Los Alamos

by Joseph Kanon

  “Are you kidding? He’s the one they want most. They’ve all got the knives out for Oppenheimer. You should see the file they’ve got on him.”

  “I have seen it.”

  “Not all of it, you haven’t. Every meeting. Every check for the Spanish refugees. His brother. The girlfriend—she was a party member. His wife used to be married to one. His students—any kid that’s left of Roosevelt they blame on him. It just piles up. Van Drasek wouldn’t even clear him until Groves told him to fuck off and just pushed it through himself.”

  “But why? What does he think Oppenheimer’s doing, working for the Russians?”

  “Why. He’s crazy. He’d love it if Oppie were working for them—that would be perfect. Actually, what it is, Oppenheimer thinks it’s bullshit and they know he thinks it. Which means he thinks they’re bullshit. Which they are. But they can’t touch him as long as he’s building their damn bomb and Groves protects him. And the more he tries to get along with them, the more they hate him. They’re all obsessed with him—the crazies, anyway. I think that’s why Karl was following him. He was a little obsessed too.”

  “What?”

  “Well, if he was. I don’t know for sure. You’re the one who thought he was following somebody.”

  “I never thought it was Oppenheimer.”

  “I know, it doesn’t fit your story. But he’s the only one I can ever remember Karl talking about. He was interested in Oppie.”

  “Why?”

  “I think because they were. Karl was ambitious, you know? Maybe he thought if he could get something on Oppie, he’d angle himself a nice big promotion. Be one of the big boys. Of course, that’s where he was crazy, because they didn’t trust him either.”

  They had begun the steep climb up the hill. Connolly was thinking again. “So if he had anything on somebody, he’d want to make sure.”

  “Home at last,” Mills said as they approached the gate. And, oddly, it was. Connolly looked at the high wire fence, the MPs checking passes, the rough buildings dim in the moonlight, and felt at home, somewhere to screen out the rest of the world. Was this what the killer had felt—relief at being back, the canyon and the panic at the church behind him?

  “Are you going to report our conversation tonight?” Connolly said.

  “I have to write something,” Mills said apologetically.

  “Try this. Say that I have evidence Karl was asked by Lansdale to do a check on Van Drasek. And accidentally get a copy to Van Drasek. We could have some fun with them.”

  Mills shook his head and smiled. “You have the fun. I just want to get back to Winnetka in one piece.”

  After they dropped the car at the motor pool, they walked back toward the Tech Area. The streets were quiet, the usual lights still shining in the labs. Not even victory in Europe interrupted the project.

  “Just out of curiosity,” Connolly said, “what will you write?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing much. You’re puzzled about the car. Can’t figure it out.” He paused. “He likes to hear you’re stumped. Makes Groves look like a jerk for putting you in. So I usually just say you’re not getting anywhere.”

  “I’m not. And what if there was a genuine security breach? While I was getting nowhere and he was looking good?”

  Mills shrugged. “What’s more important in the scheme of things, somebody else’s security or your own job? They’ve got a healthy sense of priorities in G-2. Nightcap?”

  “No, but I’ll buy you a coffee if the lodge is still open.”

  “Mike, about all this—I couldn’t help it. You know I would never say anything—”

  Connolly looked at him, the pleasant, eager face that avoided waves. “Unless you had to.”

  Mills looked as if he’d been slapped.

  “Never mind,” Connolly said, not wanting to push him. “It’s just the way things are now.”

  “It’s the war.”

  “Yeah, the war.”

  There were still people at the lodge, smoking over leftover dishes and coffee cups, the celebration dinners finished. A few men from the office hailed them and Mills joined them with something like relief, tired of intimacy. Connolly sat with them for a while, listening to the easy jokes, ignoring the rest of the room because Emma was three tables away. She had glanced up when he came in, then turned back to her table as if he weren’t there. He heard her laugh. The officers at his table were telling their own war stories—Feynman sending a letter cut into pieces to kid the censors; the physicist who sneaked out through a hole in the fence and kept coming back through the gate, a Marx Brothers trick. He looked at their faces and wondered if one of them checked on the others, an easy deceit. Was she aware of him? They were ten feet apart, no more. Did Daniel see her glance over, notice some nervous pitch to her voice? He moved restlessly in his seat, uncomfortable, afraid of giving himself away. But no one paid any attention.

