Henry McGee Is Not Dead

by Bill Granger

  The door splintered as soon as he had finished the words.

  The man with the sledgehammer stepped back and two others with Uzi submachine guns entered and covered the room.

  Kools just stared at the muzzles, he didn’t even see the men.

  “Hit the floor and spread them,” one of the men said.

  Noah got up and raised his hand as though asking permission to go to the bathroom. “Look—” he began.

  The second man slapped him across the face with the muzzle of the gun.

  Kools heard Noah’s teeth crack. He was on the floor and he was spreading them.

  A moment later, he heard Noah’s body hit the floor as well and he heard the sobs.

  Kools felt the hands on his body and he took it easy, put on the prisoner mode, just took it one step at a time. He thought about doing time again. He thought he couldn’t stand to do time again. Noah didn’t know, never had done time, didn’t know what time was like. Time never stopped but it never seemed to get started either. They could tell you, just like that, two years or six years or eighteen months and then the goons led you to the corridor behind the courtroom and you were gone, man, you didn’t even exist for the straights in the courtroom anymore, you were just Mr. Six Years or Mr. Ten to Life or Mr. Asshole.

  Kools was thinking about time when he felt the cuffs go on his wrists behind his back. They were cold and tight and cut off the circulation and his hands were already beginning to feel numb. They pulled him up to his feet by the hair. They were really going to play rough, these guys weren’t state cops.

  “I got rights,” Noah said. Kools winced: Man, don’t tell them nothing. You think you’re talking to your public defender? You think these guys are from the ACLU?

  The second one shoved the muzzle of the Uzi very hard into Noah’s belly and Noah gagged and started to retch on himself.

  “Ain’t he beautiful,” said the one with the sledgehammer.

  “Which one of you is Arthur Wakely?”

  Arthur Wakely for Christ’s sake, Kools thought. He almost smiled at that except these guys didn’t want smiles.

  “I am,” Noah said.

  Arthur Wakely, for Christ’s sake.

  “And that makes you Henry Yin’ik, doesn’t it, asshole?”

  Kools waited because they were just fucking around now. If they wanted to beat you up, they’d beat you up, there wasn’t anything you could do about it.

  The guy with the sledge put it down and smacked Henry Kools Yin’ik in the face with a hand nearly as large as the head of the hammer. Kools felt the bone breaking in his nose because it had broken once before, in the prison at Palmer.

  “You two assholes are in the deepest shit of your lives,” the first one said. Kools tried to look at them but he kept seeing the Uzis instead of the faces behind them. “A couple of fucking terrorists, you guys don’t terrify me, you want me to be terrified?”

  Kools blinked at the speaker. He liked to talk tough, which meant he probably wasn’t that tough. The second one, who said nothing, he was just staring at Kools the way guys in prison do that ten-yard stare.

  “We under arrest?” Noah said. Kools blinked. Noah was incredible. Kools didn’t realize until this minute what a stone asshole Noah was.

  “Notes,” said the second one.

  “Jesus Christ, they even write it out for us,” the first one said, picking up Noah’s report. The one with the sledge opened the bag on the easy chair and saw the ticket to Seattle. “I guess this is the one we were supposed to be able to pick up in Seattle,” the sledgehammer said.

  “You ain’t never going to see Seattle,” the first one, the mouthy one, said to Kools.

  Kools said nothing. His nose was broken and he could taste the blood on his lips. He thought about tomorrow. There would be oatmeal for breakfast, always had fucking oatmeal for breakfast or cornflakes, or, big fucking deal, pancakes. He got to the point inside of craving meat so bad that he could dream about caribou. He could actually dream about killing a caribou and skinning it with an ulu and scraping down the meat and shoving it in his mouth still hot from the body of the dead deer. They called them Eskimos because it was some French word for eaters of raw meat. Kools could dream about eating meat in prison.

  “This one is a space cadet,” said the first one. They were looking at Kools.

