Los Alamos (4 page)

Mills grinned. “No, we’ve got a nice dormitory room for you.”

Later, walking down the dusty road with piles of sheets and towels, Connolly felt more than ever that he’d gone back in time to school. The dormitory was the familiar dull green army clapboard, but the dayroom inside, with its Ping-Pong table and Remington cowboy prints, had an undergraduate look, and the rooms were the same glorified cubicles you’d find on any state campus. The polished wood floor was bare, reflecting light from the uncurtained windows, but a curtain of sorts had been hung along the frame of the indented closet area. Aside from the single bed, there was a small desk, a reading chair, a short bookcase, and a hotel-standard imitation Sheraton chest of drawers with a Bakelite radio on top. The room was almost aggressively neat, as if the slightest rearrangement of the furniture would put it hopelessly out of kilter.

“Well,” Mills said, dumping the linens on the bed, “welcome to Boys’ Town. It ain’t much and it sure ain’t home. I’m just down the hall, so I should know.”

“I thought he said nobody’d touched the room.”

“Nobody has.”

Connolly opened the top drawer to see neatly folded handkerchiefs and pairs of shorts. “Signs of life.”

“Well, I’ll let you get on with it,” Mills said. “Dinner’s in the commissary—that’s just beyond P Building, the big one with the bridge. You won’t have any trouble finding it—just follow the smell of grease. Motor pool’s on the other side, so don’t get confused. Workday begins at oh eight hundred, but that’s up to you, I guess.”

Connolly continued to go through the drawer, carefully moving pieces of clothing as if reluctant to disturb the dead. “What do we do with this stuff?” he asked.

“Beats me. No next of kin, if that’s what you mean. I thought you’d want to go through it before we pack it up. I’ll get you a box tomorrow. I suppose we have to hold it. You know, as evidence.”

It was a question, but Connolly was preoccupied.

“I suppose. What happened to the next of kin?”

“Bruner was a German Jew. His parents are still there—or not—as far as we know. We have to assume not. No other relatives in his file.”

“Speaking of which, I’m going to need—”

But Mills was already pulling a manila folder from under his arm. “Bedtime reading,” he said, handing it over.

Connolly looked at him and smiled. “Why do I get the feeling you’re one step ahead of me?”

“Don’t worry, you’ll catch up. That’s all there is.”

Connolly glanced at the file. “Did you know him?”

“He worked in the section and he lived down the hall, so yes. But no.”

“Did you like him?”

Mills hesitated. “That’s some professional question. He was all right.”

“That’s some answer.”

“He was a hard guy to like.”

“How so?”

“He had an edge. He’d been through a lot and it showed. He couldn’t relax. I suppose he was always waiting for the knock on the door. A lot of the Germans are like that. They can’t feel safe, not after everything. You can’t blame them, but it doesn’t make them the life of the party, either.”

“What happened to him there? Specifically.”

“The Nazis thought he was a Communist and locked him up. He had a rough time.”

“Was he?”

“Not according to him. He was a student who attended a few meetings. It’s all in there,” he said, pointing to the folder. “In the security report. Even the Nazis couldn’t make it stick, so they finally let him out. This was years ago, when they were trying to deport the Jews instead of keeping them in, so they sent him to Russia.”

“They took him in?”

“Uh-huh. And then arrested him as a German spy. They were even worse than the Nazis. They pulled his teeth out, one day at a time. That’s why he had the plate.”

“Jesus.” Connolly imagined the wait every morning, the clang of the bolt in the door, the pliers and the screams and the blood. The spare, clean room suddenly seemed different, as if Bruner had tried to live as unobtrusively as possible, wanting to be passed over, out of pain.

“Yeah, I know. When they ran out of teeth they started messing up his hands, until I guess they finally decided he didn’t know anything. Just one of their little mistakes. So they got rid of him too. The rest is in there. It’s your standard refugee itinerary, with the usual red tape and crooks and helping hands until one day he’s drinking milkshakes in God’s country. And now this. Some life. You have to feel sorry for the bastard.”

“But you didn’t like him.”

“You trying to make me feel guilty? No, I didn’t like him. Maybe it wasn’t his fault, but deep down he had no use for anybody. He was the kind of guy who was always looking for some angle.”

