by Joseph Kanon
“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.
2
CONNOLLY WAS LATE to the party and wouldn’t have gone at all if Mills hadn’t dragged him. He had needed sleep, not dinner, but Mills had gone to the trouble of getting a table at Fuller Lodge and he felt he couldn’t refuse.
“Better to start off on the right foot,” Mills had said. “You can eat at the commissary anytime. The lodge is as good as it gets here.”
And in fact the food was good and gave him a second wind. The room itself, oversized and two stories high, with a running balcony and a massive stone fireplace at either end, looked more like the dining room of a national park lodge than the army-camp messes where most of Los Alamos ate. Every table was filled, so that the room buzzed with conversation and clinking flatware.
Connolly was surprised at how many people wore coats and ties. There was clearly no dress code—he could see occasional open shirts and even some Western-style pointed collars—but most people were in full suits, the women in bright, slightly dowdy dresses. Saturday night at the Faculty Club.
“If you want to do some scientist spotting, you might start with that table over there,” Mills said, nodding his head. “Let’s see how good you are.”
Connolly glanced at a tall man, his apple cheeks bellowing out with the draw on his pipe. He had the white hair and gentle, puckish face of a thin Nordic Santa Claus.
“Niels Bohr,” Connolly said. “I’m impressed.”
“Nicholas Baker. Code names only, please. All physicists are ‘engineers,’ and he is Mr. Baker.”
“I’ll try to remember.” Connolly grinned. “Who else?”
“Henry Farmer.”
Connolly thought for a second. “Of the Italian Farmers?”
“You’re catching on.”
“Is he here too?”
“He’s the one with Mr. Baker.”
Connolly looked at the modest figure with thinning dark hair, bent over to catch the soft-spoken Baker’s words. Fermi. “A penny for their thoughts.”
“You wouldn’t understand them even if you heard them. You’ll get used to that too.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Forever. Since ’forty-three. It was a lot smaller then. When I first got here, we only had the old school and a few buildings in the Tech Area. One telephone line. The road up the mesa was still dirt.”
“The good old days?”
“Not really. For the scientists, maybe. They were gung-ho—real pioneer times for them. For the rest of us it was—” He searched for a word. “Quiet. You felt like you’d dropped right off the edge and nobody knew where you were.”
“Nobody knows now.”
Mills shrugged. “Like I say, you get used to it. And of course things got busier and busier so you didn’t have much time to think about it. I suppose it’s a little like overseas, except nobody gets killed.”
“Until now.”
“Yeah, until now. Not exactly a war casualty though, was he?”
“No.” Connolly shifted. “What did you do before the war?”
“Lawyer.”
“Is that how you ended up in security?”
“I wish I knew. Maybe they thought law meant law enforcement. They aren’t famous for being logical. Maybe they just thought I’d make a rotten soldier and I’d be better off pushing paper somewhere.”
“Criminal law?”
“Estates and trusts. I know, boring, but you’d be surprised. Besides, it makes the firm a ton of money and everybody wants to marry you.” He grinned. “They don’t even notice the hair,” he said, running his hand along his balding top.
“But nobody did, I take it,” Connolly said, gesturing toward Mills’s bare finger.
“Not yet. But wait till I make partner.”
“So meanwhile, what do you do for a social life?”
“You know, you have a delicate way of asking rude questions.”
“Okay.” Connolly laughed. “Withdrawn.”
“What the hell, I don’t care. Mostly there isn’t any. Just like any army base. But I suppose there’s enough going on if you look for it. You don’t want to go near the wives—we’ve had a little of that and that’s always trouble. The WACs are something else again. We tried to keep the dormitories off-limits to single men for a while, and it was the WACs who screamed bloody murder, so the parties started right up again. You can’t blame them. Nobody’s allowed to fraternize with the locals for security reasons, so every night’s prom night for the WACs. They’ll never be this popular again.”
“What about Santa Fe?”
“Not much. It’s an old town, and the Spanish won’t even look at you. Albuquerque’s better. Some of the guys go on a spree there if they get a weekend pass, and sometimes we have to go get them out of the tank, but mostly they’re so afraid of getting a dose that they just get drunk and end up at the movies.”
“I found some prophylactics in Bruner’s drawer.”
“Did you?” Mills looked away. “I don’t know what that means.”
“It usually means he was sexually active.”
“One way or the other.”
“Yes, one way or the other.”
“Christ,” Mills said, “I don’t know. Maybe he just kept them around, you know, the way some guys keep them in their wallets.”
