They found the car on May 8th, the day the war ended in Europe. Connolly had spent the afternoon at a motel on the Taos road, a motor court with faded cabins that had become their usual place, and had stayed late. Daniel had been spending most of his time at the test site, but he was back again this week, so they had to steal what time they could, a few hours of afternoon on old sheets, the sun dimmed to evening by dusty Venetian blinds. At first Mills had been titillated by Connolly’s absences, but now, finally bored with someone else’s affair, he scarcely raised an eyebrow.
“More research?” he said when Connolly turned up.
“You ought to at least check in once in a while.”
“Why? Did I miss something?”
It was a standard joke between them. For days, weeks now, there had been nothing to miss. Ramon Kelly had been convicted, a one-day excitement for the Santa Fe New Mexican, a longer run for the Albuquerque papers, and the Hill had shrugged off the news with indifference and gone back to work. Karl Bruner, even as gossip, was gone, a few paragraphs on the crime blotter. Corporal Batchelor, a little nervous now at having come forward at all, had found nothing to report. Doc Holliday checked in regularly, but more out of boredom than progress. The files on Mills’s desk sat undeciphered, dusted once a week by the cleaning staff, waiting for a new key. All around them life on the Hill intensified-furloughs canceled, lights blazing at night as eighteen-hour workdays raced to some uncertain deadline-so that by contrast they seemed at a standstill, just holding their breath. Connolly, to his surprise, didn’t mind. He lived in the hurried, measured hours of motel rooms. There would be time enough later for everything else.
“The car,” Mills said. “They found Karl’s car. One of Kisty’s men.”
“Down at S Site? It’s been here all along?”
“No.” Mills smiled. “Nothing that good. One of the box canyons off the plateau.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Join the club. Hell of a place to stash a car.”
“Wrecked?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been waiting for you.” He glanced at his watch. “For hours, in fact.”
“Well, let’s go.” Connolly led the way out of the office.
“Relax, it’s not going anywhere. We’ve got a guard posted.”
“We ought to call Doc.”
“I did. He’ll wait for us at the west gate.” Mills met Connolly’s glance. “I told him you’d be back by five.”
“Why five?”
Mills shrugged. “I’m in security, remember? I notice things. You’re always back by five.”
“Why is that, I wonder.”
“I figure somebody’s got to be home.”
“A detective.”
Mills smiled. “It passes the time. Quiet around here lately.”
“Feeling neglected?”
“Me? I like it quiet. The Germans surrendered, by the way, in case you haven’t heard.”
Connolly nodded. “You’d never know it here.” He looked around the Tech Area, as busy and undisturbed as ever.
“Oh, they’ll pop a few corks tonight. You know the longhairs-work first.”
“Unlike some of us, you mean.”
“No. I figure you’re pretty busy.” He grinned. “Just thinking about it is what gets me through the days.”
They drove past S Site, the explosives unit at the opposite end of the plateau, a new industrial plant of snaking steampipes, smokestacks, and hangars of heavy machinery. The Tech Area was the university, but S had the raw utility of a foundry, where blueprints were hammered into casings and people risked accidents.
“Who found it?”
“They were setting up a new firing range in one of the canyons off South Mesa. You know they like to keep the explosives off the Hill.”
“Yes, it’s comforting.”
Mills grinned. “Lucky this time, anyway. We never would have found it otherwise.”
At the end of a road thick with conifers, they found Holliday standing at the gate, chatting with the young sentry.
“You took your time.”
The sentry, recognizing Connolly, gave an innocent half-salute.
“Funny, isn’t it?” Mills said, catching the gesture. “All this time and I’ve never used this gate. You?” he said to Connolly.
“Once in a while,” Connolly said, not looking at him.
“Well, I don’t blame you,” Holliday said to Mills. “My friend here says they don’t get much traffic anytime. Nights they just close the road, so you’d have to drive all the way around to the front. Pretty discouraging if you didn’t know that.”
“But everybody does,” the sentry said, his voice liquid with the South. “It’s just for Hill people. Trucks go to the east gate.”
“And all us folks from the outside, eh?” Holliday said.
“Ain’t nobody from outside on the Hill.”
“No. Well, I guess that’s right. And here I was with my nose pressed against the screen, just like always.”
Holliday followed their car as they skirted the plateau on winding switchbacks. The mesa was like a giant hand with a series of deep canyons between its fingers, some in turn breaking off into smaller box canyons that dipped away under the pine cover, lying as hidden as secrets. The car was in one of these, a mile or so from the entrance turnoff, at the end of an old dirt road partly overgrown with brush. An MP was posted where the car had driven off the dirt to carve its own path into the canyon floor. Mills cleared them and they moved toward the car, looking at the broken brush along the way.
“Why the road?” Connolly said.
“Probably an old logging road,” Holliday said. “They used to take a fair amount of timber out around here. You notice that canyon just before this one? There’s a real road there. They probably just gave up on this one.”
“That’s the test range,” Connolly said.
“What exactly they firing there?”
“I don’t know.” Then, catching Holliday’s look, “Honestly.”
