she said. “Is he spying on the animals?”

Rhonda shook her head. “He’s an FBI agent named Mr. Burroughs. Someone sent an anonymous letter telling the FBI to look at Dr. Kiel’s lab.”

“Because Elena is a communist spy?” Abigail said.

“Don’t say things like that, Abigail. Especially not to Agent Burroughs. Elena is not a spy, and if Dr. Dolan would only—” she bit her lip, not wanting to gossip about Dolan with her daughter.

“But she did give Dr. Kiel a potion,” Abigail persisted.

“Whatever you saw was none of your business!” Rhonda said. “Clear the table and put the dishes in the machine.”

If Mother was angry, she was less likely to notice what Abigail was doing. While Mother watched It Takes A Thief, Abigail cleaned up the kitchen, then brought a saucer from her doll’s tea set into the kitchen and put some peanut butter in it. Before she went to bed, she stuck some peanut butter onto another piece of the pill and got Miss Bianca to swallow it. When she brushed her teeth, she filled one of her doll’s teacups with water. The mouse didn’t want to drink, so Abigail brought in a wet washcloth and stuck it in Miss Bianca’s mouth.

She quickly shoved the shoebox under her bed when she heard Mother coming down the hall to tuck her in for the night.

Abigail didn’t sleep well. She worried what would happen when Dr. Kiel discovered that Miss Bianca was missing from the lab: she should have taken all the mice, she realized. Then the FBI might think it had been a communist, stealing their secret mice. What would happen, too, when Mother realized one of Abigail’s t-shirts was missing.

In the morning, she was awake before Mother. She gave Miss Bianca another piece of pill in peanut butter. The mouse was looking better: she took the pill in her little paws and licked the peanut butter from it, then nibbled the tablet. Abigail took her into the bathroom with her and Miss Bianca sipped water from the tap in the sink.

All this was good, but it didn’t stop Abigail feeling sick to her stomach when she thought about how angry Dr. Kiel would be. Mother would lose her job; she would never forgive Abigail. She put the mouse on her shoulder and rubbed her face against its soft fur. “Can you help me, Miss Bianca? Can you summon the Prisoner’s Aid society now that I’ve saved your life?”

The doorbell rang just then, a loud shrill sound that frightened both girl and mouse. Miss Bianca skittered down inside Abigail’s pajama top, trying to hide. By the time Abigail was able to extricate the mouse, she was covered in scratches. If Mother saw them—

The doorbell rang again. Mother was getting up. Abigail ran back to her bedroom and put Miss Bianca into the shoebox. She peeped out of her room. Mother was tying a dressing gown around her waist, opening the front door. Dr. Kiel was standing there, the vein in his forehead throbbing.

“Did you do this?” he demanded, shaking a newspaper in Mother’s face.

Mother backed up. “Dr. Kiel! What are you—I just got up—Abigail! Put some clothes on.”

Abigail had forgotten to button her pajama top. She slipped back into her room, her heart pounding. Dr. Kiel had come to fire Mother. Her teeth were chattering, even though it was a warm fall day.

She flattened herself against the wall and waited for Dr. Kiel to demand that Mother turn her daughter over to the police. Instead, Mother was looking at the newspaper in bewilderment.

“‘Reds in the Lab?’ What is this about, Dr. Kiel?”

“You didn’t tell the paper that the FBI was in the lab yesterday?” he demanded.

“Of course not. Really, Dr. Kiel, you should know you can trust me.”

He slapped the paper against his hand so hard that it sounded like the crack of a ball against a bat. “If Bob Pharris did it—”

“Dr. Kiel, I’m sure none of your students would have called the newspaper with a report like this. Perhaps—” she hesitated. “I don’t like to say this, it’s not really my place, but you know Dr. Dolan has been concerned about Elena Mirova.”

Dr. Kiel had been looking calmer, but now his jaw clenched again. “Elena is a refugee from communism. She came here because I thought she could be safe here. I will not let her be hounded by a witch hunt.”

