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.