The Night Watch

by Julian Dinsell

  November’s reply came with unexpected intensity. “Because the show is over. The players have left the theatre, but nobody’s wound down the curtain. So the few that are left in the audience have mistaken the sceneshifters for the cast. Eventually, they too will leave and the lights will go out.”

  Grant, as November had already observed, was not an imaginative man. “What’s all that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that we, here in this magnificent house…” November somehow contrived to make the grandeur seem trivial. “We are sitting at the centre of the largest piece of industrial obsolescence in the world. From Philadelphia in the East to Chicago in the Mid-West, industries that made America great are in deep trouble, or will be in the next ten years.”

  Grant’s silence encouraged November to continue. He swung both arms in a gesture towards the darkened windows. “Your splendid lawn which sweeps down to the lake, how often is it mown? Every week in the summer? Just like backyards right across America. To do that you need gasoline, steel, design, engineering, manufacturing, marketing, distribution and a gardener. Soon you won’t need any of that, just a different packet of seeds – grass that doesn’t grow above an inch high. What is Grant Industries doing about that?”

  Grant didn’t want to lend credibility to November’s thesis by entering an argument on equal terms.

  “I don’t answer questions on game shows,” he snapped, picking up his brandy glass. “Our guests are becoming fretsome.” He used an antique New England term in an attempt to lift the feeling of embarrassment that had descended upon the table.

  He pushed his chair backwards and stood up. Others took their cue and began to gather in small groups, murmuring about November’s outrageous behaviour. The man at the centre of their attention stood alone with his back to them, looking out into the shadowy space beyond the tall window that opened onto the lawn and the distant lake.

  Grant Jnr took his father by the elbow and led him into the study, a room lined with shelves of matching leather-bound volumes, all of them unread. Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the works of Victor Hugo, Jane Austen and Washington Irving, stood side by side in virgin uniformity.

  “Father, I’m sorry…” he began.

  “It’s okay, son. He knew he’d only get one bite at the cherry and I’m used to teeth marks. Tell me about him.”

  “He’s unusual, you’ve seen that; he never had any real friends, not even me.” Grant Jnr found it difficult to explain what it was like to live alongside November. “He has the strangest abilities. He wasn’t like some students who are just brilliant. You know the type – they goof off all semester, study the week before exams and get straight As for everything. He’s obsessive. He was always studying – nights, weekends, vacations, he never let up. Not for a dance, not to meet girls or go to a movie, not for anything. He’d work away in his corner of the room for hours at a time. Sometimes I’d try to distract him, turn the stereo on real loud maybe or some stuff like that, but it made no difference, he didn’t seem to hear. Then, for no reason at all, he’d come out with the weirdest things–”

  “Weird? What kind of weird?” Grant interrupted sharply.

  “I only remember some of the things he said: ‘Wealth is a sign of weakness’, and ‘Power is the product of the mind, not of politics’. Another time, he said, ‘You only think money, you don’t think rich enough.’ And then he’d set back to work without any attempt at explaining what he meant. It was like trying to talk to somebody who’s sleepwalking; you couldn’t wake him out of an idea.”

  Grant Snr was thoughtful. He slowly strode the length of the room, running his fingertips over a long shelf of books. The sensation helped him think.

  “Mr November sounds like a troubled young man,” he said as he turned to face his son. “How did you and he come to share a room?”

  Grant Jnr thought for a moment. “That’s strange, too. On the first day, when the allocations were made, I was there ahead of time, unpacking my things. He came in and said, ‘My name is November, and I have chosen you.’ That made me nervous because, well, you know, with the family name I thought he might be some sort of social climber. But he wasn’t, and that was strange too, because most of the guys and a lot of the girls were, when they found out who I was. That’s why I thought it safe to invite him here tonight; I even lent him a dinner jacket!”

  “What did he do for his PhD?” Grant Snr asked.

  “Bioengineering.”

  Grant Snr thought for a moment longer, and then made a decision. “Let’s go talk to him.”

