"Warm." Joe noticed that the safety on the shotgun was off.
"Going to be a dry summer," Roberto agreed.
"I still have a share in a bean field down in the pueblo. How do you think beans will do?"
"Bad year for rain," Roberto said. "Good year for lightning."
"He's blind," Fuchs whispered.
"What's that got to do with the weather?" Joe asked. Through his glasses Fuchs' pale eyes were fixed on the gun on Joe's belt. Joe reached for cigarettes. "Smoke? I owe you one."
Roberto nodded.
"He's a madman," Fuchs hissed.
"He's a spy," Roberto told Joe.
Joe tapped the last cigarettes from his pack.
"Sorry, only three," he told Fuchs. He lit all three at once and passed two to Anna, she passed one to Roberto's lips.
Roberto inhaled and smiled. "I can tell she's pretty. There's a feeling around pretty women."
"He doesn't sound crazy," Anna told Fuchs.
"It's not funny." Fuchs looked at the muzzle between his legs.
"You're German, too?" Roberto asked Anna. "I like your accent."
"I'd rather lose it," she said.
"Study Billie Holiday. Get her records," Joe told her. He told Fuchs, "A little Fats Waller would do you a world of good. You were spying?"
"He tried," Roberto said.
"I wasn't spying, I just happened to be here."
"Did you apologize?" Joe asked.
Fuchs snorted.
Most of the priests were old men and they would have to spirit away altars, prayer sticks, stones, fetishes– a lot to carry off a cliff. Joe put in some silence for respect before saying, "Well, this is a very ignorant person, Roberto. What do you want to do with him?"
"Shoot him."
"Dear God," Fuchs muttered.
"That's an idea," Joe granted.
"Dear God," Fuchs muttered again.
"Are you religious?" Roberto asked him.
"His father is a minister," Anna answered.
"Mormon?" Roberto asked. "We have a lot of Mormons here."
"Lutheran," Fuchs said.
"That's interesting. Don't you think that's interesting, Roberto?" Joe inquired.
"If he's a missionary, that's worse," Roberto said.
"That's right," Joe conceded.
"I am a scientist," Fuchs pleaded. "I don't believe in God."
"You'll have to admit there is some contradiction in what you say one moment and what you say the next," Joe told Fuchs. "It's too bad that you don't believe in God, because there is another way out, aside from being shot. You could become a member."
"A member?" Fuchs asked.
"That's how a lot of priests join," Joe said. "If they happen to stumble on a ceremony, they have to join. That way they never reveal the secrets."
"Like the Communist Party," Anna said.
"The Party cannot be compared to Indian medicine men howling on a cliff," Fuchs answered.
"Where does the Party howl?" Joe asked.
"It is not relevant."
"Touchy, touchy."
"Why spy on Indians?" Anna asked.
"Why are you siding with these ignorants? Why are you with the Indians? Why are you all against me?" Fuchs demanded. Spittle jumped from him to Roberto. "You stupid, little blind man, you wouldn't dare pull that trigger."
Joe had for some time assumed that Roberto wouldn't pull the trigger, so he was caught flat on his seat when Roberto's finger squeezed the shotgun trigger shut. The spurred hammer rose and snapped, sending a metallic click the length of the empty barrel and into Fuchs. The physicist's face went green and puttyish and his next breath came as a moan.
"Fascinating," Anna said.
Fuchs moaned more deeply, like a cello. Roberto broke the shotgun open. The first barrel was empty, but in the second barrel was the brass eye of an unfired shell. Roberto pulled the shell out, fumbled for Fuchs' shirt and dropped the shell inside it.
"Roberto." Joe shook his head.
"This will make him more religious or more polite, I think," Roberto said.
Joe considered throwing the shotgun down off the shelf, but a new one would cost its owner twelve, thirteen dollars from Wards.
"Got any more shells?" he asked Roberto.
"No."
"They coming back for you?"
"Sure." Roberto was cheerful, as if he were hosting a social event. "You better be going before they get here."
"Yeah."
"It was good meeting you," Roberto told Anna. "I'll see you and Joe again."
"Anything seems to be possible."
