"I don't want to trouble you."
"No trouble."
Gold struggled discreetly. Keeping a grip on him as porters pushed past was like squeezing a beachball.
"I have a call to make."
"Right round the corner. Just take a second."
"Joe! Over here!"
It was Anna's voice. She stood on the far curb, wearing the turquoise necklace he had given her. In her hair was the silver hairpin he'd seen on the portal and in her hands was the black pot that Augustino had been admiring. With her Hawaiian shirt, she achieved a Pueblo-Hebrew-Polynesian beauty. She also had a Maytag's bag. It was the weekend, why wouldn't Anna be in town shopping? She crossed the street behind a tour bus as it pulled in front of the hotel. The FBI agent behind her waited to cross; she wouldn't be hard to follow.
"Why should there be traffic signals?" Anna showed the contented smile people wear when they suddenly take possession of a new town, when they've decided they will stay a while and, against all odds, are comfortable. She paid no attention to Gold or to the porters or to the people hopping down from the bus. "How boring it would be with traffic signals."
"Go to the bar," Joe told her. "I'll be right there."
"See what else." She carefully put the bowl into the bag and took out a record. Billie Holiday. Lover Man. "What shall I do first, make a pot or sing the blues?"
Gold freed one hand and gave it to Anna. "Harry Gold."
Joe was trying to steer Anna towards La Fonda when Oppy came out of the hotel and took in the trio on the curb with a strained grin. His eyes looked out from wells of exhaustion.
"Where the hell have you been, Joe? I've been waiting for half an hour."
"Harry Gold," Gold said and offered Oppy his hand.
"Am I interrupting your private business and affairs?" Oppy asked. He disregarded Anna and ignored Gold's hand. "Santa told me you were out here. You went for a walk, a drink, a little spree?"
"Can you wait a minute?" Joe asked.
Cleto inserted himself in front of Gold and presented an arm draped with necklaces.
"Two dollars."
Tourists from the bus gathered around Cleto and pushed Gold aside.
"I have to make an appointment with a sergeant?" Oppy asked. "With my own driver? And where were you last night? I went by your room and you weren't there."
"I went out for a second."
"I came by twice," Oppy said. "I looked all over and couldn't find you. In the Army isn't that called AWOL?"
"Ask me where he was," Anna said and Oppy flushed as if she'd slapped him across the face.
The tour bus pulled away. Cleto moved on.
"Please ask me," Anna insisted.
Oppy lowered his head like a man on a cross.
"No?" she said. "Well, if you do think of any questions, I will be at the bar having a very early, not-so-perfect martini. I will be returning to the Hill later with Klaus. I know how you want to be sure where everyone is at all times."
Oppy didn't raise his head until she was gone, and then he blinked as if he were trying to will away a scene. "Joe, where were you?"
Gold was already gone. Joe saw him trotting up the street past a camera shop and as the tour bus rolled by, Gold skipped off the curb and jumped on to the running board, his newspaper clutched under his arm. "I met a spy," Joe said.
Together, Joe and Oppy walked a block to the old Spanish courtyards on
Palace Avenue
. This was the Hill bus stop and Joe's jeep was parked outside, but Oppy opened a wrought-iron door to the smallest courtyard, a narrow passageway of carved beams and squash blossoms around a browning lawn. The screen door at the inner end of the courtyard was the Hill's anonymous parcel drop and reception center in Santa Fe.
"You mean Gold," Oppy said in a low voice although there was no one else in the courtyard. "Augustino told me about him. Augustino is handling it. I don't see how you're involved."
"Gold was in Santiago this morning."
"Augustino is handling everything. What you can do is stay out of Captain Augustino's way. Let's hope you haven't scared Gold off. You know, Joe, we are fast approaching the climax of this enormous endeavor. I don't have the time or the patience to deal with you and your different adventures any more, not when the effort of thousands of people and the lives of many, many thousands of soldiers are in the balance. You are the smallest possible factor in Trinity. Please don't fuck it up. Stay out of my way, stay out of Captain Augustino's way and, if you want to do Anna Weiss a great favor, stay out of her way, too."
