But it wasn’t Emma he got to drive that week, it was Oppenheimer.
“Any idea why he requested me?” he asked, annoyed at this complication.
Mills shrugged. “Maybe he likes your conversation. Maybe he doesn’t like mine. Anyway, you’ll have to wear this,” he said, holding out a gun.
Connolly took it hesitantly. He had handled guns before, always with the sensation that they were about to go off. “Christ, am I actually expected to use this?”
“I thought you were a tough-guy reporter.”
“That’s Winchell. I just go to press conferences and lock my door at night.”
“You know how to use it, don’t you? I mean, you don’t need a lesson or anything.”
“I’ll manage.”
“Just remember about the safety. Of course, you’re supposed to catch the other guy’s bullet first, so what the hell.”
“Catch how?”
“By dying, mostly. Put your body in front of Oppie and do your bit for the war effort.”
“Can’t we send someone else?”
“You have something better to do?”
Connolly looked at him, wondering for a minute whether Mills suspected anything. Did it show, this heat? Like some priapic blush? But Mills was only being sarcastic. “Just finish the accounts, okay? You might give Holliday a buzz. He’ll let things slide if you don’t goose him now and then. Where am I going, by the way?”
“South. To the test site.”
“I didn’t know there was one.”
“They built it in December. Must be getting ready to do something, ‘cause there’s been quite a little traffic back and forth lately. Try to avoid lunch if you can.”
“Why?”
“It’s antelope. Enlisted men have nothing to do down there except shoot rattlesnakes and antelope and roast them-the antelope, that is. They say it tastes like beef, but that’s only because they’ve had their brains bleached out in the sun. It tastes like antelope.”
“How far is this place, anyway?”
“About two hundred miles.”
“Christ, that’s all day.”
Mills grinned and handed him a test site pass stamped with a large T. “Don’t forget to ask about the money.”
In fact, it was the first thing they discussed.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Oppenheimer said as Connolly started down the switchback road in the morning sunlight. He was sitting in front, at his request, and was clearly expecting to talk. “This will give us a chance to catch up. Any progress? Suspects?”
“Only you.”
“I beg your pardon?” He twisted in the passenger seat, his eyebrows raised, anticipating a joke.
“Why did you withdraw a thousand dollars over three months this winter?”
Oppenheimer was quiet, then lit a cigarette. “None of your damned business.”
“If you say so.”
“I do.”
“Then I’ll take your word for it.”
Oppenheimer looked out the passenger window and smoked. Finally he said, “You needn’t do that. It’s personal, but not, I suppose, secret. I’m not allowed secrets anymore.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to-”
“No, you’re just doing your job,” Oppenheimer said. “Go ahead, do it.”
“What did you do with the money?”
“Put it into two postal orders and sent them to an old friend who needed it.”
“Why?”
“She’s been under psychiatric care, if you must know. She’s broke. We call it a loan.”
“No, I mean why a postal order?”
“How else? We don’t have checks up here. You know that.”
“Do you still have the receipts?”
“Yes.”
“Does your wife know?”
“Yes.” He was silent again. “You’ve got a hell of a nerve, you know that?”
“You authorized the search.”
Oppenheimer sighed. “So. No good deed goes unpunished. I never imagined you wanted to look at mine. More fool me. Of course you would. I’m the obvious person to beat someone up in the park. Do you ever feel embarrassed doing this?”
Connolly downshifted. “I don’t feel great now, if that’s what you mean.”
Oppenheimer sighed again. “No, of course you don’t. And now I should apologize for being rude, which somehow makes it all my fault, when you were the one asking the questions. Interesting how we tie ourselves up in knots, isn’t it?”
“Well, don’t do it on my account. Look, I’m eliminating any loose end I can. I didn’t mean to intrude on your personal life. Let’s just forget it.”
“But what did you think it meant? What are you looking for? What’s the point of it all?”
“Bruner came into some money before he died. He may have been blackmailing somebody. He may not. I want to find out where he got it.”
“And you thought he was blackmailing me? What on earth about? Do you think there’s a single thing about me the government doesn’t already know? Maybe you should see what it feels like to be on the other side of a security check. Your left-wing friends. Your right-wing friends-well, such as they are. Your old girlfriends. Your Jewish friends. Your students. An ambulance for Spain? Was that politically motivated? What did you study in Germany? How much do you drink? Do you ever feel conflicted loyalties? My God, does one ever not?”
“I said, let’s forget it.”
“Bruner didn’t know anything about the project.”
“I wasn’t thinking of that.”
“What, then?”
“He was homosexual. That gets to be a pretty sensitive issue.”
“Oh,” Oppenheimer said, then laughed. “Well, I have to hand it to you-that’s one question they never asked. Are you writing this up for my file? Am I supposed to formally deny it?”
“I’m not writing anything.”
“It would almost be worth it to see the look on G. G.’s face,” he said, still amused.
“I thought you might be sensitive on someone else’s behalf. A friend. Someone who needed the money.”
Oppenheimer looked over at him. “Only the once,” he said, ending it.
Connolly drove for a while in silence. The air was warmer down in the valley. They had passed through the slopes of pinon and juniper to the sage desert. Oppenheimer had lifted some papers from a briefcase and was working through them on his lap, tapping his cigarette out the open window. Ordinarily Connolly would have turned on the radio, but he was too interested in Oppenheimer to think of it. Everyone else got fifteen minutes, and he had hours to go.
“What did you mean when you said he didn’t know anything about the project?” he asked.
Oppenheimer looked up from the papers. “Anything that would put it in jeopardy,” he said deliberately. “He couldn’t. Only a scientist would know that.”
“The way I hear it, he liked to nose around. Maybe he knew more than you think.”
