Los Alamos

by Joseph Kanon

  “Yes, in the mountains. For years. He loved to ride in those days. Does he still?”

  “You haven’t seen him?”

  “No one has. He never comes here. Is he still up on the Hill, or is that one of your classified questions?”

  Connolly shrugged.

  “Well, then, I don’t ask. But if you do see him somewhere, give him my regards. He should take care of his health, that one. And tell him that we’re still waiting to hear what it was all about. Making history, he said. Oo la, that sounds important, but what kind of history, eh? Anyway, never mind about history, my darling,” she said to Emma, giving her a goodbye kiss on her cheek. “Be happy.” She shook Connolly’s hand. “And you. Good luck with your destiny.”

  “And yours,” he said, smiling.

  “Oh, don’t worry about me,” she said, “I have the Ciro’s touch.”

  Emma asked to drive back to Santa Fe, and he was surprised to find her inexperienced, coming up fast on curves and then jerking the clutch at the last minute as if she were pulling on reins. He was by now so used to her self-assurance that this inadequacy behind the wheel seemed touching, an opening. She held the wheel tightly, afraid the car would bolt.

  “Sorry,” she said after an audible moan from the gears. “I haven’t got the hang of this one yet.” She spoke straight ahead to the road, unable to switch her concentration.

  “It’s all right. It’s stiff.”

  “No, it’s not. But thanks. How did you like Hannah?”

  “She seemed to think we’d known each other for some time.”

  “Did she? I wonder why. What did you say to her?”

  “I didn’t get a word in edgewise.”

  Emma grinned. “Yes. She can be like that. I wish she’d listen to Hector, though. There’s something wrong there. He was positively churlish. He’s usually rather sweet, in a way.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “No, really. But he seemed all on edge. Something’s happened.”

  “The bust-up?”

  “Maybe. Oh, don’t laugh. I know they’re an odd couple. Still, it’s sad to see any couple come to an end. They suited each other in a way.”

  He felt for an instant that now they were a couple, falling aimlessly into a postmortem after dinner with friends. “What way?”

  “Now you’re going to be impossible. I don’t know—the way people do. There’s no explaining it.”

  “No.”

  She glanced over at him quickly, then looked back to the road.

  “She said you married your husband to get him out of Germany.”

  “Did she?” Emma said nervously. “I married him. He got out of Germany. They’re not necessarily connected.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  She was quiet for a minute, avoiding the conversation. “Anyway, what does Hannah know about it?” she said, concluding an argument.

  “I thought maybe you’d told her.”

  “I didn’t. It’s her imagination.”

  “Maybe she’s intuitive.”

  “Maybe you’re not a very good intelligence officer. Do you always believe the first thing you hear?”

  “When I want to.”

  “Well, don’t.” She downshifted, flustered. “What else did she have to say?”

  “Not much. This and that and Germany and destiny.”

  “Quite a chat.”

  “Very gloomy and Wagnerian.”

  “Hannah?” She laughed. “You must bring out something in her. She doesn’t usually get much further than Louella Parsons. Louella O. Parsons. What do you think the O stands for?”

  “Are you trying to change the subject?”

  “Trying.”

  “All right. How about banks?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Is there a bank in Santa Fe everyone uses? Where do you go, for instance?”

  She laughed. “That’s certainly changing it. I don’t go anywhere. We’re not allowed to have accounts off-site.”

  “What do you do? Keep it in a sock under the bed?”

  “There’s not very much to keep, for a start. What there is we keep in a post account. I suppose everyone does. Why do you want to know?”

  “So if you made a large cash purchase, you’d have to withdraw the money from this account? I mean, you wouldn’t write a check?”

  “No. Cash. I suppose if it were a lot, you’d get a money order from the post office. Except I never do. It always just goes somehow.”

  Connolly was quiet for a minute, thinking.

  “Now may I ask why?” she said.

  “I was just wondering why anybody would carry a lot of cash, when a check is so much easier.”

  “Not anybody. You mean Karl, don’t you?” she said, her voice suddenly tight. “They said he was robbed. Is that why? He was carrying a lot of money?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you—” She hesitated. “The police?”

  “No,” he said easily, “but naturally we’re curious too.”

  “Naturally.”

  “I didn’t realize you knew him.”

  “Everybody knew him. He was security. There’s no escaping you.”

  “Did you like him?”

  She seemed surprised by the question, at a loss. “He was all right, I suppose,” she said finally.

  “So you weren’t tempted by his coupons?”

  “What?”

  “You said before that G-2 had lots of coupons.”

  “Did I? Quite the elephant, aren’t you? No, I wasn’t tempted by his bloody coupons.”

  “Just mine.”

  She sat back in the seat, smiling involuntarily. “Just yours.”

  “Well, that’s something, anyway. Maybe next time it’ll be for the pleasure of my company.”

  “Is there going to be a next time?”

  “Isn’t there?” he said quietly.

  She turned to look at him. “I don’t know,” she said seriously. “Don’t ask me, okay? I don’t know.”

