Half World: A Novel (6 page)

15

Washington, D.C., Winter 1955

Henry sits at his desk. His office door is closed. He has just finished lunch at his desk. He always eats lunch at his desk. It is early afternoon, nearly a month since the interrogation.

The light through the window behind him is bright white. Clear, cold December light, seemingly from no single source, simply from the winter world itself: the half inch of snow on the ground, the frozen reflecting pool in the mall. There is a neat stack of papers on his desk, another neat stack of file folders. He lights a cigarette, sets it in the glass ashtray. Replaces one folder, retrieves another from the stack.

What Weir knew. What Weir had whispered into the ear of the enemy. How many had suffered for Henry’s mistake? Agents in the field, assets, sympathizers. Operations had been rolled up by the Russians, the Chinese. Brave men would spend the rest of their lives in prisons, torture chambers. Brave men would be killed. Had been killed. How many had already been killed?

They were right to have accused him. It was not all for show. Marist had stood in the conference room and called Henry a traitor and Henry could feel his hands around Marist’s throat, his thumbs pressing the windpipe, fingertips on skin. He had wanted to kill the man from anger and shame.

The papers slide from the folder, off the edge of the desk to the floor. Henry kneels beside his chair, gathering the pages.

There is a knock at the door. Henry ignores it, continues to pick up the papers. The door opens. Marist is there. His suit coat is gone, his tie is loosened, there is a drink in his hand. Henry can hear laughter from down the hall, a shout, some applause. It is the afternoon of the office Christmas party.

Henry stands. More papers fall to the floor.

Marist looks at the spilled folder. “Why don’t you come down?” he says. “Close up in here. Take a break.” He places the drink on Henry’s desk. “I poured that for you. Bourbon, neat, correct? Your wife is from Kentucky. I’ve never met your wife.” He pauses, considering something. “We’re having a get-together at our place tomorrow night, Angela and I. We’d like you to come. You and your wife. But first, I want you to close up in here, come down the hall. You’ve missed the worst of it, I assure you. Everyone’s drunk now, so it’s easier to navigate.”

Marist waits, looks again at the bourbon in the desk. “Are you going to drink that or am I?”

Henry gathers the last paper, stands. “Be my guest.”

“It’s not a request, Henry. I don’t like the idea of you holed up in here alone. There’s nothing to work on this afternoon.”

“There’s always something to work on.”

Marist starts for the door. “Close up and come down. That’s a direct order.” He turns the corner and disappears.

Henry looks at the drink. A tumbler from the bar set in Marist’s office. Weir’s old office. The bourbon was Weir’s as well, a rich single-barrel. Henry takes a drink.

The sound of an off-key Christmas carol from down the hall. Marist had insisted the party go on as planned. Weir’s betrayal had shaken everyone, but Marist believed the party would help to release some of the tension and frustration. Would prove that the world turned, the show must go on.

Henry couldn’t fathom what it would take to walk down into the party. Everyone there assumed he was guilty in some way. This was the organizing principle that he had instilled in the company, that Weir had instilled. Proximity to guilt is still guilt. It is a communicable disease. He would bear it always, by his own design. A skin he could never shed.

He takes another drink, places the folders into the appropriate drawers and file cabinets, locks the locks. He unbuttons his suit coat, carrying his cigarette and the drink with him as he leaves the office, locking the door behind him.

*   *   *

An older secretary noticed first, her eyes widening at the sight as Henry emerged into the large, open space. The party was in full swing. Recognition spread quickly, voices quieting as other secretaries and officers noticed him, conversations stumbling and then ceasing altogether as they realized who the naked man was. The shock of the most improbable sight, Henry March, standing pale and bare, holding an empty whiskey tumbler.

He had stripped himself on the walk down the hall, following the sounds of the party, leaving his clothes behind in a trail stretching back to his office door. Shirt, undershirt, slacks, underpants, socks, shoes. Even his glasses. The world before him a soft blurred whirl.

Roy Pritchard approached, looked Henry in the eye, and when he saw no one there that he recognized, led Henry by the elbow back up the hall. A few titters from some of the tipsier secretaries, openmouthed surprise from the others. Similar reactions from the officers. Henry March standing naked before them, a pale ghost, there and then gone. Marist stood in the farthest corner of the room, stopped in midconversation, watching without an immediately readable expression.

Roy took Henry back to the office, collecting clothes as they went. Once inside, he closed the door and turned Henry to look at him again.

“I have nothing to hide,” Henry said. His voice all the more disturbing to Roy for its measured tone. Henry’s normal, everyday voice, calm and even.

“You see?” he said, looking at Roy, his face steady, his eyes steady. “I have nothing.”

