FUCHS

I let a week go by before I asked after the card, which is the professional interval — soon enough to learn something, late enough that nobody remembers the asking.¹ On the Tuesday, our trade concluded, I put it to Frankie sideways, as a housekeeping matter.

"The card with the motorcar. The one that wants nothing."

"Dr. Fuchs. British mission." She did not trouble the index. "Quietest customer on this post. Keeps a Buick down the lot, secondhand and looks it. Gives lifts to Santa Fe."

"Gives them to whom?"

"Whoever's standing by it of a Sunday morning." She squared her cards. "You'll be standing by it."

I had a look at the man first, in the ordinary way of business. The British mission had come ashore superior to the marrow — five years on powdered egg and they still contrived to forgive us our steaks — and they went about the Tech Area in a body, complaining beautifully. Fuchs was the one who didn't. Pale, thin, spectacles, a forehead going up early into his scalp; thirty-three or four and carrying ten more; courteous to colonels and porters in equal, identical amounts. At colloquium he sat perfectly still, took no notes, and looked at whoever was speaking. He spoke when spoken to, answered exactly the question asked, and stopped.

I braced him in the T corridor that week and gave my name and my office — the man who keeps the minutes.

"Yes," he said. "I have seen you." And stood there, agreeable and finished.

"They tell me there's sometimes a seat in your car of a Sunday."

"Ten o'clock, by the water tower. There is room this week." A small correct nod, and away down the corridor without a wake.

I tried him again at the coffee urn — weather, billets, the war news, three openings any corporal alive can play. Three answers came back, each one correct, complete, and terminal. A large pink man of his own mission had watched me work, and took pity between refills.

"Penny in the slot, old boy," he said. "Put your question in, out comes your answer. No rattle, no change."

His own people had a name for him already — Penny-in-the-slot Fuchs² — and used it with affection; the affection was general. That went down as my first note on him: everybody's good opinion, and not one friend anybody could name.

Reading men is my living, and I read for wants. Vanity, debt, thirst, a girl, a grievance, a hunger to be asked about the work — every man on that mesa returned at least two, and most returned five. Over three weeks I gave Fuchs the full survey I would have given a rich widow, and here is the whole of the yield: no requests on his card, no complaints in the mess, no gossip taken or given, no debts, no girl, no politics, and no visible wish for anything on the Hill except to be useful and left alone. The needle came back clean. Too clean — and I will own that something at the back of the shop rang once, small, when I saw it. I knew one other drawer on that mesa with nothing in it, because the drawer was mine, and the merriest lockpick on the site had once opened it for sport, found the blank pads and the bourbon, and told me to my face what nothing means: a man who keeps nothing is a man who expects to be searched. I heard the bell. I did not go and see. I wrote the quiet man down instead as a prig — the émigré German variety, which is the most durable made, a man who has lost his country, his furniture, and his passport, and kept his certainty of how things are properly done. Prigs are the easiest reading in the trade, and I went back to men I could use.

The Buick, though, was worth cultivating, and the Buick complicated my Sundays, which were spoken for — Fisk's coffee, renewed weekly by never being mentioned.

"Pour at nine," I proposed.

"Half nine," said Fisk.

"The car goes at ten."

"Drink faster."

So by March my Sundays kept books like a branch bank. Half past nine, coffee at Fisk's, taken at a scald; ten, the water tower, where the Buick stood loading; noon, Santa Fe, and Vera out of the cathedral from the eleven o'clock, taking my arm as though I had been to mass myself, which for working purposes I had — G-2's watchers entered me under the usual heading, and that heading did more for my safety that spring than my clearance did. Five o'clock, the Buick north again, full of bookshop parcels.

I asked Fisk once, over the second cup I never had time for, what he made of the quiet man. He thought about it while the stove ticked.

"Does his own sums," he said — which, from Fisk, was a knighthood.

The rides themselves I can give almost in full, there being almost nothing to give. Four or five of us to a load; Fuchs at the wheel with both hands and his whole attention; the mountains doing the talking. He drove the way he answered questions — correctly. Over the Sundays of that spring I put perhaps forty questions into the slot, and forty answers came out, and no two of them ever joined up into a man. What he did with his own Santa Fe afternoons I never once thought to wonder — a walk, I supposed.

The system ran without slack, which is another way of saying it broke the once. A Sunday late in March the percolator died, the second pot went to a saucepan, and it was three minutes to ten when I got out Fisk's door. I did the quarter mile to the water tower at the dead run and arrived to find the Buick standing, engine idling, three passengers seated, and the driver consulting his watch. He did not tap it. He put it away as I came up, said, "You are here," and drove. I would rather have been sworn at. The return leg ran to the same clock: five at the plaza, and at one minute past he pulled out. A chemist who lingered over a farewell came home Monday on the mail truck, and no apology was asked for or offered on either side.

