Half World: A Novel (2 page)

PART ONE

Telegraph Hill

1

San Francisco, Spring 1956

The landlady opened the door and led him into the apartment he’d telephoned about, the rooms above the mechanics’ garage on Telegraph Hill. She stood to the side while Henry walked to the far end of the living room and looked out the windows through the last of the morning fog. Alcatraz to the north, the bridge and the bay and the black hills to the east. A beautiful corner view. He would need to cover it.

He held his hat in one hand, his briefcase in the other. The brightness through the windows showed every imperfection in the room, the scuffed wood, the scratched baseboards. There was a nearly matching sofa and armchair, a vase of dusty plastic flowers on the coffee table, a wooden crate of LPs by the bedroom door. The landlady said that a pair of young women had lived there most recently, working girls, secretaries downtown, and that they had left the furniture when they vacated the apartment two months before. Henry asked if there was any chance that they would return for their belongings and the landlady assured him that there was none. The girls had sailed off to Asia with a pair of merchant marines.

The landlady’s name was Mrs. Barberis. A widow, she said, God rest her husband’s soul. Henry asked her about the mechanics, and she told him that they had been renting the garage for as long as she’d owned the building. They kept to themselves, and so did she. She had moved out of the city after her husband passed and she rarely came back, preferring
the rent be sent by mail, that the tenant handle any necessary maintenance or repair. She asked Henry if this was acceptable, that she would be an absentee landlord, and he told her that it was.

The kitchen was to his left. There was a Formica-topped table with three vinyl-padded chairs, a stove and a white refrigerator that looked like the model Ginnie had bought for the house in Arlington. There was a pair of small windows above the sink and a larger, lower window that led out to a fire escape. Henry leaned out, looked down three floors to the alley. A Negro mechanic in a blue jumpsuit stood there, smoking a cigarette, the bald oval at the crown of his head shining in the midmorning sun.

*   *   *

He had spent his first week walking the streets of the city. Every morning after breakfast, he left the house and drove across the bridge into San Francisco. He walked in loops around the financial district, gradually widening his radius until he could form an accurate picture of each street, the connections between them. Ten, twenty blocks a day. Only then would he move farther. He had a map, but he rarely used it. He needed to know the place in his own way. He had been taught not to work within a landscape that he didn’t understand.

He opened a bank account with the two letters of recommendation he’d been given before he left Washington. He had never heard of either of the recommending businessmen whose signatures closed the letters. He wasn’t sure if the men existed or if they existed only enough to open a bank account. Once it was open, he deposited the check he’d brought with him and sent the account number back east.

His new name was printed at the top of the bank letters. He wrote the name in his ledger. He repeated the name to himself while he walked the city. He repeated it at night in the house in Oakland as he circled sleep, knowing that the last thing on his mind at the end of the day would be the first thought he woke to in the morning. Sitting up in bed with the name on his lips, surrounding himself with the name while he shaved and washed and dressed, while he kissed Ginnie and Hannah and Thomas good-bye, while he drove into the city and walked the unfamiliar streets.

*   *   *

The bedroom was small, dimly lit. There was a single window above the alleyway, two twin beds, a dresser standing against the south wall. Mrs. Barberis pulled the chain for the overhead light, the cord for the ceiling fan. The walls were painted mustard yellow, except for one which was covered with dark-patterned paper, tightly wound floral swirls framing the bathroom doorway.

The toilet flushed and Mrs. Barberis gave a proud nod. She turned the taps over the sink to demonstrate the water pressure. Henry opened the medicine cabinet, empty except for a bottle of aspirin sitting alone on one of the glass shelves.

*   *   *

He knew no one in the city. Most days he didn’t speak to another person except for a brief exchange at a newsstand or a market. He could drive home in the evenings and count the number of words he’d spoken throughout the day.

He repeated the new name as he walked, as he looked for apartments, drank coffee in an automat. He repeated it at the dinner table, silently, while asking Ginnie and Hannah about their days, while helping Thomas cut his meat. He practiced writing the name in the ledger. He let it enter his body, so that after a few days when he stepped onto the bustle of Market Street and passed his reflection in car windows, shop windows, the new name was the only one that identified the man he saw there.

*   *   *

They crossed the small vestibule and Mrs. Barberis showed him the south apartment, which was also available. The two apartments were mirror images of each other, she said, the only difference being that the southern rooms had views of the city, and the northern rooms had views of the bay. He could take his pick, whichever he preferred. She told him that the north apartment was two hundred dollars a month. He asked about the rent for the south apartment and she said that it was the same.