"Good." Roberto pointed in Fuchs' general direction. "But don't bring him."
Joe had to carry Fuchs fireman-style off the canyon wall. When they finally got to the floor, Fuchs sped behind the pines, wrenching his belt open while he ran. Anna watched Fuchs disappear.
"This is another planet."
"New Mexico." Joe felt for cigarettes and remembered he'd smoked the last on the shelf.
"If he'd pulled the other trigger, he would have killed Klaus."
"If he wanted to kill Klaus, he would have done it before we got there."
"I thought so, then…" She smiled. "Was Roberto crazy or not? Were we humoring him or was he humoring us?"
"Roberto knows what he's doing." Joe took a deep breath and looked straight up at the far-off, converging tips of the ponderosas. Up in the sky, a squirrel swayed on the highest tip. Maybe he was blind. Maybe the other squirrels were coming back.
"They say you are so violent, Joe. You don't seem so."
He liked the way she ran her words together; the accent was sinuous in her mouth, alive and warm under the cool surface. It was the first time she'd said his name. He liked the explosion of the J.
"I don't shoot blind men."
"Your aura of violence must attract some women, though."
"Yeah, first I fuck them, then I scalp them." He signed. "Sometimes, the other way round."
She clapped her hands together and laughed.
"Wild, wild, Joe!"
Juniper boughs nodded under mistletoe. Fuchs, shirt stained and reeking, lagged far behind.
"Oppy studied under my father in Göttingen. In Germany," Anna said. "He seemed to live in our house. We thought he would marry my older sister, Emma. My father was very worried because everyone believed Oppy would leave physics for poetry. He was very German in Germany, except when he talked about New Mexico."
"About New Mexico in Germany?" Joe was surprised.
"With my father, he discussed physics. With Emma, he discussed poetry, philosophy, psychology. With me, he talked about wild Indians. I think I had the best bargain."
"Oppy loves to talk."
"Roberto is a medicine man?"
"A priest."
"You believe in Indian medicine?"
"Crazy stuff like that? No, I believe Christ died and rose again in three days and ascended like a B-19. But Indian stuff is all around here. Like Roberto today, like the kiva I told you about."
"I used to believe that if I ate a shrimp, I was an unclean girl and a shame in God's eyes. Once I ate a lobster and was positive that I would die in the night."
He couldn't imagine Anna scared. He had been scared with Roberto; she wasn't.
"What do you suppose Oppy believes in?" she asked.
"Well, he's not a very orthodox Jew. He sort of gets around the whole religious issue by going Hindu. What he really believes in, I think, is science. He thinks science can save the world. If every scientist were as good a man as Oppy, I might agree."
"How good is that?"
"The best."
They had reached the head of the ski slope that looked over Los Alamos. Dark spruce bordered a steep meadow of aspen that ran down the side of the mountain like a shaft of light.
"Enough Indians, enough guides." Fuchs caught up. "What I want to know, Sergeant, is what you're going to do about the madman who tried to kill me."
"Who threatened you
, you mean."
"Tried to kill me while you did nothing." Fuchs rose to his toes, levitating on anger and humiliation.
"There's no reason to stir things up with the pueblo. Why don't we just forget about it?"
"Forget about it? I want him reported. You know who he was, you said his name. And he knew you."
"If you report him–" Joe began.
"No. You report him, Sergeant," Fuchs said. "You."
Joe had decided not to report Anna Weiss and to avoid Augustino as long as he could. Now, he had to see Augustino about a medicine man?
"Would you?" Anna Weiss said.
"
If Dr
Fuchs insists, I have to report the incident."
"And put your friend in jail?" she asked.
"That's not up to me." Joe felt like he was backing into a corner. Roberto wasn't his friend; he hadn't known him until two days ago.
"Who is it up to?" she asked.
"The officer in charge of security."
"Captain Augustino?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Ah." Fuchs re-set his glasses. "After all your talk, we see what kind of Indian you really are."
"It's Army business as soon as I see Augustino," Joe tried to explain to her. "I'm a sergeant, I don't have a choice, I don't have the power to make that decision."
