Los Alamos (46 page)

“Maybe it’s a relief for me, to say it once.” Pawlowski straightened himself to go. “Emma’s not a prisoner. She’s free to do as she likes.” He looked out toward the blast area. “It seems a small point now.”

“Not to her. Help her.”

He looked straight at Connolly and then over toward Mills. “Ah,” he said wearily, “I forgot. In America, always the happy ending. Better than the truth. And so easy. Even a car and driver.” He took a step, then turned. “But always there’s the loose end, you know. Even here.” He looked away, then pointed to a jeep farther along the road. “That needs to go back to the bunker. You’ll return it?”

Connolly nodded.

“Straight out that road. You can’t miss it. There’s nothing else there now.”

Connolly watched him walk heavily over to the car and open the back door, nodding to Mills as he got in, not turning around.

The road to S 10,000 was busy with vehicles, visitors returning from the blast area, and soldiers still collecting sensors. Connolly saw Oppenheimer’s porkpie hat outside the door of the control station, bobbing in a sea of heads. Somebody was taking a picture. He parked the jeep and sat for a few minutes, not wanting to interrupt, looking out across the waste. When the group broke up, Oppenheimer spotted him and walked over, his face no longer pale, as if it had colored with excitement and was just calming down.

“How about a lift?” he said.

“Sure. Where?”

“Out there,” Oppenheimer said, indicating the far edge of the blast area. “I want to get away for a bit. It’s quite safe as long as we don’t go near the crater. You need a lead-lined tank for that.”

The paved road ended a short distance past the bunker. Out on the dead sand, Connolly looked toward the huge blast crater, the sun reflecting off what seemed to be pieces of green glass.

“The ground fused. In the heat,” Oppenheimer said calmly.

There was no destination. After a while they simply stopped and got out, looking around at the empty desert. There was no sound at all in the new silence, not even the faint scratching of lizards and insects. Oppenheimer stood still, looking at nothing.

“The worst part is, I was pleased,” he said suddenly, still looking away. “When it went off. It worked.”

Connolly looked down to where the funhouse mirror of the morning glare stretched their shadows out along the ground. “They’ll blame you,” he said.

Oppenheimer turned to him slowly, surprised. “You think so? Prometheus?”

“No. Fire was a gift. This is a curse.”

Oppenheimer was quiet. “It need not be. It doesn’t have to be—this,” he said, spreading his hand.

“Anyway, it’s the end of war. They won’t dare, now.”

Oppenheimer looked down. “You’re an optimist, Mr. Connolly. That’s what Alfred Nobel said about dynamite. He was wrong.”

“I’m not.”

“We’ll see. I hope so. That would be quite a thing—to be blamed for ending war.”

“They’ll honor you first. And then—”

Oppenheimer looked at him, and Connolly saw that his usual ironic glint had faded.

“Get out while you can,” Connolly said.

“After this?” Oppenheimer said, looking around again. “Do you want me to leave the generals in charge?”

“No,” Connolly said reluctantly. “You can’t.” He turned away, kicking at the sand. “Anyway, it worked. Numbers on paper. You found it. Is it what you expected?”

“It was waiting to be found, Mr. Connolly. A problem.” And then, a trace of smile. “Like yours, perhaps. Waiting to be found. You said you solved it. Is it what you expected?”

“I didn’t expect anything,” Connolly said. “I just wanted to know.”

“Yes,” Oppenheimer said, almost to himself. “That’s all I ever wanted too.” He walked away, lighting a cigarette. “And how did it come out? You were going to tell me.”

“Groves will fill you in. A worker on the Hill. There’s one thing he doesn’t know.”

Oppenheimer raised his eyebrows in question.

“He was working for Hannah Beckman. She was Eisler’s contact.”

“Hannah,” Oppenheimer said blankly, as if he had misheard.

“Your old friend.”

“We used to go riding. When I first came out to the ranch. But it’s impossible. Hannah? She had no politics at all.”

“It’s possible. It was her.”

Oppenheimer took this in, not saying anything. “Was?”

“They’re both dead. There’s no need for anyone to know about her part in it.”

