The Heat of the Sun (30 page)

‘Will you lock the door for me, Sharpless?’ He touched his bandaged temples. ‘Don’t want anyone bursting in, do we?’

Why I obeyed him, I could not be sure. For too long the Pinkertons had held me in their power. But their power was fading, almost gone. The lock shut with a satisfying thud, and I recalled the
prison cells of these last days: Trouble’s, then mine. Then this, the greatest cell of all.

‘That dagger,’ I said, ‘how did you get it?’

‘My wife brought it back from California. They confiscated it from my son when he was arrested. Did you know there are words on the blade in Japanese? Something about dying with
honour.’

‘Yes, when you can no longer live with honour,’ I said.

The senator withdrew the blade, held it up before his face as if he could see it, then sheathed it again.

‘Did I ever tell you I was happiest in Japan?’ he said. ‘Not the sort of thing I say to the voters, of course. I suppose you think I didn’t love that girl. No: I treated
love lightly, but when I was with her in that house on Higashi Hill, I knew a contentment I’d never know again. She didn’t understand I was just a naval lieutenant. She thought
I’d bring her back to America with me, to live in my castle... strange, to think I spent the rest of my life becoming the great man she thought I already was! And she wasn’t here to see
it. The man who could have been president. Can’t you see us in the White House? President Pinkerton and his Jap First Lady! Would there have been a war if that had happened?’ His words
rose, absurdly now, to their old oratorical pitch. In every great statesman there is something of the preacher. But this was a sermon no one wanted to hear.

He went on: ‘What’s the good of thinking of worlds that never were? Down the river of life we toss and tumble, and if we lodge for just a short time – a year, a month, a minute
– on an island called Contentment, we should count ourselves lucky. Do you think I’m a lucky man, Sharpless? Oh, the luckiest! Because once, between sailings of the
Abraham
Lincoln
, I lived in Nagasaki in a house on Higashi Hill.’

He faltered, slumping forward over his desk. I went to him; I embraced him, and his shoulders shook. I smoothed his head. Over the years the sleek grooves of his hair had grown sparser; he was
almost entirely bald. Fat, in a thick roll like meat loaf, bulged from the back of his neck.

‘It’s over for us,’ I said. ‘For you and me, there’s nothing left. But are we to say the world is ruined, because our lives are ruined? You’ll never go back
to Nagasaki. But your son’s there, and has a chance of something neither of us will have again. Call Truman. Which one of these telephones is the hotline? Tell me: I’ll get him for you.
Talk like a great man one more time. Say there’ll be no more bombings. The telephone, Senator – the telephone.’

Then came another voice: ‘You’re wasting your time.’

Deep in shadow, far from the desk, a black high-backed swivel chair had been turned away from the room. Slowly it swung around and the voice went on, bleakly wry: ‘You’ve been
entertaining me, Mr Sharpless. A little diversion to ease a lonely vigil! But I fear you’re becoming boring.’

Kate Pinkerton stood. Long strands of hair hung dishevelled over her cheeks, and the jewel had vanished from the open neck of her blouse. She wore no jacket. She wore no shoes. The sky had grown
red, and her face as she moved towards us was illumined weirdly in spectral light. Something cracked in my heart. The world had been ruined after all.

I stepped away from her husband. ‘Is it so bad, what I’ve said?’

‘Oh, Mr Sharpless! You destroy my life, then say to me,
Is it so bad?
Those Orientals you’re fond of have the right idea, haven’t they? Face ruin, die, but never mind,
it’s only one life and you’ll have another. The wheel turns and one day, if your number comes up, you reach Nirvana. I dare say being suddenly obliterated is of little moment to the
Oriental. I’d guess we’ve done the good burghers of Hiroshima a favour – wouldn’t you suppose, my dear? After all, we’ve sped them on their way.’

She stood close to me, too close. I smelled her sweat. Appalled, I looked into her sagging face.

‘It was your idea,’ I said to her. ‘The bombing.’

My words, I thought at once, were as mad as her own, but terrible certainty shook me as if the ground had rocked. Lightly, she touched my cheek. She might have been placating a child. I almost
sobbed. ‘Really, Mr Sharpless!’ she said. ‘Does anyone listen to a weak woman?’

‘When she controls her weak husband? Maybe,’ I said.

