SANTA FE

The bus down from the Hill left at eight, and I had the window seat by the simple expedient of telling a private it was reserved for couriers, which it was, in the sense that I was on it and had once been a courier. Forty minutes of switchbacks and there was Santa Fe below, adobe and holy candles, a town where the eighteenth century was still getting the news and liking very little of it, now garrisoned by tourists, GIs, and the best-fed secrets in the world. My appointment was at five. A wiser man would have spent the day rehearsing. I have never rehearsed a surrender in my life — you give the other fellow's script the respect of improvising against it — so I spent the day banking cover instead, and I commend the day's work to any young man being blackmailed toward espionage, for I did it all on instinct and it stood for two years.

First call, 109 East Palace, on the pretext of a mislaid badge list. Dorothy McKibbin ran the whole roaring secret of the age out of that little office with the patience of a woman minding a church raffle, and she greeted me by name, and poured me coffee, and asked me nothing at all. I have said for sixty years that she suspected me from the first day, and I say it here again with the full weight of my reputation: she knew. No woman is that serene around a man of my quality without private information.¹ She asked after my health. She asked after the weather on the Hill. Not one question about the badge list, which I had invented and she must therefore have seen through. I left more convinced than ever, and considerably refreshed, and if the reader detects in this the vanity of a man who cannot bear to have gone unsuspected — the reader is invited to acquire a reputation of his own before auditing mine.

Second call, the La Fonda bar, eleven sharp, because a man with an appointment among spies at five wants an alibi with a room number attached, and the La Fonda at eleven was where the territory kept its widows. I found mine on the second stool — the first stool being occupied by a second lieutenant of engineers with designs of his own, whom I removed by mentioning that his colonel was asking for him at the desk, which was false, and watching him go at the double, which was gratifying; they teach obedience at those schools and nothing else. The prize was Vera, out of Fort Worth, oil money — which is Dallas money with the manners left on — thirty-nine by candlelight, wearing her grief the way other women wear scent, applied twice daily and stronger toward evening. The late Mr. Crews had been in pipe. Vera was in Santa Fe for her lungs, she said, and the bar received this with the gravity it deserved, her lungs being, on the evidence, the two healthiest institutions west of the Mississippi. I bought the third round with money I did not have, lost graciously to her at gin, which cost me a further four dollars and bought me the entire afternoon, and by half past two we had gone up to inspect the air on the third floor, and found it beneficial.²

Note what I was actually purchasing, for it was not the obvious, or not only. A man who means to spend his Saturdays in Santa Fe needs a discreditable reason to spend his Saturdays in Santa Fe: sin is the one alibi nobody checks the second half of. Catch a man at one vice and the whole town stops looking for his other one. Vera of Fort Worth was the finest insurance policy I ever held, and the premiums were no burden, though she talked about pipe.

At a quarter to five the cathedral bells started in — the Archbishop calling the faithful to be told about poverty by the best-dressed man in the territory — and I walked up San Francisco Street with my shoes shined and my heart going like a two-dollar watch, and went in under the portal of the café, past a waiter of the country who had perfected the local defense against conquerors of every vintage — courteous, unhurried, and deaf in whichever ear you addressed — and there he was.

I will disappoint the reader now as he disappointed me then. I had built him, over three notes and a returned glove, into something from the pictures — a scar, perhaps; a ring worth noticing; at minimum a cigarette held wrong. What rose to shake my hand was a small neat grey-eyed man in a pressed suit the color of dust, forty-five or fifty, barbered within an inch of his life, with the manner of a claims adjuster who has seen your claim and finds it, on the whole, payable. He ordered for us both in Spanish better than the waiter's. He asked about the bus. He asked about my mother — not menacingly; knowledgeably, the way a family friend asks, which was worse — and observed that Astoria must be hot just now, and that Kowalczyk was an honest trade of a name, radio work being the future. Fifteen minutes of this, gentlemen — me with my spine full of ice water waiting for the knife, him spreading jam on a roll — before I cracked and asked him what he wanted, and he looked genuinely, courteously surprised, and said the sentence I have heard in my sleep for sixty years:

"Wanted? Corporal, I have everything I want. I am simply pleased that we are finally introduced." He tidied the crumbs into a little pile with the edge of his knife. "You may call me Anton. It is not my name, but it is a good name — my mother considered it for me, and I have always felt it deserved a career."

I said — and I promise you it took nerve to say anything — that men who collected other men's histories generally had a bill in mind, and he nodded along as if I had said something sensible about the weather, and set me straight in a voice you would use to explain a timetable. He was not, he said, a recruiter. Recruiting was strenuous, and left marks, and was in any case unnecessary in my case, because — and here he looked at me with something horribly like affection — "You are not going to be asked to betray anything, Corporal. You are going to be asked, very occasionally, to continue being exactly what you are, in the place where you already are. We would not dream of altering you. One does not repaint a working instrument."

There it was again — the third man in a year to call me an instrument, and the first to say it with a caress. I asked what the occasional asking would look like. He said it would look like nothing at all, for a long time, and that I would hardly feel it, and that in the meantime I should consider him — and he meant this; it was the only warmth in the interview — a resource. Did I need money? I did not, thanks to Fort Worth. Was anyone on the Hill troubling me? A captain, perhaps? He said the captain's name and his schedule and the date of the captain's next review board, all three correctly, while buttering the second half of the roll, and my remaining illusions about the fence around my small town got up and left without paying.

I have taken meetings with every species of predator the century produced — I have been lunched by Groves's people and dined by the KGB and had breakfast, God defend me, with venture capitalists — and I record it as a professional judgment that Anton's was the finest opening call I ever sat across from. He asked for nothing. He established supply. He priced my enemies. He mentioned my mother. And at six sharp he looked at his watch, paid in coin, and stood, and only then, as an afterthought so manufactured I wanted to applaud, slid a manila envelope across the cloth.

"A small thing for your files." A pause of exquisite length. "Ah. But I forget. You keep none."

I did not open it in the café, or on the street, or in the plaza, where the Saturday crowd was thick with uniforms. I opened it on the bus, in the last grey light, with the private beside me asleep against the glass, and then I sat very still for a long time while the switchbacks went by, because it was a photograph, eight by ten, glossy, of a cloud-chamber plate — of the plate, the fifth plate, my beautiful kinked particle decaying in flight, the plate that had gone into a single grave in Pasadena in June of 1942 with two lawyers for pallbearers.³

Someone had dug it up, photographed it, and mailed it two thousand miles so that a small neat man could hand it to me with the jam. On the back, in the tidy patient hand, was a single line, and I give it to you exactly, punctuation and all, because it is the most honest sentence anyone addressed to me in the whole of the Second World War:

"A very fine drawing. — A."⁴