Oppenheimer looked at him curiously. “Why?”

“Because you’d be walking into a buzz saw. They’re after you as it is. And this one’s too close to home. You’d be handing them a gun, you and Eisler. If it comes out that the project was being sold out by old friends of yours, they’ll smell the blood all the way to Washington. The truth won’t matter. They’ll destroy you.”

Oppenheimer held his eyes with a flicker of the old intensity. “According to you, they’re going to do that anyway.”

“Not with my help, they’re not.”

Oppenheimer smiled involuntarily, then frowned. “So I just—say nothing?”

“You don’t know anything to say. You never heard a word.”

“You want to rewrite history.”

“Just a little. You’ve made plenty of it to go around. Now just change a little piece for yourself.”

Oppenheimer looked at him, thinking. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because I want to keep you out of trouble. I think we’re going to need you.”

Oppenheimer said nothing for a minute, then nodded. “Thank you.”

“Okay,” Connolly said, holding his eyes and nodding back. Then, uncomfortable, he turned away. “We’d better get back. It’s a great day for the project. You don’t want to miss any of it.”

“Yes,” Oppenheimer said wearily. “I was pleased,” he said again, still wondering at himself, and then pointed. “The tower was over there. It evaporated. Just—evaporated. Can you imagine that?” He looked around, now lost in his thoughts. “Everything’s dead.”

Connolly waited.

“We’re going to use it on people.”

“I know. Once.”

“Twice,” Oppenheimer said, correcting him. “There are two. That’s what the general said to me right after it went off. ‘Two of these and the war is over.’ ”

“Why not just one?”

“We’ve only tested the plutonium gadget,” he said, a scientist again. “The uranium bomb needs—” And then he caught himself and shrugged. “I suppose he wants to scare them to death.”

They started for the jeep.

“This is what they’ll remember,” Oppenheimer said, looking at the desolation. “Not the rest of it. They’ll wonder what we were doing all this time. What am I going to tell them?” He paused. “My God, I was never happier in my life.”

“Not just you. Everybody.”

Oppenheimer glanced at him. “Yes,” he said. “The time of our lives. It won’t be convenient to remember that. That we enjoyed doing it.” He stopped. “God help me, it’s true.”

For a minute Connolly thought he would break down, his thin body finally overcome by contradiction.

“People do funny things when they’re scared to death. I’m worried about you,” Connolly said, unable to keep the intimacy out of his voice. He looked at the frail figure beside him, the hollow cheeks and anxious eyes, and suddenly wished him back at the blackboard at Göttingen, thinking out puzzles.

“I’m worried about all of us,” Oppenheimer said.

“I can’t think about that many. Right now I’m just worried about you.”

But Oppenheimer had recovered and had moved his chalk to the larger problem. “They won’t stay scared,” he said. “A little learning’s a dangerous thing. A lot isn’t. Maybe it’s what we need—to know this much. To change.”

“It won’t change anything. They’ll hate you for trying.”

“Well—” he said, then looked over at Connolly, an almost jaunty gleam in his eyes. “You know, the trouble with you, Mike, is that you don’t trust people.”

Connolly flushed. It was the first time Oppenheimer had ever used his name, and it took him by surprise, the pleasure of it.

“Sometimes you have to have a little faith,” Oppenheimer was saying.

And Connolly felt that he was losing him, that he was drifting away, unwilling to be distracted from his new theorem. “Not them,” he said urgently, taking Oppenheimer’s elbow as if he were trying to anchor him. “You don’t know them. They can’t stop now. You have to be careful. You have to protect yourself.”

Oppenheimer’s eyes wandered to the tower site. “How do you do that?” he said. Then he looked down at Connolly’s hand and gently pulled his elbow away. “You know, you may be wrong.”

“I’m not.”

Oppenheimer looked at him, his eyes tired and knowing. “Well, we’ll see,” he said. “I’m going to hope for the best.”

