Shadow of the Bomb

Chapter 9

As we walked east and north toward the tavern, I fell into conversation with Edward Rickman while the other three talked among themselves, mostly about their remembrances of Bergman. Rickman seemed intrigued by my interest in the murder.

“So, Mr. Malek, is it typical for a reporter to go to a funeral in a situation like this? I must confess to being unfamiliar with the workings of journalists.” His tone, like Overby’s earlier at the church, was tinged with disapproval, with a possible dash of academic snobbery thrown in.

“No two cases are the same, but it’s not out of the ordinary,” I responded.

“Why? Whatever would you expect to learn?” Contentiousness had now crept into his voice.

“Hard to say.”

“I should think so. Unless I’m not as observant as I like to think, I didn’t notice any police lurking at the church. And if anybody might be expected to seek clues, or suspects, at a funeral service, it would seem to be them.”

“Good point,” I answered, refusing to be drawn into an argument as we arrived at the University Tavern.

The place was almost empty. We found a circular table in a corner big enough to accommodate five, and a waitress with a weary expression and a yellow pencil behind one ear took our orders. Rickman ordered scotch and water, Overby a bourbon highball, the rest of us beer.

“I’m puzzled as to why you wanted to meet with us, Mr. Malek, although I’ve never been known to turn down a beer,” Lazar said with a chuckle.

“I gather you all worked with Mr. Bergman and were close to him, right?”

“As close as anyone could be to Arthur,” Rickman put in. “He was something of a loner. But all four of us here, plus Arthur, joined the faculty at about the same time, so we became something of a support group for one another, complaining about university policies and other faculty members, the sort of griping that’s typical of professors everywhere.”

“Of the five of us, though,” Ward added, “Arthur was the least open. He tended to hold his own counsel more than the rest of us. And we had seen less of him lately, as he’d taken this semester off from teaching except for one class.”

“Why was that?” I asked.

“He said he was working on some sort of research paper, but he wouldn’t talk much about it,” Overby said. “Again, that was typical of him — always a touch of mystery.”

“This is just a long shot, but I thought one of you might have some idea as to what could have happened,” I said.

“Mr. Malek, it won’t surprise you to learn that all of us here, along with just about everybody else in the Physics Department down to the secretaries, have been questioned extensively by the police,” Rickman said.

“No, that doesn’t surprise me at all. But I wouldn’t be a good reporter if I didn’t ask questions, even if they’re the same ones the cops asked.”

“Meaning that to you, as well as to the police, we are suspects, is that it?” Ward murmured, lighting his pipe and taking a puff as the drinks were delivered.

I held up a hand, smiling. “Not at all — not in the least. But you might know if he had any enemies, anyone who... ” I let the sentence hang, and Rickman finished it: “... might want to kill him?”

Overby took a sip of his highball and leaned forward. “Mr. Malek, I’d like to pose a question of my own: If I understand correctly, you don’t have any idea what kind of unrest it was that brought you down here to Hyde Park in the first place, right?”

I saw no reason to be mysterious. “Not really, only that some people living near the campus told police they saw more strangers around the neighborhood, some of them ‘foreign-looking.’”

Overby allowed himself a slight smile. “Foreign-looking, eh? I’ve been on this campus for more than fifteen years, and during that time every third person I’ve passed on the sidewalks would be termed foreign-looking by the little old ladies living in the big old places up on Woodlawn and University and Kenwood. I can’t believe that they’re getting worked up about it after all these years.”

“It’s probably because of the war,” I told him. “We’re finding that everybody’s more nervous now, more suspicious. Hardly surprising.”

“But maybe there are things going on here,” Rickman said. “A lot of us have been doing some wondering of our own.”

Ward set his beer down. “Now Ed, let’s not get... ”

“Let me finish, Theo,” Rickman snapped, holding up a palm and turning toward me. “Mr. Malek, have you ever heard of Enrico Fermi?”

“Uh... I don’t believe so. Should I?”

“He won a Nobel Prize in physics three, four years ago. One of the great scientific minds today. How about Leo Szilard?” I shook my head.

“Another brilliant physicist,” Rickman proclaimed. “Hungarian-born, studied in Berlin, collaborated with Albert Einstein on several projects, developed an electron microscope, got out of Germany before the start of the war. I could go on and on.”

“I’ll take your word for all of it. So... ?”

“So, Mr. Malek... both Fermi and Szilard are on this campus right now. I’ve seen both of them several times.”

I took a healthy swig of beer and wiped my mouth. “Should I be surprised? From what I’ve been told, this is a great university. Why shouldn’t great brains be here?”

Rickman sighed, as if disappointed by my denseness. “They should,” he said, “but not in a place called the Metallurgical Laboratory.”

“Which I assume means it has something to do with metals.”

“So one would think,” Theodore Ward said, tugging his vest down over his expansive midsection. “But the ‘Met Lab,’ as it’s commonly known around here, seems like an unlikely place for two of the greatest physicists in the world. On top of that, it’s an open secret that there are people from DuPont on the campus. You may know that the company started out as a manufacturer of high explosives.”

“Okay, then what’s the explanation?” I asked, looking at each of them in turn. I was tired of guessing games, especially when I had to play them with a quartet who probably qualified as geniuses, at least in their field.

Miles Overby cleared his throat. “We — at least some of us — think the Met Lab’s a cover for something else. Mr. Malek, have you ever heard of nuclear fission?”

“I feel like I’m a contestant on ‘Twenty Questions,’ and not doing very damn well at it,” I told him. “I have no idea what nuclear fission is, but I suspect you’re going to tell me.”

