Perhaps people needed to be together after a death in the family, or perhaps Professor Weber’s evenings were always better attended than he liked to think, but his house was crowded. A cluster of music stands had been set in one corner of the living room, and people spilled out in groups down the hallway in a line to the kitchen, where the coffee and trays of cakes were arranged on a crocheted tablecloth. The air was warm and close with cigarette smoke and the overpowering scent of butter, sugar, and cinnamon. Connolly felt wrapped in the cozy sweetness of a prewar bakery and wondered for a minute where all the coupons had come from; did the bachelors trade Frau Weber their ration books for these once-a-week memories of home? The coffee smelled rich and strong, but as many people held glasses as coffee cups, and the hum of conversation rose and fell in the familiar lapping waves of a cocktail party. Pregnant women occupied the few upholstered easy chairs, with friends draped on the broad arms, balancing plates. Oppenheimer was there, a martini glass in one hand, his hair so short that without his hat his head seemed almost shaved. He barely acknowledged Connolly with a nod. His wife, Kitty, sat near him, her legs curled beneath her on a sofa, an ashtray in her lap, but paid no attention to her husband as she stared through her smoke, preoccupied with some interior conversation. She had clearly ceded all hostess duties to Johanna Weber, who bubbled all around her, directing people to food and making introductions.
“Mr. Connolly, yes, my husband has told me about you. I’m so glad you could come. Do you know Mrs. Oppenheimer? Kitty, Mr. Connolly.” Kitty glanced up, but Johanna Weber had already moved him along, introducing everyone in their immediate vicinity. “Mr. Connolly, Professor Weissmann, his wife, Frieda. Mr. Connolly. Dr. Carpenter. Dr. Carpenter is visiting us this week-” And so it went, a party trick, one name following another without pause and without forgetting. Connolly thought she was wasted on the Hill. In Washington she could have run one of the great houses in Rock Creek, her mind a vast photographic file of names and connections.
“And this is Emma Pawlowski.” She hurried on, scarcely noticing that Emma’s back was turned to her. “Her husband, Daniel.”
Connolly stopped and nodded, hopelessly curious, but Pawlowski was a pleasant-looking young man, eager to be polite, who had obviously never heard of him and wanted only to resume his conversation with Carpenter. His skin was a scholar’s pale white, with what seemed to be a permanent five-o’clock shadow.
“Yes, we’ve met,” Connolly said as Emma turned around. She looked oddly festive, her nails and mouth vivid red, her eyes shining. Connolly realized it was the first time he had seen her in a skirt, so that she seemed overdressed, as if she had put on heels and makeup for another party and landed here instead.
“Again and again,” she said. “You seem to be everywhere.” And then to her husband, who looked mildly puzzled, “Darling, this is Mr. Connolly I told you about. Or did I? Anyway, he very kindly drove me to Hannah’s, so you must be especially nice. He’s new on the Hill.”
“Welcome,” Pawlowski said in the flat, monotonal accent of one who had learned too many languages. Connolly wondered fleetingly if Conrad had sounded like this, both Polish and English squeezed of all inflection. “Whose unit are you with?”
“Oh darling, he’s not a scientist. He’s with security or something. It is security, isn’t it?” she said, all innocence.
Connolly nodded.
“But you like music,” Pawlowski finally said, at a loss to explain him, and not sure it was worth the effort.
“No, he’s come to spy on us,” Emma said playfully. “Absolutely tone-deaf. Can’t hear a note.”
Pawlowski looked at her, then smiled gently, a lover’s indulgence for what he didn’t understand. It seemed enough that she was lovely and spirited; he didn’t have to keep up to admire her for it.
“Then I will have to play more loudly,” he said, missing the joke. The effect was to make him seem younger than he was, a boy making his way. Connolly looked at his polite face and thought about the unreliability of language. He had studied with Meitner, a man of importance at the KWI, but faced with idle chat he became an awkward teenager. Like so many others on the Hill, he would have to retreat to the language of science to find his maturity.
Johanna Weber was there again, a tugboat still steering him through the harbor. “As loudly as you like, Daniel. Never a wrong note. Not like Hans. But come, some coffee, Mr. Connolly?”
“Or perhaps you’d like a drink,” Emma said, holding up her glass. For an instant, Connolly wondered if that explained the shine in her eyes.
