“I’m not a cop.”
“No, something else. God, I wish he would tell you. Put an end to all this. We could just be ourselves. What’s the difference, anyway? We could go away somewhere together.”
Connolly stared ahead. A dog was barking on the bridge, herding the children across.
“Is that what we’re going to do?” he said.
“I don’t know. Is it?”
He got up and took her arm. “If that’s what you want, yes. We’ll do whatever you want.”
She looked up at him and nodded. “But not now.”
“No. When it’s finished.”
Eisler got worse that night. The morphine had made him itch, and, unconscious, he had scratched himself over and over, so that in the morning his arms were covered in jagged red lines. Connolly found him tethered to the bed with narrow strips of gauze, and when he reprimanded the nurse and gently untied the arms, thin as sticks, he felt Eisler look up at him, momentarily coherent and grateful. “Robert,” he said, his voice little more than a croak. “Is Robert coming?”
“Later,” Connolly said.
Eisler nodded. “He’s very busy,” he said, then drifted off again.
Later that afternoon they talked a little, but Eisler’s mind wandered. He no longer cared about his charts or his own disintegration. He lived now entirely in memory, sustained by an IV dripping into his arm. When Connolly asked once about Karl, he seemed to have forgotten who he was. He went back to Gottingen, a lecture about the instability of negative charges. Connolly fed him small pieces of ice, and when the ice began to melt it ran down his chin, his cracked lips too dry to absorb the moisture. The gold crown on one of his molars had become radioactive, causing the tongue to swell on one side. When they capped it with a piece of lead foil, a last tamper, his gums bled. Warm June air blew in through the window, but the smell, resistant, hung over everything. Connolly no longer noticed. He watched Eisler’s face, waiting. When Eisler gasped, involuntarily wincing in agony, Connolly knew it was time to ask for another injection, and then he would lose him again until the pain had soaked up the drug and brought him back.
“You’ve got to see him,” he said to Oppenheimer. “He asks for you.” And when Oppenheimer didn’t reply, “He won’t last the week. It would be a mercy.”
“A mercy,” Oppenheimer said, examining the word. “Have you learned anything?”
“It’s too late for that.”
“Then why do you stay?”
Connolly didn’t know what to answer. “It won’t be much longer,” he said.
Oppenheimer did come, in the morning, with the sun cutting through the slats in the blinds. He took off his hat and stood for a minute at the door, appalled, then forced himself to cross to the bed. Eisler’s eyes were closed, his face immobile, stretched taut as a death mask.
“Is he awake?” he said in a low voice to Connolly.
“Try,” Connolly said.
Oppenheimer took Eisler’s hand. “Friedrich.” He held it, waiting, while Eisler’s eyes opened.
“Yes,” Eisler said, a whisper.
“Friedrich, I’ve come.”
Eisler looked at him, his eyes confused. “Yes. Who is it, please?”
Oppenheimer’s face twitched in surprise. Then, slowly, he let the hand go and stood up. “Yes?” Eisler said again vaguely, but his eyes had closed, and Oppenheimer turned away. He faced Connolly, about to speak, but instead his eyes filled with tears.
“Don’t go,” Connolly said.
“He doesn’t know me,” Oppenheimer said dully, and turned toward the door.
Connolly went over to the bed to wake Eisler, but when he looked back again Oppenheimer had gone, so he dropped his hand to his side.
“Yes?” Eisler said faintly, returning.
“It was Robert,” Connolly said, but Eisler seemed not to have heard.
“Robert,” Eisler said, as if the word meant nothing. Then his eyes widened a little and he felt for Connolly’s hand. “Yes, Robert,” he said, holding him.
There were two more days, as bad as before, and now no one else came at all. Connolly sat for hours by the bed, listening for breathing. Once Eisler came back, his voice clearer and his eyes steady, not moving as they usually did to avoid the pain.
“What is troubling you, Robert?” Eisler said, for Connolly was always Robert now.
“Nothing. Get some sleep.”
“No more questions? What happened to the questions? Ask me.”
“It’s all right.”
“Ask me. Can’t I help you?”
“You remember Karl?”
“Yes,” he said vaguely. “The boy.”
“The man you met-he was wearing workboots.”
“Workboots? I don’t understand.”
“Workboots. On the Hill. It doesn’t fit.”
“I don’t understand, Robert. Why are you asking me these things? What about the test? Trinity. Be careful of the weather. The wind-the particles. The wind will spread everything—”
“We’ll be careful,” Connolly said.
“Good,” he said, closing his eyes again. “Good.”
In a minute Connolly tried again. “Friedrich,” he said. “Please. Tell me. Who was driving the car?”
Eisler lay quietly, his eyes fluttering. “They stopped at the river, Robert,” he said, opening them. He looked at Connolly, troubled and confused, and Connolly leaned forward to hear him. But it was another river. “The Russians. They stopped at the river. Until the fighting was over. They wouldn’t cross. They waited till everyone was dead.”
Connolly knew then that the Hill had slipped away for good. He had lost. “In Warsaw,” he said, giving in.
“In Warsaw, yes. They waited. Till everybody was dead.”
Connolly watched his eyes fill with tears, a spontaneous sorrow. He wondered if everyone ended this way, overwhelmed with regret.
“Can you imagine such a thing?” he said. “The Russians.” Then, his eyes moving irrationally, he grabbed Connolly’s hand. “Don’t tell Trude.”
Connolly patted him soothingly. “No. I won’t.”
Eisler lay back, his eyes closed again, but he kept Connolly’s hand. Connolly, helpless to remove it, sat there feeling Eisler’s fingers pulse faintly, then clutch and relax, as if he were touching what was left of his life. Of all the strange things that had happened to him since he had come to Los Alamos, this seemed to him the strangest. The sour room. The swollen hand holding on to someone else he thought was there. The unexpected intimacy of death, confiding in an imposter. When Eisler clutched him tightly toward the end and said, “Was it so terrible what I did? Was it so terrible?” he knew he meant not this last betrayal but the ruined faith of a lifetime.
“No, not so terrible,” he lied, giving comfort to the enemy.
14
Groves used the funeral service as the excuse for his trip. The entire Hill closed down for the afternoon, eerie in the sudden stillness, like a forest in the absence of birds. Connolly had never realized before how noisy the place usually was, voices and motors and the clangs of the metallurgy unit vibrating in a constant hum. Now you could actually hear the wind blow across the mesa, a character in the creation myth. It was even quiet in the crowded theater, only a few whispers and scraping chairs until Professor Weber’s quartet filled the room with some mournful Bach. Afterward, Oppenheimer and Groves sat on the stage with the speakers, Groves in his tight, bullying uniform
