by Joseph Kanon
“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 matériel—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 imagin
ed 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.”
