Santa Fe gave its name to a railroad, but the train itself stops twenty miles to the southeast, at Lamy, a dusty town in the high desert that seemed to have been blown in by the wind and got stuck at the tracks. Michael Connolly thought he’d arrived in the middle of nowhere. The train had been crowded, a sea of uniforms and businessmen with travel priority and women holding children in their laps, but only a few got off on the sleepy platform. Beyond the buildings and the jumble of pickup trucks that had come to meet the passengers, there was nothing to see but scrub grass and sage until the tracks finally disappeared in the direction of the mountains. The young soldier looking eagerly at each face was clearly meant for him. He looked like a high school shortstop, jug ears sticking out of his shaved head.
“Mr. Connolly?” he asked finally, when the passengers had dwindled to an unlikely three.
“Yes.”
“Sorry, sir. I was looking for a uniform.”
“They haven’t got me yet,” Connolly said, smiling. “I’m just a liaison. Is this really Santa Fe?”
The soldier grinned. “It gets better. Help you with that?” he said, picking up Connolly’s suitcase. “We’re right over here.” The car was a Ford, still shiny under a blanket of dust.
Connolly wiped his forehead, glancing up at the cloudless sky.
“Nothing but blue skies, huh?”
“Yes, sir. Sunny days, cool nights. They got weather here, that’s for sure. Best thing about it.”
“Been here long?” Connolly said, getting into the car.
“Since January. Straight from boot. Not much to do, but it beats overseas.”
“Anything would, I guess.”
“Not that I wouldn’t like to see some action before it’s all over.”
“Better hurry, then.”
“Naw, I figure the Japs’ll hold out another year at least.”
“Let’s hope not.” It came out quickly, a kind of scolding.
“Yes, sir,” the soldier said, formal again.
“What’s on the program, anyway?”
“First we’ll get you checked in at Santa Fe. Mrs. McKibben will have your stuff. Then my orders are to get you up to the Hill ASAP. General Groves wants to see you before he goes back to Washington tonight.”
“Is ‘the Hill’ a code name?”
The soldier looked slightly puzzled. “I don’t think so. I never heard that, anyway. It’s just what everybody calls it around here.”
“I assume there is one-a hill, that is.”
“What they call a mesa. Spanish for table,” he said, a tour guide now. “That’s what they looked like, I guess-flat-topped hills. Anyway, there used to be a school there, kind of a dude ranch school for rich kids, I think. Sure doesn’t look like a school now.”
“What does it look like?”
The soldier grinned, breezy again. “Look like? Well, if you’ll pardon my French, like a fucking mess.”
Santa Fe, however, was pretty. The adobes, which Connolly had never seen, seemed to draw in the sun, holding its light and color like dull penumbras of a flame. The narrow streets leading to the plaza were filled with American stores-a Woolworth’s, a Rexall Drugs that had been dropped into a foreign city. The people too, dressed in cowboy hats and jeans, looked like visitors. Only the Mexican women, wrapped in shawls, and the Indians, nodding over their piles of tourist blankets, were really at home. The plaza itself was quiet, a piece of Spain drowsing in an endless siesta.
“That’s the Palace of the Governors,” the soldier said, pointing to the long adobe building that lined one side of the square. “Oldest government office in the country, or something like that. Project office is right around the corner.”
The sense of enchantment held. They walked through the quiet courtyard of a small adobe house where the only sound was the travelogue splash of a fountain. But America returned inside. A bright, cheerful woman, hair piled on top of her head, was busy on the phone as she arranged papers on the desk in front of her.
“I know space is tight, but he’s just got to have it.” She covered the mouthpiece and nodded to Connolly. “I’ll be with you in a sec.” Then, to the phone, “Edith, please see what you can do. He just won’t take no for an answer. Give me a call back when you hear, okay? Yes, I know. Bye now.” She smiled up at Connolly without pausing for breath. “You must be Mr. Connolly. I’m Dorothy McKibben. Welcome to Santa Fe,” she said, shaking hands. “You certainly have picked a crazy day. ’Course, they’re all crazy one way or another. I had to get all this together in a hurry, but I think it’s all here.” She handed him a manila envelope. “ID, ration card, driver’s license. No names, of course, we just go by numbers up on the Hill. Local stores are used to this, so you shouldn’t have any problem. Try not to get stopped for speeding, though-the police have a fit writing out a ticket to a number. You’ve been cleared for a white badge-that allows you into the Technical Area, so you’ll be able to go anywhere. I’ve included the army bus schedule into Santa Fe just in case, but you’ll have your own car.” She raised an eyebrow. “That’s pretty unusual around here, so you must be important, I guess.” She made a small laugh that said she was no stranger to importance. “Security office will give you your housing assignment up top. I’m sorry we couldn’t find anything at Fuller Lodge, but we’ve got wall-to-wall visitors for some reason, and it couldn’t be helped. If any of them leave, of course, we can reassign you right away. Let’s see, what else? All mail to P.O. Box 1663, Santa Fe. No other address. You should know that mail is censored. We don’t like to do it, but it became a security issue. You get used to it.”
