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or simply the man who looked through it.
    How could it be otherwise? The pain must have been crippling, all the worse for being repeated without end. Had Bruner counted the teeth left, wondering as his raw mouth puffed up with pain whether he could stand another day, ten? Or had the Nazis months before already beaten his face to another form? Connolly looked at the nose in the picture for the sideways slant of a break, but it was straight, and again he came back to the eyes. They were so bright that for a split second he thought he could reach through to the man, but the more he looked, the less they seemed to say. They stared without any comment at all, as if simply being alive were enough.
    Connolly put the file down and covered his tired eyes with his sleeve. In the end, the pictures were always the same. File after file had crossed his desk, stories from Europe, not just the battle dispatches and the statistical pieces but the personal stories, each one terrible, each one of suffering almost unimaginable, until you were lost in the scale of it all. We would never recover from this, unless we simply stopped listening. Europe seemed to him now like a vast funhouse, dark and grotesque and claustrophobic. You were jerked along from one startling exhibit of horror to the next, rocking in alarm, squirming. Skeletons dangled, monsters leaped out, horrible mechanical screams tore the air, and you would never get out.
    The stories made other stories. Something had happened to Karl Bruner, who in turn became a different person, which in turn made him do—what? Maybe nothing. But once the violence started, there was no end to it—every crime reporter knew that. It demanded vengeance, or at least some answer, an endless series of biblical begats. A gun fired never stopped, it kept cutting through the lives of everyone around it, on and on. Like some unstoppable—Connolly smiled to himself at the aptness of it—chain reaction. Until it all became part of the war.
    Connolly liked the remoteness of Los Alamos, the clean, high air away from the files and reports of the world destroying itself. A simple personal crime, a police blotter item—not a war. An assignment out of the funhouse, some time in the light. But Bruner’s face had thrown him back again—another European story. He wondered why it had ended on the Santa Fe river.

2
    C ONNOLLY WAS LATE to the party and wouldn’t have gone at all if Mills hadn’t dragged him. He had needed sleep, not dinner, but Mills had gone to the trouble of getting a table at Fuller Lodge and he felt he couldn’t refuse.
    “Better to start off on the right foot,” Mills had said. “You can eat at the commissary anytime. The lodge is as good as it gets here.”
    And in fact the food was good and gave him a second wind. The room itself, oversized and two stories high, with a running balcony and a massive stone fireplace at either end, looked more like the dining room of a national park lodge than the army-camp messes where most of Los Alamos ate. Every table was filled, so that the room buzzed with conversation and clinking flatware.
    Connolly was surprised at how many people wore coats and ties. There was clearly no dress code—he could see occasional open shirts and even some Western-style pointed collars—but most people were in full suits, the women in bright, slightly dowdy dresses. Saturday night at the Faculty Club.
    “If you want to do some scientist spotting, you might start with that table over there,” Mills said, nodding his head. “Let’s see how good you are.”
    Connolly glanced at a tall man, his apple cheeks bellowing out with the draw on his pipe. He had the white hair and gentle, puckish face of a thin Nordic Santa Claus.
    “Niels Bohr,” Connolly said. “I’m impressed.”
    “Nicholas Baker. Code names only, please. All physicists are ‘engineers,’ and he is Mr. Baker.”
    “I’ll try to remember.” Connolly grinned. “Who else?”
    “Henry