Code Name November

by Bill Granger

  “They’ll be comin’ along shortly, now, miss,” said the garda from Galway City. “I’ve just got the signal. Yer father’s landed.”

  And she had not even seen it. She ached for him. Her father was distant, and frightening even, but, somehow, she had found love in him. An offhand love that suited her.

  She saw him at the end of the immense corridor. They had taken him through a special door, away from the customs area and the gaudy tax-free shop where weary hours were spent waiting for planes by buying bottles of Irish whisky and bolts of Irish cloth.

  She did not wave. They did not wave or shout to each other—that wasn’t their way. Like the horse. On her fifteenth birthday, she had awakened and dressed and gone down to breakfast, but he had not been there. Rushing from the house, she ran down along the stony road to the stables and there it was—a big brown stallion with coltish eyes. Farrell—old Farrell—was standing there holding the rein for her. Her father was not at the stable. He had gone away, but that was all right; she understood it was not indifference in him but an embarrassment at showing love.

  Coming toward her now, he looked so tired, so sad. His hand was bandaged. When they were close enough, he beckoned for her to come to him and hug him.

  “Hello, Brianna,” he said softly.

  The Rolls purred effortlessly up into the burren hills of Clare, along the coast road around Galway Bay. Winter in the west country: The hills were empty ridges of stone, treeless, fenced with stone fences of a thousand families who had finally fled the inhospitable land in the face of English landlords and Irish famines.

  Brianna and Lord Slough did not speak. The bleak scenery comforted them. They had known it all their lives, from the time when Slough bought the crumbling castle and restored it and defiantly decided to live in it—an English lord in the midst of the impoverished Irish west.

  The black car flashed through the little town of Innisbally, wipers silently driving the tears of rain from the windscreen. A drunk stumbled in the street on his way to the pub; he paused and let the immense car splash past him. His face was stupidly amazed. And then gone. Brianna barely saw it. She sat back in the comfort of the cushions, in the silent world of wood paneling that smelled of oil on the leather, and warmth.

  Lord Slough looked out the window, at last. Deirdre’s face was still before him. Still in the shape of the bleak land. She said the Irish laughed because God cried enough for them. She told a story about the burren families and of how they had stood on the point of Galway Bay and watched the ships pass on their way to America, and of the tears of those left behind.

  He imagined her now, in the reflected window glass of the car, as she had been. On that last night and last morning, up until the moment she had gone to the door. He saw her as the fresh-faced teacher who had first come to Clare House after Margaret had died. He saw her alive because he would not look at her broken face in the Chateau Frontenac. He had refused because he had seen enough bodies in the war—bodies of friends—and he could never think of those friends again as they had been in life; they were always only bodies, bits of bone and flesh, mangled for eternity by death. He had not wanted to remember Deirdre like that. So he had refused to look at her.

  He sighed.

  Feeling the presence of Brianna next to him, he thought he should do something. Tell her something.

  At last, he reached and touched her hand and held it. It was all he could think of.

  Enough. She pressed next to him. When she was a baby, she’d had milky breath. He thought he smelled it now, the same innocent breath.

  “Home, Brianna,” he said at last. The word included the car and the plain hills. It was all he could think of.

  She knew he meant to comfort her.

  11

  BELFAST

  Inspector Cashel of the Special Branch, Dublin, piled his heavy bag into the black Ford Anglia. He could have taken a police auto, but the black Ford—the first car he had ever owned—was his not-so-secret joy. Cashel, who would go on and on about the mechanical wonders of the sturdy little car, did not realize that he and the vehicle were an object of fun in his division. And if he had known, he would not have seen the humor of it.

  A surprisingly tender kiss from his wife, a little wave, and then he was gone, plunging into the streets of empty Dublin.