  November was standing where they had left him, in unselfconscious isolation. He did not turn as the Grants approached.

  “Do you have answers as well as questions?” the elder Grant asked.

  On getting no reply, he reached out and pulled the cord that drew the curtains across the window, cutting November off from his view of the night. His concentration broken, November turned to Grant.

  “Yes, I have answers.”

  “What are they, and what will they cost me?” Grant said.

  “The answers are free, but to find out if you’re asking the right questions will cost you the ten million dollars I asked you for earlier.”

  “Meet me in the library in the morning,” Grant said.

  November simply nodded. Father and son turned away towards the centre of the room where a group of guests quickly gathered round them. November was left alone.

  The next time any of the guests took notice of Calvin November was when the New York Times called him ‘The World’s First Eco-Billionaire’.

  Chapter 16 - Galesburg Illinois

  At Grade School in Galesburg, Illinois, Calvin November was an introspective child; his classmates thought him gloomy. ‘When November comes, winter can’t be far behind,’ a spiteful teacher had once said, and the label stuck. Moreover his first name, that of a dour president well remembered for saying nothing, made him the butt many schoolyard jokes. It was his mother, Martha, daughter of a Lowland Scottish immigrant family, who was the secret behind the name. Calvin Coolidge, recent President and former Vermont lawyer, displayed a wintery aloofness from worldly entanglements that was much admired in a faithfully Presbyterian household. Yet there was also ambition in Martha’s choice. John Calvin of Geneva was one of the fathers of the Protestant Reformation that had changed the world.

  Hard times and heavy drinking by Walter, Calvin’s father, forced the family to move repeatedly from one small Mid-Western town to another, ever in search of another job, cheaper lodgings or escape from growing notoriety. November’s abiding memory of childhood was of a land with uninterrupted horizons and small communities, like islands in an ocean of prairie. Each had a welcome that sooner or later wore out.

  Choices for a growing child were many but few – many because every type of sport was available, and few because there was little to exercise the mind. Those for whom this was important tended to turn in on themselves. Often the results were unexpected, like small prairie towns producing a succession of Admirals who grew up without ever having seen the sea.

  The first words November remembered learning to read were ‘The Land of Lincoln’, the state motto on the fender of his father’s battered Ford pickup. It was while still very young that November became obsessed with the idea of greatness. To his teachers, he was a learning machine. His ability to study the lives of people who had left their mark on the world was prodigious. He devoured the lives of Alexander the Great, Thomas Edison and John D. Rockefeller in the same way that others followed the careers of Babe Ruth and Jesse Owens.

  Since he had no friends, his mother supposed that the boy must be lonely, but loneliness never occurred to him. His contemporaries simply did not interest him. In none of them could he see any trace of his heroes. He enjoyed the idea of being at a distance from people and took long solitary walks along the prairie skyline, knowing full well that the daily sight of a single figure in so large a landscape would i
mprint itself on the mind of the community.

  One dusty Saturday morning, the county librarian and two policemen arrived at the front door of the small timber-framed house with peeling paint where the Novembers lived.

  The librarian was a short, energetic woman who was almost overpowered by the force of her own outrage. She hammered on the front door.

  “Your boy is an animal, a thief and a vandal,” she shouted as Alice November cautiously opened the door. Though a forceful woman, she was dumb with astonishment.

  Faced with the librarian alone, she would have answered back, but ever respectful of authority, she was overawed by the two policemen.

  The librarian’s fury knew no limits. “He has done the basest and most disgusting thing I have ever come upon in twenty-five years of public service.”

  The sergeant, a kindly man, tried to reduce the temperature. Stepping in front of the librarian, he said, “Mam, if we could just take a look in the boy’s room?”

  She nodded, and in a state of shock led them up the narrow stairs, past the open door to the teenage chaos of Jonathan’s room. She stopped at Calvin’s door and knocked. There was no answer. She tried the handle.

  “Sometimes he locks it,” she said apologetically.

  “I’m not surprised. We’ve been watching him, gathering evidence,” the librarian said.