“Censored here?” Connolly asked.
She smiled. “Dear me, no. I’m not that much of a busybody. Army censors. Off-site. Wouldn’t be fair to have someone you know poking around in your mail, and of course I know everybody.”
“Of course.”
She blushed. “I don’t mean it that way, to brag or anything. It’s just what I do. That and try to find an empty seat when the general decides to fly out of Albuquerque on the spur of the moment and that means bumping somebody else, who’ll be madder than a hornet.”
Connolly smiled. “Well, there’s a war on.”
She smiled back. “You’d be surprised what little ice that cuts at the airport. I wish he’d take the train, the way he usually does. But we’ll get him on somehow.”
And of course she would. Connolly looked at her, surprised at how quickly he’d been taken in and charmed. Everything about Los Alamos seemed disjointed-the train that stopped somewhere else, this city that didn’t seem to be in America, and now this good-natured, competent woman who managed emigre physicists and army generals as if they were hungry customers at a church potluck supper. He wondered how much she knew, what she made of it all. A secret project that would help win the war-was that enough? Was that all she needed? According to his briefing, there were now four thousand people at Los Alamos. Mrs. McKibben had been there from the start, settling them in, handing out numbered identities. What did she think they were doing, all these people with unpronounceable names and housing problems, working into the middle of the night on a hilltop?
“Now, if you need anything else at all, you just let me know.”
“Thanks. I’m sorry to have put you to so much trouble.”
“That’s what we’re here for.” For a moment he thought he saw in her eyes the inevitable question: what are you here for, with your car and your wad of coupons? But if she wondered, she said nothing.
“The car. Where do I pick it up?”
“Why, you’ve been in it. That is, once the motor pool assigns it to you.”
“Which they will.”
“You bet. I signed the papers.”
They drove for almost an hour before they got to the long twisting road up the mesa. It was graded and paved now but still had all the debris and scattered equipment of a permanent construction site. Bulldozers and back-hoes perched at the edge of hairpin curves, and halfway up they passed a car awaiting rescue, one of its thinly patched tires finally done in by too many rocks and baked-over ruts. Once the road had all been dirt, a glorified mule track for pack trips up to the school, and even now it looked temporary and risky, ready at any moment to be reclaimed by scrub. It must be a hell of a drive at night, Connolly thought as he watched the soldier negotiate the curves, pulling hard at the wheel, an amusement park ride.
The landscape changed as they climbed, sagebrush and stunted junipers giving way to taller pinons and alpine trees. The air smelled fresh, as if it had been rubbed with astringent, and the bright blue sky went on forever. Connolly felt the alertness of higher altitude, awakened from Santa Fe’s timeless nap. There was traffic on the road now, trucks grinding up the steep grade or jerking and halting their way back down, and everything moved quickly. The entire hill was on the march. As they approached the east gate, the activity increased. Cars waited to be passed through security, and beyond the fence Connolly could see a giant water tower and the instant city, a jerry-built ant farm of dull green army-issue buildings, Quonset huts, and barrack apartments. They were still building it. The air itself seemed obscured by dust and tangles of overhead wires, noisy with construction and running motors. Men, mostly civilians, darted through the unpaved dirt streets with the quick steps of people who had somewhere to go. Connolly’s first thought was that a whole college had somehow been dropped accidentally into an army camp. While Santa Fe dreamed on below, up here in the high, cool air, everything was busy.
They passed through the tollbooth checkpoints and parked just outside the Technical Area, a group of buildings surrounded by yet another high wire-mesh fence with two strands of barbed wire running along the top. Connolly glanced up at the watchtowers, where bored MPs gazed out toward the mountains. It was an indifferent concentration camp, too cheerful to inspire any alarm. Girls in short dresses and sweaters, presumably secretaries, passed through the fence, barely flashing badges at the young guards. The two largest buildings were long barracks of offices, connected by a second-story covered passageway over the main road, which gave the town its own form of grand portal. It was late afternoon, and buses were filling with day laborers for the trip back home, down the mesa. Connolly noticed a busload of Indian women, with their stern faces and braided hair, pulling away toward the gate. In the most secret place in the world, there was maid service.
Connolly and his bags were deposited at the security office with Lieutenant Mills, tall, pencil-thin, and prematurely balding in his twenties, who smiled nervously and kept glancing away, as if he wanted to examine his new colleague from an angle before meeting him head on.
“Look, we’ve got a lot to go over, but General Groves wants to see you right away, so it’ll have to wait. I’ll show you around afterward. Colonel Lansdale’s away, as usual, so it’s just us. And the staff, of course.”
