“He won’t believe it. He’ll go right to the Russians.”

“Of course he won’t believe me. But apart from treason, Harry Gold is a two-bit chemist, a nothing, a zero. The luckiest day of his life was when he became a spy. You think he wants to lose his only interesting quality? He’s not going to tell the Russians anything. Tonight never happened.”

“Like us, sir. I never saw you, you never saw me.”

“Would I stand in the way of romance, Sergeant? When we’re on the same team at last?”

Driving back to the Hill, they stopped to swim in the Rio where it cut a deep curve in the sandbanks above Santiago. White petals passed on the black surface of the water. With five days left until Trinity, minutes seemed to hurry by, as if rushing to a quicker channel of time.

“A choirboy? I can’t believe it,” she said.

“We’ll go to Harlem an’ we’ll go struttin’,” he sang to her, “an’ there’ll be nothin’ too good for you.”

She was cool and weightless to the touch, but she slipped away from his hand. Something was wrong, although he didn’t know what.

“Sometimes I wonder what my father’s dreams for me must have been,” she said. “A lecturer’s chair at the Mathematical Institute. Learned arguments with other professors as we watched Göttingen fade into the dusk.”

“Sounds like a travelogue.”

“The memory of a refugee is a travelogue. Anyway, a proper husband, also a professor, two children and a villa on the Wilhelm-Weber-Strasse with window boxes of clematis. I don’t believe my father ever dreamed of the Rio Grande or you. I will miss it.”

“Miss it? What do you mean?”

“I will miss this place.”

“You’re leaving?”

“Everyone will be leaving soon after Trinity. I’m leaving before. I’ve only told Oppy, and you.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to leave New Mexico.”

“Yes, it does.”

“What about us?”

“Us? This is your home, and now you have your music here, too. It’s not my home, and I don’t have my work here.”

Though he was floating, he had the sensation he was about to fall through the water. “You came tonight to say good-bye?”

“Yes.”

“No. You asked me to come to Chicago. That’s what you were getting at when we were dancing.”

“Joe, we’ve only known each other a month—really, two weeks. This is not the end of a long affair. We were just getting to know each other. I had never seen you happier than you were tonight.”

“I thought you were happy, too.”

“Not like you. It must be wonderful to be so in love with music.”

“You’re leaving to make some sort of ethical statement about Trinity, right? You feel forced to go?”

“You could say that.”

“Then come back.”

“And do what? Sell cigarettes in a nightclub?”