He lit a cigarette and wondered whether Bruner had ever come here, felt the new freedom of the desert space. Probably not. Connolly guessed that it would have terrified him. He had lived in too many cells to feel comfortable without walls. And yet he liked to go driving. Why? Where did he go? Maybe, a new patriot, he wanted to see this movie Western landscape come to real life. Connolly tried to imagine him gazing out to the horizon, hand shielding his eyes, but the picture wouldn’t come. His face in the file photo was pale, a stranger to the sun. His life had been formed in the furtive corners of rooms, bargaining for food, tapping on walls-but this was nonsense. There was no way of knowing. He could try the Oppenheimer method and start with a guess, but no connections seemed to follow. If you had been a victim, you could believe in conspiracy. Now what? If you believed in conspiracy, you believed in the value of knowing about it. How else to be safe? The world was organized in a series of invisible networks-in prison, where survival depended on it; in a secret community, where sex flourished more freely the more it was hidden. When everything important is invisible, do you begin to take pleasure simply in discovering it? It wasn’t just keeping your eyes open, that wasn’t enough. It became, finally, a love of knowing for its own sake. An advantage.
So Karl read files. Whose? Yes, he could picture that, Karl sitting under a lamp at night, absorbed in a folder, looking for a date that didn’t match, anything. Or something specific. It’s what isn’t there, he had said. But then why the car? Why take time away from the hunt pretending to be an indifferent tourist, unless this was playing cat and mouse too. Unless you were tracking somebody. Unless you were with somebody. Until curiosity killed the cat. And now Connolly, as always, ran out of connections. There had to be someone else. It’s not possible to live without a trace. Karl, neat as a monk, had left prophylactics in his drawer. There had to be someone. Even, though he still could not believe it, a pickup.
“You got a light?”
After days of modulated European accents, the thick American twang of the voice surprised him. Texas, probably, or Oklahoma. He looked like someone who had played football in high school, broad and muscular, with an unshaven chin that jutted out in jock confidence. He was stripped to the waist, his chest covered in an alkali film, so that the bandanna facemask now pulled down around his neck flapped like the collar to a shirt that wasn’t there. Young jug ears stuck out beneath the fatigue hat. Connolly handed him the lighter.
“You new on the site?” He was one of those people whose most innocent question came out like a challenge, as if he hadn’t learned to mask some fundamental belligerence. Connolly imagined him starting a bar fight, a redneck quick to take offense.
“Just down for the day. Guard duty.”
“No shit. Join the club.” He grinned, easier now that Connolly had explained himself. He flashed a security badge to establish club contact. “Who’d you draw?”
“Oppenheimer.”
He grunted. “You’re lucky. He never stays over. You don’t want to stay here. No fucking way.”
“You been down here long?”
“Twenty-eight days. Twenty-eight fucking days. They moved a bunch of us down last month. Let me tell you, this is about the hardest time there is.”
Connolly looked at him with interest. He thought he’d already talked to everybody in the intelligence unit. No one had mentioned transfers to Trinity. “Yeah, it’s hot.”
“It ain’t the heat. We got heat in East Texas. It’s the Mickey Mouse. They got this tighter than a rat’s ass. Nobody goes out. There ain’t nothing to do but shoot rattlers. The well water’s got all this shit in it so’s you can’t drink it-gypsum and stuff-but you wash in it so everybody gets the runs anyway. You got to stamp on scorpions in the latrine. Said they wanted only the best for Trinity duty, so naturally we all thought it was something special. It is.”
“So what do you guard?”
“Them Gila lizards mostly. There ain’t nothing down here to guard. Worst problem they got is all the antelope tripping over the sensor wires they got running everywhere.”
“That’s why they shoot them?”
“Yeah, that’s the excitement. Just the shooting. Nothing to eat and nothing to fuck. At least they got women on the Hill. Once some of the WACs came down to keep us company, but they don’t put out, never, so what the fuck?”
Connolly put out his cigarette. “Well, it won’t be much longer.”
“According to who?”
Connolly shrugged. “What do they tell you?”
“You kidding me? Brother, they don’t tell us nothing. We’re not supposed to know. They told us when Roosevelt died-that’s it. For all I know, the war’s over.”
“It’s not,” Connolly said.
The kid took off his hat to wipe his forehead, the skin now turned permanently red under the short blond hair. “Well, I got to get going. I was just on my break. Nice talking to you.”
Connolly looked at him to see if he was joking, but the face was earnest.
“Watch out for the centipedes, they sting like hell.”
“I’ll do that. Mind if I ask you a question?”
The kid, about to move away, turned toward him, his eyes suddenly wary. Connolly had seen the look before, the automatic reaction of someone used to the police, the legacy of too many Saturday night brawls that had got out of hand. He waited.
“When you were on the Hill, did you know a guy called Karl Bruner?”
“Karl?” he said, looking puzzled. “Sure. He was G-2. Everybody knew him. Why?”
“He’s dead.”
“Karl?” He was genuinely surprised. So not even gossip had penetrated the news blackout. Or maybe nobody had cared.
“He was killed.”
“No shit. How?”
“He was murdered.”
The kid stared at him. “You kidding me?” he said quietly.
“No. He was found in the river park in Santa Fe, off the Alameda. You hadn’t heard?”
“I told you, we don’t hear nothing down here. Who did it?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out.”
“You’re a cop,” he said, an accusation, as if Connolly should have declared himself earlier.
“No. Army Intelligence. We’re looking into it on our own.”
“I don’t understand. What happened?”
Connolly watched his reaction as he answered. “We don’t know. The police think it might have been a homosexual murder.”
It was a surprise punch. The kid caught his breath with a nervous laugh of disbelief. “That’s fucking crazy.”
“Why?”
“Why? Karl wasn’t any fruit.”
“How do you know?”
He sputtered. “How do I know? He just wasn’t, that’s all. Christ Almighty. Karl?”
“Did you know him well?”
“He was just a guy in the office. He used to give me duty assignments after I came off the mounteds.”
“So you don’t know who his friends were? Whether he was seeing anybody?”
“No.”
“Okay. I just thought you might have noticed something. He talk to you much?”
“Some.”
“What about?”
“Nothing. Stuff. You know.”
“What kind of stuff?”
He hesitated for a minute, and Connolly could see him debating with himself, embarrassed.
“Did he ask about your girlfriends?” Connolly said, steering him.
“Like whether I was getting any? Yeah, he asked that.”
“And you liked to tell him.”
“Go fuck yourself,” he said, angry now.
“No, it’s important. Did you get the sense that he was interested or just making conversation to make you think he was interested?”