“How many?”
“Altogether twenty-eight military and seven civilians in G-2, but only four of us here.”
“Not a lot, then.”
“Well, we’ve never had any security problems before.”
“Do you have one now?”
Mills looked at him and took the bait. “I assume that’s what you’re here to find out.”
“But you haven’t been told?”
“Me? I just run the bodyguards. They don’t have to tell me anything.”
“Who gets the guards?”
“All the top scientists-Oppie, Fermi, Bethe, Kistiakowsky. Anyone considered vital to the project who needs protection outside.”
“Or surveillance.”
This time he didn’t rise to it. “Or surveillance.”
“That must make you popular.”
“The groom at every wedding.”
Connolly laughed. “Yeah, I’ll bet. Well, let’s see the boss. What’s he like, anyway?”
“Straight shooter,” Mills said, leading him out of the building. “Built the Pentagon in a year. Made this place out of nothing. Does drink, doesn’t smoke. Clean living. No detail too small.”
“That easy, huh?”
“Actually, he’s all right. This business with Bruner’s got him spooked, though, so give him a little room.”
“Generals are all alike.”
“Just like happy families.”
Connolly smiled. “You’ve been to school.”
“Here we are. Mind your head,” he said, opening the door.
Inside was a plain anteroom, barely big enough for the desk and the pink middle-aged woman who fluttered behind it.
“Mr. Connolly? Thank goodness you’re here. The general’s got a plane to catch, and he’s been asking for you all afternoon. I’ll just tell him-”
But there was no need, because the door behind her was opened by a big man in khaki who seemed to fill the entire doorframe, absorbing the space. He was not sloppy-he was tucked in as neatly as a hospital corner at inspection-but he had the pudgy flesh of an overweight businessman and his large stomach strained at his belt. There were damp patches under his arms, and Connolly imagined the Washington summers were torture for him. The overall effect was boyish, like someone who had ballooned out at puberty and couldn’t, even now, pass up a jelly doughnut. But the mustache in the middle of his round soft face was surprisingly trimmed and small, the borrowed look of a thin clerk.
“Good, you’re here. Connolly, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
He handed a sheaf of papers to the woman. “We haven’t got much time, so let’s not waste any. I’ve got to catch a plane in Albuquerque, and it’s a heck of a drive getting there. Betty, you’ll make sure the car’s ready? These are all okayed and ready to go. Be sure you get copies of the first two to Dr. Oppenheimer tomorrow-he’s been waiting. I’ll phone you from Washington about the plumbing contracts. Connolly?”
The office was simple, about the size of a large dormitory room, with a window looking out onto the busy main street and the Tech Area fence. There was nothing personal on the walls, just a photograph of Roosevelt and a map of the country, and the desk, piled with folders and contracts and a picture of a woman with two little girls, could have been that of any bureaucrat. Only the two black telephones, a wartime luxury, suggested any importance. Connolly knew instinctively that his real office in the Pentagon was probably no different-plain, pared down, as if he were determined to remove anything that could distract him from the job. In the wastepaper basket at the side of the desk Connolly saw the incongruous shiny brown of a Hershey bar wrapper.
“Sit down,” he said, gesturing to the only chair. “Please. I apologize for not seeing you in Washington, but I was out on the road, as usual. They say the war’s winding down, but I don’t see it. Now. You’ve been briefed?”
“On Karl Bruner’s death, yes.”
Even the sound of the name seemed to make him uncomfortable.
“Yes,” he said, throwing a folder on the pile and resting his hands on the back of his chair. “First time anything like this has happened on the project. Terrible thing, any way you look at it. The question is, how do we look at it?”
“Sir?”
“I mean, is there more here than meets the eye? Less? Do we have a problem?”
“Well, you’ve got a dead body.”
“Correction. The Santa Fe police have a dead body. What we’ve got is a missing security officer. That could be a heck of a lot more serious.”
“Any idea how serious?”
Groves glared for a minute, then sighed. “No. Maybe we don’t even have a problem. Maybe it was just-something that could happen to anyone. Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with the project or his being on the Hill. Maybe. But we need to be sure. And we’re going to be.” He stopped and looked straight at Connolly. “I’ve seen that look a million times before, so don’t waste it. Groves going off the deep end again. Spies under the bed. Paranoid. In fact,” he said, smiling a little, “I can almost guarantee you that’s what you’ll hear from my friend Dr. Oppenheimer. Says it to me all the time. But sometimes I think Robert’s too trusting for his own good, so where do we draw the line? I can’t change the way I feel-somebody’s got to worry about things. Right from the start people here treated security like a joke. They’re brilliant men, I’m the first to say it, but sometimes they’re like kids-irresponsible, you know, maybe even looking for a little trouble. Some of them used to play pranks with the mail-can you imagine that? Grown men? They used to cut holes in the fence just to see if they could get in and out without anybody noticing. Grown men. Brilliant men. So somebody’s got to play principal, and I guess that’s me. I don’t care what anyone says so long as the project’s safe.”
