"Do you mind if I speak to the sergeant alone?"
"Please," Fuchs said.
The arc of Augustino's cigarette waved Joe out. He couldn't tell how long the captain had been standing, listening.
"Our Germans. I'll say one thing for Fuchs, he's scrupulous about security, unlike some people. Sergeant, are you aware of the improvement in the living standards of the people in the local pueblos since you arrived on the Hill? Cigarettes, tires from the motor pool, sugar from the commissary. Particularly disturbing is the rumor that Indians have opened some of the old turquoise mines."
"You don't like Indian jewelry, sir?"
"What I don't like is the idea that they're blasting open the mines with high explosive. There's only one place in this part of the country for them to get explosives, Sergeant, and that's the Hill. I'd hate to think any of my men was stealing Army property to sell for personal profit."
"Indians are pretty poor, sir. He can't be making too much profit."
"Then that makes him stupid too."
"If he's that stupid, he'll make a slip. I'll watch for him, sir."
"Do that. In the meantime, General Groves has arrived at the guest house. Wrap up the music. Since you'll be taking the general and Dr Oppenheimer to see the Alamogordo range tomorrow, I want you to get a good night's sleep. The fate of the world will be riding in the car you'll be driving, so it would be nice if you were bright and sober. Agreed?"
"Yes, sir."
"Please be aware, Sergeant, that I am unhappy with the quality of information that you've been giving me lately. We have a deal. You're on provisional assignment to me. That's probation. You go back to the brig any time I say. Now you get back inside the lodge, give them a couple more tunes and send our civilians home happy. By the way, do you know the difference between a nigger playing the piano and an Indian playing the piano?"
"No, sir."
"Funny, neither do I."
Joe tried to concentrate on the music for the last set. He did a little serious work on "I Got It Bad", turning the chorus into bebop flat fifths, followed with the tom-tom rhythm of "Cherokee", then moved into the placid waters of "More Than You Know". The jitterbuggers got one last shot with "The GI Jive" before he U-turned through "Funny Valentine" and slid into the final tune of the night, "Every Time We Say Goodbye". Fuchs was doing a Hapsburg ballroom number with Anna Weiss, as if he was waltzing to "The Blue Danube". She seemed graceful enough in his arms, and smiled as if she found him either amusing or ridiculous. Across the floor, Oppy kept his eye on Fuchs and the girl with a concentration that was unusual even for him. At the same time, Kitty was behind Oppy and watching him and the girl. Perhaps it was the novelty of a new face or her bizarre coveralls, but everyone seemed to watch Anna Weiss; on the dance floor she seemed to be the only one completely alive. It was a trick of the light that followed one person around. Joe had seen the quality before; it was rare, but not unknown.
Every time we say goodbye… Porter had written an intimate ballad for lovers parting at train stations, troopships, beds. At previous dances, Fuchs's style had struck Joe as ludicrous; tonight, it was irritating. When he saw Fuchs and his partner heading for a dip, he skipped a bar, went on four bars, inserted the missing bar of music and continued. Fuchs looked like a man trapped by a traffic signal. The girl looked at Joe. The other dancers didn't notice because they were all dancing close and slow. As Fuchs stared at the piano, Joe drew the tune out. It was full of the loveliest A-minor chords. He got Harvey to sustain an E and came down the whole keyboard on the ninths like Tatum, returning to catch Harvey's dying note and stretch it into melody with the right hand while he brought the left softly up the keys like a rabbit. Harvey stopped playing and stood with the reed at his open mouth, eyes big. Joe turned the rabbit into a bebop bopping from chord to chord as softly as a lullaby until he merged the melody again and made it swell until Fuchs couldn't help but start dancing again. When Fuchs was in full spin, he dropped into "The Skater's Waltz", still in A-minor. The girl was laughing , taking him up on it. Fuchs tried to stop but she wouldn't let him; Oppy wiped tears of laughter.
Slowly, as if it were a force taking control, syncopation came out of the bass and the waltz became a dreamy rag, then escaped into a comic stride that left Fuchs not knowing whether to put down his left foot or his right until Joe marshaled the notes into a resolute 2-4 and marched them into a proper waltz, where he left them for dead and reprised Porter as if nothing at all had happened, no Strauss, no bebop. Then he cut it short with a nod to Harvey, who came through with a flutey arpeggio. Joe hit a last chord and that was that.
