Trinity, p.2
Trinity, page 2
My last memory of him was when he was a kid, his face a moon in the car window, jutting out from the jumble of suitcases and lamps and spare pillows our mother thought to throw in there. Now he was grown and getting ready to ship out to fly planes over Japan, and the point he wanted to make never got made. That conversation just hung in the air around the back stoop, gathering the importance of conversations that never got finished.
After that, I had trouble sleeping. At work, I tried to stay focused. I remembered the major directives. Be overaware of the details, Pash said to us during training. Heed atmospherics. Your gut feeling is usually right. But after Warren shipped out, I was in a strange state. Not unhappy, exactly, just wakeful. Alert to the task of finding evidence.
Because, of course, at that point I had a good life. Even though it was wartime, I was happier than I’d ever been. I was lucky to be in the counterintelligence game, stationed stateside, living in a new house with my new wife. I liked our life together. May was so funny. So good at cards. After dinner, we sat together, and while she was racking up wins, she’d make clever jokes. And sitting there across from her, I was so happy, so I had to find whatever evidence I could find that Warren was wrong about what he’d suggested.
Then, after May and I went to bed, I often lay awake. That’s when I realized how often she got up in the night. More nights than not, she woke at some point and threw off the covers.
Silently, she’d rise from the bed. Then, gently, she’d pull the sheet back over her absence. Then she’d cross the floor and move out of the bedroom.
Once she’d closed the door, I sometimes heard water running in the hall bathroom. Other times I realized she must have gone somewhere else.
Sometimes she stayed out a long time. I lay there in bed, wondering where she’d gone off to. Did she sit at that kitchen table? Did she read a magazine in the armchair? Maybe she ventured farther. Maybe she was on the back stoop. Or maybe she was walking down the back alley, past the fences covered with jasmine, past the Millers’ dog in its doghouse.
Later, when she came back into the bedroom, she was always so quiet. And where, I wondered, had she learned to slip so silently into a room? When had she practiced those noiseless footsteps?
At her touch, the latch of the door was a cat’s tongue. I had to wait for an angle of moonlight from the hall window to open over the floorboards to let me know that she hadn’t left me.
What a relief it was, that pale fan of light spreading over the floor. Then closing again. And May’s shadow, returning to join me.
WHICH IS ALL ONLY TO SAY THAT MY HEAD WASN’T ENTIRELY STRAIGHT when I followed Opp into the city. I tried to note what I could. When the train pulled into the station, for instance, he was the first person out. I tried to follow, but I got stuck behind an old woman, and for a moment, out on the platform, I was almost worried I’d lost him.
But then there was that porkpie hat, sailing ahead. And then I’d maneuvered myself to see his whole body. He was leaning forward, walking with one hand stuffed in his pocket.
Even now, I can see it so clearly. The way he walked with that jerky stride, like a big marionette. He moved in a way that was slightly unnatural, as if someone else had the strings and was awkwardly controlling the movements.
Even so, he moved pretty quick. I had to pick up my pace not to lose him.
“THE FUCK’S HE WAITING FOR?” FRANK SAID WHEN I’D CLIMBED INTO the De Soto. His crossword was folded up on the armrest.
Opp had come to a stop in front of the station. He was standing beside a fat man who kept mopping his face with a handkerchief. I took another photograph. I focused on the space between the big man and Opp. I was looking to see if they touched each other, even just slightly. A brushed sleeve, some kind of contact. Some kind of sign revealing that the fat man was Opp’s contact.
But then a few minutes later, without so much as exchanging a glance, the fat man picked up his suitcase and exited the frame. When I put the camera down, I watched him maneuver himself into the low passenger seat of a black sedan that had pulled up in front of the station.
Frank lit a cigarette and leaned back in his seat. “That fat man looked like a woman,” he said.
I didn’t answer.
“Unfortunately that’s what happens to fat men,” Frank said. “At some point they become women.”
