Half World: A Novel (13 page)

Authors: Scott O'Connor

Valerov’s handlers had given him a list of sights to see, tourist spots, along with a map of a neighborhood that he might find more interesting. He had been told of the Embarcadero, the north end of Powell, a particular bar, the types of women he could meet there. The night that Valerov arrived in the city, Dorn made an appearance, a couple of arrests, knowing that word would spread quickly and the place would be clear of competition for a while. So two days into his trip, on the night Valerov entered the bar, Elizabeth was the only girl working the room.

It was after midnight when they stumbled out, Valerov appearing so intoxicated that Elizabeth’s drunk act seemed unnecessary. They started up the street, haltingly, Henry following a block behind. When they reached the top of the hill, Henry stayed at the corner, watched Valerov and Elizabeth make their way to the apartment and turn inside. He waited a few minutes and then followed. Easing the front door open, taking the stairs quickly, then into the office, where Dorn and Clarke sat in the dark, headphones over their ears. When Henry slid on his own, he was stunned by the noise, Dizzy Gillespie at a high volume and Valerov’s roaring laughter.

Henry took off the headphones. The office was quiet. He looked away from the window. He wouldn’t miss anything he hadn’t seen or heard before. Valerov and Elizabeth drinking, having sex; Valerov passing out
somewhere in the room. Henry sat in the silence. He was anxious, eager to get started, but he was willing to be patient, to wait through the formalities, the hours or even days before the man had been turned inside out enough that the first real question could be asked.

* * *

It was almost like he had slept, dozing off for some indeterminate length of time. When he looked back up to the window, the bedroom was there, floating beyond the office wall. The lamp on the table was lit and Valerov was lying naked on the bed, the rise of his stomach obscuring any view of his face. The picture above the headboard was hanging crooked and the bedclothes were strewn across the room. Elizabeth was nowhere to be seen. Dorn appeared in the mirror, then Clarke, carrying a black physician’s bag. Clarke removed a stethoscope from the bag and stood over Valerov and listened to his chest. He removed a sphygmomanometer from the bag and fastened the cuff around Valerov’s arm and inflated the pressure, watching the gauge, listening through the stethoscope. Dorn said something and Clarke nodded, still watching the gauge. Clarke removed the cuff from Valerov’s arm and then removed a syringe from the bag, affixed a needle to the end. He ran his thumb across the crook in Valerov’s arm, strumming the vein, then inserted the needle and slowly pressed the plunger. He removed the syringe and looked at his watch and wrote in a small notepad. Dorn said something else and Clarke nodded. They walked toward the door, disappearing from the frame.

* * *

Valerov sat on the edge of the bed, still naked, staring at the mirror. Henry was at his desk, watching. Valerov’s limbs and torso covered in hair, his hands limp at his sides. Like an ape, like watching an ape in a cage. There was a fat purple bruise in the bend of his arm where Clarke had inserted the needle.

Valerov was sweating profusely. His eyes were glassy and dull. He was breathing heavily through his mouth. Clarke had given him a sedative so that when he woke he would be calm. He was calm. Henry
watched. Without the ledger, all he could do was watch. No recordings, no photographs. There would be no record, no history. There would be the thing as it was, what would happen in the room, and then there would be nothing.

* * *

Do you know why you’re here?

Valerov sat motionless on the edge of the bed, staring at the mirror. It seemed that he was ignoring Dorn, or that he hadn’t registered Dorn in the room, but then he began to shake his head, slowly, once to the left, once to the right.

You’re here because you’re a liar. You’ve been lying to the people who are trying to help you.

Henry could only see Dorn’s left arm hanging into the right side of the mirror’s frame. The rest was just a disembodied voice in the headphones.

No response, again, and then that same torpid head turn, Valerov still looking straight ahead at the mirror.

Henry had told Dorn about Weir, what Valerov might know. Dorn had already heard it all from Clarke, Henry had listened to their discussions on the tapes, but he wanted Dorn to hear it from him, wanted to be clear so that there would be no mistakes.

