The Heat of the Sun (21 page)

Once it would have seemed monstrous that such destruction should be unleashed upon civilians. Today, air raids were commonplace: Guernica. Chungking. London. Rotterdam. Berlin. Coventry.
Dresden. The list went on and on. And Tokyo had been the worst so far.

We cut along Albuquerque’s broad, straight streets, then out again towards blue-green mountains. There was something fantastical in our surroundings, something unearthly, and I wondered
what the senator and a scientific base could be doing in these ancient Indian lands.

‘You’re happy?’ I asked Trouble. ‘In your role now?’

‘Role? Well, I like that!’

He had said we could talk properly. I wanted to ask him why he had come home. He had never explained. In Japan, I had believed him when he said he had renounced America. Perhaps the threat of
war, when he realized it was real, had shocked him at last out of his foolish course. But he had not only come back to America; he had returned to his family as if all had been forgiven. I wished I
could see into his mind, his heart. Perhaps, if I worked slowly, carefully, I could make him reveal himself. But I was not sure how to start.

He asked after Aunt Toolie, and I told him she was still happily married. ‘They have a place up in Carmel – Wobblewood West! I’m going for a weekend – next weekend, in
fact, if I still get that leave I’ve booked. I
do
get time off after looking over this base of yours, don’t I?’

Two days had passed since I received my summons.

I had been bewildered. ‘The senator wants me?’ I said. ‘But why?’

Trouble’s voice fizzed over long-distance wires. ‘Why do you think? A new job! How about that?’

For three years, nearly four, I had been deployed in propaganda. Trouble had secured me my commission, pulling strings in his new assignment as Senator Pinkerton’s right-hand man. When my
papers came through I was overjoyed, imagining I would spend the war in Washington, DC, with Colonel B. F. Pinkerton II perhaps only a stroll away down Constitution Avenue.

I had been disappointed. I wrote recruiting copy in an office in New York, then army information manuals in Richmond, Virginia. In Los Angeles, seconded to Paramount Pictures, I script-edited
war films and for a time served as publicity officer, and minder, for a Hollywood he-man; too drunk for the forces, he stumped back and forth across the country, selling war bonds.

The road climbed between rocks and pines.

We had just turned a corner when the bright day shattered. First came the report, sharp as a whip crack but twice as loud, then the streak through the air, zinging past my ear.

‘Duck!’ cried Trouble, and I jerked back.

He accelerated wildly. Another whip crack sounded. Dust whirled up from beneath our wheels. I was almost tossed from the jeep. Crouched low, I clung to the edge of the door as we squealed around
bend after remorseless bend, pain stabbing through my damaged leg with every lurch and jolt. The desperate ride had begun so suddenly; it was as if we had plummeted from one world into another, a
world of wild caprice where nothing mattered but speed and flight. We almost hurtled over the edge of a cliff.

When we slowed at last, Trouble arched back his neck and I saw his Adam’s apple straining in his throat. Whether he was frightened, I could not be sure. Flushed, I clambered back into my
seat.

‘What
was
that?’ I asked, when I could speak again.

‘Sharpless, please’ – he turned to me, earnest – ‘don’t tell the senator. Please, just don’t.’

‘What?’ I said. ‘I don’t even know what happened!’

He put on speed again. I feared he would say no more, but after I had sat in silence for some moments, numb with shock, he said flatly, ‘Sniper in the rocks. Must I spell it
out?’

‘Well,
yes
. Why do I get the feeling this has happened before?’

‘Just don’t tell the senator. Please, Sharpless.’

We drove on down the dusty road.

Los Alamos lies on a verdant mesa some seven thousand feet above sea level. The first sentry post had been several miles from the base, a stripy barrier beside a hut stuck
alone in the woods, where two crew-cut privates loitered on duty, rifles at the ready. Closer to the base came two further checkpoints: gates in fences topped with wire, opening the way to a
collection of huts and hangars sprawled across the mesa like a boomtown on Mars.

‘Main Street,’ Trouble announced as we passed between stores and bars. Another jeep, driven by a corporal, nosed by us with a honk; a becalmed truck, juddering smokily, with a cargo
of crates stamped us army, blocked half the road; men, some uniformed, some in lab coats, and one or two secretarial-looking women crossed Main Street here and there, but the place had about it a
sense of sleepiness, as if, in these weird mountain lands, human imperatives could not count for much. None of this is permanent, the mesa seemed to say; boomtowns turn into ghost towns soon
enough.