"I told you," Fuchs turned to Anna Weiss. "I warned you he was Captain Augustino's man. Good, Sergeant, you do as you're told." Fuchs backed away and then started downhill, stumbling through the dry grass.
"I was hoping for irrationality." Anna Weiss squinted as if she were trying to see something in the distance, on the other side of the mountains. Gray eyes with black edges, as if charred. "The world is full of people who take orders. For a moment, I thought you might be different."
"It's an Army post, it's as simple as that."
"You're right. I was foolish to think anything else."
"And I'm a sergeant on it."
"Captain Augustino's man. And Mrs Augustino's man. Many things, but not very Indian." She looked up at Joe. "The answer to your question is, no, I'm not interested."
She went after Fuchs. Watching her descend, a white figure swinging from aspen to aspen, Joe wanted to call, as if words could reach out and stop her. But he had no words on his mountaintop, he was as dumb as a yearning brute.
Augustino wasn't at headquarters or the Tech Area. In the commissary, Joe heard the captain had been seen driving on Bathtub Row.
Bathtub Row had nothing but long afternoon shadows. No maids hanging clothes or walking babies. There were no sounds except for jays and drifting shouts of a softball game on the playing field. Walking past Fermi's cottage and Jaworski's stone house, he remembered that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the early movie. Everyone with kids, even Kitty Oppenheimer, was at Snow White.
At the end of Bathtub Row a garden of poplars and spruces lent privacy to the Oppenheimer cottage. Augustino was coming out of the kitchen door and there was something about the way he moved that made Joe silently stop and watch. Augustino carried a small reel of white wire finer than the electrical wire used on the Hill. He let himself out of the back garden gate and slipped into the trees.
The boy's scooter still sat in the flower bed. It looked rusted to the spot and the flowers lay flat and dead. Joe knocked softly at the door. It was unlocked. The living room's casement windows afforded sunlight that reflected off a hardwood floor and whitewashed stone walls. The furniture was Spanish rustic and rattan, an easy chair with a laurel pattern, stand-up ashtrays, serapes on the sofa, bookcases, Santiago pottery on the mantelpiece. Nothing apparently out of the ordinary.
Kitty didn't like maids re-ordering the bedroom. A four-poster stood over ashtrays, open books, loose butts, water glasses. There was a Picasso lithograph on the wall, a disheveled bookcase. No white wires along the skirting board.
The study had a Spanish fireplace in the corner, a desk of spreading papers, two ashtrays of cigarette butts and a third ashtray with two pipes, a meerschaum and a briar. Hanging pictures of Krishna and a sailboat off a beach.
The nursery had been a sun porch and still had the yellow light of the porch. A crib at one end and a bed at the other. Teddy bears on a scatter rug. A case of children's books with a top row of German novels. Kitty employed a German nurse.
Joe returned to the living room, moving round the periphery and lifting chairs, tables, sofa. As he moved the bookcase, he saw the white wire that emerged from the edge of the floor, rose almost invisibly up the whitewashed wall and led into the back of the case. He searched through the records on the bottom shelf: Bach, Beethoven, Fauré. He spilled out the books above: Austen, Unamuno, Jeune Fille Violaine, Thermodynamique, Upanishads, The Interpretation of Dreams. Behind Freud was the microphone, a wire-mesh button no larger than a dime. He snapped it off.
Tracking the wire to the boiler room in the basement, he found a new electrical connection off the junction box and a radio hidden behind a bin of soft New Mexican coal. He took the radio, went back to the living room and neatened up the books. By the time he left there was no sign of his visit or the captain's, nothing but resonance, a fading disturbance like two trails in a cloud chamber.
13
Utah sky was different. Scrubbed clean. Saline. Instead of vultures, gulls.
FortDouglas, Salt Lake City, was different from Los Alamos because Douglas was so quiet. No booms from a mesa. No Indians. No women. Just the olive drab lethargy of the rearmost echelon of the United States Army.
The motor pool was a Quonset hut with open wings of galvanized steel over shadows and the glow of welders. Joe and Ray Stingo waited at the pumps. A noon sun lifted the reek of petrol off the tarmac. Ray's pompadour, usually sculptured with Wildroot, hung like crepe.
