CHICAGO

The Army makes couriering simple: a sealed pouch, a chain, a wrist, and a receipt worded just short of blood. What it cannot simplify is the passenger list. Anton's lunch and the Army's pouch went east out of Lamy on the same ticket, and I spent the first hour of the Super Chief locked in my roomette with the pouch on my knees, doing the arithmetic. I was carrying a bag I was under orders not to know the inside of — the one order of that war I obeyed with appetite — into a building stocked with the men best qualified to hang me; and somewhere between errands I owed lunch to a stranger who would know me and whom I must on no account know. I had walked into plenty of rooms not knowing what was in them. This was the first time anyone had issued me the room, the key, and the witness on a single voucher.

By Albuquerque I had stopped sweating, having remembered the first law of the trade — nobody watches a man who looks bored — and I took my boredom along to the club car to give it some scenery.

The club car held two plainer girls, a bodyguard of matched luggage, and Bunny — a rich man's daughter keeps a plain friend the way a jeweler keeps velvet, and Halsted money kept two. She was going home to Lake Forest from a summer of being improved somewhere, and she was — I say it across sixty years and one divorce I never got — the finest-looking thing I had seen since California: corn-gold, blue-eyed, built for the tennis court and the cotillion in that order, with a laugh she worked the way other women work a fan. I had my hat off and my war on before the porter — George; they are all George — had finished pouring. Corporal Klipspringer, of the — well, there it was: he couldn't say. The war-can't-say did more for me in thirty seconds than honest prospects could have done in a year. That class of girl is raised from the crib to marry a portfolio, and not one of them can resist a secret, and I was nothing that season if not a walking secret with good manners.

She was a sophomore at Northwestern. Evanston — the finishing school with a football team, where the daughters of the grain exchange major in one another and take a gentleman's C in Appreciation until the right marriage comes to collect; educating that class of girl is engraving a ham — fine work, and still a ham. The next morning I would be sneered at down the length of the Metallurgical Laboratory by men from the University of Chicago, which is a different article altogether — Hutchins had abolished football there as a distraction from thinking, which tells you the whole economy of the place. A Chicago man will make you feel a fool for not having read Aquinas; an Evanston girl will make you feel a genius for having heard of him. I knew which I could use. A clever woman is a poor bet for a man in my line; she reads the fine print. Bunny read the society page and her own reflection, and gave good notices to both.

Here is the part I never told anyone: I could not read her. Reading people is the one honest talent under all my counterfeit ones — I have had the measure of every man and most women inside a minute since I was old enough to be lied to — and I ran the full instrument panel over Bunny Halsted across four hundred miles of Kansas and the needles never moved. Serene. Sunny. Bottomless. No want showing, no fear, no price. I filed it, God help me, under stupidity, the way you file a locked door under empty room; congratulated myself on an easy mark; and asked might I have her address against a future leave, which she wrote out in a hand as round and untroubled as a child's. I have her buried in Lake Forest, and what was behind the blue eyes I know today exactly as well as I knew it in Kansas. Enough — she comes back; they all do.

Chicago received me at dusk in a cold rain off the lake, which is the only reception the city stocks, and rained all night to prove the point. In the morning the cab ran me south through the Polack wards under the stockyard stink — you cannot always tell the parish from the pens by nose alone — to a university got up in grey Gothic with the end of the world quartered in its squash courts. The Metallurgical Laboratory received me worse than the weather had. Those were the men who had done the thing first — stacked the world's first working pile under the west stands of the football field they were too high-minded to play on, back in '42 — and then watched the glory and the sunshine emigrate to New Mexico while they kept the winter and the carbon paper, and the grievance had gone to the bone.¹ Three anterooms aged me on principle before a harassed major signed for the pouch like a man signing for his own funeral, told me the return would be ready at four, and had me shown out with three hours to kill, a strange city to kill them in, and a lunch on my books I wanted the way a man wants the dentist.

I never found the restaurant. The restaurant found me.

