November Man

by Brian Freemantle

  There was more movement in the room now, and Melkovsky thought he detected open sniggers of laughter.

  ‘You mean’, queried Doborin, ‘that the Americans actually believe we are going to withdraw all our troops from the satellite countries and open up our missile sites for inspectionl’

  Incredulity etched the question.

  Melkovsky nodded. Very seriously he said, ‘Those are the guarantees I gave them.’

  ‘How far away is the election?’ asked Doborin. He knew, as did everyone else in the room, but he wanted to show his complete understanding of Melkovsky’s manœuvre.

  ‘A little over a year,’ replied the Foreign Minister.

  ‘So how much will be made public immediately?’ asked the Russian leader.

  ‘Nearly all,’ replied Melkovsky. ‘The wheat deal first, of course. It represents a huge trade-deal for American farmers who are almost buried under their own grain. The shipments will start within three weeks. Then the technological assistance and the oil agreement …’

  He smiled again, enjoying the account.

  ‘… I agreed to there being no public announcement from us about the speed-up of the SALT talks. It will be done by leaks through the White House diplomatic correspondents, so that the interest can be slowly built up.’

  ‘You’ve obviously determined a way for the talks to collapse,’ anticipated Dorobin.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Melkovsky.

  ‘By which time we’ll have the food and a large quantity of this equipment?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied the Foreign Minister again.

  ‘And no one, not even the Americans who will be suspicious of any breakdown, will be able to blame us for the collapse?’

  ‘No. We’ll be entirely without responsibility,’ assured Melkovsky. ‘It’s important to maintain our present level of friendship.’

  The First Secretary became serious, picking up Melkovsky’s remark.

  ‘It’s vital that there be no serious, lasting rift,’ he insisted. ‘There must not be a break so severe that Peking can take advantage.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Melkovsky, still confident. ‘It’s all been painstakingly planned.’

  ‘I hope it has,’ said Dorobin. He paused. Then he added. ‘For your sake, I hope it has.’

  A thousand miles away in Prague, Josef Kodes, a timid man still nervous that his implied support of Alexandre Dubček in 1968 would be realized and topple him as Trade Minister, tucked his twin girls into bed, kissed them goodnight and went back into the living-room.

  ‘Time to eat,’ he said to his wife.

  In Moscow, Melkovsky decided to abandon dinner. In his Kremlin office he put aside the file on Kodes that had been maintained by the K.G.B. for just such a moment as this. Alongside the Kodes documents were the records of an East German politician called Wolfgang Junkers. As the Russian opened the folder, Junkers was belching to clear the beer fumes before rolling over upon the blond secretary, who lay beside him. The girl closed her eyes and let her mind go blank.

  The dossier on Jocelyn Hollis was the third document upon Melkovsky’s desk, and upon this the Foreign Minister finally devoted most time, reading far into the evening.

  It was in many ways a desperate plan, conceded Melkovsky, writing the three names on a piece of paper before him and then drawing circles around them to form a linking pattern. But it had the element of originality which convinced him it would succeed, if his suspicions against Altmann could not be confirmed.

  If Altmann were innocent, to involve the Austrian would be inspired, he decided. As an afterthought he added the man’s name to his child-like drawing.

  It was almost midnight when the secretary announced Turgonev’s arrival, and Melkovsky admitted him immediately, pushing the papers aside. It had been a mistake to ignore food, he thought, holding his stomach.

  ‘Well?’ demanded Melkovsky.

  ‘It went perfectly,’ reported Turgonev. ‘Hugo will know it was an attempt on his life, but it has been officially logged as an accident.’

  Melkovsky nodded, contentedly.

  ‘If he runs to the other side, everything is going to be easy for us,’ said the minister.

  Turgonev said nothing, studying the litter on the minister’s desk. Aware of the attention, Melkovsky said casually, ‘And if he doesn’t, then I’m ready to move against the Englishman. I’ve already chosen a Czech and an East German …’

  He looked down at his drawing.