Oppenheimer was still on the curb. He was peering across the street with that same blinded look. I kept the camera trained on his face. I wanted to note the precise moment when there was a shift in his expression, so it was Frank who first noticed the girl.
“Who’s the piece?” he said.
I put the camera down. Frank tilted his chin toward the opposite sidewalk. The girl had stopped in her tracks. The other pedestrians were streaming around her, and she was smiling at Opp. She’d lifted one hand to get his attention. Then she stepped off the curb.
For a moment, before she got ahold of herself, she broke into a run. She was still waving. Then she slowed herself back down to a walk, but anyway her hand was still up in the air. It seemed sort of exposed. Left out in the open.
I turned back to Opp. He’d clearly seen her. In the meantime, he’d started smiling.
Or that’s the best way I can describe it: he’d seen her, he’d started smiling. But the smile wasn’t entirely natural. It didn’t seem to give him any real pleasure. It looked like his vision had been restored too abruptly, and, seeing her, a smile cracked open his face.
The girl walked toward him with her hand up, and he stayed where he was, one hand stuffed in his pocket, the other hand hanging free, that smile cracking his face like an eggshell.
When she reached him, she stood before him. They didn’t touch. But they obviously knew each other.
“There she is,” Frank said.
The girl was saying something we couldn’t hear. She was gesturing with her left hand. Opp looked down at her, and he was still smiling, but he kept his hand in his pocket. I thought I saw it twitch a few times, as though he wanted to pull it out into the open.
“You think she’s pretty?” Frank said.
I took a few pictures. Thick dark hair, pale skin, black dress with a looped bow at the collar. Tall, with a solid build, somewhat thick in the ankles. But her face was beautiful.
“She’s got a nice figure,” Frank said.
She was still standing in front of him. That smile was still wrecking Opp’s face. She was saying something and laughing, but after a while, her smile wavered. Then she wasn’t smiling. Then Opp tried to stop smiling, too, but it was as though his lip had gotten caught on a hook. It took him a second to get it back down.
And the whole time, she stayed where she was. She was looking up, squinting into the light. Or maybe frowning. Then with a small gesture, almost a shrug, she turned, and they walked off together, across the street and away down the sidewalk.
FRANK NOSED THE CAR FORWARD. “THAT’S REALLY A VERY FINE-FIGURED girl,” he said. “Sailing off down the street like a ship.”
We followed them for a couple of blocks. Opp still hadn’t looked over his shoulder. He was refusing, one hand thrust in his pocket.
“Prow riding high,” Frank said. “Flags flying.”
The girl had a pocketbook slung over one shoulder. She kept her left hand pressed against it, maybe to keep it from bumping her hip. That silk bow at her neck was fluttering slightly.
“Are we supposed to think she’s his handler?” Frank said.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Maybe she’s the bait. They send her in to get compromising photographs. By tomorrow they’re blackmailing him for nuclear secrets.”
I lifted the camera and focused on the space between Opp and the girl. They were walking close enough that sometimes her sleeve brushed against his. Then I let the camera drop.
“Or she’s just some woman he knows.”
“No way,” Frank said. He stubbed out his cigarette.
Opp and the girl had stopped walking in front of a green Plymouth coupe. She stepped off the curb, glancing back at him while she did.
On her way around the nose of the car, she stayed close to the body. It was a 1935 model, the one with big rounded tire hoods that always reminded me of the front paws of a lion.
“No way,” Frank said, repeating himself. “No chance in hell he came all this way, lied to a five-star general, and risked not only the entire national security apparatus but also his job just to meet up with some side piece.”
Opp was waiting by the passenger seat. His hat was pulled down over his forehead. He was looking down at the sidewalk. Then I remembered I’d seen his wife once, when I’d just taken the job.
It was one of my first assignments for Pash: watching a party Opp and his wife threw, the week before they left San Francisco. I had a list of CP members and their license plate numbers, and I checked them against the cars parked in front of their house. I found a fair number of matches. Bernard Peters, for one. And a few of Opp’s former graduate students. Then I just watched the guests, coming and going. When the party was finished, and everyone but Haakon Chevalier had gone home, Opp’s wife moved between rooms, picking up empty glasses.