“They’re measuring projectile velocity,” Mills said.
They looked at each other, then at him. He laughed. “Well, I asked. That’s what they told me.”
“You mean like how fast an arrow goes when you shoot it?” Holliday said.
“Something like that.”
“Sure are chewing up the trees to find out.” He pointed toward the end of the canyon, where a series of test explosions had opened a rough clearing.
“But why come here?” Connolly said.
“Well, if they hadn’t started shooting things up around here, nobody would have found it.”
“You know what I mean.”
Holliday looked at him. “You mean why so close to the Hill.”
Connolly nodded.
“I don’t know. Let’s see what we got first. Maybe it’s not even his.”
But there had been no attempt to disguise the car; the Hill license plate, the glove compartment registration were intact. The paint in front had been scratched by the drive through the brush, but otherwise the car was as Karl might have left it. The keys were still in the ignition switch.
“That’s a nice touch,” Holliday said. “I’ve never seen that before.”
“Can you have them checked for prints?”
“I could, but I’ve got no jurisdiction here.”
“Nobody does. You’re just assisting the Manhattan Project of the Army Corps of Engineers.” Connolly smiled at him. “War work.”
“You got a paper if I need it?”
“We’ve got nothing but paper.”
“I think there’s some blood here,” Mills said, looking at the back floor.
“Yes, sir,” Holliday said. “Don’t touch that, now-we’ll see if we can get a match.”
“Try a church parking lot,” Connolly said. “I guarantee it.”
There was nothing unusual in the trunk. Aside from the bloodstains in the back, where Karl’s head must have been laid, the car was clean.
“Let me try something,” Connolly said, taking a handkerchief in his right hand. He got in and twisted the key. The motor turned over and started. He sat at the wheel for a minute, listening to the hum, running Karl’s car as he had worn his boots. When he turned it off, the canyon was quiet enough to hear the birds.
“Why save the key?” he said, handing it, wrapped, to Holliday.
“Why anything?” Holliday said. “These things-they don’t have to make sense.”
“Yes they do. They don’t have to be sensible, but they have to make sense.”
“I’ll get the boys to go over the whole thing for prints,” Holliday said, ignoring him. He was searching the ground. “Too much traffic here.”
“Kisty’s men,” Mills said. “They didn’t know it was a crime scene.”
“Let’s check it anyway,” Connolly said. “You never know. You want to square it with the guard?” he said to Mills. It was a polite dismissal and Mills took it, moving back to the road.
“What’s on your mind?” Holliday said.
“I can’t see the logistics of this,” Connolly said, staring at the car as if there were a visible answer. “Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, you kill Karl at San Isidro. You put him in the back and then you dump him in the park. Why not just dump him here?” He looked up at Holliday’s stare. “Okay, you want him found, just the way you said. Like that, like it was something else. Why not find the car too? Why not just leave it in Santa Fe near the park? The blood, I guess,” he said, talking to himself.
“Maybe he needed the ride.”
Connolly looked up. “So where was his own car?”
Holliday shrugged. “He could have walked to the church.”
“If he was already in Santa Fe. How did he get there?”
“You’re assuming the guy was from here.”
“Yes.”
“Bus. They’ve got buses running from here, don’t they? Saturday night. You got a few people on passes, right?”
Connolly nodded, thinking. “Then why not take a bus back? Just leave the car.”
Holliday leaned against the car, staring at the ground. “Well, what did we think happened? When we found him?”
“That it had been stolen.”
“Uh-huh. Which fit, right? That kind of crime. Bump him off and the next thing you know you’re in Mexico. Valuable thing, a car in wartime. You leave it on the street, you’ve got somebody asking questions. Plus you’ve got the blood,” he said, nodding to him.
“So you’ve got to get rid of it.”
“Seems a shame, a nice new car, but I guess you do.”
“But there are lots of ways to do that. Leave it in the desert, push it over a cliff.”
“Well, the trouble is, you never know how that’s going to turn out. It falls wrong or the damn thing catches fire. You don’t want to attract any notice, you just want it to disappear. For good. Or a good long while, anyway. And maybe you don’t have time for any of that. Maybe you don’t even have time for all the thinking we’re doing about it. You just hide it.”
“Here.”
“Here. Like I said, maybe he needed the ride. He comes here, the gate is closed. Nobody around. Maybe he knew the gate was closed.”
“Then he’d still have to get over to the east gate. The only way to do that-”
Holliday nodded. “That’s right. If somebody else was driving his car.”
Connolly stared at the ground, silent. “Two. I hadn’t thought of that.”
“I don’t say it happened that way. Just that it could have.”
“It makes sense. There had to be another car.”
“Could be and had to be are two different things.”
But Connolly dismissed him with a wave of his hand, still thinking. “Okay, he gets the car here and someone else gets him back on the Hill. You agree he’s on the Hill?”
“I’d say it was indicated,” Holliday said, a cop giving testimony.
“So why leave the keys? Why not just throw them away?”