He stopped suddenly, looking a little surprised at himself for having run on.
“I’m not a policeman,” Connolly said, a question.
“I don’t want a policeman. Tommy McManus tells me you’re a good man and I can trust you. If Tommy says it, that’s it. He doesn’t know how you ended up at OWI in the first place. He also tells me you can snoop around without upsetting the horses.”
“That why you wanted a civilian?”
Groves smiled. “Partly. The scientists are allergic to uniforms. It’s very important to keep things running smoothly now. We’re coming to the end of the project. I’ve got a lot of nervous types up here-sometimes I think the smarter they are, the more nervous they are. You never know what’s going to set them off. I’m not going to stand for anyone running around digging up dirt that doesn’t mean a thing. We take care of ourselves. Do you know how many security incidents we’ve investigated since this project began? Over a thousand. Wives talking at cocktail parties about how brilliant their husbands are. Factory workers in Tennessee bragging about their paychecks. Newspapermen get curious, so we have to make sure they don’t get too curious.”
“General, I think you should know that McManus recommended me because I’ve spent the last two years in Washington keeping you out of the papers. That’s part of my beat-the blackout on the project. Scientific journals. Everything.”
“So you understand the science?” Groves asked, curious.
“Does anybody understand the science?”
Groves looked at him.
“A little,” Connolly said apologetically. “Enough to know what can’t be said. Which is just about everything. Right down to the word atom. Anyway, I’m familiar with the operation.”
“Good. Then I don’t have to tell you. Over a thousand incidents, and so far, not one leak and not one day of work lost. This isn’t going to be any different. You do your job right and the scientists aren’t even going to know you’re here. What’s the matter?” he said, catching the look on Connolly’s face.
“General, I’m just trying to figure out if I’m here because I don’t know anything or because you don’t want to. Are you trying to catch this guy or not?”
Groves raised his eyebrows. “That’s an interesting question,” he said finally. “I’m not sure. If somebody robbed Bruner and bopped him over the head, I hope the police catch him. But not if it means taking five minutes away from the project. It’s just not worth the time. Hate to put it like that, but it’s the truth. Do you have any idea how important this is, what we’re doing here? I know you keep it out of the papers, but do you know what it means? We could end the war.” He said this calmly, matter-of-factly, without the usual bond-drive fervor, so that Connolly took it as literal. “Right now you’ve got thousands of boys dying every week. You’ve got Curt LeMay running those B-29s over Japan like the wrath of God. We have no idea how many casualties. None. And the invasion will mean more and more. We can stop that if we finish the work here. So no, I don’t care if they catch one killer-we can catch millions. Unless it isn’t just a robbery. Unless it’s about the project. That’s what we’ve got to know.”
“Okay,” Connolly said, “so we want to find out if his being murdered had anything to do with the Hill, but we don’t want to bother anyone on the Hill finding out.”
Groves looked at him steadily. “Now you think you’re being funny. I allow one wisecrack, and now you’ve had yours.”
“Sorry. I just wonder if you’re giving the police a fair shake. Or me, for that matter.”
“Fair doesn’t apply to you,” he said evenly, “you’re working for me. The police? They took their own sweet time getting in touch, by which time the physical evidence-if there was physical evidence-didn’t amount to much and the papers already had the story. That’s the last thing we want. Luckily, it’s still a John Doe to them, no connection to the Hill at all. You make sure it stays that way.”
“So you put a lid on it.”
“Sealed. For good. The police will cooperate. Well, I guess they have to. They’re not even allowed up here.”
“And they still think it might have something to do with his being homosexual?”
“Now that’s just what I mean,” Groves said, louder suddenly. “Where do they get that? Says who? I do not want allegations like that going around. We’ve never had anything like that up here, and once that kind of rumor starts-” He trailed off, blushing, and Connolly realized that the subject was an embarrassment for him.
“General,” Connolly said calmly, “if he was homosexual, that would constitute a security risk all by itself. You know that.”
Groves looked at him and sat down, a kind of body sigh.
“Yes, I know that. But do you know what it means when you start a scare like that? I’ve seen it happen, down in Miami. The army goes on a queer hunt and there’s no end to it. You’ve got everybody looking over his shoulder and wondering, and that’s just the kind of mess I’m trying to avoid here.” He paused. “We don’t know anything except Bruner got caught with his pants down. Whatever that means. I want you to find out, but I don’t want you turning the place upside down to do it. There’s no need to smear this man’s reputation. For all we know, he didn’t do anything more than run into some drunk Mexican.”