23
How high the MOON? the horns asked. Tables sat on circular tiers around the dance floor and bandstand, each table set with red cloths and candles, some with sweating pails of champagne. HOW high the moon? trombones wondered. Waiters in red jackets balanced steaks on trays. Wrought-iron sconces lit the curved adobe-like wall. Out on the hardwood, a generation of young officers danced with women in full skirts and puffed shoulders, blondes coiffed like Ginger Rogers, brunettes like Dorothy Lamour. The club comfortably held two hundred diners and dancers, and another forty at the bar.
How HIGH the moon? The lead sax stood to pursue the matter with a stutter of riffs. When the clarinet argued in falsetto, Joe thought of Harvey. The bass man thumped at the musical question, passed it to the drummer, who tapped it in the top cymbal, let it slip out on to the snare drum and when it bounced from there, socked it into the bass drum. How high THE moon?
In front of a red plush curtain the band wore white Eton jackets, the music stands were white with glittering clefs and the piano as white as a tooth, although the pianist was in khaki. Joe caught the tune in his right hand way up the keyboard, as if everything had been delicate introduction. He went at the tune like Basie, like a chick pecking at a diamond, until he turned the hand to boogie woogie, paused for a horn reprise, and at the horn's last brassy gasp came down the keys in slowly assembling minor chords.
"Remember how I enlisted, the parade at midnight?" Joe had asked Anna. The interesting thing was not that he was willing to bribe Shapiro and leave the Hill and drive to Albuquerque five days before Trinity, but that Anna was willing to go with him. For the occasion, she wore her hairpin and a long green velvet Navajo skirt. Pollack had given her a gardenia for her hair and she sat with the owner of the Casa Mañana at his table near the rear by the bar. In his tux, Pollack looked more like an African ambassador than a nightclub owner. He poured champagne for her and drank seltzer himself.
"One more time!" the sax section shouted. And this time, Joe played "Moon" with little quotes from "Blues in the Night", "Swingin' the Blues", "Blowin' the Blues Away", sliding across the luminous melody. He could feel everyone moving with him, as if a lid had been taken off the club to unveil a starry, cerulean night, because these people were ready for the impossible. Better than a moon in June was a moon in July. They'd been at war for five years and now the war was over, the war was almost over. "Blue Skies Smilin' at Me", Joe injected, and the entire club seemed to rise. If blue skies were going to explode on them, they were ready, so he made the melody… bluebirds singin' a song even as he brought the "Moon" down a chromatic descent, a chord at a time. The tunes merged and split again, accelerating until keyboard and crowd swung between flight and plunge. Joe cued the horns, who stood and hit the Charlie Parker riffs that settled the argument by demanding How High the Moon? How High the Moon? as if it were the sun.
"Is this the Casa Mañana?" Pollack asked Joe when he joined the table. "Is this not a wonderful club?"
"No, thanks," Joe said and waved off a drink.
"You said you were partners with Joe's father." Anna played with her new hairpin, which she had taken out for the gardenia.
"With Mike Peña," Pollack said.
"Doing what?"
Pollack glanced at Joe. "Distribution, mainly."
"A dangerous business," Joe said. "Mike was distributing a load of booze up from Mexico one night when a tire blew or he hit a cow or someone dr
ove alongside and shot him in the head. The truck crashed and the gas and alcohol blew like a Molotov cocktail."
"It wasn't clear whether a bullet was found," Pollack said.
"The investigation was led by a Judge Hilario Reyes," Joe explained. "It was very inconclusive."
"I sent Joe down to El Paso before he could get himself into trouble," Pollack told Anna. "I had a brother working in the circus. I thought Joe was going to feed the elephants, but he caught on to music real fast. Of course, he used to play the organ in the pueblo even before that. He was a choirboy and everything."
"Did Mike like your music?" Anna asked.
"No." Joe had to laugh. "He hated it."
He took her on to the floor and they danced to "Flamingo", the Ellington version.
