“I love the piano. I love the weight, the shape. There’s something about a concert grand, playing a high E in an empty house.”

“And women? Is it the same, the high E in an empty house?”

“Well, a little. How did you get involved in the Hill?”

She thought for a moment, but he could already hear her voice. Most important for him was that a woman have her own voice, and he’d never heard anyone like her.

“I could always see numbers. It’s like having your own world, or a world you only share with a few others. Prime numbers. Positive numbers and negative numbers in patterns like physics. To amuse myself I did a paper on reaction multiplication when I was sixteen. I was in a sanatorium.”

“Why?”

“Hysteria. Anemia. Pregnancy. It depended on which doctor you talked to. I was lucky to be in the sanatorium at all because they weren’t supposed to take Jews, but my father, although he had lost his professorship at the university, was so respected that I was allowed in. The sanatorium had once been a monastery with gardens and orchards, even lemon trees, that ran in terraces to the river, the Elbe. In one garden was a bower of honeysuckle that stirred with bees. I retreated there. I tried to think of things so small and insignificant that they would be almost pure mathematics, that they would have nothing to do with the larger, real world. I watched the bees move from flower to flower. This was just after the Meitner-Frisch article on fission—you remember that?”

“I think I was fighting in Chicago that day. I must have missed it.”

“Bees and neutrons are a little the same. The paper was only a few pages and it couldn’t be published because I was a Jew. Five years later in New York, Oppenheimer came by.”

“You were surprised?”

“It was so odd to see him because he used to have long brown curls. He had cropped his hair, like Joan of Arc, to go to war. Yes, like Joan of Arc! In his hand he had a copy of that paper I wrote as a girl. First, he asked if I wanted to see my numbers come to life, then he invited me to work on the project.”

“He’s a seducer.”

“Yes.” For a minute she looked into the canyon, and to the mountains beyond, to distant lightning collecting at a peak. “You didn’t tell anyone, did you, about Harvey? You didn’t report your friend Roberto either, did you?”

“That doesn’t mean I agree with Roberto.”

“Or with Harvey and me.”