by Joseph Kanon
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.
7
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 piñon 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 matériel 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 matériel 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 aro
und 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.”