by John Altman
Two miles from the cemetery was a strip mall, with eateries and hardware stores and multiplexes and gas stations. They found an open bar in an upmarket barbeque restaurant serving lunch. Both ordered Noble’s brand: Cutty Sark. The toast was wordless.
In school, Roger Ford announced then, everybody had known Noble would go far; but nobody had realized how famous he would become. Ford wouldn’t be surprised if something was named after him, a library or a foundation. He raised his glass, tinkling around the ice cubes. The world was worse off, today, than it had been when Noble still had graced them with his presence.…
Finney managed a few mumbled blandishments of his own. Noble had been intelligent, and ambitious. Then they sat in a paradoxical silence, both uncomfortable and hazily comforting.
Roger Ford looked at the bottles lined up behind the bar. “Well,” he said. “That one was for Arthur. Now how about one for us?”
He chose a better brand of scotch and ordered two more drinks, water back. Again they toasted wordlessly.
Ford stirred through a bowl of cocktail peanuts. He popped one in his mouth and chewed. A change occurred in his body language: a tightening of the neck and shoulders, a rising tension. Finney noticed it, and prepared himself for whatever the tension presaged.
“Listen,” Ford said.
Finney listened.
“I did meet Arthur at school. But there’s more to it than just that. We’ve worked together, on and off, in the years since.”
A spy after all, Finney thought. The most surprising thing was how unsurprised he felt.
“I’ve done a lot of scrambling, over the past few weeks, trying to wrap up some of the loose ends left by his passing. He truly was an amazing man. He stayed so busy, right up until the end.…”
Ford left the hook dangling. “‘Busy,’” Finney echoed at last.
“KINGFISHER wasn’t the only operation he was involved with. He served as watchman on two other high-priority interrogations. But the hardest roles to fill will be the administrative ones.” He raised another peanut, looked at it, and set it on the bar. “One in particular,” he said. “Called LONGSHOT.”
Finney said nothing. He drank deep.
“I’m aware of your … mixed feelings … about government work. And after the experience you’ve just had, one could hardly blame you for any reservations. But as I said, some of the roles that need to be filled are purely administrative. No hands-on testing whatsoever. Yet they’re sensitive. We can’t bring in just anybody to take over. We’d prefer a candidate who’s already been proven … like yourself, Doctor.”
“Arthur told me he hadn’t accepted a contract in years,” Finney said thickly.
“Because otherwise you wouldn’t have spoken to him. A little white lie.”
Finney drank again.
“Take my card,” Ford said. “And if you find yourself thinking you may want to give a little something back …”
A card came out of his wallet. He set it on the bar beside the peanut, and pushed it in Finney’s direction. Finney looked at it. He took it, only to avoid conflict. A little white lie of his own.
“… he’ll be missed,” Ford said. He wiped at his eye again, although as far as Finney could tell, he wasn’t crying.
He had misplaced the card.
Now he wondered how serious the misplacement had been. Was it in the bottom of a desk drawer, beneath birding magazines and knickknacks? Or had he left it in a pile of trash, and thrown it away?
And why was he wondering at all?
Because staying locked in his study, huddled in his den like an aging dog, did not suit him. Because he could sense Lila’s frustration, even from beyond the grave, at what he had become.
He was alive—wasn’t he?
Why don’t you act like it? Lila demanded.
Outside, the autumn rain gained force.
He wanted to feel the rain.
He walked into the downpour without bringing an umbrella. After thirty seconds, he was soaked through. He kept walking anyway, alongside trees whipped colorless by the weather. The cold had hounded him through much of the summer, turning into bronchitis before he’d finally beaten it. Now it would return as pneumonia, he thought.
Let it.
He sneezed, wiped at his nose, sneezed again, and kept walking.
Noble had been lying, when he’d claimed not to have accepted a government contract in fifteen years. Was it any surprise that Finney found himself unable to pay his respects to a man who never had given him anything but lies?
But that wasn’t quite fair.
At the beginning, there had been no need for lies. The top secret international jaunts, the generous funding, the cloak-and-dagger élan; all had conspired to overcome any misgivings Finney felt about taking part in MKULTRA. He had been nestled under the wing of a brilliant young doctor, and some of Noble’s glow had been passed to him through osmosis. He had seen the envy in other students’ eyes when they looked at him. Even Lila, he thought, had been attracted to his new success. No, there had been no misgivings worth mentioning—not at the start.
But reality soon had set in. The clinical results they obtained were nebulous, difficult to quantify; yet Noble put a polished gloss on the reports he sent off, which always happened to coincide with a need for more funding. The fast-and-loose interpretation of the results had been disillusioning. But they had been only the tip of the iceberg. Far more troubling had been the nature of the enemy—the other side, as they’d called it then. In practice, the other side had seemed to be composed of mental patients, prisoners, and soldiers drawn from their own ranks. It was a dirty game; and when one played it, one’s hands did not remain clean for long.