“General, can I be frank? It’s unlikely the police are going to get anywhere-they aren’t even being told the man’s name. I take it you don’t want to call in the FBI-”
“Are you out of your mind? You do that and you’ve got Washington all over it and I’ll never get anything done. The FBI hasn’t been allowed near this project since 1943, and I intend to keep it that way. War Department intelligence takes care of the Manhattan District of the Army Corps of Engineers. That’s enough for me.”
“Except Bruner was intelligence.”
Groves peered at him. “That’s the rub, isn’t it? That’s what we can’t get past. He wasn’t just anybody. He was G-2. I don’t believe in coincidences. I’m paranoid, remember? I don’t know what’s involved here or who else is involved. I don’t know whether he was a fairy or not, but if he was we had no idea. Now that makes me worried.”
“So, an outsider,” Connolly said.
“McManus said you were like a dog with a bone with a story.”
“That’s reporting. I haven’t done that in a while. And that’s still not being a policeman.”
“The war makes us all into something different. I never met a reporter yet who didn’t think he’d make a better cop than a cop. Besides, you’re what I’ve got. You’re educated, so you can talk to the geniuses here without getting everyone riled up. You’re used to the police-Tommy said you covered the police blotter in New York before the war. If you can handle that, the police in Santa Fe should be a piece of cake. You’ll be official liaison to the chief there, by the way. We don’t want them to feel we’re not cooperating with them. And you’re already briefed on the project. Darn few have been, I might add, and nobody really knows it all except Robert.”
“And yourself.”
“And myself. And sometimes I wonder about that.”
Connolly smiled. This was about as far as Groves was likely to go toward making a joke, and he appreciated the effort.
“Well, now at least I know what my qualifications are.” In spite of himself, he was pleased. He hadn’t expected to like Groves, and now he found himself wanting his respect.
“And you were available,” Groves said bluntly. “There wasn’t time to get anyone else up to speed. I don’t know what we’ve got on our hands here, but we’d better find out PDQ. Any questions?”
“Not now,” Connolly said, getting up. “I assume everyone in G-2 knows I report to you?”
“Mills does. Colonel Lansdale’s away, so you work with Mills. As far as anyone else is concerned, you’re Bruner’s replacement. As far as Mills goes, you’re Bruner’s replacement and you’re investigating his death. If you need to reach me in Washington, Betty will always be able to find me. And of course Dr. Oppenheimer knows everything. If for any reason I’m unavailable, consider him me.”
Connolly smiled inwardly at the pairing, some odd Jack Sprat variation.
“So he’s one of the trustworthy scientists. Not one of the kids.”
Groves’s face grew stern. “Dr. Oppenheimer is a hero.” It was said utterly without irony, the highest accolade this spit-and-polish military man knew, and Connolly wondered at the intensity of his feeling. It seemed to have the brusque affection of old campaigners whose trench scars could never be shared. “He may just win this war for us. And he’s got enough here on his shoulders,” Groves said, standing, displaying his own capable frame, “without having to worry about some German G-2 going and getting himself killed.”
“Bruner was German?” Connolly said, surprised. “I hadn’t realized that.”
“Well, German born,” Groves said. “He’s American now, of course. Or was.”
“Is that usual? In G-2, I mean?”
“There’s nothing in that. He was fluent in both German and Russian, which comes in handy around here. Half the people on the Hill are from somewhere over there. There’s never been a question of his loyalty, if that’s what you mean.”
“Did you know him well?”
“Let’s just say I knew who he was. I try to keep tabs on everybody, but it’s impossible these days. The place is just too big now. Lansdale always thought highly of him. As I say, there was never a question of his loyalty.”
“There was never a question of his being murdered, either.”
Groves stopped, not sure how to respond, then brushed it aside. “You’d better get started. Anything else?”
“No, sir. I appreciate your confidence. One thing. Every reporter knows most murders don’t get solved unless the wife or the husband did it. I don’t want you to expect too much.”
Groves looked at him. “I like to get started on the right foot. I think we have, so let me tell you exactly what I expect. I expect you to get this job done, no excuses, which is the same thing I expect from everybody. I expect the contractors to put up buildings in half the time they usually do. And I expect the professors here to deliver our gadget on time. So far we’re on schedule. No leaks, no trouble. The only thing we can’t seem to solve is getting enough water. Now, you come back and tell me I’ve got nothing else to worry about and I’ll be the happiest man on earth. I hate to worry, it slows things down. So you go and do that. And you should know, I always get what I expect.”
Connolly stared at him, not sure what to make of this vaudeville turn, but since Groves seemed perfectly genuine in the part, he saluted. “Yes, sir.”
Groves saluted back, a surprisingly careless wave of the hand. “I’ll be back in a few weeks. By the way,” he said, a slight smile beginning on his face, “don’t think my bark is worse than my bite. It isn’t.”