“Coffee would be fine,” he said, and Johanna Weber beamed, clearly pleased, and took him in tow to the tall urn. Emma gave him a weak, ironic salute with her glass.
“Here,” Johanna Weber said, handing him a cup. “Shall I get you some cake?” But she was distracted by a new arrival, and Connolly watched the party game begin all over again, one accurate name following another.
The day had been somber-these were some of the same faces he had seen drawn and grieving in front of the Admin Building-but the party had taken on a life of its own, and as each voice rose to be heard above the others, the small house hummed with a kind of decorous gaiety. The Webers’ rooms were small but, unlike other interiors on the Hill, had the settled look of lives accumulated bit by bit. The heavy furniture, the antimacassars, the shelves of porcelain knickknacks, seemed to have come out of a time machine launched when the world was solid, weighted down and explained by things. There were no cactuses or Indian throws or anything else to suggest they had all gathered on a cool night somewhere on the Parajito Plateau. Warmed by the lamps and the yeast cakes and the smell of furniture polish, they were back in old Heidelberg. The Webers were at home.
“Don’t be noble,” Emma said, coming up to him at the urn and handing him a drink instead. “You’ll want two of these in you before they start playing.”
He took the drink and smiled. “Past experience?”
“Years of it.”
“What was that all about?” he said, gesturing to where they had talked before. “Jealous husband?”
“Daniel? No, he wouldn’t dream of it. That was about Johanna. Always on the qui vive. She gives me the pip.”
“A gossip?”
“Terrible, and she doesn’t have much to go on. She already thinks I’m disreputable.”
“Why?” he said, biting into a cake.
“Consorting with the lower orders, I suppose. She’s a fearful snob.”
“Lower orders meaning me?”
“Well, let’s just say you’re not a scientist. There’s always a pecking order, even here.”
“Who else do you consort with?”
She looked up at him, then took a sip before she answered. “You’ll do for now.”
“Your husband seemed nice.”
“Don’t.”
“What?”
“Just don’t. God, here she comes again.”
“Ah, Mr. Connolly,” Johanna Weber said, as if saying his name aloud sealed it in memory. “You’re meeting people, good. Emma’s an anthropologist, did she tell you?”
“Yes, we were just talking about the Anasazi,” Connolly said.
Johanna Weber hesitated, clearly surprised. “Fascinating, isn’t it?” she said, recovering. “Emma’s become quite an expert on the subject.” She looked at Emma to contradict her.
“In an amateur sort of a way,” Emma said smoothly. And then Frau Weber was being embraced by a new arrival and they were alone again.
“You’ve got a pretty good memory yourself,” Emma said. “However did you remember the poor old Anasazi? Most people can’t even pronounce it.”
“Anthropologist?” he said playfully.
“Pompous old trout. Everybody has to be something grand. Her maid is probably an Indian princess. And you-”
“Dick Tracy?”
“No, darling, Hoover at the very least. What’s the J stand for anyway, in J. Edgar?”
Connolly shrugged. “Maybe it’s like the O in Louella O. Parsons. Maybe they’re the same person.”
She laughed. “That’s a thought. Do you take anything seriously?”
“Everything. Freud tells us there are no jokes.”
“Does he really?”
“Uh-huh. Of course, he meant something else, but I doubt he had much of a sense of humor anyway.”
“How do you know things like that? Who are you, anyway?”
“You pick up things in the paper.”
She looked at him appraisingly. “I don’t think so.”
“But then, you’re an anthropologist,” he said easily.
“Quite. Maybe you’ll be my next project. The mysterious Mr. Connolly.”
“Don’t drop the Anasazi yet. That would be fickle.”
She was quiet for a minute, studying him over the rim of her glass. “Tell me about yourself,” she said softly.
“Such as?”
“Well, who are your people, as they used to say at garden parties.”
“My people? My mother’s dead. My father works at an insurance company and spent his life doing crossword puzzles in ten minutes and resenting the fact that he worked for people who couldn’t. He saved everything to send me to school.”
“Then what happened?”
“I went to work for the same people and now he resents me for the education he wanted himself. It’s a very American story.”
“You like him.”
“I feel sorry for him. Not quite the same thing.” He paused. “Yes, I like him.”
“And you-are you good at crosswords too?”
He nodded. “I used to be. In the genes, maybe. I like figuring things out, watching them fall into place.”