  The second one said, “No, that’s the inside stare. He’s just doing time. He’s doing time now, we just picked him up. He’ll be a good boy, won’t you, Henry?”

  Kools nodded.

  The first one smiled. “Well, we better get them the fuck out of here if we want to have any time with them.”

  Kools picked that up. He knew Noah wouldn’t get it but Kools let himself think about it and he felt a surge of hope. These guys weren’t cops at all. These guys didn’t have any right to do what they had been doing.

  Kools thought about it and it was better than thinking about time.

  24

  TO BUILD A FIRE

  Devereaux awoke frequently. When he turned his head, he felt dizzy and he knew it was a concussion. He did not know how bad it was. There was dried blood on his lips and under his nose. He must have bled from the concussion. He thought of the girl in the blood-splattered blouse and he felt the ropes cutting his wrists and ankles.

  He would fall back into unconsciousness then. He would dream that he was tied up to the legs of a sleeping shelf inside a cabin in the wilds of the Alaskan bush. It was an absurd dream.

  He awoke again and it was evening but he could not see because the cabin did not have any windows. This time he could feel his head hurt and he thought he might be better and that he might be able to hang on to consciousness.

  It was very cold.

  He blinked and he thought about the cold that must have begun creeping into his body while he was unconscious. He was sure he had not been cold before, the other times he awoke.

  He turned his head and felt dizzy. He looked across the room at the kerosene heater in the middle of the floor. The heater was off.

  Did Henry McGee intend this? Henry McGee said he had intended everything, even the false trails, even the killing of poor old Otis Dobbins merely to signal R Section that Henry McGee was still alive and still playing tricks on them. Henry had wanted Devereaux to come after him. But did Henry have him tied up and then intend that the heat would be shut off and Devereaux would freeze to death?

  It was just May in Alaska and Devereaux was in a cabin a hundred miles from the Arctic Circle. The wind blew constantly off the shallow Bering Sea. The days were bitter and damp. There was a lot of rain and it froze you to the bone when it seeped through your clothes. There was great, wild beauty all around but the reminder of winter was always there, even when the sun shone twenty-two hours a day.

  The heater had kicked off. The cabin was losing its store of heat through the walls.

  Devereaux wore the same trousers and sweater he had worn that morning when Narvak picked him up at the Nugget Inn. How long ago was it? A day or a week?

  Devereaux felt a wave of nausea and then cold sweat on his forehead. He began to shiver and he realized the cold was really inside his body now and that it was seeping into the bones, pouring itself into him carefully and slowly. When the bones were all cold, they would squeeze the last warmth of the rest of the body. He might be unconscious then.

  He could not believe that Henry intended for him to freeze to death.

  He pulled again at the ropes around his wrists. The ropes bit into flesh when he pulled against them. He could scream if he wanted but there was no one to hear it.

  He tried to get leverage but he was tied down flat on his back on the shelf. The ropes were not tight but they left no slack. He shivered again and turned his head and expected the wave of dizziness and then finally threw up. There was nothing in his stomach and the spittle ran onto the floor.

  The girl wasn’t really dead, he had been so shocked by the noise of the scatter-gun blast and the blood on her face…
but it had been just a trick. Why did Henry tell him everything he had told him?

  Unless he was dead.

  They had noted a peculiarity in the 201 file on Henry McGee, something Devereaux had put in after the first interrogations of the man who had come across the ice from Siberia.

  Devereaux had been fascinated by Henry McGee’s elaborate stories and his endless talk. Devereaux came from the world of silence and Henry McGee was exactly the opposite. He seemed to have no secrets, no insight. He told stories on the surface, almost like folktales, in which the lucky peasant or the unhappy farmer’s wife is merely described as lucky or unhappy and then the story unfolds without any characterization. Henry McGee answered every question. Henry McGee had no secrets. Henry McGee was completely open.

  Devereaux had written: Is anyone without secrets?