I had her name on my list. Kitty Oppenheimer. She’d been a CP member once, though her membership was now defunct.
Through the windows, I could see her perfectly clearly. All the lights were still on in the house, and the shades hadn’t been drawn. She was a small woman, wearing a blue skirt and a sweater and bobby socks with her loafers. By the time she’d done a circle of the living room, she was carrying an armload of glasses.
For a while, she moved back and forth, between the kitchen and the living room. Opp and Chevalier had gone out to the back porch, and she was inside, cleaning up. Sometimes she stopped in the kitchen. Then she looked out at them through the window over the sink.
It’s a strange thing, watching people you’ve never met. You stand outside their house on the sidewalk, and after a while, you start to imagine you know them. A woman you’ve never spoken with in your life is suddenly a woman you’ve fallen in love with. Suddenly she’s a woman you’re waiting for on the sidewalk, hoping she’ll look out the window and see you.
That’s how I felt. Of course it didn’t make sense. I’d never even met Kitty in person. I had no idea what she was thinking when she collected those empty glasses, or when she carried them into the kitchen.
After that party, they left for the mesa and I never saw her again. But then I’d already spent a night watching her through her window, so I did sometimes wonder if she was adjusting. I wondered how she liked her new house. I found out somehow that they’d given her a place on Bathtub Row, where all the top scientists lived. That satisfied me, for a while. Then I found a few pictures. The houses on Bathtub Row looked pretty old, but not all that bad in the end. And I told myself even if the house wasn’t great, she would have a view of those pink mountains out back, and those weird horizontal piñons.
Then I started to wonder: Up there on the mesa, in that old, rickety house, did she sometimes move around the living room, picking up empty glasses?
Did she watch her husband and his friends outside the kitchen window?
I had no idea. All I knew about Los Alamos, besides those pictures I saw, was that it had once been a boys’ school. We’d gotten the owners to sell, then surrounded the campus with a barbed wire fence and built a few checkpoints. Some of the old school buildings were repurposed as dorms for the GIs and the WACs. They made the main building a lodge where the scientists could eat dinner and dance on Saturday nights. Then they built laboratories and a PX and a school for the scientists’ kids.
So that’s where Kitty was, in her house on Bathtub Row, surrounded by the barbed wire fence, when Opp came back to San Francisco. And that’s what I was thinking about when I watched Opp looking down at the sidewalk. And maybe that’s what he was thinking about, too, with his hat drawn down over his forehead, waiting on the passenger side for that girl to unlock the green Plymouth.
IT WAS GETTING DARK BY THAT POINT, BUT PEOPLE HADN’T TURNED on their headlights just yet. Before, while we were still on the train, heading out over the water, the sun had been gaudy. Now both sides of the street were in shadow.
When the girl got to the driver’s-side door, she fumbled around in her purse. Walking beside him, she’d seemed at once graceful and sturdy, but now, with her head down, rooting around in her pocketbook, she’d become clumsy. Her neck was exposed. She glanced up every so often, looking for Opp on the sidewalk.
Then I noticed there was a run in the ankle of one of her stockings. It was only small, but it was there, nevertheless. When she finally got ahold of the keys, she let herself in, then reached over and pulled up the lock. Opp folded himself into the seat, then closed his door, and we had a good view through the rear windshield.
They sat for a moment together, finally alone but not touching. He still wouldn’t look over his shoulder.
Then she reached out and touched the brim of his hat. Then she took it off. She held it gently in her lap, and looked down at it for a moment, and only then did he lean forward and kiss her.
I DON’T LIKE IT EITHER. I DON’T LIKE IT NOW, AND I DIDN’T LIKE IT back then: peering through the back windshield at the other side of a lie.