They stepped into the south bedroom. Henry looked up at the molding along the ceiling, down at the baseboards. The rent was due on the first of the month, Mrs. Barberis said. No exceptions. All utilities were paid. He could make alterations to the apartment, within reason. New paint, new drapes, carpet, whatever he liked.

He stood at the wall that was shared with the bedroom in the north apartment. He touched the paint with a fingertip, as if determining a place to hang a picture, and when Mrs. Barberis turned her head to clear her throat, he tapped the wall once, twice, to test its thickness.

*   *   *

At the end of that first week of walking he reached the Embarcadero. Sea level, suddenly. The fisherman’s wharves, rows of sailor’s bars and flophouses. He turned and looked at the city rising behind him. Off to the side, a concrete tower protruded from a thick grove of trees. He consulted his map. This was Telegraph Hill, high above the waterfront, standing apart, seemingly, from the rest of town. An isolated, private perch.

The next morning he began looking for rooms to rent.

*   *   *

They stood in the vestibule between the two apartments, at the top of the stairs that led down to the front entrance. Henry opened his wallet and began unfolding the bills for the first month’s rent. He had two phone numbers on a slip of paper in his wallet. The first number belonged to an electrician and the second, he had been told, belonged to a cop. They had given him the new name and the letters for the bank and the paper with the phone numbers, with the instruction to call the numbers, in the order they were written, once he had secured a location.

Mrs. Barberis produced a small note pad and asked his name and Henry told her and she wrote that on the page,
Mr. Henry
Gladwell
. Then she asked him which apartment he would prefer, the north or the south. He passed her the money and told her that he would take both.

2

They were a small unit at the start of the war, a handpicked group of officers working under Arthur Weir, who was only five years Henry’s senior but had already established a near-mystical reputation as a genius of counterintelligence. The idea of an organized espionage unit was new to the military, so the group had been sent to London to learn tradecraft from the experts, before being dispatched to Rome to disrupt Mussolini’s homeland apparatus and encourage the small but committed underground.

Henry had felt at home in that world immediately. He was surprised by how easily he moved through it. His natural stillness served him well. He could hear amid the noise of war. He could see. He could discern small gestures, whispers and glances, deciphering meaning, piecing together motives and personalities. The way people spoke and didn’t speak, this made sense to him. The things they did in secret, the ways in which those secrets could be uncovered and used.

Weir took a special interest in Henry. They spent long evenings discussing their work, and the work yet to come. Weir was an evangelist. He did not see the war as the final word, merely as the end of one era and the beginning of the next. Already there was evidence of movement by the Russians, positioning for the future. Most of Henry’s colleagues couldn’t wait to get back to the States and resume their interrupted lives,
but through Weir, Henry began to see what they were doing as the first clash in a much bigger battle.

They discovered that they had poetry in common, both having studied it in college. To Weir, reading poetry was another way of looking for secrets, of deciphering code. It was proof that their work could be beautiful, an art in and of itself. Eventually, Henry showed Weir some of his own poems, verses no one but Ginnie had seen. For a few days he lived in fear of Weir’s judgment, until one morning Weir returned Henry’s pages, saying only that it seemed both men were wasting their talents on the U.S. government.

When the war ended, the intelligence services were dissolved, despite Weir’s protestations. A few high-level officers were scattered to various military departments and the rest were sent home. Henry and Ginnie married and moved to Chicago, where Hannah was born, and Henry took an accounting job at a firm downtown. He rode the train every morning, feeling incompatible, a man out of place. Ill at ease, now, in civilian life. He kept in contact with Weir, who was still making the rounds in Washington, trying to convince politicians of what was happening on the other side of the world while their country slept. But there was no appetite for more conflict, and eventually Henry lost touch, resigned himself to tax codes and actuary tables in the West Loop.

Five years later, Henry looked up from his newspaper on the morning train to see Weir standing at the opposite end of the car, a slight, sly smile pulling at his lips. They had coffee at a bar on Madison, only a few blocks from the office where Henry should have been at his desk. It was an entirely uncharacteristic shirking of responsibility, wholly thrilling to Henry, there with Weir while the workaday world went on as usual around them.

Weir made his pitch, though it was really little more than a formality. People in power had finally listened, and they were creating the skeleton of a new organization. Henry would be Weir’s number two in a legitimate counterintelligence division. They would be late to the war, but, Weir said, still smiling, better late than never.

They shook hands across the table. That afternoon Henry tendered his resignation at the accounting firm. By the middle of the week Ginnie was packed and Hannah was out of kindergarten and they were on a train to Arlington.

It felt to Henry as if he was coming home.