  “Shall I bust it open?” the younger of the two policemen asked.

  The sergeant turned to Alice and gently asked, “Do you have a key, Mam?”

  “No, no, I don’t believe I have.” Alice’s mind was numbed by thoughts of the nameless atrocity that her son was supposed to have committed.

  “We don’t like doing this; are you sure you don’t have a key?”

  By now Alice had recovered some of her normal sense of indignation. “Just tell me what you’re looking for, and by what right you can come bursting into my home.”

  The sergeant ignored her. “Okay, Leroy, do it.”

  The doorframe offered little resistance, and the librarian strode inside at the head of the group and began to open the dresser drawers.

  “Leave this to us, Mam,” the sergeant said.

  He began searching the dresser, but was interrupted by his partner who was reaching onto the top of the wardrobe.

  “Hey, take a look at this.” He held a bunch of scrapbooks that had been carefully bound by red cord into a single volume.

  Alice dreaded what they might contain. The cluster of scrapbooks carried a title in large hand-drawn letters: A Strategy For My Life. The sergeant put it on the dresser and flicked it open.

  “That’s it,” the librarian screamed. “It’s obscene what he’s done.”

  The scrapbooks held a pantheon of heroes, each with their name and achievements recorded in meticulous handwriting.

  Alice was appalled. Each page was covered with pictures and phrases neatly cut from library books.

  “Two hundred books he’s destroyed, two hundred,” the librarian shouted.

  *

  Doc Stevenson’s elderly Buick pulled up outside the Novembers’ house. Stevenson had been the Novembers’ family physician since their arrival in the town some years earlier. He knew Alice to be a woman of sober judgement and she was clearly in distress when she called. As he put the phone down, he resisted the temptation to finish the excellent dinner of chicken gumbo that Clarissa, his wife of forty years, had prepared as a wedding anniversary reminder of their honeymoon in New Orleans. But he was resigned to interrupted meals and broken sleep.

  As he knocked on the door at the Novembers’ house he was more puzzled than resentful. Alice opened the door, and the doctor’s perplexity grew as soon as she led him into the parlour and closed the door behind them. Saying nothing, she thrust a bundle of scrapbooks into his hands.

  He took them, looked for a seat and sat himself down next to the table lamp that illuminated a corner of the gloomy room. For a moment he fumbled for his glasses, and then began to read. Alice couldn’t wait for an answer.

  “He’s sick, isn’t he?” she said, as if willing the doctor to agree.

  “Well, I–”

  She cut him off in mid-sentence. “I know it’s serious. There are Commies in that book, Marx and Lenin, real bad people. Why does a boy his age want to fill his mind with that sort of stuff?”

  “There are plenty of other people in here besides Commies…”

  Alice took a deep shuddering breath. Slowly her head sank to her knees and she began to sob convulsively.

  “Six hundred and fifty dollars … I don’t know what we shall do.”

  “Six hundred and fifty dollars for what?” the doctor asked, his patience wearing thin.

  “The books he cut up. Over two hundred of them, and they say we have to pay six hundred and fifty dollars, that’s the State valuation. Six fifty is more than Walter earned all last summer, leastways it’s more than he brought home.”

  “Alice, this is not a medical problem,” the doctor said sympathetically.

  “Not a medical problem! A boy would have to be sick to do a thing like that,” she insisted.

  “Perhaps I ought to speak to him.”

  “Yes, you ought,” Alice said firmly. “I’ll go get him.”

  Frank Stevenson sat in the dimly lit corner with his eyes half-closed as he listened to Alice’s determined tread on the stairs. The sound of a door being opened was followed by a conversation, which was too distant for him to make out.

  Another thoughtless, selfish child, another father on the booze and another mother under more stress than she knew how to handle – a tedious, sad and familiar story.