Holliday sighed and took out a cigarette. “Yeah, why not? I’ve been thinking about that. Maybe just force of habit, you know? You don’t throw keys away-what for? You don’t want them on you, but you don’t know if you’re going to need them again either.”
“You think he was going to use the car?”
“No, I was thinking of something else.” He looked up, searching the canyon rim with a turn of his head. “Must have been pretty dark when he parked it here, right? So he can’t tell if it’s been hid real good. I mean, that time of night, you can’t see anything. So I think-it’s just a guess, now-that he wanted to take another look in the day, see what he could see. What if you look down from up there,” he said, pointing to the rim, “and there’s this shiny new car. Even just a piece of it. You’d have to move it, make sure it was really out of sight. So he might’ve left the keys just in case. ‘Course, he never thought you boys would be shooting up the place.”
“He’s on the Hill,” Connolly said.
“Yes, he is,” Holliday said quietly. “Or was.”
“He’d be taking a hell of a chance, coming back for the car.”
“Mister, he took a hell of a chance when he murdered a man.”
As a V-E celebration, he took Mills to dinner in Santa Fe, following Holliday’s car down the back road, past Bandelier and the Rio Grande Valley and the humpy stretches of twisted pinon and red earth. The plaza was crowded, the sleepy square awake with people waving little flags and drinking openly, shouting victory with the bells of the cathedral. It was early, but La Fonda was packed, and they spent an hour at the bar before they could get a table.
“Do you really think he’s FBI?” Connolly said, indicating the bartender.
“That’s what they say. Makes a great martini, though,” Mills said, sipping at the rim of the wide glass.
“Maybe he’ll go legit after the war. A good bartender’s never out of work.”
“The FBI always finds something for them to do.”
“What about you?”
“After? A nice house on the North Shore. Nice office with a window. Wacker Drive, I think. How does that sound?”
“Nice.”
“Yeah, I know, dull as hell. Christ, it’s something, isn’t it, to think this might be the most exciting time of your life? And all I did was not get shot.”
Dinner arrived, a broad platter of chiles rellenos, and Mills ordered another martini.
“You could catch a murderer,” Connolly said. “That’s exciting.”
“You catch him.”
“He’s on the Hill,” Connolly said slowly.
“I know. I figured, what with the car and all.” He ate.
“That what you and Holliday were talking about?”
Connolly nodded.
“You think he’s still up there?”
“Yes.”
“And that doesn’t bother you?”
“No, why should it?”
“It scares the hell out of me. Did it ever occur to you that if he did it once, he’d do it again?”
“But we don’t know why he did it.”
“The motive’s easier this time. You get away with murder and some guy tracks you down to nail you for it. So you nail him first. You’d have to.”
“Two guys tracking you,” Connolly said, looking at him.
“That’s what I mean. I’ve never been a target before.”
“Do you want to be reassigned?” Connolly asked seriously.
Mills went back to his food. “No, that’s all right.” He smiled. “You’ve got me interested now. Just watch my back, will you? Be nice to get back to old Winnetka in one piece.”
“He doesn’t know,” Connolly said. “He doesn’t know I know he’s there.”
Mills raised his eyes again. “He knows you’re looking.”
So they celebrated the end of the Third Reich with martinis and chiles rellenos, as if the war had caught them posted somewhere overseas. Afterward, pressured to give up the table, they walked out into the plaza, where people were shouting in Spanish, slightly rowdy but good-natured. It was beginning to get dark, the warm pink and coral of the adobes fading back to earth.
“Do me a favor,” Connolly said. “Let’s drive down to San Isidro.”
“There’s nothing to see there. They’ve been all over it a hundred times.”
“I know. I just want to be able to picture it in my mind. Indulge me, okay?”
“For a change.”
It was slow going over the Cerrillos bridge, with the streets still filled with pockets of celebration parties, but they thinned as the road headed south, past gas stations and quiet houses. There were a few cars in the alley next to the church and, inside, the glow of candles and the sound of voices. Mills idled the car across the street, watching Connolly study the building.
“Seen enough?”
“Let’s go in for a minute. They must be saying mass. They do this every night?”
“No, we checked. Probably a celebration. For the war.”
“Not very many cars.”
“People walk. It’s a neighborhood church. Only the tourists drive out here.”
Connolly frowned, brooding, then shook the thought away and entered the church. It was crowded inside, rows of women with shawls over their heads and men holding hats. The small lights of votive candles licked against the whitewashed walls, and the reredos, intricate and dark during the day, glowed now as if it were simmering on a low flame. At the altar end of the narrow room, carved wooden saints, crude and bright with paint, looked down on the congregation like primitive Aztec gargoyles. A priest was speaking in Spanish at the lectern. Connolly felt he had literally stepped back in time. The faithful had gathered like this for centuries, fingering rosaries, praying for rain, while the rest of the world went to hell. But these were the people who had beat the Nazis too. In the room there must be Gold Star mothers. He wondered if they sent telegrams in Spanish or if the bad news was the piece of yellow paper itself, the army messenger. From the outside their lives seemed timelessly simple, hoarding squash and chiles, sticky candy on name days, but they had driven tanks and thrown grenades at scared, frozen teenagers who were trying to kill them. All those mad northern people who wanted-what? More room to breathe, or something like that. Now a victory in Europe. And they had walked here. Only the tourists drove.
