London, the first days of February 1950: the quietest man on the old post confesses, and the serious men with maps and timetables promised in the first bundle begin walking every mile his Buick ever ran to Santa Fe. The author told the reader once that one of those miles was his; this is the number in which it is called for. —Ed.
They arrested him on a Thursday. The papers had it Friday morning, and Zaremba read it over the partition before I had my coat off: a doctor of the British atomic establishment, held in London for handing the bomb to the Russians, and the name, spelled right the first time, was Fuchs.1
I sat down with some care, my knees having voted to do it in any case, and looked at the photograph. Pale, spectacled, the forehead going up early into the scalp, the collar of a man who irons his opinions. Quietest customer on the post, Frankie had said, dealing his card off her tray five years back, and telling me in the same breath where he kept his car.
Kessler read the column standing, like a man reading a sentence passed on a relative. "I knew this kind in Kiel," he said at last. "The certain ones. You will find he took nothing for it." He was right; the man had handed over the sun for no fee but the satisfaction of a theory, and it is the men who steal on principle you can never buy back, the doctrine he did it for being worth rather less than the tires on his own Buick.
Miss Dunn asked had I known him. Every face in the office made room for the answer, my legend being furniture by then.
"Everybody knew him," I said. "Nobody knew him. He was the man who drove you to town on Sundays."
Which was as true as anything printed in America that day. I said it watching a drop of snow-melt come off my hat brim onto the blotter; the room had too many eyes in it, and the drop had none. I had ridden that car most Sundays of a season. One Sunday of April I had driven it myself. And past that Sunday stood four minutes I did not propose to be asked about by anyone in this life.
The country took it at the top of its voice. By the weekend the offices that had cleared the man seven times on two continents had convened to discover who had cleared him, and had cleared themselves first, the security trade being the only American line of work where missing the burglar gets you a bigger office to miss the next one from.
Sennett's wire found the office Monday, in the old dialect: LONDON MAN WAS YOUR POST. CAR IS KNOWN. RIDERS BEING LISTED. YOU WERE A PASSENGER. REMAIN ONE. VOLUNTEER NOTHING. WRITE NOTHING. I burned it in the ashtray, and the smoke did less for me than usual; Sennett's grammar had said what his discretion would not. The Bureau already had the car.2
Corbett telephoned Wednesday night, the voice a half-tone high again.
"They came back, Jay. A different two. All of it Sundays, all of it the car. Who rode, which weeks, whether he talked shop at the wheel."
"And you said?"
"That he never talked anything, and that I rode twice. They're building a passenger list. I put you on it; everybody will; you rode every week."
"That's what lists are for. Passengers are wallpaper, Corbett. Ride easy."
"One thing more they asked." The line stood quiet a second. "Whether he ever lent it out. I said he'd sooner lend his spectacles."
"He was particular," I said, "about being back by six," and put up the receiver before my mouth could add to anybody's record.
That night I did the sums with the lamp off. The gate book would show the doctor on the Hill the second Sunday of April, 1945. And in Santa Fe that noon the watchers, my own dear watchers of G-2, who entered me every week under the heading that did more for my safety than my clearance ever did, had entered me once more: arrived alone, by motorcar. Paper testifies for whoever holds it last, and the Bureau now held my alibi with the mile inside it, the way amber holds the fly. Of my three gifts, the first had built the legend, the third was ringing like a firehouse, and the second, the knack of standing next to the right man, had billed me at last: I had stood next to him so faithfully I had ended holding his car keys. From Anton, on the other set of books, nothing came all winter, and nothing needed to; a creditor can rest while the newspapers dun you for him.
Tuesday's three lines came as ever: the lake was iron, the Averys were home from Arizona, and Daddy said the English business proved what he had always said about foreigners in a works. That month there was a fourth line. "They can't think it was anyone nice, darling." The needles, as ever off that hand, gave me nothing.
Dow came back the last week of February, same young man beside him, no afterthoughts this time; the afterthoughts came first. I had left the gyroscope on the desk where his thumb had found it in November, on the rule that a room once searched by eye must never afterward look tidied. I watched him see it, and we understood each other before anybody sat down.
"You rode with Dr. Fuchs," he said. "Sundays."
"Most Sundays of a season, along with half the Tech Area; nothing else went down that didn't smell of the bus."
