The Heat of the Sun

Instead I said, though I wasn’t sure I meant it, that none of us could have saved Trouble. Shikata ga nai. It
can’t be helped. Too bad.
    ‘You must want to know about your orders,’ she said.
    I had forgotten about the senator’s orders.
    ‘Our agents arrested my son in Mexico,’ she said simply. ‘He’s in a cell in San Diego. He’ll always be in a cell now, of course. Always, until he dies. You know
what that means, I suppose?’
    I felt cold, as if the sun had dimmed suddenly, sinking the room into shadow. I had wanted to see Kate Pinkerton as a statue, adamantine, unyielding. Was she now crumbling before me?
Counterclockwise this time, she retraced the steps she had made in the wide arc around me.
    ‘I’ll wear him down,’ she said. ‘One day, he’ll see me.’
    On the day the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima (though I didn’t know that yet), I stood in a cool corridor in San Diego, waiting for a young captain to unlock a door. The
door was heavy and the lock was stiff. He was having difficulties and cursed beneath his breath. I had flustered him, no doubt. ‘You’re sure, sir?’ and ‘From Senator
Pinkerton?’ he had said as I showed him my papers. Yes, I agreed, it was most irregular. Yes, it was authorized in the highest places. No, I would not wait while he made a call. I thought I
put on a good show: sighing, rolling my eyes, rapping my ashplant on the edge of his desk.
    Uncertainly, he had looked through the venetian blind. My vehicle stood waiting, gleaming on the tarmac; my two guards leaned against the hood, smoking cigarettes. Those fellows! Before today I
had never met them, but they treated me with a familiarity bordering on insolence. It was not my place to complain. They had arrived along with the senator’s orders.
    The captain opened the dungeon at last. But dungeon , of course, was not the word: the place was an airfield lock-up, the cinder-block walls neither dank nor dripping, the concrete floor
free of straw and rats, the barred window surprisingly large. There were even touches of luxury: a bookcase piled with copies of Photoplay , a table on which lay the remains of breakfast, a
silvery steel toilet bowl and sink, and two bunks made up with grey blankets.
    Trouble sat hunched on the lower bunk, not looking up, leafing through a Photoplay.
    I asked the captain to leave us.
    ‘You’re sure, sir?’
    ‘Don’t worry. I’ll call if I need you.’
    The door clanged shut and the key turned again, this time with a smooth, authoritative thud. Trouble did not look up. I stepped towards him. I had expected him to be changed, dishevelled at the
least, cowed, chastened, but he seemed the same as he had always been. What about the hands, any nervous twitch? No. What about the eyes, were they circled darkly? No.
    He licked a finger, turned a page.
    ‘Did you know, Sharpless, that Howard Hughes designed a special brassiere for Jane Russell in The Outlaw ? Remarkable. All his skills in aerodynamics, all that engineering genius
that designed revolutionary aircraft, bent now to this task: lift up, push out.’ He held up her picture in the magazine. ‘Talented girl.’
    Wearily, I sat on the cell’s only chair.
    ‘I’ve been AWOL,’ I said.
    ‘Back now, by the looks. And nobody cared?’
    ‘You and me, we’re not real soldiers, are we? We answer to the senator. Quite a privilege, all told. I never thanked you for getting me my job in Los Alamos. Smoke?’ I held out
my pack.
    ‘Time can hang heavy on a fellow’s hands, can’t it? And sometimes a tattered Photoplay can’t quite do the trick. I suppose you know Mama tried to visit me. I
refused to see her. Made quite a scene, she did.’ He sounded unconcerned, as if he were talking about a bit of bad weather, since passed. I lit his cigarette and he said, exhaling smoke,
‘I already knew that about Jane’s brassiere, didn’t you? Christ, everyone knew that. That news is years old.’
    I could abide his flippancy for only so long. ‘What do you think’s going to happen?’ I said.
    He stood and stretched, reaching towards the ceiling. His shirt pulled free from his trousers and I glimpsed his bare torso, still boyishly taut. ‘Well, I’d guess the senator and
Truman are clustered around the conference table right about now, debating what to do with the ultimate weapon. Kyoto? Yokohama? Or straight to Moscow and cut out the middleman?’
    ‘Truman’s in Potsdam. Or on his way home.’
    ‘Oh? I’m so