Connolly stepped back out the door, feeling like an intruder. San Isidro had nothing to do with them. He asked Mills to head for the Alameda, trying to imagine that other drive as they passed the quiet streets. It was dark in the ribbon of park along the river, but a few people were out strolling, lit by passing headlights. He saw one couple kissing against a tree. Mills parked the car by the murder scene without being asked, and they sat looking at the bushes.
“There are people,” Connolly said finally. “Why bring him somewhere where there are people?”
“There weren’t,” Mills answered. “It was late. It was raining.”
“But he couldn’t be sure.”
“Maybe he drove around until the coast was clear.”
“Maybe.”
“It’s a park. You mind your own business, especially at night. Look at those guys.” He nodded toward a man walking unsteadily, propping up a drunk friend under his arm. “Who’s to say he isn’t dead? Who’s going to ask?”
“You have an answer for everything,” Connolly said.
“Let’s go home, Mike. There’s nothing here.”
But Connolly, not yet satisfied, asked that they drive the back way to the canyon by the west gate.
“Retracing steps?” Mills said as they climbed the road to Bandelier.
“I can’t see it. Look, we figure the car’s here because the guy needed to get back to the Hill, right? Then why leave the Hill at all? You’ve seen the church. If you were meeting somebody, there are a hundred places on the Hill that would be better. Why go all the way to Santa Fe to a public place?”
“I thought the idea was they didn’t want to be seen together. You know.”
“That was the idea. It’s wrong.” Mills looked from the wheel, surprised. Connolly ignored him. “They could just go into the woods for that. Or for anything.”
“If the other guy was already on the Hill.”
“Exactly. That’s what doesn’t make sense. He was. He must have been. There’s no other explanation for the car. So why go all the way to San Isidro to meet somebody who’s just down the street?”
“I give up. Why?”
“He wasn’t meeting Karl.”
Mills drove in silence for a minute. “Want to run that by me again?”
“He was meeting someone else. Someone off the Hill. It’s the only way it makes sense.”
“But Karl’s the one who’s dead.”
“He wasn’t supposed to be there. It was-a surprise.”
“You don’t know any of this.”
“No, I’m guessing. But follow me. Tonight I stood there in that alley next to the church and I thought, no one in his right mind would pick this place to kill someone. Open like that. A Mex neighborhood. But no one did pick it. It must have been an accident-an accident that it happened there, I mean. But it happens. Then what? Everything has to be done in a hurry. You have to take some risks, even. All along we’ve been trying to follow Karl’s moves. How would Karl see it? What would he do? Like he was the criminal. But all that stops in the alley. It’s the other guy we ought to be thinking about. What would he do? Tonight I was trying to imagine how he saw it.”
“And?”
“I had to get rid of a body. I had to get rid of a car. And I had to get home.”
“I’d say you did a pretty good job.”
“I was lucky too. Nobody saw. The one thing I couldn’t imagine, though, was Karl. If I’d wanted to kill him, I would have done it somewhere else. Why go to San Isidro to see him? Answer: I didn’t.”
Mills thought for a minute. “But he was there anyway. Another accident?”
“No. He followed me.”
“Now you’re really guessing.”
“Why not? He was security, wasn’t he? He was used to tailing people.”
“There isn’t much of that. We go with people. Guards. We don’t usually tail them. That’s FBI stuff.”
“But Karl might. He was capable of that, wasn’t he?” Mills hesitated. “Yes,” he said finally.
Connolly looked at him. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“He did tail people, didn’t he?”
“I guess so. He knew things-where people went, things like that. He liked knowing things. He’d say something once in a while. How else would he know? I guess he must have been following them. I never thought about it before.”
“Yes you did.”
“All right, I did. But it wasn’t official, so what was it? I figured it was just Karl. He liked being the sheriff. You learn not to pay too much attention to things like that.”
“That’s a hell of a thing for a security officer to say. You’re supposed to pay attention.”
“Yeah, well, how did I know he was going to get himself killed, for Christ’s sake? I just thought he was a nut like the rest of them.”
“The rest of who?”
“Security. They’re all a little nuts. Maybe you too. How do I know? Look, I didn’t ask for this assignment. I don’t get shot and I keep my head down. You stick it out and there’s always somebody ready to chop it off. You never know what anybody’s up to. For all I knew, Karl was FBI-he sure acted like it. So you don’t look too closely. Just keep your head down and stay out of the way.”
“He wasn’t FBI.”
“You know that for sure?”
“Groves would have told me.”
“Yeah.” Mills laughed. “Just like he told Lansdale about you, right? You’ve got the head of project security sitting there in Washington and his boss puts an outside man in and he doesn’t know what the hell is going on. He’s a little nuts already. Now how do you think he feels?”