“He wouldn’t know how to separate what was important. The basic principles were perfectly clear before the war, you know-any physicist worth his salt understands the principles. Someone like Heisenberg would know a lot more than that. It’s the mechanics of it that matter now. A layman wouldn’t be able to differentiate. He simply wouldn’t know what to look for. In that sense, the complexity of the project is its own security.”
“If you don’t know what to look for, you look at everything.”
“Rather like you and your project.”
The quickness of the answer took Connolly by surprise. “That’s some connection.”
“That’s how science works. You guess, you make connections, then if it fits you prove what you guessed in the first place. Isn’t that what you’re doing?”
“I haven’t guessed yet.”
“But you’ve guessed where to look,” he said, his voice playful. “Where would you start looking to find out about the gadget?”
The question had the effect of a chess piece put into place. Connolly, alert to the game, moved his own. “Where would I start? Your briefcase.”
Oppenheimer looked at him appreciatively, then smiled. “You might be disappointed. The only thing you’d learn in here,” he said, casually holding up a sheaf of papers, “is how utterly fouled up our bureaucracy is.”
“Fucked up,” Connolly corrected him.
“As you say,” Oppenheimer said, enjoying himself. “Why bother with the euphemism? What would you make of this, for example?” He took up a sheet. “This one’s from Bainbridge-a good man, in charge of Trinity.”
“Which is?”
“Where we’re going. The test site. He wants it officially designated Project T. It turns out the business office calls it A and Mitchell over in procurement calls it T but ships to S-45 and last week it was made Project J, to prevent any confusion with Building T or Site T, but people call it T anyway since the passes are marked T, so he wants to go with T.”
“And do you?”
“Oh yes. Whatever Ken wants. Here’s another. Procurement wants to create a new series of ratings. We’ve got X, A, B, and C, X being priority. Now they want to break X out to XX, X1, and X2.”
“What’s XX? Special delivery?”
“Virtually. Goes right to the War Production Board to dispatch a cargo plane anywhere in the country.”
“And will you approve it?”
“Certainly. We can’t afford to wait for materiel while the services squabble over priority.” And there it was again, the unexpected steel, the arrogant willingness to override. “Of course, it’s easy to make fun of all this alphabet soup. The problem is, it’s important, really. Every detail. It’s all important to somebody.”
“How much materiel are we talking about?”
Oppenheimer sighed and lit another cigarette. “We handle about thirty-five tons a day at the warehouse. Maybe five of that is going down to the site.”
“Five tons a day?” Connolly was staggered.
“Yes,” Oppenheimer said, “more or less. Everything from beer to-well, everything.”
“But it must be huge. How do you hide something that big? I never heard of it before today.”
“Yes,” Oppenheimer said, smiling, “and you’re in security. Special security, anyway. I often wonder myself. You know, when we set up the site we needed our own wavelength for the ground shortwave system, and what we got, by accident, was the one they use in the San Antonio freightyards. They could hear us, but I doubt they knew what we were talking about. We routed the phones through Albuquerque and Denver so nobody outside would make a connection to the Hill. Elaborate security precautions. But we still have to ship the stuff off the Hill-no way around that. So we send out trucks every night after it gets dark, ten of them sometimes, and you know, I don’t think anyone’s noticed? It’s as I said, you have to know what you’re looking for.” He smiled, as if he had just demonstrated the neatness of a formula.
“Maybe,” Connolly said. “On the other hand, sometimes you come up lucky. I’ve just collected information about the scale of the project, the code names, the exact telephone connections, and the personnel in charge, and I haven’t even been through your briefcase.”
“So you have,” Oppenheimer said quietly. “Maybe you’re more dangerous than I thought.”
“Only if I have to use this.” He nodded down at the gun. “One more question?”
“Could I stop you?”
“Is there anything in the briefcase you wouldn’t want the Germans to see?”
Oppenheimer considered. “Yes.”
“But you brought it out anyway?”
“I doubt we’re going to be attacked by the Nazis on the road to Albuquerque. It’s a long drive, and I’ve got a lot of paperwork to do. It seemed worth the risk.”
“But strictly speaking, it’s against regulations? Do the other bodyguards know this?”
Oppenheimer smiled a checkmate grin. “Of course. Why do you think I requested you?”
They had lunch at Roy’s in Belen, a designated project stop, and Connolly found himself sweating under the punishing sun. After the cold air of Los Alamos, the desert here was a furnace, hot and almost empty all the way to Mexico. Even the stunted pinons of the rolling high plateau had now given way to cactus and scorpions. In his gray suit and porkpie hat, Oppenheimer seemed unnaturally cool, dabbing the back of his neck with a handkerchief while Connolly dripped large patches of sweat through his shirt. But afterward, as the dust blew through the windows on a constant wind, scratchy and irritating, he gave up too, abandoning his work and staring listlessly at the wavy glare that stretched for miles.
“Yes, Virginia, there is a hell and we’re in it,” he said to the air. “All this to win the war.” He pulled his hat to shield his eyes and slumped down in the seat, pretending to sleep but continuing to talk. “The Spaniards called it the Jornada del Muerto, and for once they weren’t exaggerating. If your wagon broke down here, there wasn’t much you could do but bring out the rosary beads.”
“Then let’s hope we don’t run out of gas. We’re pretty low.”
“That’s poor planning, I must say. There’s a station up ahead in San Antonio. Keep an eye out-if you blink, you’ll miss it. There’s a bar there too. We’re not supposed to stop, but everyone does, and you’ve already broken all the rules.”