  ‘… Hollis and Altmann complete the picture,’ he said.

  Turgonev didn’t bother to reply. It wouldn’t work, he thought. There were too many uncertainties.

  ‘The London embassy have given us a perfect lever to the Briton’s weakness,’ elaborated Melkovsky.

  The Foreign Minister was very confident, thought the K.G.B. colonel. He wondered what the man’s attitude would be if he knew that Turgonev had begun the probe into the leak within his own organization. That was going to be an onerous task. But it would be worth while to remove the cancer.

  ‘I don’t like the idea of involving Altmann in the second proposal,’ cautioned Turgonev. ‘I think we should just drop the man altogether.’

  ‘No,’ disagreed the minister. ‘Throwing them together will have every advantage: it can even act as another test of Altmann’s loyalty.’

  The minister was a bully, thought Turgonev. And bullies usually got beaten.

  James looked tired, decided Marion Hollis. His eyes were dark-ringed, and several times during dinner he had withdrawn from the conversation, as if there were something else far more important occupying his mind. Such rudeness was almost unthinkable in her brother: he had that politician’s awareness of politeness.

  She revolved the brandy bowl in her hand, staring across the embassy lounge at him. Everyone else was paying polite attention to Jocelyn’s account of re-selling an oil shipment seven times at sea during a voyage to Japan, but Marion felt they were bored. Jocelyn became aware of the growing lack of interest and tried to improvise humour into his story, which lengthened the telling and increased the discomfort in the room. The relief among the guests when he finished was discernible, and she knew she was blushing.

  James came towards her, smiling. Was he patronizing? she wondered. He carried a brandy bowl, but she knew it was only for appearance and that he’d only drunk one glass of white wine during the meal.

  ‘Jocelyn is still the big tycoon,’ he opened predictably.

  ‘Please don’t,’ she asked. Jocelyn’s attitude was understandable, she decided fairly: James was always supercilious towards him.

  He frowned at the feeling in her voice.

  ‘Problems?’

  She shrugged, refusing the commitment. Her brother waited hopefully. Sod you, she thought.

  ‘Of course not,’ she lied. ‘None at all …’ she paused. ‘He becomes a bit of a strain, sometimes.’

  James nodded, looking back to where Hollis was seeking the attention of a group of people with another story.

  ‘Poor Jocelyn,’ he said. ‘Why is it that nobody really likes a truly nice man? Villains are always much more attractive.’

  Patronizing again, she thought. James always saw himself as the cavalier: predictably his favourite author was Dumas. And really, she thought, Jocelyn was far more of an adventurer than James. She wondered if her brother were jealous.

  ‘You’ve had a lot on your mind tonight,’ she accused, dismissing the thought. James came back to her, staring at her intently.

  ‘Have I?’ he parried.

  ‘Almost as if your thoughts were three thousand miles away …’ she continued, pressing. ‘Even thinking about an election, in fact …’

  He grinned, enjoying the intimacy, but it was cosmetic humour.

  ‘No one must have the slightest clue, Marion,’ he warned. He looked to where Hollis was concluding his anecdote. ‘Certainly not Jocelyn.’

  She nodded, waiting. How good it would be to be back among the family in America, feeling the p
olitical electricity in Washington and Boston.

  ‘It’s spectacular,’ enlarged her brother, ‘but dangerous.’

  ‘Will you tell me?’

  ‘No.’

  She accepted the immediate refusal without offence. It would be exciting, she thought enviously. Caucus meetings, deals struck to guarantee support, commitments for past favours to be drawn in, funds to raise, exhaustion to be fought against. How boring England would be in comparison. She looked across at James’s wife, standing near the fireplace. Did the woman know how lucky she was, being involved, wondered Marion. Probably not.

  She threw out an arm, indicating the room and the embassy beyond.

  ‘What about all this?’

  ‘Ending,’ he answered, shortly. ‘In a month I’m being named as special adviser to the President.’