She shook her head. ‘When have I ever controlled that big mewling baby? Don’t think I wouldn’t have – I’m a Manville, aren’t I? I could have been a senator
like
that
.’ She snapped her fingers. ‘And why just a senator? I could have been president. But no, my duty was to preside over parties for campaign donors; my duty, to smile at
VIP receptions and dance in the arms of fat foreign diplomats who reeked of garlic, and to assure them what fine fellows they were. Control him! Do you think he gave me a moment’s thought? I
covered up his every mistake, I supported his every decision, I worked for him like a slave, and he rewarded me by carousing with his whores. Do you think I let him know he was killing me? Think of
it: everything I’d worked for, everything I’d lived for, a lifetime of duty and sacrifice – all of it, to be ruined by a half-caste bastard, son of a slant-eyed whore! Yes, I told
my husband what to say to Truman: I told him what to say about the first attack and I’ve written his memo about the second one too. We’ll save ourselves, I said. We’ll root out
the cancer that’s gnawed at us all these years. But he had to spoil it. He had to be weak, weak to the last.’

Desperately, I said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Oh? I thought you’d met our friend Mr Mendoza. The sniper.’

The senator stood. ‘Ben, Ben!’ He clutched the back of his big leathery chair. ‘That son of mine’s a foolish boy. Always has been, always will be. He thought he was so
clever! Of course we knew what he was up to at Los Alamos. I only wanted to warn him off, then cover the traces. Naturally, my wife wanted him punished. How she longed to stand over him in his
cell, gloating at his disgrace!’

I said hotly, ‘You know that isn’t true.’

‘Who are you to tell me what’s true? She’s my wife. He’s my son. She never loved him. Everything that was real about the boy, everything that wasn’t just an act,
was a source of shame to her.’

‘So you sent him back to Nagasaki.’ Kate Pinkerton’s voice choked. Horrified, I knew she was broken now: something in her had smashed, and would never be repaired.
‘Nagasaki!’ she repeated, expelling a sharp breath, as if the name contained all the sorrow of the world.

Fearfully, I would have asked her what she meant, but a telephone rang – the white – and she answered it, switching suddenly into calm, official tones; I thought she would pass the
receiver to her husband, but she made no move to do so and he seemed not to expect it. He only stumbled towards the windows. I went to him. The evening was purple, with clouds fine as mist hanging
in tattered scrims.

The senator spoke as if he could see the view, even pointing with the dagger. ‘Now, take,’ he said, ‘the Library of Congress,’ or ‘Consider Capitol Hill,’ or
‘See that statue, Sharpless? Can you tell me who that is?’ But more important than the sights was what they symbolized. Respectfully, I listened as he spoke of Life, Liberty, and the
Pursuit of Happiness as if he really believed in them, but all the time I strained to hear Kate Pinkerton at the telephone.

Yes, they must come, she said. Yes, he was here.

Now I understood: I was too late. Until the last, the machine would grind on; Senator Pinkerton would command and be obeyed; there would be important calls; the guard at the door would imagine
himself charged with a sacred trust; but the trust, like the senator’s, was no more than a shell. The senator was a traitor, and the time had come to take him. We had all been traitors.

Kate Pinkerton replaced the receiver.

‘Bitch. You bitch,’ I said, but shame filled me as soon as I spat the words. All she did was look at me with implacable eyes. What else was there to be done? Nothing. We heard a
siren, far away.

‘They’re coming, aren’t they?’ said the senator. He was staggering towards his wife.

‘It’s over, Ben. You’ve destroyed us, and for nothing.’

‘Not nothing. There’s my son, in Nagasaki.’

She shivered, as if feverish, and murmured: ‘How I longed to see that place wiped from the earth – longed for it, all these years! Now,
a rain of ruin from the air, the like of
which has never
—’

The senator clung to his wife; the dagger, still in his hand, glimmered against her crumpled blouse. For a moment she held back, then sank into his arms as if she were returning home at last,
after a lifetime away. She moaned as soft words tumbled from his lips. ‘Kate,’ I heard him say, ‘it’s dark. Why is it so dark? You said you’d protect me from the
dark.’ On he babbled, a frightened child, until she calmed him with a kiss. I wished I were a thousand miles away. Still the siren sounded. Still the twilight faded: grey, almost black.

The blue telephone rang and I picked it up. ‘Senator Pinkerton’s office.’