Incredibly, the bar was crowded. Connolly wondered where, in all this barren emptiness, they could have come from. The room was dark-he had to squint when he walked through the door-and one wall at the end was entirely lined with bottles, a trophy wall to past conviviality. When his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw that at least part of the crowd had come from the Hill. They made an elaborate show of pretending not to notice Oppenheimer, as if one security violation could be redeemed by obeying another, but Oppenheimer ignored the charade and went over to talk to them. Connolly saw Eisler and Pawlowski, and he smiled to himself at the irony of discovering Pawlowski’s destination after all. It was a small world in the middle of the desert. While Emma sat alone, both the men who wanted her faced each other over beer in a Mexican bar. It was an irony Oppenheimer would appreciate, Connolly thought, absurd and elegant at the same time. A young Mexican bartender went busily back and forth, popping caps off beer bottles, his eyes shining at what must have been unexpected traffic. Eisler, his pale skin gleaming in the half-light, managed to look formal even with his short-sleeved cowboy shirt and Coca-Cola, like someone who had stepped into the wrong advertisement.
But Oppenheimer didn’t want to stay-they had miles to go-and his leaving broke up the party for all of them.
“So this is what you meant by off-site,” Connolly said to Pawlowski as they left together.
“We’re not supposed to say,” he said simply. He glanced at Connolly’s gun, confused, as if he were still trying to place him. “I didn’t know you were coming here.”
“I’m driving Oppenheimer. Is there someone with you?”
He smiled shyly. “No, I’m not that important. The only danger to me is from Friedrich’s driving.”
“We haven’t done so badly so far,” Eisler said pleasantly. Connolly noticed that one of his forearms was sunburned, bright pink against the short sleeve, and he imagined him driving with it hanging rakishly out the window, his fingers light on the wheel, an old schoolmaster free on the open road. He wondered what they talked about and knew instinctively it would be serious, the arcane mechanics of the gadget that Oppenheimer believed constituted its own security. “Shall we follow you? It’s a comfort to have another car. In case of a breakdown, you know.”
And so, with a third car Connolly hadn’t seen before, they set out in caravan across the flat desert. Oppenheimer resumed his slumped-down position, angling his hat to avoid the blazing afternoon sun.
“You could nap in the back,” Connolly offered.
“I could nap in the front if it were quiet,” Oppenheimer said. He sighed and took out a cigarette. “Which somehow I feel it won’t be. What else is on your mind?”
Connolly grinned. “Nothing. What’s Pawlowski like?”
“Don’t tell me you suspect him too?”
“No, idle curiosity. It passes the time.”
“Hmm. Like the radio.” He exhaled, thinking. “Hardworking-enjoys working. Bethe thinks the world of him. Determined, even stubborn,” he said, playing with it now, as if he were composing an applicant’s recommendation. “Wonderful mind, but interior. I’ve always thought that physics became a substitute world for him, but that’s just a guess. Actually, it’s not so unusual here-we’re all a little interior. No patience with showboating. He can be a little-what does Herr Goebbels call us? Stiff-necked. Thinks Teller’s an ass, for instance, and wouldn’t work for him. Not a homosexual either, by the way.”
“No. I’ve met his wife.”
“Emma? Yes. She’s quite a girl.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning she’s quite a girl. English. Most beautiful rider I’ve ever seen. You have to be brought up with it to ride that well.”
“Unusual marriage.”
“Is it? I wouldn’t know. I think all marriages are unusual unless you happen to be in them.”
“No, I mean coming from such different backgrounds.”
He laughed. “Don’t be such a snob. You obviously don’t know the English. Least conventional people in the world-once you get to the gentry level, anyway. She fought in Spain, you know, so there must be a wild streak somewhere. You should watch her ride. You can tell everything about an Englishwoman by the way she rides.” He took a drag on his cigarette. “On the other hand, what could it possibly matter to you?”
He dropped it lightly, like an ash on the seat, and for a minute Connolly didn’t know what to say.
“It doesn’t.”
“Just looking at everything,” Oppenheimer said. “I had no idea you were casting your net quite this wide.” He paused, waiting for Connolly to respond. “She’s an attractive woman.”
“Yes, she is,” Connolly said flatly. He felt, talking to Oppenheimer, that he was always moving a piece into place. But the game was unfair-it didn’t matter to Oppenheimer, so he didn’t have to play carefully. “I was wondering. The way science works? If you guess wrong, there won’t be any connections to make, will there?”
“No, not if you guess wrong.”
Connolly let it drop. Then, annoyed at himself for having somehow started it in the first place, he grew even more annoyed at not knowing whether Oppenheimer had meant anything or not. It was a reporter’s instinct to hide behind a one-way mirror, not revealing anything himself. Now he felt he was too close to the surface, unreliable, as if the slightest poke would show his hand.
“Dr. Eisler said something interesting the other night.”
“That’s unusual,” Oppenheimer said, bored. “Friedrich doesn’t usually say anything. Maybe you have a gift for drawing people out.”
“What if the Germans give up before you finish the project?”
“Friedrich said that?” Oppenheimer said, drawing his neck up, turtlelike.
“Not exactly. He said the Nazis, the fact of them, gave us permission to make the gadget, so what would we do without them?”
Oppenheimer took off his hat and rubbed his temple. Connolly saw that his face had grown taut with disapproval.
“We haven’t made it yet,” he said finally. “His qualms are premature. He may be premature about the Nazis as well.”
“But if he isn’t?”
“That’s something devoutly to be hoped for. Every minute this war goes on.”
“But would you keep building it?”
“Of course,” Oppenheimer said simply. “Do you think we’ve come this far not to build it?”
“But if we didn’t need it to win the war?”
“Then we’d need it to end the war. The Germans aren’t the only ones fighting. Sometimes our European friends forget that, but that’s understandable. How many more casualties are acceptable in the Pacific? Another year? Less? I don’t know how anyone makes that determination. I certainly can’t.”