  He turned down Baggot Street, past St. Stephen’s Green and the Shelbourne Hotel and the mile of colorful old homes and just as colorful public houses. At the bridge over the little trickle of water that eventually becomes the broad Shannon River, he turned again, following the road to Limerick. The highways of Ireland have no name or number designations—they are merely roads which guide at intervals with white stakes pointing toward cities. It was a system considered confusing by tourists and comfortable by people like Cashel.

  The windshield wipers clicked at the rain and the little heater warmed Cashel. His broad face reddened, making his black mustache seem blacker, blue eyes more blue. He thought of taking a pipe but decided to defer the pleasure of the first bowlful until he broke his journey in midmorning.

  In a little while, he was in the country.

  He would be at Clare House before noon, he thought.

  Denisov stood in the dark doorway of St. Anne’s Church. He had been waiting for an hour.

  He glanced again at his watch and saw the time; he waited for the bells to tremble the hour in the belfry above him. They finally did, two minutes late by his reckoning.

  From where he stood, he could look down the hilly O’Donnell Road to Flanagan’s public house, still blazing lights past closing time. Denisov had tried mightily to understand the pub-closing laws of England, Ireland, and Scotland and the exceptions to them and the history of them, and he still could not. He had waited in the church door an hour too long.

  The rain had been falling since afternoon when Denisov had begun his search for O’Neill. He knew about O’Neill, of course, and Hastings and the connection in Edinburgh with Devereaux; but he did not understand the content of Devereaux’s mission or the extent of Hastings’ information. There were moments—now, waiting in the doorway, feeling cold and almost ill—when he did not understand his own reason for being there.

  He yearned for the warmth of Asia to warm his cold bones. He yearned for games he could understand.

  He felt in the pocket of his raincoat for the little Beretta. Old-fashioned weapon, light, not terribly accurate. So they told him. But he didn’t care. He never intended to use it.

  Finally, Flanagan’s began to close in the slow and reluctant way of bars all over the world. He watched the patrons stagger out of the pub, stand on the steps and talk in the rain, and then scatter to their separate streets. He was amused to see one carrying on a conversation while he leaned against the fence around the vacant lot and urinated. The lights of the pub were extinguished, one by one, and, at last, he saw the figure of O’Neill trudging up the hill to St. Anne Road.

  He did not like contact; he was basically a gatherer of information, and contact always made him feel a little uneasy.

  O’Neill began singing, inexplicably, in the darkness of Belfast and in the rain falling straight down. Denisov heard snatches of lyrics carried on the wind as O’Neill came nearer:

  “… It’s not the leavin’ of Liverpool,

  That’s grievvvvvvvin’ me,

  But the love I’ll leavvvvve behind.…”

  Denisov smiled and then stepped from the shadow of the doorway.

  “You sing well.”

  O’Neill was startled but not frightened; he turned to the stranger and smiled. “C’mon inter the light like an honest man,” he cried and waved vaguely towards the darkened street.

  Denisov complied.

  O’Neill’s face was red and bloated and rain-streaked; his collar was damp and a red tie was knotted at his throat.

  “Who’re ya?”

  “My name is Denisov.”

  “What kinda bloody name is it, then?”

  “Russian.
”

  “Yer a fuggin’ Russian then?”

  “I am,” said Denisov.

  O’Neill seemed to absorb this information slowly but with equanimity. “Well, let’s go inter the city and find a jar.”

  “A jar—”

  “A bloody jar of Guinness—”

  “Stout—”

  “Porter—”

  Denisov shrugged. “The pubs are closed—”

  “But not the hotels. Not the bloody hotel bars, not by a sight. And me, the O’Neill himself, has got the quid fer it and he’ll buy even a fuggin’ Communist a drink on it.”

  “That’s very nice,” said Denisov.

  They walked along St. Anne Road together; Denisov had been there before. They strolled past the place where Blatchford had died and Devereaux had nearly been killed. It looked like every other spot on the pavement.

  O’Neill began to sing “The Leaving of Liverpool” again. He sang it through in a steady, off-key voice and Denisov did not interrupt him. The feeble lights of the center of the city beckoned ahead. Magically, the rain ceased, too.

