The November Man

by Bill Granger

  They found Sellers on Saturday afternoon, locked in the trunk of a Budget rent-a-car parked in the crowded lot at National Airport, in the spaces reserved for Congressmen.

  He was really upset and very frightened when they found him.

  20

  DEATH COMES TO THE TAXMAN

  Kaplan died shortly after dawn on Saturday.

  Hanley had been unaware of his death, though they shared the same room.

  Kaplan had made a noise, started, been still.

  Kaplan was the tax accountant who worked for IRS and had devised the Church of Tax Rebellion, also incorporated as the Church of Jesus Christ, Taxpayer. The death of the prophet went unnoticed for two hours.

  Hanley had awakened suddenly at seven and pressed the button. The button was all-important. It was his last link to life. He was sinking away, into himself; he would be dead in a little while.

  His arms were scrawny and his eyes bulged.

  He did not read or watch television.

  He would stare in the darkness at night; and into the light during the day. He would see nothing. His eyes seemed to react very badly to the things around him. He knew smells: The smell of Sister Domitilla, the smell of Dr. Goddard. He heard voices but they were from far away.

  There was the voice of his sister Mildred. And his mother. And the voice, very deep and very slow and very certain, of his father.

  There was the voice of the Reverend Millard Van der Rohe in the pulpit of the plain wooden Presbyterian church on Sunday. The smell of dust on summer afternoons coming through the plain windows. Women with paper fans from a funeral home fanning themselves. The sweat breaking in stains across their broad backs. Men sitting as solemn as the church, listening to the words of the Lord.

  And sometimes, he heard the Lord as well.

  The Lord explained things to him in such a simple and wonderful way that Hanley felt glad.

  He freely confessed his sins to the Lord and the Lord was as kind as the face of his mother. The Lord reached for his hand and took it and made it warm. The Lord spoke of green valleys.

  Hanley became aware again.

  They were closing the curtain that divided Mr. Kaplan’s bed from his own in the small white room. The room did not have a couch. No one in the room was expected to stay for a long while. There were no restraints. No one needed them. Age restrained; illness restrained; the weakness that comes at the end restrained.

  Hanley waited for them to feed him. He felt like a baby again and that was comfortable. In a little while, he would go to the Lord, who had the face of his mother. The Lord smelled of his mother’s smells. The Lord comforted him. He would lie down in green pastures. There was a summer storm coming across the meadows and he was a child in the pasture, watching the magnificent approach of the high black thunderclouds eating up the blue sky, tumbling up and up with power and majesty and glory.

  He had never felt so close to God.

  21

  NOT MONSTERS

  William said she did the right thing. Of course, she called him by his nickname but when she thought of him, she thought of him as William.

  William was a software programmer and he wore very white shirts to work every day.

  They had met at one of those little group parties that form after computer conventions. She had been attracted to him by his stern face, his light brown hair, and the expanse of white covering his chest. He seemed very serious and sincere. They had shared Virgin Marys together and made a date that first meeting.

  They both liked music in the little clubs on Lincoln Avenue. They both lived in the Lincoln Park neighborhood and cared for plants that insisted on dying anyway. William had a cat named Samantha, which Margot Kieker thought was real cute, and it was rather touching in William to have a cat at all. The cat didn’t like Margot. She was used to that. At least William liked her.

  He had theories about the seriousness of the world. He didn’t like black people very much because he had never met very many of them; but he wasn’t prejudiced at all. He once voted Democratic and then stopped voting until Reagan. He was twenty-eight and he owned a condo and a BMW.

  William said Margot did not owe a thing to some distant relative she barely remembered. Someone named “Uncle Hanley.”

  For two days, she carefully cleaned her apartment, thought about William, sold $32,000 in hardware and software for the new PC line of computers, played her complete file of Boston Pops records, and thought about an old man named Hanley.

  Lydia Neumann met her at 8:30 in the coffee shop of the Blackstone Hotel, where the Neumanns were staying. Leo was up and about already but he was not involved in this; it was better to keep it separate. Leo and Lydia had a lot of separate compartments and that kept them together.

  Margot Kieker was drinking a Coke. Actually, a Diet Coke. And carefully applying strawberry jam to her whole wheat toast.

  Lydia Neumann sat down heavily and saw no change in Margot Kieker. The hair was precise, the makeup muted, the face unlined, the eyes unclouded. No worry, no sleepless nights, no fears of tomorrow. The future was perfectly assured. Lydia Neumann felt disgust for the creature in front of her. And yet, there was curiosity as well.

  “You don’t understand me,” began Margot without looking up from her toast. She was saying words that were unpleasant and she never wished to be unpleasant. There had been unpleasantness last night when she had explained to William what she was going to do. Well, that was unpleasantness enough to last for one week.

  “This really is too much,” Lydia Neumann said in her best voice. It was the voice of her Aunt Millie. It defined the world with a series of boldly drawn lines. “Do all conversations you have begin with yourself?”

  Margot looked up. “I beg your pardon?” She was really puzzled.

  Lydia frowned, let it go.

  “You don’t like me,” Margot said. She had given it a lot of thought. “You don’t understand me though. That’s what I meant. It took me a while. You have to be careful, someone like me. I mean, I have to be careful.”