Some secrets aren’t meant to come out. Some, when they do, are only misleading. Sometimes an uncovered secret is worse than having no information to start with. It’s the portion of the iceberg that shows over the surface, which isn’t helpful at all, at least not for measuring the shape and mass of the iceberg.
Sometimes it only serves to point out how much you don’t know about the whole object. I didn’t know, for example, when I watched Opp and that girl through the back windshield, why Opp waited until she touched him first before he leaned forward to kiss her.
Or what she was thinking, when she put his hat in her lap. Or what she was thinking when she sat there for a moment, looking down at the hat, and he hadn’t yet kissed her.
And given those holes in the information I did have—that Opp had veered off from his preapproved plan; that he’d lied about where he was going; that he’d ended up with a girl who wasn’t his wife; that he’d gotten into her car; that he’d finally leaned forward and kissed her—given those holes, what did I know about that situation?
Some uncovered secrets only point out the need to uncover more secrets, especially when it comes to a man with a position like Opp’s. He ran off from the mesa, after all, having been granted the highest level of security clearance. And we were at war. Pearl Harbor had been attacked. Most of us believed that San Francisco or Los Angeles would be the next target.
Now the danger’s receded, so it seems prying, watching Opp and that girl through the lens of a camera. When you’re not living with an imminent threat, it’s easier to think that people should be permitted their secrets. But when Opp came back, we were on guard. We’d set aside our reservations.
That month, for example, was the same month a white mob rioted for three days in the black neighborhoods of Beaumont. But I only know that because when I came home from following Opp, I sat down for a drink at the table and saw that May had left the newspaper open. She had it turned to an article about Beaumont, buried somewhere deep in the back pages.
There was a water ring from her glass, just above the photograph. The caption mentioned that five black people were killed. Whole blocks were burned to the ground, and nobody was prosecuted.
Then, for a moment, I wondered why May wanted to read about Beaumont. I’d never even heard of the place before I found that ring on the paper.
Do you see what I’m saying? We were at war. Stories like that one got buried. That same month, in Los Angeles, a mob of servicemen on leave headed to a Hispanic neighborhood and started attacking residents. Five days later, thousands of civilians were involved in the fighting, but you didn’t read about that in the papers.
In San Francisco, when we followed Opp, everywhere you turned you saw banners: Japs Move Along, or Japs Don’t Let the Sun Set on You Here. There were foreclosure notices on every Japanese storefront, whole streets of houses abruptly abandoned, whole neighborhoods suddenly vacant except for a few Polish families wandering around like survivors.
But no one really paid much attention. We were focused on other threats. Violence on an international scale. Opp, for instance, ran off from the mesa in possession of secrets about a weapon that could evaporate a whole city. So you understand why we believed we had to collect whatever information we could.
Even if the information wasn’t complete.
Or even if it was of a personal nature. Even if it involved looking in the back window of that girl’s Plymouth coupe, and taking a photograph when he kissed her.
ONCE THE GIRL PULLED AWAY, SHE HUNCHED OVER THE WHEEL AND fumbled with the ignition. Frank waited for the Plymouth to edge out into traffic, then let a few cars get between us.
“Unfortunately,” Frank said, “I’m starting to think she might love him.”
“Why unfortunately,” I said.
“It always ends badly for the piece if she loves him.”
We followed her up Fremont Street toward Market. When we’d pulled up at a red light, Frank checked his mirrors. Then he leaned back in the seat. He cradled his head in his hands.
“By page sixty-three,” he said, “she’s looking lovely, draped over a desk, wearing a hole in her head instead of a hat.”
That’s the kind of story Frank liked to make out of a case. It got on Pash’s nerves. Pash was a dramatic person himself, but when other people took narrative license, it rubbed him the wrong way. He liked to insist we were in the business of uncovering facts. He got livid whenever Frank started talking like a gumshoe in a pulp. At first, he’d try to pretend he couldn’t hear what Frank was saying, but his face picked up that angry, rabbity look. His eyes started to bulge, and his mouth worked under his moustache. Eventually he’d start to issue directives.