“No,” Connolly said quietly.
“Mooning about ‘permission’ when there’s so much at stake.”
“But you can see what he means. That’s why they wanted to build it.”
“We wanted to build it because it was going to be built. By someone. We wanted it to be us, all of us here wanted that. Does that shock you? Sometimes it shocks me. Where do our egos come from? We are trying to release the energy of matter itself-literally transform the composition of things. What physicist would resist that? Would you? The science is there. It doesn’t ask for permission. It asks to be revealed. But so difficult. Expensive. The price was the military-how else could we have done it?”
The sun was still high when they passed the test site perimeter guards and exchanged their passes at the security office. The base camp, another instant city of hutments and army buildings wrapped in miles of overhead wires, baked unprotected in the glare. Most of the men were shirtless, a few even down to skivvies, but despite the heat they moved quickly, full of purpose, like stagehands making last-minute adjustments before an early curtain. The only shade lay in the slim patches next to the east side of the buildings. At noon there would have been none at all.
Connolly was struck yet again by the sheer scale of the project. On the Hill, with buildings sheltered by trees and water tanks or tucked away in nearby canyons, it was easier to imagine it a familiar city in the grip of a construction boom. There were wives and clotheslines and musical evenings. The land rolled away to calendar mountains. There were ranches. But here, on the endless stark desert, the site was undisguised in all its strangeness, a bleached oasis willed into existence overnight. Connolly knew the Manhattan Project had factories elsewhere in the country, huge plants created just to make the gadget’s fuel, but it was at Trinity that he finally grasped the enormous ambition of it all, because nothing belonged here, and when the test was finished nothing would remain. A whole city-all those millions of tons of materiel-had gone up for a single moment in time.
Oppenheimer had one inspection to make-a bunker almost completed, about six miles away to the south-and then a series of meetings back at the camp, so Connolly was left to his own devices, as smoothly dismissed as a family servant. Despite a creaky air cooler, the mess was stifling. He took a cold Coke and went outside to sit in the dusty wind. The beads of condensation on the glass evaporated instantly in the hot air. He leaned against the side of the building in a sliver of shade and watched men stringing more wires overhead, working in bulky gloves to prevent scorching, their eyes covered by goggles against the blowing sand. Jeeps went back and forth, throwing up dust, but each time they passed they left silence. There were no birds. Only men ventured aboveground; the rest of the desert burrowed in, waiting for night.
The camp lay in a hollow bowl whose far sides, the Oscura Mountains, were too distant to be much more than hazy frames. Connolly had never seen so much space. If you walked into it, stepped beyond the plywood shacks and telephone poles, you would be lost. He had spent most of his life trying to find enough room-the cramped pull-out couch in his boyhood living room, the cubicle at the newspaper, where there never seemed any surface to put down a cup of coffee-and now, unexpectedly, he had found it. This was as far away as you could
Everything here seemed remote-the war, the office in Washington, all the life of the past. The desert erased it away. He stared at the landscape blankly. It was impossible to think here-the sun burned through the connections, allowing only stray thoughts to float out like the little eddies of dust, meaningless. He drained his Coke, and the thick bottom reminded him of Manny Wonder’s glasses, smeared from constant wiping so that Connolly thought he barely saw at all. Manny was the paper’s columnist, a short, perpetually sweaty man who turned every morning to page 10 of the Mirror to see what Winchell had done, then spent the rest of the day sifting through the reams of press-agent tips to make a column out of what was left. An assistant cut up releases and sorted them in piles for him: Wonders of the City, Seven Wonders, Wonderfuls. He never took his jacket off in the newsroom, as if he might have to leave any minute for El Morocco, and treated the copyboys with elaborate courtesy, his thin voice barely audible above the typewriters. In his column debutantes did the rumba, idle women got divorced, actresses sacrificed their careers to war bond drives, and the country saw Manny with them, up all night on the town, but in the newsroom he was a sweaty little man with the manners of an accountant. He had had four wives. Connolly smiled. What was his real name? He had never asked, and now he would never know, because Manny too drifted away, just another ghost on the desert who might never have existed at all.
He wasn’t going to return to the paper. He had loved it then-the handlers at City Hall, the cops on their free lunch-but he didn’t care anymore. He was tired of those stories too. The war had taken him away and parked him finally here at the end of an army lifeline down Route 85 on the edge of something new. It was what gave the project its exhilaration-not the high mesa air, not ending the war, but this feeling that they might be the only people in the world who were not still sorting out its past. Everything here was brand-new-the raw wood, the calculations, the profound mystery of what it would be. Maybe that’s what Oppenheimer had meant. They were staring at a blank piece of paper, like this endless white sheet of desert. Nobody knew what would be on it.
He heard a roar overhead and saw three bombers flying toward him from Alamogordo. Getting ready. But what was he doing here? Everyone else was busy preparing for something. Maybe this is what sunstroke was like, a weightless dreaming. It wasn’t his project-he didn’t even understand it. If he were still a reporter he’d be taking notes, amazed at his luck in being in the middle of a story that dwarfed anything on the metro desk. But he had given that up. He was here only to solve a crime everyone else was too busy to care about, nothing more than an interruption in their lives. And, oddly, he didn’t mind. He felt grateful to the project for letting him imagine a future. The war made everyone live day to day, never promising anything beyond its own ending. Now he felt the urge to get on-it didn’t matter where. All that was left was to put things in order so he could pack up. But now that he’d come here, he really didn’t want to go anywhere else. The future was here.
