Los Alamos (5 page)

The stories made other stories. Something had happened to Karl Bruner, who in turn became a different person, which in turn made him do—what? Maybe nothing. But once the violence started, there was no end to it—every crime reporter knew that. It demanded vengeance, or at least some answer, an endless series of biblical begats. A gun fired never stopped, it kept cutting through the lives of everyone around it, on and on. Like some unstoppable—Connolly smiled to himself at the aptness of it—chain reaction. Until it all became part of the war.

Connolly liked the remoteness of Los Alamos, the clean, high air away from the files and reports of the world destroying itself. A simple personal crime, a police blotter item—not a war. An assignment out of the funhouse, some time in the light. But Bruner’s face had thrown him back again—another European story. He wondered why it had ended on the Santa Fe river.

2

C
ONNOLLY WAS LATE
to the party and wouldn’t have gone at all if Mills hadn’t dragged him. He had needed sleep, not dinner, but Mills had gone to the trouble of getting a table at Fuller Lodge and he felt he couldn’t refuse.

“Better to start off on the right foot,” Mills had said. “You can eat at the commissary anytime. The lodge is as good as it gets here.”

And in fact the food was good and gave him a second wind. The room itself, oversized and two stories high, with a running balcony and a massive stone fireplace at either end, looked more like the dining room of a national park lodge than the army-camp messes where most of Los Alamos ate. Every table was filled, so that the room buzzed with conversation and clinking flatware.

Connolly was surprised at how many people wore coats and ties. There was clearly no dress code—he could see occasional open shirts and even some Western-style pointed collars—but most people were in full suits, the women in bright, slightly dowdy dresses. Saturday night at the Faculty Club.

“If you want to do some scientist spotting, you might start with that table over there,” Mills said, nodding his head. “Let’s see how good you are.”

Connolly glanced at a tall man, his apple cheeks bellowing out with the draw on his pipe. He had the white hair and gentle, puckish face of a thin Nordic Santa Claus.

“Niels Bohr,” Connolly said. “I’m impressed.”

“Nicholas Baker. Code names only, please. All physicists are ‘engineers,’ and he is Mr. Baker.”

“I’ll try to remember.” Connolly grinned. “Who else?”

“Henry Farmer.”

Connolly thought for a second. “Of the Italian Farmers?”

“You’re catching on.”

“Is he here too?”

“He’s the one with Mr. Baker.”

Connolly looked at the modest figure with thinning dark hair, bent over to catch the soft-spoken Baker’s words. Fermi. “A penny for
their
thoughts.”

“You wouldn’t understand them even if you heard them. You’ll get used to that too.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Forever. Since ’forty-three. It was a lot smaller then. When I first got here, we only had the old school and a few buildings in the Tech Area. One telephone line. The road up the mesa was still dirt.”

“The good old days?”

“Not really. For the scientists, maybe. They were gung-ho—real pioneer times for them. For the rest of us it was—” He searched for a word. “Quiet. You felt like you’d dropped right off the edge and nobody knew where you were.”

“Nobody knows now.”

Mills shrugged. “Like I say, you get used to it. And of course things got busier and busier so you didn’t have much time to think about it. I suppose it’s a little like overseas, except nobody gets killed.”

“Until now.”

“Yeah, until now. Not exactly a war casualty though, was he?”

“No.” Connolly shifted. “What did you do before the war?”

“Lawyer.”

“Is that how you ended up in security?”

“I wish I knew. Maybe they thought law meant law enforcement. They aren’t famous for being logical. Maybe they just thought I’d make a rotten soldier and I’d be better off pushing paper somewhere.”

“Criminal law?”

“Estates and trusts. I know, boring, but you’d be surprised. Besides, it makes the firm a ton of money and everybody wants to marry you.” He grinned. “They don’t even notice the hair,” he said, running his hand along his balding top.

“But nobody did, I take it,” Connolly said, gesturing toward Mills’s bare finger.

“Not yet. But wait till I make partner.”

“So meanwhile, what do you do for a social life?”

“You know, you have a delicate way of asking rude questions.”

“Okay.” Connolly laughed. “Withdrawn.”

“What the hell, I don’t care. Mostly there isn’t any. Just like any army base. But I suppose there’s enough going on if you look for it. You don’t want to go near the wives—we’ve had a little of that and that’s always trouble. The WACs are something else again. We tried to keep the dormitories off-limits to single men for a while, and it was the WACs who screamed bloody murder, so the parties started right up again. You can’t blame them. Nobody’s allowed to fraternize with the locals for security reasons, so every night’s prom night for the WACs. They’ll never be this popular again.”