3
In the beginning, Oppy thought he could build the bomb with just five other physicists. They could take over the schoolmasters' houses and eat at the school lodge. What laboratories were needed could be squeezed in between the canyon rim and the little man-made pond that graced the front of the lodge.
After deeper thought, Oppy doubled and re-doubled the number of physicists and added some mathematicians, chemists and metallurgists. The Army brought in the Engineers Detachment to man the labs, run the power plant, maintain the roads and drive the trucks. Two hundred MPs were shipped in for security. WACs came for clerical work. The labor had to be expanded because work that had been expected from the outside world, the real world so far away from New Mexico, couldn't be done there. Volcanic tufa was bulldozed for foundries. Cyclotrons and particle accelerators were jimmied up the canyon road. The British Mission arrived. Dormitories, hospital, school were built and babies born. Soldiers, MPs and WACs were again doubled and needed more barracks, cafeterias, commissaries and theatres. The civilian machinists who cut high explosives would leave if they didn't have their own housing. Civil servants had to be housed. By December 1944, five thousand people were crammed on to the mesa, and they were without streetlights because the Army was still trying to hide its most secret project.
From the dance, Joe cut across the playing field and behind the beauty shop to an area of low, rounded Quonset huts, so-called "Pacific hutments" designed to be thrown up on tropical islands, not New Mexico in the winter. This was where the construction workers who built the housing for everyone else were expected to live. He found the fight by the noise.
The ring was in the day room of the central hutment. Sergeant Ray Stingo was fighting one of the workers. Like Joe, Ray was a bodyguard and driver with security clearance, and had been a fighter, a heavyweight, before the war. He sported a black spit curl over a beaten-down nose and showed a stomach still hard as a washboard, but he must have had ten years on the kid he was boxing.
Joe edged open the door just enough to see, and smelled the deep, sour reek of stale beer and dead cigarettes. The Hill had recruited and suffered through successions of construction men, each group meaner than the one before, as healthy workers without police records were likely to be drafted. The latest bunch were Texans who labored stripped to the waist but, like a caste mark, always wore their hats. They'd put on their Stetsons and pointy boots for the evening's entertainment and stood on sofas and chairs to root their boy on. Ray's backers were MPs, a corps of uniformed thugs who looked nearly civilized next to the Texans. Even with helmets and sticks, the MPs usually stayed clear of the hutments on Saturday night. Joe saw money passing between the two camps. There was probably $2,000 or $3,000 riding on a fight like this.
The boy was left-handed, fast, aggressive. Not much face: a heavy brow, dim eyes, a flat, spade nose dotted with blood. Short, sandy hair and peg ears. In his tank shirt and denim trousers, his most distinctive features were his neck and shoulders of fanning muscle. A natural heavyweight. Twenty years old. Less.
Ray tried to slip the right jab, but the boy pulled it back and snapped it again, moved in again to a chorus of cowboy hoots. There was an old saying, "Poor New Mexico, so far from heaven, so near to Texas." Joe'd always felt it was a combination of the big hats and Texas sun that baked and compressed the Texas brain to the size of a boiled egg. There was
a deeper mystery here, though. The Army was drafting men who were missing fingers, toes, other appendages. There was a clerk with two fingers typing in the quartermaster's office. Joe couldn't count fingers inside a boxing glove, but this boy seemed exactly the sort of post-adolescent maniac who should be gutting Japs on some barren atoll. Ray was getting thrashed.
Ray kept circling to his left, which was right into the kid's jab. In New York, Ray had been a solid, middle-of-the-card fighter, a body puncher. Tonight he looked old, the eyes desperate, the muscles puffy. A painful blush spread on his chest and face everywhere a punch landed. He circled into a jab, ducked and moved into a straight left and was down on his ass, sitting on his gloves, his legs splayed. The kid bounced and motioned Ray to stand. The shouts of a hundred men tried to take off the roof.