  “Ah, it’s a bloody climate, man. I don’t know how ya can stand it,” O’Neill said at last, wiping rain from his broad, mottled forehead. His face was so bloated that Denisov thought it looked about to burst.

  “It is less violent than the Soviet Union,” said Denisov.

  “Aye. I’ve heard about Russian winters,” said O’Neill in sudden comradeship. He slapped Denisov painfully on the back. “Yer don’t look like a Russian,” he said.

  Denisov shrugged. It was probably meant as a compliment.

  They found a bar at last. They sat with the late crowd, sipping at Guinness. O’Neill—warm, dry, and with drink—said, “I’m a commercial traveler—what’s yer line?”

  “Similar,” said Denisov. He sipped manfully at the thick, sweet black beer.

  At the second round, Denisov began slowly. “You know a man named Devereaux.”

  “What? Oh, aye. I met him once. He came to the house one mornin’. Yesterday? The day before? I fergets.”

  Denisov realized at once that O’Neill did not know Devereaux by his real name—that, in fact, the dead Blatchford had been Devereaux to O’Neill. He tried again.

  “There’s another fellow,” he started.

  O’Neill looked at him with a dawning suspicion.

  “One you met in Scotland. An American.”

  “He didn’t say his name was Devereaux. There might be two, I suppose—”

  “Mr. O’Neill. I want to be honest to you. I am a representative of my government—”

  “I thought you said you was a commercial traveler, too.”

  “In a sense, I am,” said Denisov. “But I am buying, not selling. And I have the money to prove it.”

  He opened his wallet and showed a thick ream of pound notes. O’Neill stared at them in a glazed way. Denisov carefully left the wallet on the table.

  “So.” O’Neill swallowed. “What is it ye be after buyin’ then?”

  “Information,” said Denisov carefully.

  “And yer come to me?”

  “I want to know what you told Devereaux. Rather, the man in Edinburgh.”

  “There were two men in Edinburgh,” said O’Neill, his eyes hooding themselves in a gesture of shrewdness.

  “Yes. I know. The other man was Hastings. He’s dead.”

  “And Devereaux killed him. The second Devereaux. The one in Edinburgh.”

  Denisov weighed that and decided there was no reason to tell the truth. He shrugged in confirmation.

  “He’s a cold bastard,” said O’Neill. “He broke me bloody nose. And he cheated me on me money—”

  “How much did he give you?”

  O’Neill glanced down at the wallet. “Five thousand American dollars—”

  “There is one thousand in pounds in that wallet,” said Denisov. “I want to know what you told the man in Edinburgh.”

  “Why should I tell ye fer less what he tol’ me fer more?”

  Denisov shrugged. “It is second-used.”

  “Yer mean it’s old information?”

  “Precise.”

  They waited. Finally, Denisov reached for the wallet.

  “Now, now, not so fast,” said O’Neill.

  “Yes?” asked Denisov. He held his hand over the wallet.

  “It’s not as though I’m not bein’ loyal,” said O’Neill to himself out loud. “Me loyalty was forced from me t’begin with. But I’m not a Communist. I’ve never been.”

  “You don’t have to be.”

  “Yer people ain’t about to try to take over Ulster, are ye?”

  “Of course not.” Denisov smiled to himself: We wish Northern Ireland on the English forever.

  “Well, then.”

  The bulging wallet seemed to beckon voluptuously.

  “Well, then,” O’Neill repeated.

  Denisov looked at him mildly. He took his hand away from the wallet.

  “Ah, it doesn’t matter anyway now, does it?”

  O’Neill reached for the wallet and opened it and looked at the pound notes inside.

  “A thousand yer said?”

  “A thousand,” said Denisov.

  “All right. It’s a bargain, then.” He spat on his hand like a farmer and shook Denisov’s hand. Discreetly, Denisov wiped his palm on the raincoat. The wallet had already disappeared into O’Neill’s clothing.