  He thought of home. Clarissa, the abandoned dinner and an open fire waited for him fifteen blocks away. There were footsteps on the stairs again, two people this time. Calvin November stood in the doorway. There was something strange about him, but in the low light Stevenson could not decide what it was. The boy stood tall and self-assured, as if his early teenage frame was a disguise for a person of maturity. Stevenson found himself getting to his feet so as not to feel at a disadvantage.

  He mustered his most authoritarian voice, the one he used for giving patients bad news.

  “Young man,” he said, “you’ve put your mother to a lot of grief. What do you have to say for yourself?” Stevenson remembered the reply he got for years afterwards.

  “I’m going to discover the outer edge,” Calvin November said.

  Chapter 17 - 44th Street

  The traffic on 44th Street growled and snarled its way across mid-town Manhattan. Twenty-two floors above the intersection with 2nd Avenue, Murphy put another card into the recorder and asked Goldman his next question.

  Finding Goldman had been a masterstroke. At four thirty in the morning after Morag identified November, Thornhill had called another meeting in his room. The tension of the previous night had drained away, leaving a collective of dull headaches, gritty eyes and coated tongues. Thornhill alone was showered and shaved. He sensed their resentment.

  “Sorry to deny you your orange juice and croissants, but we need to move quickly.”

  It took Morag no more than five minutes to set out the profile of November.

  “Sounds to me as if we are hanging a great weight on a small nail,” Darcy said.

  “He’s the best candidate we have,” Morag said flatly.

  “He’s the best candidate we have because he’s the only candidate we have,” Darcy said with unconcealed irritation.

  Thornhill chose to ignore the exchange. “Morag has a direct route in,” he said.

  Morag spoke before anybody could interrupt. “There’s a writer, his name is Art Goldman; he specialises in ‘revelatory biographies’. His current subject is Calvin November. Goldman is known as a ‘sleaze ball’.” She used the unfamiliar phrase like a technical term. “I know somebody at Columbia who can get us to him.”

  “Great,” Murphy said, bringing a large hand down with a thud on the arm of his chair. “Sounds like my kind of guy.
Let me go talk to him.”

  “Very well,” Thornhill said.

  “I can be in Manhattan before lunch,” Murphy said eagerly.

  *

  In Goldman’s book-cluttered apartment, the windows faced the grimy brick flank of the building alongside. Murphy pressed the record button again.

  “The Outer Edge, that’s the name of the book?”

  “Yeah, that’s the title, unless I come up with something better,” Goldman said huffily.

  “It’s original, it’s what November said when he was a kid. The old doctor told me, the one I interviewed at Galesburg, out in Illinois. He’s dead now.”

  “Sounds tacky, the title,” Murphy said; he wanted to find a way through Goldman’s self-confidence.

  Goldman took the bait. “Look, I agreed to talk to you on a confidential basis, because an old friend at Columbia said it was important.”

  “And because we’re paying you twenty grand,” Murphy added.

  Goldman ignored the remark. “Look, if you want to play at literary criticism, then you can wait until the book is published and read it along with everybody else.”

  “And pay $29.95 instead of twenty thousand.” Murphy knew it was important to stay in the driving seat. “How much collaboration have you had from your subject?”

  “I don’t do collaboration, it cramps my style.”

  Murphy noticed that the absence of a view into the street also meant that nobody could get a shot into the apartment.

  “I guess you must get scared some nights – these people you write about, some of them have a long reach.”

  “Ha!” Goldman snorted in contempt. “With what you don’t understand I could fill several books. These guys, all of them, they threaten to sue, try to buy me off and yes, I get threatening calls – they feel they have to go through all of that. But underneath it all, they love it. Even if they won’t admit it, even to themselves, they can’t get enough of it.”

  Murphy stood up as if to stretch his legs and began a circuit of the small, cluttered room. The wall opposite the window was lined with rickety shelves crammed with research files, each dated and labelled in Goldman’s careful handwriting. The sins and omissions of the high and the mighty were listed, indexed and numbered with academic exactitude. The last file was a catalogue of computer databases that gave access to newspaper articles and broadcast transmissions in Europe, the USA and Japan.