  She frowned at the nebulous title.

  ‘… With special emphasis on foreign affairs,’ he added.

  She stared at him, unspeaking for several seconds. Then she said, ‘Good luck, brother James.’

  She raised the brandy bowl.

  ‘To the Presidency,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, not joining in the toast.

  She paused, glass to her lips. She wouldn’t be able to make any decision that would affect James’s attempt at office. Shit, she thought. Seconds later she accepted the emptiness of the silent protest. In fact, there was an inexplicable feeling of relief at finding a temporary excuse for avoiding the collision with her husband. She never had found it easy to admit a mistake, she recalled sadly. Certainly not to James. Or anyone.

  (5)

  There was silence in the subterranean safe-deposit cubicle of the Swiss Bank Corporation vault in Paradeplatz in Zurich, except for the faint hiss of the electric extractor-fan withdrawing stale air.

  There were two file-boxes extending before Altmann, each containing bulging manila folders, secured with sealing wax in three places. The cover of each was carefully annotated, giving instant reference to its contents in English, German and Russian. With difficulty he created space for another folder in the box to his right, checking the index against the contents and consciously having to concentrate.

  Even the sound of the air-conditioning intruded, distracting him.

  How ugly the headless body of the murdered Russian officer looked. Immediately the thought came: I could look like that. Today. Or tomorrow. He shivered, despite the heat of the enclosed room.

  There had been little sleep during the past week. Just growing apprehension. He had analysed every involvement in the past year, seeking clues to the assassination attempt, and today he’d spent four hours in the safe-deposit vault, going back even farther through the carefully kept records.

  And found nothing.

  He closed the latest file almost angrily, snapping his lighter to melt the wax and seal it. With his tongue he wetted the signet ring he’d taken from the little finger of his left hand and pressed it into the congealing wax, then added the file to the tray.

  He sat back sighing, worrying his lip between his teeth. How many lives, he wondered, had been lost already by the secrets that those ordinary buff envelopes contained? And how many had been saved? There would be no way of producing an equation, he knew. Although he possessed the keys, the details of the machinery they unlocked and put into the sort of action that resulted in headless men being found beneath harbour piers, were held thousands of miles away in far more secure underground vaults in London, Moscow and Washington.

  Let what happened be a mistake, he thought desperately. Hugo Altmann had stopped believing in God years ago, after the first weeks of Ravensbrück, but suddenly in the clinical vault he closed his eyes, and his lips moved in muttered prayer. ‘I don’t want to die,’ he said, quite alone. ‘Please. Let me be safe.’

  Safety – and survival – had been Altmann’s preoccupation from the day the Americans had opened the gates of the concentration camp and told him he was free.

  To be safe. And respected again. That was all he had ever sought. He sniggered, a contemptuous sound. For a year he’d actually believed he was achieving even that humble ambition.

  He’d started well, he remembered nostalgically. Despite the deprivations of those horrifying six years he retained a lawyer’s ability to assemble and then relate facts with dates, fervently anxious to involve himself in the evidence-gathering for presentation to the German government in Bonn to settle reparation for Nazi atrocities against the Jews.

  It was to have been his attempt to prove himself. And to purge himself of the guilt that had stayed with him, from the day he helped Hannah through the camp gates, unable even then to support her. She had actually been carried to freedom by one of the captured German soldiers who had herded her in six years before, he recalled angrily.

  Groping for familiar reassurance, he told himself there was no way he could have guessed the trap being laid for him by the quiet-spoken, always smiling man who convinced him that day in Berlin of the Russian determination equalling that of Israel to punish the Nazis.

  Hannah had been so ill then, needing constant nursing. And drugs that were only available on the black market, their cost rising almost by the hour. The man had offered money as well as retribution against the men who had robbed Altmann of his self-respect; it had seemed such an obvious way of getting revenge as well as real, positive help for Hannah.

  Willingly he had made available the documentation he had so laboriously collated. And actually believed they were pursuing the man who had successfully hidden his Nazi past to become a West German jurist.