A reporter. A leak, he said. Source reliable. No, he couldn’t say from where (I hadn’t asked), but could the senator comment? The senator, I said, had no comment. – None? None,
when halfway around the world, where it’s morning and tomorrow, a B-29 called
Bock’s Car
is on its way home from its mission over Japan? None, when Truman’s curse has come
to pass and the rain of ruin is descending as we speak? They’ve done it, haven’t they? Plutonium bomb! Crack in the clouds! Down, down, through the crack in the clouds...

‘They’ve bombed Nagasaki.’ I tried to replace the receiver but fumbled. It swung from the edge of the desk. ‘Nagasaki.’

Blankly, I heard the siren; I heard the radio; I heard the Pinkertons sob when I repeated my announcement, louder this time; but as the senator pushed his wife away, then struck her, I could do
nothing to intervene. The world lurched and I fell to the floor.

‘Trouble,’ I said like a prayer.

I felt the softness of the carpet beneath me; I fondled at the fibres and inhaled their rich aroma – so many cigars dropping ash, so many boots pressing down the gathered dust of years
– before rolling on to my back and gazing up at the chandelier, ponderous as fate but still unlit, while the senator and Kate Pinkerton, in lurid shadow-play, ended their odyssey at last.

‘You’ve killed my son.’ Horror hung heavy in the senator’s words.

‘Ben, no! He was my son too.’

‘You wanted this. You said so.’

Imploringly, she spread her hands. ‘What does it matter what I wanted, what you wanted? The machine had been set in motion. Had the Japanese beaten us to the atomic bomb, they would have
levelled Los Angeles. They aren’t innocent. They aren’t good. None of this could be helped. Not Hiroshima. Not Nagasaki. And not the world that lies ahead.’

‘You’ve always hated him, and hated me.’

‘Ben, I love you.’ Her hands dropped. ‘
Ben, what are you doing
?’

I wonder still if I could have saved Kate Pinkerton. Time seemed to smash, like a plate on tiles. I might have been back in that bunker at Alamogordo; I would always be in that bunker in
Alamogordo, dazzled by the beauty and terror of the three-person’d God, for all the years that I lived.

Half sobbing, I scrambled to my knees, but agony seared my injured right leg, and all I could do was watch as Kate Pinkerton backed away from her blind, blundering husband; as he ripped the
sheath from the dagger and lunged at her; as she hurled one heavy statute book at him, then another, then crashed into the radio and brushed the bulky controls. The room filled with a deafening
crescendo. It was Tartarin’s great lament, ‘
Il mio sogno dei leoni è finito
’ – my dream of the lions is over. For Kate Pinkerton, it marked the moment when all
she had been, even the remnants of what she had been, fell from her at last.

The dream was over. Everything was over. She tore her hair. Like a crazed insect, she battered this way and that: against the windows, against a wall, against a map of the world, with pins and
paper arrows marking the progress of the Pacific campaign. She rushed back to the telephones, grabbed one, then another, then swept them all from the desk; she doubled over, then gazed up in
despairing rapture at the blind man with the dagger and stepped, ecstatic, into his embrace.

‘I love you, Ben,’ she cried, then slumped down.

The senator stepped away, raising the blood-dripping dagger like an offering to the night. He flung back his throat, as if to cry out to the gods, but the music was rising, bursting and
cascading like the bomb that had blinded him. It filled the air, relentless as fire: that great despairing plea of Tartarin’s that the world should be something other than what it had
become.

There was nothing but the music: if telephones jangled, we would not hear them; if sirens wailed or snapped into silence, we would know nothing of it; if guardsmen’s boots pounded across
the marble hall below and up the stairs, we would remain oblivious – oblivious too, as fists, then shoulders, crashed against the locked doors like battering rams. There was no world outside,
only this classical drama where a blind man, crazed and raving, staggered against a flagpole and made it topple; thudded to his knees, sank to his haunches, hunched his shoulders, then raised his
torso, clutched the dagger in both hands, positioned it below his diaphragm, and thrust it abruptly upwards.

No
, I thought to say, but I never wanted him to stop. The machinery had worked its way to the end; the ticktock motion begun in Nagasaki so many years before had at last achieved its
rest.

When a guardsman splintered through the doors, he cuffed a light switch, disclosing in the dazzle of the chandelier two corpses, one collapsed across the other. Half draped over the
senator’s shoulders was the fallen Stars and Stripes.