  “I can see that,” Lydia Neumann said.

  “You don’t even understand. You think I can’t think about things or that I don’t know what I am or what my limits are. But I do. Everyone does. Everyone my age does. We know there are rules and rules and rules and God help us if we don’t learn all the rules the way we’re supposed to.”

  It was the first bitterness in her voice, the first crack of the façade.

  “Do you know how many people would give their life for a job like mine?”

  “And how many have,” Mrs. Neumann said. Her throaty whisper made Margot shudder.

  “I worked very hard. I think you have to understand that. I’m not pretty but I can look pretty. And I am willing to work very hard, even if I have to work harder than others just to stay up. You came into my life two mornings ago and you talk about flesh and blood and you expect me to enter into a very complex thing for the sake of someone I haven’t even laid eyes on for more than twenty years. And you called me a monster.”

  Lydia Neumann stared at her.

  “I am not a monster,” Margot Kieker said. “I am alone in the world and I am making my way by myself. I close the door of my apartment at night and it is my apartment—that’s a good thing—but that’s all I have. It reminds me that anything I have and anything I am still means I am alone. That doesn’t seem to mean much to you. You said you were traveling with your husband. And naturally, you work for the government. No one in the government has to worry too much about working too hard.”

  “Don’t bet on it, honey.”

  “Why do you patronize me?”

  Yes, Lydia Neumann thought with a start: Why was she hostile to this pathetic creature with her too small nose and wide eyes?

  Because of Hanley, came her own answer. This was Hanley’s legacy, all he had in the world to leave his world to. It made her mad. She and Leo might go to the end of their lives without children and there would be no legacy but it didn�
�t matter to them.

  They were not alone. Until they died.

  “Why did you call me?” Lydia Neumann said.

  “You left your number. At the hotel that day. You said you would be here until today. I wanted you to go back but then, last night, I realized that I couldn’t let that poor man, whoever he is, just die.”

  “Whoever he is is your great-uncle.”

  “Some stranger who came to the house once. Do you know my mother was thirty-seven when she died? Breast cancer. I’m twenty-eight. My grandmother was fifty-one. The same thing. Do you know what I think about at night alone? Just the thought of being alone. I never smoked, I don’t drink, I take care of myself. I had a mammogram last month. Every year. The doctor said that in view of my history, it might be a better idea for me to have my breasts removed surgically before any sign of disease appeared.”

  She said this in her mechanical, computer voice. It was the only voice she had. It was borrowed, without accents and with rounded consonants to sound like vowels. She was crying when she said these things.

  Lydia Neumann stared at her.

  Margot wiped her eye with a handkerchief of white linen. The handkerchief had her initials sewn in blue. William had given her the handkerchiefs at Christmas; it was the last gift she had expected.

  “I can arrange this for you,” Mrs. Neumann said.

  Margot looked up.

  “With your company, your supervisor. It’ll only take a few hours; a few telephone calls. It won’t appear to be what this is about at all. I am quite well known in some very upper circles in the wonderful world of computer science,” said Lydia Neumann. She touched Margot’s pale, ringless hands. “Leave it to me.”

  22

  THE GOSSIP OF BERLIN

  Denisov learned enough in three days to understand the direction of things. He merely didn’t understand the sources.

  He had tapped the informal network of private intelligence operatives (called “casuals” and “contractors” in some jargon); he had caught the thrust of Alexa’s trail. It was dangerous for Alexa. She was “going into black” in the citadel of the West to kill an American agent. “Going into black” was to go illegal, off the charts, into enemy lands, into illegal jobs that no one would vouch for.

  Why was it so obvious?

  Denisov was a careful man and he was appalled at the carelessness of the information sources he tapped. Everyone seemed to know about Alexa’s mission; everyone seemed to agree that it was going to be very dangerous. It was as though information were suddenly free and intelligence had become a sieve. There was so much that so many knew that it was like a story agreed upon before the telling by both sides.

  The last source had been Griegel, the “wise old man of Berlin.” Griegel was—How could you explain him? He was the go-between and lived quite undisturbed in his three rooms on the top floor of an ornate old residence off the Unter den Linden. He was an old man who had always been old, who smoked American Chesterfield cigarettes in a long black holder.

  Griegel was alone now. His wife had died two years ago, about the time that Denisov had finally met him through Krueger in Zurich.

  Griegel was one of the honest go-betweens. What information he had was given to him. He offered no bona fides because none could be given. He fulfilled the role of an international neighborhood gossip. He lived undisturbed 1.4 miles east of the Berlin Wall at the point of the Soviet War Memorial.

  “Birds of peace,” said Griegel, pointing with his cigarette holder at the pigeons wheeling in the bright spring air. “East or West. All the same to them.”

  The trite sentiment was expected. Griegel was a man who liked company. He held on to the company of others by delaying the inevitable moment when he would have to reveal all of substance that he knew. Like many gossips, the facts were less important than the talk; he kept stoking the talk with prods of unimportant comments.

  The two men sat at a table by the balcony and looked down. At the corner of the narrow street, they could see a few of the famous linden trees for which the great Berlin street is named.