He lit a cigarette and wondered whether Bruner had ever come here, felt the new freedom of the desert space. Probably not. Connolly guessed that it would have terrified him. He had lived in too many cells to feel comfortable without walls. And yet he liked to go driving. Why? Where did he go? Maybe, a new patriot, he wanted to see this movie Western landscape come to real life. Connolly tried to imagine him gazing out to the horizon, hand shielding his eyes, but the picture wouldn’t come. His face in the file photo was pale, a stranger to the sun. His life had been formed in the furtive corners of rooms, bargaining for food, tapping on walls-but this was nonsense. There was no way of knowing. He could try the Oppenheimer method and start with a guess, but no connections seemed to follow. If you had been a victim, you could believe in conspiracy. Now what? If you believed in conspiracy, you believed in the value of knowing about it. How else to be safe? The world was organized in a series of invisible networks-in prison, where survival depended on it; in a secret community, where sex flourished more freely the more it was hidden. When everything important is invisible, do you begin to take pleasure simply in discovering it? It wasn’t just keeping your eyes open, that wasn’t enough. It became, finally, a love of knowing for its own sake. An advantage.
So Karl read files. Whose? Yes, he could picture that, Karl sitting under a lamp at night, absorbed in a folder, looking for a date that didn’t match, anything. Or something specific. It’s what isn’t there, he had said. But then why the car? Why take time away from the hunt pretending to be an indifferent tourist, unless this was playing cat and mouse too. Unless you were tracking somebody. Unless you were with somebody. Until curiosity killed the cat. And now Connolly, as always, ran out of connections. There had to be someone else. It’s not possible to live without a trace. Karl, neat as a monk, had left prophylactics in his drawer. There had to be someone. Even, though he still could not believe it, a pickup.
“You got a light?”
After days of modulated European accents, the thick American twang of the voice surprised him. Texas, probably, or Oklahoma. He looked like someone who had played football in high school, broad and muscular, with an unshaven chin that jutted out in jock confidence. He was stripped to the waist, his chest covered in an alkali film, so that the bandanna facemask now pulled down around his neck flapped like the collar to a shirt that wasn’t there. Young jug ears stuck out beneath the fatigue hat. Connolly handed him the lighter.
“You new on the site?” He was one of those people whose most innocent question came out like a challenge, as if he hadn’t learned to mask some fundamental belligerence. Connolly imagined him starting a bar fight, a redneck quick to take offense.
“Just down for the day. Guard duty.”
“No shit. Join the club.” He grinned, easier now that Connolly had explained himself. He flashed a security badge to establish club contact. “Who’d you draw?”
“Oppenheimer.”
He grunted. “You’re lucky. He never stays over. You don’t want to stay here. No fucking way.”
“You been down here long?”
“Twenty-eight days. Twenty-eight fucking days. They moved a bunch of us down last month. Let me tell you, this is about the hardest time there is.”
Connolly looked at him with interest. He thought he’d already talked to everybody in the intelligence unit. No one had mentioned transfers to Trinity. “Yeah, it’s hot.”
“It ain’t the heat. We got heat in East Texas. It’s the Mickey Mouse. They got this tighter than a rat’s ass. Nobody goes out. There ain’t nothing to do but shoot rattlers. The well water’s got all this shit in it so’s you can’t drink it-gypsum and stuff-but you wash in it so everybody gets the runs anyway. You got to stamp on scorpions in the latrine. Said they wanted only the best for Trinity duty, so naturally we all thought it was something special. It is.”
“So what do you guard?”
“Them Gila lizards mostly. There ain’t nothing down here to guard. Worst problem they got is all the antelope tripping over the sensor wires they got running everywhere.”
“That’s why they shoot them?”
“Yeah, that’s the excitement. Just the shooting. Nothing to eat and nothing to fuck. At least they got women on the Hill. Once some of the WACs came down to keep us company, but they don’t put out, never, so what the fuck?”
Connolly put out his cigarette. “Well, it won’t be much longer.”
“According to who?”
Connolly shrugged. “What do they tell you?”
“You kidding me? Brother, they don’t tell us nothing. We’re not supposed to know. They told us when Roosevelt died-that’s it. For all I know, the war’s over.”
“It’s not,” Connolly said.
The kid took off his hat to wipe his forehead, the skin now turned permanently red under the short blond hair. “Well, I got to get going. I was just on my break. Nice talking to you.”
Connolly looked at him to see if he was joking, but the face was earnest.
“Watch out for the centipedes, they sting like hell.”
“I’ll do that. Mind if I ask you a question?”
The kid, about to move away, turned toward him, his eyes suddenly wary. Connolly had seen the look before, the automatic reaction of someone used to the police, the legacy of too many Saturday night brawls that had got out of hand. He waited.
“When you were on the Hill, did you know a guy called Karl Bruner?”
“Karl?” he said, looking puzzled. “Sure. He was G-2. Everybody knew him. Why?”
“He’s dead.”
“Karl?” He was genuinely surprised. So not even gossip had penetrated the news blackout. Or maybe nobody had cared.
“He was killed.”
“No shit. How?”
“He was murdered.”
The kid stared at him. “You kidding me?” he said quietly.
“No. He was found in the river park in Santa Fe, off the Alameda. You hadn’t heard?”
“I told you, we don’t hear nothing down here. Who did it?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out.”
“You’re a cop,” he said, an accusation, as if Connolly should have declared himself earlier.
“No. Army Intelligence. We’re looking into it on our own.”
“I don’t understand. What happened?”
Connolly watched his reaction as he answered. “We don’t know. The police think it might have been a homosexual murder.”
It was a surprise punch. The kid caught his breath with a nervous laugh of disbelief. “That’s fucking crazy.”
“Why?”
“Why? Karl wasn’t any fruit.”
“How do you know?”
He sputtered. “How do I know? He just wasn’t, that’s all. Christ Almighty. Karl?”
“Did you know him well?”
“He was just a guy in the office. He used to give me duty assignments after I came off the mounteds.”