  It was such a cryptic observation that it had been scrutinized at the highest levels inside R Section. Admiral Galloway, then the head of Section, had finally answered Devereaux’s question by ignoring it. The notation had not been included in the final report on the interrogation of Henry McGee, and McGee had been carefully programmed and recruited into R Section. He had been a double agent all along. Or had he been? Perhaps nothing had happened “all along” but Henry McGee merely invented details moment by moment, including his own life’s script.

  Devereaux felt the hard wood beneath him. He stared at the rafters. The cabin smelled of damp now as the cold seeped across the spaces vacated by warmth.

  He could see his breath. He coughed once, as an experiment, and the sound startled him.

  He tried to flex his arms against the ropes. He flexed first his right arm and then his left. The ropes strained and held.

  He exhausted himself for a moment. He let himself relax, even at the risk of accelerating the cold seeping into his body. He felt the cold on his tongue and in his throat.

  Denisov. There were photographs of Denisov in Zurich and there is no doubt that the other man in the photographs would turn out to be a Soviet agent. Why would Henry McGee have told him these things? Because he knew that Devereaux had turned Denisov seven years before, knew that Devereaux had made contacts with Denisov over the years. How much did Henry McGee and the Soviets know? Was Section so breached that its secrets were worthless? Was this Henry’s message?

  Devereaux could bring a lot of doubt back to Section. If he lived.

  Henry had not thought about the heater breaking down. Would it take a day for Devereaux to die? Or two days? What would it be like, to die of the cold?

  He tried to remember the Jack London story about the man dying because he could not build a fire. The man goes through stages of confidence, panic, then despair and finally acceptance of death by cold. Would Devereaux accept death?

  Devereaux thought about Rita Macklin because he did not want to accept death just yet. He remembered her in little vignettes because they had already lived through so many pieces of their lives that the vignettes were the most shining things he could remember. He could never remember her except she was pretty, except she was staring at him with her lovely and deep green eyes, except that she lay naked in bed with him and they had just made love. He remembered her on the boat on Lac Léman below the sloping terraces of Lausanne. They were sailing in the fresh breeze and her wild red hair was blowing. She broke his heart every day he was with her. Nearly every day he was away from her. He had fallen in love with her when he was certain he was incapable of loving any creature in the world.

  Then he thought of her frown that afternoon when the telephone rang in the hallway of the townhouse and she knew what it was. He had felt her frown like a hurt. She had not understood. Section held him in a way that he could not escape. Like ropes binding his limbs in a cabin near the Arctic Circle. Like death creeping up on him in the cold seeping through the walls.

  Two weeks, Rita. Or three. Just a little matter and then he would return.

  He pulled at the ropes again and they held again and he wondered if he was really going to die. The possibility seemed more a certainty now. He thought he could hear his heart beating.

  He tried again against the ropes and they held his body down.

  He thought about the trail of Henry McGee. The absurdity of everything Henry supposed. Was it possible Denisov was dealing in secrets from Silicon Valley and selling them to the Soviets? Espionage had become such a lackadaisical enterprise that all sorts of people were attracted to it now for the most mundane reasons. Sell us that microchip and we will give you the down payment on a new Chevrolet Beretta with red racing stripes.

  Was Denisov stupid enough to let the Soviets know he was alive and living in California?

  Henry McGee told his folktales incessantly and there were so many of them that his logic was never questioned. The time passed too breathlessly to question anything.

  Devereaux suddenly and quite inexplicably felt angry. Again he strained against the ropes holding down his body and he willed himself to be free of them. The moment went on and on. He could hear his heart beating. He wanted to be free or for his heart to burst. He pushed his body up and he knew the ropes would break at any moment. He was very angry and it turned his pain into an act of will.

  The ropes held.