“The trouble is, we don’t know anything about her,” Mother said. “She seems to know a great deal about your work, more than seems possible for a dishwasher, even one whose husband was a scientist.”

Dr. Kiel snarled. “Patrick Dolan has been sharpening his sword, hoping to stick it into me, since the day he arrived here. He’s not concerned about spies, he’s studying the best way to make me look bad.”

He looked down the hall and seemed to see Abigail for the first time. “Get dressed, Abigail; I’ll give you a ride to school.”

Dr. Kiel drove a convertible. Susie Campbell would faint with envy when she saw Abigail in the car. When she started to dress, Abigail realized her arms were covered with welts from where Miss Bianca had scratched her. She found a long-sleeved blouse to wear with her red skirt. By the time she had combed her hair and double-checked that Miss Bianca had water, Mother was dressed. Dr. Kiel was calmly drinking a cup of coffee.

Abigail looked at the newspaper.

The newspaper and the FBI both thought Elena was a spy. Maybe she was, maybe she really had given Dr. Kiel a magic potion that blinded his eyes to who she really was.

“Rhonda, we’re going to have every reporter in America calling about this business. Better put your war paint on and prepare to do battle,” Dr. Kiel said, getting up from the table. “Come on, Abigail. Get to school. You have to learn as much as you can so that morons like this bozo Burroughs from the FBI can’t pull the wool over your eyes.”

Abigail spent a very nervous day frightened about what would happen when she got to the lab and Bob Pharris accused her of stealing Miss Bianca. She kept hoping she’d get sick. At recess, she fell down on the playground, but she only skinned her knees; the school nurse wouldn’t let her go home for such a trivial accident.

She walked from school to the bacteriology department as slowly as possible. Even so, she arrived too soon. She lingered at the elevator, wondering if she should just go to Dr. Kiel and confess. Bob Pharris stuck his head out of the lab.

“Oh, it’s you, short stuff. We’ve been under siege all day—your mom is answering two phones at once—someone even called from the BBC in London. A guy tried to get into the animal room this morning—I threw him out with my own bare hands and for once Dr. Kiel thinks I’m worth something.” He grinned. “Number 19 cannot get a PhD but he has a future as a bouncer.”

Abigail tried to smile, but she was afraid his next comment would be that he’d seen that Number 139 was missing and would Abigail hand her over at once.

“Don’t worry, Abby, this will blow over,” Bob said, going back into the lab.

Dr. Kiel was shouting; his voice was coming up the hall from Dr. Dolan’s lab. She crept down the hall and peeked inside. Agent Burroughs, the bozo from the FBI, was there with Dr. Kiel and Dr. Dolan.

“What did you do with her?” Dr. Dolan said. “Give her a ticket back to Russia along with your mouse?”

Abigail’s heart thudded painfully.

“The Bureau just wants to talk to her,” said Agent Burroughs. “Where did she go?”

“Ask Dolan,” Dr. Kiel said. “He’s the one who sees Reds under the bed. He probably stabbed her with a pipette and threw her into the Kansas River.”

Agent Burroughs said, “If you’re hiding a communist, Dr. Kiel, you could be in serious trouble.”

“What is this, Joe McCarthy all over again?” Dr. Kiel said. “Guilt by association? Elena Mirova fled Czechoslovakia because her husband was imprisoned. As long as she was in Bratislava, they could torture him with the threat that they could hurt his wife. She was hiding here to protect her husband. Your jackbooted feet have now put her life in danger as well as his.”

“There was no Elena Mirova in Czechoslovakia,” Burroughs said. “There are no Czech scientists named Mirov or Mirova.”

“What? You know the names and locations of everyone in Czechoslovakia, Burroughs?” Dr. Kiel snapped. “How did you get that from the comfort of your armchair in Washington?”

“The head of our Eastern Europe bureau looked into it.” Burroughs said. “The Bratislava institute is missing one of their scientists, a biological warfare expert named Magdalena Spirova; she disappeared six weeks ago. Do you know anything about her?”

