CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
After returning Simone to the Nassau Inn — which had, obligingly, relocated her to a much nicer room on the top floor — and making sure she had finally fallen asleep, Lucas set out for the junior faculty housing on Harrison Street.
So much of what he’d seen in the film — the weird shapes cavorting in the mist, the gleam of light from the empty eye sockets of the skull — was inexplicable, but one image, appearing in only the last few frames, was not.
Someone real had run from the conservation room — the same someone upon whose heels another of the apparitions had followed like a faithful dog — and that someone, he strongly suspected, was Andy Brandt.
It was only a suspicion, but one thing he had learned in the war was that his suspicions were often spot-on. The guy was definitely a snoop, insinuating himself into Delaney’s lab whenever he could, always asking about the advancements in the radiocarbon processes, or kidding with Lucas about what he did all day, holed up in the art museum. “You’d think you had some top-secret weapon in there,” he’d joked, though he had also waited for an answer, which never came. But why had Brandt been in the conservation room in the first place, and what, if anything, did he know that Lucas did not?
Dusk had fallen and a light rain had begun by the time Lucas arrived at the barracks-like structures, built decades before and coming apart at the seams, that most of the young faculty and grad students inhabited. Not for the first time, he thanked his lucky stars that he had again landed his spot at Mrs. Caputo’s; if, as he imagined, strings had been pulled behind the scenes, by President Dodds or the OSS or whomever, he was grateful they had been.
Stepping into the open stairwell and shaking the rain off his leather bomber jacket, he scanned the tenant roster. Hand-lettered labels had been taped up on the board. “A. Brandt” was listed in apartment 2B, one of the upper units, and he climbed the darkened stairs cautiously. Although there was a light fixture in the ceiling, someone had made off with the bulb; they were in scarce supply these days and highly coveted as a result.
At the door with a metal “2” on it, and a “B” hanging by a thread, he raised a hand to knock, then paused when he heard a voice within. Bending his ear closer to the door, he heard the voice — Andy’s — continuing to talk, but nobody was talking back. He waited, but it was still only Andy talking, and in subdued tones at that — too subdued for Lucas to make out what he was actually saying. The chances of these apartments having individual phone lines was pretty much nil.
It sounded more like he was transmitting via a ham radio.
Was Andy a ham radio operator? He’d certainly never said anything about it that Lucas could recall, and even if he was, why would he be speaking in such a clandestine way?
Holding his breath, Lucas eased himself away from the door. His wet shoes made a sucking noise on the floor, and he stopped — but the broadcast went on.
One by one, Lucas went down the steps, backward so as to keep an eye on the door, and once outside again, he ran around to the back of the building, where a rusty fire escape rose to the second-floor units. He climbed the squeaking rungs as quietly as he could and then crouched in the rain outside Andy’s apartment. The blind was drawn, but like everything else in this housing block, it hung imperfectly, slanted to one side. Lucas peeked inside the room.
Andy was sitting on a wooden chair, with a radio transmitter on the table, speaking into a handheld microphone. Lucas recognized the radio — it was a standard issue, BC-1000, the same kind he had employed in Europe. He surveyed the fire escape for an antenna. There it was, fixed flush with the window frame, its customary olive green painted the same brown as the wood, presumably to camouflage it. He peered in again, and now he could see that Andy was consulting a batch of papers and reciting what he read there into the microphone.
Papers that were gathered in a blue folder — just like the one Simone said was missing from the suite.
Whatever he was up to, Lucas thought, it was time to put a stop to it. Digging into his pocket, he found his key ring, and picking the one with the bluntest end, he wedged it, as quietly as he could, under the antenna, until he had pried it loose from the window frame. At one end was a loop of wire, just long enough to coil around his wrist. He pulled hard, snapping it in two.
He didn’t wait to see what would happen next. He clambered down the escape, antenna in hand, and had just reached the muddy ground when the window sash rose, and Andy poked his head out into the drizzle. Lucas hid in the shadows of the building while Andy looked to the right and left, then ran his hand along the side of the window, feeling for the missing antenna. He craned his neck out farther and found the split wire. For a second, he looked puzzled, and then, after another quick look around, ducked his head back inside.
He would know it was no accident.
But what would he do next?
Running back around to the front of the building, Lucas concealed himself in the neighboring stairwell and waited. The rain had not let up, and the temperature had dropped into the forties. The wound on his arm, where Wally Gregg’s knife had slashed him, throbbed. Running his hand along his hair to brush the water off, he debated what his next move should be. Should he continue to wait here, or find a way to get to a telephone and call his contacts at the OSS, and then leave it to them to sort it all out? Was it possible that Andy Brandt was more than an annoying brownnoser? That he was actually an enemy mole?
While it seemed impossible at first, the more he thought about it, the more the pieces fell into place. By the time Lucas had arrived at Princeton, hadn’t Andy Brandt already secured a place for himself in the same science building as Professor Delaney, who was in the midst of conducting top-secret isotope testing? And since then, hadn’t Brandt done everything in his power to ingratiate himself with Delaney — which might have worked for a spy gifted with a better personality — and used every opportunity to penetrate the upstairs lab and procure its latest findings?
Could it have been Brandt who had stolen into Dr. Rashid’s suite at the Nassau Inn and made off with his papers? The blue folder was right there in plain sight on Brandt’s desk.
A wind ripped the treetops, sending a cascade of wet leaves onto Harrison Street.
The next question, however, was the most terrifying of all, for if Lucas followed the train of logic, it led to one conclusion alone. If Brandt had broken into the hotel room, had he been there when Dr. Rashid had suffered his fatal accident in the tub? Was it an accident at all? Or had Simone’s father been deliberately drowned?
He heard a door close, then footsteps descending in the next stairwell over. As Lucas kept watch from his hiding spot, Andy, wearing a long black rain slicker with a hood, stepped out into the rain, looking all around. Like some ghastly caricature of Santa Claus, he carried a canvas rucksack over his shoulder, bulging with something that made a clatter. Satisfied that he was unobserved, he walked up the street, staying out of the light of the occasional streetlamp, and stopping periodically to turn and look behind him.
Trailing him from a safe distance, Lucas watched as he skirted the little campus train station, built to resemble a Cotswold cottage, crossed the tracks, and entered the lower reaches of the campus. Lights were on in the dormitories, and lampposts glowed along the main walkways, but most of the grounds were black as pitch, and Lucas had a hard time just keeping Brandt in sight. The rain didn’t help. Fortunately, Andy was moving slowly, and whether it was due to the galoshes he wore or some kind of sprain, Lucas was grateful.