Joseph Kanon - Los Alamos

“I don’t know. Fit the punishment to the crime. Maybe something like that.”

Oppenheimer looked at him, a question.

“No, not Karl,” Connolly said. “I think it’s about the bomb.”

But Oppenheimer didn’t want to hear it. “Nonsense.”

“He’s a scientist,” Connolly said. “Maybe for him it’s the elegant solution.”

Oppenheimer started at the words. “No,” he said wearily. “It’s an atonement. My God, what a waste. Does he think anybody’s watching?”

“He asks for you.”

Oppenheimer ignored him. “Groves wants to come,” he said again. Then he anticipated Connolly’s reaction. “I told him you were doing everything possible.”

“He doesn’t trust me?”

“He’ll have to. We’ll all have to, Mr. Connolly. Interesting how things work out, isn’t it? Do you think he’ll talk?”

“If he doesn’t, we’re at a dead end. Literally. It dies with him. Keep Groves away, will you? And no goons either.”

“I’ll do what I can. He has to come sometime, you know. We have to decide what to do.”

“Like what? There’s nothing to be done.”

“You don’t know G.G. There’s always something to be done. In fact, I suggest you start thinking about what- he’ll want ideas. I’d better go now. We’ve still got a gadget to build.”

“You don’t want to see Eisler?”

“I’ve seen him,” he said, and walked away.

So Eisler talked to Connolly. Some days he would lie staring at the ceiling, his eyes half-closed in a daze, and then there would be a rush of talk. Hamburg. A back garden. The damp rooms after the first war, when there was no coal. He talked pictures for Connolly, gabled roofs and tramlines and a summer lake. Then, as if a cloud had passed in front of the sun in his mind, block-long factories and slate skies and his father, the hacking cough of damaged lungs. A last attempt, even now, at precision. Connolly didn’t interrupt, hoping instead for a revealing moment. Sometimes he drifted into German, a secret testimony that left Connolly helpless. He had long since stopped answering questions. If Connolly drew him back to the alley at San Isidro, he would grow quiet, then speak of something else. He no longer enjoyed the verbal fencing. There wasn’t time to go over it again. He was talking out his life. Now Berlin. Trude. A hiking trip in the mountains. Connolly sat in the dim room day after day, listening for clues.

He saw Emma only once, on a Saturday when they drove up to Taos Pueblo for an outing, past Hannah’s ranch and along the high mountain road where the villages reminded her of Spain. After days with Eisler, the sun was too bright, glaring off the whitewashed walls, and after a while Connolly wished he hadn’t come. What if Eisler said something and there was no one to hear? He missed the puzzle of the stories. Eisler had wanted him to understand, but all he had learned so far was that his life was inexplicable. It couldn’t end in the alleyway. He had to leave a name, a description.

The pueblo itself was poor and dusty, filled with scratching chickens and occasional pickup trucks and quiet, resentful Indians selling blankets. The mud apartment blocks, windows outlined in bright blue, seemed like tenements, all clotheslines and old tin cans and rickety ladders leading to roofs. Maybe it had always been like this, he thought, the splendor of the Anasazi ruins no more than a leap of imagination. They sat near the fast, high stream that divided the two sides of the settlement, watching children crossing on the railless wooden bridge.

“Are you really all right?” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“People are talking. They say you’ve got it too. That’s why you’re the only one allowed. They’re afraid to let anyone else in.”

“No. I’m fine. I just talk to him, that’s all.”

“You mean you’re questioning him. I thought he was dying.”

“He is.”

“What about? Karl? You think he killed Karl? I don’t believe it.”

“Neither do I. But I think he knows who did.”

“Why would he?” she said, and then, when he didn’t answer, “Oh, I see. Don’t ask. Run along, Emma. Is it something terrible?”

“Yes.”

She shivered. “Then don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. I like him.”

“I like him too.”

“Then why do this to him? What do you actually do, anyway? Give him shots to make him talk? Keep at him till he breaks down? Like the films? God, Michael. Sitting there like a vulture waiting for him to die. Everybody deserves a little peace.”

Connolly was quiet for a minute. “He doesn’t want peace. He wants to talk. We just-talk.”

“About what?”

“His life. Germany. Everything. He’s dying, Emma. He wants somebody to talk to.”

“And you volunteered.”

“It just worked out that way. I can’t explain it now. I don’t like it either, you know. It’s a lousy way to die. It’s not fun to watch.”

Emma stood, picking up a stone and throwing it at the water. “I hate what you do.”

“I didn’t ask to do it.”

“You didn’t say no, either. And now you’ll never give up. Sometimes I wonder how far you’d go. Would you do anything?”

“No.”

“What’s your limit, then? Do you know?” She came back from the stream.

“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.”