The base, Trouble informed me, had been built on the site of a school for boys called the Los Alamos Ranch School. Commandeered by the military some years before, the original school, with its
stately timber buildings, could be glimpsed between the mean, low clutter that had overwhelmed it.

‘You can bunk with me,’ he added, pulling up beside a low galvanized-iron hut. Our route had taken us some distance from Main Street, weaving between lines of similar huts, and I
wondered how I would ever find this one by myself. The ground outside was dusty, deeply rutted. Duckboards did service for sidewalks; laundered clothes, unstirring in the heat, hung on lines
between the huts, and electricity poles jutted untidily skywards.

‘You’re not telling me the senator lives in one of these places?’

‘Don’t be silly. The VIPs are in the old school buildings. Not for us, alas. Space is tight up here.’

We made our way into a single-room apartment. The heat under the tin roof was savage. Sunlight pressed behind a drawn blind, and two metal cots, made up precisely, stood side by side; there were
lockers and simple chairs, but no strewn magazines, no empty beer bottles, no ashtrays filled with butts. On the sill beneath the window was the room’s sole ornament: a twist of branch with
two jutting twigs, a desiccated piece of debris retrieved, perhaps, from a desert roadside.

‘This one’s yours.’ Trouble thumped down my knapsack on a cot. ‘Tonight, it’s dinner with the senator. But you’ll want to wash up, I guess. I’ll show
you to the showers.’

‘Shouldn’t you tell me what all this is about?’ I said.

‘What, and steal the senator’s thunder?’

Curiosity consumed me, but when I returned from the showers Trouble had vanished, leaving a message in neat handwriting, telling me that something was up – some sudden duty – and our
dinner must be postponed. I found it strange to think of Trouble as an important, responsible man.

That night I found my way to the mess hall alone, and had applied myself to a surprisingly edible rabbit stew when a fellow across the table said to me, ‘I know you. You’re one of
us.’

The voice suggested Brooklyn, and the face that blinked into mine belonged to a journalist I had met some years back, a plump, round-faced fellow who looked perpetually eager to please, like a
schoolboy stabbing up his arm to answer questions in class before any other pupil had a chance.

‘Sharpless, ain’t it? I’m Miller, remember? You’ll be replacing McKenna, then?’ he asked me.

I suppose I looked blank.

‘Tell you fuck-all, don’t they?’ cracked a dishevelled, rangy fellow who bore some resemblance to the actor Robert Mitchum, complete with waggling, ill-made roll-up in a corner
of his mouth. ‘And once you’re here, you can’t go back. Unless you do a McKenna.’

‘Can’t?’ I said. ‘What is this place, a prison?’

‘Hush-hush. Stands to reason, don’t it? McKenna, he went loopy. Let’s hope you don’t do the same.’

‘Raving, tearing his hair,’ said Miller. ‘This foul-mouthed bastard’s Meyer, by the way – and
that
one,’ he added, pointing to a young man with
thinning blond hair and round gold-rimmed spectacles, ‘is Maybee – Miller-Meyer-Maybee. Think of us as the Andrews Sisters. Maybee’s LaVerne.’

‘Yes, quite an amusing little corps we are,’ said Maybee in a Boston Brahmin voice, looking me over with patrician eyes. ‘I prefer to call us the End of the World Archivists
– I’m an historian,’ he explained, not without pride, and asked me what my own ‘discipline’ might be.

‘Propaganda, ain’t it?’ said Miller, and Maybee, somewhat sourly, pursed his lips.

‘Nobody’s told me a thing yet,’ I said. ‘I’m not even sure what all this is
for
.’

Meyer, or Robert Mitchum, laughed. ‘Fucking hell, you really haven’t heard of the Manhattan Project?’

Maybee rolled his eyes. ‘It
is
secret, isn’t it?’

‘What’s going on in Manhattan?’ I said, foolishly.

‘Not Manhattan – here! It’s a code name.’ Meyer called down the refectory table, ‘Hey, fellas, this fucker don’t know about the Big One!’

‘The Bomb.’ Miller puffed out his plump cheeks, then expelled a spitty explosion. Droplets sprayed my face. ‘It’s the ultimate weapon, ain’t it? Ming the Merciless!
Just one and we can flatten a city. Enough of them, we can wipe out the world.’

Startled, I looked between grinning faces.