16

San Francisco, Spring 1956

The second girl arrived. She was tall and strongly built, a few years older than Elizabeth. She said her name was Emma. Dorn rolled his eyes at this. They gave her the briefing in the living room. She sat alone on the sofa with her legs crossed and her hands in her lap, listening with her face set as if she didn’t quite believe them either. She had many of the same questions as Elizabeth: how she would be paid, if she would be working alone or with another girl. She had a low, deep voice, a southern accent, country rather than city. Henry was surprised that Dorn quoted her the same rate as Elizabeth. He had assumed Dorn would pay her less because she was a Negro.

She walked through the apartment, inspecting the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen. She flipped through the crate of records, unimpressed, and Dorn gave her some money to buy new ones, anything but Benny Goodman. She looked at him like he was speaking a foreign language, like she had no idea who Benny Goodman was.

“You can drink in here,” Dorn said. “But no drugs. Not in the apartment.”

Emma smoothed the front of her dress. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Not in the apartment. Understood?”

She turned to Henry. “Is he a cop, too?”

“He’s not a cop,” Dorn said.

“He doesn’t look like a cop.”

Dorn lit a cigarette, passed it to Emma. “What does he look like?”

She stared at Henry through the smoke. “He looks like a teacher or something. A professor.”

Dorn laughed.

“I don’t know what he looks like.” Emma took a pull on her cigarette. “He just looks like a regular guy.”

17

Arlington, Winter 1955

Henry was unwell, that was what the voice on the phone said. It was a day not long after Henry’s official questioning had ended. Thomas was napping, Ginnie was finishing her lunch when the phone rang. The man on the other end of the line spoke with a smooth timbre, a hint of the affected Brahmin tone she heard from many of Henry’s colleagues. He introduced himself as Paul Marist.

Henry is unwell, Marist said. He’ll be coming home soon.

A half hour later she heard a car door closing, the sharp bark of metal in the cold. She looked out the kitchen window to see Roy Pritchard’s beetle-black Ford idling at the curb, exhaust billowing in the December air. Linebacker Roy, seemingly Henry’s only friend left in Washington. Roy came around to the passenger side and opened the door, hunched by the raw wind, holding his gloved hands at the buttons of his coat. Henry stepped out onto the sidewalk, head down, coat open, his face obscured by the brim of his hat. Ginnie stood in the doorway, trying to see Henry’s face as he made his way up the walk. She was one of the only people who could read his expressions. If she could see his face, then she could gauge the seriousness of the situation.

They reached the door. Roy took off his hat. It looked like he was about to say something, but then he set his hat back on his head and turned and walked to the car.

Henry didn’t lift his head. Ginnie was afraid to touch him. She had never seen him like this, unsteady, uncertain. She asked if he would like to lie down. He nodded and she stepped aside to let him pass. She didn’t lay a hand on him until he was in bed, still fully dressed, the sheets pulled up to his neck. Sent home like a sick child. She tried to undress him, but he wouldn’t let her take his clothes off. He gripped the front of his shirt like he was afraid it would be ripped from his body.

She set her hand on his forehead. His skin was cool. His eyes were squeezed shut as if he was trying to force something away.

Later, he would tell her that he had become ill at work, that something he had eaten at the Christmas party hadn’t agreed with him. This was not the truth. If she couldn’t get the whole story from him, then she could still tell when she wasn’t getting the truth. The man she had opened the front door to was not a man who had simply become sick at the office. Something deeper had happened.

Who he had looked like was Thomas. She tried to banish the thought, but it stayed with her, the rightness of the comparison making it impossible to send away. In that moment on the bed he had looked like Thomas after coming through a tantrum. Thomas reborn, bewildered. A new boy emerging into a frightening world.

18

Oakland, Spring 1956

They stood on the Sullivans’ front step, waiting for the door to open. Ginnie made one last attempt to smooth Hannah’s hair, but Hannah pulled away, took Thomas’s hand. Thomas stared straight ahead at the door, adjusted his earmuffs.

The sound of footsteps from inside. Ginnie leaned into Henry. “Doris and Dick,” she whispered. “He’s a lawyer for a firm downtown. She was a beauty queen years ago. Miss Golden Gate Bridge or something.”

Doris Sullivan welcomed them effusively, the guests of honor, then led them through the house to the back patio doors. She weaved a little as she walked, her hands out to her sides in a half dance step, seemingly more than a little drunk.

It was a larger party than Henry had expected. The yard was full of neighborhood families. There was a line at the barbecue, another at a bar in a corner by the fence. The noise was considerable, but Thomas seemed all right as long as his earmuffs were on and Hannah was by his side. She was happier than Henry had seen her since the move, the protective big sister, guiding Thomas along the hors d’oeuvre table, over to the sidelines to watch a badminton match between some of the other children.