"What did he talk about, driving?"
"Whatever you asked him, exactly, and then he stopped. Mostly the mountains did the talking."
The young man wrote it down. Dow let the room go quiet, and I let it stay quiet, having had that trick from a better man years before.
"Second Sunday of April, '45," he said. "The doctor never leaves the Hill; the gate has him. No lift runs; three men remember walking down and finding no car. And you are in Santa Fe by noon, Mr. Klipspringer. Alone. Arrived by automobile. Whose automobile?"
I will hand the apprentice the rule, gratis, it having cost me a good shirt that winter: when the fact is already in the other man's hand, volunteering the shameful half of it is not volunteering. It is dressing.
"His," I said. "The doctor's."
The pencil stopped.
"He lent it to you."
"Before I had the sentence finished. That was his way with the car; the whole mission borrowed off it. I wanted it for a birthday in town, and I had it back by six, tank as I found it. The clutch took up high," I said, "and the horn didn't work. You may check the horn."
"A birthday." Dow turned his hat a quarter on his knee. "Whose?"
"A lady's. You'll have her under a heading already, if you have that spring's book. Crews. Vera Crews, a widow, of Fort Worth." I gave it up with my eyes on the young man's pencil, chewed at the end like a schoolboy's, my shirt going through at the back where nobody could write it down. "I'd take it kindly if the lady got the courtesy the heading calls for. My wife keeps well, thank you."
"What did the day come to, in town?"
"Lunch off the plaza. A drive out the Taos road and back. Bells and gasoline." All of it true, and all of it the case of the watch, not the works; nobody asked what the car did in its first four minutes off the plaza, and the truthful answer I had ready went home unspent. I have never been gladder to waste a preparation.
Dow stood at the end with his hat on. "The doctor's answering questions of his own over there. In time our people will put him some of ours. Borrowers, for instance. He's said to have a memory."
"He'll tell you the clutch took up high," I said, and saw them down the steps at the gait of a man with nothing in the house. Then I went back inside and was sick into the scrap basket, holding my own tie out of the way, a service I had performed for other men and never before for myself.
On the first of March they tried him at the Old Bailey, and the whole of it, confession to sentence, took ninety minutes, which is less time than the car ever took to Santa Fe.3 Fourteen years, the most the statute would carry, the Russians having been our gallant allies at the hour the goods went over. Sennett wired the same week: FOURTEEN YEARS. VISITORS WILL CALL ON HIM IN SPRING. RIDERS BEING RESEEN. BE DULL.
Be dull. I could do better than dull; I could be entered. A man missing from the record the season it matters is a fugitive, and a man present in it on his own business is a bore, and the Bureau does not collect bores. So Miss Dunn typed me an itinerary in carbon, and the bomber plant at Fort Worth received, that Friday, the hero of the atomic desert, come to sell arithmetic by the cabinet. The handshake did most of the selling. And on the Saturday I took coffee on a hotel mezzanine with a lady who was Mrs. Ordway now, of Rivercrest, her second husband being in insurance and the vestry.
"You didn't come to Texas to sell sums," she said. "You sold them Friday; it was in the Star-Telegram. You look like a man who's been sleeping in his good clothes."
"Vera. There will be two polite young men in good hats, and they'll have your name and mine in one sentence five years old."
She gave her coffee its full turn. "That little doctor. The spy. He was off your post, wasn't he." Then, over the cup, with the eyes that held one subject and every acre adjoining: "The car, Jay. The Sunday you came down driving that awful borrowed thing with the dead horn, and swore at a wool wagon the length of Palace Avenue. Whose was it?"
There it sat, across a coffee service in Texas: my mile, alive in a memory I could reach, dead horn, wagon and all, wanting only its owner's famous name. If she could say it to me, she could say it to a hat.
"A man on the post," I said. "It matters to nobody now, and it matters a great deal to me that it go on mattering to nobody."
"Mm," she said. "And what is it I remember, when the hats come?"
"Whatever is true and kind to Mr. Ordway. Lunch. Bells. A corporal who paid you attention the year the whole state was in uniform and no fun."
"Mr. Ordway is a warden of the vestry," she said, "and I am on two committees of the spring bazaar, and I have never in my life been able to tell one automobile from another."4 She set the cup down square on its ring. "When is my birthday, Jay?"