‘I told you,’ said Maybee, ‘we’re the End of the World Archivists.’

‘End of the Japs, anyway,’ said Miller.

‘Hah! If the fucking thing works,’ said Meyer.

‘It will,’ said Maybee. ‘And take the world with it!’

Meyer spat on the floor. ‘I’ll believe it when I see it. The cash they’ve wasted on this thing, you wouldn’t fucking believe,’ he said to me. ‘Billions! And
all because of some rumour the Krauts were building one too. So we had to get there first.’

‘But the Germans have surrendered,’ I said.

‘Noticed that, did you?’ said Miller. ‘He’s sharp, this one!’

I wanted to know more, but a girl appeared between Meyer and Maybee and asked, with a hand on the shoulder of each, if they would be at the dance that night. Meyer offered up his Mitchum smirk
– ‘Sure thing, honey’ – and Maybee, who seemed awkward with women, blushed bright red.

I thought I might as well go to the dance. Confused thoughts filled my brain as I tagged along after Miller-Meyer-Maybee. In a noisy hall, leaning against the bar, I drank too many beers and
watched the base’s too few girls whirling in the arms of excitable young men. I wished they would dance to something other than Miller’s namesake. Glenn Miller was missing; his plane
had vanished somewhere over the English Channel, but still he haunted every jukebox in America, a ghost pressed into wax. Again and again a girl punched in the numbers for ‘Yes, My Darling
Daughter’, and no one seemed to mind.

Maybee turned his attentions to me. And was I, he asked, the Sharpless who had worked with that left-wing photographer fellow, Augustus Le Vol? He said he had one of Le Vol’s books at
home, and I was surprised: I had not thought the Boston Brahmin would take much to Le Vol’s work, but it seemed he admired him aesthetically, if not politically.

‘So what’s Le Vol doing in the war? Still a red?’

I wished I could change the subject. There was nothing to say: Le Vol had sailed to China and never come home. I had tried and tried to find out what had become of him, but Le Vol, like Glenn
Miller, might have vanished into the air. If he had stayed on in China, I only hoped he had kept out of Japanese hands. After Pearl Harbor, with the American fleet safely out of action, a lone
white man in East Asia would have been in constant danger. Le Vol might have been in a prison camp or dead.

Only after I had left the dance did I realize there were no street lamps on the base. I stumbled in the dark, tripping once in a pothole and once on the edge of a duckboard.

When I got back to our hut, Trouble was not there. I resolved to wait up, but lay down on a cot – his, not mine – and fell asleep. I dreamed: reveries of Asian faces screaming out of
fire, buildings falling and puffed cheeks exploding with spit, while all the time ‘Yes, My Darling Daughter’ played.

Not until my second evening did I meet the senator. Trouble accompanied me to one of the old school buildings. Perhaps it had been the headmaster’s house; some distance
from the rest of the base, it was a solid, sprawling bungalow surrounded on all sides by broad verandas.

A cocktail party was in progress when we arrived. Someone played a piano; privates acted as waiters, and faces smiled at Trouble as he guided me through the crowd, introducing me to generals,
chiefs of staff, Washington insiders. Names blurred and so did features, but by the time I was ushered into the senator’s presence, I had practised my banter sufficiently to respond to him
with ease.

I had followed Senator Pinkerton’s career with fascination. Everywhere in the war, I detected his hand. When America’s battered industries were galvanized into life by military
demand, I could hear his patriotic words ringing out in the Senate, demanding that it be so; when, after a shocking series of Japanese victories, our fortunes turned in the Battle of Midway, I knew
the senator’s wisdom had been at work; I detected it too, as US troops pushed further into the Pacific, beating back the enemy from island after island.

One evening in a newsreel theatre, I watched an item about Japanese Americans. Herded from their houses, they were corralled into trucks and taken to internment camps; then, filling the screen,
came the big-necked, porcine head of Senator B. F. Pinkerton (Democrat, New York), the policy’s architect and most ardent supporter. With astonishment, I thought of Trouble’s role in
this, working coolly at his father’s side.

The great man introduced me to the party surrounding him: this one, General Somebody; that one, Professor Someone; Miss Something – had I met Miss Something?

‘And Bob,’ he said, turning to a lean man on the fringe of the group, who appeared, I thought, a little out of place. ‘That son of mine’s introduced you to Bob,
surely?’

‘Oppenheimer,’ said the lean man, and I shook his hand.