“So you don’t know who his friends were? Whether he was seeing anybody?”
“No.”
“Okay. I just thought you might have noticed something. He talk to you much?”
“Some.”
“What about?”
“Nothing. Stuff. You know.”
“What kind of stuff?”
He hesitated for a minute, and Connolly could see him debating with himself, embarrassed.
“Did he ask about your girlfriends?” Connolly said, steering him.
“Like whether I was getting any? Yeah, he asked that.”
“And you liked to tell him.”
“Go fuck yourself,” he said, angry now.
“No, it’s important. Did you get the sense that he was interested or just making conversation to make you think he was interested?”
But this was too complicated for him, and he looked at Connolly blankly. “He was interested. He liked to know where you could go, things like that.”
“And who?”
“Sometimes.”
“And did you tell him?”
He darted his eyes away, searching for a way out, wondering how they had got here. “Sometimes.”
“But he was just curious? He didn’t want the names for himself?”
“No,” he said, seeing the implication, “but not because he was a fruit. He was already fucking somebody.”
Connolly was quiet, unsure where to go with this. It was possible that in the Texan’s mind, bored and adolescent, somebody always had to be fucking somebody. It was possible that Bruner had used this as a cover, a lure for a braggart’s gossip. But it was just possible that it was true, the missing link.
“What makes you think so?”
“I don’t know-things he said, I guess. You know, like he’d say he had a date.”
“Those exact words? He had a date?”
“Something like that. Yeah, exact, I guess. I didn’t pay much attention.”
“He mention a name? How did you know it was a woman?”
The Texan flushed. “Well, what else? Jesus Christ. I mean, why would he want to hear about what I was doing if he was a fruit?”
“That’s a good question.”
“What do you mean by that?” It was at once hostile and uncertain, as if the situation were so foreign to him that he wasn’t sure he should resent it.
“Did he ever ask for any sexual details? You know-”
“No. You don’t talk about stuff like that.”
“So it was just ‘I had a good time last night,’ or ‘Boy oh boy, you should see-’ ”
“Yeah. Like that. Nothing dirty. Look, he asked. What was I supposed to say?”
“Maybe your reputation preceded you. Maybe he was looking for pointers.”
“Is that supposed to be funny?”
“So how often did you guys compare notes?”
“For two cents I’d push your face in. You got a right to ask all this, I suppose?”
“All the way up to Groves himself.”
“Shit,” he said, disgusted. “Look, you’re making a big deal out of this. It’s just the way guys talk. You know. Every once in a while.”
“I thought you were scoring all the time.”
“Hey, more than you, I’ll bet,” he said, sullen, childlike.
“You’d win that one,” Connolly said, smiling. “Listen, I don’t care if you fuck around. More power to you. I just want to know what you said about it to a murder victim.”
“I don’t know nothing about that. The guy liked to kid around once in a while, that’s all. We didn’t compare notes. He had something going all by himself. And then they broke it up, I think. Anyway, he didn’t say anything much lately, so that’s what I figured. And then I came down here. I was just kidding around, you know? Not some federal case. He liked to listen. He was that kind of guy. And he wasn’t no fruit.” He said this with emphasis, as if it were important to him that Connolly agree.
“I wonder how you can be so sure.”
“I’d know. I’d just know.” He drew himself up, almost physically taking a stand.
“You got a lot of them down in East Texas, huh?”
“Not alive.”
There were four other security guards who’d been reassigned from the Hill, and by dusk Connolly had interviewed them all without learning anything he didn’t already know. Oppenheimer still hadn’t returned as he lined up with the others for dinner, so preoccupied that he barely noticed the food filling his tray. He sat with a group of machinists who were working on protective aluminum goggles to keep off the alkali dust. It was cooler now in the mess and he lingered over coffee, even after the men at his table had filed out for an open-air movie. He smiled at the idea of one of Hannah’s nightclubs lighting up a patch of the nighttime desert. Even here, in the Jornada del Muerto, people danced. He stirred the coffee and absentmindedly played with the spoon, lifting it out of the cup, then lowering it to watch the coffee rise.
“Displacement theory,” Eisler said, interrupting his thoughts. “You see how scientific principles never change. First Archimedes in his bath, now a coffee spoon. May I join you?”
Connolly smiled and opened his hand to the empty chair. “Did he really run through the streets naked, shouting ‘Eureka’?”
“I hope so,” Eisler said. “It makes a lovely story. But perhaps only after he’d written his report to the scientific committee.”
“In duplicate. With copies for the file.”
“Yes.” He smiled. “In duplicate.” His soft eyes were tired, his skin pink from the sun. He leaned forward over the tray as he ate, his shoulders slumped in the same concession to weariness Connolly had noticed in Oppenheimer. While he had been looking at the desert and toying with an overgrown teenager, they had been working hard.
“Where’s Pawlowski?” Connolly said.
“Oh, he won’t be coming back with us tonight. He’s here for the week, poor devil.”
Connolly felt a surge of happiness, so sudden and unexpected that he was afraid it would show. A week.
“I hope you had some rest,” Eisler was saying. “Oppie doesn’t like to drive, and it’s difficult for me to see at night. Such a long drive. It would be better, you know, to stay the night.”
“No, we need to get back,” Connolly said, now eager to start.
Eisler misinterpreted him and smiled again. “Yes, it’s not the Adlon here, I agree. Think of Daniel. All day at Station South. Every step you have to watch.”
“Snakes?”
Eisler shuddered. “Or scorpions. Who knows? I confess, I am a coward in the desert.”
“What’s he doing here?”
“Am I allowed to tell you? Is this a security test?”
Connolly shrugged. “I’m pretty safe. I won’t understand it anyway.”
