Andrea Barrett - The Air We Breathe

“Excuse me,” Arkady said. “What are you doing?”

He retrieved his own pillow from one of the men. The agent took it back and tried to explain, even as Abe clutched his slippers to his chest.

“It’s come to this?” Otto said, sitting down heavily on his bed.

The second agent grimaced. “Dr. Richards’ orders,” he said. “Don’t make a fuss.”

“Everyone’s room?” Arkady asked. “Or just us?”

“Just you,” the third agent said calmly.

Arkady and Abe sat down on either side of Otto then, glaring at the strangers. It was an outrage, Otto thought. Ridiculous, thought Abe. But it would be over, Arkady thought, in a minute; they’d done nothing wrong. The third agent opened Leo’s locker, which was also now Otto’s — we’d all had to double up — and, after examining the shoes on the floor and the clothes on the hooks, found under Leo’s jacket the little tin box Eudora and Naomi had held.

“Yours?” the agent said to Otto.

“I’ve never seen it,” Otto said truthfully.

“Then it belongs to Leo Marburg?”

“How would I know?” Otto said.

The agent returned to the empty bed and pointed at the white-topped table beside it. “Leo’s?” he asked Abe.

“Obviously,” Abe said.

The agent picked up the two green volumes, which he must have already looked at once; they sat squarely in the center of the table, not open as Otto had left them. Now Arkady watched the agent reinspect them with disturbing eagerness. “We should take these,” he said to his two companions. “ The Principles of Chemistry —wouldn’t you like to know what he learned from these ?” The three men nodded at each other and one went off to notify Dr. Richards.

We are nothing if not efficient and the news spread instantly; the rest of us knew what had happened, and what was in the box, even before Dr. Richards returned an hour later with Miles. When we saw him arrive in his sleek new machine, we clammed up. No one had to tell Arkady, Otto, and Abe not to speak further while Dr. Richards and Miles searched the locker again, checking for anything the agents might have missed.

“You three,” Miles said. “What do you know about this box?”

Nothing, they said; nothing, nothing. They’d never seen the box or its contents before. In the midst of their protestations, Dr. Petrie, who’d just heard what was going on, skidded into the room.

“What’s this about?” he asked indignantly.

Miles showed him the contents of the box. “Otto claims it isn’t his,” he said. “Which makes it Leo’s. I’ve seen drawings of these in the papers and I suspect you have too. What possible reason could Leo have for owning such things, unless he had a plan to burn the place down?”

Something like pleasure rushed through Miles’s veins as he spoke. Earlier, piecing together the chronology of movie night, he’d found that although the details themselves were painful, their accretion into an orderly structure was as satisfying as mapping out a fossil skeleton dispersed in rough ground. As he’d explained the chronology, substituting for our chaotic and contradictory memories one clean narrative of the night, he’d felt sure that this work would yield similar rewards. Already it had uncovered three new shards of truth: Naomi had been here that night; Leo had lured her here; Leo was a liar. When he thought of Naomi, forced to run away because of something Leo had said or done to her, he wanted to throw the bedside table through the wall.

“Leo wouldn’t hurt a fly,” Dr. Petrie said.

But with the box in his hand, the intact pencil-that-wasn’t-a-pencil exposed along with the pieces of another and the diagram showing how the pieces went back together, Miles could see that his own intuitions had been right. A perfect structure rose before him, the last bones ready to lock into place.

“That’s Leo’s handwriting,” he said triumphantly. “Look how he shapes the r’s — I’ve seen that on his notes.” Perhaps it was over this very diagram that Naomi and Leo had quarreled; no wonder her voice had been raised, no wonder people had noticed them arguing! If she had only come to him when she first suspected trouble, he might have prevented everything.

The diagram did look bad, Dr. Petrie admitted to himself. So clear, so careful. But to Miles he said, “You’re talking about a man who risked his own life to save that of another patient.”

In answer, Miles held out the volumes his agents had plucked from Leo’s table. “Since when do patients have books like this?” he asked. “We could have another Dr. Scheele on our hands. That druggist, in Brooklyn — a German chemist, from a family of chemists, who was sent here by the German government as an undercover agent.”

“The Scheele cigar bomb,” Dr. Petrie murmured, appalled at the connections Miles was making. He’d seen the diagrams in the newspaper, a little metal tube a few inches long, separated by a thin tin partition into two compartments. Some chemical filled one compartment, a corrosive acid the other, needing only a sailor or a stoker willing to plant the tube in the bowels of the ship. Out at sea, a few days later, the acid would eat its way through the tin and combine with the chemical to start a fire. Ships had burned to the waterline.

“How is this different, really, from those cigar bombs?” Miles asked. “Even you can see the resemblance. And here we have another chemist, also with a German name, and another device in close proximity to a fire…”

“It’s true that Leo has an interest in chemistry,” Dr. Petrie said, “but we all knew that. Irene gave him those books, and she loaned him others. I loaned him some, myself.”

His stomach rolled and burned and his ears were ringing. Was he going to faint? He’d been working too hard since the fire, seldom sleeping, eating poorly, cut off until recently from the comfort of talking with Irene.

To Miles he said, “His interests don’t make him a criminal. I’m sure there’s a good explanation for the box — if you have a question, go ask him. He’s still weak, but he’s well enough to talk.”

“You would defend him,” Miles said. He closed the box and tucked it carefully under his arm. “I’m going back to town, I have to check something and I need to make some telephone calls.” I have to talk to Eudora, he thought. “But I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said.

EUDORA HE FOUND on the ground floor of the men’s annex, bent over a bucket in her blue wrapper, disinfecting the baseboards along the main hall. He was so angry that he nearly slipped on the damp linoleum as he rushed toward her. Clearly she knew far more than she’d let on weeks ago at Mrs. Martin’s house, when she’d evaded his question about Naomi’s disappearance. Perhaps she’d been lying all along, about everything.

But before he could ask her where, exactly, she’d been during the fire, and what she knew about Leo and Naomi, she straightened up, a wet rag in her hand, and said, “What gave you the right to search Leo’s room ?”

“The law,” Miles said, surprised at her boldness. “The new laws give me every right; I would have been remiss if I hadn’t looked. Just as you were remiss not to tell me what he was studying. Those books Irene supposedly gave him: you knew about those?”

Drops of water darkened Eudora’s wrapper as she squeezed her rag. She already knew what his agents had found — news does travel fast here — but she hadn’t realized how he might interpret it. Without knowing she was repeating Dr. Petrie’s words, she said, “Studying chemistry doesn’t make Leo a criminal. I—”

“It’s not just the chemistry books,” he interrupted. “Not even the books combined with what’s in here.” He tapped the box tucked under his elbow. “It’s everything, every aspect of his behavior. No one’s thinking clearly. Not you, not Dr. Petrie. Not even me. We have to look at this rationally — I’m upset, of course I’m upset. That doesn’t mean I can ignore the facts. And you — why didn’t you tell me that Naomi was here the night of the fire? Why didn’t you tell me before about Leo’s interest in Naomi?”