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.
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.”
Connolly glanced at a tall man, his apple cheeks bellowing out with the draw on his pipe. He had the white hair and gentle, puckish face of a thin Nordic Santa Claus.
“Niels Bohr,” Connolly said. “I’m impressed.”
“Nicholas Baker. Code names only, please. All physicists are ‘engineers,’ and he is Mr. Baker.”
“I’ll try to remember.” Connolly grinned. “Who else?”
“Henry Farmer.”
Connolly thought for a second. “Of the Italian Farmers?”
“You’re catching on.”
“Is he here too?”
“He’s the one with Mr. Baker.”
Connolly looked at the modest figure with thinning dark hair, bent over to catch the soft-spoken Baker’s words. Fermi. “A penny for their thoughts.”
“You wouldn’t understand them even if you heard them. You’ll get used to that too.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Forever. Since ’forty-three. It was a lot smaller then. When I first got here, we only had the old school and a few buildings in the Tech Area. One telephone line. The road up the mesa was still dirt.”
“The good old days?”
“Not really. For the scientists, maybe. They were gung-ho-real pioneer times for them. For the rest of us it was-” He searched for a word. “Quiet. You felt like you’d dropped right off the edge and nobody knew where you were.”
“Nobody knows now.”
Mills shrugged. “Like I say, you get used to it. And of course things got busier and busier so you didn’t have much time to think about it. I suppose it’s a little like overseas, except nobody gets killed.”
“Until now.”
“Yeah, until now. Not exactly a war casualty though, was he?”
“No.” Connolly shifted. “What did you do before the war?”
“Lawyer.”
“Is that how you ended up in security?”
“I wish I knew. Maybe they thought law meant law enforcement. They aren’t famous for being logical. Maybe they just thought I’d make a rotten soldier and I’d be better off pushing paper somewhere.”
“Criminal law?”
“Estates and trusts. I know, boring, but you’d be surprised. Besides, it makes the firm a ton of money and everybody wants to marry you.” He grinned. “They don’t even notice the hair,” he said, running his hand along his balding top.
“But nobody did, I take it,” Connolly said, gesturing toward Mills’s bare finger.
“Not yet. But wait till I make partner.”
