Half World: A Novel (4 page)

6

San Francisco, Spring 1956

He introduced himself as Jimmy Dorn, the name as he said it sounding like a single word. He spoke in a distracted headlong rush, his eyes settling briefly on Henry before moving to the details in the background, the layout of the north apartment, the sight lines out the windows. A veteran cop’s sizing up of the premises.

“Heyhowareya. Gladwell? Jimmydorn.”

He was a great grappler of a man, possibly ten years Henry’s senior, thick in the neck and chest, his head bare and pink as a thumb. His brow was wet, the collar of his shirt dark with sweat from the climb up the stairs. He was breathing hard but that didn’t slow his forward momentum as he walked past Henry, immediately filling the space. His voice was low and loud, with the cigarette-and-booze roughness Henry had first heard during their brief phone conversation the day before.

Dorn cracked a cough into his fist, pounded himself on the chest to jar something loose.

“So show me around. This the bedroom in here?”

Henry watched him, silent. Dorn wore a sharp blue suit, custom-cut. Not the kind of outfit easily afforded on a detective’s salary alone. He
kept moving, briskly inspecting the kitchen, the closets, asking questions without waiting for answers.

“Where’s the head? In here?”

Henry waited in the living room. The toilet flushed once, twice.

“Henry? Hank?”

Dorn said the second name as if he had already decided on it. He returned to the living room, lifted the curtains away from the walls, poked the couch cushions with the toe of a wing tip.

“Who did your decorating? The place looks like a Catholic girls’ dorm.”

He stopped in the center of the room, finally catching his breath, then turned to look at Henry.

“All right. Enough bullshit. Show me your setup, Hank. Let me see all the secret stuff.”

*   *   *

They had lunch at an automat on Powell. Henry sat at a table by the window with a cup of coffee, watching Dorn make his way down the line of lit compartments. With every plate he pulled, Dorn lowered his head and sniffed, recoiled and replaced the item. He finally settled on what looked like tuna salad and toast, sat down across from Henry.

“Let’s not make a habit of coming here. I know a million great places where you don’t pull your lunch from a hole.” Dorn looked at his tuna salad without enthusiasm, then at Henry’s coffee. “Did you already eat or are you not eating?”

“I’m fine with coffee.”

“This is all I can have.” Dorn indicated the limp sandwich. “Half this. I’m trying to get back down to my fighting weight. Two-ten. Two-fifteen. My wife is on my back.” He took a bite. “Where you from, Hank? Originally.”

“The Midwest.”

“The Midwest.”

“Chicago,” Henry said.

Dorn flipped his tie back over his shoulder, tucked his napkin into
his collar and spread it across the front of his shirt. “You married? Any kids?” On Henry’s look he waved off his own question, took another mouthful of tuna salad. “Forget I asked. Too personal. Won’t happen again.”

“What do we need to get started?”

Dorn wiped his mouth on his napkin. “We’ll need two girls. Maybe three, but no more than that. They chirp like housewives. I’m thinking a white girl and a Negro. A Negro would widen the net. That way you’re going to get Negro males, and white males who are into Negroes. We could have a Chinese, too. That could be number three. Then you’ve pretty much got the whole city open to you, except for the queers. The queers are a different story. I don’t know if you want to go that route or not.”

“Let’s start with two.”

“Two it is. No problem. You got any preference, Hank? Blondes, brunettes? I’m just joking. You look like a family man. I’m just pulling your leg.”

“How are they paid?”

“Cash at the end of the night. And a few favors. I can keep them out of trouble. The protection is what instills loyalty. It’ll keep them quiet. You look a little queasy, Hank. You sure you don’t want something to eat?” Dorn produced a pen and a small black datebook from his breast pocket. He touched the tip of the pen to his tongue and jotted a note on a fresh page.

“All discussion of this type is off the record,” Henry said.

“What record? There is no record.” Dorn finished his note, closed the book, and returned it to his pocket. “Don’t worry about any of this, Hank. I’ll take care of everything.”

7

Washington, D.C., Winter 1955

Fifteen workdays in a windowless room with Paul Marist and Marist’s subordinates from the Office of Security. Questioned without rest, eight hours a day, except for a brief lunch when one of the officers brought in sandwiches. Marist and his men devouring the food while Henry consumed only coffee and cigarettes and thought back through the morning, what he had been asked, the answers he had given.