“And have they?”
“No. Only in puzzles.”
She stopped, still staring at him. When she spoke again her words seemed almost unconscious, drawn out of her in a trance. “What are you working out now?”
“Now? I don’t know. Why I’m here in a room full of pinheads eating cake instead of getting shot on Okinawa. Why anybody’s on Okinawa in the first place. What the Jap pilots think about when they crash into the ships. Why somebody got killed in a park. What are we going to do after the war.” He stopped, looking at her. “Why I’m pretending I’m thinking about any of this. All I’m really trying to figure out is how I can go to bed with you.”
She looked at him as if nothing had been said, but the longer she was silent, the more real the words became, hanging between them like visible shapes. For an instant he thought he had frightened her, but he held her eyes without apology, determined to play the hand through. Then, still saying nothing, she took a drink and walked away from him into the room.
He stared after her, unable to read any expression in her movement, not sure what he had done. Then people closed around her in the crowded room and she was gone. Someone at the table jostled his arm, and finally distracted, he looked at the rest of the room. People were still eating and talking. In the music corner, one of the players began tuning his viola.
“Now where is Hans,” Johanna Weber said to nobody in particular, busy now with a new hostess assignment. Connolly decided to look for the bathroom before the music began. The room had become even warmer, and despite the chill someone had opened the door to let in the fresh night air. He brushed past some smokers lining the narrow hallway and went through a half-open door to the bedroom. The bed was heaped with jackets and coats, and in the corner, under a desk lamp, Professor Weber and another man were leafing through pages. The room itself seemed oddly solemn, a refuge from the conversation just steps away, and Connolly realized that the effect came from the men themselves, wordlessly and gravely turning the pages of a magazine. He had clearly interrupted them, but Weber, glancing over his shoulder, nodded with an automatic courtesy.
“The bathroom?” Connolly said.
“Through there,” Weber said, pointing to a door. And then, still courteous, “This is Friedrich Eisler. Friedrich, Mr. Connolly.”
Connolly nodded, but both men returned to the magazine as if he had gone. “Oh, Friedrich,” Weber said, a plaintive sound of such quiet distress that Connolly stopped, alarmed. The room suddenly was no longer solemn but filled with the disturbance of something gone wrong. Connolly looked toward the open magazine- Life, or something like it-and stopped, shaken.
He had seen combat pictures before, and pictures of rubble and bodies crushed in suffering, but this was something new. Skeletons covered with a thin layer of skin looked out at the camera through a wire fence, their eyes utterly without expression. Some wore the black-and-white stripes of dirty prison camp uniforms. Behind them bodies lay on the ground, one so thin that a thighbone seemed to puncture the skin. In another, bodies were heaped in piles, limbs at unnatural angles, mouths wide open to the air. Connolly looked at them, paralyzed. Children. The men at the fence seemed to hang there, as if they needed to hold the wire to remain upright. In another picture, a vast open pit was filled to overflowing with shaved heads and naked bodies. Everyone was dead, even the ones pretending to be alive at the fence. Their eyes burned straight through the camera. Connolly wondered who had taken the pictures, who had recorded not just lifeless bodies but death itself. Only a mechanical box should see this. He imagined his finger trembling on the shutter, refusing to look. His eyes swam. He darted from picture to picture, trying to make any sense of it, but the world had tilted slightly on its axis, rearranging everything, and it was impossible to understand anything so new. Another picture: a ragged group of Nazi guards, their eyes dead too. A camp entrance. More piles of bodies. People lying in bunks, a bony arm jutting out for help. But all too late. Even those with open eyes were already dead. He could hear, outside, the rasp of the viola tuning and people talking, and he realized that in the bedroom they had almost stopped breathing.
There was a shame in seeing this-the act of witnessing made one a part of it. And there was the shame of failed hopes. The past few weeks had been filled with exultant news from Germany. The Rhine crossed. A city taken. Berlin within reach. Refugees marching to a somber future, richly deserved. Since the offensive of the winter, the war had taken on the pace and excitement of a long sporting match finally about to be won. The world was beginning to make sense again. Now he saw it was too late for that too.
“So many,” Eisler said, a low intoning.
“We knew, but we didn’t know.” They were still oblivious to Connolly, but looking at the photographs had drawn him into their circle. “Friedrich,” Weber said, “they killed everybody.”
