Free Stallion Gate by Martin Cruz Smith Page A

hole for a mouth, shirt and stomach burst open. A flying advertisement for Bataan.
    When the Japs called at night, “Hey Joe!” “Over here, Joe!” Joe often wondered whether Rudy Peña had ever thought there was some confusion, that they’d come for the wrong man.
    Without even trying to be quiet, Joe closed the magazine bunker door, snapped the padlock shut and followed his flashlight across the apron toward the Hill. He figured he owed the Army nothing.

8
    Oppy had taken over the house of the headmaster of the old Ranch School. It was a stone-and-timber cottage behind a stand of spruces at the end of Bathtub Row. The sun had just set over the Jemez, leaving the sky bright and the mesa dark. Joe had strapped on his Sam Browne belt and .45. His guard post was the garden.
    Seen through the windows the cocktail party had the quality of the pages of an illustrated book being idly turned. The Oppenheimers entertained infrequently and briefly, and when they did, only the highest level of the Hill’s scientific community was invited, so the guest list was basically European. Their faces were rosy with tension and drink. Joe saw Fermi and Foote arguing, the bemused Italian rocking impassively on his heels while the Englishman gesticulated with a highball. Fermi’s and Teller’s wives, two small, dark women, leaned close for a confidence on the sofa. The ensemble of faces changed from moment to moment, but everyone inside seemed to glow.
    “Sergeant, you look lonely.” Kitty Oppenheimer wascarrying a scotch out for him. With a smile, she would have been a pretty woman. Her brown hair was a tangle. She managed to look blowsy and sharp at the same time.
    “Thanks.” Joe took the glass.
    “Shoot to kill.”
    “I will.”
    “Shit.” She tripped on a boy’s scooter and landed on her back in a flower bed. “My zinnias. Nothing’s going right. Let me rest, for God’s sake.” She waved away Joe’s hand. “They’re singing the ‘Marseillaise’ again in there. Give me a smoke.”
    Joe set the drink on the grass, put a cigarette in her mouth and lit it. “You’re pissed as a skunk,” he said.
    “Goddamn right I am. Sergeant, what I meant to say when I came out was that you look lovely. You do. All dark and Byronic out here in the gloaming. She’s pretty, isn’t she, Joe? And young. He was engaged to her sister once, did you know that?”
    “Who?”
    Kitty rambled on. “He was a real hero to Anna, I suppose. Men do that to little girls. Then when the girls grow into women, the men try to stay romantic figures. There are any number of interesting psychological aspects. I have my breath back.”
    She gave Joe her hand and he pulled her to her feet. The story was that she was part European nobility, related to Admiral Canaris of the Abwehr.
    “Can you stand?”
    “I must return to my duties as hostess of the Royal Society of Prickless Physicists.”
    “Can you walk?”
    “The funny thing is, at a certain point you don’t worry about other women at all. If you’re smart, you worry about girls.”
    “Take a keep breath. Today Germany, tomorrow the world.” Joe picked a flower from her shoulder. “You can do it.”
    “I look like Ophelia.” Kitty had a throaty, corroded laugh. “I always thought I’d be Lady Macbeth.”
    After she returned to the house, Joe poured the scotch out. The party would be over soon and he’d go to Santa Fe to deliver the gelignite waiting in his jeep; he’d have his drink then. Besides, some guests were wandering into the garden now to take advantage of the evening, the hour between the heat of the June day and the chill of the mountain night. The altitude of the Hill was seven thousand feet. Voices seemed to carry, or maybe they were just louder. In the last month, since the defeat of Germany and death of Hitler, all the émigrés seemed wrapped in a rubicund patriotism, as if their Americanism had been confirmed. They’d make Trinity work, no matter what. He saw Kitty