"Chief, you should've fought."
"They asked for you and me."
"Why?"
Joe walked to the other side of the petrol pumps rather than argue. He and Ray had flown in from Santa Fe the night before and all the way Ray had asked the same question: why?
"The Texas kid killed Shapiro," Ray said.
"That's what I heard."
Ray followed Joe round an oil can.
"Captain Augustino can't have wanted you here."
"The captain never said anything to me about it." Joe hadn't spoken to Augustino since Oppy's cocktail party the week before. "Look, while Oppy's still in Washington, I'm available for this."
"But what about me?"
"You'll be okay."
A convoy rolled towards the pumps. Army sedan, truck, ambulance and tail sedan had started out the day before in Hanford, Washington, and had come 550 miles. FortDouglas was where the teams switched.
"Too late," Ray moaned.
The schedule was strict. As soon as the lead sedan was at the first pump, four CID lieutenants jumped out and a fresh quartet took their place. Mechanics swung wearily out of the repair truck, a slope-fendered Dodge 6x6. The two men Joe and Ray were replacing both pulled the ambulance handbrake and jumped out. Joe and Ray climbed in, Joe behind the wheel. The rear of the ambulance was green Army. No white cross. No cots, no stretchers, no medicine. Only two fold-down seats and, farther back and taking up most of the space, an open steel square, four feet to a side, bolted to the floor and braced to the walls. Restraining straps of 1,000-lb-test nylon reached in from the eight corners of the square and hooked on to a 50-lb spun steel canister suspended at the center. The canister was lined with graphite and lead, and bore, inside a hollow of moderating water, a ten-gram, lead-coated, stainless steel capsule of jelly-like plutonium nitrate that drivers called the slug.
The two sergeants from Hanford had bright eyes and stubble and the air of men returned from the dead.
"Want some bennies?" One came over to Ray's window and offered a handful of white pills. Ray took three and swallowed them. "You better take this, too." He handed in the Tommy gun that the co-driver was supposed to carry.
"Secure the convoy!
" the lieutenants shouted at each other. They were boys right out of college and straight into Intelligence and would never see war. As they ran around with .45s and submachine-guns they reminded Joe of the sort of kids who brought baseball gloves to big league games. Mechanics clambered into the truck. Its back was stuffed with ambulance, car and truck spare parts in case there was a breakdown on the way. The orders were – as always, from Groves – no stopping.
"Let's for Chrissake go." Ray clutched the Tommy gun. Hair clung to the sweat on his forehead. His face had closed down to a bleak and dangerous glare. He refused to look back at the suspended, eight-armed canister riding in the rear of the ambulance.
"Wait a second, men."
A white-haired man in a tweed jacket and carrying a clipboard bounded out of the garage towards the ambulance.
"Santa!" Joe said.
"I'll kill him," Ray said.
Santa was the Hill psychiatrist. He'd always seemed to be part of the furniture at the lodge, an amiable headshrinker on hand to offer security-cleared emotional assurance to any longhair with the blues. Joe couldn't figure what Santa was doing at FortDouglas. He expected the lieutenants to block Santa's way because no one outside convoy personnel was allowed near the ambulance, but the officers waved Santa on.
"Permission to come aboard?" Santa took a letter from the clipboard and handed it through Ray's window to Joe. The letter was a pass for Dr Delmore Bonney to accompany the drivers of Army ambulance YO3 from FortDouglas to Site Y (Los Alamos), and the order was signed by both Oppy and Groves.
"I think you'd be more comfortable in one of the cars." Joe gave the letter back.
Santa shrugged happily. "Orders are orders. Sometimes even civilians have to suffer."
"Sergeant Stingo isn't feeling too good. It could be infectious," Joe warned.
Santa raised white eyebrows. "It could be psychosomatic."
Joe pushed open Ray's door. Ray leaned woodenly to one side so Santa could slip through to a fold-down seat. Already the lead sedan and truck, then ambulance and tail sedan were turning round the petrol pumps for the remaining 450 miles to New Mexico and the Hill.