  When she changed cars in Santa Fe, she shook his hand nervously and tried a casual goodbye, but since they were both heading back to the Hill, she didn’t leave him after all. He followed her car up to the Parajito Plateau, watching her glance into the rearview mirror as she spurted ahead, then waited for him to catch up, darting along the empty desert road like birds from the mesa in a courtship flight. She drove fast, carelessly ignoring the speed limit, but he trailed smoothly in her wake, close enough to keep eye contact in the mirror, until finally she laughed and waved and, allowing herself to be pursued, they drove together.

  5

  MILLS WAS UNCHARACTERISTICALLY official about getting Bruner’s account records.

  “We’d need some kind of order,” he said. “They have the same legal protection as real bank records would. We can’t just—”

  “How long would it take to get them?”

  Mills sighed. “About an hour.”

  But Bruner’s account was no different from his passbook, as orderly as his room had been. Connolly scanned the even columns, month after month of regular deposits, with no significant withdrawals. When he compared them to the payroll records, he found himself staring at an unrevealing window into Bruner’s life. Once he deducted the subsidized rent from his salary, he was left with the account deposit and the same amount of pocket money each time.

  “Look at this,” he said to Mills. “Did he have any expenses?”

  “Well, Karl was close with a dollar. He never grabbed a check if he could help it.”

  “But this goes all the way back to ‘forty-four. At the most, a ten-dollar variance here and there.”

  “Clothes, probably,” Mills said.

  “What about his car? That can get pretty extravagant these days.”

  “He fiddled that.”

  “How fiddled?”

  “Whenever he needed gas, he’d sign up for escort duty—you know, taking the scientists around—and he’d top up from the motor po
ol supply. Repairs, same thing. He was like that. What exactly are you looking for, anyway?”

  “Three two-hundred-dollar withdrawals in the last six months.”

  Mills whistled. “You’re kidding. Where did Karl get that kind of money?”

  “That’s what I want to know. According to these, he saved everything. So where did he get the extra money? He hasn’t touched this account in over a year.”

  “Maybe he had it from before.”

  “Maybe. Then why not bank it?”

  “The Europeans are funny that way. Some of them don’t trust banks at all. They just stash the money or put it into gold or something they can carry. You know, refugee stuff. Maybe he brought something over with him and then sold it.”

  “No. Why do that and turn around and buy something else?”

  “What did he buy?”

  “Turquoise jewelry.”

  “Karl?”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  Mills was quiet for a minute. “Then he must have been trying to hide it.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Keep it off the books. Put it somewhere you couldn’t trace it. You know, sew it in your jacket lining to cross the border, that kind of stuff.”

  “You’ve been seeing too many movies,” Connolly said.

  “Maybe, but they did it. They weren’t allowed to take anything out. Professor Weber’s wife had her earrings ripped out on the train.”

  Connolly winced. Another European story.

  “Okay, but where did he get it? He didn’t deposit it, but somebody must have taken it out. Tell you what, let’s have a look at all the records.”

  “Are you kidding? Do you know how many people we have up here?”

  “Over four thousand. But not all of them have accounts, and we can eliminate the crews and the enlisted men—in fact, anyone making less than two thousand dollars a year. They wouldn’t have that kind of money lying around. That ought to bring it down to a few hundred at most.”

  “This will take weeks.”

  “Then the sooner you get started, the better.”

  “I get started?”

  “We both get started. Six hundred bucks shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

  “Assuming it’s someone with an account. Assuming they took the money out. Assuming it’s someone up here.”

  “Assuming all that.”

  “I didn’t know we were assuming it was someone on the Hill,” Mills said pointedly.

  “We’re not. We’re looking for six hundred dollars, and this is somewhere to start. You can eliminate all the women, too.”

  Mills looked up at him. “So that’s where you’re going. You think Karl would do that?”

  “What would have happened to him if he’d been exposed as homosexual?”

  “He’d have been discharged.”

  “So he’d want to keep it very quiet then, wouldn’t he? Anyone like him would. He’d understand that. He knew what that felt like. What if he wasn’t the only one up here who needed to keep things quiet? What if he thought that might be—well, an opportunity. Is that so farfetched?”

  Mills nodded. “Not very nice, but not farfetched, I guess. So you think Karl was putting the bite on someone?”

  “Let’s just say he sounds capable of it. For all I know, the money was a present. Maybe he had a boyfriend. Maybe there’s no connection at all. But we have a general who’d rather not know, a director who doesn’t want to know, and a police force that wouldn’t know if you showed them ‘cause they’re too busy pretending everyone’s Buster Crabbe. So we’d better start somewhere. You want to get the records?”

  “You’re going to need Oppie’s okay on this. Getting Karl’s account is one thing, but my friend Eddie over there isn’t going to turn the whole goddamn project over. That’s pretty personal stuff you’re talking about. People aren’t going to like us sniffing around their money. Hell, I don’t like it.”

  “Don’t tell them, then. You don’t make enough to be so touchy,” Connolly said, smiling.

  “I just mean it’s personal, that’s all.”

  Suddenly the windows shook as the sound of a blast came up from the west.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “Kisty’s group. Explosives. They use some of the lower canyons around the plateau for testing.” He grinned as another blast sounded in the distance. “You get used to it.”