At the Lodge one Saturday in March the band went into a waltz, and I looked up from the punch to find the mission's quiet man turning a group leader's wife around the floor with an ease that stopped my cup halfway. He was the best dancer on that mesa, and I say so as a man who has earned his living in ballrooms. Precise, light, tireless, every partner delivered back to her table pleased with herself. On a mesa running ten men to the woman, a bachelor who could actually dance did not sit out two numbers together all spring. Between numbers I put my question in the slot.

"Where does a theoretician learn to dance like that?"

"Leipzig," he said. The machine stood quiet. The next hostess took him away, and for half a bar the reading would not balance — a man whose conversation stood at attention and whose feet did not — and then I let it go.

Anton had kept his winter silence — months of nothing, that being his cadence, and then an errand the size of a stamp. The note came through the Technical Area mail in the first week of April, the small tidy hand unchanged. An envelope would be waiting at the La Fonda desk, held in my name. It wanted posting in the box outside the Santa Fe post office. Sunday next — that Sunday, not the Saturday before, not the Monday after. Nothing else.

The flaw was the day. At the Friday urn one of the mission stood complaining that there was no ride that week, Fuchs being promised elsewhere, and the bus not running at any hour a Christian would keep. I ran the owner down on Saturday evening, second floor of a Sundt block, where a colleague and his wife had gone off to a party and left him the garrison: two children in pajamas, five and seven or thereabouts, playing snap with him on the floor. The small one was calling him Klaus and cheating. He was losing with every appearance of honest effort. The room was picked up, the milk glasses were washed, and a book of English fairy tales lay face-down over the chair arm, the place held with a folded pass slip. The Hill's mothers would not have trusted me with a geranium, and they handed this man their sons and daughters of a Saturday night and went out with easy minds — a man who volunteers for the duty nobody on earth wants, and asks nothing for it. The small bell again, at the back of the shop. Again I did not go and see.

"The car," I said, "if it's idle tomorrow. A lady in Santa Fe — a birthday — and the bus is no good for it."

"Yes, of course." The keys were out of his pocket before I had finished the sentence, as though lending the thing were its natural condition and his own driving the imposition.³ "The clutch takes up high. The horn does not work."

"Back by six, full as I found it."

"By six I am here again," he said, and the seven-year-old, who had waited out the interruption with the patience of a dowager, said, "Klaus. Your turn," and the household dismissed me.

So the second Sunday of April I ran the ledger single-handed. Coffee at Fisk's; he watched the keys come out of my pocket onto the table and said nothing, which from Fisk is not the same as not noticing. Down the switchbacks alone at ten. The La Fonda desk produced the envelope — plain, sealed, stamped, addressed in a stranger's hand to a box number in Denver that has never since appeared in any file I have been shown — and the clerk, who knew me for Mrs. Crews's caller, handed it across and asked nothing. I walked it two streets, dropped it in the box outside the post office, and heard the flap swallow it. Four minutes, desk to box. Then Vera, the birthday invented and the appetite genuine; then the switchbacks; then the keys back in their owner's hand at ten before six, tank as found. He was in his room, with a book.

"It went well?" he said.

"Like a watch."

"Good," he said, and returned to his book.

One sentence now, and not another word of it in this packet: the day came, years on, when serious men with maps and timetables reconstructed every mile that Buick ever ran to Santa Fe, and one of those miles is mine.

At the month's end I gave de Silva his weather and gave the British mission a clean bill — the quiet one, I told him, the cleanest of the lot⁴ — and answered Bunny's April letter, Clipper having thrown a shoe and Lake Forest having opinions about it.

Then May came, and the wind changed. My monthly with de Silva was postponed without a new date — the first time in two years. The rest I smelled two days out, which is my usual margin: a teletype that arrived under escort, a G-2 lieutenant walking the T corridors counting doors. Then the notice went up on the canteen board, courteous as a subpoena: by direction, officers of the intelligence section would conduct interviews with all Technical Area personnel — all badges, no exceptions — schedules to follow by section.

The schedules came round on mimeograph two days later, and a clerk ran his finger down the K's and made out my slip while I stood there being pleasant about the spring. Interviews ran Monday through Saturday, the alphabet dealing, no trades.

That evening I went to the annex and opened my cabinet and checked what a search would find, which was what a search had always found: blank pads, carbons, the bourbon. A man who keeps nothing is a man who expects to be searched. I had carried that doctrine three years, and in all my celebrated reading of that mesa it had not once occurred to me to point it at anybody but myself. I shut the drawer and wondered, for the first time since it was last opened for sport, whether nothing was going to be enough.

The slip said Thursday.