Yet the game needed to be played. Noble had liked to illustrate this point with a quote from George Orwell: Men sleep peacefully in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
Finney had seen the wisdom in the quotation. The desire to protect men who slept peacefully in their beds—in addition to the flattery and the money—had been a prime motivation for continuing with MKULTRA. But when faced with the consequences of his choices … when faced with the Susan Franklins … he had transferred the responsibility for his decisions onto Noble.
Cowardly, he thought.
Weak, cowardly, proud, and vain.
He remembered a dream: Lila standing with him before Noble’s grave, urging him to place a stone on the headstone. Forgiveness isn’t a gift you give someone else, she said.
Then he thought, It’s a gift you give yourself.
He came to a halt.
For almost two minutes, he stood motionless in the driving rain.
At last, he sneezed again. Then he turned and moved back to the farmhouse at a faster clip, past thickets and stables. Only a glutton for punishment—or a fool—stayed out in the rain.
The business card was in the bottom of his drawer, between a roll of masking tape and his checkbook.
He put it beside the telephone and looked at it for five minutes. Then he dabbed at his nose with a Kleenex, shook his head at some unarticulated thought, and picked up the receiver. He dialed.
“Roger Ford’s office,” a young woman said.
Ford played it as if he were pleasantly surprised. “Doctor!” he crowed. “Do you know, I’d just about given up on you? What’s it been, six months? But do you know, we still haven’t been able to fill that position I mentioned. There’s been—”
“You said no hands-on testing,” Finney interrupted.
“Absolutely. Whatever makes you comfortable. We’d be honored to have you aboard in whatever—”
“Just because you don’t do the tests yourself,” Finney said tautly, “doesn’t remove the burden of responsibility.”
A few moments of silence.
“No,” Ford agreed cautiously. “But if the undertaking is worthwhile, taking the responsibility can be a pleasure. And the nature of these tests is benign, Doctor. There’s no suffering. In fac
t, I’m told the subjects find it quite pleasurable.”
Finney squeezed the pockmarked doubloon in his hand, and didn’t answer.
“I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you take a look and judge for yourself? I could send a car, if you like. Just tell me when.”
“I won’t compromise myself.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to.”
“I won’t,” Finney said again.
“Come take a look,” Ford said, “and you can make up your own mind.”
He made an appointment for the following Monday.
Then he poured himself a stiff drink. After that, another.
The doorbell woke him up.
He’d managed to fall asleep in the chair behind his desk: not a bad trick, with the window open and a sharp snap of cold air blowing in. Finney tottered to his feet as the doorbell rang again. He found his walking stick leaning against the Queensleg desk, then humped out into the foyer. Considering the amount of time he’d spent prowling the fields behind the farmhouse, over the summer and fall, his continuing lack of strength came as something of a surprise. According to the doctor, the physical damage had healed. Yet Finney was not the man he once had been. He doubted that he ever would be that man again.
On his way to the door he paused to pick up the wicker basket he’d left on the hall table. Inside the basket were two dozen bite-size Milky Way bars. Most of the candy would be wasted; only eight children managed to reach the remote farmhouse for trick-or-treating, and that was on a good year. By now, the Tyler children probably were in high school. Without them, only four could be counted on: the three Travaglioni sisters and little William Finneran, who dressed every year in the same castaway blue sheet with jagged holes cut out for eyes.
It was the Travaglioni sisters. Finney opened the door and then recoiled in mock horror at the princess, the mermaid, and the witch standing on his doorstep. Mrs. Travaglioni was behind them, costumeless, holding the keys to her station wagon in one hand and displaying a forced smile.
“Trick or treat!” the girls called, more-or-less in unison.
Finney put a hand on his chest. After recovering, he offered the basket. “Take two,” he urged. “Take three. They’ll only go to waste.”
The girls obeyed, with the mermaid taking four. Then they turned to flee; their mother stopped them, spreading her arms into a barricade. “Mr. Finney,” she said. “How are you feeling?”
“Well, thank you. And yourself?”
“Fine, fine,” she said. “Fine. Girls, don’t you have something to say to Mr. Finney?”
Thank yous were muttered without eye contact. Finney could only imagine how he seemed to these children: the mysterious old man with the cane, living in the rambling decrepit farmhouse, making appearances in town to stock up on supplies only about once a month.
Creepy, no doubt, was how he struck them. Particularly on Halloween night.
And they didn’t know the half of it.
Mrs. Travaglioni’s forced smile broadened into a grimace. “You look well,” she told him.
“Thank you,” he said.
“I’m afraid we’ve got to run along. Lots of trick-or-treating to squeeze in tonight!” As if the circuit of candy-givers was not limited to five houses, and then only if she was willing to shuttle her children up and down this road fifteen miles in either direction. “Happy Halloween, Mr.Finney! Say goodbye, girls.”