3

There was a knock at the door of the north apartment. Henry opened it to find an adolescent boy standing at a lopsided attention, his head cocked to one side and most of his weight shifted to the other. He wore a cap with earflaps that reached almost to his chin, carried a small stepladder and a large leather tool bag. Without speaking, the boy set down his bag and rummaged in the pockets of his work pants, then in the pockets of his jacket and shirt, until he finally produced a business card and presented it to Henry. On the card was the name
Salo Perelman,
the electrician Henry had called from a pay phone, the first number on his slip of paper.

The boy’s hand was still out, waiting to retrieve the card. Henry handed it back and the boy stepped through the doorway into the living room and unzipped his bag, pulling out a pair of work gloves and various sizes of pliers.

Henry said, “Where’s Mr. Perelman?”

The boy dug deeper into the bag, coming out with spools of electrical wire which he stacked beside his tools. Henry repeated himself, louder this time, and the boy finally turned.

“Isaac,” the boy said. His voice was strangely bloated, the vowels overfull, the consonants imprecise. Henry realized he was deaf or close to it even before the boy pushed the flaps of his cap back, revealing large twin hearing aides.

“Your name is Isaac?”

The boy watched Henry’s mouth as he spoke, nodded.

“Isaac Perelman?”

The boy nodded again.

“Is your father coming?”

Isaac shook his head and returned to his work.

Henry showed him the places where he wanted the wiring, beneath the molding and the baseboards, under the couch and beds, behind the toilet, alongside the ceiling fans. Isaac stood on his stepladder and drilled tiny holes in the walls, cut small compartments into the ceiling. He ran the wires, the strands eventually converging in the south wall of the bedroom, and then he drilled a larger, deeper hole and ran the wires into the adjacent bedroom in the south apartment. He worked in silence. The only sounds in the rooms throughout the day were that of the drill or some small grunts he made while guiding a wire through a wall.

Later in the afternoon, Isaac pulled cans of paint from his bag and selected those with colors closest to the walls and ceilings, carefully masking his work. When the boy was finished, Henry walked through the apartment, looking from room to room, hard-pressed, with the day’s light almost gone, to see where anything had been done at all.

*   *   *

Henry sent a letter back east informing them that he had procured an appropriate location and requesting funds for what he thought he would need. He had the locks to the apartments changed, making certain that he had the only keys. He had the office furniture delivered and carried up the stairs to the vestibule. Once the deliverymen were gone, he dragged it all into the south bedroom. It was beginning to look like a proper office. He placed two desks side by side, facing the shared wall between the two apartments.

He took a streetcar to a bookstore on Nob Hill and purchased books on photograph developing, the mechanics and chemistry involved. The Lazarushian mystery, raising an image from a glossy white square. He installed a blackout curtain over the window in the south apartment’s
bathroom, changed the overhead bulb to a safelight he’d painted red. At a photographic supply shop he bought an enlarger and developing equipment, jars of the liquids and packets of the powders listed in the books.

He read the books cover to cover before he attempted to develop a single frame. He kept notes in the ledger, important points he would need to reference. There had been a time when the ledger wouldn’t have been necessary, but he could no longer trust his memory.

He practiced mixing, heating, cooling the chemicals. He trained himself to work without light. Placing the developing tank in the bathtub, pouring developer into the tank. Agitating the tank until it was time to remove the developer and pour in the stop bath. Agitating again until it was time to remove the stop bath and pour in the fixer. Reaching for jars without seeing them. When he dropped or bumped a jar, he cleaned up and started again. Working with the strips of film from the cross-country trip, St. Louis, Opelousas, the Grand Canyon. Working until he was able to move confidently, silently, until there were no accidents. Days of repetition, until he had mastered the room in the dark.

1 Bell recorder, with headphones

4 wood card files

1 metal equipment rack

1 Monroe calculator

1 combination file

1 safe

2 office desks

2 swivel chairs

1 bookcase

1 lot of electrical small parts including microphones, etc.

2 Diebold cameras

1 studio couch

2 desk lamps

2 Royal typewriters

1 York air conditioner

1 radio

1 voice compressor

1 polygraph

*   *   *

A few days later, Isaac Perelman returned, this time with his father, to install the mirror between the two apartments. Henry stood outside in the vestibule, smoking while they worked, watching down the stairwell for Mrs. Barberis or a curious mechanic, anyone who might be drawn to the noise of the Perelmans cutting through the wall.

