Los Alamos (12 page)

“Okay. So he saw Bruner?”

“No, just the car. He thought it was funny, a car like that, but like I said, he figured it was somebody visiting. You know, some Anglo with a girlfriend down there.”

“Is there a lot of that?”

“All over the world.”

“Very funny. So if he didn’t see him, we don’t know for sure he was actually there.”

“Oh, we know. We found his blood.”

He imagined Holliday’s face as he said it, the jaws clamping shut in satisfaction. He listened to the silence for a minute. “Want to tell me about it?”

“There’s a patch of ground near the church, right under where the tile sticks out. Seems it never rains there, so we got some dry ground with some blood on it.”

“And it’s Burner’s.”

“O negative. I figure it’s a safe assumption.”

“So Bruner gets hit next to some Spanish church and his body winds up in the park and his car disappears.”

“That’s what it looks like.”

“I wish I could say any of it made sense.”

“Well, I wish you could too. And while you’re at it, try making some sense of his pants now. Kinda changes things, don’t you think? Doesn’t fit, that kind of activity at a church. Would they do that there? Then driving him all over with his pants down. No sense to it. Could be we’re sniffing around the wrong tree here. You know, maybe he wasn’t that way at all.”

“It was your idea.”

“Well, I’ve been known to be wrong. Once or twice.”

“Then how do you explain the pants?”

“I can’t. Yet. I’m just saying it’s a hell of a place to have sex.”

“Well, for that matter, it’s a hell of a place to kill somebody. But why move him?”

“The thought that occurred to me was that they didn’t want him found so easy. He’d stick out like a sore thumb at the church, but he could have been days in the park. Well, one.”

“Then why not just take him out to the country and bury him?”

“Well, if you get a better idea, let me know.”

“You talk to the neighbors?”

“Sure.
Nada
. Amazing how the Spanish mind their business when the police come around. I never knew a people for going to bed so early.”

“But why move him? That’s what I don’t get.”

“I don’t know. But I tell you one thing, it sure wasn’t out of respect for the church.”

6

P
ERHAPS PEOPLE NEEDED
to be together after a death in the family, or perhaps Professor Weber’s evenings were always better attended than he liked to think, but his house was crowded. A cluster of music stands had been set in one corner of the living room, and people spilled out in groups down the hallway in a line to the kitchen, where the coffee and trays of cakes were arranged on a crocheted tablecloth. The air was warm and close with cigarette smoke and the overpowering scent of butter, sugar, and cinnamon. Connolly felt wrapped in the cozy sweetness of a prewar bakery and wondered for a minute where all the coupons had come from; did the bachelors trade Frau Weber their ration books for these once-a-week memories of home? The coffee smelled rich and strong, but as many people held glasses as coffee cups, and the hum of conversation rose and fell in the familiar lapping waves of a cocktail party. Pregnant women occupied the few upholstered easy chairs, with friends draped on the broad arms, balancing plates. Oppenheimer was there, a martini glass in one hand, his hair so short that without his hat his head seemed almost shaved. He barely acknowledged Connolly with a nod. His wife, Kitty, sat near him, her legs curled beneath her on a sofa, an ashtray in her lap, but paid no attention to her husband as she stared through her smoke, preoccupied with some interior conversation. She had clearly ceded all hostess duties to Johanna Weber, who bubbled all around her, directing people to food and making introductions.

“Mr. Connolly, yes, my husband has told me about you. I’m so glad you could come. Do you know Mrs. Oppenheimer? Kitty, Mr. Connolly.” Kitty glanced up, but Johanna Weber had already moved him along, introducing everyone in their immediate vicinity. “Mr. Connolly, Professor Weissmann, his wife, Frieda. Mr. Connolly. Dr. Carpenter. Dr. Carpenter is visiting us this week—” And so it went, a party trick, one name following another without pause and without forgetting. Connolly thought she was wasted on the Hill. In Washington she could have run one of the great houses in Rock Creek, her mind a vast photographic file of names and connections.

“And this is Emma Pawlowski.” She hurried on, scarcely noticing that Emma’s back was turned to her. “Her husband, Daniel.”

Connolly stopped and nodded, hopelessly curious, but Pawlowski was a pleasant-looking young man, eager to be polite, who had obviously never heard of him and wanted only to resume his conversation with Carpenter. His skin was a scholar’s pale white, with what seemed to be a permanent five-o’clock shadow.

“Yes, we’ve met,” Connolly said as Emma turned around. She looked oddly festive, her nails and mouth vivid red, her eyes shining. Connolly realized it was the first time he had seen her in a skirt, so that she seemed overdressed, as if she had put on heels and makeup for another party and landed here instead.

“Again and again,” she said. “You seem to be everywhere.” And then to her husband, who looked mildly puzzled, “Darling, this is Mr. Connolly I told you about. Or did I? Anyway, he very kindly drove me to Hannah’s, so you must be especially nice. He’s new on the Hill.”