When they had gone, he returned to the study. He’d been halfway through a drink when he’d fallen asleep. He pushed the glass away, looking out the window at the lowering twilight.
Tomorrow, perhaps, he would pay a visit to the cemetery.
He would place a stone on Noble’s grave. It would not symbolize forgiveness, he thought. He would not go through the motions of something he did not feel.
Yet it would symbolize something. A letting go … or was it the opposite? A bringing to … a taking of responsibility.
For Noble wasn’t the one who needed forgiving, after all.
On Monday he would meet with Ford, and see what LONGSHOT was about. Then would come a decision. The decision would be made by Finney, and by nobody else. This time, he would go into it with eyes wide open—
The doorbell rang again.
He heaved himself out of the chair, found the stick, and clopped into the foyer. He carried the wicker basket to the door and opened it.
Nobody was there.
For ninety seconds he scanned the front yard, the black skeleton trees and the final smear of daylight on the horizon. A trick, he thought. Perhaps the Tyler children had grown too old for the treat part of Halloween and had graduated to mischief.
That was all it was. Local teenagers, playing a trick.
By his feet was a jack-o’-lantern he had carved the previous afternoon. After going to the trouble of carving it, he hadn’t bothered to place a candle inside. He had lost his will to proceed. Suddenly this rankled him profoundly. Why, he had left too many things unfinished, hadn’t he? He had started down too many roads, then given up before reaching their conclusions.
Like Susan Franklin, he thought. What was stopping him from checking on her again, from seeing if the damage they had inflicted truly had healed?
Perhaps Roger Ford would be able to provide an address. Perhaps Finney could find the strength within himself to put many unfinished things to rest. Susan Franklin; a visit to Noble; even his service to his country …
He wasn’t taking anything for granted. There was no guarantee that these things would reach a satisfying end.
But if he didn’t try, he would never know.
He went to the kitchen and found a candle and a knife. He brought them back to the porch, crouched with a grunt, then dug a crater in the bottom of the jack-o’-lantern. He placed the candle inside and lit it. Light capered to life inside the pumpkin’s eyes.
For a few seconds he stayed where he was, watching it.
Then he turned. Night was falling in earnest. He went inside and washed the pumpkin seeds from the blade of the knife. Instead of rinsing them down the drain, he gathered them together—a handful of small, slippery pods—and set them in a glass.
Throughout the evening, the doorbell stayed quiet. But at a few minutes past midnight he sat up in bed with his heart catching in his chest. There had been a sound outside the house. More mischief. More tricks.
He went to the window and looked out. He saw nothing except the jack-o’-lantern—darkened now, but still standing vigilant guard on the porch.
Beyond it, in the yard, shifting dark shadows. Only the trees, and the wind.
He went back to bed, listening to the wind.
He did not sleep again that night.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Robert and Jane Altman, Dr. Mark Branon, Kevin Connell, Richard Curtis, Brendan Duffy, Jed Freeman, Richard Galganski, Ned Higgins, Pierre Honegger, Evan Metcalf, Neil Nyren, and Sarah Silbert.
About the Author
John Altman is the author of thrillers including A Gathering of Spies, A Game of Spies, Deception, The Watchmen, The Art of the Devil, and Disposable Asset, forthcoming in 2015. A graduate of Harvard University, Altman has traveled to every continent, including Antarctica, and has worked as a teacher, musician, and freelance writer. Born in White Plains, New York, he now lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with his family.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2004 by John Altman
Cover design by Morgan Alan
ISBN: 978-1-4976-7924-5
T
his edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
Turn the page to read from John Altman’s The Korean Woman
Copyright © 2019 by John Altman
Published in 2019 by Blackstone Publishing
For Danny
Only after having acknowledged sins and reflected deeply upon them can a prisoner begin anew.
—Ninth law of the kwan-li-so, North Korean prison camp system
PROLOGUE
Tumen River,
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
The river was a smooth black mirror. She gathered her courage and stepped off the bank, rippling the surface. Icy water filled her sneakers. She moved forward. The water soaked the cuffs of her dungarees and rose up her calves. She paused to look back. She could just make out the low white retaining wall on the embankment. Beyond it lay a cornfield, a dirt road, a mountain.
She advanced again. Each step sent undulating circles through the faint reflections of stars. Freezing water climbed to her knees, her thighs, her sex. Her waist, her solar plexus. For a moment, halfway across, she felt herself floating. Her toes quested, found the bottom again.
She pushed ahead. Water reached her breastbone. She drew a deep breath and kept going.
Abruptly, the water level began to drop. To waist, knees, ankles …
And she was across.
She slogged onto the bank, hugging her elbows, shivering violently.
After a few seconds she shucked off the backpack. Inside, the yukpo, the beef jerky, tightly wrapped in plastic film, was fine. The phone and documents were safe and dry in their cases. But the carton of Jangbaeksan cigarettes had gotten damp. She could only hope the tobacco …