“I’m not like you, Burroughs, keeping track of everyone behind the Iron Curtain,” Dr. Kiel said. “I’m just a simple Kansas researcher, trying to find a cure for Q Fever. If you’d go back to the rat hole you crawled out of, I could get back to work.”

“Your dishwasher is gone, whatever her name is, and one of your infected mice is gone,” Burroughs said. “I’m betting Mirova-Spirova is taking your germ back to Uncle Ivan and the next thing we know, every soldier we have below the DMZ will be infected with Q Fever.”

Abigail’s bookbag slipped out of her hand and landed on the floor with an earth-ending noise. The men looked over at her.

Dr. Kiel said, “What’s up, Abigail? You think you can be David to all us angry Sauls? Play a little Bach and calm us down?”

Abigail didn’t know what he was talking about, just saw that he wasn’t angry with her for standing there. “I’m sorry, Dr. Kiel, I was worried about the mouse.”

“Abigail is the youngest member of my team,” Dr. Kiel told Burroughs. “She looks after our healthy animals.”

The FBI man rounded on Abigail, firing questions at her: Had she noticed Elena hanging around the contamination room? How hard was it to get into the room? How often did Abigail feed the mice? When did she notice one of the mice was missing?

“Leave her alone,” Dr. Kiel said. “Abigail, take your violin down and play for the mice. We have a lab full of fascists today who could infect you with something worse than Q Fever, namely innuendo and smear tactics.”

“You signed a loyalty oath, Dr. Kiel,” Agent Burroughs said. “Calling me names makes me wonder whether you really are a loyal American.”

Dr. Kiel looked so murderous that Abigail fled down to the animal room with her violin and her bookbag. She felt guilty about taking Miss Bianca, she felt guilty about not rescuing the other mice, she was worried about Miss Bianca alone at home not getting all the pills she needed. She was so miserable that she sat on the floor of the animal room and cried.

Crying wore her out. Her head was aching and she didn’t think she had the energy to get to her feet. The floor was cool against her hot head and the smells of the animals and the disinfectants were so familiar that they calmed her down.

A noise at the contamination room door woke her. A strange man, wearing a brown suit that didn’t fit him very well, was trying to undo the lock. He must be a reporter trying to sneak into the lab. Abigail sat up. Her head was still aching, but she needed to find Bob.

The man heard her when she got to her feet. He spun around, looking scared, then, when he saw that it was a child, he smiled in a way that frightened Abigail.

“So, Dr. Kiel has little girls working with his animals. Does he give you a key to this room?”

Abigail edged toward the door. “I only feed the healthy mice. You have to see Bob Pharris for the sick mice.”

As soon as she’d spoken, Abigail wished she hadn’t; what if this man wrote it up in his newspaper and Bob got in trouble?

“There aren’t any foreigners working with the animals? Foreign women?”

Even though Abigail was scared that Elena was a spy, she didn’t feel right about saying so, especially after hearing Dr. Kiel talking about witch hunts.

“We only have foreign witches in the lab,” she said. “They concoct magic potions to make Dr. Kiel fall in love with them.”

The man frowned in an angry way, but he decided to laugh instead, showing a gold tooth in the front of his mouth. “You’re a little girl with a big imagination, aren’t you? Who is this foreign witch?”

Abigail hated being called a little girl. “I don’t know. She flew in on her broomstick and didn’t tell us her name.”

“You’re too old for such childish games,” the man said, bending over her. “What is her name, and what does she do with the animals?”

“Mamelouk. Her name is Mamelouk.”

The man grabbed her arm. “You know that isn’t her name.”

Bob came into the animal room just then. “Abby—Dr. Kiel said he’d sent you—what the hell are you doing here? I thought I told you this morning that you can’t come into the lab without Dr. Kiel’s say-so and I know damned well he didn’t say so. Get out before I call the cops.”

Bob looked almost as fierce as Dr. Kiel. The man in the brown suit let go of Abigail’s arm.

He stopped in the doorway and said, “I’m only looking for the foreign woman who’s been working here. Magdalena, isn’t it?”

Abigail started to say, “No, it’s—” but Bob frowned at her and she was quiet.

“I thought you knew, little girl. What is it?”

