Half World: A Novel

by O'Connor, Scott

  More soft Russian, what sounded like the lines of a prayer. The rhythmic incantation. Then a silence, a long, protracted space, nothing, nothing, and then the screams, Dorn and Clarke lowering their headphones and Henry lowering the gain, the men sitting back in their chairs while Valerov shrieked, the sound white and hot, a burning point of light in the dark.

  * * *

  Clarke gave Valerov vitamin injections, gave him STORMY with water. They let him sit in his clothes, his mess. They left him blindfolded. They were only in the room long enough to give him more of the drug and when they left they turned out the lights.

  It did not seem like he slept. There was always sound coming from the room, shouting or screaming or talking or whispering, sometimes just formless noise, buzzing and humming. Whenever there was a moment of silence, Henry would think that Valerov had finally succumbed to sleep, but it would be broken soon enough by more noise.

  Dorn and Clarke slept, sometimes deeply, sometimes fitfully. Henry did not sleep. He did not know how long it had been since he’d slept. He watched the dark window, listened through the headphones. He would stay awake as long as Valerov was awake. It was just the two of them now, it was down to the two of them, so he stood by the window and listened to the man come apart.

  * * *

  Dorn’s voice from somewhere in the office behind Henry, slurry with sleep.

  “You want me to go in?”

  “No,” Henry said.

  “When?”

  “Soon.”

  Henry stood at the window, the red burn of his cigarette the only reflection in the glass.

  “We’re missing something.” Dorn’s voice from somewhere back in the dark. “Your book, Hank. Where’s your book?”

  * * *

  The room smelled like sweat and urine, bodily waste, sour breath, gases. The heat was overwhelming. Henry turned on the overhead light. The floor was wet. The paint was peeling from what was left of the walls. An unthinkable place he had created.

  Valerov didn’t move. He was breathing with some difficulty. He sat slumped, head down on his bare chest, his arms tied behind the back of the chair, the blindfold a tight black strip over his eyes.

  Henry lifted the blindfold. Valerov kept his eyes closed, his head down.

  “My name is Henry March. I was a colleague of the man you say you knew. I was a friend of the man.”

  Valerov slowly opened his eyes. Squinting in the light, blinking rapidly.

  “How long have I been here?” Valerov said.

  “I don’t know.”

  Valerov nodded, as if this was the answer he’d expected.

  “This is your only chance to talk,” Henry said. “When I leave this room you will be back in the dark. That other place. You will be here as long as it takes.”

  Valerov’s lips were dry and cracked. He ran his tongue over his bottom lip, moving some of the dead skin away.

  “That is not why I am still here.”

  His voice was a torn, pained thing. What was left of his voice.

  “I am still here because you do not know what to do with me,” he said. “I know where I am. I am in San Francisco, California. I am in the United States of America. You cannot just open the door and set me free. Not after what has happened here.”

  He licked his lips again, blinked at his bare feet.

  “So the question now is something different,” Valerov said. “It is not Monarch. It is not anything I can tell you.”

  Valerov looked at the wall, the door, his eyes without color, nothing but black pupil, and Henry realized that the man could no longer see, that he was still in the dark.

  “The question now is one of disposal,” Valerov said.

  Henry turned, unlocked the bathroom. He filled a glass with water from the sink, brought it back out, held the glass to Valerov’s lips.

  “It’s just water,” he said. “Nothing else.”

  Valerov’s mouth turned in an ugly smile. He took a drink, coughed, took a longer drink, gulping the water.

  “It does not matter what it is,” Valerov said.

  He sucked the liquid. When he stopped coughing, he spoke again.

  “I know you, Henry March. I know your paperwork. I cannot see you, but I assume you resemble your photographs. I knew your friend as well. A highly intelligent man, a sensitive man. A poet. A man with a great understanding of the world.”

  “What did you give him?”