Joe had already taken a step out into the dark. Through the door, the scene looked smaller, like a cockfight, bettors hanging over a pit, some glum, some screaming till their neck cords popped. It depressed him. There was something about war, about murder on the grand scale, that made mere boxing unnecessary.
The cooling night winds blew. Across the valley the range of Sangre de Cristo was a spine pointing south to Santa Fe. At his back the JemezMountains were a dark, volcanic mass. In between, the moon looked ponderous, ready to crash.
Why had he picked on Fuchs? Because he was angry and the German was the first easy target to waltz on to the dance floor. Jesus, how shameless would he get before this war was over?
Since he was supposed to be on twenty-four-hour call to drive Oppy and handle any "native" problems, Joe lived outside the barracks, in his own room in the basement of Theatre 2, the enlisted men's general-purpose hall. The basement corridor was a black tunnel of volleyball nets and music stands. Without bothering to turn on the light in his room, he went straight to his locker and opened a new bottle of bourbon and a fresh carton of cigarettes. The glow of the match lit a poster for the Esquire All-Stars, featuring Art Tatum and Coleman Hawkins.
Hawkins held a tenor sax. The poster was a door to the past and to the future; it sure as hell wasn't the present. He blew out the flame and on the wall the black men faded and he felt like he was fading himself. Hanging in the center of the room, barely visible, was a heavy bag. Joe set down his drink and cigarette, pulled off his tunic and shirt. He tapped the bag with a jab and as much felt as saw it wiggle on its chain. The bag's name was MacArthur. Joe hooked it with his left and listened to the satisfying creak of leather and kapok. He hooked again and crossed with his right, and MacArthur jumped. Jabbed, hooked, crossed, bobbed, and crossed again. Air popped from the seams. Over the chain, the ceiling groaned. A heavy bag demanded commitment; hit it tentatively and a man could break his wrist. Joe snapped the bag back, moved in to hit it again and slipped, nearly fell. The bag bounced off his shoulder as he reached to the floor and picked up silk and tulle. The silk had polka dots, like a spotted lily.
"I'll give you a hint. It isn't Eleanor Roosevelt."
Mrs Augustino lit her own cigarette. She had a silver lighter and a silver cigarette case and that was all. Even in winter she had a two-piece bathing-suit tan and she was a genuine blonde. She shut the lighter, but Joe wouldn't have been surprised to see her whole body continue glowing like a neon sign. An Army wife was a dangerous thing. He could almost hear a neon sizzle.
"You shouldn't be here." He was still breathing hard from hitting the bag.
"Try and throw me out, Sergeant, and I'll scream rape so loud they'll hear me in Santa Fe."
"Go ahead, scream." Mostly what he could see now was the glint of her blue eyes.
"Rape," she said softly.
"Mrs Augustino–"
"Call me Celeste."
"Mrs Augustino–"
"I'm twenty years old, attractive. Married to a captain. Here I am, waiting hours for a sergeant to come to bed."
"I didn't ask you, I hardly know you."
"Hardly anybody knows me, Sergeant. This is an Army post and I should be at the top of the social pinnacle. Instead, with all these foreigners and scientists, I'm treated like some ignorant hillbilly, like an intellectual embarrassment. I looked around that dance tonight for one man who didn't give a damn for all these geniuses and tin gods and I only found one, Sergeant, and that was you."
He found himself interested. "You think so?"
"I saw you talking to Fuchs. You hate them."
"I may dislike Fuchs."
"And the German girl with him."
"She's not my type."
"That's my point. I am your type, Sergeant."
Well, there was a little bit of truth in that. Enough truth to frighten the lion in his lair, the chief in his tepee. She sat up. His eyes had adjusted to the tiny beacon of her cigarette. Light freckles covered her breasts.
"I'm flattered, Mrs Augustino. Really, but–"
"It's cold out there. Could a lady at least have a drink before she goes off in humiliation?"
Joe brought her the bourbon he'd poured for himself. Tin gods and geniuses? And the occasional sergeant, the one-time fighter but now a man who steers clear of trouble, a man in a long, dry spell of good conduct. Looked at that way, in a desert, she was an oasis of sin.
"Where is the captain?" Joe asked.
"Who knows?"
