The Sleeper

by Christopher Dickey

  Betsy and Miriam got out of the hospital on Tuesday, but they didn’t come back to the house. They went to Ruth’s because Betsy thought our baby wasn’t ready to spend a lot of time with her daddy just yet. Betsy said she’d talked to the doctors at the hospital and that was what they told her. They said we’d have to take it in stages, real gentle. In the late afternoon I drove by Ruth’s house slow, hoping I’d see Miriam in the yard or maybe just get a glimpse of her through the window, but I didn’t, and I didn’t stop.

  I wanted to go back to work right away, but Sam said he could handle it until next week and he wanted me to take the time off. I couldn’t just stay in the house. I couldn’t sit there and think. I didn’t turn on the computer. I didn’t watch TV. There was all this talk on the news about a coming war with Iraq. I didn’t want to know. So I ran. But whatever was there for me on the old run along Crookleg Creek was gone now. There was no mystery I wanted answered at Jeffers’ Rocks. I ran on through the fields and tried, without much heart, to find the hill above the pond, but I must have gone wrong in the high stands of corn, and I couldn’t find that place at all anymore.

  On Tuesday afternoon, I drove over to my sister Selma’s trailer. It had been a long, long time since I did that, and when she came to the door I was surprised by how old she looked. Her hair was a weird brown with a streak of gray along the part. Her skin was gray, too, and leathery from smoking.

  “Well if it ain’t the hometown hero,” she said.

  “No, it’s just me,” I said.

  “Nice of you to remember your big sister. What do you want?”

  “I wanted to see you, because it’s been too long.”

  “Well here we are.” She looked down at her jogging suit, which looked like it hadn’t been washed for a while. “Want some coffee?” She poured some cold stuff from that morning into a chipped mug and put it in the microwave. “Your wife okay? And little Miriam?”

  “They’ll be okay.”

  “So what do you want, Kurt?”

  “I want to look in Mom’s cedar chest.”

  Selma’s eyes narrowed and there was something animal in them. “What are you looking for?”

  I was walking toward the bedroom in the trailer, where I knew she kept the chest. It took up about a third of the space in those cramped quarters, but she maneuvered around me and stood in the way.

  “The uniform,” I said. “Is it still in there?”

  Selma ran her tongue under her upper lip, making a show of thinking. She knew every little piece of memory that was in that trunk, big or small. Every so often she took all the clothes out and folded and refolded them, and put them all back in. And the uniform, which my mother kept for me, used to be at the bottom. What I didn’t know was if she’d thrown it away.

  “Yes,” she said at last. “Yes, I guess it’s still there.”

  On Wednesday I was lying naked in bed awake before dawn with the windows open to catch whatever cool there was, and whatever noise there was. The lawn sprinkler across the street hissed and sputtered for a while, then went off a little before sunrise. A couple of lonely birds sang. A car rolled down our street, and then slowed, and then drove back. The engine roared softly in front of our house, then shut down. There was nobody I wanted or expected to see today, not at this time of the morning anyway. My left hand felt the barrel of the Mossberg twelve-gauge on the floor beside the bed. I pumped a shell into the chamber, rolled off the bed, and stepped into the hall. The doorbell rang. I leveled the barrel at the door and waited for whoever it was to go away.

  “Kurt?”

  “Griffin? That you?”

  “None other.”

  “You alone?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Good,” I said, opening the door. “I’ll put some clothes on. Why don’t you go on into the kitchen.”

  “That gun for me?”

  “Nope. The dick’s not either.”

  “Fuck you.”

  When I joined him he was sitting at our little table with two big cups of Chuckwagon coffee, a box of Krispy Kremes, and a big thick manila envelope.

  “So?” I said. “How goes the war in Washington?”

  “It’s going to be long and hard,” he said. “You want to stay as far away as you can.”

  “I’m trying,” I said. “But there’s this asshole from Langley who keeps knocking on my door.”

  “This is the last time.”

  “You’re not telling me this is good-bye.”

  “Could be.”

  “Well hamdulillah.”

  “This is for you,” he said, pushing one of the coffees toward me. “And this too.” The envelope.

  “Court papers?” I didn’t want to touch them if they were. He shook his head. “Take a look,” he said

  There were little bundles of hundred-dollar bills. A bunch of them. I sat down. “What the fuck is all this, Griffin?”

  “That’s a hundred fucking thousand dollars.”

  “Yeah. And?”

  “For Betsy and Miriam.”

  “In cash?”

  “From the DCI himself.”

  There was something wrong here. Real wrong. “You want me to sign a receipt?”

  “Nope.”

  I spread the sheaves of bills on the table. “Whoa. It sure is pretty,” I said. “Never seen that much money in one place, in cash like this.”

  “Yep. Mighty pretty.”

  “But, Griffin, where’s it from?”

  “Who it’s for is you.”

  “Griffin, what’s happening to all that money from La Merced?”

  “I don’t know. Gonna be tied up in the courts for a long time, I guess.”

  “This ain’t part of it?”

  “No. Shit no. The Director himself signed off on this.”

