Assassins Have Starry Eyes (3 page)

“Yes,” I said. “I’m fine. Doing very well. Everybody’s proud of me.”

“Excuse me for being a damn fool,” she said.

“I don’t mind,” I said. “I’m used to it.”

She made a face at me, and we looked at each other for a while.

I said, “You’re a screwball, Princess. You might have killed yourself.”

She said, “Look, let’s stop this horsing around, darling. Do you want me back?”

I said, “Getting divorced wasn’t my idea.”

“Is that all you’re going to say?”

I said, “The hell with you, Princess. I did all my crawling last summer. If you want to come back, come back, but don’t expect me to get on my knees and ask you.”

She said, “You don’t leave a girl much pride.”

I said, “You’ve got enough.”

She said, “Well, I’m coming back. Somebody’s got to look after you. And it’s going to work this time. I’m going to make it work. You’ll see. I’m just going to love this lovely old country with its lovely old dust storms and its fascinating old men in dirty old blankets and its enchanting old mud ruins… I think I’ll become an authority on old ruins. I might as well, everybody else is. What the hell are you laughing at?”

“You’re drunk, Princess,” I said. “Go over to the hotel and sleep it off.”

“There he goes,” she said. “After pleading with me for hours to come back to him, he’s trying to get rid of me already.”

FIVE

THEY LET ME come home for Christmas. It was the first time in my life I had been glad to leave picturesque old Santa Fe for Albuquerque, which is a big, impersonal, modern city; and one it’s hard to get very fond of. There’s no visible reason for its existence except tourist courts; and you can’t see what the hell a tourist would want with the place. Aside from a small plaza, known as Old Town, there are few historical attractions; the scenery is nothing out of the ordinary for that part of the country; and the much-advertised Rio Grande—the historians’ Rio Del Norte—is a string of mudflats much of the year, since most of the water is drained off for irrigation from early spring to late fall.

Despite these handicaps, you have one of the largest cities in the southwest sprawling over a God-forsaken stretch of desert along the banks of the little river that mostly isn’t there. The city is divided into two parts; there’s the Valley, and the Heights. The Valley is the river bottom; outside the downtown business district, green stuff will grow there if you water it with reasonable regularity. The Heights is the barren upland, or mesa, in the shadow of the abrupt Sandia Mountains east of town, and nothing grows there unless you soak it down good each night to keep it from blowing away in the morning. The bluff that divides the two sections is not precipitous, but it is quite noticeable, and the climatic difference is such that all Albuquerque weather reports give temperature readings for both parts of town. Since the Valley was taken up by the first comers, who weren’t so dumb, all the new developments, including ours, are on the Heights.

Our house was of the local, single-story, flat-room, cement-block, picture-window design, plastered to look vaguely like the native adobe. The resemblance was sketchy, since adobe forms soft outlines and rounded corners, while no amount of plaster will camouflage the rigid rectangularity of the blocks. The lots in this development were somewhat larger than average, giving me plenty of opportunity for healthful exercise with the lawn mower; the watering system for the lawn was built in, with sprinkler heads peeping through the grass every twenty feet or so, which made watering the lawn easier than it might have been. Our house was pastel blue; the one to the north was pale yellow; and the one to the south, baby pink. Somebody once told me that this represented authentic old-time southwestern atmosphere, but I looked it up and found that most early writers comment explicitly on the drab and monotonous appearance of New Mexico towns of their time. They were all one color, the color of adobe mud. Maybe this is an improvement.

I had never quite managed to think of the place as home. For one thing, I’d had nothing to do with picking it out or paying for it; for another, it was too much machinery and too little house. I was brought up in a big old Wisconsin farmhouse; to me, a home is three stories high and has an attic full of junk you don’t use, and a cellar full of junk you use, and a great big old coal furnace—if it has central heating at all; we lived without it for years—that has to be fed by a shovel in the hands of yours truly. To be able to get heat into the place without even striking a match, and wash the dishes merely by turning a button, is convenient to be sure, but it seems a little like cheating. So does the fact that the whole works was given to us as a wedding present by Natalie’s father.

“I know you want a plate glass mansion on a hill, Princess,” Mr. Walsh said in presenting us with the deed, “and this man of yours probably wants a shack out in the woods. While you’re arguing about it, you can live here. Don’t bother to tell me you don’t like it; I had it picked for its investment value, and you can sell it any time you decide what you really want. Here’s a check toward the furniture; I’ll let you choose that for yourself.”