“I don’t know,” Connolly said quietly. “How does he?”
Mills looked ahead at the road, saying nothing.
“He asked you to report on me, didn’t he?” Connolly said, his voice low. Mills still said nothing. “Didn’t he?”
“I’m sorry, Mike.”
“Jesus Christ.” He felt disgust mingled with irrational fear, the way he had felt the time his apartment had been burgled. There was nothing to steal. It was just the fact of someone’s having been there at all. But now there was something. He imagined Emma’s name sitting in a Washington file. “Tell him anything interesting?”
“No, nothing like that,” Mills said. “It’s just the case, Mike. He wants to know what’s going on. He thinks Groves should have put him in charge.”
“So your boss tells you to spy on me so he can spy on his boss. All in the family. Nice.”
“I was ordered, Mike,” he said quietly.
“What a fucking waste of time. And who’s checking up on you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you. That’s what it’s like. Maybe Karl was.”
Connolly thought for a minute. “Is that possible? Would he be asked to do something like that? Unofficially?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t think they trusted him that way.”
“The way they trust you. Why not?”
“He was foreign.”
“Everybody here’s foreign.”
“That’s what makes them crazy. They can’t trust anyone. Mike, look, I have to ask. Anything I tell you-”
“You can trust me,” Connolly said, his voice heavy with sarcasm.
They were driving around the bottom of the mesa, away from the canyon where the car had been hidden, back toward the east gate. Connolly looked out the window, again imagining the drive that night.
“I don’t want any trouble,” Mills said.
But Connolly was lost in his own thoughts. “You have to admit, he’d be ideal from their point of view.”
“No. You don’t know them. He was too smart for them.”
“You weren’t.”
“They didn’t have much choice. I’m the only one you’re working with. Anyway, I’m not a Communist. Karl might have been. For a while, anyway. That makes them crazier than anything.”
“I thought he was tortured by them. Or was that a lie too?”
“No, there’s no question about that. He hated them. But there it was in his file. They’re not going to use anybody with that in his file. I know. They had me on the clearance files the first few months I was here. Lansdale’s like a maniac with that stuff. Van Drasek’s worse. You met him yet? He’s a real cutie. Crazy.”
Connolly smiled. “Pretty high opinion of your colleagues.”
“They’re just following orders too. But look who’s giving them. Van Drasek’s specialty is Reds, so he keeps busy. You know what it’s like here. Half the Berkeley crowd were parlor pinks. The unions, the Negroes-the usual. It doesn’t amount to a damn thing, but try to tell old Van Drasek that. He’s on a mission. He’s out at Lawrence’s lab again-goes through the place over and over.”
“Maybe he’s just trying to get away from his wife.”
“We’d all be better off. He’s serious, though. I’ve seen him deny clearance to scientists here and then call the university to get them fired. A real vindictive prick. And he’s got Lawrence running in every direction, scared shitless they’ll stop his funding. He’s got files on everyone. I know.”
“You know a lot,” Connolly said, thinking of that first night, Mills’s shiny head bobbing at the square dance. “Why doesn’t Oppenheimer put a stop to it?”
“Are you kidding? He’s the one they want most. They’ve all got the knives out for Oppenheimer. You should see the file they’ve got on him.”
“I have seen it.”
“Not all of it, you haven’t. Every meeting. Every check for the Spanish refugees. His brother. The girlfriend-she was a party member. His wife used to be married to one. His students-any kid that’s left of Roosevelt they blame on him. It just piles up. Van Drasek wouldn’t even clear him until Groves told him to fuck off and just pushed it through himself.”
“But why? What does he think Oppenheimer’s doing, working for the Russians?”
“Why. He’s crazy. He’d love it if Oppie were working for them-that would be perfect. Actually, what it is, Oppenheimer thinks it’s bullshit and they know he thinks it. Which means he thinks they’re bullshit. Which they are. But they can’t touch him as long as he’s building their damn bomb and Groves protects him. And the more he tries to get along with them, the more they hate him. They’re all obsessed with him-the crazies, anyway. I think that’s why Karl was following him. He was a little obsessed too.”
“What?”
“Well, if he was. I don’t know for sure. You’re the one who thought he was following somebody.”
“I never thought it was Oppenheimer.”
“I know, it doesn’t fit your story. But he’s the only one I can ever remember Karl talking about. He was interested in Oppie.”
“Why?”
“I think because they were. Karl was ambitious, you know? Maybe he thought if he could get something on Oppie, he’d angle himself a nice big promotion. Be one of the big boys. Of course, that’s where he was crazy, because they didn’t trust him either.”
They had begun the steep climb up the hill. Connolly was thinking again. “So if he had anything on somebody, he’d want to make sure.”
“Home at last,” Mills said as they approached the gate. And, oddly, it was. Connolly looked at the high wire fence, the MPs checking passes, the rough buildings dim in the moonlight, and felt at home, somewhere to screen out the rest of the world. Was this what the killer had felt-relief at being back, the canyon and the panic at the church behind him?
“Are you going to report our conversation tonight?” Connolly said.
