“I don’t care,” she said.
Mills was waiting for him when he got home, stretched out on Karl’s narrow bed with his hands behind his head, staring at nothing.
“Make yourself at home,” Connolly said, surprised to see him.
“Thanks. You sure haven’t done much to it, have you?” he said, getting up and looking around the spare room. “It’s like old Karl never left.”
“I wasn’t planning on a long stay.”
“None of us do.”
“Something on your mind, or is this just a social call?”
“Take a look,” Mills said, taking a sheet of paper out of his jacket. “I went over to the office before. The movie stank-Lee Tracy and Nancy Kelly. Jap spies and the Panama Canal. I mean, a little late for the canal, don’t you think? You wonder who thinks them up.”
Connolly glanced at him, cutting him short.
“So I went back to the office to go through a few more files, and this caught my eye. Probably nothing, but you said you wanted to see anything interesting.”
Connolly was looking at the figures. “Two withdrawals of five hundred dollars. That’s a lot of money. Who is it?”
“That’s the funny part. Oppenheimer.” Connolly glanced at the paper again, then handed it back. “Better keep looking.”
“That’s what I thought you’d say.”
“Meaning?”
“Nothing. I just think you’re under the spell. I know all the signs.”
“What spell?”
“Our great leader. Those blue eyes. That lightning mind. I’ve seen it all before.”
“Mills, have you been drinking?”
“I have, as a matter of fact. But not that much. Hell, I don’t think it’s him either-I don’t think it’s any of them. I was just hoping we’d stop all this bank business. But out of curiosity, are you going to ask him about it?”
“Yes.”
“He’ll love that. You’ve got guts, I’ll say that for you. Questioning Caesar’s wife.”
“Except he’s Caesar.”
“That’s something worth thinking about,” Mills said.
It did snow over the weekend, and the ground was covered with the dry, powdery snow of the high desert when they met for the memorial service on Sunday. Despite the cold, the April sun was bright, reflecting off the snow, filling the morning with an unnatural glamour. The flag in front of Fuller Lodge was at half mast, and Oppenheimer spoke in the theater, his voice no longer filled with the hastily assembled emotion of Thursday but with a more public eloquence. All of Los Alamos, it seemed, had turned out for this final salute, and Connolly felt himself looking at them again as if they were in a lineup. It was absurd. All these bright, well-meaning faces-he doubted there was even a traffic violation among them. He looked at the men, in formal overcoats and shiny shoes, dressed for a winter Sunday’s outing in Vienna. Some of the women wore hats. There were children, looking solemn. Oppenheimer quoted from the Bhagavad Gita: “Man is a creature whose substance is faith. What his faith is, he is.” Roosevelt’s faith, the faith they all shared, was a belief in a better world. His voice was simple and unaffected. The room was hushed.
Could Oppenheimer really be involved? Wouldn’t Caesar sacrifice anything to win? But what could make Karl so important to him? The answer was, he wasn’t. Perhaps Mills was right-once you started, you tainted everything with suspicion until no one was truly innocent. There was always something, even something that didn’t matter, that was only about itself. They were chasing shadows.
While Oppenheimer spoke, Connolly’s eyes drifted elsewhere. She was sitting on the aisle three rows away, her head tilted toward the stage in attention. Her hair was down, and it caught the sheen of the snow glare through the windows. Her shoulders were straight, and he imagined holding them, warm to the touch, and feeling them go slack when they moved their bodies together. Her skin would be cream. Even while he listened to the meaning of leadership, the search for a better world, he saw the messed bed, her body barely covered by a tangled sheet, her skin slick with perspiration, all that fierceness dissolving in his hands, wet for him. And then, as if she had read his thoughts, she turned her head and looked at him, a direct glance, an intimacy that said they were already lovers. It was the last thing he had expected to happen, and for one quick instant he wanted to get away before it was too late, just run back to Washington, leaving them to stew in their own unsolvable murder and impossible moral questions and affairs from which-of course she was right-no good could come. But he felt the pulse of his erection and he knew he would never leave now. The murder would solve itself somehow and the moral questions would drift to that limbo where they always went and he would have her. Again and again. It was as clear and simple as that.
When they all stood to leave, he realized with embarrassment that he was still hard, and folded his coat in front of him. People filed out quietly. When she passed by him, her husband at her side, they exchanged a glance. In all this somber crowd, did anyone else see that her eyes were shining? But no one noticed at all, and he saw that the secret itself was part of the excitement for her.
Outside they stood in small groups, like people after church, and to avoid looking at her again, Connolly found himself talking to Pawlowski instead.
“I never got a chance to tell you how much I enjoyed the music,” he said. “Are you playing again this week?”
“Not me, I’m afraid,” Pawlowski said politely.
“But you were very good.”
“No, it’s not that,” Emma said, cutting in. “Daniel won’t be here. He has to go off-site.”
Connolly felt a prick of excitement, as if she had touched him, declared herself.
“Emma, you’re not supposed to—”
“Oh, darling, I’m sorry. But he is security. Surely it’s all right?” she said to Connolly easily. And while her husband said something polite about the other players doing well without him, Connolly looked at her for the first time. Do you really want this? her glance said. This is what it will mean. The code words. Sex would be the beginning. While he imagined those afternoons, she had already seen what would come, all the complications, furtive and tricky and maybe even doomed, like the movie Japanese risking everything for worthless plans of the Panama Canal. Yes, I want it, he thought.
7
But it wasn’t Emma he got to drive that week, it was Oppenheimer.
“Any idea why he requested me?” he asked, annoyed at this complication.
Mills shrugged. “Maybe he likes your conversation. Maybe he doesn’t like mine. Anyway, you’ll have to wear this,” he said, holding out a gun.
Connolly took it hesitantly. He had handled guns before, always with the sensation that they were about to go off. “Christ, am I actually expected to use this?”
“I thought you were a tough-guy reporter.”
“That’s Winchell. I just go to press conferences and lock my door at night.”
“You know how to use it, don’t you? I mean, you don’t need a lesson or anything.”
“I’ll manage.”
“Just remember about the safety. Of course, you’re supposed to catch the other guy’s bullet first, so what the hell.”
“Catch how?”
“By dying, mostly. Put your body in front of Oppie and do your bit for the war effort.”
“Can’t we send someone else?”
“You have something better to do?”
Connolly looked at him, wondering for a minute whether Mills suspected anything. Did it show, this heat? Like some priapic blush? But Mills was only being sarcastic. “Just finish the accounts, okay? You might give Holliday a buzz. He’ll let things slide if you don’t goose him now and then. Where am I going, by the way?”
“South. To the test site.”
“I didn’t know there was one.”
“They built it in December. Must be getting ready to do something, ‘cause there’s been quite a little traffic back and forth lately. Try to avoid lunch if you can.”
“Why?”