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Chapter One
February 1950

H
e was not allowed to attend the hearing. There was his age, for one thing, but he knew it was really the reporters. From his bedroom window he could see them every morning when his father left the house. Mr. Benjamin, his father’s lawyer, would come for him—it was somehow unthinkable that he should make the short walk down 2nd Street to the Capitol alone—and the minute they were down the steps Nick would see the clusters of hats swooping toward them like birds. There was even a kind of ritual about it now. No one stood in front of the house. Usually they were across the street, or on the corner, drinking coffee from paper cups, exhaling little puffs of steam in the cold February air. Then the front door would open and they would stamp out their cigarettes, suddenly on duty, and surround his father, falling into step with him and Mr. Benjamin as if they were joining them for a stroll.

In the beginning there had been photographers, their hats pushed back on their heads as they popped flashbulbs, but now there were just the reporters. No one yelled or pushed. The ritual had turned polite. He could see his father in his long herringbone coat drawing the pack with him as he moved down the street, Mr. Benjamin, terrier-like, hurrying to keep up. His father never ignored the reporters. Nick could see him talking—but what did he say?—and nodding his head. Once Nick saw one of them laugh. His father had said the whole thing was a goddam circus, but from up here in the window, watching the hats, it seemed friendly, a gang of boys heading for school. It wasn’t, though. At night, alone in the study, smoking in the light of the desk lamp, his father looked worried.

His mother always left separately. She would busy herself with Nora, arranging the day, then stand in front of the hall mirror, touching her hair, smoothing out her wool skirt, while a cigarette burned in the ashtray on the table where they put the mail. When Nick came downstairs she would look surprised, as if she had forgotten he was in the house, then nervously pick up her lipstick to get ready. Her new dress, with its tight cinched waist and fitted top, seemed designed to hold her upright, every piece of her in place.

“Have they gone?” she said, putting on the lipstick.

“Uh-huh. Dad made one of them laugh.”

Her hand stopped for a minute, then the red tube continued along her lip. “Did he,” she said, blotting her lips, but it wasn’t a question. “Well, I’ll give them another five minutes.”

“They never wait for you, you know,” Nick said. It was one of the things that puzzled him. His mother walked to the hearings alone every day, not even a single straggler from the pack of hats waiting behind to catch her. How did they think she got there?

“They will one day,” she said, picking up her hat. “Right now all they can think about is your father. And his jokes.” She caught the edge in her voice and glanced at him, embarrassed, then went back to the hat.

“There was only one,” Nick said.

“I know,” she said quietly. “I didn’t mean—Check the window again, would you? And shouldn’t you be getting ready for school?”

“I am ready,” he said, going over to the window. “I don’t see why I can’t go to the trial.”

“Not again, Nicky, please. And it’s not a trial. For the hundredth time. It’s a hearing. That’s all. A congressional hearing.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Your father’s not a criminal, that’s the difference. He’s not on
trial
for anything.”

“Everybody acts like he is.”

“What do you mean? Has anyone said anything to you at school?”

Nick shrugged.

“Have they?”

“They said he’s on trial for being a Communist.”

His mother stopped fixing the hat and lowered her hands. “Well, he’s not on trial and he’s not a Communist. So much for what they know. Just don’t listen, okay? It only makes it worse. They’re
looking
for Communists, so they have to talk to a lot of people in the government, that’s all.”

Nick came back to the mirror, studying them both, as if the world reflected would be his mother’s cheerful dream of before, when all they had to worry about was school gossip.

“They want to hear what he has to say. That’s why it’s called a hearing. There,” she said, pressing the hat like a protective shell. “How do I look?”

Nick smiled. “Beautiful.”

“Oh, you always say that,” she said lightly, glancing at the mirror again and leaning forward. Nick loved to watch her dress, disappearing to the edge of her careful absorption. It was the harmless vanity of a pretty girl who’d been taught that how you looked mattered, that appearance could somehow determine events. She blotted her lips one last time, then noticed his expression. “Honeybun, what’s wrong?”

“Why can’t I hear him too? I’m not a little kid anymore.”

“No,” she said softly, touching the side of his head. “Maybe just to me. But ten isn’t very old either, is it? You don’t want to grow up too fast.”

“Is he going to go to jail?”

