“He’s a mystery to me.”
Eisler moved toward the door. “Perhaps that’s because you do dissemble, Mr. Connolly. Good night.”
Connolly watched him go, his tired shoulders sloping as he went down the corridor. When he looked back at the blackboard, he saw nothing more than crude grade-school sketches, a child’s problem. No car was driving down the road, nervous about a body. No questions. He stared at it for a few minutes, then took up the black eraser and wiped the chalk away. Tomorrow there would be grown-up numbers there.
Outside, he put on his jacket against the night chill. The moon outlined the buildings with faint white lines. He felt that he was walking in one of his blackboard maps. This road went south from the Tech Area. The box canyon was in the far distance to his right. The longer he walked, the more the map filled in, until he could see the whole plateau, fingers stretching away from the Jemez toward Santa Fe. He kept walking, awake with coffee and the bright night sky. But it had been cloudy that night, perhaps already raining when the car pulled into the canyon. Dark. And suddenly he thought of a question and started walking faster, glancing at his watch as he headed away from the building toward the far west gate.
His luck held. The same soldier was on night duty, sitting inside the lighted post with a Thermos and a comic book. He looked up, surprised, when Connolly said hello.
“Mighty late,” he said, a question in his voice.
“I was just out taking a walk. It’s a nice night for it.”
“I guess,” he said, all Piedmont twang and suspicion.
“I have a question for you. You have any more of that coffee?”
“Well, sure. Nice to have some company. What’s on your mind?” He poured some coffee into the lid cup and handed it to Connolly.
“At night, when they close the entrance, what happens exactly?”
“Well, they close it. I don’t know what you mean.”
“They lower the crossing barrier to cars, right? But someone’s still here?”
He nodded. “Me, usually. I’ve been pulling night shift regular.”
“But if a car came by accident, you’d let him in?”
“They don’t. There’s two barriers. Road’s closed down at the turnoff, so a car don’t come up this far.”
“But you’re here anyway.”
The soldier smiled, a sly grin. “Well, that’s to keep people from going out. Ain’t nobody coming in that late.”
“But if they were-I mean, someone could walk in, couldn’t he?”
“Walk?” The vowel spread into syllables.
“Just for the sake of argument. Someone could walk in, right? There’s nothing to stop him.”
“Well, there’s me. I’d stop him.”
“If you heard him.”
The soldier looked at him guardedly, as if he were somehow in trouble and didn’t know why. “I’d hear him.”
“You didn’t hear me. Right now, while we’ve been talking here, someone could have slipped by outside, couldn’t he? Look, I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m just trying to get a picture of how it works.”
“It works fine,” the soldier said defiantly, the vowel stretched again. Connolly stepped out of the box, sipping the coffee as he looked around, the soldier following him. “Ain’t nobody going to walk, you know,” he said, still worried. “Where they going to be walking from? Who’s going to walk?”
“I don’t know,” Connolly said, looking at the road, the wide space at the pole, the dark on the side. “Nobody, I guess. I was just wondering.” It would have been easy, no more difficult than a stroll. “You patrol out here or just stay in the post?”
“I got my rounds. If somebody’s complaining, they don’t know jackshit. I’m up and down here all night, even if it is cold.” But it had been raining, a comforting drum on the post roof. “What’s all this about, anyway? You got some kind of problem?”
“No. They’re just looking over all the security points.”
“What for?” he said, still suspicious.
“It’s the army. They don’t need a reason.”
The soldier grinned. “Yeah, I guess.”
Connolly looked up and down the dark road again. One car, not two. Hide it and walk in. A long walk, but safe enough. Worth the chance. And then home.
“How long you been on the Hill?” he asked casually.
“ ’Bout a year, I guess. I ain’t never had no trouble before.”
“You haven’t got any now. I was just curious. Like it?”
The soldier shrugged. “Ain’t nothin’ to do. Beats combat, though, I guess. You read about them Jap dive-bombers? They’re just plain crazy, those people.”
Connolly nodded. “Year’s a long time. You must know everybody up here.”
“I just look at the passes. We don’t get invited to no parties. That’s only for the longhairs.”
“You know Karl Bruner?”
The soldier looked at him, his eyes squinting again in suspicion. “That’s the guy who got himself killed.”
There it was again-Karl’s fault. “Well, somebody killed him. Know him?”
“I knew who he was. I never talked to him or nothing. I heard they got the guy,” he said, a question.
“Yeah, they did. He use this gate much?”
“Off and on.”
“So you’d see him then.”
The soldier shrugged again. “Well, sure, if I was on duty.”
“They told me he liked to drive around.”
“Yeah, in that Buick of his.” So he noticed.
“Did he ever have anyone with him?”
The soldier looked at him, puzzled, as if he hadn’t understood the question.
“Did he?” Connolly asked, pressing.
“Sometimes. You’re asking an awful lot of questions,” he said, cautious again.
“Just one. Who used to go with him?”
The soldier looked away. “Is this some kind of investigation or something? What do you want to know for?”
Connolly stared at him.
“I mean, he’s dead. I don’t want to go making trouble for nobody. That was his business. Now it’s just hers, I guess.”
“Hers?”
“Well, sure. I figured they was just-scootin’ off, you know? None of my business.”
“You’d better make it your business. I mean it. You know who she was? What she looked like? I need to know this.”
The soldier looked flustered. “Well, hell, I thought you did know. I didn’t mean to start nothing.”
“How would I know?”
“Well, I thought she was a friend of yours too.”
Connolly stood still. When he finally spoke, his voice had the low steadiness of a threat. “Are you trying to tell me it was Mrs. Pawlowski?”
The soldier retreated a step. “Well, God Almighty, you kept askin’. Now don’t go and blame me.”
“How many times?” Connolly said, his voice still unnaturally steady.
“A few.”
“Where were they going?”
“Where?” And now his face, no longer frightened, filled with a sly grin, as if the question were irrelevant. “I guess you’ll have to ask her.”
11
He didn’t see her until the end of the week. He sat listlessly at his desk or lying on Karl’s bed, absorbed in his own mystery. The days were hot and dry, a steady wind scratching at everyone’s nerves. The talk was of drought and an outbreak of chicken pox in the school and the frequent caravans to Trinity. The scientists seemed never to appear, locked full-time in the labs. There were no parties. A fight broke out in one of the enlisted men’s barracks, something to do with an insult taken, but really about the new tension of the work and the constant dry wind that made everything feel as suspended as dust.
Connolly didn’t notice any of it. Something had detonated in him, like one of Kisty’s tests, and he sat shuffling through the pieces, repeating her conversations in his head, wondering what had been meant, what she wanted him to believe. Mills avoided him, sensing the black mood that was smothering him, and when Connolly noticed him at all, it was only as a figure of a more cheerful betrayal. He read through Emma’s file, and Daniel’s, as if they were new characters on the Hill, people he’d never met. Why had she married him? He’d never asked. How many others? The mood festered in him, silently, until the surprise and hurt became pure anger, and when that happened he stopped thinking about anything else.