“The instruments to measure the radioactivity. Not the actual, of course. Simulated, at low level.”
“The test isn’t the real thing?” Connolly asked, surprised.
Eisler smiled. “This is for the test before the test. Only this time, TNT, one hundred tons, to study blast effects. Actually, to test our instruments. So we put one thousand curies of fission products in the pile to simulate the radioactive material. I’m sorry, do you understand this?”
“I understand one hundred tons of TNT. My God.”
Eisler smiled weakly. “That’s the trial run only. The gadget will produce more, as many as-well, nobody really knows. They have a pool to guess. A game, you see.” His sad voice trailed off in thought. “How many tons of TNT blast can we produce with one gadget? A hundred? Five thousand? More? We cannot know yet.”
“How many tons did you bet?”
“Me? I don’t bet, Mr. Connolly. It’s not a lottery.”
“But think?”
“Twenty thousand tons,” Eisler said matter-of-factly.
Connolly stared at him, appalled. “Twenty thousand,” he repeated flatly, as if he were trying to confirm the figure.
“My friend,” Eisler said softly, “what do you think we are doing here? Why do you think we call it a gadget? Security code? I don’t think so. Maybe we don’t want to remind ourselves what it is we are making. Yes, twenty thousand tons. My calculations are quite precise. I would bet on it.” He smiled ironically. “Of course, we can’t yet calculate the dispersion. There are no good formulas for radioactivity. Even our Daniel recognizes that.”
Connolly felt stunned by the figures. They were calmly talking in a makeshift mess hall in the desert; the rest was beyond imagining. He could only fall back on the details of what was real, like a terminal patient still interested in medical procedure.
“Is that what you do too?” he asked. “Measure radioactivity?”
“Partly. We are not allowed to say, you know.”
“You work with Frisch in G Division, Critical Assemblies Group.”
Eisler flinched, surprised. “How do you know that?” Connolly didn’t say anything. “I see. Another test. So if you know, why do you ask?”
“I know where you work. I don’t know what it means.”
“So. Do you know fast neutrons? Do you know critical mass? How can I explain?” His eyes looked around the table, searching for props. “How much uranium do we need for the gadget-that’s the problem. We know it theoretically, but how to test the theory?” He moved Connolly’s coffee cup to the space between them. “Suppose this coffee were U-235. If we took enough, if we reached critical mass, there would be a chain reaction and, of course, the explosion. But when does that happen? So we take the coffee we think we need but we keep a hole in the middle-you must use your imagination here, I’m afraid-so the neutrons can escape. No reaction. The spoon will be the coffee we took out.” He held it over the cup. “If we lower it, like this, the neutron bombardment increases, the chain reaction accelerates. You have then the conditions for an atomic explosion.”
“But not the explosion.”
“We cheat a little-we use uranium hydride so it reacts more slowly. And we drop the slug very quickly. But yes, when we pass through the core,” he said, letting the spoon fall in, “we momentarily form a critical mass. It’s as close as we can come to an atomic explosion without having one. Of course, you can also produce this effect by simply stacking cubes of U-235 in a tamper of beryllium blocks. A critical assembly. But the other is more sophisticated. Perhaps also a little safer.”
Connolly stared at the coffee, then looked up at Eisler as if he were someone else. The last thing he had ever imagined him to be was daring. “You must have nerves of steel,” he said finally. “That’s like playing chicken.”
“Dragon,” Eisler corrected him.
“What?”
“We call it the Dragon Experiment-tickling the tail of the sleeping dragon.”
“And you don’t worry you’ll blow the place up?”
“No. We can control that. It’s the radiation that’s dangerous.”
“Well, better you than me.”
“Mr. Connolly, please don’t be so impressed. It’s a scientific experiment, no more. I think sometimes we’re all tickling the dragon, just a little. Testing how far we can go. Don’t you feel that? It’s only-” he searched, “the radiation we don’t expect.”
“I guess,” Connolly said, feeling that Eisler was really talking to himself.
“And now may I ask you something?” Eisler said politely. “What do you do? You’re not a driver.” He anticipated Connolly’s protest with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Please. I know. Drivers don’t go to Weber’s for the music. Oppie wants to drive with you alone. That’s very unusual, you know. We notice things like that. You have my dossier. I assume others as well. What exactly are you doing here? Am I permitted to know? A government agent of some sort, I think. So there must be something wrong. What dragon are you tickling?”
Connolly was struck again by how different the emigres were. Their first assumptions were still those of the police state.
“No,” he said, “nothing like that. I’m just helping to investigate a murder.”
“Oh? Whose?” His voice was so controlled and deliberate that Connolly took it for indifference.
“A security officer named Bruner.”
Eisler sipped his coffee, saying nothing.
“Did you know him?”
“No. That is, I knew who he was. We are still a small community on the project. I was sorry to hear about it. I didn’t realize it was a security matter,” he said, the last an uninflected question.
“It may not be.”
Eisler raised his eyebrows in another question, but Connolly didn’t elaborate.
“But you don’t know who killed him?”
“Not yet.”
“I see,” he said slowly, pushing aside his tray. “So you will be our sword of justice. Well, I wish you success in your hunt. To think of catching even one. So many dead these days, and never any killers.”
“I’m only looking for one in particular.”
“Yes, of course. Forgive me. I seem always to argue philosophy when you have work to do.”
“Are you married?”
Eisler looked at him dumbfounded, the subject swerving so abruptly that he’d been caught in its whiplash. Connolly could see him sorting through explanations and failing, until he sputtered a sort of laugh. “Why do you ask? Is it the investigation? Place of birth, school, married-”
“No, just curious.”