  “In exchange for his secrets? Your secrets? You would be disappointed. As would my colleagues back home. What did you give me for my secrets?”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  Valerov lifted his shoulders, winced, let them drop. “Men who betray their countries, where do they go? Rooms like this, possibly. We have rooms like this.”

  “And the others?”

  “Further penetration. You want to know if your organization is riddled with liars. With deceivers.”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course it is. As is mine. As are they all. We are all being betrayed. We are all in danger of being heard. This is not a secret. This is not one of our secrets. You are so young, your people. You are children who do not yet understand.”

  Valerov stuck his tongue out. Henry brought the glass to his lips. Valerov finished the water greedily, sputtering from the overflow. When he spoke again his voice was stronger, clearer.

  “My name is Grigori Sergeyevich Valerov. My father’s name was Sergei Nikolayevich Valerov. My wife’s name is Constantina. My daughters are Sasha and Padme. I am a citizen of the Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik. I am a member of the Kommunisticheskaya Partiya Sovetskogo Soyuza. I have nothing more to tell you, Henry March. I have told you everything.”

  Henry set the empty glass on the dresser.

  “I ask only that you do it quickly,” Valerov said. He tilted his head, his unseeing eyes rising. “A professional courtesy. Only what you would ask of me if our situation was reversed.”

  * * *

  Into the office, Henry turning the switches on the wall, flooding the room with light. Dorn stands from the sofa, squinting. Clarke leans forward at Henry’s desk.

  “What did he tell you?”

  “Nothing,” Henry says. “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then they want him turned,” Clarke says.

  “I know what they want.”

  Clarke places his hands on Henry’s desk, pushes himself up. “What do you want to do, Henry? You want to open the door? You want to let him go?”

  Dorn moves slowly toward Clarke, shifting his weight from one leg to another, restarting the circulation.

  “Call them,” Henry says. “Call Marist. Tell them we can’t do any more.”

  “It’s already done, Henry.” Clarke says. “There is no way out of here. Where is the way out?”

  There is a look exchanged, Clarke and Dorn, and then Dorn is past the desks, out of the office. Henry turns to see Dorn reappear on the other side of the mirror, unstrapping Valerov, shouting at the man, knocking him to the floor.

  Henry is moving again, pulling open the drawers of Dorn’s desk, rummaging through the suit coat on the back of Dorn’s chair.

  Dorn screams at Valerov, whipping him with the straps. Valerov cowers against the wall by the blinded window, blocking his face with his hands, screaming in return.

  Henry drops the coat, pulls the cushions from the sofa where Dorn had slept.

  “You’re looking for his gun?”

  Clarke’s back is to the window. He’s watching Henry. Behind him, Dorn has the straps pressed to Valerov’s neck. Valerov pulls at Dorn’s wrists, gasping.

  Clarke says, “He has it.”

  Henry looks past Clarke to the other room. Dorn’s revolver is tu
cked into the back of his belt, visible beneath the open flap of his shirt.

  Out of the office. He can’t move fast enough, stumbling through the outer room, then through the door and into the brightness of the vestibule. Blinded, lurching. There is no sound. Sunlight in the vestibule. Dust in the air, turning. Then into the living room and there is no sound and then there is a muffled burst in the air, a plosive breath. Henry standing outside the bedroom door. The bedroom door open but not enough for Henry to see into the room. Inside, one man has shot the other. Either Dorn has shot Valerov or Valerov has shot Dorn and now whoever has the gun will turn it on Henry.

  It is morning now. He can still feel the sunlight from the vestibule on his face. He can see Hannah walking down the hill to school, can see Ginnie and Thomas at the park, their faces warm from the sun. Henry’s face is warm from the sun. Dust spins in the air.

  There is a noise, movement from inside the room. A man stirring, coming toward the open door.

  He has created this. He has created something monstrous, and it will consume him, will consume those he loves, if it has something to follow, if it has a name.

  There is a noise from the other room. Henry lets the first name go, the second. Henry Gladwell, Henry March. He sees now how Weir did it. You let the names go and the man follows.