The housing office was in one of the old school cabins, dwarfed now by another huge water tank. Mills had arranged for him to have Bruner’s room, and Connolly guessed this had violated the usual waiting-list order of things, because the clerk was surly as he signed the forms.
“Nothing’s been done to that room,” he said. “Nobody told us. You better change the sheets. Lieutenant,” he said to Mills, “can you kit him out over at housekeeping? We’re about to close here.”
“Sure. How’s my Sundt duplex coming?”
“In your dreams.”
“Bathtub Row?”
The clerk didn’t even bother to answer.
“Want to translate?” Connolly said as they went outside.
“Bathtub Row’s for the top brass-they’re the old buildings from the ranch school, which means they were actually built for people. They’re the only housing on the Hill with tubs, not showers, so they’re considered the top of the line. Of course, they don’t get much water either, so big deal.”
“Sundt?”
“Construction company that built a lot of the Hill. The housing units are named for whoever built them, so you’ve got Sundt units and Morgan duplexes and McKee prefabs-those are the flat-tops-and Pascos. Then you’re down to trailers and huts and whatever keeps the cold out.”
“I assume Bruner wasn’t in a Sundt.”
Mills grinned. “No, we’ve got a nice dormitory room for you.”
Later, walking down the dusty road with piles of sheets and towels, Connolly felt more than ever that he’d gone back in time to school. The dormitory was the familiar dull green army clapboard, but the dayroom inside, with its Ping-Pong table and Remington cowboy prints, had an undergraduate look, and the rooms were the same glorified cubicles you’d find on any state campus. The polished wood floor was bare, reflecting light from the uncurtained windows, but a curtain of sorts had been hung along the frame of the indented closet area. Aside from the single bed, there was a small desk, a reading chair, a short bookcase, and a hotel-standard imitation Sheraton chest of drawers with a Bakelite radio on top. The room was almost aggressively neat, as if the slightest rearrangement of the furniture would put it hopelessly out of kilter.
“Well,” Mills said, dumping the linens on the bed, “welcome to Boys’ Town. It ain’t much and it sure ain’t home. I’m just down the hall, so I should know.”
“I thought he said nobody’d touched the room.”
“Nobody has.”
Connolly opened the top drawer to see neatly folded handkerchiefs and pairs of shorts. “Signs of life.”
“Well, I’ll let you get on with it,” Mills said. “Dinner’s in the commissary-that’s just beyond P Building, the big one with the bridge. You won’t have any trouble finding it-just follow the smell of grease. Motor pool’s on the other side, so don’t get confused. Workday begins at oh eight hundred, but that’s up to you, I guess.”
Connolly continued to go through the drawer, carefully moving pieces of clothing as if reluctant to disturb the dead. “What do we do with this stuff?” he asked.
“Beats me. No next of kin, if that’s what you mean. I thought you’d want to go through it before we pack it up. I’ll get you a box tomorrow. I suppose we have to hold it. You know, as evidence.”
It was a question, but Connolly was preoccupied.
“I suppose. What happened to the next of kin?”
“Bruner was a German Jew. His parents are still there-or not-as far as we know. We have to assume not. No other relatives in his file.”
“Speaking of which, I’m going to need-”
But Mills was already pulling a manila folder from under his arm. “Bedtime reading,” he said, handing it over.
Connolly looked at him and smiled. “Why do I get the feeling you’re one step ahead of me?”
“Don’t worry, you’ll catch up. That’s all there is.”
Connolly glanced at the file. “Did you know him?”
“He worked in the section and he lived down the hall, so yes. But no.”
“Did you like him?”
Mills hesitated. “That’s some professional question. He was all right.”
“That’s some answer.”
“He was a hard guy to like.”
“How so?”
“He had an edge. He’d been through a lot and it showed. He couldn’t relax. I suppose he was always waiting for the knock on the door. A lot of the Germans are like that. They can’t feel safe, not after everything. You can’t blame them, but it doesn’t make them the life of the party, either.”
“What happened to him there? Specifically.”
“The Nazis thought he was a Communist and locked him up. He had a rough time.”
“Was he?”
“Not according to him. He was a student who attended a few meetings. It’s all in there,” he said, pointing to the folder. “In the security report. Even the Nazis couldn’t make it stick, so they finally let him out. This was years ago, when they were trying to deport the Jews instead of keeping them in, so they sent him to Russia.”
“They took him in?”
“Uh-huh. And then arrested him as a German spy. They were even worse than the Nazis. They pulled his teeth out, one day at a time. That’s why he had the plate.”
“Jesus.” Connolly imagined the wait every morning, the clang of the bolt in the door, the pliers and the screams and the blood. The spare, clean room suddenly seemed different, as if Bruner had tried to live as unobtrusively as possible, wanting to be passed over, out of pain.