  “How do you keep bombs a secret when you keep shooting them off?”

  “These are just the triggers. And how do you test them if you don’t explode them? They used to do it at night, but everybody complained. No sleep as far away as Santa Fe, or so they said. I don’t know who we think we’re fooling.”

  “All of the people all of the time.”

  “Yeah.” Another explosion went off as Mills turned to go. “Now for the quiet life of a bank examiner.”

  The records, when they finally arrived with Oppie’s warning to keep the audit secret, proved more absorbing than Connolly expected. He had imagined tracing tedious columns of numbers, but instead the whole complexity of daily life at Los Alamos seemed to lie there undeciphered, spread across their desks like messages in code. To understand the savings, he needed Mills to explain the expenses. Paychecks were cashed at the commissary, supplies purchased at the PX. Some expenses were fixed: rents pegged to annual salaries—$29 a month at $2100, $34 at $3400, etc.; utilities to space—$9.65 for a three-room McKee. But beyond that, there was the sheer variety of financial lives—the thrifty savers, the spenders borrowing down, the hoarders who must have kept their cash, since none of it appeared in the books. He wondered why auditors were considered boring. Maybe they were simply hypnotized by the stories behind their numbers. He was surprised, though, to see how low the amounts were. They might be making history on the Hill, but no one was making much money. Two hundred dollars should leap off the page. But so far it hadn’t.

  The problem with the decoding process, for all its fascination, was that it could take weeks. They needed a smaller test group, like scientists who worked down the table of elements to narrow the possibilities. It was Mills who came up with the morning tagging system, and for the next few days they followed the same routine. Connolly would telephone Holliday to see if the police were any further along, exchanging disappointment over coffee, then sit down with Mills for the quick first pass. Files with regular deposits were immediately put on the return pile. Variations under a hundred dollars were given a quick glance, then returned as well. Anything else was tagged for the afternoon, when they could piece together the file with more care, no longer as overwhelmed by the size of the pile to come. Now it was the exception pile that grew instead, so that they were working out of alphabetical sequence, the names often not even noticed as they looked at the number patterns. A choice few, where the numbers seemed puzzling, went on to the small pile for further investigation. But the Hill’s privacy, thought Connolly, was safe. The names were meaningless to him.

  It was only when he examined Emma’s husband’s account that he felt Mills might have been right—this was personal. He felt prurient, like a burglar going through drawers. There was nothing odd about the account—erratic deposits, but marginal amounts—yet he stared at the paper as if he were staring into the marriage itself. Did Emma handle the money? Or did he dole out allowances? Why no deposit one month—a celebration dinner? A weekend in Albuquerque? Did they fight? Did she use up her clothes coupons or wait until she had enough for a splurge? But the paper, typed numbers on army buff, in the end told him nothing. He touched it as if he could coax it to reveal something, but the numbers were simply numbers and the lives were somewhere else. The audit suddenly seemed foolish. What did he expect any of these accounts to reveal? He was looking at the financial life of the Hill, but the people were as unknown as ever. The numbers kept their secrets. Why expect a connection to Bruner anywhere? Here was a file to which he could attach a face, and it told him nothing that mattered. How often did they sleep
together? What was it like? Why, for that matter, should he care?

  “Got something?” Mills said, looking up.

  “No,” Connolly said. “My mind was just drifting.” He put the file on the stack of discards before Mills could see the name and lit a cigarette. “You know, maybe we’re looking at this the wrong way.”

  “I told you that two days ago.”

  “No, I mean, it’s not what’s in here that’s interesting, it’s what isn’t here.”

  Mills looked at him oddly.

  Connolly smiled. “I guess I’m not making much sense.”

  “No, I was just thinking. Bruner used to say that. ‘It’s what isn’t here.’ Just like that. I remember him saying it.”

  Connolly stared at him, disconcerted. They couldn’t possibly have been talking about the same thing. What had Bruner meant?

  “When?” he asked.

  Mills thought for a minute. “Well, that’s the funny thing. It was just like this, when he was going through the files.”

  “These?”

  “No, security clearance. Karl liked to go through the files. Of course, it was part of his job, but he said it was a great way to get to know people. So he’d go over them. And when I’d say, ‘You must know everything in there,’ he’d say, ‘It’s what isn’t here.’ Just the way you did.”

  Connolly was silent. “Where do you keep them?” he said finally.

  “In a safe over in T-1. Oh, no.”

  “But he removed them. So there must be a log?”

  Mills nodded.

  “Let’s see who he checked out over the past six months—no, nine months.”

  “Why not a year, just to play it safe?”

  “Okay.”

  “I was being funny.”

  “Be convenient if we found something that matched up with one of our exception files here, wouldn’t it?” Connolly said, patting them.

  “A miracle.”

  “Anyway, it’s something.”

  “Mike, it’s a phrase. It was just something to say. This isn’t getting us anywhere.”

  “Maybe. But he was interested in them. The least we can do is look at what interested him. Maybe it’ll tell us something about him.”