She knelt down to face him, holding his shoulders. “No. Look, I know all of this seems confusing. But it’s not about you, do you understand? Just—grownups. Your dad’s fine. You don’t want him to have to worry about you too, do you? It’s—it’s a bad time, that’s all.”

A bad time. Nora, for whom Ireland was always just a memory away, called it troubles. “Before your father’s troubles started,” she would say, as if everything that was happening to them were beyond their control, like the weather. But no one would tell him what it actually was.

“You
go,” he said stubbornly.

“It’s different for me. You’re just a child—it has nothing to do with you. It’s not
going
to, either. I’m not going to let that happen,” she said, holding his shoulders tightly. “Do you understand?”

He didn’t, but he nodded, surprised at the force of her hands.

“You’ll be late,” Nora said, coming into the hall. His mother looked up, distracted. “Yes, all right. Come on, honeybun, time for school. It’ll be all right. You’ll see. This won’t last much longer, I promise. Then we’ll go up to the cabin and forget all about it. Just us. Would you like that?”

Nick nodded. “You mean out of school?”

“Well, in the spring.”

“Don’t forget you’ve got Father Tim coming over later,” Nora said. “You’ll want to be back. Last time he was halfway through the bottle before you were through the door.”

“Nora,” his mother said, pretending to scold but laughing in spite of herself. “Listen to you. He’s not a drinker.”

“No, the poor are drinkers. The rich just don’t mind if they do.”

“He’s not rich anymore. He’s a priest, for heaven’s sake,” she said, putting on her coat.

“The rich don’t change. Someone else’s bottle, that’s what they like. Maybe that’s why they’re rich. Still, it’s your bottle, and if you don’t mind I’m sure I—”

“Nora, stop babbling. I’ll be back. Coast clear?” She nodded her head toward the window. “How about a kiss, then?” She leaned down to let Nick graze her cheek. “Oh, that’s better. I’m ready for anything now.”

At the door she put on her gloves. “You remember what I said, okay? Don’t listen to the other kids if they start saying things. They don’t know what they’re talking about anyway.”

“It wasn’t the other kids. About Dad. It was Miss Smith.”

“Oh.” His mother stopped, flustered, her shoulders sagging. “Oh, honeybun,” she said, and then, as if she had finally run out of answers, she turned and went out the door.

After that, he didn’t go to school. “At least for a while,” his mother said, still pretending that things were normal. Now, after his parents left, the house would grow still, so quiet that he would tiptoe, listening for the sharp whistle of Nora’s kettle in the kitchen, then the rustle of newspaper as she pored over his father’s troubles with one of her cups of tea. He was supposed to be reading
Kidnapped
. His mother said he was the right age for it, but after the wicked uncle and the broken stairs in the dark it all got confusing—Whigs and Jacobites, and you didn’t know whose side you were supposed to be on. It made no more sense than the papers. His father was a New Dealer but not a Communist, and not a Republican either, according to Nora. Then why was he on trial? Some terrible woman had said he was a spy, but you only had to look at her, all made up the way she was, to know she was lying. And a Catholic too, which made things worse. It was the Jews who loved Russia, not people like his father, even though she’d hate to think how long it had been since he’d seen the inside of a church. Still. And the things they said. But when Nick asked her to see the newspapers himself, she’d refuse. His mother wouldn’t like it.

So he sat in the deep club chair in the living room, pretending to read but listening instead. While Nora had her tea there was no sound but the ticking of the ormolu clock. Soon, however, he’d hear the scraping of a chair in the kitchen, then the heavy steps in the hall as Nora came to peek in before she began her chores. Nick would turn a page, his head bent to the book he wasn’t reading until he felt her slip out of the doorway and head upstairs. After another few minutes, the vacuum would start with a roar and he could go. He would race down the back kitchen stairs, careful not to hit the creaky fourth step, and get the newspaper from behind the bread box, where Nora always hid it. Then, one ear still alert to the vacuum, he would read about the trial.
KOTLAR DENIES ALLEGATIONS. COMMITTEE THREATENS CONTEMPT. MUNDT SET TO CALL ACHESON. NEW KOTLAR TESTIMONY
. It always gave him an odd sensation to see his name in print. His eye would flash down the column, “Kotlar” leaping out as if it were in boldface, not just another word in a blur of type. But it was
Kidnapped
all over again. Whigs and Jacobites.

