The Heat of the Sun

will,’ said Maybee. ‘And take the world with it!’
    Meyer spat on the floor. ‘I’ll believe it when I see it. The cash they’ve wasted on this thing, you wouldn’t fucking believe,’ he said to me. ‘Billions! And
all because of some rumour the Krauts were building one too. So we had to get there first.’
    ‘But the Germans have surrendered,’ I said.
    ‘Noticed that, did you?’ said Miller. ‘He’s sharp, this one!’
    I wanted to know more, but a girl appeared between Meyer and Maybee and asked, with a hand on the shoulder of each, if they would be at the dance that night. Meyer offered up his Mitchum smirk
– ‘Sure thing, honey’ – and Maybee, who seemed awkward with women, blushed bright red.
    I thought I might as well go to the dance. Confused thoughts filled my brain as I tagged along after Miller-Meyer-Maybee. In a noisy hall, leaning against the bar, I drank too many beers and
watched the base’s too few girls whirling in the arms of excitable young men. I wished they would dance to something other than Miller’s namesake. Glenn Miller was missing; his plane
had vanished somewhere over the English Channel, but still he haunted every jukebox in America, a ghost pressed into wax. Again and again a girl punched in the numbers for ‘Yes, My Darling
Daughter’, and no one seemed to mind.
    Maybee turned his attentions to me. And was I, he asked, the Sharpless who had worked with that left-wing photographer fellow, Augustus Le Vol? He said he had one of Le Vol’s books at
home, and I was surprised: I had not thought the Boston Brahmin would take much to Le Vol’s work, but it seemed he admired him aesthetically, if not politically.
    ‘So what’s Le Vol doing in the war? Still a red?’
    I wished I could change the subject. There was nothing to say: Le Vol had sailed to China and never come home. I had tried and tried to find out what had become of him, but Le Vol, like Glenn
Miller, might have vanished into the air. If he had stayed on in China, I only hoped he had kept out of Japanese hands. After Pearl Harbor, with the American fleet safely out of action, a lone
white man in East Asia would have been in constant danger. Le Vol might have been in a prison camp or dead.
    Only after I had left the dance did I realize there were no street lamps on the base. I stumbled in the dark, tripping once in a pothole and once on the edge of a duckboard.
    When I got back to our hut, Trouble was not there. I resolved to wait up, but lay down on a cot – his, not mine – and fell asleep. I dreamed: reveries of Asian faces screaming out of
fire, buildings falling and puffed cheeks exploding with spit, while all the time ‘Yes, My Darling Daughter’ played.
    Not until my second evening did I meet the senator. Trouble accompanied me to one of the old school buildings. Perhaps it had been the headmaster’s house; some distance
from the rest of the base, it was a solid, sprawling bungalow surrounded on all sides by broad verandas.
    A cocktail party was in progress when we arrived. Someone played a piano; privates acted as waiters, and faces smiled at Trouble as he guided me through the crowd, introducing me to generals,
chiefs of staff, Washington insiders. Names blurred and so did features, but by the time I was ushered into the senator’s presence, I had practised my banter sufficiently to respond to him
with ease.
    I had followed Senator Pinkerton’s career with fascination. Everywhere in the war, I detected his hand. When America’s battered industries were galvanized into life by military
demand, I could hear his patriotic words ringing out in the Senate, demanding that it be so; when, after a shocking series of Japanese victories, our fortunes turned in the Battle of Midway, I knew
the senator’s wisdom had been at work; I detected it too, as US troops pushed further into the Pacific, beating back the enemy from island after island.
    One evening in a newsreel theatre, I watched an item about Japanese Americans. Herded from their houses, they were corralled into trucks and taken to internment camps; then, filling the screen,
came the big-necked, porcine head of Senator B. F. Pinkerton (Democrat, New York), the policy’s architect and most ardent supporter. With astonishment, I thought of Trouble’s role in
this, working coolly at his father’s side.
    The great man introduced me to the party surrounding him: this one, General Somebody; that one, Professor Someone; Miss