“Mamelouk,” Abigail said. “I told you that before.”

“So now you know, Buster. Off you go.”

Bob walked to the elevator with Abigail and called the car. He stood with a foot in the door until the man got on the elevator. They watched the numbers go down to “1” to make sure he’d ridden all the way to the ground.

“Maybe I should go down and throw him out of the building,” Bob said. “He was here when I opened for the day. Elena took one look at him and disappeared, so I don’t know if he’s someone who’s been harassing her at home, or if she’s allergic to reporters.”

He looked down at Abigail. “You feeling okay, short stuff? You’re looking kind of white—all the drama getting to you, huh? Maybe Dr. Kiel will let your mom take you home. She didn’t even break for lunch today.”

When they got to the office, Bob went in to tell Dr. Kiel about the man in the animal room, but Rhonda took one look at Abigail and hung up the phone mid-sentence.

“Darling, you’re burning up,” she announced, feeling Abigail’s forehead. “I hope you haven’t caught Q Fever.”

She went into Dr. Kiel’s office. He came out to look at Abigail, felt her forehead as Rhonda had, and agreed. “You need her doctor to see her, but I can give you some tetracycline to take home with you.”

Rhonda shook her head. “Thank you, Dr. Kiel, but I’d better let the pediatrician prescribe for her.”

Mother collected the bookbag and violin where Abigail had dropped them on the floor of the animal room. “I never should have let you work with the animals. I worried all along that it wasn’t safe.”

In the night, Abigail’s fever rose. She was shivering, her joints ached. She knew she had Q Fever, but if she told Mother, Mother wouldn’t let her stay with Miss Bianca.

Mother put cold washcloths on her head. While she was out of the room, Abigail crawled under bed and got the mouse. Miss Bianca needed more of her pills, but Abigail was too sick to feed her. She put Miss Bianca in her pajama pocket and hoped she wouldn’t make the mouse sick again.

Mother came and went, Abigail’s fever rose, the doorbell rang.

Abigail heard her mother’s voice, faintly, as if her mother were at the end of the street, not the end of the hall. “What are you doing here? I thought it would be the doctor! Abigail is very sick.”

An even fainter voice answered. “I sorry, Rhonda. Men is watching flat, I not know how I do.”

She was a terrible spy; she couldn’t speak English well enough to fool anyone. Abigail lay still, although her head ached so badly she wanted to cry. She couldn’t sleep or weep; Mother might need her to call the cops.

“You can’t stay here!” Mother was saying. “Dr. Kiel—the FBI—”

“Also KGB,” Elena said. “They wanting me. They find me now with news story.”

“The KGB?”

“Russian secret police. I see man in morning, know he is KGB, wanting me, finding me from news.”

“But why do the KGB want you?”

Elena smiled sadly. “I am—oh, what is word? Person against own country.”

“Traitor,” Rhonda said. “You are a traitor? But—Dr. Kiel said you had to hide from the communists.”

“Yes, is true, I hiding. They take my husband, they put him in prison, they torture, but for what? For what he write in books. He write for freedom, for liberty, for those words he is enemy of state. Me, I am scientist, name Magdalena Spirova. I make same disease that Dr. Kiel make. Almost same, small ways different. Russians want my Rickettsia prowazekii for germ wars, I make, no problem. Until they put husband in prison.”

Rhonda took Elena out of the doorway into the front room. Abigail couldn’t hear them. She was freezing now, her teeth chattering, but she slid out of bed and went into the hall, where she could hear Elena.

Elena was saying that when she learned the authorities were torturing her husband, she pretended not to care. She waited until she could take a trip to Yugoslavia. She injected herself with the Rickettsia she was working on right before she left Bratislava to go to Sarajevo. In Sarajevo, Elena ran away from the secret police who were watching her and hitchhiked to Vienna. From Vienna, she flew to Canada. In Toronto, she called Dr. Kiel, whom she had met when he came to Bratislava in 1966. He drove up to Toronto and hid her in the backseat of his car to smuggle her to Kansas. He gave her tetracycline tablets, but she didn’t take them until she had extracted her infected blood to give to Dr. Kiel. That was the magic potion Abigail had seen in the animal room; that was why her arm was all bruised—it’s not easy to take a blood sample from your own veins.