  The door opens, fully. A figure in the doorway.

  He realizes, now. This is how Weir did it.

  This is how you disappear.

  PART TWO

  * * *

  American Berserk

  1

  Summer 1972

  It was the takeoffs he didn’t like, the plane struggling into the air, the last gravitational grasp pulling him down into his seat, the whine of the landing gear folding into the belly of the machine, leaving the plane without lower limbs, an insane, crippling action Dickie saw as tantamount to jumping off a flight of stairs and tying your legs behind your back in midair.

  He wasn’t crazy about the flight itself either, but at least he could open his eyes after takeoff, loosen his fingers from the armrest, light a cigarette, have a drink if he was still drinking, which he wasn’t, so there was that added to the equation. The old bird sitting next to him ordered a gin and tonic about thirty seconds after they’d reached cruising altitude, and Dickie had to make a conscious effort not to throttle her for her glass, or lick her denuded fingers for the precious liquid she spilled while positioning the drink on her tray. Instead, he picked an Antabuse out of his little plastic bottle, set the tablet on his tongue, and motioned to the stewardess for a glass of water.

  One takeoff down, Moline to Vegas, with one to go, Vegas to L.A. He hadn’t been on a plane since he’d started on the MAELSTROM operation, more than four years ago. An enviable period, it now seemed. Over that time he had traveled by train, or more often by bus, or most often in someone’s car, almost always at night, on back roads if possible, driving just below the speed limit so as not to attract attention. Flying was for aboveground travelers, honest citizens, businessmen and vacationing families with legitimate identification they’d be willing to show at ticket counters and security checkpoints. The groups Dickie had been with had traveled earthbound, changing modes every few hundred miles, consulting Greyhound and Amtrak timetables like holy writs, Paul’s Letter to the I-5 Bus Rider. The methods and peculiarities of fugitive movement. Time was different underground. It was slower, older, closer to the skin, an element to live in rather than an enemy to defeat.

  OPERATION MAELSTROM. That was what Father Bill had called it, its official designation, though it was only now, four years later, after everything had fallen apart, that Dickie started to think of how fitting the name really was.

  Father Bill was Dickie’s man back east. His real name was Bill Collins, but Dickie had started calling him Father after their first couple of meetings. It was a good way to get a rise out of the man, a reference to the fact that Bill had spent six months in seminary after Yale and seriously considered the priesthood before realizing that his talents lay in other directions. So he’d married his college sweetheart and had four kids and gone to work for a government agency he refused to mention by name. The priest thing was a surprisingly personal disclosure, and Dickie had jumped on it and refused to let go, whether it bothered Bill because it was an embarrassingly candid biographical fact or a bullshit cover story being pretty much beside the point.

  Bill had brought Dickie into MAELSTROM to infiltrate some of the student and antiwar groups, to get names and connections and compromising information, to work his way deeper as the groups got more serious, closer to actions other than marches and sit-ins. Eventually he would find the tiny nerve centers of the most radical groups, the planning cells, the boys and girls who crouched over workbenches packing formaldehyde bricks, hot-wiring fuses and alarm-clock detonators. He was to gain their trust, their respect, and then nudge them toward setting one of those timers, which would lead, ideally, to explosions and arrests, and the tipping of public opinion back to the side of the authorities.

  During the years on MAELSTROM, Father Bill had been his only link aboveground. Dickie would call at whatever day and time they’d agreed on, once a month, once every other month, squeezed into a phone booth, vibrating from too many bennies, trying to keep his cigarette steady, the smoke from his eyes, relaying information to Bill or asking for instructions, advice. Hearing sometimes, on Bill’s end of the line, the sounds of normalcy, laughter at a cocktail party in the background or the delighted after-school squeals of Bill’s kids. Dickie finding himself looking forward to these five-minute conversations with an embarrassing overeagerness, the opportunity to lift his head above water for a few minutes, and then, afterward, always feeling chagrined by the disdain in Bill’s voice, Bill’s response to what Dickie must have sounded like on his end of the line: strung out, insomniac, very far into the weeds.