“Yeah, I know. When they ran out of teeth they started messing up his hands, until I guess they finally decided he didn’t know anything. Just one of their little mistakes. So they got rid of him too. The rest is in there. It’s your standard refugee itinerary, with the usual red tape and crooks and helping hands until one day he’s drinking milkshakes in God’s country. And now this. Some life. You have to feel sorry for the bastard.”
“But you didn’t like him.”
“You trying to make me feel guilty? No, I didn’t like him. Maybe it wasn’t his fault, but deep down he had no use for anybody. He was the kind of guy who was always looking for some angle.”
“But good at his job? Loyal American and all that?”
Mills grinned. “Yeah, all that. He liked it here all right, but more because I think he hated everywhere else. Maybe it was too late for him to make friends. He wasn’t the kind of guy who just came by your room to have a smoke and shoot the breeze. Come to think of it, I think this is the first time I’ve ever been in this room. He hung out in the dayroom-he wasn’t a hermit or anything-but you never felt he was really enjoying it.”
“No close friends?”
“He may have. None that I knew about.”
“How about his social life?”
“By which you mean?”
“What you think I mean.”
“I don’t know,” Mills said slowly. “I always thought there might be somebody, but he never said anything. It was none of my business. It never occurred to me that it might be a man.” He looked up at Connolly. “I know what the police think, but there was none of that here. Ever.”
“Are you trying to tell me it’s safe to use the showers?” Mills let it pass.
“All right. What made you think he was seeing a woman? Or anyone?”
“His car. He loved his car. He was always trying to cadge extra coupons, and he used to love to show it off. You know, offer to take people into Santa Fe, things like that. And then more and more he was off by himself, so I figured he had a girlfriend somewhere.”
“How did he rate a car? I thought they were-”
“Oh, it was his car. He got it in ’forty-two, when you could still get them. A Buick. And the way he took care of it, it was probably as good as the day he drove it off the lot.”
Connolly looked around the room, imagining the furniture as immaculate pieces of engine. “I should probably take a look. Where is it now?”
“No idea. He took it down the Hill Saturday and neither of them came back.”
Connolly thought for a minute. “And now we only know where one of them is. Hard to lose a car, though. It’s bound to turn up someplace. I don’t suppose you know the local black-market heavyweights?”
“Black market? Never heard of it. That’s one thing we leave to the police.”
“The only thing, from the sound of it. All right, I’ll check it out tomorrow. I suppose it’s registered to a code number like all the cars here?”
Mills nodded.
“You guys like to make things easy.”
“Haven’t you heard? We’re the best-kept secret of the war. You might even say we don’t exist.”
“I know. I get paid to help keep it that way.”
“So what do you do, anyway?” Mills said. He caught Connolly’s look. “If I’m allowed to ask.”
“Office of War Information liaison to Army Intelligence. I’m a rewrite man.”
“What do you rewrite?”
“Dispatches. Speeches. News. Whatever the army thinks we should know. For a while there we didn’t have any American casualties-only the Germans got shot-but they’ve been better lately. Even they couldn’t keep it up indefinitely.”
“You mean you write propaganda?” Mills said, intrigued. “I’ve never met anyone who did that.”
Connolly smiled. “No. Not propaganda. That’s big lies, fake stories-the stuff Goebbels used to do. We don’t make anything up. You couldn’t, these days. We just look at it right, make people feel better about things. So they don’t get discouraged. We don’t have heavy casualties, we meet fierce resistance. A German advance is a last-ditch counterattack. No body parts, dismemberment, guts hanging out, just clean bullets. French villages are glad to see us-I think they must be, too. Our boys do not get the syph-or give it, for that matter. We don’t mean to bomb anybody by accident, so we never do. The army isn’t up to anything in New Mexico. There is no Manhattan Project.”
Mills stared at him, surprised by the casual cynicism of the speech.
“Just a few rewrites,” Connolly said. “For our own good.”
“How do you feel,” Mills said curiously, “about doing that?”
“How would you?”
Mills looked away, suddenly embarrassed.
“So in a way it feels good to be back on the crime beat again,” Connolly said lightly. “Except I’m not really here.”
Mills picked up his mood. “Town’s full of people this week who aren’t really here. If you want to do some ghost spotting, though, you might check out the party tonight. I assume you’re on a face-recognition basis with the world’s leading physicists. Otherwise it’ll be lost on you.”
“Only if they look like Paul Muni.”
“Now there, you’ve gone and done it. You’re supposed to use his code name. Anyway, eight o’clock if you’re interested. And all things considered, you should be.”
“What’s the occasion?”
“They don’t need a special occasion to have a party. It’s just one long bacchanal up here on the mesa. Of course, if they are celebrating something, we don’t allow them to say so.”
Connolly grinned. “Okay. Maybe I’ll see you there later. An ordinary party might be nice.”