There was a Victrola against the wall and 78s arranged neatly underneath; he took better care of his records than anything else and he didn't need light to set a disc on the turntable and let the arm down. "Mood Indigo" whispered.
"Then maybe we have time for one dance." He took the empty glass from her.
In her bare feet, Mrs Augustino didn't come to his chin.
"Ready for the dip?" Joe pulled her close.
They bumped into the heavy bag and it wiggled on its chain.
"Was that General Groves?" she laughed. "No, that's General MacArthur."
"That's a terrible name for a punching bag. He's the greatest American alive."
"That's the one."
4
Snow had fallen like a fine dust during the night. Mrs Augustino stepped delicately through it into the early morning dark.
When Joe went back to his room it was rank with free-floating lust and stupidity. As he picked up the blanket, her cigarette case fell out, cool to the touch, and he knew he didn't want to see her again. Case in hand, he rushed through the basement hall, knocking aside volleyball nets, up the stairs and across the theatre pews that would be turned round in a few hours for Sunday morning services and threw open the side door she had left by. Too late. Nothing but snow and the cold night air. He was only in shorts and icy sweat. Storm clouds had cleared. Directly across the road was Military HQ, an E-shaped building. The roofs were white rhomboids floating on black.
Between two arms of the E, an engine started and tires rolled. A vehicle crossed the dim gloaming of the road and stopped ten feet in front of Joe. Headlights went on, blinding him. Its engine raced with the clutch in, then shifted into neutral. Captain Augustino stepped out of the weapons carrier and gave a visible sigh.
"Excellent tracking snow, Sergeant." The captain considered the thin sheet-white snow that lay over the road and the prints of a woman's shoes leading from the door.
"For hunting, sir?" Joe held the cigarette case behind his back.
"Just what I was thinking. Better get your clothes on, Sergeant, we don't want to miss the dawn."
"Now, sir?"
"No better day."
"I don't have a rifle, sir."
"I brought one for you. Better get your clothes on."
"I'm supposed to pick up the Director at eleven."
"We'll be done by then."
While Joe went in for his clothes and jacket, he realized his own taste for the expedition. Who was fooling who? If Mrs Augustino was in the bed, could Captain Augustino ever be far behind? Her invitation to Joe became, as soon as he was between her legs, his invitation to the captain, and there was a pure and shining inevitability to the situation that app
ealed to the blood, as if the blood were rising with the moon. If nothing else, his career as an informer was coming to an end. Though, mulling a different set of ethics, he should stay away from officers' wives. MacArthur jiggled as Joe passed. He deserved to be shot.
The weapons carrier climbed west to the Valle. The snow was deeper in the mountains and the pines made a luminous tunnel in front of the headlights. Captain Augustino's face had its own lunar glow, the intensity of a husband who had not slept during the night's snowfall.
"It's illegal, you know, Sergeant."
"What, sir?"
"Hunting. This is an Army preserve now. Of course, Indians still hunt here."
"Do they, sir?"
"Sneak up here and hunt. Hard for your friends to break old habits."
"Yes, sir."
"It's poaching now, just like in Robin Hood's time. This is like Sherwood Forest now."
"Really, sir."
"You're not a student of history, Sergeant."
"Not really, sir."
"History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. It was not an Indian who said that."
"Not a Pueblo?"
"Karl Marx. You never heard of him?"
"From New Mexico, sir?"
"No."
"From Texas?"
"No."
"Musician?"
"Maybe the violin in his parlor. You never heard of Das Kapital or The Communist Manifesto?"
"I'm going to develop my mind some time, sir."
Pines rose like snow-bearing shadows. Augustino was a skillful driver, swinging the weapons carrier wide on a curve without losing momentum or control. A Marlin and Winchester, both lever actions, rattled on the back seat. Also on the seat was a box of .30-.30s.
"At any rate, Sergeant, you don't mind doing something illegal?"
"Not with the right person, sir."
"That's what I thought. You said you were a neck shot or a heart shot?"
"I don't recall, sir."
"I like the spine shot myself. I like to see a big animal drop where he stands, so he doesn't run for a mile and make me chase him. Ever shoot a deer in the ass, Sergeant?"