“Now, Dr. Kiel have Rickettsia prowazekii, he maybe find vaccine, so biological war not useful.”

The words faded in and out. Miss Bianca had a bad Russian germ, now Abigail had it, maybe she would die for thinking Elena-Magdalena was a communist spy.

The front door opened again. Abigail saw the brown suit. “Look out,” she tried to say, but her teeth were chattering too hard. No words would come out.

The brown legs came down the hall. “Yes, little girl. You are exactly who I want.”

He put an arm around her and dragged her to her feet. Mother had heard the door; she ran into the hall and screamed when she saw the brown suit with Abigail. She rushed toward him but he waved an arm at her and she stopped: he was holding a gun.

He shouted some words in a language that Abigail didn’t understand, but Elena-Magdalena came into the hall.

“I am telling Dr. Spirova that I will shoot you and shoot the little girl unless she comes with me now,” the man said to Rhonda. His voice was calm, as if he was reading a book out loud.

“Yes, you putting little girl down.” Elena’s voice sounded as though her mouth were full of chalk. “I go with you. I see, here is end of story.”

Elena walked slowly toward him. The man grinned and tightened his grip on Abigail. It took Rhonda and Elena a moment to realize he was going to keep Abigail, perhaps use her as a hostage to get safe passage out of Kansas. Rhonda darted forward but Elena shoved her to the ground and seized the man’s arm.

He fired the gun and Elena fell, bleeding, but he had to ease his chokehold on Abigail.

“Miss Bianca, save us!” Abigail screamed.

She dropped the mouse down the man’s shirtfront. Miss Bianca skittered inside in terror. The man began flailing his arms, slapping at his chest, then his armpits, as the mouse frantically tried to escape. He howled in pain: Miss Bianca had bitten him. He managed to reach inside his shirt for the mouse, but by then, Rhonda had snatched the gun from him. She ran to the front door and started shouting for help.

Abigail, her face burning with fever, fought to get the mouse out of his hand. Finally, in despair, she bit his hand. He punched her head, but she was able to catch Miss Bianca as she fell from his open fist.

The police came. They took away the KGB man. An ambulance came and took Elena to the hospital. The doctor came; Abigail had a high fever, she shouldn’t be out of bed, she shouldn’t be keeping mice in dirty boxes under her bed, he told Rhonda sternly, but Abigail became hysterical when he tried to take Miss Bianca away, so he merely lectured Rhonda on her poor parenting decisions. He gave Abigail a shot and said she needed to stay in bed, drink lots of juice, and stay away from dirty animals.

The next morning, Dr. Kiel arrived with a large bouquet of flowers for Abigail. Rhonda made Abigail confess everything to Dr. Kiel, how she had stolen Miss Bianca, how she had stolen tetracycline out of his office. She was afraid he would be furious, but the vein in his forehead didn’t move. Instead, he smiled, his brown eyes soft and even rather loving.

“You cured the mouse with quarters of tetracycline tablets dipped in peanut butter, hmm?” he asked to see the pieces Abigail had cut up. “I think we’re going to have to promote you from feeding animals to being a full-fledged member of the research team.”

A few months later, Dr. Dolan left Kansas to teach in Oklahoma. Later still, Bob did get his PhD. He was a good and kind teacher, even if he never had much success as a researcher. Magdalena recovered from her bullet wound and was given a job at the National Institutes of Health in Washington, where she worked until the fall of the Iron Curtain meant her husband could be released from prison.

Miss Bianca stayed with Abigail, living to the ripe old age of three. Although Rhonda continued to work for Dr. Kiel, she wouldn’t let Abigail back in the animal lab. Even so, Abigail grew up to be a doctor working for Physicians for Social Responsibility, trying to put an end to torture. As for the five lumpy Kiel children, one of them grew up to write about a Chicago private eye named V. I. Warshawski.