"Are there clubs like this in Chicago?" she asked.
"Great clubs up there."
"Would you go to Chicago to play?"
"No. When I get out of the Army, I'm not going to take orders from anyone. I'm going to have my own club. For the first time in my life I know what I want."
"What is that?"
"This." He took in the seraphic row of white music stands against the red velvet, the warm languor of the women in their long hair and short dresses, the waiters gliding under trays of iced drinks, and the music curling within the circular Hollywood-adobe walls, eddying and overlapping into echoes that asked for a sharp piano riff, the stab of a minor chord.
"It must be wonderful to know what you want," she said.
"One fight will pay for it."
"Then the Casa Mañana will make you rich?"
"It's the music, not the money. Sooner or later, a great club loses money the way a beautiful balloon loses air. You mind my fighting?"
"It sounds like a bad movie. We had such movies in Germany. The man who fights one last time to pay for an operation for his sister so her sight can be miraculously saved. Naturally, he loses his..."
"I'm going to win. And I won't go blind or break my hands."
"If this is what you truly want–"
"It is."
"Then I don't think anyone in the world could stop you."
It was midnight when they came out of the club into the parking lot, half a block of cars surrounded by a low adobe barrier.
This part of Albuquerque's
Central Avenue
was called "OldTown", as if the Old West were lined with curio stoves and pawn shops with steel shutters. At night, except for the Casa Mañana, the street was deserted. Black, except for the tents of light around streetlamps.
As Anna got into the jeep, she touched her hair. "My new pin. I left it on the table."
Joe returned for the pin and when he came out of the club again he took a shortcut through the kitchen and out the back. There were fewer cars there, the jalopies of waiters and kitchen help. Among them, he heard voices and laughs and then something hitting the ground.
Between a pair of Fords, a tiny beam of light played from a horizontal face to a shirt, to a double-breasted jacket and a hand in the jacket pocket. As Joe approached, the beam slid back up to the face, which was round as a plate, subcutaneous blue on the upper lip and chin, eyes closed and mouth slack. Spread on the man's chest were license, business cards, postcards, money. Kneeling over him was Captain Augustino, still in civvies.
"Harry Gold." Augustino read the cards under the light. "Harry Gold of the Philadelphia Sugar Company. Harry Gold, licensed driver of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Street map of Santa Fe, $1,250 in cash. Harry Gold on vacation."
An empty champagne bottle rolled away from the captain's knee and came to rest against a tire. Joe assumed Augustino had used the bottle against the back of Gold's head.
"You know about him," Joe said.
"Heinrich Golodnitsky, to be exact, Sergeant." Augustino flicked the light back to the plump face and crumpled hat. "Heinrich Golodnitsky of Russian-Jewish lineage. Golodnitsky, who came at the age of three to an America of sugar-sweet opportunity, not only to find gold on the streets but to be Gold. Golodnitsky, Gold. Heinrich, Harry." Augustino pointed the beam at Joe and some of the light escaped to touch his own lean, passionate face. "See, you always thought I was crazy, Sergeant. Yet, here he is. It's like catching a real devil. A small devil, but a devil all the same. We were at the bar. You played well. Dr Weiss looked lovely."
"I thought you were at Trinity, sir."
Augustino opened the back door of the nearer Ford. "I thought you were on the Hill. Help me get him into the car."
The band could be heard faintly in the lot. He could make out the beat, but not the tune. Two-four time. A whisper of horns.
He gathered Harry Gold in his arms and laid him on the back seat of the car. "What are you going to tell Gold when he wakes up?"
"The concussion will eliminate any short-term memory. I'll tell him he got drunk, fell down and hit his head. He was drunk."
"He won't believe it. He'll go right to the Russians."
"Of course he won't believe me. But, apart from treason, Harry Gold is a two-bit chemist, a nothing, a zero. The luckiest day of his life was when he became a spy. You think he wants to lose his only interesting quality? Also, even if he realizes I knocked him out, he'll know he's already caught and on the cross. Hope springs eternal even in the breast of pathological scum. He's not going to tell the Russians anything. Tonight never happened."