  “You’re that tight with him? And he knows that much about me?”

  “He knows enough.”

  “Right,” I said. “Right. Thanks for the coffee.”

  “Sure.”

  “Keep the money.”

  “Kurt, what’s the matter with you? This is enough to build a new house, at least. Betsy wants this. Miriam needs it. Man, it could be her college education.”

  “Uh-hunh. It’s like a commission.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about three hundred million dollars in blood money.”

  “Fuck no. And anyway, you earned it, man. Who more than you?”

  “Not like this. Not with you coming here like a bagman.”

  “You want me to get it out of an ATM like in London? That make you happier?”

  “Forget that, Griffin. It’s different. I can’t take it.”

  Griffin put his big hands flat on top of the money. “Don’t take it now. Okay. I thought it would be good for you. Maybe you’ll think about it a little longer and you’ll think so, too.”

  I took a deep breath. “Yeah.” I took another couple of breaths for Miriam and Betsy. “Yeah. I’ll let you know.” I put the money back in the envelope. “Everything okay with you? Still leaving the Agency?”

  “Not yet.”

  “That’s what I figured.”

  “Yeah, the lines are drawn more clear since last week. The folks that count—they understand we got to do our own thing. The FBI’s being cut out of the picture.”

  “You mean now that their shooters took Oriente out of the picture.”

  “Yeah. The Fucked-up Bureau of Investigation.”

  “But you were with them when that happened.”

  “I told them not to shoot unless he went for you or he tried to run. But you know, they don’t listen, least not to the Agency.”

  “Right. Got it. That’s why he got seven rounds in the gut while he was sitting still right next to me.”

  “I don’t know what happened,” said Griffin. “I haven’t got to the bottom of it. But I will.”

  “Glad to hear it.” We sat there drinking the coffee a couple of minutes. “I think
you better go,” I said.

  We shook hands at the door. “Thanks for everything, Griffin. I mean it.” I handed him the envelope. He took it without a word. “And—don’t come back,” I said.

  Griffin walked toward his car, and I rested my hand on the barrel of the Mossberg leaning against the door frame. He turned quickly and looked over his shoulder, suddenly tense. I held up my empty hands. He smiled. With a wave that was half a salute, Griffin got into his rent-a-car and drove away.

  A big storm was moving in from the northwest, and the air was real heavy at sundown. The bedroom was almost completely dark when I started to pay attention to the flickering in the vacant lot behind our house. “Lightning bugs,” I said out loud. They floated like sparks over an invisible fire, cool and magic. “Look at that, Sugar,” I said to the empty room. “Lightning bugs.”

  A second later the storm broke with a huge flash and a loud low rumble of thunder. I went to the window listening for the rain and smelling it on the wind. It came on fast and hard, beating the insects into the grass and stealing their glow. The jagged lightning cut across the sky. The white fire shot down into the fields, searching out trees and fence posts, and a sound like God’s own war echoed across the land.

  “Kurt.”

  I turned around and Betsy was standing just behind me. “Ah, Darlin’,” I said.

  Her clothes and hair and face were wet from the rain. I pulled her toward me. “Careful,” she said. “The bandage.” As I hugged her I could feel the chill leave her body and the warm begin.

  “I’ve got to go back to Miriam in a little while,” she whispered. “But I didn’t want you to be all alone tonight.”

  The parade was due to start at ten in the morning. Most folks were out milling around in the parking lot of Westfield High a little after nine. The marching band tuned up a ragged version of “Over There.” The majorettes threw batons in the air and caught them, or not. There were six or seven floats, one of them with a big papier-mâché face of Bin Laden peering out of a cave while a huge American eagle looked down at him. Another celebrated the cowboy heritage with a pretty collection of cowgirls from the class of 2003. There were kids all over the place on tricycles and bicycles with red, white, and blue crepe paper threaded through the spokes and streamers on the handlebars. And this year there was also something I’d never seen before: a roller blade routine put together by some of the regulars at the Genesis Health Club. One of the skaters was Ruth, decked out in red satin shorts, a red-white-and-

  blue shirt, and a gold glittery bicycle helmet.

  “I’ll be damned,” I said as she rolled up to me.

  “You look grand,” she said, a little winded already. “If I’d have known you looked like that in a uniform, oh boy—”

  “I never saw this side of you, Ruth.”

  “Oh there’s lots of sides you ain’t seen. Didn’t Betsy tell you about all this?” She struck a pose.

  “No.”

  “That girl. Only thing she ever thinks about is you, like you was going to break or something. You, the toughest bravest man—and just about the handsomest—that little ol’ Westfield ever saw.”

  “Is she here? Did she bring Miriam?”

  “They’re waiting up at the Veterans’ Memorial. Gotta go,” Ruth said, and rolled away.