“What about Santa Fe?”

“Not much. It’s an old town, and the Spanish won’t even look at you. Albuquerque’s better. Some of the guys go on a spree there if they get a weekend pass, and sometimes we have to go get them out of the tank, but mostly they’re so afraid of getting a dose that they just get drunk and end up at the movies.”

“I found some prophylactics in Bruner’s drawer.”

“Did you?” Mills looked away. “I don’t know what that means.”

“It usually means he was sexually active.”

“One way or the other.”

“Yes, one way or the other.”

“Christ,” Mills said, “I don’t know. Maybe he just kept them around, you know, the way some guys keep them in their wallets.”

“Maybe. But we have to assume they were used sometimes.”

“Look, I know what you’re after, but I can’t help you. I don’t know anything about his sex life. Christ, I can’t even
imagine
it. He never said a word. I keep trying to think of something he might have said or some look—I mean, we worked in the same office, for God’s sake. All this time. How could you not notice something? I mean, what do you look for, anyway? He was here almost a year and I had no idea. Never. I still can’t believe it.”

“Does it bother you?”

“Of course it bothers me. Wouldn’t it bother you? I mean, I don’t care if he didn’t like women. That’s his business. He could fuck goats for all I care.”

“Then why does it bother you?”

Mills paused and looked at him. “I guess because it means he was another person all along. I never knew it. I mean, what’s the matter with me? Hell of a thing not to know if you’re in security, don’t you think?”

He felt the glow of the drinks as they walked toward Theater-2. His body was still tired but his mind was fresh now, eager to take things in. Everything was sharper in the cold air, bright in the glare of the mounted floodlights around the Tech Area. The whole place seemed not quite real. With its dusty, unnamed streets, its wire fences and plain clapboard buildings, it became a frontier town, but backlit, insubstantial. The strangeness of the mesa delighted him. After months in Washington, with its weighty masonry and stuffy rooms and routine, everything here was raw and new and interesting. There were still ditches in the street to catch the runoff. Even at this late hour, lights burned in the laboratory buildings and MPs walked on patrol. The night air smelled of diesel and pine.

They heard the music even before they got to the building, sawing fiddles of a Western band pouring through the open doors like the soundtrack for a movie saloon. The big room was as smoky and raucous as Connolly expected, but the cowboys were only servicemen in uniforms and bushy-haired civilians dressed up for a night on the town who had, inexplicably, wound up in a barn instead. It was one of the oddest things he had ever seen. At one end of the room, on a raised stage, a make-shift band of soldiers, country boys all, played loud accompaniment to a caller in blue jeans and a bandanna who clapped out the beat as he sang instructions to the dancers. Stamping feet echoed off the polished hardwood floor of the basketball court. There were tables of food and punch bowls and bottles along one wall and folding chairs scattered everywhere but on the dance floor itself. People talked over the music and laughed at their unfamiliarity with the steps. They all seemed to be at the wrong party, moving awkwardly but gamely through their paces, stocky middle-aged men in ties determined to be good sports and young pale men whose jeans looked as stiff and uncomfortable as a second language. Here and there someone executed steps with confident precision, but off-rhythm, as if he had mastered the dance as a matter of scientific principle. What should have been fluid was jerky and tentative, but no one gave up, and the more complicated the maneuver, the more inevitable the missteps and the better they liked them. The fun, for these engineers of perfect measurements, was not caring. Physics had come to a hoedown and seemed to be having a great time. The room hummed with high spirits.

“Quite a party,” Connolly said, smiling.

“Wait till they really start drinking,” Mills said.

He led Connolly toward the drinks table, where a ruddy-faced man whose hair stuck out on the sides like flaps was furiously attacking a block of ice in a zinc wash-tub. Chips flew out on the table as he drove the pick up and down.

“Careful, professor,” Mills said.

“Gott im Himmel,”
the man said. “You would think in such a place someone would invent a
machine
for this. Here,” he said, handing Mills a glass with ice. “On the rocks, yes?”

“Always. Meet Mike Connolly. Hans Weber.”

“Hello, Mr. Connolly. You’re new? You must be in Kisty’s group. There’s someone new every day. We can’t get one more person, not one, and for Kistiakowsky they never stop coming.”

“No, I work with Lieutenant Mills in the security office.”

“Ah,” he said, pausing to look at Connolly. “So. You replace poor Karl.”

“Yes.”