  O’Neill began and told as much as he knew about the plot against Lord Slough. The information seemed to disappoint the Russian, so he tried to elaborate on it, but there was little. O’Neill had spent the past two days on a roaring drunk and he had not gathered more information; and, when he had heard about the assassination attempt on Lord Slough that afternoon, he had assumed he would never see the mates of those torn thousand-dollar bills. With a fatalistic nonchalance, he had spent the night drinking to his bad fortune. And now here was a Russian, wanting the same information.

  Denisov could not believe it. Why would Devereaux have come to Ireland? For this? And why had the CIA plotted against his life—for the sake of protecting an assassination attempt three thousand miles away? It was craziness.

  Further, how would he justify the paying of one thousand pounds for such worthless information? They had been brutal about expenses on the last assignment and Denisov feared they suspected, correctly, that Denisov was secretly putting expense money into his own Swiss account. Would they believe he gave this foolish Irishman a thousand pounds for information so scant—and so old—that it would not have justified any payment at all? He wondered if he should kill O’Neill for the money.

  “There’s nothing more?”

  “More? More, ye bloody man? I’ve given ye a bargain—five thousand pounds they paid me—” O’Neill, believing for a moment his own hyperbole, was indignant.

  “Devereaux would not come here for that—”

  “Oh, aye. He seemed disappointed, too—but yer see, that’s not me fault. There were other parts and Hastings had put it all together. Hastings understood everything and that’s why he wanted me to meet him in Edinburgh. I was just one of the parts he was sellin’ the Americans.”

  “Did Devereaux—did the American in Edinburgh—have the other parts of information?”

  “How the bloody hell should I know that?” O’Neill took a deep gulp of Guinness.

  “For my thousand pounds I would think you know,” said Denisov. He was annoyed both with O’Neill and with the thick black beer. And he was already worried about his expense report.

  “Well, as a matter of fact, I do know that he seemed t’question me like he didn’t know much more than I told you. He seemed bloody sad in the puss like you are now. It’s only money, man; c’mon, I’ll buy you a jar of whisky—”

  “No.” He waved his hand. But O’Neill pressed him and he finally let the Irishman buy him a large glass of Irish whisky—with his own money.

  “T’yer health, sur,” said O’Neill, and he too
k a large swallow.

  Denisov drank silently. Gloomily.

  “It’s funny about it all, though,” said O’Neill at last. His mood had become quiet. “I tell yer what I know and yer sad in the puss. I tell the fella in Edinburgh, whoever the hell he is, and he’s down in the mouth. But when I tol’ the other fella—Devereaux, the one what come t’me house in the mornin’—I tol’ him just what I had tol’ his partner in Edinburgh—why, he seemed almost bloody cheerful!”

  Denisov looked up: Blatchford had seemed cheerful.

  “It was bloody strange, yer ask me. I was hardly half awake and me nose was painin’ me from where the fella in Edinburgh had broke it on me—and so I’m not in a good humor yer might say, and this fella starts on me, askin’ the same bloody things the other one did. Well, when I tol’ him what I knew—why, I thought he’d bloody laugh he looked so bloody happy! Like a bloody child on Christmas Day! Well, there’s no accountin’, is there?”

  Denisov nodded.

  O’Neill took another sip of whisky. “It was just as if he knew all about what I was tellin’ him but was just happy that was all there was. If yer understand me, sur?”

  Denisov nodded.

  He thought he was beginning to understand.

  Devereaux had not left her until he had it all. He picked through her life carefully from the time she had been in the Peace Corps (that had been true), and into her marriage to a government lawyer and her divorce and the death of her son. That had been difficult but he had pulled that out as well. Then into her struggle for jobs in the circles of government in Washington. Up to the day she met the man called Hanley.

  She described R Section. Wearily, she went over the same ground again and again. She got up once and went to the window and looked out at the ring of hills around the old city; she talked dreamily of her past life—of her child, of her husband—and crisply of the life of R Section and the cover with Free The Prisoners.