“Well, ordinary for here.”
Afterward he lay on Bruner’s bed, too tired to change it, his mind drifting from the file to the expressionless room around him. Some rooms were so inhabited with personality that their occupants refused to leave; you could feel their presence like a kind of haunting. But this wasn’t one of them. Bruner had never been here. But of course he had been-nobody left without a trace. Connolly’s eyes moved slowly around the room. Perhaps the neatness itself was a clue, a life all tucked in, put away, leaving nothing behind to give it away.
His things had been unremarkable. A crossword puzzle book-to perfect his English or just to pass the time? — and a German-English dictionary on the desk. No mail. A photograph in the drawer of a couple dressed in the dated clothes of twenty years ago, presumably his parents. A random collection of reading books- For Whom the Bell Tolls, an illustrated book of Southwest Indian life, Armed Forces paperback westerns, an anthology of war correspondent dispatches. Connolly leafed through the latter, suddenly back at OWI, with burly prima donnas throwing tantrums over troop transport passes and scheming to go on bombing raids so their bylines would end up in collections just like this. There would never be a bigger story.
Suits, a few pairs of socks, and a tie rack in the closet. Connolly took out the empty suitcase to fill it with the folded, ordinary clothes in the drawers. A Dopp Kit with the usual brushes and razors, a box of prophylactics, and special denture powder. A project account book with orderly rows of regular deposits. Only when he took out the sweaters to pack them did he find anything interesting-a few pieces of Indian jewelry, silver and turquoise, hidden in one of the folded sleeves.
Now, on the bed, he held them up to the light, playing with them. A belt buckle inlaid with turquoise, a pendant (no chain), links for one of those necklaces Spanish cowboys wore around the crowns of their hats. Why jewelry? Bruner’s clothes were conservative-hard to imagine him drawn to anything so flashy. A present? The same night he used the prophylactics? Anything was possible. Maybe he simply liked the stuff. The meager bookcase suggested some interest in Indians. Perhaps the turquoise was no more than a hobby collection, like FDR’s stamps-Bruner’s unexpected passion. Connolly imagined him taking the pieces out of the sweater at night to look at them, their glow of silver and blue-green lighting up the drab room like Silas Marner’s gold. And then again, maybe not. He put them down on the bed and picked up the file instead.
What no one had mentioned was that Bruner was good-looking. Not conventionally pleasant, but striking, his high cheekbones and bush of dark hair arranged in an original angular way that drew attention to his eyes. Even in the file photo they had a frank, direct stare that still seemed alive. There was no humor in them, but a kind of hard vitality that put the rest of his face in shadow. Nothing else, not the stubble of afternoon beard covering the chin, not the hollow cheeks or surprisingly full lips, registered. What seemed at first the pale Jewish face of a hundred other photographs was now rearranged, as if the sensitivity had been stamped out to leave something hard, more determined. Connolly wondered if the extraction of the teeth had literally changed the shape of the face or simply the man who looked through it.
How could it be otherwise? The pain must have been crippling, all the worse for being repeated without end. Had Bruner counted the teeth left, wondering as his raw mouth puffed up with pain whether he could stand another day, ten? Or had the Nazis months before already beaten his face to another form? Connolly looked at the nose in the picture for the sideways slant of a break, but it was straight, and again he came back to the eyes. They were so bright that for a split second he thought he could reach through to the man, but the more he looked, the less they seemed to say. They stared without any comment at all, as if simply being alive were enough.
Connolly put the file down and covered his tired eyes with his sleeve. In the end, the pictures were always the same. File after file had crossed his desk, stories from Europe, not just the battle dispatches and the statistical pieces but the personal stories, each one terrible, each one of suffering almost unimaginable, until you were lost in the scale of it all. We would never recover from this, unless we simply stopped listening. Europe seemed to him now like a vast funhouse, dark and grotesque and claustrophobic. You were jerked along from one startling exhibit of horror to the next, rocking in alarm, squirming. Skeletons dangled, monsters leaped out, horrible mechanical screams tore the air, and you would never get out.
The stories made other stories. Something had happened to Karl Bruner, who in turn became a different person, which in turn made him do-what? Maybe nothing. But once the violence started, there was no end to it-every crime reporter knew that. It demanded vengeance, or at least some answer, an endless series of biblical begats. A gun fired never stopped, it kept cutting through the lives of everyone around it, on and on. Like some unstoppable-Connolly smiled to himself at the aptness of it-chain reaction. Until it all became part of the war.
Connolly liked the remoteness of Los Alamos, the clean, high air away from the files and reports of the world destroying itself. A simple personal crime, a police blotter item-not a war. An assignment out of the funhouse, some time in the light. But Bruner’s face had thrown him back again-another European story. He wondered why it had ended on the Santa Fe river.