Читаем Los Alamos полностью

“Yeah, I know. When they ran out of teeth they started messing up his hands, until I guess they finally decided he didn’t know anything. Just one of their little mistakes. So they got rid of him too. The rest is in there. It’s your standard refugee itinerary, with the usual red tape and crooks and helping hands until one day he’s drinking milkshakes in God’s country. And now this. Some life. You have to feel sorry for the bastard.”

“But you didn’t like him.”

“You trying to make me feel guilty? No, I didn’t like him. Maybe it wasn’t his fault, but deep down he had no use for anybody. He was the kind of guy who was always looking for some angle.”

“But good at his job? Loyal American and all that?”

Mills grinned. “Yeah, all that. He liked it here all right, but more because I think he hated everywhere else. Maybe it was too late for him to make friends. He wasn’t the kind of guy who just came by your room to have a smoke and shoot the breeze. Come to think of it, I think this is the first time I’ve ever been in this room. He hung out in the dayroom-he wasn’t a hermit or anything-but you never felt he was really enjoying it.”

“No close friends?”

“He may have. None that I knew about.”

“How about his social life?”

“By which you mean?”

“What you think I mean.”

“I don’t know,” Mills said slowly. “I always thought there might be somebody, but he never said anything. It was none of my business. It never occurred to me that it might be a man.” He looked up at Connolly. “I know what the police think, but there was none of that here. Ever.”

“Are you trying to tell me it’s safe to use the showers?” Mills let it pass.

“All right. What made you think he was seeing a woman? Or anyone?”

“His car. He loved his car. He was always trying to cadge extra coupons, and he used to love to show it off. You know, offer to take people into Santa Fe, things like that. And then more and more he was off by himself, so I figured he had a girlfriend somewhere.”

“How did he rate a car? I thought they were-”

“Oh, it was his car. He got it in ’forty-two, when you could still get them. A Buick. And the way he took care of it, it was probably as good as the day he drove it off the lot.”

Connolly looked around the room, imagining the furniture as immaculate pieces of engine. “I should probably take a look. Where is it now?”

“No idea. He took it down the Hill Saturday and neither of them came back.”

Connolly thought for a minute. “And now we only know where one of them is. Hard to lose a car, though. It’s bound to turn up someplace. I don’t suppose you know the local black-market heavyweights?”

“Black market? Never heard of it. That’s one thing we leave to the police.”

“The only thing, from the sound of it. All right, I’ll check it out tomorrow. I suppose it’s registered to a code number like all the cars here?”

Mills nodded.

“You guys like to make things easy.”

“Haven’t you heard? We’re the best-kept secret of the war. You might even say we don’t exist.”

“I know. I get paid to help keep it that way.”

“So what do you do, anyway?” Mills said. He caught Connolly’s look. “If I’m allowed to ask.”

“Office of War Information liaison to Army Intelligence. I’m a rewrite man.”

“What do you rewrite?”

“Dispatches. Speeches. News. Whatever the army thinks we should know. For a while there we didn’t have any American casualties-only the Germans got shot-but they’ve been better lately. Even they couldn’t keep it up indefinitely.”

“You mean you write propaganda?” Mills said, intrigued. “I’ve never met anyone who did that.”

Connolly smiled. “No. Not propaganda. That’s big lies, fake stories-the stuff Goebbels used to do. We don’t make anything up. You couldn’t, these days. We just look at it right, make people feel better about things. So they don’t get discouraged. We don’t have heavy casualties, we meet fierce resistance. A German advance is a last-ditch counterattack. No body parts, dismemberment, guts hanging out, just clean bullets. French villages are glad to see us-I think they must be, too. Our boys do not get the syph-or give it, for that matter. We don’t mean to bomb anybody by accident, so we never do. The army isn’t up to anything in New Mexico. There is no Manhattan Project.”

Mills stared at him, surprised by the casual cynicism of the speech.

“Just a few rewrites,” Connolly said. “For our own good.”

“How do you feel,” Mills said curiously, “about doing that?”

“How would you?”

Mills looked away, suddenly embarrassed.

“So in a way it feels good to be back on the crime beat again,” Connolly said lightly. “Except I’m not really here.”

Mills picked up his mood. “Town’s full of people this week who aren’t really here. If you want to do some ghost spotting, though, you might check out the party tonight. I assume you’re on a face-recognition basis with the world’s leading physicists. Otherwise it’ll be lost on you.”

“Only if they look like Paul Muni.”