Ginnie was at ease here. She had a poise and confidence in social situations that had always seemed effortless to Henry. She moved across the
lawn, touching elbows, throwing her head back to laugh at one of Dick Sullivan’s jokes. Henry followed a step behind, smiling mildly, concentrating on his drink.

“And what do you do, Mr. March?”

Doris Sullivan had cornered him by the edge of the patio. He’d become separated from Ginnie, somehow. It shouldn’t have been so hard to give his standard answer, that he was an accountant, but he found himself tripped up here, still off balance from the unexpected crowd, stuck in Doris’s close, unblinking gaze. He forced a smile, cleared his throat.

“Henry is a photographer.”

Ginnie was there, suddenly, sweeping in beside him, a hand on his arm.

“How fascinating,” Doris said. “Portraits or landscapes?”

“Portraits, mostly,” Henry said.

“You’ll have to show us your work,” Doris said. “Dick is a shutterbug himself. Nothing at your level, I’m sure, but he loves talking about cameras. Would you do that sometime? Show us your work?”

“Of course,” Ginnie said. “That sounds wonderful. Doesn’t it, Henry?”

“Wonderful,” Henry said. “Yes, it does.”

Doris beamed.

19

The girls went out with their lists of names and came back with johns that Dorn wanted questioned, open cases in his department that had grown cold utilizing standard methods.

Dorn procured the drugs. Cannabis, mescaline, morphine, scopolamine. They tested the efficiency of various delivery systems. Whether a drug was smoked in a tainted cigarette or consumed in a spiked drink. They measured onset times, the degree to which the drug softened resistance, loosened tongues.

The results were different with every john. The men talked, or slept, or wanted nothing but sex for hours. They found that it was better for the girls to ask questions after sex, lying in bed with johns who expected them to dress and take their money and leave. The flattery of the extra attention, the unexpected intimacy. This was far more effective than asking questions earlier in the encounter, while teasing or withholding, which tended only to make the johns angry.

They watched things Henry would have preferred not to. His eyes on the window and then down to the ledger, reading what he’d written in the spilled-over light from the other room. Taking his attention off the scene when he could. Trying not to think about the fact that these girls were daughters, that they might have brothers and sisters, may have once been part of a family. The girls slapped or pushed or held
down. The first few times this happened, Henry rose from his chair but Dorn told him to stay put, that one of them running in would do nothing but blow the project and put the girls in further danger down the road. So Henry sat and looked at the ledger when he could no longer watch the window.

He checked the post office boxes, sent paperwork back east. He typed up brief memos, the barest outlines of the operation, dates and times, the relative success or failure of a particular night. Funds arrived in the bank account and Henry withdrew enough for the rent and the liquor cabinet, the film and reels of audiotape.

They used the apartment three or four nights a week. Henry was home during the mornings, working on the biography of his time with Weir, or sleeping when he could, the sounds of Ginnie and Thomas reading or playing in the living room weaving in and out of his dreams. Hannah would already be at school. He seldom saw her during the week. After lunch and maybe a trip to the park with Thomas, he was back in the city, getting to the apartments no later than sundown. The end of the workday on the streets around him, men walking to the train, loosening their ties, heading home. Henry walking against the flow, crossing from one place to another.

He had told Ginnie that he would be working nights now, mostly. He didn’t give her any more information and she didn’t ask, though he could tell she wanted to. It wouldn’t be for long, he said. Things would be back to normal soon.

Dorn arrived after his detective’s shift, and they ate the sandwiches Henry had picked up from the deli on Powell. Sometimes Dorn insisted that they go out for a real meal, and then they took the Lincoln to one of Dorn’s favorite spots, a restaurant in Chinatown or North Beach where the maître d’s had booths waiting and the bartenders kept Dorn’s martini glass full.

My name is Clarence. My name is Heath. My name is Stan. I’m a longshoreman, a truck driver, a shoe salesman in town on business. They all had different wants and needs, different things they told the girls to do. Some of the white men wanted to be rough with Emma; some wanted
her to be rough with them. Some wanted to be tied to the bedposts with their belts, burned with cigarettes. Some wanted to be coddled, caressed, held.

The range and depth of need didn’t surprise him. He had been trained to seek out the weaknesses in others. He’d seen photos, read private letters, heard recorded conversations. What surprised him was watching it play out just a few feet away. Human bodies in motion. There was nothing more intimate or frightening than two people alone in a room. It was difficult not to consider what his own need would be, what could be drawn out of him if he were on the other side of the window. What he would be willing to risk everything for.

He listened in the headphones, snapped pictures. He leaned forward at his desk, peering into the glass before the drugs knocked the johns completely out, straining to hear if their answers to the girls’ questions were any more revealing in that brief moment before the men lost control. Dorn sitting beside him with a cigarette and a drink, chuckling or clucking his tongue or whistling low, whispering to Henry that this was the best goddamn television show he had ever seen.