That was three years ago, and I guess you get kind of used to a place in three years. Despite my reservations about it, I found myself remarkably pleased to see it again. Natalie’s little red sports car was in the driveway; she had driven ahead to get things ready. The ambulance boys wanted to cart me inside on the stretcher. I told them I had been making the perilous journey to the john for a couple of weeks now; I could manage to stagger into my own house.

There was a Christmas wreath with a big red bow on the front door. Before I reached the door, it swung open, and Natalie came out on the step in a short, shiny bright green dress with an inadequate bodice and a skirt that took up a lot of room and rustled when she moved. These old-fashioned hoops and crinolines the girls have been getting themselves up in of late look remarkably silly shopping in the supermarket, but they do have a nice, impractical, festive look for special events. She had a red ribbon in her hair and looked very Christmasy indeed. She took me by the arm.

“Brace yourself, darling,” she said out of the corner of her mouth. “It’s a goddamn surprise party.”

We stepped inside, and a lot of people jumped out of the corners with bells, ringing them madly and singing—you guessed it—“Jingle Bells.” At least it seemed like a lot of people after my cloistered hospital existence. Once the din had subsided and I had been deposited in a long chair with a blanket over my legs, the number reduced itself to three: Ruth and Larry DeVry, and Jack Bates.

Somebody put a vegetable-juice cocktail into my hand to give me something to hang onto, and Ruth said, “I hope you don’t mind, Greg. I think surprise parties are silly, and I know you’re tired after your long ride, but the boys were bound they were going to welcome you home, and Natalie seemed to think it would be all right if we didn’t stay too long.”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s swell, Ruth.”

“You will let us know the minute you get tired.”

“Sure.”

She said, “It
is
good to have you back. We’d have come up to see you in the hospital, only at first they wouldn’t let us and then, well, you know how it is just before Christmas…”

She went on into a Christmas-shopping story. Natalie, with a drink in her hand, was talking to Jack Bates in front of the fireplace, which did not look quite like the fireplaces of my youth. Modern design apparently requires that nothing be built to look like what it is. We have a waffle iron that’s streamlined for an air speed of approximately four hundred miles per hour. Similarly, our fireplace dispenses with a mantelpiece and has its chimney masonry concealed by discreet paneling so that, surprise, surprise, nothing but the fireplace opening itself peeks out at the room from another innocent wall.

Ruth was still talking. She was a thin and fairly tall girl, with straight brown hair cut in a bang across her forehead, and glasses that always had something fancy in the way of rims—tonight’s were striped gold and black. She wasn’t bad looking by a good deal, but she had been better looking when I knew them in Chicago. I’m no authority on feminine beauty, but I have observed that women who go too long without having children often tend to get a kind of intense and frustrated and dried-up look. Not that I was in a position to criticize. Our house wasn’t resounding to the patter of tiny feet. Ruth was wearing a long skirt of some heavy Indian weave in a yellow-and-black pattern and a brief black jersey bodice. A tremendous necklace of Indian silver occupied most of the space left bare; and there were similar bracelets on both arms. I did not dare comment on the stuff because she collected it, and I did not want to hear about the charming old squaw at the picturesque old pueblo who had sold it to her for only thirty per cent more than she would have paid for it at Marshall Field’s back in Chicago.

Friendships are funny things. Once I had been good friends with Ruth DeVry, as well as with Larry. In Chicago I used to practically live in their little apartment near the University. It seemed a long time ago. When I spoke of it to Natalie, she wanted to know if Ruth and I had ever exchanged kisses or other tokens of affection when Larry wasn’t around.

I said, “Keep it clean, Princess. They were just friends of mine, that’s all.”

“But didn’t you ever think of it?” she insisted.

I admitted that there might have been times in those long-lost days when slender, intense, artistic Ruth DeVry had seemed very attractive to a lonely bachelor; however, as a gentleman and a friend of her husband’s, I had concealed my feelings.

“That,” said Natalie, “is what you think. Why do you think she hates my guts?”

Well, that was Natalie’s theory, and I didn’t put much stock in it. The fact remained that Ruth got on my nerves nowadays; and I was glad when Natalie and Jack Bates came over to join us.

“Hi, Boss,” Jack said. “God, you look terrible.”

“You don’t look so good yourself,” I said. “What’s the matter, have the women been running you ragged?”

He was a big, blond guy in his late twenties who liked anything that took him outdoors—and apparently, although he did not talk about it, a few things that took him indoors, as well. Van Horn had taken me aside to caution me about this tendency of his several months ago. Nowadays it seems that a man can’t have any privacy at all in government service; even his love life comes under the heading of security information. Jack and I had struck up a hunting acquaintance in a duck blind on the Potomac while I was working in Washington; and when I needed a man with his qualifications, I remembered him. After all, physicists are a dime a dozen, but a man who can drop a passing canvasback at fifty-five yards is a jewel to be treasured and cherished.