“Welcome,” Pawlowski said in the flat, monotonal accent of one who had learned too many languages. Connolly wondered fleetingly if Conrad had sounded like this, both Polish and English squeezed of all inflection. “Whose unit are you with?”

“Oh darling, he’s not a scientist. He’s with
security
or something. It is security, isn’t it?” she said, all innocence.

Connolly nodded.

“But you like music,” Pawlowski finally said, at a loss to explain him, and not sure it was worth the effort.

“No, he’s come to spy on us,” Emma said playfully. “Absolutely tone-deaf. Can’t hear a note.”

Pawlowski looked at her, then smiled gently, a lover’s indulgence for what he didn’t understand. It seemed enough that she was lovely and spirited; he didn’t have to keep up to admire her for it.

“Then I will have to play more loudly,” he said, missing the joke. The effect was to make him seem younger than he was, a boy making his way. Connolly looked at his polite face and thought about the unreliability of language. He had studied with Meitner, a man of importance at the KWI, but faced with idle chat he became an awkward teenager. Like so many others on the Hill, he would have to retreat to the language of science to find his maturity.

Johanna Weber was there again, a tugboat still steering him through the harbor. “As loudly as you like, Daniel. Never a wrong note. Not like Hans. But come, some coffee, Mr. Connolly?”

“Or perhaps you’d like a drink,” Emma said, holding up her glass. For an instant, Connolly wondered if that explained the shine in her eyes.

“Coffee would be fine,” he said, and Johanna Weber beamed, clearly pleased, and took him in tow to the tall urn. Emma gave him a weak, ironic salute with her glass.

“Here,” Johanna Weber said, handing him a cup. “Shall I get you some cake?” But she was distracted by a new arrival, and Connolly watched the party game begin all over again, one accurate name following another.

The day had been somber—these were some of the same faces he had seen drawn and grieving in front of the Admin Building—but the party had taken on a life of its own, and as each voice rose to be heard above the others, the small house hummed with a kind of decorous gaiety. The Webers’ rooms were small but, unlike other interiors on the Hill, had the settled look of lives accumulated bit by bit. The heavy furniture, the antimacassars, the shelves of porcelain knickknacks, seemed to have come out of a time machine launched when the world was solid, weighted down and explained by things. There were no cactuses or Indian throws or anything else to suggest they had all gathered on a cool night somewhere on the Parajito Plateau. Warmed by the lamps and the yeast cakes and the smell of furniture polish, they were back in old Heidelberg. The Webers were at home.

“Don’t be noble,” Emma said, coming up to him at the urn and handing him a drink instead. “You’ll want two of these in you before they start playing.”

He took the drink and smiled. “Past experience?”

“Years of it.”

“What was that all about?” he said, gesturing to where they had talked before. “Jealous husband?”

“Daniel? No, he wouldn’t dream of it. That was about Johanna. Always on the qui vive. She gives me the pip.”

“A gossip?”

“Terrible, and she doesn’t have much to go on. She already thinks I’m disreputable.”

“Why?” he said, biting into a cake.

“Consorting with the lower orders, I suppose. She’s a fearful snob.”

“Lower orders meaning me?”

“Well, let’s just say you’re not a scientist. There’s always a pecking order, even here.”

“Who else do you consort with?”

She looked up at him, then took a sip before she answered. “You’ll do for now.”

“Your husband seemed nice.”

“Don’t.”

“What?”

“Just don’t. God, here she comes again.”

“Ah, Mr. Connolly,” Johanna Weber said, as if saying his name aloud sealed it in memory. “You’re meeting people, good. Emma’s an anthropologist, did she tell you?”

“Yes, we were just talking about the Anasazi,” Connolly said.

Johanna Weber hesitated, clearly surprised. “Fascinating, isn’t it?” she said, recovering. “Emma’s become quite an expert on the subject.” She looked at Emma to contradict her.

“In an amateur sort of a way,” Emma said smoothly. And then Frau Weber was being embraced by a new arrival and they were alone again.

“You’ve got a pretty good memory yourself,” Emma said. “However did you remember the poor old Anasazi? Most people can’t even pronounce it.”

“Anthropologist?” he said playfully.

“Pompous old trout. Everybody has to be something grand. Her maid is probably an Indian princess. And you—”

“Dick Tracy?”

“No, darling, Hoover at the very least. What’s the J stand for anyway, in J. Edgar?”

Connolly shrugged. “Maybe it’s like the O in Louella O. Parsons. Maybe they’re the same person.”

She laughed. “That’s a thought. Do you take anything seriously?”

“Everything. Freud tells us there are no jokes.”

“Does he really?”

“Uh-huh. Of course, he meant something else, but I doubt he had much of a sense of humor anyway.”

“How do you know things like that? Who are you, anyway?”

“You pick up things in the paper.”

She looked at him appraisingly. “I don’t think so.”

“But then, you’re an anthropologist,” he said easily.