  Denisov said nothing. He watched the street.

  “The next summit meeting is to be in Berlin,” Griegel said. He had the sharp accents of the Berliner and Denisov raised his hand in protest—his German was too slow.

  “Would you prefer English then? Or Russian?” Griegel smiled. “Unfortunately, I cannot speak Russian very well. This makes it difficult when they want to tell me things.” And he smiled. He had the wizened flat German eyes of the kind seen on some old men, with Oriental corners and merriment that is kin to mischief.

  “I came to see you,” Denisov began because the old man would not start the conversation. “I am not concerned with the summit meeting. I am concerned with my own business.”

  “And what is your business now?”

  “I am in trade. Commercial trade.”

  “Ah,” Griegel said. He smiled at the shadows on the street. “What do you sell?”

  “The things that people need,” Denisov said.

  “Ah,” Griegel said again, catching his breath and bobbing his head as though he understood.

  “Why does the community speak so openly of intelligence? Of exchanges?” Denisov began again.

  “The community,” Griegel said. “The community lives on gossip.”

  “And you are the greatest gossip of all,” Denisov said.

  Griegel cackled. He ended his laughter with a fit of coughing and placed a new Chesterfield cigarette in his holder.

  “The summit interests me,” Griegel said. “It is such an important thing. And to have it here, in Berlin. There is talk these days about the summit and the air is filled with hope.” He puffed the cigarette. “Hope like pigeons who are the symbols of peace, flying freely over poor Berlin. Holy doves.”

  Denisov frowned. “Flying rats,” he said. He would prefer the conversation to end within a week or two. He shifted his bulk uncomfortably at the table. Even the saintly eyes seemed irritated. He had done his work in Europe, tapping into old sources and networks, feeling his way around the dark room of espionage without bumping into any unexpected pieces of furniture.

  There are rarely facts found in such a search; Denisov had merely discovered a sentiment, a feeling of change to come. Griegel was useful because he was a parrot—he repeated the lies told him exactly as they had been stated in the first place. A useful parrot, used by both sides and by independents—like Denisov.

  “How can you say such things about birds? They are God’s creatures, even in this godless state,” Griegel said. He was smiling still. “You are such a cynic, friend. Reality should not cloud your vision.” The smoke drifted out the window. The old man sat in a wooden chair beside a wooden table butted against the iron balustrade that formed a small, crude balcony. He never moved from the chair. The street—narrow and in shadows—was his world. Up and down the street they came to the gossip of Berlin.

  The old man sighed. He took the cigarette out of the holder and threw it out the window. He stared at the holder for a moment and then put it down.

  “All right,” he said.

  Denisov said, “What about Switzerland?”

  It was automatic, like pressing the button on a jukebox. Griegel played the record triggered by the words.

  “They talk about action in Switzerland,” he said. His eyes glazed over. “Soviet agent, one of the best, goes mad and kills two of her comrades. It was a quarrel, they say. She has fled to the West, they say.”

  “She.”

  “She,” Griegel said.

  Denisov put the money on the table. Not overvalued East German marks but Swiss francs. Hard money. The amount never varied, was never haggled over. The information retrieved from the old man was all alike to him, like so many songs on so many recordings.

  “Who controls her?”

  Griegel blinked; again, the eyes seemed glassy, as though he were drugged. When he spoke, the voice was automatic: “They say there is an old man in
Moscow who is old and diseased and who wishes to live forever. Although, in a way, he is already immortal because his name lives forever.”

  “What about him? Is he in control?”

  “In control? Who can say about that old man who wants to live forever.” Griegel frowned. The wrong record was chosen. “Who can say.” The frown deepened. “Some say the old man will go.”

  Go. Defect.

  “Alexa,” Denisov tried. He was operating in darkness. What buttons had to be pushed to retrieve information?

  “She went to kill a man in Switzerland and killed her own comrades.” He was silent; it was all.

  Denisov was sweating though it was a cool day. The sweat broke on his forehead and beaded and fell down his face.

  “November.”

  Griegel closed his eyes. The machine of memory whirred. He opened his eyes and saw nothing. “November is dead,” he said.

  “November in Switzerland.”

  “There is no November. November is dead,” Griegel said.

  “Who did Alexa go to kill?”

  “Alexa killed two comrades in Switzerland. She went mad.”

  Denisov wiped at his face because the sweat stung his eyes. Outside, the rumble of Berlin filled the air. Pigeons fluttered above the low buildings and thought about East and West and where to eat next. The Wall was a good deal safer these days for pigeons because it was difficult to recruit soldiers to man the Wall and some of the watchtowers contained machine guns and cardboard cutouts of soldiers. The pigeons knew these things.

  Devereaux had wanted information. Had wanted Denisov—for a considerable price—to tap into the “Community” of shadows that existed in Europe—the soldiers of fortune, the mercenary agents, the contractors and private intelligence sources, the arms dealers who knew many things about many countries. He had tapped, probed, prodded: And all he had was this vague feeling of momentous events yet to come.

  “Who is the old man in Moscow?”

  Griegel snapped out of the trance. He smiled. “Who can say?”