If this seems like an irresponsible way of filling an important post, all I can say is that Jack Bates had been a life-saver in the lab, steady and conscientious and dependable; which is more than could be said for Larry DeVry who, despite our long-standing friendship and his brilliant qualifications as a mathematician, had turned out to be a hell of a prima donna on the job. Granted that it had been a tough assignment for him to turn around and work under me here, after seeing me through to my degree at a time when he was already an instructor at Chicago; nevertheless there had been times when I could see no sense to the temperamental performance he had put on. Even tonight, instead of joining in the festivities, he was browsing through my collection of classical records in an absorbed way, although he knew what was on the shelf as well as I did.

He was a small, dark specimen with glasses, who lived in a kind of fog of abstract numbers. It was typical of both of them that Jack had sent me, by way of Natalie, several batches of outdoors magazines in the hospital. Larry had sent me a box of candy. Only Larry DeVry would have thought of sending chocolate creams to a man convalescing from multiple perforations of the guts.

The three of us were always referred to by visiting celebrities as my “team.” In the Army, everybody is a team; and while we were not strictly speaking in the Army, we never got lonely for the sight of uniforms. As far as I’m concerned, this team business is a lot of bunk. I never did get anywhere in any sport that demanded co-operation with a lot of other men. I can overlook the comic aspects of a couple of guys trying to whale hell out of a little round ball, just for fun, on a golf course or tennis court; but when five or nine or eleven get together and make a religion of it, you can count me out for laughing.

But the way some of the visiting VIP’s talked, we at the Project were playing important ball in two leagues at once. There was the intramural league, in which the competition was represented by Los Alamos and various lesser centers of research around the country. The winner at this level would earn the honor of representing the country in the big, intercollegiate matches, to be climaxed, I guess, by the annual homecoming game against Soviet U. Now, I may not take my responsibilities as a Man of Science quite as seriously as some of my colleagues would like, but I’m damned if I’m going to belittle this atomic rat-race by treating it as a sport. So you’ll hear no more reference to “teams” from me.

Seeing the rest gathering around the guest of honor, Larry gave up sulking and came on over. “It’s good to have you back, Greg,” he said. “Maybe now we’ll get some action out of Washington. They’ve been sitting on that last report long enough.”

Ruth said, “Now, boys. No shop talk.”

Jack said, “Say, Greg, did you hear about Louis Justin?”

Ruth said, “Jack, I don’t really think Greg should be worried—”

“What about Louis Justin?” I asked.

Natalie, sitting on the arm of my chair, said, “Who
is
Louis Justin, anyway? Oh, I remember, that’s the one who had us to dinner up at Alamos and fed us enchiladas made with his own little hands.” She ran her fingers through my hair. “I’m glad you don’t like to cook, darling. There’s something queer about any man who messes around a kitchen.”

I said, “What about Louis Justin?”

“He’s disappeared,” Jack said. “Vanished. Evaporated. It’s very mysterious. Six million security men are tearing their hair out by the roots, one hair at a time. It takes longer that way. Meanwhile, no Justin.”

“How did it happen?” I asked.

“He was a ski-bug, as you probably remember. I suppose it was the Swiss in him coming out. Any time there was snow up on the mountain, Louie would be out there trying to break a leg. His record was pretty good; he managed to average one simple fracture a winter, with a compound thrown in every couple of years for good measure. Sprains and torn ligaments don’t count. Well, a week or so ago there was finally enough snow up in the Sangre de Cristos, and Justin headed up to the ski-run to try it out. He strapped the boards on his feet, took off, and was never seen again. Van Horn is having kittens, pink ones with chartreuse spots. It’s not really his baby—it belongs to the boys up at Alamos—but he’s checking this end and talking darkly about Burgess and Maclean, with a little Fuchs on the side.”

Larry shook his head. “It’s hard to believe. Of course, Louis always was an odd sort of person—”

“Oh, bunk!” Jack said rudely. “Don’t you go climbing on the little red bandwagon, too. Justin just cracked up like old Fischer, who dived into Chesapeake Bay last summer and let his boat sail home without him. Only Justin didn’t crack quite far enough to kill himself. God knows there are times I get sick of this business, too. It would be nice to take a powder to some pleasant island where the natives do nothing more unfriendly than cook and eat each other. I say chalk up another victim to the guilt of Hiroshima. Justin’s probably a thousand miles away, happily selling size-five shoes to ladies with size-nine feet.”