Shadow of the Bomb

Chapter 16

The Monday morning after Thanksgiving, the entire nation focused on one grim event: the horrific fire at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Boston over the weekend, which killed nearly 500 in the overcrowded building. Stampeding patrons had been stacked up at revolving doors in the rush to escape, and the cowboy film actor Buck Evans was among the dead. For one day, at least, the war got edged out as the lead story on Page 1 of papers across the country.

At noon, after an uneventful morning at the Hyde Park precinct and throughout the whole of the South Side, I was at the University Tavern bar, ordering lunch, drinking coffee, and reading newspaper accounts of the fire when Edward Rickman slid onto the stool next to me. “Mind if I join you?” he asked, tugging at the knot of his silk tie.

“Not at all. I didn’t know you ate here.”

“From time to time. I find it a refreshing change of scenery from the campus dining spots, where all the talk is thinly veiled faculty gossip — well, actually not always so thinly veiled. Terrible story, isn’t it?” he said, gesturing to the Cocoanut Grove headline on the early edition of the Daily News that I had spread out on the bar.

“Awful. All those people partying, having fun after a college football game, and then... ”

Rickman nodded solemnly. “Who lives and who dies seems so arbitrary, so random, even capricious. And it doesn’t always have to do with your station in life. Most of the people in that club were probably from the upper crust, or at least the upper end of the middle crust. College students from good, solid families, successful alumni, community leaders.”

“Live every day as though it’s your last,” I mused.

“Sorry to come in here and be so morbid,” Rickman said. “Have you ordered lunch?”

“My usual, the hamburger plate. It’s on the way.”

“Can’t go wrong with that. Chester, I’ll have the same thing as this gentleman, including coffee,” he called out to the burly barkeep, who turned to place the order with the kitchen. “Anything new on Arthur’s death?”

“Not that I’ve heard. Do you have any fresh theories yourself?”

“Afraid I haven’t.”

“I assume you know Dieter Schmid.”

“Yes, although not very well. Why do you ask?”

“It’s a little piece of what you referred to a minute ago as ‘faculty gossip.’ Seems that he may have been involved with Bergman’s wife.”

Rickman looked surprised. “Really? I’m curious as to the source of your information.”

“Your colleague Mr. Ward says he saw them together in what might best be described as a compromising situation.”

“What does that mean? Was Theo peeking into a bedroom window with binoculars?”

I laughed as Chester delivered my hamburger plate and a coffee refill. “No, one night he saw them on the street, embracing for an extended period.”

“Well, she’s a damned attractive woman, and divorced. If I weren’t happily married myself, I would certainly be knocking on her door with flowers and candy in hand.”

“She wasn’t divorced a couple of years ago, when the aforesaid embrace took place.”

“Hmm. I never heard Theo say anything about this.”

“I was having lunch with Lazar a few days back at Hutchinson Commons and Ward stopped by and told us about it. Said he’d never mentioned it to anyone before. Overby dropped over for a minute, too. Anyway, Ward suggested that the former Mrs. Bergman might be a suspect.”

“Irene? Ridiculous!”

“That seemed to be the majority opinion at the table as well.”

“I should think so,” Rickman huffed. “Talk about reaching.”

“Well, in fairness to Mr. Ward, he backed down on his assertion after the others jumped all over him.”

“Good for them. Ah, here’s my lunch. Thank you, Chester. How are things going in the Pacific?”

“All right, so far,” the bartender muttered, nodding curtly.

“His son Len is a seaman on a destroyer,” Rickman said sotto voce as Chester ambled toward the other end of the long bar. “I saw in the paper that we lost yet another destroyer in the Solomon Islands, and I was afraid something might have happened to Len. Chester doesn’t talk a lot, but I know he’s worried sick. The kid just missed catching it at Pearl Harbor. He was a crew member, a seaman, on one of the destroyers that got sunk, the U.S.S. Downes, but he was ashore in Honolulu at the time.”

“Maybe that’s why the barkeep is so dour all the time, although he has warmed to me slightly — very slightly. Or at least he’s gotten used to my coming in here with some regularity.”

“There have to be thousands like him all over the country, worried that every phone call or every mail delivery is going to bring dire news.”

“True. Tell me more about this guy Schmid. He sounds like a German to me, although I understand he’s Swiss.”

Rickman chuckled. “Funny you should mention that, and in the U.T. of all places. He drops by on occasion for a drink, as I do, but we rarely sit together. As I said before, I don’t know him all that well. I have nothing against him, mind you, but he’s very reserved, generally keeps to himself.

“Anyway, just a few weeks ago, he came in here one night alone, nodded at me, and sat several stools away. A few minutes later, a chemistry professor, a hail-fellow type named Carver, sees Schmid and greets him in his booming voice, saying something like ‘Well, if it isn’t our house German, Herr Dieter Schmid. Zig heil!’ Schmid looked like he wanted to crawl under a table.”

“Doesn’t sound like a particularly funny thing to say, especially not in these times.”

“No,” Rickman said, “but that’s Carver. Knowing him, he meant no harm, but I think he’d had a few drinks before he got here. Anyway, I doubt if Schmid’s been back since, although I’m not here often enough to know myself.”

“Has anybody ever seriously suggested that he might be a German spy?”

“Not at all,” Rickman said, waving the suggestion away with a hand. “He’s been here for years, and he’s a highly regarded physicist. And as I understand it, he’s definitely Swiss, not German.”

“Is he one of those who are working in the Metallurgy Lab?”

“I... think so. Like Bergman, he hasn’t been teaching this term, which might suggest a ‘special project.’”

“Has he ever been married?”

“Not that I’m aware of, although he could have been back in Switzerland, for all I know. I’m still digesting what you said about him and Irene Bergman.”

“I wonder if they’re carrying on now.”

Rickman shook his head. “I wouldn’t have thought he was her type. But then, I never thought Arthur was exactly her type, either, although I always liked him, despite his phlegmatic disposition.”

“Just what is her type?”

“Good question,” he said before taking a healthy bite of his hamburger. “I would have thought she’d have hooked up with somebody more outgoing than either of them. Both brilliant, yes, without question, but not exactly brimming with personality and charm.”

“Yet Bergman, at least, seemed to reel women in like a fisherman in a newly stocked pond,” I said.

“Indeed, particularly of the coed variety. I must admit I’ve never understood that.”

“Young women in search of a father figure to comfort them, perhaps?”

“Maybe. It’s as good as any other explanation that comes to mind.”

“You came in here to get away from campus gossip, and that’s essentially all we’ve been doing,” I said with a dry laugh. “Afraid I’m a bad influence.”

“Nah, you’re a newspaperman. You’re allowed to gossip.”

“True. We call it ‘researching a story.’”

“Well, in any event, I don’t think either of us is any more knowledgeable than when we walked in here today,” Rickman said as he finished his meal and rose. “Except now I know a little more about the social activities of a living colleague and the ex-spouse of a deceased one.”

“I’m not sure I’d call that progress,” I told him, leaving a quarter tip on the counter for Chester and taking my check to the cashier. “If you happen to hear anything interesting, I can be reached at the Hyde Park police station, my new office when I’m not in here.”

“It’s unlikely,” Rickman said with a wry grin. “I barely know what’s happening in my own department most of the time.”

“Well, whatever else you do, stay healthy,” I said. “One dead professor is more than enough.”