  But instead of the Nazi, who still lived in affluence in Frankfurt, the Russians had eliminated the Israeli cell Altmann’s information had naively exposed, a Jewish group which had begun, even in those early days, to foment the demand for Zionist emigration from the Soviet Union.

  Of course they had photographs of him handing over the information and receiving the money to keep Hannah alive, labelling him a spy against his own people, committing him to a prison as secure as the barbed-wire incarceration he had endured at Ravensbrück.

  First the betrayal of his wife, then of the ideal for which he was working to rehabilitate himself in his own eyes, he thought with familiar regret.

  And now the final, predictable move, he decided. An attempt on his life. But who, in God’s name, wanted him dead? It couldn’t be the Russians, Americans or English. They were never allowed to forget the consequences if anything happened to him.

  Impulsively he stood up, walking around the cramped room. Altmann was a small, slightly built man who carefully trained his receding hair to disguise the growing depth of his forehead and had perfected an ambience of timid diffidence which led ticket-collectors and junior clerks to be rude to him and meant that nearly everyone else ignored him. Which was precisely what Hugo Altmann intended. Having been driven to live in the shadows, he had become one. His six suits were all grey and his twelve shirts all white. He never raised his voice in any of the six languages he spoke fluently, and an ingratiating smile was rarely far from the thin, compressed lips.

  For that brief year after his concentration-camp release, he had abandoned anonymity, quite enjoying the small degree of public recognition from the work he was doing chronicling the Nazis.

  And because of it, he had been trapped.

  So for twenty years he had been the man whom no one noticed, and had remained safe. Until now.

  He put out his hand, riffling aimlessly through the folders. My life’s work, he mused again. Forty-two files in a Swiss safe-deposit box that kept him alive, just as the drugs daily administered to Hannah in the clinic five miles away sustained her existence.

  There should have been a better record, he thought bitterly, a legacy of which a man could be proud. Not this. No one could be proud of what lay before him.

  Those Nazi files would have given him pride, he knew, just as they earned respect for Simon Weisenthal. Weisenthal had just the sort of library Altmann had be
en creating and the Viennese Jew was known and revered throughout the world.

  He sighed. There was little point in recrimination, he decided realistically. His future was secondary, anyway; Hannah was the only consideration now, and his disgust at the life he followed was immaterial compared with the protection it provided for her.

  Who would there be to care for her and pay the bills if there were another, successful attempt, he thought suddenly. He would have to get protection.

  Altmann slid the trays into their receiving runners, slammed them home, then locked them, testing both drawers several times to ensure they were locked. This was his library, a catalogue of other horrors.

  And it should be used to avert the risk that appeared to be threatening him. One of the countries that had so willingly used him over the past two decades would now have to guard him, he decided.

  He sat down at the tiny desk, happy with the decision. Any of the countries would do it, he knew, once they were rerninded of the embarrassment and collapse of international relationships his death would create. Which one? he wondered. He dismissed England immediately: they still had what was possibly the most efficient secret service in the world, but it was small, without the scope of either Washington or Moscow. Russia was the obvious choice, he supposed reluctantly. But it would be a clumsy protection, he suspected. They might even try to make him go East, which would be impossible. He couldn’t abandon Hannah again.

  So it had to be America. He straightened, relieved at the choice, knowing it was the proper one. He’d get a message through to the Virginia headquarters of the C.I.A., he decided. And quickly, before there was the opportunity for another attempt. Tomorrow, he determined. He’d do it tomorrow.

  Altmann walked slowly along the corridor, reluctant to quit the security of the vault, nodding to the guard at the gate. The lift carried him to the floor of the Executive Directors, where it only took minutes to return the keys, and by twelve-thirty he was standing nervously in Paradeplatz again. He kept away from the kerbside, attentive to every vehicle. He let two taxis go, then waited until the third had almost passed before stopping it to take him to the restaurant.