When they were finished, Henry stood with them in the office and looked through the new window into the darkened north bedroom. Then he stood in the north bedroom and looked at the new mirror that hung above the dresser. His own dim reflection. He cupped his hands and peered into the glass. He could just barely make out the shapes of the father and son standing on the other side. He motioned for them to turn out the overhead light and Salo Perelman reached up and pulled the chain and the room disappeared.

*   *   *

The paper rose to the top of the pan, breaking the surface of the developing liquid. A fuzzy image of a woman in the Grand Canyon parking lot, standing by the car next to their station wagon, a cigarette held between her lips while she stretched her arms behind her back. Henry had focused the camera on Ginnie, but at the last instant he’d moved and activated the shutter, photographing the stranger behind his wife.

He lifted the picture from the pan, clothespinned it to dry on the line he’d strung overhead. His first successful print. An image he alone had witnessed and captured and documented. The woman unaware of being photographed, the negative and print seen only by him. An airtight process. A perfect secret.

He placed the next square in the solution and let it sink.

*   *   *

A box with the cameras and audio equipment arrived. Henry spent a morning attaching it all to the wiring Isaac had threaded through the
walls of the north apartment, positioning the microphones, placing the cameras into the small compartments the boy had cut into the ceiling.

When he was finished, he stood in the south apartment office, looking through the new window, wearing the headphones and listening to the empty-room hiss of the north bedroom. He could hear the faint sound of honking horns from a few streets beyond the open window, and then, just barely, the ticking of his watch, which he had placed under one of the beds. He stopped the recorder, rewound the tape, listened again to the previous few seconds. The just-passed car honks, the old air in the room, the ticking of his watch. He replayed it again, to be sure. The captured moment.

*   *   *

He gave each of the children a photograph from the trip, which he told them he’d had developed and framed at a shop in the city. Thomas on the banks of the Mississippi with a riverboat paddling in the distance; Hannah blowing a gum bubble at a filling station in New Mexico. Hannah was particularly moved by her picture. She hung it on the wall beside her bed, fascinated with the photo, not so much because of the image but because she couldn’t remember Henry taking it. A recovered instant she hadn’t known she’d lost.

He gave Ginnie a photo from the Grand Canyon, the image he’d taken after he’d snapped the picture of the other woman. Ginnie standing by the station wagon, hair blowing in the wind, hands clasped at her waist. She placed it on the mantel in the living room, proud of both how poised she looked in the photo and Henry’s skill in taking it. She jokingly called it her fashion shoot. Hannah asked her to re-create the pose and Ginnie obliged, lowering her hands to her waist and tossing her hair, eliciting an admiring smile from Hannah, much overly loud whooping and clapping from Thomas.

And my photographer, she said, nodding to acknowledge Henry, who shook his head and raised his hands, waving off the renewed round of applause.

*   *   *

After dinner in the evenings, while Ginnie washed the dishes and Hannah retreated to her room and her homework, he sat at the table with Thomas and his transit maps and rail schedules. Henry removed his watch and set it on the table and called off times and Thomas pointed to the spot on the map where the train would be at that moment. Twelve-fifteen on the B Geary line and Thomas tracing a finger along the route, bringing it to rest at the correct station. Always the correct station.

Most nights were like this, the two of them at the table until the fraught, complicated bath-time process, Thomas unclamping himself from his invisible railroad tracks and getting into the tub, Ginnie rushing to get him soaped and rinsed before he felt his fuel was completely depleted. If she spent too much time washing his hair or scrubbing his nails, Thomas flew into a frenzy, splashing and kicking, screaming, Henry running in to pull him from the tub, pin his arms to his sides, holding Thomas to his chest, both of their bodies straining, the tight embrace in the small room. Finally Thomas would grow tired enough that they could get him dry and dressed, get him back on his tracks to his room, where he plugged himself into the imagined outlet in his wall and lay down on the floor beside his bed.

They would stand in the doorway, Henry and Ginnie, feeling the new bruises surfacing on their arms and chests, listening to Thomas’s deepening breath, so peaceful so suddenly. Ginnie’s weight leaning into Henry, her hand on his shoulder, on the back of his neck, squeezing, holding on.

*   *   *

The office was nearly dark but he’d left a light on in the north bedroom. He could see it glowing on the other side of the new window. Something caught his eye, some movement beyond the glass, a figure crossing the space.

Henry looked up. The bedroom was empty. He could see the beds, the dresser, the lamp. He walked to the window, his face close, his breath fogging the glass. No one there. Just the room, waiting.

He finished his cigarette and returned to his desk. He removed the slip of paper from his pocket, the two numbers. He drew a line through the first, the number belonging to the Perelmans. He looked again at the window, then lifted the receiver of the new phone.