It had not been hard for Mudcat to follow Justine home from work on the day she fled the loathsome Sonny. He had merely followed her to her friend’s Buick, and then he had followed the Buick to The Julia Ladies’ Residence.
It had also not been hard to return before dawn and watch the rooming house until Justine appeared, nor to shadow her to the home of a woman who was obviously very close to her. It had then been easy to leave her there and trek to the public library where he had learned so many useful things.
For example, he had found shelves loaded with university yearbooks. The Tulane University volume from 1940 had proven particularly useful. Inside its gold-stamped cover, wrapped in leather dyed the warm red of cinnamon, the Jambalaya had included a photo of Gerard Byrne in his physics lab, probably taken just months before he died. This photo was worth examining later, so Mudcat had slid his trusty Minox Riga out of a pocket hidden inside his left sleeve and snapped a photograph.
With the camera safely stowed, Mudcat had continued studying the yearbook and its printed photo. Gerard Byrne’s round face was a serious one, framed by a close-cropped brown beard going gray and an out-of-fashion silver pince-nez. Beneath his photo was a caption touting his publications and awards. This caption had told Mudcat enough about Byrne’s publication history to make the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature useful, so he had followed that research trail. There, he had learned that Dr. Byrne often listed his wife, Isabel, as a coauthor, as well as a woman named Gloria Mazur. And, once, Justine Byrne.
Mudcat might not be a physicist, but he knew enough to recognize that it wasn’t the usual thing for renowned scientists to collaborate with women. The Byrnes were people one might expect to produce an unusual daughter.
Some of the scientific journals that published Byrne’s work were on the library’s shelves, so he’d asked the librarian to fetch them for him. The journals had appeared at his elbow as if by magic, with no need for him thank her or even to acknowledge her, but he had.
As he said, “Thank you very much,” he had flashed a smile designed to secure her ongoing helpfulness. Careful to squint his eyes, forming trustworthy wrinkles at their corners, he’d shown his teeth to prove his openness. The effort was effective, because she had mirrored his smile in a way that thawed her frosty efficiency by a degree or two. The ability to artificially project charm and charisma was a valuable one for a spy. He practiced it daily.
The scholarly journals turned out to be a gold mine. The articles themselves weren’t particularly meaningful—Mudcat knew next to nothing about crystallography—but each one included a brief biographical sketch of the authors. Those biographical sketches were meaningful indeed. Justine Byrne’s father had studied under J. J. Thomson at Cambridge and Owen Willans Richardson at Princeton, both of them Nobel Prize laureates. Byrne had written his dissertation on positive rays and mass spectroscopy under Arthur Jeffrey Dempster at the University of Chicago.
The people with whom he’d coauthored a steady stream of papers formed a kind of scientific genealogy for Byrne. At the top was Thomson, the discoverer of the electron. Even Mudcat could see that Byrne’s mentors were an impressive intellectual patrimony. How did Gloria Mazur fit into this pantheon where all the gods were fathers?
At this point in his search, the luck that came with deep research gave him a great gift. Or was it luck since people who didn’t dig deep enough never received its gifts? Appended to one of Byrne’s publications, Mudcat saw a biographical note for his collaborator, Dr. Gloria Mazur, and it gave her academic affiliation as H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College.
Aha! So she was a nearby associate, not somebody like Ernest Lawrence and Enrico Fermi, who would have corresponded with Byrne from their labs in California and New York. Gloria Mazur’s position at Sophie Newcomb had set Mudcat’s intuition aflame, as he had just seen Justine greeted warmly by a woman who lived within a reasonable walk of that college’s ornate iron gate.
A recent yearbook for Sophie Newcomb was as easily found as the Tulane yearbook had been. Within minutes, Mudcat was looking at a photo of Gloria Mazur in her lab, which looked sad and empty when compared to Byrne’s forest of modern equipment. No wonder she was forced to play intellectual handmaiden to Byrne.
Mudcat knew women like Gloria. She would be willing to be Gerard Byrne’s barely credited collaborator for her entire career, if that was what it took to see her work in print. And she would be bitter.
Understanding Gloria Mazur would be the key to understanding Justine Byrne, who was clearly as intelligent and driven as this woman in her inadequate lab. In thirty years, Justine would either be the contented wife of a man who had tamed her, or she would be as thwarted and bitter as Gloria Mazur. Or perhaps she would be looking back on her years traveling the world at Mudcat’s side as an agent who was just as intellectually accomplished as Dr. Mazur but with far more personal autonomy.
Mudcat had been lonely, but he didn’t realize how lonely he’d been until he caught his breath at the thought of life with Justine Byrne. She was attractive in her unconventional way, which was light on cosmetics and hairstyling and long on vibrant youth, but there was more to Justine than her face and form. She moved through the world like a human being with a goal and a plan. He had seen her throw her arms around Gloria Mazur like someone who didn’t have to be given permission to love.
Mudcat had been content to make his way alone, but he felt something shift inside him when he thought about Justine. He wasn’t sure he’d be willing to leave her behind when his work in New Orleans was done, so he’d best focus his mind on recruiting her to his cause. After that, he could focus on winning her in all the other ways.
He shoved those thoughts aside and realized that he was still staring at the small black-and-white photo of a woman who wasn’t Justine. The picture of Gloria Mazur made him think that she, too, would have been an unconventional beauty in her day. He slid a magnifier out of his other sleeve to get a better look at her face. He had no doubt that she was the same woman who had wrapped Justine in her arms with such love.
He retrieved the camera and carefully snapped photos of each page of the article cowritten by Justine and Drs. Byrne, Byrne, and Mazur, then he snapped a shot of Gloria Mazur in her tiny, ill-equipped lab. The world of science had not been kind enough to Dr. Isabel Byrne to leave a photo of her in its journals for Mudcat to find.
Many hours would be spent developing the photos, which did not bother him at all. He loved the smell of the photographic chemicals in the red-lit closet that served him as a darkroom. He loved watching faces surface on the prints where they would remain trapped on paper.
He would particularly enjoy developing his first photo of the day, a long-distance shot of a flame-haired woman wrapped in an emerald cardigan who made him regret the limitations of black-and-white photography. She stood with one foot raised to step onto a streetcar that couldn’t outrun her pursuer.