Eisler put his hand on Weber’s shoulder, glancing up at Connolly. Connolly took him in for the first time-a tall, scrawny man with the pallor of laboratory duty about his face. His neck stretched unnaturally high, with a prominent, bobbing Adam’s apple and the slight discoloration of a birth defect to the right of his chin. Connolly noticed his long fingers, delicate and tapering, as if they had been formed, or trained, for precision work. His hair was uncombed, landing wherever it fell over his gentle face.
“They’ve won,” Weber said, almost to himself.
“No. What are you saying?”
“They killed everybody. It’s too late, don’t you see? All this work. We’re too late now.” He shrugged in resignation just as his wife came to the door to summon him.
“Liebchen, come start, please. It’s getting late,” she said, barely sticking her head in, unaware that she had trivialized the moment.
Dutifully, Weber got up and shuffled out of the room, leaving Connolly and Eisler in uncomfortable silence. Still holding the magazine, Eisler sat heavily on the bed, cushioned by the heap of coats. Connolly stared down again at the pictures. Personalize the crime, an old journalist’s trick. Focus on one person-that man looking through the fence-to construct the story. But as he stared at the picture, everyone became disembodied. There were no people left, just those rows of blank eyes. Then Eisler let the magazine slide shut and he was staring at the bright color of a Chesterfield ad on the back.
“What did he mean, we’re too late?” Connolly said quietly.
For a moment he thought Eisler hadn’t heard, but when he finally spoke, his soft voice was precise, as if he had been carefully considering his answer. “We came here to defeat the Nazis. Soldiers, you see?” He smiled weakly. “This was our way of fighting. With our slide rules. Our tests.” His voice had only a trace of accent. “We were the little boys wearing glasses, not the big ones with the boots and the armbands. But we had the intelligence. We could fight with this.” He tapped the side of his head. “We would build a bomb to kill all the Nazis. A terrible thing, yes. But with the Nazis, anything was permissible. Even the bomb. They wanted to kill everybody. And now, you see, they have. What are we going to do now?”
“The war isn’t over yet.”
Eisler looked up at him, surprised at the sound of his voice, and Connolly realized he’d been thinking aloud, not talking to him at all.
“It is for them,” Eisler said, rising slowly and handing Connolly the magazine. “It will be over for the rest of us very soon. You think perhaps they have a secret weapon? A new rocket for London? Well, it’s an idea. Convenient, certainly.”
“Convenient?”
He took off his glasses and rubbed them slowly with a handkerchief. “If there are Nazis, we don’t have these inconvenient moral questions. But what shall we do with this bomb if there are no Nazis?”
“I don’t know,” Connolly said, at a loss.
“No,” he said, smiling. “None of us do. Sometimes I wonder what we have been thinking. Maybe the Nazis did that to us too. But you must excuse me. You came to hear the music, not to discuss-well, what do we call it?”
Outside, the music had begun, the precise lilting phrase of a Bach partita.
“German music,” Eisler said ironically. “Such beautiful music. You must admit, we are an extraordinary people. Or were.”
Connolly felt again that he was eavesdropping on someone else’s conversation. Eisler might have been talking to Weber, not a stranger holding a magazine. His shy face seemed to be looking elsewhere, at some invisible sadness.
“Something always survives,” Connolly said, not even sure what he meant.
“Yes, we survive,” Eisler said gently, opening his hand to indicate the house. “Americans now. Oh, I can see you think I’m being sentimental. You’re right, of course. That’s very German too. But our culture is over. Perhaps it had to end this way-killing ourselves. Very German. The end of the world. But now it is really over. There won’t be any more music, you know. It’s finished. Only this bomb is left-our last gift. I wonder what you will do with it. Perhaps you’ll become Germans too. Everybody can become monsters now.”
Connolly felt claustrophobic, as if he had stepped into Eisler’s self-absorption and couldn’t find his way out. Los Alamos had struck him as some overgrown international campus, everybody’s project, but that seemed irrelevant now. To Eisler, the Americans, the Hungarians, the Italians, the whole polyglot community were simply spectators to some violent national drama.
“If someone has to have it, I’m glad it’s us,” he said finally.