Eisler looked at him thoughtfully now. “I think you are never just curious, Mr. Connolly.” He sipped his coffee. “I was married. She’s dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, it was a long time ago. Many years now. Trude. She was killed-no, not like your friend. There was no killer. A street fight in Berlin. We used to have so many in those days. The Freikorps and the GPD and-Who remembers them now? What could have been so important? But riots, you know, real blood in the streets. If you happened to pass by, you could get caught. Just taking the wrong street. Like a traffic accident. So.”
“You never knew who killed her?”
“Who? Who?” he said, his gentle voice impatient now. “History killed her. There’s no one to hunt. Like a disease.” He shrugged.
“I’m sorry. You must still miss her.”
“No, Mr. Connolly. I’m not a romantic. She’s dead. I put the past behind me. The old world. Isn’t that the American idea? Start fresh, leave everything behind?” Connolly thought of the white empty stretch of desert, his own impulse for something new. “No more history. You don’t believe in history here. Yet. Sometimes I think we don’t believe in anything else. So. We’ll see who was right.”
“And what would you bet?”
Eisler smiled. “Twenty thousand tons. For the rest, I don’t know. It’s hard to leave everything behind. It’s always there somewhere. You think-but then it surprises you. A little like the dragon’s tail, eh?”
“What is?” said Oppenheimer, putting his coffee on the table as he took a chair. He seemed jumpy and annoyed.
“History and philosophy,” Eisler said. “Such matters.”
Oppenheimer shot Connolly a glance. “Another seminar? How about finding us some gas instead? We need to start back or we’ll be up all night.”
“You’re not eating, Robert?” Eisler said.
“No, just coffee.” He scratched one of his hands.
“You should eat something,” Eisler said kindly.
“Not now,” he snapped. It seemed to Connolly he was living on nerves. “What a godforsaken place,” he said, rubbing his hand again. “You wash and the water’s so hard you’re covered with magnesium oxide. Now I’ll be scratching all night.”
Connolly smiled at the scientific exactness of the complaint. It was, he realized, the first time he had ever heard Oppenheimer complain about anything. He had seen him buried under work, exasperated, worried, but that all seemed part of what he liked. Other people complained, leaned on his endless optimism to keep them going. If he felt things were all right, then the problems were just sandflies. Now, however, he was irritated and fretful, finally done in by an itch.
“We have five trunk lines here. You’d think they could manage to keep one open. G.G. throws a fit when he’s cut off. Now we have to sit around and wait for them to get the connection back. Waste of time.”
“In that case,” Eisler said, “have a little something. You’ll get sick. A roll, even.”
“Friedrich, stop hovering. I’m fine. I heard something today that might interest you, by the way.”
“Yes, Robert?” he said, chastened.
“The army took Stassfurt.” He paused, waiting for a response, then plunged in. “The Germans had the uranium ore there. Over a thousand tons, most of the original Belgian supply. They can’t have much anywhere else, so I think we can rule out the possibility of a German gadget.”
It seemed to Connolly he was taunting Eisler, getting back at him for having raised any qualms at all, and Connolly was surprised by the sharp cruelty of it. No more Nazis to give permission. He was daring him to question the project again.
But Eisler refused to be drawn. “That’s everything we hoped for,” he said carefully.
“Yes. Now there’s only the Japanese.”
Eisler’s face clouded for only a moment, but what Connolly saw there was terrible, a resignation so profound it looked fated, as if a long-awaited punishment had finally been handed out. And then it cleared and he was composed again. “Yes,” he said.
Was Oppenheimer aware of what he was doing? Connolly looked again at Eisler, so easily troubled, so alert to contradiction, and he wondered if what Oppenheimer saw was some part of himself he needed to override. How else to become a general, to see things through, but to put everything else aside? The prize no longer allowed him any doubts, not in any part of himself.
“Phone call, sir.” The GI had barely reached the table when Oppenheimer leaped up. “No, sir, sorry, not for you. For Mr. Connolly.”
Oppenheimer was too surprised to be angry. Since he was already standing, he made an “After you” sweep of his hand. But the unexpectedness of it restored his good spirits, and he laughed at himself.
“Don’t tie up the line. You’ll keep the general waiting. And by the way, tell your mother or whoever it is that it’s illegal to call here.”
Connolly shrugged his shoulders. “Be right back.”
“You’d better hope this is important.”
It was Mills, sounding elated. “I thought you’d want to know-they got him.”
“What?”
“The killer. Holliday called. Albuquerque police nailed him. Both crimes. Looks like you can start heading back to the bright lights.”
But Connolly realized with a sharp pang that it was the last thing he wanted.
“You still there?” Mills said, louder now, as if he feared a bad line.
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“Brother, you don’t give up, do you? They closed the case. Fermata, as we say in the Rio Grande. He’s Mex, by the way. Just like they thought.”
“I want to see him.”
Mills paused. “Holliday said, if you asked, to tell you that the Albuquerque police want you both to politely butt out. They’ll send a copy of the report, but-”
“Tell him I’ll be there tomorrow. I have to get Oppenheimer back tonight.”
“He said they’re pretty firm about it. Probably got some bug up their ass about the army coming in-”
“You listening? Tell Holliday I’ll be in Albuquerque tomorrow and I’ll interview the suspect then. If I’m not interviewing the suspect tomorrow, I’ll be on the phone to General Groves and he’ll be talking to the governor of New Mexico and he’ ll be dealing with a severe manpower shortage on the Albuquerque police force. Clear?”
“Could you really do that?”
“Probably. I don’t know, but it’s a risk he’s not going to want to take.”
“All right, calm down. I’ll see what I can do. You don’t sound very happy. I thought you’d be pleased as hell.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just don’t believe it. He’s not the guy.”
“Mike, you’d better believe it,” Mills said calmly. “He confessed.”