“What is it?”
“It’s just that-Look, you’re making a mistake.”
“About Kelly?”
“No, not about Ramon.”
Connolly was surprised. “You know him?”
The soldier shrugged. “Lots of people know him. He gets around.”
“So do you, huh?”
He stiffened. “No, not like that. Ramon’s just one of those guys who’s around, you know?”
“In the bar.”
“Yeah, in the bar. But Karl wasn’t. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. You’re looking at this wrong. He wasn’t—”
Connolly waited for him to finish, but he had stopped, whatever courage had prompted him now gone. “How do you know?” Connolly said finally.
“I’d know, that’s all.”
“You were a friend of Karl’s?”
“No, just from the office.”
“That’s right, you’re a driver. So you’d be attached to the office.”
The soldier bit his lip.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to say anything. I don’t even want to know who you are.”
“What’s the difference? You could find out in a minute.”
“Why say anything, then?”
“You’re right, maybe I’m crazy. It’s just I can see where this is all going. I’ve seen it before. They start looking at everything. I hear you’re going through our savings accounts.” He smiled at Connolly’s expression. “I have a friend over in admin,” he explained. “Things get around. Everybody gets along fine here. Nobody bothers anybody. But now you think it’s a sex crime. Wait and see. All hell will break loose. I was on a base once where they started—”
“I’m not looking for that.”
“No? And what if you find it? All the sudden they’ve got records on people, stuff they never bothered about before, and then you’ve got trouble. I’ve seen it. That’s bad enough, but this time there’s no point. It all starts because of Karl and he wasn’t like that.”
Connolly was quiet. “So you said before. How do you know?”
“I’d know,” he said again.
“You guys have a secret handshake or something? Like the Masons?”
The soldier wrinkled his nose in disgust. “Okay, forget it. I knew I was crazy to do this.”
“I think it took a lot of guts.”
“You do, huh?”
“Yes, I do. But what do you expect me to do with this? Ignore everything because it might be inconvenient for you? You didn’t even know the guy. All we can go on is what we know, and what we know here is we’ve got a guy dead in the park with his pants down.”
The soldier looked at him. “I could pull your pants down right here and what would that make you?”
The quiet hung between them. “If you killed me, I guess it would make me Karl.”
The soldier nodded, then turned to walk away.
“I’ll make you a deal,” Connolly said after him, watching him turn back with suspicion. “What if you look for me?”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe you’re right. But what if you’re not? What if Karl was so secretive that even you couldn’t spot it?”
“And?”
“It’s important that we know for sure, know who his friends were. Know who he was seeing. We need to talk to other people who might know.”
“You’ve got the wrong guy.”
“I’ll take your word for it. That’s the deal. You’re telling me there are things going on up here I don’t know anything about and I’m going to make a mess trying to find out. Okay, I won’t. No mess. You do it for me. Talk to people-don’t tell me who, just tell me if you find out anything about Karl. I’ll look somewhere else. If you’re right, fine. I’ll take your word for it. But make sure. That’s your part of the deal.”
“No tricks?”
“No tricks. You’d be doing me a favor. And your friends. Nobody wants to turn the place upside down.”
The soldier stuck out his hand and took Connolly’s. “Christ, I don’t believe I’m doing this. What does this make me, an undercover cop?”
Connolly smiled. “Well, you’ve got the handshake down.”
“Nobody knows about this, promise?”
Connolly nodded. “By the way, what’s your name? So I don’t have to look it up.”
“Batchelor.” He grinned. “Yeah, I know. Some joke. Maybe it was in the stars. Okay, I’ll let you know if I come up with anything. But don’t get your hopes up. I’m right about this.”
“Just out of curiosity, do you always know?”
“Well, sometimes you hope. It would be nice to be wrong about you, for instance.”
Connolly was shocked, then laughed, caught off-guard. “Am I supposed to be flattered?”
“No, I think that about lots of people,” he said, waving his hand in a mock salute as he left.
Connolly watched him for a minute, then turned toward the dormitory. He felt cheered by the meeting, as if a road sign had been replaced, finally sending him on his way instead of around in circles. But now there was the deflation of having to begin over. Los Alamos began with a secret and now it seemed it lived on them, one layer wrapped around another. He wished for a minute to be back at the movie, where everything was before you, a shining self-contained surface that stopped at the edge of the screen, hiding nothing.
9
The car was still covered in early morning dew, a film of rime catching the pale light, but she came out in hiking shorts, her long legs shivering in the cold. She threw her knapsack in the back as she motioned him to the passenger seat.
“Are you trying to be provocative?” he said.
“Come on,” she said quietly. “It’s bloody freezing. I want to get the heater going.”
“Next time you could wear nothing at all.”
“You’d like that, would you?” she said, pulling the car away and heading west. “You’d be surprised how fast it heats up here. It’ll be boiling in a few hours. Any trouble getting away?”
“Not when you write your own passes.”
She grinned at him and he saw that she was excited, as if they were children ducking out of school and the day an adventure.
“Where are you going? The gate’s that way.” He pointed behind them.
“West gate. We’ll take the back road-it’s faster.”
“Oh.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said, thinking about the investigation. “I just forgot there was another gate. I’ve never been there.”
“You haven’t missed much.”
In fact it was much smaller than the east entrance, with a single sleepy MP at the barrier, stifling a yawn as he checked the passes and waved them through.
“There’s tea in the Thermos. Hope you don’t mind, but I hate drinking coffee all day.”