“But good at his job? Loyal American and all that?”

Mills grinned. “Yeah, all that. He liked it here all right, but more because I think he hated everywhere else. Maybe it was too late for him to make friends. He wasn’t the kind of guy who just came by your room to have a smoke and shoot the breeze. Come to think of it, I think this is the first time I’ve ever been in this room. He hung out in the dayroom—he wasn’t a hermit or anything—but you never felt he was really enjoying it.”

“No close friends?”

“He may have. None that I knew about.”

“How about his social life?”

“By which you mean?”

“What you think I mean.”

“I don’t know,” Mills said slowly. “I always thought there might be somebody, but he never said anything. It was none of my business. It never occurred to me that it might be a man.” He looked up at Connolly. “I know what the police think, but there was none of that here. Ever.”

“Are you trying to tell me it’s safe to use the showers?” Mills let it pass.

“All right. What made you think he was seeing a woman? Or anyone?”

“His car. He loved his car. He was always trying to cadge extra coupons, and he used to love to show it off. You know, offer to take people into Santa Fe, things like that. And then more and more he was off by himself, so I figured he had a girlfriend somewhere.”

“How did he rate a car? I thought they were—”

“Oh, it was his car. He got it in ’forty-two, when you could still get them. A Buick. And the way he took care of it, it was probably as good as the day he drove it off the lot.”

Connolly looked around the room, imagining the furniture as immaculate pieces of engine. “I should probably take a look. Where is it now?”

“No idea. He took it down the Hill Saturday and neither of them came back.”

Connolly thought for a minute. “And now we only know where one of them is. Hard to lose a car, though. It’s bound to turn up someplace. I don’t suppose you know the local black-market heavyweights?”

“Black market? Never heard of it. That’s one thing we leave to the police.”

“The only thing, from the sound of it. All right, I’ll check it out tomorrow. I suppose it’s registered to a code number like all the cars here?”

Mills nodded.

“You guys like to make things easy.”

“Haven’t you heard? We’re the best-kept secret of the war. You might even say we don’t exist.”

“I know. I get paid to help keep it that way.”

“So what do you do, anyway?” Mills said. He caught Connolly’s look. “If I’m allowed to ask.”

“Office of War Information liaison to Army Intelligence. I’m a rewrite man.”

“What do you rewrite?”

“Dispatches. Speeches. News. Whatever the army thinks we should know. For a while there we didn’t have any American casualties—only the Germans got shot—but they’ve been better lately. Even they couldn’t keep it up indefinitely.”

“You mean you write propaganda?” Mills said, intrigued. “I’ve never met anyone who did that.”

Connolly smiled. “No. Not propaganda. That’s big lies, fake stories—the stuff Goebbels used to do. We don’t make anything up. You couldn’t, these days. We just look at it right, make people feel better about things. So they don’t get discouraged. We don’t have heavy casualties, we meet fierce resistance. A German advance is a last-ditch counterattack. No body parts, dismemberment, guts hanging out, just clean bullets. French villages are glad to see us—I think they must be, too. Our boys do not get the syph—or give it, for that matter. We don’t mean to bomb anybody by accident, so we never do. The army isn’t up to anything in New Mexico. There is no Manhattan Project.”

Mills stared at him, surprised by the casual cynicism of the speech.

“Just a few rewrites,” Connolly said. “For our own good.”

“How do you feel,” Mills said curiously, “about doing that?”

“How would you?”

Mills looked away, suddenly embarrassed.

“So in a way it feels good to be back on the crime beat again,” Connolly said lightly. “Except I’m not really here.”

Mills picked up his mood. “Town’s full of people this week who aren’t really here. If you want to do some ghost spotting, though, you might check out the party tonight. I assume you’re on a face-recognition basis with the world’s leading physicists. Otherwise it’ll be lost on you.”

“Only if they look like Paul Muni.”

“Now there, you’ve gone and done it. You’re supposed to use his code name. Anyway, eight o’clock if you’re interested. And all things considered, you should be.”

“What’s the occasion?”

“They don’t need a special occasion to have a party. It’s just one long bacchanal up here on the mesa. Of course, if they are celebrating something, we don’t allow them to say so.”