"Like us, sir. I never saw you, you never saw me."
"Would I stand in the way of romance, Sergeant? When we're on the same team at last?"
On the way back to the Hill they stopped to swim in the Rio where it cut a deep curve in the sandbanks above Santiago. Berry petals passed on the dark surface of the water. There were five days left until Trinity. Minutes seemed to hurry by, as it rushing to a deeper, quicker channel of time.
"A choirboy? I can't believe it," she said.
"We'll go to Harlem an' we'll go struttin'," he sang to her, "an' there'll be nothin' too good for you."
She was cool and weightless to the touch and she slipped away from his hand. Something was wrong, although he didn't know what.
"Sometimes I wonder what my father's dreams for me must have been," she said. "A lecturer's chair at the Mathematical Institute. Learned arguments with other professors as we watched Göttingen slip into the dusk."
"Sounds like a travelogue."
"The memory of a refugee is a travelogue. Anyway, a proper husband, also a professor, two children and a villa on the Wilhelm-Weber-Strasse with window boxes of clematis. I don't believe my father ever dreamed of the Rio Grande or you. I will miss it."
"Miss it? What do you mean?"
"I will miss this place."
"You're leaving?"
"Everyone will be leaving soon after Trinity. I'm leaving before. I've only told Oppy and you."
"That doesn't mean you have to leave New Mexico."
"Yes, it does."
"What about us?"
"Us? This is your home, and now you have your music here, too. It's not my home, and I don't have my work here."
Though he was floating, he had the sensation he was about to fall through the water. "You came tonight to say goodbye?"
"Yes."
"No. You asked me to come to Chicago. That's what you were getting at when we were dancing."
"Joe, we've only known each other a month – really, two weeks. This is not the end of a long affair. We were just getting to know each other. I've never seen you happier than you were tonight."
"I thought you were happy, too."
"Not like you. It must be wonderful to be so in love with music."
"You're leaving to make some sort of ethical statement about Trinity, right? You feel forced to go?"
"You could say that."
"Then come back."
"And do what? Sell cigarettes in a nightclub?"
"You wouldn't have to do anything."
"But I do do something. I'm a mathematician, and I work at a certain level. B
esides the Hill, there is no such place here for me to work. Could I work with you? You wouldn't know what I was saying. This is not insulting. I'm not asking you to leave your music, to live in Chicago and erase blackboards for me."
"Then the hell with the club. I'll go with you, once I'm out of the Army."
"Now that I know that the club is what you want most in life? Oh no."
"I love you. There'll always be another Casa Mañana."
"I don't think so. I think this is your chance. For you to give it up and follow me, that would be a small version of Joe Peña. You know, the first time I saw you at the Christmas dance, Klaus Fuchs pointed to you and said, 'There is the Chief, stupid and dangerous and larger than life.' You aren't stupid, but you are the other two and I don't want you to change. I don't want you any smaller than Chief Joe Peña."
"It's beginning to sound as if I've been some sort of conquest for you. Entertainment. Part of your tour of Indian country."
"That's not true."
"It's simple. I love you and I'm willing to go. If you loved me, you'd stay."
She reached out for him. "I do love you. We can make love right now."
He wanted to. The water was getting colder and colder. She hovered in it like a flame.
"Then stay." He could only stand her silence so long before he turned. "Then go. Let's get you out of here. Let's get you packed and gone."
She followed him out of the water, so he was the first to see two figures squatting on the sand.
"Hello, Joe."
24
In the quarter-moon, Roberto and Ben Reyes showed the fatigue of a chase. Their hair was loose, their necks limp. Sophie Reyes hung back behind a log.
Joe picked up Anna's skirt for her. "One's blind. The other's so old it doesn't matter."
"They need your help," Sophie said.
"Do they?" Joe asked. He stepped into his trousers. "Well, the lady's in a big hurry. So, excuse us, but we're going."
"It was the Indian Service. They came at sunset," Roberto said. "It was lucky they came from the east. Ben saw them."