Connolly smiled. “No. Not propaganda. That’s big lies, fake stories-the stuff Goebbels used to do. We don’t make anything up. You couldn’t, these days. We just look at it right, make people feel better about things. So they don’t get discouraged. We don’t have heavy casualties, we meet fierce resistance. A German advance is a last-ditch counterattack. No body parts, dismemberment, guts hanging out, just clean bullets. French villages are glad to see us-I think they must be, too. Our boys do not get the syph-or give it, for that matter. We don’t mean to bomb anybody by accident, so we never do. The army isn’t up to anything in New Mexico. There is no Manhattan Project.”
Mills stared at him, surprised by the casual cynicism of the speech.
“Just a few rewrites,” Connolly said. “For our own good.”
“How do you feel,” Mills said curiously, “about doing that?”
“How would you?”
Mills looked away, suddenly embarrassed.
“So in a way it feels good to be back on the crime beat again,” Connolly said lightly. “Except I’m not really here.”
Mills picked up his mood. “Town’s full of people this week who aren’t really here. If you want to do some ghost spotting, though, you might check out the party tonight. I assume you’re on a face-recognition basis with the world’s leading physicists. Otherwise it’ll be lost on you.”
“Only if they look like Paul Muni.”
“Now there, you’ve gone and done it. You’re supposed to use his code name. Anyway, eight o’clock if you’re interested. And all things considered, you should be.”
“What’s the occasion?”
“They don’t need a special occasion to have a party. It’s just one long bacchanal up here on the mesa. Of course, if they are celebrating something, we don’t allow them to say so.”
Connolly grinned. “Okay. Maybe I’ll see you there later. An ordinary party might be nice.”
“Well, ordinary for here.”
Afterward he lay on Bruner’s bed, too tired to change it, his mind drifting from the file to the expressionless room around him. Some rooms were so inhabited with personality that their occupants refused to leave; you could feel their presence like a kind of haunting. But this wasn’t one of them. Bruner had never been here. But of course he had been-nobody left without a trace. Connolly’s eyes moved slowly around the room. Perhaps the neatness itself was a clue, a life all tucked in, put away, leaving nothing behind to give it away.
His things had been unremarkable. A crossword puzzle book-to perfect his English or just to pass the time? — and a German-English dictionary on the desk. No mail. A photograph in the drawer of a couple dressed in the dated clothes of twenty years ago, presumably his parents. A random collection of reading books- For Whom the Bell Tolls, an illustrated book of Southwest Indian life, Armed Forces paperback westerns, an anthology of war correspondent dispatches. Connolly leafed through the latter, suddenly back at OWI, with burly prima donnas throwing tantrums over troop transport passes and scheming to go on bombing raids so their bylines would end up in collections just like this. There would never be a bigger story.
Suits, a few pairs of socks, and a tie rack in the closet. Connolly took out the empty suitcase to fill it with the folded, ordinary clothes in the drawers. A Dopp Kit with the usual brushes and razors, a box of prophylactics, and special denture powder. A project account book with orderly rows of regular deposits. Only when he took out the sweaters to pack them did he find anything interesting-a few pieces of Indian jewelry, silver and turquoise, hidden in one of the folded sleeves.
Now, on the bed, he held them up to the light, playing with them. A belt buckle inlaid with turquoise, a pendant (no chain), links for one of those necklaces Spanish cowboys wore around the crowns of their hats. Why jewelry? Bruner’s clothes were conservative-hard to imagine him drawn to anything so flashy. A present? The same night he used the prophylactics? Anything was possible. Maybe he simply liked the stuff. The meager bookcase suggested some interest in Indians. Perhaps the turquoise was no more than a hobby collection, like FDR’s stamps-Bruner’s unexpected passion. Connolly imagined him taking the pieces out of the sweater at night to look at them, their glow of silver and blue-green lighting up the drab room like Silas Marner’s gold. And then again, maybe not. He put them down on the bed and picked up the file instead.
What no one had mentioned was that Bruner was good-looking. Not conventionally pleasant, but striking, his high cheekbones and bush of dark hair arranged in an original angular way that drew attention to his eyes. Even in the file photo they had a frank, direct stare that still seemed alive. There was no humor in them, but a kind of hard vitality that put the rest of his face in shadow. Nothing else, not the stubble of afternoon beard covering the chin, not the hollow cheeks or surprisingly full lips, registered. What seemed at first the pale Jewish face of a hundred other photographs was now rearranged, as if the sensitivity had been stamped out to leave something hard, more determined. Connolly wondered if the extraction of the teeth had literally changed the shape of the face or simply the man who looked through it.
How could it be otherwise? The pain must have been crippling, all the worse for being repeated without end. Had Bruner counted the teeth left, wondering as his raw mouth puffed up with pain whether he could stand another day, ten? Or had the Nazis months before already beaten his face to another form? Connolly looked at the nose in the picture for the sideways slant of a break, but it was straight, and again he came back to the eyes. They were so bright that for a split second he thought he could reach through to the man, but the more he looked, the less they seemed to say. They stared without any comment at all, as if simply being alive were enough.
Connolly put the file down and covered his tired eyes with his sleeve. In the end, the pictures were always the same. File after file had crossed his desk, stories from Europe, not just the battle dispatches and the statistical pieces but the personal stories, each one terrible, each one of suffering almost unimaginable, until you were lost in the scale of it all. We would never recover from this, unless we simply stopped listening. Europe seemed to him now like a vast funhouse, dark and grotesque and claustrophobic. You were jerked along from one startling exhibit of horror to the next, rocking in alarm, squirming. Skeletons dangled, monsters leaped out, horrible mechanical screams tore the air, and you would never get out.
The stories made other stories. Something had happened to Karl Bruner, who in turn became a different person, which in turn made him do-what? Maybe nothing. But once the violence started, there was no end to it- every crime reporter knew that. It demanded vengeance, or at least some answer, an endless series of biblical begats. A gun fired never stopped, it kept cutting through the lives of everyone around it, on and on. Like some unstoppable-Connolly smiled to himself at the aptness of it-chain reaction. Until it all became part of the war.
Connolly liked the remoteness of Los Alamos, the clean, high air away from the files and reports of the world destroying itself. A simple personal crime, a police blotter item-not a war. An assignment out of the funhouse, some time in the light. But Bruner’s face had thrown him back again-another European story. He wondered why it had ended on the Santa Fe river.
2
Connolly was late to the party and wouldn’t have gone at all if Mills hadn’t dragged him. He had needed sleep, not dinner, but Mills had gone to the trouble of getting a table at Fuller Lodge and he felt he couldn’t refuse.
“Better to start off on the right foot,” Mills had said. “You can eat at the commissary anytime. The lodge is as good as it gets here.”
And in fact the food was good and gave him a second wind. The room itself, oversized and two stories high, with a running balcony and a massive stone fireplace at either end, looked more like the dining room of a national park lodge than the army-camp messes where most of Los Alamos ate. Every table was filled, so that the room buzzed with conversation and clinking flatware.
Connolly was surprised at how many people wore coats and ties. There was clearly no dress code-he could see occasional open shirts and even some Western-style pointed collars-but most people were in full suits, the women in bright, slightly dowdy dresses. Saturday night at the Faculty Club.
“If you want to do some scientist spotting, you might start with that table over there,” Mills said, nodding his head. “Let’s see how good you are.”
