by Joseph Kanon
“No, my fault. I was just thinking.”
Weber smiled. “Thinking,” he said, savoring the word. “For us now it’s only the work. So close.” He fluttered his hand in the air. “Every day a new deadline. But no matter. We’re almost there.” The w was a v.
“So I hear.”
Weber looked up at him sharply, a pinprick of alarm, then put it aside, too absorbed to pursue it. “We all work too hard—even thinking. You look like Robert. All the troubles of the world. No time even for music. Do you play?”
Connolly smiled to himself. “No, but I like to listen.”
“Good, good, come tomorrow. A small gathering. So many at Trinity now, of course.”
Before Connolly could answer, Weber started off, his mind busy again with formulas. Connolly watched him go, bustling toward the gate, encased in his private bubble. He seemed the very soul of the Hill, all distraction and yeast cakes and the determined icepick at the dance.
But the sudden jolt to Connolly’s shoulder had awakened him, like someone shaking him to get up for work. He knew that later he would sink back into his private obsession, the terrible feeling of having broken something he didn’t know how to fix. But what did any of it have to do with the case? At least there was still that. He thought of Weber peering up, trying to place him. Karl had known Emma right away. All she had had to do was walk into the office.
When he got to his desk, however, he simply sat there staring, not sure where to begin.
“What’s wrong?” Mills said.
“Nothing. Why?”
“I don’t know. You look funny. Everything all right?”
“As rain,” he said absently, then, aware of Mills watching him, picked up the phone to call Holliday.
“Howdy,” Doc said when he got on. “I was just about to call you.”
“Let me ask you something,” Connolly said briskly. “You examined the body.”
“Well, I saw it—”
“Could a woman have done it?”
“Not unless she was one hell of a strong woman. He was hit more than once, you know. Kicked too. Not many women’d do that. At least, I hope not. What’s on your mind?”
“Nothing. Never mind. Just a little crazy, I guess.”
“It’s the altitude. You ought to watch that. They say half the people up there are crazy.”
Connolly said nothing, running his finger along the edge of the phone, his mind elsewhere.
“Want to know why I was going to call?” Doc said finally.
“I’m sorry. Yes. Sure.”
“You’re going to like this. Cheer you right up. You know those bars you told me to look into, the ones we haven’t got? Turns out you were right. We got one.”
Connolly said nothing but looked up from the phone, puzzled.
“Now I suppose I got to keep my eye on it. Wish I could say I was better off knowing about it, but I doubt it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m getting to it. Turns out there was a little loose talk there and one of my boys heard about it. ‘Course, everybody was quiet as a mouse before, but now that they’ve got the guy—well, you know how it is. A few beers and—”
“Doc—”
“All right, all right. Hold on. You going to let me tell this my way? Seems one of the customers was in the park that night. Taking care of a little business. He don’t want to talk about that, though. Anyway, point is he saw someone taking old Karl into the bushes. Just like you figured—thought he was drunk. Car pulls up and before you know it the two of them are heading somewhere quiet. Our boy don’t think nothing of it. Tell you the truth, sounded like he was annoyed. Didn’t want any company around.”
“What was he doing there?”
“Said he was taking a leak.” Holliday paused. “Yeah, I know, looks like I got to keep an eye on the Alameda now too. All kinds of stuff going on I didn’t know about.”
“Did he get a look at him?”
“Nope. Said he was tall.”
“Tall.”
“That’s right. Now Ramon, he struck me as on the short side, wouldn’t you say? So I asked him about that. But he says tall. ‘Course, given what he might have been doing there, maybe anybody’d look tall.”
“What else?”
“Nothing else. Next thing he knew was when he heard the car driving away. Like I said, he didn’t think nothing of it. And then, when it comes out there’s a body found there, well the whole thing just goes right out of his head. You know.”
“He didn’t see his face?”
“No. Tall, that’s it. I asked.”
Connolly was quiet. “So what have we got?” he said.