Connolly grinned. “Okay. Maybe I’ll see you there later. An ordinary party might be nice.”

“Well, ordinary for here.”

Afterward he lay on Bruner’s bed, too tired to change it, his mind drifting from the file to the expressionless room around him. Some rooms were so inhabited with personality that their occupants refused to leave; you could feel their presence like a kind of haunting. But this wasn’t one of them. Bruner had never been here. But of course he had been—nobody left without a trace. Connolly’s eyes moved slowly around the room. Perhaps the neatness itself was a clue, a life all tucked in, put away, leaving nothing behind to give it away.

His things had been unremarkable. A crossword puzzle book—to perfect his English or just to pass the time?—and a German-English dictionary on the desk. No mail. A photograph in the drawer of a couple dressed in the dated clothes of twenty years ago, presumably his parents. A random collection of reading books—
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, an illustrated book of Southwest Indian life, Armed Forces paperback westerns, an anthology of war correspondent dispatches. Connolly leafed through the latter, suddenly back at OWI, with burly prima donnas throwing tantrums over troop transport passes and scheming to go on bombing raids so their bylines would end up in collections just like this. There would never be a bigger story.

Suits, a few pairs of socks, and a tie rack in the closet. Connolly took out the empty suitcase to fill it with the folded, ordinary clothes in the drawers. A Dopp Kit with the usual brushes and razors, a box of prophylactics, and special denture powder. A project account book with orderly rows of regular deposits. Only when he took out the sweaters to pack them did he find anything interesting—a few pieces of Indian jewelry, silver and turquoise, hidden in one of the folded sleeves.

Now, on the bed, he held them up to the light, playing with them. A belt buckle inlaid with turquoise, a pendant (no chain), links for one of those necklaces Spanish cowboys wore around the crowns of their hats. Why jewelry? Bruner’s clothes were conservative—hard to imagine him drawn to anything so flashy. A present? The same night he used the prophylactics? Anything was possible. Maybe he simply liked the stuff. The meager bookcase suggested some interest in Indians. Perhaps the turquoise was no more than a hobby collection, like FDR’s stamps—Bruner’s unexpected passion. Connolly imagined him taking the pieces out of the sweater at night to look at them, their glow of silver and blue-green lighting up the drab room like Silas Marner’s gold. And then again, maybe not. He put them down on the bed and picked up the file instead.

What no one had mentioned was that Bruner was good-looking. Not conventionally pleasant, but striking, his high cheekbones and bush of dark hair arranged in an original angular way that drew attention to his eyes. Even in the file photo they had a frank, direct stare that still seemed alive. There was no humor in them, but a kind of hard vitality that put the rest of his face in shadow. Nothing else, not the stubble of afternoon beard covering the chin, not the hollow cheeks or surprisingly full lips, registered. What seemed at first the pale Jewish face of a hundred other photographs was now rearranged, as if the sensitivity had been stamped out to leave something hard, more determined. Connolly wondered if the extraction of the teeth had literally changed the shape of the face or simply the man who looked through it.

How could it be otherwise? The pain must have been crippling, all the worse for being repeated without end. Had Bruner counted the teeth left, wondering as his raw mouth puffed up with pain whether he could stand another day, ten? Or had the Nazis months before already beaten his face to another form? Connolly looked at the nose in the picture for the sideways slant of a break, but it was straight, and again he came back to the eyes. They were so bright that for a split second he thought he could reach through to the man, but the more he looked, the less they seemed to say. They stared without any comment at all, as if simply being alive were enough.

Connolly put the file down and covered his tired eyes with his sleeve. In the end, the pictures were always the same. File after file had crossed his desk, stories from Europe, not just the battle dispatches and the statistical pieces but the personal stories, each one terrible, each one of suffering almost unimaginable, until you were lost in the scale of it all. We would never recover from this, unless we simply stopped listening. Europe seemed to him now like a vast funhouse, dark and grotesque and claustrophobic. You were jerked along from one startling exhibit of horror to the next, rocking in alarm, squirming. Skeletons dangled, monsters leaped out, horrible mechanical screams tore the air, and you would never get out.