He shook his head. “A terrible thing. Terrible. So young. And for what? Some wallet? Some pocket change? How much could such a person have?”

“You knew him well?”

“No, not well. Sometimes he was my bodyguard. That’s right, yes? Bodyguard?”

“We prefer ‘escort,’ ” Mills said, smiling. Then he turned toward Connolly. “Professor Weber is one of the engineers who’s always given protection off-site.”

“Hah, protection,” Weber said good-naturedly. “Snoops. This time it was the protector who needed the protection. What a world we are becoming. So,” he said, changing tack, “you like music, Mr. Connolly?” His intonation made
mister
a literal translation of
Herr
. “Not this screeching of cats, but real music?”

“Very much.”

“You play?” he asked eagerly.

“No.”

“No, that would be too much luck. Our group lost a member last year,” he explained, “and I keep trying to find a new one, but no. People keep coming, but no one plays. But you like to listen? We meet on Thursdays. My wife likes the visitors. You would be most welcome.”

“Thank you. I’d like that very much.”

“Well, we’ll see. How is the saying, don’t count the chicken before the hatching? We are amateurs only. But sometimes it’s good.”

“Oh, there’s Oppie,” Mills said, clearly looking for an excuse to begin pulling Connolly away. “I have to introduce Mike,” he said to Weber. “You know how Oppie likes to greet the newcomers.”

Weber smiled and moved his hand in a churning benediction. “Circulate, circulate.”

Oppenheimer was standing with his back to them, talking animatedly to a colleague, but when he turned to be introduced, he looked at them with his full attention, as if the entire evening had been arranged for this meeting. Connolly had seen photographs, but he was unprepared for the focus of Oppenheimer’s gaze, eyes that took him in so quickly that he was enveloped in an intimacy even before he spoke. Oppenheimer was thin, even frail, so that the hollow face offered no distraction from the eyes. Oddly, Connolly thought of Bruner, but those eyes had simply been intense; these were quick and curious. Behind them was a tiredness so profound that their shine seemed almost feverish. He had a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other, so he had to bow his head in greeting, which he managed with an ironic oriental grace. His voice was low but as quick as his eyes.

“Sorry I couldn’t see you earlier—there was a meeting I couldn’t get out of. I hear you saw the general?”

“Yes.”

“And how did you find G.G.?”

“Colorful.”

Oppenheimer laughed. “Did he mention his bark and his bite?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” Connolly said, surprised.

“Good, then you must have given him a bit of trouble,” he said, drawing on his cigarette. Connolly felt the words come at him like the fast balls of a Ping-Pong match, and he saw that Oppenheimer enjoyed conversation as a form of recreational sport.

“And is it worse? His bite?”

“Oh yes, very much so. The general never lies. I don’t think he knows how, actually. The most honest man I’ve ever met. Not an ounce of guile. How he copes with the Washington maze I don’t know, but he just plunges in, full steam ahead, and before you know it, the thing’s done.”

Oppenheimer, with his almost feline elegance, might have been describing his opposite, and Connolly wondered again about their odd friendship. With Oppenheimer, everything must be charm and coercion and subtle juggling—it couldn’t get done otherwise. Maybe his was the admiration of the master politician for the effective battering ram.

“Maybe they’re so used to looking for tricks that he takes them by surprise.”

Oppenheimer enjoyed the return and smiled. “Maybe so. No doubt you’ve experienced a good deal of that yourself in Washington. How they love intrigue. Poisonous place.”

Connolly laughed. “Well, the air’s better here, but offices are pretty much the same wherever you go.”

Oppenheimer looked up at him, an appreciative glance. “Think you can find mine in the morning? Say, seven-thirty?”

Connolly raised an eyebrow.

“Oh, don’t let this fool you,” Oppenheimer said, raising his glass. “We start early here. Officially at eight, and I’m afraid I’ve got a meeting scheduled first thing, so we’ll have to make it earlier. I do apologize—not very civilized, is it? But Janice will get you a good cup of coffee—the commissary stuff is swill—and besides, it’s really the best part of the day here. Wonderful for riding. Do you ride?”

“No. Just the subways.” The phrase was involuntary, a casual signaling of the distance between his New York and the Riverside Drive where Oppenheimer had grown up, busy with lessons and parties and privilege. But Oppenheimer seemed not to notice.

“That’s a shame. We’ve still got a few horses left from the ranch school, and there’s nothing like it in the mornings. Wonderful trails up the mountains, all the way to the caldera. Well, maybe someone will give you a few lessons—there’s nothing to staying on.”