“Not much. He’s not even what you’d call a real witness—all he saw was two guys going into the bushes, one of them drunk. Court of law, it wouldn’t mean shit. But he saw what he saw. Only reason I got it out of him now is he probably thinks it was Ramon he saw and it’s all over anyway. He’s the nervous type. But I figured you’d like to know you weren’t imagining things. Happened just like you thought.”
“Yeah. Thanks, Doc. What about the car?”
In the pause, Connolly felt he could see Doc smiling.
“Oh, I almost forgot that. He did see that. Funny thing, isn’t it, he didn’t see the guy but he did remember the car.”
“Let me guess.”
“If you said a Buick, he wouldn’t argue with you.”
“You still holding him?”
“No, I’ve got no call to do that. I could charge him with something, but why would I want to go and do that and stir up everybody? He was practically pissing in his pants the way it was. Now what’s all this about a woman? You on to something up there?”
“No, nothing. Just thinking out loud. Trying to figure out, you know, how strong—”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’ll be down in a few days. I’ll fill you in.”
“What’s the matter? Your phone tapped?”
Suddenly he was Karl again. His hand instinctively recoiled from the black telephone, as if Doc’s words had carried their own shock. Of course. Oppenheimer’s phone. His. Naturally they’d do that. He looked over at Mills, blandly signing forms, paying no attention. He tried to remember everything he’d just said, imagining it typed up, one carbon for the files. Was there a phrase that drew the eye, that would have to be passed along? His mind was busy again.
“Mike?” Doc said.
But don’t let them know that you know. “That click you hear is me hanging up, Doc,” he said easily. “I have to go. I’ll call you. And thanks.”
Then, the receiver back in its cradle, he looked at it again. They had every right to know. That’s what they were all doing here. Karl, at least, had known that, had stayed alert.
After a while he felt Mills looking at him.
“Now what?” Mills said.
“Nothing. I’ve been thinking. You know those security files?” Karl had noticed her right away.
“Intimately.”
“The vetting and the updates. I want to see everybody who arrived on the Hill—when was the first two hundred bucks? October? Let’s say from September on. Just the new arrivals. Foreigners. How many do you think there are?”
Mills shrugged. “Some. The Tube Alloys group came through Canada about then. They’d all be foreign. But not Americans?”
“If they were naturalized. First I want the ones who were vetted abroad.”
Mills raised his eyebrows. “What’s up?”
“We’re looking for any left-wing history—groups, contributions, Popular Front, any of it.”
“Communists?”
“Not officially. What was it Karl said to you? It’s what’s not there. I think that’s what Karl knew. A Communist who wasn’t there.”
Mills looked at him for a minute. “What makes you think so?”
“A hunch.”
“A hunch.”
“That’s right,” Connolly said, looking at him directly.
“Okay. I’ll get started on the arrival list. You want to look at all these yourself?” It was another question.
“Both of us,” Connolly said. “But no one else. No reports.”
Mills stood in front of the desk, raising his palms in a kind of pleading. “It’s my job, Mike.”
Connolly looked up at him, just a soldier following orders, but what he heard was himself, talking to Emma, mad as the rest of them, and then the noise in his head began to clear and he felt ashamed. “Trust me a little,” he said, and now the voice was hers.
He went out to Ashley Pond, shrunken now in the drought, and walked around its necklace of dried mud. The late afternoon sun burned against the windows of Gamma Building, making rows of little fires. The Hill, as always, was in motion, trucks grinding past scientists rushing to meetings and secretaries in wobbly heels heading to the PX on their break. It all went on behind him, around him, while he stood apart on this margin of water. Karl hadn’t said anything. Why? Out of some improbable decency? No. Maybe he thought it wasn’t really over, that he could always return when his new interest had been satisfied. Or maybe he thought there was nothing to tell, just another European story they would never understand. Questions would have to be asked, about him too, already compromised. What good would it do? He lived to protect himself, now in a world of tapped phones and secret reports and files that told everything about the past except what it meant. You had to be careful. Loyalty was a bargaining chip—you had to hoard it until you could play it to advantage. And meanwhile the Hill would go on around him too, indifferent, busy with itself. Connolly saw him standing by the same pond, outside of things, looking for a way in. Why would they trust him? The Germans hadn’t, the Russians hadn’t. Would his new masters be any different? Unless he had something really important to offer, something more than a sloppy vetting. So he waited.