“I have to write something,” Mills said apologetically.
“Try this. Say that I have evidence Karl was asked by Lansdale to do a check on Van Drasek. And accidentally get a copy to Van Drasek. We could have some fun with them.”
Mills shook his head and smiled. “You have the fun. I just want to get back to Winnetka in one piece.”
After they dropped the car at the motor pool, they walked back toward the Tech Area. The streets were quiet, the usual lights still shining in the labs. Not even victory in Europe interrupted the project.
“Just out of curiosity,” Connolly said, “what will you write?”
“I don’t know. Nothing much. You’re puzzled about the car. Can’t figure it out.” He paused. “He likes to hear you’re stumped. Makes Groves look like a jerk for putting you in. So I usually just say you’re not getting anywhere.”
“I’m not. And what if there was a genuine security breach? While I was getting nowhere and he was looking good?”
Mills shrugged. “What’s more important in the scheme of things, somebody else’s security or your own job? They’ve got a healthy sense of priorities in G-2. Nightcap?”
“No, but I’ll buy you a coffee if the lodge is still open.”
“Mike, about all this-I couldn’t help it. You know I would never say anything-”
Connolly looked at him, the pleasant, eager face that avoided waves. “Unless you had to.”
Mills looked as if he’d been slapped.
“Never mind,” Connolly said, not wanting to push him. “It’s just the way things are now.”
“It’s the war.”
“Yeah, the war.”
There were still people at the lodge, smoking over leftover dishes and coffee cups, the celebration dinners finished. A few men from the office hailed them and Mills joined them with something like relief, tired of intimacy. Connolly sat with them for a while, listening to the easy jokes, ignoring the rest of the room because Emma was three tables away. She had glanced up when he came in, then turned back to her table as if he weren’t there. He heard her laugh. The officers at his table were telling their own war stories-Feynman sending a letter cut into pieces to kid the censors; the physicist who sneaked out through a hole in the fence and kept coming back through the gate, a Marx Brothers trick. He looked at their faces and wondered if one of them checked on the others, an easy deceit. Was she aware of him? They were ten feet apart, no more. Did Daniel see her glance over, notice some nervous pitch to her voice? He moved restlessly in his seat, uncomfortable, afraid of giving himself away. But no one paid any attention.
He looked in the other direction, toward a large table of scientists who were laughing at something Teller was saying. Ulam, Metropolis, and a few of the others surrounded him like a court, and he was beaming with pleasure, the center of attention, the bushy eyebrows raised in arcs over the round, vain face. Oppenheimer’s problem child. And of course that was why he was happy: Oppenheimer wasn’t there; the table, its little world, was his. Connolly wondered for a moment what Oppenheimer meant to them, whether, like Mills’s boss, they were simply waiting for their moment. But it seemed absurd. The table was genial, the room itself filled with high spirits, a bright faculty lounge on Oppenheimer’s enchanted campus. How had he managed it? He listened, people said, he understood everything. He kept the army away. He defused the rivalries. Von Neumann’s mathematics. Fast neutrons. Diaper service. Everything. People wanted to be with him at parties. And, according to Mills, they were out to get him.
Was Oppenheimer aware of any of it? Did he notice the jealousy and suspicion, frosted over now in the consensus of getting the job done? Did he know that Karl had been following him? Just another in a long line of checks and clearances, too familiar to bother about. A nuisance. And was Connolly any better? Another one of Groves’s whims, blundering in on the scent of small scandal when there was important work to be done. Did Oppenheimer resent him too? Connolly felt suddenly like Mills, wanting to explain, to excuse himself. He meant no harm to the project, and he knew that one way or another-a crime revealed, a husband betrayed-he would do it damage. And his first impulse? He smiled to himself. Like everyone else with a problem at Los Alamos, he wanted to talk to Oppenheimer.
He wandered out to the Tech Area, nodding at Emma’s table as he left, surprised by the shiver of guilty pleasure he felt at getting away with something. It was easy to look at her now; she was someone else here, another person. The lights were still on in Main Tech. He showed his badge to the sentry MP at the inner fence and climbed the few wooden steps to the building. Inside, it was quiet. He turned left, toward Oppenheimer’s office, then stopped in the corridor. What, after all, had he come to say? A report on the car. A question about Karl. A complaint about Lansdale. Excuses, not worth his time. The fact was, he simply wanted to talk, like an eager graduate student working out a proof. When he saw that Oppenheimer’s office was dark, he felt relieved and foolish at the same time. Why had he expected him to be here so late? Yet it was part of the myth he was helping construct. In his mind, the brightly lit door was always open.
The door next to the office, however, was open, fluorescent light pouring out into the corridor. There was no one inside. Instinctively he reached in to snap out the light, then stopped. It had been years since he had been in a classroom, and he stood there for a minute taking in the familiar smell of chalk and dust and dry radiator heat. The room was small-a desk in one corner piled with books, a conference table with chairs, a blackboard, and two narrow windows that faced Ashley Pond. The blackboard had the chalk smears of a hasty eraser, and Connolly went over to it, automatically picking up the eraser to finish. He took off his coat and looked at the blackboard. In school, it had helped to map things out, make the problem visual. He remembered writing formulas on the board, so clear when you could see them that the answer followed at the end. He took a piece of chalk and, almost without thinking, began to draw.