“Quite. Maybe you’ll be my next project. The mysterious Mr. Connolly.”

“Don’t drop the Anasazi yet. That would be fickle.”

She was quiet for a minute, studying him over the rim of her glass. “Tell me about yourself,” she said softly.

“Such as?”

“Well, who are your people, as they used to say at garden parties.”

“My people? My mother’s dead. My father works at an insurance company and spent his life doing crossword puzzles in ten minutes and resenting the fact that he worked for people who couldn’t. He saved everything to send me to school.”

“Then what happened?”

“I went to work for the same people and now he resents me for the education he wanted himself. It’s a very American story.”

“You like him.”

“I feel sorry for him. Not quite the same thing.” He paused. “Yes, I like him.”

“And you—are you good at crosswords too?”

He nodded. “I used to be. In the genes, maybe. I like figuring things out, watching them fall into place.”

“And have they?”

“No. Only in puzzles.”

She stopped, still staring at him. When she spoke again her words seemed almost unconscious, drawn out of her in a trance. “What are you working out now?”

“Now? I don’t know. Why I’m here in a room full of pinheads eating cake instead of getting shot on Okinawa. Why anybody’s on Okinawa in the first place. What the Jap pilots think about when they crash into the ships. Why somebody got killed in a park. What are we going to do after the war.” He stopped, looking at her. “Why I’m pretending I’m thinking about any of this. All I’m really trying to figure out is how I can go to bed with you.”

She looked at him as if nothing had been said, but the longer she was silent, the more real the words became, hanging between them like visible shapes. For an instant he thought he had frightened her, but he held her eyes without apology, determined to play the hand through. Then, still saying nothing, she took a drink and walked away from him into the room.

He stared after her, unable to read any expression in her movement, not sure what he had done. Then people closed around her in the crowded room and she was gone. Someone at the table jostled his arm, and finally distracted, he looked at the rest of the room. People were still eating and talking. In the music corner, one of the players began tuning his viola.

“Now where is Hans,” Johanna Weber said to nobody in particular, busy now with a new hostess assignment. Connolly decided to look for the bathroom before the music began. The room had become even warmer, and despite the chill someone had opened the door to let in the fresh night air. He brushed past some smokers lining the narrow hallway and went through a half-open door to the bedroom. The bed was heaped with jackets and coats, and in the corner, under a desk lamp, Professor Weber and another man were leafing through pages. The room itself seemed oddly solemn, a refuge from the conversation just steps away, and Connolly realized that the effect came from the men themselves, wordlessly and gravely turning the pages of a magazine. He had clearly interrupted them, but Weber, glancing over his shoulder, nodded with an automatic courtesy.

“The bathroom?” Connolly said.

“Through there,” Weber said, pointing to a door. And then, still courteous, “This is Friedrich Eisler. Friedrich, Mr. Connolly.”

Connolly nodded, but both men returned to the magazine as if he had gone. “Oh, Friedrich,” Weber said, a plaintive sound of such quiet distress that Connolly stopped, alarmed. The room suddenly was no longer solemn but filled with the disturbance of something gone wrong. Connolly looked toward the open magazine—
Life
, or something like it—and stopped, shaken.

He had seen combat pictures before, and pictures of rubble and bodies crushed in suffering, but this was something new. Skeletons covered with a thin layer of skin looked out at the camera through a wire fence, their eyes utterly without expression. Some wore the black-and-white stripes of dirty prison camp uniforms. Behind them bodies lay on the ground, one so thin that a thighbone seemed to puncture the skin. In another, bodies were heaped in piles, limbs at unnatural angles, mouths wide open to the air. Connolly looked at them, paralyzed. Children. The men at the fence seemed to hang there, as if they needed to hold the wire to remain upright. In another picture, a vast open pit was filled to overflowing with shaved heads and naked bodies. Everyone was dead, even the ones pretending to be alive at the fence. Their eyes burned straight through the camera. Connolly wondered who had taken the pictures, who had recorded not just lifeless bodies but death itself. Only a mechanical box should see this. He imagined his finger trembling on the shutter, refusing to look. His eyes swam. He darted from picture to picture, trying to make any sense of it, but the world had tilted slightly on its axis, rearranging everything, and it was impossible to understand anything so new. Another picture: a ragged group of Nazi guards, their eyes dead too. A camp entrance. More piles of bodies. People lying in bunks, a bony arm jutting out for help. But all too late. Even those with open eyes were already dead. He could hear, outside, the rasp of the viola tuning and people talking, and he realized that in the bedroom they had almost stopped breathing.

There was a shame in seeing this—the act of witnessing made one a part of it. And there was the shame of failed hopes. The past few weeks had been filled with exultant news from Germany. The Rhine crossed. A city taken. Berlin within reach. Refugees marching to a somber future, richly deserved. Since the offensive of the winter, the war had taken on the pace and excitement of a long sporting match finally about to be won. The world was beginning to make sense again. Now he saw it was too late for that too.