The blunt pragmatism of the answer roused Eisler, and his faraway milky eyes gleamed with attention. “Why? Because we’re not monsters? I say we. I’m American now too. But perhaps I don’t trust us quite so much. Once, perhaps. Not now. We have all learned to be monsters in this war. I wonder, are those lessons we forget? I don’t think so.”
“Nobody ever won a war being nice.”
“Fire with fire. Shall I tell you something? I am from Hamburg originally. You read about the firebombing there. The number of houses. The docks. Even the casualties. But what was it like? Most people don’t want to read that. The fire so high that it sucked in all the oxygen. For miles. You can do the calculations with slide rules. So you step out of the house and your lungs collapse. No escape. You jump into a canal and you are boiled alive. They found people trying to cross the street. Their feet were stuck in the melting asphalt, so they just stood there-screaming, I imagine-until they burned to death. Thousands. What difference, the numbers? Everybody.”
Eisler glared at him as if he knew Connolly had rewritten those first dispatches, headlining the statistics of victory. A payback for London.
“We didn’t start the war,” Connolly said stupidly, a reflex.
“Mr. Connolly, neither did my friends in Hamburg.”
“That was an English raid, you know.”
“Now you are splitting hairs with a vengeance. Tokyo was all yours. That was even worse, if there is such a thing. What do we do now, argue over degrees of terror? You think there is a hierarchy of suffering?”
Connolly was quiet. “I don’t know what point you’re trying to make.”
Eisler sighed, his shoulders slumping in a kind of apology. “Forgive me, please. I’m not myself.” And he seemed then physically to return to his earlier manner, his face growing gentle and sensitive, a young boy too polite to offend. When he spoke, he was distracted, as if he were examining his own outburst. “My point. What was my point? I’m sorry, my point was not to disturb you. I suppose only this-be very careful when you fight monsters. Be careful what you become.”
Connolly held out the magazine. “We’ve never done this.”
“No.” Eisler’s voice sank in defeat. “Not that. So,” he said reflectively, “they make it possible for us to make the bomb. Now what else will they allow us to do?” He hung his head.
For the first time since he had come to Los Alamos, Connolly felt himself an intruder. He had expected the science to be over his head; what went on in those barrack laboratories was some new form of alchemy, too mysterious to be reduced to a set of formulas. Now everything that surrounded it seemed equally complicated and incomprehensible, a series of questions to which there were no answers. They folded back on themselves, contradictory, insistent, then got lost in vagueness, their scale as measureless as theology. Connolly liked a problem with a solution. He liked the crossword filled in, a murder explained. But what was happening here left him finally overwhelmed, and out of place. All of them-the gentle emigre scientists, the eager American kids-were living in a state of abstraction as high and remote as the plateau itself. He turned toward the door and the audible sounds of the music, something real.
People were listening politely, some of them with their eyes closed, nodding to the familiar notes. The group was amateur but competent. They approached the music with a hesitant respect, but at least they didn’t plow through it, and the music rewarded them, carrying them through difficult patches with the logical force of its own structure. The music leaped; the notes joined each other and rose with the lamplight to brighten the room. Connolly realized with some surprise that everyone already knew the piece-it was as familiar to them as a jukebox hit-and he felt again oddly out of place, the little boy with his face pressed against the glass. But the music itself was welcoming, racing along now, simple at its heart, and no one in the room was excluded.
At his cello Professor Weber, usually bubbly, was sight-reading with determination, so fixed on the page that he seemed unaware of anything around him. Next to him a young American in a busy V-neck sweater played with confidence, glancing up from his instrument to take the audience in when the notes began to answer each other. Daniel, Emma’s Daniel, looked only at his violin, his eyes sometimes closed in concentration, his movements sure and accomplished. Connolly imagined him as a boy in Poland-what was that like? — practicing on a rainy afternoon. A good boy, responsible. Or had he been chased home by bullies, his case flapping as he ran from the tram? Connolly’s imagination bounced with the staccato notes, but the fact was, he didn’t want to imagine Daniel at all. A decent man, a gifted scientist. Why go further? As he brought down his bow across the strings, there was a surgeon’s accuracy-the strength was in knowing where things went, not in being forceful. But what did that mean? That he was self-possessed, or merely that he’d been trained properly all those rainy afternoons? He had seemed diffident before, but now Connolly wondered if he had misread him. And then suddenly his eyes opened and Connolly had to look away, embarrassed by his reverie. He didn’t want to know him. It was safer to speculate about the others; there were no consequences to that. The fourth member of the quartet, for instance, with his bulky double-breasted suit, Slavic cheekbones, and pudgy fingers that grasped the bow like a lance. But he couldn’t imagine anything about him.
