Mills grinned. “No, we’ve got a nice dormitory room for you.”
Later, walking down the dusty road with piles of sheets and towels, Connolly felt more than ever that he’d gone back in time to school. The dormitory was the familiar dull green army clapboard, but the dayroom inside, with its Ping-Pong table and Remington cowboy prints, had an undergraduate look, and the rooms were the same glorified cubicles you’d find on any state campus. The polished wood floor was bare, reflecting light from the uncurtained windows, but a curtain of sorts had been hung along the frame of the indented closet area. Aside from the single bed, there was a small desk, a reading chair, a short bookcase, and a hotel-standard imitation Sheraton chest of drawers with a Bakelite radio on top. The room was almost aggressively neat, as if the slightest rearrangement of the furniture would put it hopelessly out of kilter.
“Well,” Mills said, dumping the linens on the bed, “welcome to Boys’ Town. It ain’t much and it sure ain’t home. I’m just down the hall, so I should know.”
“I thought he said nobody’d touched the room.”
“Nobody has.”
Connolly opened the top drawer to see neatly folded handkerchiefs and pairs of shorts. “Signs of life.”
“Well, I’ll let you get on with it,” Mills said. “Dinner’s in the commissary-that’s just beyond P Building, the big one with the bridge. You won’t have any trouble finding it-just follow the smell of grease. Motor pool’s on the other side, so don’t get confused. Workday begins at oh eight hundred, but that’s up to you, I guess.”
Connolly continued to go through the drawer, carefully moving pieces of clothing as if reluctant to disturb the dead. “What do we do with this stuff?” he asked.
“Beats me. No next of kin, if that’s what you mean. I thought you’d want to go through it before we pack it up. I’ll get you a box tomorrow. I suppose we have to hold it. You know, as evidence.”
It was a question, but Connolly was preoccupied.
“I suppose. What happened to the next of kin?”
“Bruner was a German Jew. His parents are still there-or not-as far as we know. We have to assume not. No other relatives in his file.”
“Speaking of which, I’m going to need—”
But Mills was already pulling a manila folder from under his arm. “Bedtime reading,” he said, handing it over.
Connolly looked at him and smiled. “Why do I get the feeling you’re one step ahead of me?”
“Don’t worry, you’ll catch up. That’s all there is.”
Connolly glanced at the file. “Did you know him?”
“He worked in the section and he lived down the hall, so yes. But no.”
“Did you like him?”
Mills hesitated. “That’s some professional question. He was all right.”
“That’s some answer.”
“He was a hard guy to like.”
“How so?”
“He had an edge. He’d been through a lot and it showed. He couldn’t relax. I suppose he was always waiting for the knock on the door. A lot of the Germans are like that. They can’t feel safe, not after everything. You can’t blame them, but it doesn’t make them the life of the party, either.”
“What happened to him there? Specifically.”
“The Nazis thought he was a Communist and locked him up. He had a rough time.”
“Was he?”
“Not according to him. He was a student who attended a few meetings. It’s all in there,” he said, pointing to the folder. “In the security report. Even the Nazis couldn’t make it stick, so they finally let him out. This was years ago, when they were trying to deport the Jews instead of keeping them in, so they sent him to Russia.”
“They took him in?”
“Uh-huh. And then arrested him as a German spy. They were even worse than the Nazis. They pulled his teeth out, one day at a time. That’s why he had the plate.”
“Jesus.” Connolly imagined the wait every morning, the clang of the bolt in the door, the pliers and the screams and the blood. The spare, clean room suddenly seemed different, as if Bruner had tried to live as unobtrusively as possible, wanting to be passed over, out of pain.
“Yeah, I know. When they ran out of teeth they started messing up his hands, until I guess they finally decided he didn’t know anything. Just one of their little mistakes. So they got rid of him too. The rest is in there. It’s your standard refugee itinerary, with the usual red tape and crooks and helping hands until one day he’s drinking milkshakes in God’s country. And now this. Some life. You have to feel sorry for the bastard.”
“But you didn’t like him.”
“You trying to make me feel guilty? No, I didn’t like him. Maybe it wasn’t his fault, but deep down he had no use for anybody. He was the kind of guy who was always looking for some angle.”
“But good at his job? Loyal American and all that?”
Mills grinned. “Yeah, all that. He liked it here all right, but more because I think he hated everywhere else. Maybe it was too late for him to make friends. He wasn’t the kind of guy who just came by your room to have a smoke and shoot the breeze. Come to think of it, I think this is the first time I’ve ever been in this room. He hung out in the dayroom-he wasn’t a hermit or anything-but you never felt he was really enjoying it.”
“No close friends?”
“He may have. None that I knew about.”
“How about his social life?”
“By which you mean?”
“What you think I mean.”
“I don’t know,” Mills said slowly. “I always thought there might be somebody, but he never said anything. It was none of my business. It never occurred to me that it might be a man.” He looked up at Connolly. “I know what the police think, but there was none of that here. Ever.”
“Are you trying to tell me it’s safe to use the showers?” Mills let it pass.
“All right. What made you think he was seeing a woman? Or anyone?”
“His car. He loved his car. He was always trying to cadge extra coupons, and he used to love to show it off. You know, offer to take people into Santa Fe, things like that. And then more and more he was off by himself, so I figured he had a girlfriend somewhere.”
“How did he rate a car? I thought they were—”
“Oh, it was his car. He got it in ’forty-two, when you could still get them. A Buick. And the way he took care of it, it was probably as good as the day he drove it off the lot.”
Connolly looked around the room, imagining the furniture as immaculate pieces of engine. “I should probably take a look. Where is it now?”
“No idea. He took it down the Hill Saturday and neither of them came back.”
Connolly thought for a minute. “And now we only know where one of them is. Hard to lose a car, though. It’s bound to turn up someplace. I don’t suppose you know the local black-market heavyweights?”
“Black market? Never heard of it. That’s one thing we leave to the police.”
“The only thing, from the sound of it. All right, I’ll check it out tomorrow. I suppose it’s registered to a code number like all the cars here?”
Mills nodded.
“You guys like to make things easy.”
“Haven’t you heard? We’re the best-kept secret of the war. You might even say we don’t exist.”
“I know. I get paid to help keep it that way.”
“So what do you do, anyway?” Mills said. He caught Connolly’s look. “If I’m allowed to ask.”
“Office of War Information liaison to Army Intelligence. I’m a rewrite man.”
“What do you rewrite?”
“Dispatches. Speeches. News. Whatever the army thinks we should know. For a while there we didn’t have any American casualties-only the Germans got shot-but they’ve been better lately. Even they couldn’t keep it up indefinitely.”
“You mean you write propaganda?” Mills said, intrigued. “I’ve never met anyone who did that.”