"The second Sunday of April, nineteen forty-five."
"It is in October." She looked out at the street awhile, and I let her. "But I was feted once in April, by a corporal with a borrowed car, and I will want flowers this April, and every April after, for as long as I am asked to remember things carefully."
I opened my mouth on some further management, and she was ahead of me.
"Don't," she said, gloves going on. "There is nothing I want to know, Jay. No man in a hat can buy that off me, and neither, dear, can you."
I rode home on the Texas Chief doing the spring's accounts, which I kept where I keep everything, nowhere. Item: one mile, called at my own front room and paid on the spot, dressed as a lady's birthday, sin being a bill the collectors mark settled without checking the arithmetic. Item: one lady, remembering nothing, at a rent of flowers every April for life, cheap at forty times the florist. Item: my name entered in the file of the age, one line, passenger and borrower, no action taken; yet is the word a man learns to hear inside "no action taken." And item, carried forward: in a cell across the water, the most exact memory I ever put a question into, which answered just what was asked and stopped, and it held my mile entire: the birthday, the six o'clock, the tank as found. Nobody had asked it the question. In the spring the serious men would sail over with their maps and timetables and begin on his miles in earnest,5 and I had personally invited them to check the horn. The first flowers went to Fort Worth in March, ahead of schedule; I have never since been late with any debt I could pay in flowers. The other kind was walking backward toward me out of New Mexico, a mile at a time.
Klaus Fuchs, by then head of theoretical physics at the atomic establishment at Harwell, was questioned at intervals from 21 December 1949 by William Skardon of the Security Service, whose method was courtesy continued until it worked; what began the questioning could be produced in no court, and is described in the notes to the last number. Fuchs confessed on 24 January 1950, signed a formal statement in London on the 27th, and was arrested on 2 February after being invited up to town on other business. The date was a Thursday. The reader who has learned to distrust the author's Thursdays is advised that this one belongs to the calendar. —Ed.
The car is historical, as the first bundle reported: a secondhand Buick, one of the few private automobiles on the mesa, lent about with a generosity the whole British mission traded on. On 2 June 1945 its owner drove it down the same road to meet a courier he knew as Raymond, near the Castillo Street bridge in Santa Fe, and passed him a written account of the implosion weapon, its geometry, its core, and the test then six weeks off; on 19 September 1945 he did it again, on a road outside town. Both meetings are matters of court record. The Bureau's reconstruction of the car's journeys, worked mile by mile against gate logs, passes, and the memories of passengers, proceeded much as the author describes, and its interest in borrowers was genuine. —Ed.
The trial, at the Old Bailey on 1 March 1950 before the Lord Chief Justice, ran from arraignment to sentence in under ninety minutes, the defendant having pleaded guilty to all four counts under the Official Secrets Act. Fourteen years was the maximum that statute allowed; treason was never available, the Soviet Union having been at the relevant dates an ally, a point the Attorney General conceded at the outset and the newspapers digested slowly. —Ed.
The Bureau's papers on the case, released a generation later, contain the author exactly twice. A list of former project personnel known to have accepted Sunday rides carries his name among some thirty others, and the summary of a single interview runs to four lines, closing "personal matter; verified; no further action"; it mentions no automobile of any kind. A lady's name is inked out of every released copy, a courtesy somebody kept. A supplementary interview conducted in Fort Worth that autumn is disposed of in one line: the subject, shown photographs of several automobiles, recognized none of them. The borrowed Sunday itself appears nowhere in the reconstruction as finally drawn. The reader was acquainted in the first bundle with the space between what the author says happened and what the file holds; the space has not narrowed. —Ed.
The spring visitors were real: two officers of the Bureau were admitted to Wormwood Scrubs in May 1950 and put their questions over some two weeks. Shown film of a Philadelphia chemist named Harry Gold, the prisoner answered exactly the question asked: that this was his American contact. Gold's house had by then yielded, from behind a bookcase, a street map of Santa Fe issued by the Chamber of Commerce; he confessed on 22 May, and the thread ran on through a machinist named Greenglass to a New York couple named Rosenberg, whose business belongs to a later bundle. The cable traffic that had started the whole walk backward stayed silent behind all of it, and stayed silent another forty-five years. —Ed.