Aside from the occasional rattle of coffee cups, the room was quiet and attentive. Still standing against the wall, Connolly found himself lulled by the music. The sharp rising notes had played themselves out, followed now by the deep bass of a cello bridge. In the slow, moody interlude, Connolly’s mind went back to the magazine and then, like a succession of snapshots, to Eisler’s wistful face, the cocktail chat in the hall, Johanna Weber’s name-remembering trick, Emma walking away. He looked around the room, trying to match faces to the faceless columns of the savings accounts. They’d be offended if they knew; he wished he could tell them it hadn’t meant anything. He wondered how many had seen the magazine. The room didn’t seem to be in mourning, not even for the President who had brought them all here. It was instead a kind of time-out, an evening of friends and yeast cakes and music from before the war, an evening from that culture Eisler claimed had already disappeared. Had it? In this room on Bathtub Row it still glowed.
He was so used to the placid, almost dreamy faces in the room that he noticed instantly Johanna Weber’s look of quiet alarm. He followed her eyes to the musicians. Hans Weber was still staring at the sheet music but was now obviously not reading-perhaps he had never needed to. As he played, he was listening to his own music, a passage of such beautiful sadness that everything else in the room had stopped. Involuntary tears rolled down each of his cheeks, as if the music itself were squeezing him in pain. He never stopped playing. His face was impassive, not scrunched with emotion, so that the tears seemed to come from somewhere else, a sorrow so secret that he was not even aware of revealing it. Connolly couldn’t look away. A few others in the audience had now noticed and looked around in dismay. The music never stopped-it seemed to grow even lovelier-and the tears rolled quietly, unwilled. What did they imagine was wrong? Did Weber, bubbly sentimentalist, frequently get carried away by the music? But no one looked as if this were normal. Something had happened. What was the protocol? Offer assistance? Pretend nothing was the matter? No one moved, and no one, Connolly saw, realized this was a larger mourning, beyond all courtesies. They hadn’t seen the magazine. They didn’t know he was playing for the dead.
The room, cozy and warm, now seemed stifling, and Connolly fought the urge to bolt. He didn’t want to be in Europe, all knickknacks and solid furniture and mistakes past repairing. Soon they would all choke on tears and he would suffocate. Then Weber, sensing their discomfort, paused briefly, wiped his face, and joined in again on the next stanza, right on the beat. To those who had not noticed, he might have been wiping away perspiration. Connolly saw the others relax. Oppenheimer, across the room, stared at Weber in astonishment, frankly curious about something he didn’t understand. Eisler, his hands at his side, bowed his head. Only Johanna Weber, her eyes shining with held-back tears, understood that something remarkable had occurred. Out of either blind loyalty or a shared distress, her face reached out to Weber across the room, ignoring the others, and Connolly saw that he had got her wrong, so eager to notice her manners that he had missed the woman. He thought suddenly that he didn’t understand anyone here, their sorcerers’ jobs and their terrible stories. How many in those camps had the Webers known? And wouldn’t it be the same if they hadn’t known any? The room was too close, and he didn’t belong here. Quietly he slipped through the door, unnoticed, with the music following him out into the night.
He gulped in some raw fresh air, surprised at its chilly bite, and looked up at the sky. The stars were always wonderful in the high air of Los Alamos, but tonight they seemed spectacularly abundant, masses of them, laid out for the music.
She was standing near the end of the building, smoking a cigarette, huddled in a cardigan, her arms folded across her chest to keep in the warmth. The weak yellow light from the window kept her face in shadow. She glanced over quickly when she heard him, then turned back again, unsurprised. For once there seemed to be no movement on the mesa, no truck exhaust and grinding gears, so that the music poured out of the house as if it were being played in the open air. She shivered from the cold and inhaled, making the end of her cigarette burn a flicker of orange.
“It might snow this weekend,” she said, her voice low but distinct, not a whisper.
“Don’t you like the music?”
“I love the music. I just don’t like to watch. They’re so-intense. I can’t bear it.”
“Won’t he notice?”
“No.”