  The VFW contingent was the biggest single group, some of them in dress blues like mine, but most in their old BDUs, or at least the jackets. There were maybe fifty who served in Vietnam, and almost as many who’d been in the Gulf War, one way or another. A couple dozen of the marchers were from World War II and Korea. I looked around to see if there might be one or two real old men left from World War I, but the ones I remembered from the parade when I was a kid were all gone now. At ten o’clock exactly they formed up in loose ranks. I took the cover off the flag and walked to the front. Winfield’s little fife and drum corps struck up the march and we set off down Main Street.

  There was a story that folks used to tell when I was a little kid, whenever there was a parade in town. I always thought it was just kind of an urban legend until one year somebody wrote a long letter to the Westfield Dispatch that gave a lot of the details. It happened in 1903. People said it was on July 4, but really it was in August. There was a town band then that used to give concerts on summer nights in the park across from the courthouse, where the Veterans’ Memorial is now. It must have been the most peaceful kind of scene, like something out of Main Street in Disneyland. But there was a young man named Welbourne who’d been away in the wars, in Cuba and in the Philippines, and who came back changed. Everybody liked him. He was a good worker at the mill, and a kind of a hero just for having gone to war. And nobody saw how much he distrusted this place he called home, how much danger he saw around him. And nobody thought anything about it when Welbourne bought himself a twelve-gauge double-barreled shotgun at the hardware store, and eight boxes of buckshot.

  The main thing I remembered from the article when I read it, when I was about fourteen I guess, was the description of Welbourne firing from Ninth Street, just off Main. He went down on one knee and let off both barrels, blasting through the man selling popcorn and the ladies in their big white bonnets and the band members who were suddenly desperately out of tune. And then he fell back a few steps like he was trained to do, reloading, and going down on one knee and firing again, and falling back, reloading, and firing again, until finally he pulled a six-shooter out of his belt and killed himself. And I remembered thinking that nobody in America knew that story except folks here in Westfield, and wondering if other towns in America had a Welbourne to forget.

  I hadn’t thought about the 1903 massacre for a long time, but as I led the parade up Main toward the corner of Ninth Street, I tightened my grip on the flag staff. There were just a bunch of little boys there waving little flags, and shouting and cheering. Then I heard an explosion. And another. A staccato like automatic weapons fire. I kept marching. The boys laughed and ran away from the string of firecrackers.

  At Tenth Street I stopped, marking time, and the parade stopped behind me. The fifes and drums beat out a solemn march. I faced left, then walked past the low bleachers to the base of the granite column with the names of Westfield’s war dead on it. I put the flag in its place. I stepped back and saluted. The fifes and drums stopped. A loudspeaker scratched and popped, and then a woman’s voice sang out, “Oh say can you see—” Eyes straight. Head high. “—O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave.”

  “Daddy!” Miriam was running toward me across the grass, with Betsy walking fast behind her. “Daddy! You’re back!”

  I picked her up. The parade was over for me.

  “Where were you, Daddy?” It was like she’d forgotten the gas, the suffocation, the terror. Buried it. Erased it. At least for now.

  “I went off to fight the Old Man of the Mountain,” I said.

  “Oh, Daddy, Aunt Ruth says that story’s not true. Do you believe it?”

  “Sure I do, Sugar,” I said.

  But the truth is, I’ve about given up on believing. It’s enough just to be.

  Acknowledgments

  The writing of this book relied, in ways that may not always be obvious, on the inspiration of two great friends. One was the novelist and essayist John Gregory Dunne, whose passion for American life and whose sure sense of patriotism impressed me and moved me for as long as I knew him. The other was Sadruddin Aga Khan, a tremendous fighter for the cause of humanity, sanity, and moderation in a brutal and disordered world. Sadly, both of them passed away in 2003. Neither of them ever had a chance to read this book, and I wish they had.

  Most of The Sleeper was written in the months immediately after the tragedy that struck New York, Washington, and the world on September 11, 2001. Although the characters are fictitious, as are the precise circumstances in which they find themselves, the story was informed by ongoing developments and the facts that surrounded them. As I had done with Innocent Blood in the mid-1990s, I used
fiction to game out the possibilities inherent in horrific events, based on my reporting about terrorist organizations, guerrilla wars, and government conspiracies since 1980. So, without implicating them in any way in this work of the imagination, I’d like to thank the editors of Newsweek for all their support in my pursuit of the truth, and among those editors, I’d like to single out my old friend Jeffrey Bartholet, whose critical eye for political and social nuance, along with his ear for good writing, have made the magazine’s foreign news coverage consistently distinctive and distinguished.

  I’d also like to thank both my editor at Simon & Schuster, Alice Mayhew, and my agent, Kathy Robbins, for their great and enthusiastic support through difficult and dangerous times. Without them, this book might never have been finished.

  The larger story, as we know, goes on.

  About the Author

  CHRISTOPHER DICKEY, Newsweek’s award-winning Paris bureau chief and Middle East editor, reports regularly from Baghdad, Cairo, and Jerusalem, and writes the weekly “Shadowland” column—an inside look at the world of spies and soldiers, guerrillas and suicide bombers—for Newsweek Online. He is the author of Summer of Deliverance, Expats, With the Contras, and the novel Innocent Blood. He lives in Paris.