If it was true. Connolly picked up a small rock, threw it into the pond, and watched the water rearrange itself, like thoughts. He thought of Emma at the memorial service, coolly walking out on Daniel’s arm; saw her at Fuller Lodge, her back to him, laughing. Maybe everything was a performance, the practiced story. But he had made her do that—it had all been for him, hadn’t it? He had made her lie and now he distrusted the lie. He started back toward the dormitory, looking down at the ground as he walked. Maybe Karl hadn’t been sure either, waiting for something more. He only had her word for it. What did Karl really think? He thought he was beginning to know him, but Karl didn’t exist. He could only imagine him.
The dormitory was quiet, even the Ping-Pong table empty, and Connolly went straight to his room. He sat in the chair by the window with Karl’s file, staring at the picture that would somehow make him real. Dark, intelligent eyes. Had he trusted her? But Karl didn’t trust anyone. Goblins everywhere. He came to the right place for it. Maybe he hadn’t felt like an outsider at all; maybe he had liked it, his files and his private suspicions and the adrenaline thrill of a hunt. Maybe he’d felt at home. He knew how to live here, what he was expected to do. But what did he have for it? A car, some money just in case, and now the secret of his own death. Half the people up there are crazy.
Connolly stared at the room and realized with a shock that it looked exactly the way it had on his first night. Did he live here? A shaving kit on the washbasin, a bag in the closet, a book. Otherwise, the same. Neat. Empty. He hadn’t expected to stay. But the room in Washington was no different. Temporary until the war was over. He was living in other people’s stories. For how long? Then the war would be over and he would be back in his own, where nothing would happen. Unless it already had. He felt a panic so intense that it swept over him like a kind of nausea. If he sat back in the chair now he would disappear into Karl’s room, waiting to be sure.
He threw the folder on the floor and got up, standing so quickly that his head felt dizzy. When he hurried out of the building, blinking at the sun, his head was still light, but he felt his body coming back, filling up again. There was room now for everything—the insubstantial buildings, the clotheslines flapping white, the smell of gasoline. When he reached her building he almost laughed, remembering that other time, turning left, turning right, the neighbor with the coffee. This time he knocked without hesitation, loudly, so that when she opened the door she pushed against it as if he were a gust of wind. He looked at her face, the details of it, his own story.
“What do you want?” she said, still holding the door.
“I’m in love with you.”
“Oh,” she said, a sound, not a word, a reflexive whimper. Her body went soft, exhaling, shoulders easing as her eyes filled. The door seemed to open by itself, pushed by the same wind, and he was inside. For a minute they just looked, her eyes fixed on him, moist with relief but not crying, moving with his, alive with conversation. “You came back,” she said.
“I’m in love with you,” he said again.
She put her hands to the sides of his face and brought him down to kiss her, short drinking kisses, like gulps.
“Yes,” she said into his cheek.
“Do you know what that means?”
“No. Tell me.” Smiling now, teasing him. Then she kissed him again. “No, don’t. So much talking. Don’t say anything else.”
“I don’t care about the rest. I can’t lose you.”
“No,” she said, her head back, shaking it happily. “No. You can’t. Tell me again.”
“Come to bed.”
And this time, she took his hand and led him into the other room.