As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, her face became clearer, and he saw that she was looking directly at him, the conversation a pretext for this other contact. She dropped her cigarette to the ground.
“Fire hazard,” she said, running it out with her shoe. “Bloody fire hazard. What about you?” She moved her head to indicate the house. “Bored so soon?”
“No. Just restless.”
She looked at him again, interested.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s all over my head.”
“You seemed sure of yourself a while ago. That’s a hell of a thing to say to anybody.”
“I didn’t say it to anybody. I said it to you.”
She was quiet, just studied his face until the silence between them became a conversation. Finally she leaned back against the building and let him come closer.
“What are we going to do about this?” she said.
“What do you want to do?” he said, his face close now. He could feel her breath on his cold cheek.
“I don’t know,” she said simply, her honesty a kind of provocation.
He leaned forward and moved her arms down to her side, and when she stood there, unresisting, he kissed her, gently pressing her against the wall, tasting her.
“Don’t,” she said, but not moving away, letting him kiss her again.
“Why not?” he said, his words kisses of breath now as he moved against the hollow of her neck.
“No good will come of it,” she said, a catchphrase to ward off a spell.
“Yes it will,” he said, still kissing her neck.
“Yes.” Then she opened her mouth to him, kissing him back, moving her tongue with his, her arms now behind him, pulling him closer.
“Oh God,” she said, whispering. “It won’t, though. No good at all.”
“How do you know?” he said, pressing against her, excited.
“It never does.” She buried her face in his chest. “Never.”
But he wasn’t listening; the words were a kind of chant, just a rhythm. Instead he kissed her harder, pulling her body next to his so that she could feel him. “It will,” he insisted, the words some code for sex. He could sense her own excitement as she twisted against him. But she was pulling away, catching her breath, shaking herself awake.
“No,” she whispered, moving away from the wall, and for a moment he thought he had lost her, frightened her away. He grabbed at her arm, moving her back into the embrace, but when he saw her eyes, angry at his force, he took his hand away and instead moved it gently down the side of her face. He touched her hair as he stroked her, and, shivering, she moved her face into his hand, bending her neck, calmer.
“I want to make love to you,” he said.
She nodded.
He leaned forward and kissed her again, gently this time. “Since the first night.”
She nodded again. “Not here. Not on the Hill. I won’t, here,” she said finally.
“Where?”
“I don’t know. I’ll think of something,” she said quickly, a conspirator.
“I’ll drive you someplace,” he said softly, kissing her again. “With my coupons.” But when he looked up, her eyes seemed stricken, as if she had already been found guilty of some terrible crime.
“Yes,” she said, catching his look. “You can drive me someplace.”
“Anywhere you like.”
“Anywhere I like. We’ll go away.”
He kissed her, a reassurance.
“But go home now, okay?” she said. “No more. I can’t.”
“Okay,” he said quietly, and turned to go, moving away from the house to the darkened street. He heard the music again. Suddenly she caught his arm and fell against him, bringing his face down.
“You’ll make it all right, won’t you?”
He looked at her and nodded. “You think you’re taking an awful chance with me. Don’t you?”
She didn’t say anything.
“Maybe I’m better than you think I am.”
“I don’t care,” she said.
Mills was waiting for him when he got home, stretched out on Karl’s narrow bed with his hands behind his head, staring at nothing.
“Make yourself at home,” Connolly said, surprised to see him.
“Thanks. You sure haven’t done much to it, have you?” he said, getting up and looking around the spare room. “It’s like old Karl never left.”
“I wasn’t planning on a long stay.”
“None of us do.”
“Something on your mind, or is this just a social call?”
“Take a look,” Mills said, taking a sheet of paper out of his jacket. “I went over to the office before. The movie stank-Lee Tracy and Nancy Kelly. Jap spies and the Panama Canal. I mean, a little late for the canal, don’t you think? You wonder who thinks them up.”
Connolly glanced at him, cutting him short.
“So I went back to the office to go through a few more files, and this caught my eye. Probably nothing, but you said you wanted to see anything interesting.”
Connolly was looking at the figures. “Two withdrawals of five hundred dollars. That’s a lot of money. Who is it?”
“That’s the funny part. Oppenheimer.” Connolly glanced at the paper again, then handed it back. “Better keep looking.”
“That’s what I thought you’d say.”