  He looked in the other direction, toward a large table of scientists who were laughing at something Teller was saying. Ulam, Metropolis, and a few of the others surrounded him like a court, and he was beaming with pleasure, the center of attention, the bushy eyebrows raised in arcs over the round, vain face. Oppenheimer’s problem child. And of course that was why he was happy: Oppenheimer wasn’t there; the table, its little world, was his. Connolly wondered for a moment what Oppenheimer meant to them, whether, like Mills’s boss, they were simply waiting for their moment. But it seemed absurd. The table was genial, the room itself filled with high spirits, a bright faculty lounge on Oppenheimer’s enchanted campus. How had he managed it? He listened, people said, he understood everything. He kept the army away. He defused the rivalries. Von Neumann’s mathematics. Fast neutrons. Diaper service. Everything. People wanted to be with him at parties. And, according to Mills, they were out to get him.

  Was Oppenheimer aware of any of it? Did he notice the jealousy and suspicion, frosted over now in the consensus of getting the job done? Did he know that Karl had been following him? Just another in a long line of checks and clearances, too familiar to bother about. A nuisance. And was Connolly any better? Another one of Groves’s whims, blundering in on the scent of small scandal when there was important work to be done. Did Oppenheimer resent him too? Connolly felt suddenly like Mills, wanting to explain, to excuse himself. He meant no harm to the project, and he knew that one way or another—a crime revealed, a husband betrayed—he would do it damage. And his first impulse? He smiled to himself. Like everyone else with a problem at Los Alamos, he wanted to talk to Oppenheimer.

  He wandered out to the Tech Area, nodding at Emma’s table as he left, surprised by the shiver of guilty pleasure he felt at getting away with something. It was easy to look at her now; she was someone else here, another person. The lights were still on in Main Tech. He showed his badge to the sentry MP at the inner fence and climbed the few wooden steps to the building. Inside, it was quiet. He turned left, toward Oppenheimer’s office, then stopped in the corridor. What, after all, had he come to say? A report on the car. A question about Karl. A complaint about Lansdale. Excuses, not worth his time. The fact was, he simply wanted to talk, like an eager graduate student working out a proof. When he saw that Oppenheimer’s office was dark, he felt relieved and foolish at the same time. Why had he expected him to be here so late? Yet it was part of the myth he was helping construct. In his mind, the brightly lit door was always open.

  The door next to the office, however, was open, fluorescent light pouring out into the corridor. There was no one inside. Instinctively he reached in to snap out the light, then stopped. It had been years since he had been in a classroom, and he stood there for a minute taking in the familiar smell of chalk and dust and dry radiator heat. The room was small—a desk in one corner piled with books, a conference table with chairs, a blackboard, and two narrow windows that faced Ashley Pond. The blackboard had the chalk smears of a hasty eraser, and Connolly went over to it, automatically picking up the eraser to finish. He took off his coat and lo
oked at the blackboard. In school, it had helped to map things out, make the problem visual. He remembered writing formulas on the board, so clear when you could see them that the answer followed at the end. He took a piece of chalk and, almost without thinking, began to draw.

  Near the bottom he drew the outline of an adobe church, two squat towers and a cross, with a side patch of alley with an X in it. A line followed the Cerrillos Road up the board, crossing the chalk arc of bridge and intersecting with the Alameda. The lines came quickly, a squiggle of river, a generic puff of bush, another X. Then some of the city streets, the rectangle of the plaza, and off in the far left corner, forty miles away, the wavy ridge of canyons, another X, the chalky portico symbols of gates.