“Maybe. But we have to assume they were used sometimes.”
“Look, I know what you’re after, but I can’t help you. I don’t know anything about his sex life. Christ, I can’t even imagine it. He never said a word. I keep trying to think of something he might have said or some look—I mean, we worked in the same office, for God’s sake. All this time. How could you not notice something? I mean, what do you look for, anyway? He was here almost a year and I had no idea. Never. I still can’t believe it.”
“Does it bother you?”
“Of course it bothers me. Wouldn’t it bother you? I mean, I don’t care if he didn’t like women. That’s his business. He could fuck goats for all I care.”
“Then why does it bother you?”
Mills paused and looked at him. “I guess because it means he was another person all along. I never knew it. I mean, what’s the matter with me? Hell of a thing not to know if you’re in security, don’t you think?”
He felt the glow of the drinks as they walked toward Theater-2. His body was still tired but his mind was fresh now, eager to take things in. Everything was sharper in the cold air, bright in the glare of the mounted floodlights around the Tech Area. The whole place seemed not quite real. With its dusty, unnamed streets, its wire fences and plain clapboard buildings, it became a frontier town, but backlit, insubstantial. The strangeness of the mesa delighted him. After months in Washington, with its weighty masonry and stuffy rooms and routine, everything here was raw and new and interesting. There were still ditches in the street to catch the runoff. Even at this late hour, lights burned in the laboratory buildings and MPs walked on patrol. The night air smelled of diesel and pine.
They heard the music even before they got to the building, sawing fiddles of a Western band pouring through the open doors like the soundtrack for a movie saloon. The big room was as smoky and raucous as Connolly expected, but the cowboys were only servicemen in uniforms and bushy-haired civilians dressed up for a night on the town who had, inexplicably, wound up in a barn instead. It was one of the oddest things he had ever seen. At one end of the room, on a raised stage, a make-shift band of soldiers, country boys all, played loud accompaniment to a caller in blue jeans and a bandanna who clapped out the beat as he sang instructions to the dancers. Stamping feet echoed off the polished hardwood floor of the basketball court. There were tables of food and punch bowls and bottles along one wall and folding chairs scattered everywhere but on the dance floor itself. People talked over the music and laughed at their unfamiliarity with the steps. They all seemed to be at the wrong party, moving awkwardly but gamely through their paces, stocky middle-aged men in ties determined to be good sports and young pale men whose jeans looked as stif
f and uncomfortable as a second language. Here and there someone executed steps with confident precision, but off-rhythm, as if he had mastered the dance as a matter of scientific principle. What should have been fluid was jerky and tentative, but no one gave up, and the more complicated the maneuver, the more inevitable the missteps and the better they liked them. The fun, for these engineers of perfect measurements, was not caring. Physics had come to a hoedown and seemed to be having a great time. The room hummed with high spirits.
“Quite a party,” Connolly said, smiling.
“Wait till they really start drinking,” Mills said.
He led Connolly toward the drinks table, where a ruddy-faced man whose hair stuck out on the sides like flaps was furiously attacking a block of ice in a zinc wash-tub. Chips flew out on the table as he drove the pick up and down.
“Careful, professor,” Mills said.
“Gott im Himmel,” the man said. “You would think in such a place someone would invent a machine for this. Here,” he said, handing Mills a glass with ice. “On the rocks, yes?”
“Always. Meet Mike Connolly. Hans Weber.”
“Hello, Mr. Connolly. You’re new? You must be in Kisty’s group. There’s someone new every day. We can’t get one more person, not one, and for Kistiakowsky they never stop coming.”
“No, I work with Lieutenant Mills in the security office.”
“Ah,” he said, pausing to look at Connolly. “So. You replace poor Karl.”
“Yes.”
He shook his head. “A terrible thing. Terrible. So young. And for what? Some wallet? Some pocket change? How much could such a person have?”
“You knew him well?”
“No, not well. Sometimes he was my bodyguard. That’s right, yes? Bodyguard?”
“We prefer ‘escort,’ ” Mills said, smiling. Then he turned toward Connolly. “Professor Weber is one of the engineers who’s always given protection off-site.”
“Hah, protection,” Weber said good-naturedly. “Snoops. This time it was the protector who needed the protection. What a world we are becoming. So,” he said, changing tack, “you like music, Mr. Connolly?” His intonation made mister a literal translation of Herr. “Not this screeching of cats, but real music?”