He knew of Paul Marist. He knew of everyone. Marist was a veteran of the gung ho operations wing of the company, an energetic figure who strode the halls, smiling and shaking hands. Something in him that Henry distrusted, that Weir had distrusted. That clear-cut sense of confidence.

Fifteen days. Henry knew that there was an element of revenge to this. These men had spent years in fear of Weir, of Henry, and now Henry was alone, stripped of his patron. They had been correct to distrust him, to distrust Weir, they had been proven right, and now they would take full advantage of the redistribution of power. He had no argument. He understood their anger, their sense of betrayal. He understood their fear, the savage uncertainty. He was trying to discover the answer to the same basic question they were asking. What he knew when.

They recorded the interviews, took copious notes. They gave Henry a polygraph test every day for a week. They never told him the results,
but they implied that he’d failed, which was common practice in these situations. He didn’t argue. Henry stated his story and answered their questions and corrected Marist when he tried to lead Henry down another path. This was Henry’s job. They were good, but this was Henry’s job. They tried every technique they knew. They questioned him one at a time, two at a time, a roomful of officers at a time, a Greek chorus of accusation. They made promises and threats, insinuations. Some of these men he had trained. Some of his very techniques turned against him. Like being interrogated by his own children.

He said nothing to Ginnie for the first two weeks. The shock was too great, the shame. What he had unwittingly helped Weir accomplish. It was something he needed to contain within himself. When he was home, he moved as if sleepwalking, his head still in the room with Marist while he and Ginnie and the children ate dinner, shoveled the driveway and the walk.

Finally, during the third week, he sat at the breakfast table and told her that Weir was gone, that he was being questioned. Ginnie stood at the counter with a stunned look, an oven mitt on her hand. What does that mean, she’d asked, and Henry had said that he didn’t know.

*   *   *

On the fifteenth day, he sat alone with Marist in the conference room. No polygraph, no notebooks, no papers on the table. Marist was relaxed, sitting back in his chair, looking at Henry as if they were two friends sharing a drink.

Marist said that they had reached a conclusion. They were confident that Henry hadn’t been involved in the deception in any way. He would be returned to his normal duties. His office would be open to him again. Everything would be as it was.

Marist stood and Henry stood. As Henry left the room, Marist stopped him, said that he had some good news for a change. That he, Marist, had been promoted. He was moving to Henry’s department. Starting that Monday, he said, he would be taking Arthur Weir’s place.

8

San Francisco, Spring 1956

Henry thought that he had entered the wrong apartment. He stood in the living room, disoriented, almost dizzy. Heavy burgundy drapes covered the windows. A chenille sofa and chair sat where the secretaries’ furniture had been. Paintings hung on the walls, nude women reclining and bathing, white and Negro, Oriental couples in various sexual positions and combinations, all lit with small electric pin lights clipped to the wood of the overly ornate frames. The walls were still wet with paint, a dark, nearly blood red. Drop cloths covered the floor, color-stippled along the edges.

In the bedroom, the twin beds had been replaced by a large four-poster covered in a gold spread, with an assortment of fringed velveteen pillows. The utilitarian dresser under the mirror had been replaced with something massive and baroque.

“Don’t worry, I didn’t screw up any of your stuff.” Dorn stood in the doorway, dressed in spattered painter’s overalls, holding a paint roller in one hand and a martini glass in the other. “You should give me a key, it’ll make it easier to get in.”

“Who else was here?”

“You don’t think I’m capable of doing this? I have an eye for this stuff.”

“Who else was here?”

“I already told you, Hank. Nobody.”

Henry walked back through the living room, crossed the vestibule, and unlocked the south door.

Dorn followed at a distance. “You don’t trust me?”

“I don’t know you.”

Henry went through the office. All seemed to be in order. The recorder, the shutter controls for the cameras. He unlocked the top drawer of his desk. The ledger was still in its place.

“Nothing else changes,” Henry said. “Nothing else comes into the apartments without my approval.”

Dorn raised an eyebrow, nodded.

Henry said, “Understood?”

“Aye-aye, Captain.”

Henry backed out of the south apartment, locked the door, brushed past Dorn on his way to the stairs.

“Don’t start worrying already.” Dorn sipped his drink, called down over the railing. “We haven’t done anything yet.”

