Henry McGee tried to understand the sociology of the place, and it buried him in despair. As he saw the hopelessness of prison life, the weight of his sentence began to drown him. His mean, black eyes lost luster, and for a time he could not eat. He sat in the darkness and stared, listening to the animal noises of the prison at night. He was certain he would not go mad; he just might not survive. He thought he was less afraid of death and the endless oblivion beyond than survival for months and years in this stupid, self-limiting place.
He tried to be patient about the Soviets and to have understanding of the real politics. The Soviets always took care of their own. It was the great unspoken tenet of Soviet espionage, the ultimate reward for the secret soldier. He had been a colonel inside KGB; he had status as a mole in R Section for nearly ten years. He had been a faithful servant to their cause, and his reward must be his freedom. Even a freedom in retirement in Moscow, with its intricately layered society of privilege.
He had been certain he would be traded in time. He had boasted about it to Devereaux of R Section, his antagonist and interrogator. Just before he’d been transferred to this prison, Devereaux had arranged to interview him one last time in a small room in the federal courthouse in Washington.
“You’ll do the time,” Devereaux said. He had said it without a note of vengeance. There had been curiosity in the gray eyes, a catlike quality that wonders what pain is like to the bird in his paws.
Henry McGee had smiled and said nothing.
“They don’t want you very badly,” Devereaux said. “We marked your trail. You gave us too much information about too many things. That’s what they think. They think you betrayed everything, and they don’t want you back.”
“You know I didn’t.”
“You confessed,” Devereaux had said. “We made a nice package and spread it around. The embassy here thinks you’re the reason we sent home seventy-four KGB-GRU ‘clerk-typists’ from the embassy and the United Nations. We gave you full credit. They’re discussing you tonight in Moscow Center.”
Henry McGee had let the smile fade exactly as Devereaux wished. It was personal with Devereaux, and Henry McGee knew the disinformation could be carried out. There was no reason to “frame” Henry McGee as a willing betrayer of the Soviet operation inside the U.S. It was too petty, too personal, too vindictive. But he had seen something in Devereaux’s eyes that chilled him. Perhaps the man was capable of coming down to that.
“They’ll still want to trade for me.”
“They have nothing to offer us, Henry. You’re used up. Empty.” The words tolled. Devereaux’s face held only contempt, without pity.
Henry was as tough as Devereaux, was the toughest man alive. He let the meanness in him sustain him for a moment.
“You’ll do all fifty, Henry. You’ll be a hundred and one when you come out. It’ll be a different world.”
“You get your kicks out of this, don’t you? Something I said? Or you just a generally sadistic son of a bitch? You want to scare someone, start practicing on little girls. I don’t scare, not from men or bears or anything.”
Devereaux had smiled. The bastard had smiled, and it unglued Henry. “I just wanted you to know, Henry. It was me. I wanted you to know that so that it could comfort you all those days you got ahead of you.”
He became a prisoner in late winter of one year. The winter-brown fields in narrow valleys, sullen with ice and streaks of dirty snow, melted at last to spring. And spring turned to the sticky, hot Pennsylvania summer. The trees bloomed, the fields were full of corn. The corn tasseled, and pollen filled the air. Fall broke the stalks in the field. The cold days came and the prisoners wore naval pea coats in the yard. Their breath came in clouds. Henry McGee went to movies and watched television. He read a book every day. He went to the dentist. He worked in the laundry first and then transferred to the library when one of the librarians was paroled. At Christmas, there was a show and some of the he-shes wore their best clothes and sang and danced and shook their fannies on the stage. Everyone loved it, even the straight cons. There was a knife fight in the laundry and two prisoners were killed. A prisoner died of AIDS in the hospital. It snowed Christmas day. Winter howled until March, and then it was spring again. Twelve months. Twelve months turned into thirteen.
Henry figured that twenty-five years had three hundred months.
He wrote to the Soviet embassy in Washington six times. He wrote twice in code. He wrote four times in clearspeak. There must have been some misunderstanding because, after four months, he began to receive the picture monthly called Soviet Life. It enraged him.
The words. It came down to Devereaux, sitting quietly in that small room, explaining how he had smeared Henry’s name with the Soviets and they would never want him back.… Henry could not stop the dreams, and Devereaux’s words came back in dreams. Everything else was an act of will, but he could not stop the dreams. He awoke some nights with sweat covering his body in a fine sheen, so that he had to towel himself off.
There were communists in the prison, but they were mostly black. Henry tried to engage them in political discussion, but their perspectives and his were very different. They talked the politics of liberation and fulfillment of a race. Henry was beyond all that. Politics was a real thing, not a wish list. It was money and power. Power turned into money, and money was power from the beginning. You just needed a certain number of chumps behind you, and you could buy the world. He couldn’t get these black guys to understand it because they came from a real world, knew too much about how real things were, and turned to Communism as Christians turn to God.
He finally discovered the mob on the sixteenth month in prison.
He had been aware of them. Everyone was aware of the members of the Mafia and respected them, even the guards who provided them with weekend passes to nearby motels for visits with women, and large, pasta-filled dinners.
Very cold for May. The clouds scudded on a wild blue sky. The wind shivered down the valleys. Exercise time and the blacks were playing their endless game of basketball, their shoulders shining with sweat, their swift and elegant dances done back and forth, up and down the court, the round ball arcing in triumph to the basket, the bodies crushed beneath the net. Shouts and shoves, grown men laughing like children in a prison yard. It was full of beauty and melancholy and life.
“Don Anthony,” Henry McGee said. “I want you to know me so that you can trust me and so that you can help me.”
The olive eyes seemed amused, but nothing else in that large, stolid face gave any indication of the mood of the man.
They were watching the basketball game in the sports yard. Don Anthony did not stand alone, but when Henry approached, they stood aside, as though what they had to say to each other was in confidence.
“Maybe I know you, you ever think of that?” Don Anthony said. Softly. The New Jersey accent was there, but so was the whispery shadow in the voice. Everything was softened in the presence of Don Anthony. He walked in his own time, in his own music, and everyone respected it because of the alternative. Henry McGee guessed that his music was II Trovatore.
“I know you know everything. But stories got stories sometimes. I tell good stories.”
“A man of stories,” Don Anthony said. He paused. He had tried to make it sound profound, but it had just seemed stupid. Henry McGee caught that.