  When he stepped back, he saw everything he knew about the logistics of the case, an algebra formula disguised as a child’s map. He held the chalk in one hand, resting his elbow in the other, as if he were staring at a painting in a museum. How to connect the Xes? He was at the church. He had come to meet someone. Karl arrived. Three cars? Faintly he heard the clunky government-issue clock ticking over the board. How many to the final X? But there’d been no signs of another car in the box canyon.

  The building was still, saved from eeriness by a background murmur of voices down the hall. Working late. He stared at the map. He could see Karl’s car moving up the Cerrillos Road. What about the others? How many at the second X? He stared until even the background sounds faded away. Rain. Headlights. There must be a way to see.

  The gasp from behind startled him. He turned around to see Friedrich Eisler put a hand to his heart, a European gesture of surprise.

  “I am so sorry,” he said, flustered. “I didn’t mean—for a moment I thought—you looked so like Robert.”

  “Robert?”

  “Yes. Of course, you are much bigger. But the way you stood there, with the chalk. Forgive me, I didn’t mean to disturb you.” He turned to go.

  “No, please, come in. I shouldn’t be here anyway. I was just doodling.”

  Eisler smiled, “Yes, doodling.” He pronounced it as an exotic word. “It was very like. Of course, this was many years ago. Göttingen. He would stand there for hours, you know, just looking at the board. Thinking. But what kind of thinking? That I could never discover. Once I saw him in the morning and I came back later and he was still there. And then later. All day. Just holding the chalk, looking.”

  “Did he find the answer?”

  Eisler shrugged and smiled. “That I don’t remember.”

  “He was your student?”

  “A colleague. I am not so old, you know.”

  “What was he like?”

  Eisler smiled again. “So. You too. Everyone wants to know Robert. What was he like? The same. Of course, not so busy. In those days, there was more time. For thinking. Like you, with the chalk.”

  Connolly had moved away from the board, and Eisler looked at it, puzzled. “This is not, I take it, a mathematical formula.”

  “No.” Connolly laughed, embarrassed. “Just a map. I was trying to figure something out. I suppose I’d better clean up,” he said, taking the eraser.

  But Eisler was looking thoughtfully at the map, his eyes darting from one X to the others.

  “No, don’t bother,” he said absently. “No one comes here. Perhaps you’ll find your answer, like Robert.” He turned wearily from the board to face Connolly. “Then you must tell me how you did it. The process. I always wondered.”

  “The Oppenheimer Principle,” Connolly said lightly.

  “Yes. Well, I leave you to your problem.”

  But Connolly was reluctant to see him go. “I was thinking about something you said to me.”

  “Really? What is that?”

  “About the Nazis giving us permission. To do what we do.”

  “Yes.”

  “Today I thought, they’re gone. Who’s going to give us permission now?”

  Eisler looked at him, his gentle eyes suddenly approving, a teacher pleased with his pupil. “My friend, I don’t know. My war is finished. That is for you to decide.” He stretched his arm back toward the blackboard. “You must use the Oppenheimer Principle.”

  “With me, it’s guesswork.”

  “Only the answers. The questions are real. Keep asking the questions.”

  “Maybe you have to be him to make it work.”

  Eisler sighed. “It will work for you too, I think.”

  “I’m not like him.”

  “No? Perhaps not. Robert’s a very simple man, you know. He does not—” He searched for a word. “Dissemble. Yes, dissemble. He doesn’t know how. There is no mystery there.”

  “He’s a mystery to me.”

  Eisler moved toward the door. “Perhaps that’s because you do dissemble, Mr. Connolly. Good night.”

  Connolly watched him go, his tired shoulders sloping as he went down the corridor. When he looked back at the blackboard, he saw nothing more than crude grade-school sketches, a child’s problem. No car was driving down the road, nervous about a body. No questions. He stared at it for a few minutes, then took up the black eraser and wiped the chalk away. Tomorrow there would be grown-up numbers there.