12
THE DROUGHT HAD brought summer early and with it one of the electrical storms that usually waited for July. Outside Weber’s house, Connolly could see the giant dark anvil of a thunderhead rolling toward the mesa, the sky crackling with branches of lightning that shot through the air like X-rays, leaving an inverted image on the eye. Inside, an Indian maid was refilling the coffee urn, edging her way through the crowded living room. Despite the absentees down at the test site, the room was full, the low thunder outside barely audible over the noise of the party voices. Nothing seemed to have changed. Kitty Oppenheimer was again curled up in a corner of the sofa, while Johanna Weber scurried about, playing her hostess memory trick. The air was close, warm with bodies, and Connolly, bored and beginning to sweat, had been there only a few minutes before he began planning an escape. Weber came to his rescue, asking him to fetch Eisler from his lab.
“He’s always forgetful, Friedrich. But it’s the Beethoven. Without him, we can’t—”
The music was outside, deep cello moans of thunder under the viola staccato of the moving clouds. For once there was no dust; even the earth was holding its breath. Eisler’s lab was near the edge of the plateau, not far from X Building, where the cyclotron was, and the rain began before Connolly could reach it, so that he sprinted the last few yards. Now the noise was everywhere, and when the wind banged the door behind him it was lost in a crack of thunder. The hallways brightened for a minute with lightning, and Connolly expected the dim of a power surge, but the overhead lights were steady. When he opened the lab door and stepped in, the sounds were hidden by more thunder, so that Eisler was unaware of his coming. He was about to call out but instead stood for a moment watching, afraid to interrupt.
Eisler was bending over a table in front of a blackboard, stacking small plum-colored metal cubes in a surrounding well of what looked like soft aluminum blocks. Critical assemblies. His body was tense, his long fingers barely moving with slow precision. In the noise of the storm he seemed to stand in his own vacuum, oblivious to anything beyond the table. Connolly watched as he tentatively lowered his right hand, dropping the metal a fraction, then held it still to listen for the increased clicking sound, his whole frame rigid with concentration. So this is what it was like, this awful attention, tickling the dragon’s tail. Then he straightened for a minute, staring ahead at the blackboard as if it were a mirror, and took a deep breath. When he bent over again his movements were fluid, no longer hes
itant, and Connolly watched, fascinated, as he lowered another cube in a steady, deliberate push.
Suddenly the clicking erupted and a blue light flashed in the room, some terrible new lightning, and Connolly gasped. Eisler whirled around, seeing him for the first time, then swept his arm across the pile of blocks, knocking them over to the floor with a crash. Connolly instinctively froze. The blue light and the frantic clicking noise stopped. For a moment they held their positions, Connolly listening to his own ragged breath, Eisler looking at him in anguish. When Connolly moved, Eisler held his hand up in warning.
“Please stay where you are,” he said calmly. “You’ve been exposed.” Then slowly, with the inevitable movements of a dream, he went over to the blackboard. “I’ll be with you in a minute, Mr. Connolly,” he said distantly, absorbed. “How many meters would you say? Ten?” The blocks lay scattered at his feet, now just harmless metal. He picked up a piece of chalk and quickly sketched an outline of the room, like one of Connolly’s maps, then began to fill the space to its side with the numbers and signs of a formula. Connolly stood trembling, watching him move his chalk across the board, methodical as a madman.
“What are you doing?” he said finally, his voice hoarse, scraped by shallow breathing.
“The effect of the radiation,” Eisler said, his back still to him. “It can’t have been more than two or three seconds. That’s something. But it’s the distance that matters. It’s good you stopped where you are. You have good manners, Mr. Connolly,” he said dispassionately, as if it were no more than another factor to compute. “Not to walk in. They may have saved your life.”
“You did,” Connolly said, shaking involuntarily.
Eisler turned to face him. “Unless I have taken it.” He paused. “We will have to do some tests.” Then, sensing Connolly’s shock, “I think you will be all right. It was a very small exposure.”
“But what happened? Was that a chain reaction?”
“Oh yes.” Eisler came away from the board, his shoulders drooping. “I am so very sorry, Mr. Connolly. I didn’t know—”