I had gone to ground in a chophouse off the Midway, to be miserable somewhere the Army couldn't grade it, and I was three bites into a chop the stockyards should answer for when a soft voice at my shoulder said my rank and then my name, and a round little man in a wet overcoat was into the seat opposite before my fork was down — spectacles fogged, wearing the mild damp smile of a druggist's cousin, settling in like an appointment made in the womb. He gave no name. He asked, in an accent I could not place and did not try to — middle Europe is all one accent to me, and all one grievance — whether my journey had been comfortable; and while he asked it he set his briefcase down against the table leg, beside mine. Brown, cracked, government-issue: the twin, to the scuffs, of the case that held my orders and receipts. My stomach executed a maneuver I have never forgiven it. This was not a lunch. It was a swap, and I had been freighted across a continent to move a briefcase eighteen inches under a table while its owner ate my dessert.

I have been afraid often, and usually at a profit; the profitable kind announces itself by its speed. The little man was murmuring about the weather — the weather where, I never established; the Urals, for all I ever knew — when the street door opened on two hats. Topcoats, government shoulders, the flat-footed stance of men salaried to look at rooms, and they looked at this one the way de Silva's people looked at rooms.² I knew them the way you know a bailiff, by the certainty of being owed; and I knew in the same heartbeat that if either case under that table came open, I would be signing statements until VJ Day.

I have heard what I did next called, by men who were not there, the coolest piece of tradecraft of the inland war. Here is the recipe: I panicked. I came up out of the chair all knees and apology — so sorry, wrong table, do forgive me — swept up the case at the table leg with a rattled soldier's clumsiness, and charged straight at the two hats with my hand out and my mouth running: were they the gentlemen from the major's office, sirs, because I had the four-o'clock return and daren't miss my train, and here were my papers, all of them, look — and I had the case open under their chins, spilling flimsies, the complete portrait of a corporal desperate to be inspected. Nothing on this earth retreats faster than authority from a keen fool with paperwork. They waved me off; they stepped back to let me pass; they wanted no share of whatever I was failing at. I went out the door apologizing and hit the rain at a trot, and I was two blocks north before I dared look at what was swinging from my hand. My own case. In the flap I had snatched back the one article I had been sent a thousand miles to leave behind — my orders, my receipts, my innocence in triplicate — and left the damp little man holding exactly what he had carried in. I had delivered nothing to nobody.³

I have spent a career dressing other men's luck as foresight; that afternoon my funk did me the service gratis. Whoever owned the hats went home empty. The little man dissolved into the Loop with his own luggage, and the one customer who had behaved suspiciously had done it at the top of his lungs, in the doorway, begging to be searched — the one cover no service has the imagination to distrust. What was meant to ride home in which case I never learned, and I have taken some pains never to be told.

At four the major chained the return to the same wrist, no wiser, and the university threw in a floor show while I waited for my cab. Across the wet flagstones went a small tidy quick man at a working pace, nothing about him of the legend and everything of a maths master late for a bus — Fermi, I was given to understand; I never got nearer and never needed to. And on the steps a wild-haired fellow stood in the drizzle haranguing two younger men about petitions and consciences and what the thing would do to the world — the great Szilard, I learned afterward, and he struck me then as he strikes me now: a man who had built a bonfire and wished to be admired for worrying about the sparks.⁴ I had a pocketful of the century's great men by then, and the sense to sell none of them retail.

The ride home I gave over to authorship, two accounts of Chicago being wanted and neither true in the same direction. One was for Anton, and had to read as loyalty and nowhere as flight: the hats arriving, the corporal keeping his head, the table kept clean under the government's nose. The other was for myself, and I have mostly believed it since — that pure animal funk had threaded a needle no professional on either side could have threaded, and come home with its paperwork in order. Cowardice gets its bad name from the men who practice it without talent.

I was back on the Hill the Friday, as promised. Under my door lay a note in the small tidy patient hand — "I trust Chicago was restful. — A." — which told me two things: that he already knew nothing had happened, and that he had decided, in his mercy, to carry the nothing on his books as my doing. I have since watched banks extend credit on the same principle, and to the same end.

And with it, forwarded through the Army's own post, a letter: three pages in a round untroubled schoolgirl hand, on the weather in Lake Forest, and a horse named Clipper, and how thrilling it must be to do whatever it was I did. I read it twice, which surprised me, and told myself it was reconnaissance; I have told myself that about Bunny's letters ever since. The censors passed every one of them beaming — a girl, a horse, the weather; wave it through — and in half a century of beaming it never once occurred to anybody in a uniform to wonder why a girl who wrote about nothing wrote so very much of it, or to me.⁵