If you admit that you’re lying, Dorn said, this will be a lot easier. We can go from there, no problem. Do you understand what I’m saying? No problem?

Dorn’s arm disappeared from the frame and he clapped sharply once, twice.

Do you understand what I’m saying?

* * *

After the sedative wore off, they left Valerov alone, let him test the new door, the metal slab over the window. Let him pound on the walls, the ceiling.

Dorn questioned him for the remainder of the afternoon. Valerov obstinate, defiant, demanding to be released. Threatening Dorn, Dorn’s
family. Refusing to speak. Speaking only in obscenities and insults. There were a few brief struggles, but by and large Dorn stood in nearly the same position for hours, arms folded, watching Valerov move around the room, getting close, nose to nose, then receding into the corners, onto the bed. Dorn repeating the questions Henry had given him, the endless repetition, regardless of the answers. The circular interrogation designed to break down even the simplest responses, the bedrock of personality, core facts questioned so many times that the answers became meaningless, became less than words, just knots of sound, animal utterances. It went on, seemingly without structure or goal. Any hesitation, any inconsistency in an answer forcing the questioning to begin again.

What is your name. What was your father’s name. Your mother’s name, your wife’s name. How many children do you have. What are their ages, their names.

Each answer from Valerov receiving no response from Dorn. As if the answers were unimportant; as if only the questions mattered. Clarke quickly grew bored watching this, but Henry gained focus as the hours passed, attuned to the smallest details, the unconscious cues from Valerov, the sweat, the slowed speech. The man had been interrogated before, would know the tactics and techniques. He would believe he could outlast them. This would be the professional’s response. Henry let the questioning continue past the point of his own distraction, to where he began to feel the numbness coming from the other room. Hours more, until he saw Dorn’s knees giving a little, his weight pulling down, and then Henry sent the signal, a single ring of the electric bell in the wall, and Clarke went out into the north apartment to unseal the door.

* * *

They fastened him to the chair with the leather restraints. When he was secure, Dorn stood back by the door and Clarke sat on the edge of the bed asking the same questions. Valerov irate, straining against the straps, his face red, then purple, veins surfacing on his forehead and neck.

Kept like an animal, he said, spitting the words in English and Russian. Kept like an animal.

Clarke asked questions and the polygraph needle jumped at Valerov’s responses, settled into a long, steady line, jumped again.

They allowed him to use the bathroom every few hours, Dorn standing watch in the doorway. Then they strapped him back into the chair. From time to time Dorn would leave the room, and Clarke would attempt to change the tenor of the questioning, implying that he was the one who could make things easier, could run interference with Dorn. Valerov wasn’t persuaded, insulting Clarke in long streams of guttural Russian, rocking back and forth in the chair with increasing violence until Henry signaled Dorn to reenter the room.

They told him he had failed the polygraph test. They told him his lies were obvious, that it would be better for him to tell the truth. They would get it from him eventually. They questioned him again and he gave them the same answers and they left him alone for a few hours, still strapped to the chair, and then they returned to the room and told him that he had flunked another test.

We can do this forever, Clarke said, lighting a cigarette, looking at the jagged marks on the polygraph roll. We have all the time in the world.

* * *

Dorn and Valerov alone. No questions. Valerov shielding himself in a corner, hands out, trying to hold Dorn at bay. Promising that he’ll talk. He’ll talk if Dorn stops. Dorn under strict orders not to stop for any response from Valerov, any promise, any softening. Dorn under strict orders not to stop for anything but the sound of the bell.

* * *

Clarke found a vein, slipped the needle in, squeezed the plunger. Dorn loosened the restraints and Valerov slumped in the chair. His face mottled, bumped and swollen. Watching Dorn leave the room.

Clarke lit a cigarette, lit one for Valerov. Poured them each a drink.

We want to know why you’re still lying, Clarke said. At this point it seems counterproductive.

Valerov tried to speak, fumbled over his words, stopped, took a drink. Winced when the alcohol touched the hole where a front tooth had been.