  Outside, he put on his jacket against the night chill. The moon outlined the buildings with faint white lines. He felt that he was walking in one of his blackboard maps. This road went south from the Tech Area. The box canyon was in the far distance to his right. The longer he walked, the more the map filled in, until he could see the whole plateau, fingers stretching away from the Jemez toward Santa Fe. He kept walking, awake with coffee and the bright night sky. But it had been cloudy that night, perhaps already raining when the car pulled into the canyon. Dark. And suddenly he thought of a question and started walking faster, glancing at his watch as he headed away from the building toward the far west gate.

  His luck held. The same soldier was on night duty, sitting inside the lighted post with a Thermos and a comic book. He looked up, surprised, when Connolly said hello.

  “Mighty late,” he said, a question in his voice.

  “I was just out taking a walk. It’s a nice night for it.”

  “I guess,” he said, all Piedmont twang and suspicion.

  “I have a question for you. You have any more of that coffee?”

  “Well, sure. Nice to have some company. What’s on your mind?” He poured some coffee into the lid cup and handed it to Connolly.

  “At night, when they close the entrance, what happens exactly?”

  “Well, they close it. I don’t know what you mean.”

  “They lower the crossing barrier to cars, right? But someone’s still here?”

  He nodded. “Me, usually. I’ve been pulling night shift regular.”

  “But if a car came by accident, you’d let him in?”

  “They don’t. There’s two barriers. Road’s closed down at the turnoff, so a car don’t come up this far.”

  “But you’re here anyway.”

  The soldier smiled, a sly grin. “Well, that’s to keep people from going out. Ain’t nobody coming in that late.”

  “But if they were—I mean, someone could walk in, couldn’t he?”

  “Walk?” The vowel spread into syllables.

  “Just for the sake of argument. Someone could walk in, right? There’s nothing to stop him.”

  “Well, there’s me. I’d stop him.”

  “If you heard him.”

  The soldier looked at him guardedly, as if he were somehow in trouble and didn’t know why. “I’d hear him.”

  “You didn’t hear me. Right now, while we’ve been talking here, someone could have slipped by outside, couldn’t he? Look, I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m just trying to get a picture of how it works.”

  “It works fine,” the soldier said defiantly, the vowel stretched again. Connolly stepped out of the box, sipping the coffee as he looked around, the soldier following him. “Ain’t nobody going to walk, you know,” he said, still worried. “W
here they going to be walking from? Who’s going to walk?”

  “I don’t know,” Connolly said, looking at the road, the wide space at the pole, the dark on the side. “Nobody, I guess. I was just wondering.” It would have been easy, no more difficult than a stroll. “You patrol out here or just stay in the post?”

  “I got my rounds. If somebody’s complaining, they don’t know jackshit. I’m up and down here all night, even if it is cold.” But it had been raining, a comforting drum on the post roof. “What’s all this about, anyway? You got some kind of problem?”

  “No. They’re just looking over all the security points.”

  “What for?” he said, still suspicious.

  “It’s the army. They don’t need a reason.”

  The soldier grinned. “Yeah, I guess.”

  Connolly looked up and down the dark road again. One car, not two. Hide it and walk in. A long walk, but safe enough. Worth the chance. And then home.

  “How long you been on the Hill?” he asked casually.

  “ ’Bout a year, I guess. I ain’t never had no trouble before.”

  “You haven’t got any now. I was just curious. Like it?”

  The soldier shrugged. “Ain’t nothin’ to do. Beats combat, though, I guess. You read about them Jap dive-bombers? They’re just plain crazy, those people.”

  Connolly nodded. “Year’s a long time. You must know everybody up here.”

  “I just look at the passes. We don’t get invited to no parties. That’s only for the longhairs.”

  “You know Karl Bruner?”

  The soldier looked at him, his eyes squinting again in suspicion. “That’s the guy who got himself killed.”

  There it was again—Karl’s fault. “Well, somebody killed him. Know him?”

  “I knew who he was. I never talked to him or nothing. I heard they got the guy,” he said, a question.

  “Yeah, they did. He use this gate much?”

  “Off and on.”

  “So you’d see him then.”

  The soldier shrugged again. “Well, sure, if I was on duty.”