  The old bird in the next seat was looking at Dickie, his hair and mustache and beard, the white octagon still on his tongue as he waited, openmouthed, for the stewardess to return with his water. Clearly not the traveling companion she’d hoped for. He hadn’t done much personal grooming during the months in Iowa. His hair was still down to his shoulders, his mustache still touching his chin. He’d lost his sunglasses somewhere back in the airport at Moline, possibly while he was throwing up in the restroom stall, and he was sure that his eyes were cracked and bloodshot and betrayed his current tenuous emotional state: smack-dab in early-stage withdrawal from drinking, sure, but also from the months in his father’s apartment, the day-to-day monotony at the end of life, watching the old man breaking down to nothing.

  The stewardess came by with a glass and Dickie swallowed his pill. His seatmate was snoring loudly now, out just like that, some kind of narcoleptic, maybe, her mouth agape, G&T glass empty, a paperback potboiler spread-eagled on her lap. Dickie’s rear end was asleep, too, so he pulled his wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans, trying to free up some space. He still had some of the cash Father Bill had given him in Iowa, along with the false driver’s license and press credential, and the small collection of insane quasi-religious pamphlets that were the reason he was heading to L.A. All sorts of good things in those: half- or maybe quarter-baked accounts of government mind-control experiments, brainwashing, surreptitious drug testing, other fun stuff which Dickie wasn’t really in the mood for with his stomach still doing backflips. Then there was the last little thing, Dickie’s personal contraband, stashed away behind the thin sheaf of bills: his legitimate driver’s license, his real ID, still a strange thing to see after years of forgeries and boosted cards. A colossal security breach to be sure, having this on him, but it wasn’t his first colossal breach, probably wouldn’t be his last, and he felt it was owed to him in some way, this one small reminder.

  He’d found the license deep in the chaos of his father’s apartment, had kept it with him during those months in Iowa, as if proximity to the inf
ormation might make it true again. Richard John Ashby, 2/19/1947, 6ˇ1ˇˇ, 200 lbs., the name and DOB correct, the height and weight close enough, though he was heavier now, pounds added at his father’s place from too many take-out burgers and Hostess Fruit Pies.

  Twenty-five. Jesus. He felt a couple of decades older. Depression era, at least, in more ways than one.

  He flipped the card over. His signature was on the back. His real signature. It looked like it belonged to someone else. He hadn’t signed that name in years. It was strange to live another life, then to be reminded of the life you had before. Whatever that life was. It was hard for Dickie to remember. His mother was dead; now his father was dead. His sister lived in Boston with her family. He had seen her exactly once in the last five years, and that only last week, at the funeral in Iowa. She hadn’t recognized him until he’d walked over and introduced himself.

  He looked at his real ID, his fake ID. The real ID looked fake; the fake ID looked real. They didn’t tell him that this would happen. Father Bill had never explained that once he pretended to be someone else he could never really go back.

  Of course, this was how they kept you. Dickie realized this. His life was with them now. He had no one else. He had nothing but Father Bill. So when Bill showed up a year after MAELSTROM collapsed, days after Dickie had buried his father and was in some kind of numb zombie zone, with no clue what he was going to do next, and Bill improbably offered another assignment, a second chance, a plane ticket to Los Angeles, well, then, it turned out that he would do whatever Bill asked.

  * * *

  He hadn’t been close with his parents or Sylvie since he’d hit puberty and discovered girls and pills. Mostly pills, to be honest, which had distanced him from his father, who lived life by the Air Force Code of Conduct, and who expected everyone else to follow the same immutable rules. His mother had tried to get through to him, Dickie could see that now, but the last thing a teenager with an amphetamine habit and a desperate need to break free wanted to hear was his mother’s nagging, well-intentioned or otherwise.