The newspapers became part of the spy game. The point at first was to see how many rooms he could visit without Nora’s knowing—from the kitchen up to his father’s study, then past the bedroom where she was working (this was the best part) to his mother’s dressing room, then back down the stairs (carefully now, the vacuum having gone silent) and into the club chair with the open book before she appeared again. Not that she would have cared if he’d left the room—it was just the game. Stuck in the house, cocooned against the cold outside that kept promising snow, he learned its secrets, the noisy parts, the bad floorboards, as if they were bits of Braille. He could even spy on Nora, watching through the crack in the door, crouching halfway down the stairs, until he felt he could roam the house at will, invisible. His father, he knew, could never have done this. You always knew where he was, clunking down the hall to the bathroom at night, all his weight on his heels. His mother said you could feel him a block away. It was Nick who knew how to spy. He could stand absolutely still, like one of those movie submarines with the motors off, on sonar silence, waiting to hear something.

Then one day, by accident, he finally saw his father at the hearing. Nora had taken him downtown to the movies, a
My Friend Irma
picture with Martin and Lewis. She crossed herself when the newsreel began with the Holy Year in Rome, long lines of pilgrims forming at the churches, some from Germany, some even from as far away as America. A crowded open-air mass. A year of new hope for a century half old. Fireworks exploded over St. Peter’s. Then, abruptly, the newsreel shifted to Washington, and the announcer’s voice turned grim.

“A different kind of fireworks on Capitol Hill, as the House Committee on Un-American Activities and combative congressman Kenneth Welles continued the probe into Communist subversion in our State Department. In the box again, Undersecretary Walter Kotlar, named by Soviet spy Rosemary Cochrane as one of the members of an alleged Washington ring.”

He felt Nora move beside him and covered her hand to keep her still as the screen filled with his father walking down a corridor to the hearing room, wearing the familiar hat and herringbone coat. The reporters were more animated now, battering him with questions, as if they had finally thawed out from their morning vigil in the cold. Then he was seated at a polished table, several microphones in front of him, facing a long dais filled with men in suits who kept turning to whisper to aides who sat behind them like shadows, away from the lights.

The man at the center, surprisingly young, was taller than the others, with a thick football player’s neck bursting out of a suit that stretched across his wide shoulders like a padded uniform.

“Mr. Kotlar, in 1945 you were a member of the American delegation that attended the Yalta Conference, were you not?”

“Yes.”

“In that capacity did you offer views on the political future of the countries of Eastern Europe?”

“No. My views were not solicited.”

“But you are Czechoslovakian, are you not?”

“No, sir, I am an American.”

“Well, Mr. Kotlar, that’s fine. I meant by origin. Would you tell the committee where you were born?”

“I was born in what was then Bohemia and is now part of Czechoslovakia,” Nick’s father said, but the carefulness of his answer had the odd effect of making him seem evasive. “I came to this country when I was four years old.”

“But you speak Czechoslovakian?”

Nick’s father allowed the trace of a smile. “Czech? No.” But this wasn’t true. Nick remembered his grandmother talking in her kitchen, his father nodding his head at the incomprehensible words. “I know a few words,” his father continued. “Certainly not enough to use the language in any official capacity. I know a little French, too.”

This seemed to annoy the congressman. “This committee isn’t interested in your knowledge of French, Mr. Kotlar. Is it not true that as a member of the Yalta delegation, you had access to information the Russians considered very valuable?”

“No. I was there strictly as an adviser on Lend-Lease and postwar aid programs. My information wasn’t classified—it was available to everyone.”

Welles looked the way Miss Smith did when someone in class was being fresh. “That remains to be seen, Mr. Kotlar,” he said. “That remains to be seen.” He paused, pretending to consult a paper but really, Nick knew, just allowing his words to hang in the air. “Lend-Lease. We’ve all heard about your generosity during the war. But after the war, you went right on being generous, didn’t you? Isn’t it true you wanted to give Marshall Plan aid to Czechoslovakia?”