  The moment ended. Devereaux felt himself collapsing. He knew he was blacking out again and he blinked to clear his vision. He felt as weak as a baby. He had no more strength. He tried to see Rita Macklin and he could not see her. He remembered that she smelled of flowers. She always smelled of flowers to him and her breath was sweet against his cheek, but he could not see her. He saw her in mind. She turned to him and the telephone was ringing. He should not answer the phone. He reached for the phone and she was frowning at him and he knew he should not pick up the phone but he could not stop his hand. The telephone was ringing and he had to answer it, it was a matter of his life. She said, “Don’t.” She told him she did not love him. She sold the house. She went away one morning on the bus and never came back. She left him. He reached for the telephone to stop the ringing.

  He was falling into blackness now.

  He felt the cold and he felt the blackness and he knew he was dying. He did not accept it. He struggled to open his eyes but he could not do it. He had no more pain. A curious peace was spreading in a warm pool across his body. He was becoming warm again. It meant he was dying. He was smiling and he did not want to smile but the pain was all gone and the pool was warm and it was all around him and there were flowers and the sweet breath of the wind and he was very small, perhaps only a baby, perhaps he was not even born. In a part of his mind he knew he was dying, but his body insisted that he was merely being born.

  25

  CONSIDER THE SOURCE

  Patricia Heath had the usual perversions of the powerful. Power begat power and became its own end so often that it was the only factor she looked for in her other pleasures.

  Sex was one of her pleasures.

  In Washington, sex is usually about power. It is a way to relax for the powerful. It is a game that allows the frustrations of gaining power in real life to be put aside for a time.

  Patricia Heath took lovers and her husband knew this and it did not matter to her that he knew it. In fact, it made it rather better for her. Her husband was an attorney and he liked power but not as much as she did. People said that she wore the pants in their family. It was quite true, like most clichés.

  “Do you like being rich?” she asked her lover.

  She had spent all day with Malcolm Crowder and considered him as a lover and finally decided he would spend the night with her. She knew that men were easy and that Terry would just have to understand. That was part of the fun of it, to think of arranging this while Terry would certainly have to know what was going on. Terry had a thirty-year-old body and a certain charm and a nice chin but Patricia Heath had all the experience in the world and experience always won out over mere beauty in sex.

  “Do you ever think you might be a monster?” Malcolm sa
id to her. He was quite serious. He had taken her in the straightforward, manly fashion at first and then he saw, to his horror, that she might be insatiable. In fact, he began to enjoy it in the second hour, doing the things she wanted him to do.

  “I don’t think about it, no,” Patricia said. “Monsters shouldn’t try to define themselves.” She was smiling at him. He was naked and she was naked and the bed was a mess. They were in the master bedroom of her house and she had a commanding view of the shallow still waters of Turnagain Arm. Her husband was in Washington and she thought she might leave the bed the way it was for her maid to find or perhaps for her husband to find when he came home. Patricia knew she enjoyed little cruelties but thought that was normal enough.

  “You are a monster,” Malcolm said. “A very lovely monster. I don’t know why we didn’t do this years ago.”

  “We didn’t have the opportunity. We were drawn together by our love of money.”

  “I always knew that about you,” he said.

  “You didn’t know anything. Put your mouth here,” she said.

  “You are a monster,” he said.

  “Yes. Yes.” She said nothing for a time and she held herself against him. “Yes,” she said at last.

  The telephone rang and it was the brief moment before dawn at two thirty in the morning. She picked up the phone and didn’t speak for a while. Then she cupped her hand around the receiver and said something and put the phone down.

  “It was the security people,” she said. “They found the two of them in the apartment building in Fairbanks the way our friend said we would find one of them. Apparently, the other one stuck around to watch the bomb go off.”

  “It would have gone off.”

  Patricia sat down at her dressing table and began to brush her hair. Her body was pale, like marble, and Malcolm was watching her. Even when she wanted to pleasure herself, she involved her lovers to such an extent that they almost forgot their own desire. It was very clever of her, almost instinctive.

  “The problem is what we do now,” she said.