“Meaning?”
“Nothing. I just think you’re under the spell. I know all the signs.”
“What spell?”
“Our great leader. Those blue eyes. That lightning mind. I’ve seen it all before.”
“Mills, have you been drinking?”
“I have, as a matter of fact. But not that much. Hell, I don’t think it’s him either-I don’t think it’s any of them. I was just hoping we’d stop all this bank business. But out of curiosity, are you going to ask him about it?”
“Yes.”
“He’ll love that. You’ve got guts, I’ll say that for you. Questioning Caesar’s wife.”
“Except he’s Caesar.”
“That’s something worth thinking about,” Mills said.
It did snow over the weekend, and the ground was covered with the dry, powdery snow of the high desert when they met for the memorial service on Sunday. Despite the cold, the April sun was bright, reflecting off the snow, filling the morning with an unnatural glamour. The flag in front of Fuller Lodge was at half mast, and Oppenheimer spoke in the theater, his voice no longer filled with the hastily assembled emotion of Thursday but with a more public eloquence. All of Los Alamos, it seemed, had turned out for this final salute, and Connolly felt himself looking at them again as if they were in a lineup. It was absurd. All these bright, well-meaning faces-he doubted there was even a traffic violation among them. He looked at the men, in formal overcoats and shiny shoes, dressed for a winter Sunday’s outing in Vienna. Some of the women wore hats. There were children, looking solemn. Oppenheimer quoted from the Bhagavad Gita: “Man is a creature whose substance is faith. What his faith is, he is.” Roosevelt’s faith, the faith they all shared, was a belief in a better world. His voice was simple and unaffected. The room was hushed.
Could Oppenheimer really be involved? Wouldn’t Caesar sacrifice anything to win? But what could make Karl so important to him? The answer was, he wasn’t. Perhaps Mills was right-once you started, you tainted everything with suspicion until no one was truly innocent. There was always something, even something that didn’t matter, that was only about itself. They were chasing shadows.
While Oppenheimer spoke, Connolly’s eyes drifted elsewhere. She was sitting on the aisle three rows away, her head tilted toward the stage in attention. Her hair was down, and it caught the sheen of the snow glare through the windows. Her shoulders were straight, and he imagined holding them, warm to the touch, and feeling them go slack when they moved their bodies together. Her skin would be cream. Even while he listened to the meaning of leadership, the search for a better world, he saw the messed bed, her body barely covered by a tangled sheet, her skin slick with perspiration, all that fierceness dissolving in his hands, wet for him. And then, as if she had read his thoughts, she turned her head and looked at him, a direct glance, an intimacy that said they were already lovers. It was the last thing he had expected to happen, and for one quick instant he wanted to get away before it was too late, just run back to Washington, leaving them to stew in their own unsolvable murder and impossible moral questions and affairs from which-of course she was right-no good could come. But he felt the pulse of his erection and he knew he would never leave now. The murder would solve itself somehow and the moral questions would drift to that limbo where they always went and he would have her. Again and again. It was as clear and simple as that.
When they all stood to leave, he realized with embarrassment that he was still hard, and folded his coat in front of him. People filed out quietly. When she passed by him, her husband at her side, they exchanged a glance. In all this somber crowd, did anyone else see that her eyes were shining? But no one noticed at all, and he saw that the secret itself was part of the excitement for her.
Outside they stood in small groups, like people after church, and to avoid looking at her again, Connolly found himself talking to Pawlowski instead.
“I never got a chance to tell you how much I enjoyed the music,” he said. “Are you playing again this week?”
“Not me, I’m afraid,” Pawlowski said politely.
“But you were very good.”
“No, it’s not that,” Emma said, cutting in. “Daniel won’t be here. He has to go off-site.”
Connolly felt a prick of excitement, as if she had touched him, declared herself.
“Emma, you’re not supposed to-”
“Oh, darling, I’m sorry. But he is security. Surely it’s all right?” she said to Connolly easily. And while her husband said something polite about the other players doing well without him, Connolly looked at her for the first time. Do you really want this? her glance said. This is what it will mean. The code words. Sex would be the beginning. While he imagined those afternoons, she had already seen what would come, all the complications, furtive and tricky and maybe even doomed, like the movie Japanese risking everything for worthless plans of the Panama Canal. Yes, I want it, he thought.