“I wouldn’t begin trying to explain it,” Overby said. “And I don’t mean that as an insult by any means. It’s a complex concept, but one of the end results is frighteningly simple: An explosive device more powerful and more terrifying than anything the planet has ever seen.”

“That sounds melodramatic,” I answered, playing my role as the skeptical newspaperman.

“Miles and I disagree on a lot of issues, both inside the world of physics and outside, but on this, he’s right, of course,” Ward pronounced quietly. “For years, there have been experiments, many of them in secret, on the possible creation of a nuclear weapon. And as Miles says, such a weapon would dwarf anything now in the arsenal of any military force — American, German, Japanese, British, Soviet.”

I wasn’t through being skeptical. “If the experiments have been so secret, how do you know about them?”

“In the international physics community,” Ward said, “it’s hard to keep anything from leaking out. For instance, it’s widely known that the Germans have been working for the last several years on a nuclear bomb.”

“And our government knows about this?”

“Absolutely,” Rickman chimed in. “There’s no way they couldn’t know. I’m sure the U.S. has spies everywhere, and so does everybody else in this war, for that matter.”

“So that brings us back here to Chicago,” I said. “What’s going on here, and what does it have to do with Arthur Bergman’s killing?”

“That’s what we would all like to know,” Lazar piped up, finishing his beer with a slurp. “If work is going forward here on some sort of a weapon, we’re not hearing anything, right?” The others nodded.

“The lid is on tight,” Ward said through clenched teeth. “And what is terrifying, really terrifying, is that if a weapon really is being developed here — which seems to me very likely — it’s being done in the heart of a metropolis of three million people, plus many hundreds of thousands more in the environs. If, God forbid, a mistake is made, this entire city could be wiped out.” He snapped his fingers for emphasis.

“Maybe that’s the price that we have to pay in wartime,” I suggested, not totally believing it. “But if none of you know what’s really going on in that Met Lab, what makes you think Arthur Bergman did? And if he did know, why was he killed? And by whom?”

“That’s what we’re all wondering,” Rickman said. “Exactly what did Arthur say to you?”

My answer combined what Pickles had overheard and what Bergman said to me: “He told me something big was happening on the campus that was going to change the world, and when I pressed him, he simply said ‘You don’t know what I know,’ or words to that effect. Then he clammed up.” I left out his cryptic comment about “where we will rise again.”

“Arthur always had a flair for the dramatic,” Lazar put in. “It’s questionable how much information he really had.”

“We’ll never know,” Ward said, stating the obvious. “If he had inside sources as to what was going on over at the Met Lab, he surely never shared them with me.”

“Or me, either, and I suspect the same is true of the others here as well,” Overby said, looking around the table. Lazar and Rickman nodded.

Rickman turned to me. “Do you know the person Arthur was talking to at the bar? The one who was so pessimistic about the war?”

“Never saw him before,” I responded truthfully, neglecting to mention that I hadn’t seen him at all. And Pickles never told me what he looked like, so I couldn’t have described him even if I had wanted to.

“Well, it’s in the hands of the police now anyway,” Lazar said.

“Or the FBI,” Ward added glumly. “But before some law-enforcement outfit finds out who did this, we may all be blown to smithereens.”

“Now look who has a flair for the dramatic,” Overby chuckled dryly.

“Well, how do you feel about nuclear experiments going on in one of the most densely populated cities in the country?” Ward snorted.

“We don’t know for certain that these experiments are actually under way,” Overby countered.

“Then kindly explain Fermi’s presence on the campus. And Szilard’s.”

Overby said nothing, and the table fell silent. “How about another round?” I ventured, pulling out my billfold. “Remember, these are on me.”

“Thanks anyway, but I’ve got a lunch date with a colleague,” Ward said, and the others all told me they, too, had engagements.

As they rose to leave, Lazar pumped my hand. “Mr. Malek, I’m afraid we’ve availed ourselves of your hospitality and then wasted your time today. We haven’t been a lot of help to you.”

“Maybe not as far as Arthur’s murder is concerned,” Ward said. “But we’ve alerted him to a terrible peril the city is facing. And I would hope he would pass it along to his newspaper.”

“What’s the Tribune going to do, Ted?” Rickman challenged. “Even assuming a bomb really is being built under our noses, the paper has to tread lightly after what happened earlier this year with the Japanese code.”

“We were cleared on that by a federal grand jury,” I piped up, defending my employer against a claim that the Tribune had violated the espionage act by reporting that the code used by the Japanese armed forces had been broken.

“Okay, point taken,” Rickman conceded, “but even without that episode, I can’t believe the paper would want to report on an American weapon being developed in secret. Hardly a patriotic act.”

“Besides, such a revelation might make the university look good,” Ward said. “And with all due respect to our journalist friend here, the Tribune and its Colonel McCormick are hardly friends of the school. They see us, from President Hutchins himself on down, as a bunch of rabid left-wingers who would like to establish a Communist state on the Midway and undermine all that is good and decent in the American way of life.”

“I don’t think this bombast is getting us anywhere,” Lazar said with a forced smile. “Let’s wish Mr. Malek well and hope that he, or the police, find out who killed Arthur, and why. And again, sir, thank you for the drinks and for your concern about our colleague. Please let us know if you find anything out. Or if there is anything we can help you with.”

I told them I would stay in touch, which seemed like the polite thing to say. We all left the saloon, which had begun to fill up with the Saturday student crowd — a group that had no football game to attend on this autumn afternoon.