9

On her way home, Hannah tried to remember the same walk in Arlington, the long stands of birch and ash trees, the familiar houses, the neighbors’ cars in welcoming colors, but all she could see was the new town, its paint-peeling weathered ugliness, and then back over her shoulder the imagined crash and glow, the city in flames across the bay.

They’d shown a civil defense film at school, footage of atomic bomb tests cut together with a projected aftermath, images from the San Francisco earthquake standing in for the next great destruction. Hollow shells of buildings, piles of brick and glass, smoke rising to the sky. A narrator warned of the dangers in the city after the bomb: radiation in the air, in the water; desperate criminal activity; still-falling masonry.

She couldn’t get the movie out of her head. She could picture her father at work in the city, the building in which he sat crumbling from under him, his desk and chair tipping, other desks tipping, men in suits grabbing for their hats as they fell. She reached the house, their new house, tried to imagine it as the house in Arlington, but the light from the explosions across the bay flickered in the windows.

She didn’t want to talk to her mother. Her mother wouldn’t understand. Her mother would say what she always said, that it wasn’t worth thinking about the bad things. As if that made them go away. She wouldn’t let Hannah walk to school alone again after a scene like this,
coming home in tears. Hannah would be forced back into the ridiculous parade of those first weeks here, she and her mother and Thomas ambling down the hill.

She would wait for her father. He had always been the one to take her fears seriously. He was different now, she knew this, something had happened that had made them move, something had happened to him, he was further away somehow, but he was still the one she went to when she was afraid.

Inside the house she marched straight to her room, ignoring her mother’s questions, closing the door and crying until the light outside dimmed and she heard the front door open, her father’s footsteps in the hall. It was the only thing she had really learned about this new place. She could tell the sound of him in the house.

When he opened her door she ran to him, clinging to his waist, blubbering about the movie, embarrassing herself but unable to stop, tears and snot on the belly of his shirt, the tail of his tie, gulping air from hiccuping sobs, pleading with him not to go back into the city. He sat with her on the bed, listened to her recount the story of the film. He didn’t try to convince her that what she had seen wasn’t real. He considered everything she said. She could see him working it over in his head, so when he told her, finally, that she didn’t need to be afraid of this, she knew she could believe him, that there was some truth there, something to hold on to. Exhausted, she lay back onto the bed and he covered her with the blanket, her hand in his, her breathing slowing, deepening.

When she woke it was dark in the house. She was still in her school clothes, though her shoes were off and her hair was down, had been brushed. She sat up and thought she could see explosions again out the black window, fire across the water, but then her father’s hand squeezed hers and she lay back down beside him, closing her eyes in the safety of his arms.

10

The girl leaned across the bed, tapped her cigarette against the wall to pack the tobacco. She found a box of matches in her purse and lit the tip, inhaling, blowing smoke in a long steady stream. It was part of some kind of show, Henry knew. She was establishing her character for him. A hard-edged woman of the world.

She was twenty, maybe, skinny and pale and angular. Her hair was blond, showing dark at the roots. She wore a thin blue dress that matched her eyes. There were bruises on her knees, and one on her thigh that Henry could see when she crossed her legs.

She said her name was Elizabeth. The first time she had buzzed at the front door he had turned her away. She’d had his name wrong, had asked for Mr. Stonewell. An hour later she returned with the correct name and he let her in, followed her up the stairs to the north apartment.

“What has he told you?” Henry passed her an ashtray, stood back by the dresser while she sat back on the bed.

“About what?”

“About this.”

She looked around the room, caught her reflection in the mirror, pushed her hair behind her ears. “That I’ll be bringing men here a couple times a week.”

“And then what?”

“Slipping them something, maybe. In their drink.”

“How long have you known him?”

“Jimmy?”

“Yes.”

“A couple of years.”

“How long have you been doing this?”

“A couple of years.” She looked to the mirror again, then back at Henry. “There’s going to be someone else? Another girl?”

“Possibly.”

“Will we be working together?”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean will we be working together.”

“That’s yet to be determined,” Henry said. “What did he tell you about me?”

“He didn’t tell me anything. Just your name: Mr. Gladwell.” She gave a smart-aleck smile, getting the name right.

“Nothing else?” Henry said.

Elizabeth leaned across the bed again, tapped the end of her cigarette into the ashtray. She looked back at Henry. “He said that you’re someone who likes to watch.”