Near the bottom he drew the outline of an adobe church, two squat towers and a cross, with a side patch of alley with an X in it. A line followed the Cerrillos Road up the board, crossing the chalk arc of bridge and intersecting with the Alameda. The lines came quickly, a squiggle of river, a generic puff of bush, another X. Then some of the city streets, the rectangle of the plaza, and off in the far left corner, forty miles away, the wavy ridge of canyons, another X, the chalky portico symbols of gates.
When he stepped back, he saw everything he knew about the logistics of the case, an algebra formula disguised as a child’s map. He held the chalk in one hand, resting his elbow in the other, as if he were staring at a painting in a museum. How to connect the Xes? He was at the church. He had come to meet someone. Karl arrived. Three cars? Faintly he heard the clunky government-issue clock ticking over the board. How many to the final X? But there’d been no signs of another car in the box canyon.
The building was still, saved from eeriness by a background murmur of voices down the hall. Working late. He stared at the map. He could see Karl’s car moving up the Cerrillos Road. What about the others? How many at the second X? He stared until even the background sounds faded away. Rain. Headlights. There must be a way to see.
The gasp from behind startled him. He turned around to see Friedrich Eisler put a hand to his heart, a European gesture of surprise.
“I am so sorry,” he said, flustered. “I didn’t mean-for a moment I thought-you looked so like Robert.”
“Robert?”
“Yes. Of course, you are much bigger. But the way you stood there, with the chalk. Forgive me, I didn’t mean to disturb you.” He turned to go.
“No, please, come in. I shouldn’t be here anyway. I was just doodling.”
Eisler smiled, “Yes, doodling.” He pronounced it as an exotic word. “It was very like. Of course, this was many years ago. Gottingen. He would stand there for hours, you know, just looking at the board. Thinking. But what kind of thinking? That I could never discover. Once I saw him in the morning and I came back later and he was still there. And then later. All day. Just holding the chalk, looking.”
“Did he find the answer?”
Eisler shrugged and smiled. “That I don’t remember.”
“He was your student?”
“A colleague. I am not so old, you know.”
“What was he like?”
Eisler smiled again. “So. You too. Everyone wants to know Robert. What was he like? The same. Of course, not so busy. In those days, there was more time. For thinking. Like you, with the chalk.”
Connolly had moved away from the board, and Eisler looked at it, puzzled. “This is not, I take it, a mathematical formula.”
“No.” Connolly laughed, embarrassed. “Just a map. I was trying to figure something out. I suppose I’d better clean up,” he said, taking the eraser.
But Eisler was looking thoughtfully at the map, his eyes darting from one X to the others.
“No, don’t bother,” he said absently. “No one comes here. Perhaps you’ll find your answer, like Robert.” He turned wearily from the board to face Connolly. “Then you must tell me how you did it. The process. I always wondered.”
“The Oppenheimer Principle,” Connolly said lightly.
“Yes. Well, I leave you to your problem.”
But Connolly was reluctant to see him go. “I was thinking about something you said to me.”
“Really? What is that?”
“About the Nazis giving us permission. To do what we do.”
“Yes.”
“Today I thought, they’re gone. Who’s going to give us permission now?”
Eisler looked at him, his gentle eyes suddenly approving, a teacher pleased with his pupil. “My friend, I don’t know. My war is finished. That is for you to decide.” He stretched his arm back toward the blackboard. “You must use the Oppenheimer Principle.”
“With me, it’s guesswork.”
“Only the answers. The questions are real. Keep asking the questions.”
“Maybe you have to be him to make it work.”
Eisler sighed. “It will work for you too, I think.”
“I’m not like him.”
“No? Perhaps not. Robert’s a very simple man, you know. He does not-” He searched for a word. “Dissemble. Yes, dissemble. He doesn’t know how. There is no mystery there.”
“He’s a mystery to me.”
Eisler moved toward the door. “Perhaps that’s because you do dissemble, Mr. Connolly. Good night.”
Connolly watched him go, his tired shoulders sloping as he went down the corridor. When he looked back at the blackboard, he saw nothing more than crude grade-school sketches, a child’s problem. No car was driving down the road, nervous about a body. No questions. He stared at it for a few minutes, then took up the black eraser and wiped the chalk away. Tomorrow there would be grown-up numbers there.
Outside, he put on his jacket against the night chill. The moon outlined the buildings with faint white lines. He felt that he was walking in one of his blackboard maps. This road went south from the Tech Area. The box canyon was in the far distance to his right. The longer he walked, the more the map filled in, until he could see the whole plateau, fingers stretching away from the Jemez toward Santa Fe. He kept walking, awake with coffee and the bright night sky. But it had been cloudy that night, perhaps already raining when the car pulled into the canyon. Dark. And suddenly he thought of a question and started walking faster, glancing at his watch as he headed away from the building toward the far west gate.