I have been telling you the truth.

Clarke shook his head. This can be so much easier, he said. You understand why we have to know. We are both professionals. If you were in my position you would need to know the same thing from me.

If I were in your position you would be dead.

Clarke stood, refilled Valerov’s glass. Well then, he said. All the more reason to be honest with me.

* * *

The needle in the arm. They retightened the restraints. Valerov blinking rapidly, his eyes jumping around the room.

Stop this. Make this stop.

Valerov shaking the chair, the chair’s legs banging against the floor.

Stop this. Please.

Clarke and Dorn left the bedroom, reappeared a minute later back in the office.

Dorn lit a cigarette. “He’s not breaking.”

“Give it time,” Clarke said.

“It’s been a long fucking time already.”

They watched Valerov yelling and rocking the chair, writhing under the restraints. Henry and Clarke at the desks, Dorn standing by the window.

Dorn turned, looked at Clarke, at Henry, back at Valerov.

“He’s not breaking.”

* * *

They began to lose track of the date, asking each other what day it was, what hour of the day. Clarke and Dorn had taken their watches off that first afternoon, so as not to give Valerov any sense of time when they were in the room. Eventually, their watches had gone dead. They’d forgotten to wind them and then when they were dead they had nothing to set them by.

Henry tried not to close his eyes. He was afraid that he would sleep
and not know where he was, who he was when he came to. The horror of Henry March waking in that room.

Valerov would not answer questions about Monarch. He maintained that he knew nothing more than what he had already disclosed back in Washington. That some of what he had disclosed may have been incorrect. He maintained that he knew nothing about further penetrations.

It was hot in the bedroom. Beastly, Dorn called it. Henry could see the sweat soaking through Dorn’s shirt and slacks while he questioned Valerov. After a couple of hours Dorn would come into the office and change his clothes and gulp water. Then back into the bedroom, where dark rings appeared immediately under his arms, at the small of his back.

Clarke gave Dorn amphetamine shots to keep him awake if he was to be up through the night with Valerov, sedatives if he needed to sleep. After the first few days they ate very little, usually only when they had given Valerov something to eat, and then they sat in the office and ate and watched Valerov eating in the bedroom.

Sometimes Henry opened his eyes in the middle of the night to see Dorn and Clarke sleeping in their chairs and Valerov in the brightly lit bedroom, raging on amphetamines, pacing, destroying what was left of the furniture. The silence of the scene and the bright square of the window, the lit tableau in the dark office. Valerov had struck the mirror sometime earlier, creating large black cracks across the shatterproof glass. A spiderweb of lines in the frame through which they saw the room.

* * *

They sat drinking and smoking, Dorn in the chair with the straps hanging loose at his sides, Valerov unrestrained on the bed. An uneasy peace in the room. The two men were not so far apart in their appetites, their interests. They talked about women, about baseball. Valerov had been following the game for years through Western newspapers and radio broadcasts. The game as an abstraction, as box score and faceless voice. He had hoped to see the Senators play when he’d come to Washington. He wanted to see the actual game, the flesh-and-blood athletes he’d heard described for so long. He knew all the numbers, the statistics. Dorn was
impressed by this. He quizzed Valerov on the Giants, on Willie Mays’s batting average. He thought it was a cardinal sin that Valerov knew Mays only by statistics, by secondhand descriptions. That he had never seen the man in motion, the poetry of his movement.

You will have to take me, Valerov said. We will go and drink beer and sit in the sun.

Dorn gave a thick belly laugh, lit another cigarette, still laughing but nodding as well, as if in some way something like this was still possible.

You want to hear that I am still working for my country, Valerov said.

If that’s the truth.

It is not the truth. But you want to hear it regardless.

I want to hear about Monarch.

I do not know who that is.

Now you don’t know who that is.

I believe I may have been wrong, when I spoke of him before. I believe I may have had my facts wrong.

Your facts.

Yes.

Dorn shook his head, blew out a long breath.