His luck held. The same soldier was on night duty, sitting inside the lighted post with a Thermos and a comic book. He looked up, surprised, when Connolly said hello.
“Mighty late,” he said, a question in his voice.
“I was just out taking a walk. It’s a nice night for it.”
“I guess,” he said, all Piedmont twang and suspicion.
“I have a question for you. You have any more of that coffee?”
“Well, sure. Nice to have some company. What’s on your mind?” He poured some coffee into the lid cup and handed it to Connolly.
“At night, when they close the entrance, what happens exactly?”
“Well, they close it. I don’t know what you mean.”
“They lower the crossing barrier to cars, right? But someone’s still here?”
He nodded. “Me, usually. I’ve been pulling night shift regular.”
“But if a car came by accident, you’d let him in?”
“They don’t. There’s two barriers. Road’s closed down at the turnoff, so a car don’t come up this far.”
“But you’re here anyway.”
The soldier smiled, a sly grin. “Well, that’s to keep people from going out. Ain’t nobody coming in that late.”
“But if they were-I mean, someone could walk in, couldn’t he?”
“Walk?” The vowel spread into syllables.
“Just for the sake of argument. Someone could walk in, right? There’s nothing to stop him.”
“Well, there’s me. I’d stop him.”
“If you heard him.”
The soldier looked at him guardedly, as if he were somehow in trouble and didn’t know why. “I’d hear him.”
“You didn’t hear me. Right now, while we’ve been talking here, someone could have slipped by outside, couldn’t he? Look, I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m just trying to get a picture of how it works.”
“It works fine,” the soldier said defiantly, the vowel stretched again. Connolly stepped out of the box, sipping the coffee as he looked around, the soldier following him. “Ain’t nobody going to walk, you know,” he said, still worried. “Where they going to be walking from? Who’s going to walk?”
“I don’t know,” Connolly said, looking at the road, the wide space at the pole, the dark on the side. “Nobody, I guess. I was just wondering.” It would have been easy, no more difficult than a stroll. “You patrol out here or just stay in the post?”
“I got my rounds. If somebody’s complaining, they don’t know jackshit. I’m up and down here all night, even if it is cold.” But it had been raining, a comforting drum on the post roof. “What’s all this about, anyway? You got some kind of problem?”
“No. They’re just looking over all the security points.”
“What for?” he said, still suspicious.
“It’s the army. They don’t need a reason.”
The soldier grinned. “Yeah, I guess.”
Connolly looked up and down the dark road again. One car, not two. Hide it and walk in. A long walk, but safe enough. Worth the chance. And then home.
“How long you been on the Hill?” he asked casually.
“ ’Bout a year, I guess. I ain’t never had no trouble before.”
“You haven’t got any now. I was just curious. Like it?”
The soldier shrugged. “Ain’t nothin’ to do. Beats combat, though, I guess. You read about them Jap dive-bombers? They’re just plain crazy, those people.”
Connolly nodded. “Year’s a long time. You must know everybody up here.”
“I just look at the passes. We don’t get invited to no parties. That’s only for the longhairs.”
“You know Karl Bruner?”
The soldier looked at him, his eyes squinting again in suspicion. “That’s the guy who got himself killed.”
There it was again-Karl’s fault. “Well, somebody killed him. Know him?”
“I knew who he was. I never talked to him or nothing. I heard they got the guy,” he said, a question.
“Yeah, they did. He use this gate much?”
“Off and on.”
“So you’d see him then.”
The soldier shrugged again. “Well, sure, if I was on duty.”
“They told me he liked to drive around.”
“Yeah, in that Buick of his.” So he noticed.
“Did he ever have anyone with him?”
The soldier looked at him, puzzled, as if he hadn’t understood the question.
“Did he?” Connolly asked, pressing.
“Sometimes. You’re asking an awful lot of questions,” he said, cautious again.
“Just one. Who used to go with him?”
The soldier looked away. “Is this some kind of investigation or something? What do you want to know for?”
Connolly stared at him.
“I mean, he’s dead. I don’t want to go making trouble for nobody. That was his business. Now it’s just hers, I guess.”
“Hers?”
“Well, sure. I figured they was just-scootin’ off, you know? None of my business.”
“You’d better make it your business. I mean it. You know who she was? What she looked like? I need to know this.”
The soldier looked flustered. “Well, hell, I thought you did know. I didn’t mean to start nothing.”
“How would I know?”
“Well, I thought she was a friend of yours too.”
Connolly stood still. When he finally spoke, his voice had the low steadiness of a threat. “Are you trying to tell me it was Mrs. Pawlowski?”
The soldier retreated a step. “Well, God Almighty, you kept askin’. Now don’t go and blame me.”
“How many times?” Connolly said, his voice still unnaturally steady.
“A few.”
“Where were they going?”
“Where?” And now his face, no longer frightened, filled with a sly grin, as if the question were irrelevant. “I guess you’ll have to ask her.”