Henry McGee Is Not Dead

by Bill Granger

  Denisov always thought of Devereaux after the Moscow dreams. He thought of the gray-eyed man on the beach in Florida that night, telling him that the game was ended and that he had lost. Telling him he would be an exile to the United States for the rest of his days. Devereaux had given him this jail and this comfortable California prison of beach and ocean and pretty houses on a pretty hillside. He would never forget that.

  He had money, quite a lot of it, stolen from the KGB when he was active, secreted in Zurich bank accounts, augmented by his shrewd trade in a secret world. The world wanted things that it was not supposed to have; he supplied part of that want, the part that was interested in cases of arms, ammunition, rockets, and other ways of death.

  He had been very careful in the beginning to hide his enterprise. He did not have to bother. The government knew about the arms trade. The government also used the arms traders when it was convenient to do so. It had taken Denisov a while to understand why the government did not interfere with his trade. He was useful to the government in the way all men without voice or status can be useful.

  The fog began to burn off as the sun pushed over the hills and filled the streets with watery light.

  Denisov always rested on a bench at the wharf that pushed out into the gentle harbor. He would watch the gulls strut on the wooden walkways or watch them dive along the shallow waters at the edge of the beach. He thought of nothing when he watched the birds; he felt rested, contemplating their graceful, unceasing activity.

  What was wrong with this life?

  He frowned, stood up, brushed his trousers. He started down the path along the beach again, as though he had someplace to go.

  And for the second time that morning, he saw the same man.

  This time the man was sitting at a café table across the street, watching him through an open window.

  Yes, he was watching; he did not try to disguise it.

  Denisov turned, felt strangely humiliated by the stranger’s stare.

  There was no expression on his face. The stranger had a blank look behind wire-rimmed glasses. His eyes were wide, his face stolid and the color of gray putty. He wore a suit and a tie.

  Denisov turned again and walked away, not quickly, but in his usual, ponderous way, along the sidewalk that led into the parkway and past a soccer field. He walked all the way to the Fess Parker Hotel and pushed into the sleek circular lobby. He found a pay phone and picked up the receiver.

  There was sweat on his upper lip, the same line of sweat he felt in the mornings after the Moscow dream.

  The same man watched him. He saw the man twice.

  The man knew he had been seen.

  Denisov blinked at the buttons on the telephone box. He tried to think through that. His eyes were blue and clear, without secrets or menace; the eyes of a saint. The saint stared at the plastic buttons on the telephone box as though they might have a message.

  A long time ago, when the exile began, they had explained to him about the vastness of America and the way they could hide people in America. They could change his face and his voice and the color of his eyes; they could change his name; they could give him an occupation or not; they were the magicians and they could do magic and make people disappear.

  Until one bad, foggy morning in Santa Barbara when a stranger began to watch him.

  He punched eleven numbers and waited for the tone and punched fourteen more numbers.

  He turned away from the telephone box and surveyed the lobby. He expected to see the stranger but there were only the ladies of morning in their careful daytime clothes, pressed smooth against their aging skin and expensive sunbathed wrinkles. The men were never around hotel lobbies in the mornings, only their women.

  “Redbird,” he said. It was his code, drawn from a computer. His code changed every eighteen months.

  The woman’s voice said he would be contacted in five minutes. He gave her the number on the telephone box. He replaced the receiver and rested his hand on the metal counter beneath the green box.

  The telephone rang once two minutes later.

  Again he said, “Redbird.”

  “What’s the problem?” The man’s voice was not the same. Denisov thought the agency kept changing personnel. In fact, it was the same man but his voice was altered every week by an adjustment in the telephone computer.

  Denisov told him.

  There was a long silence when he finished.

  “Do you want a babysitter?” the voice finally asked.

  “Of course. Unless it is one of your people who—”

  “We’ll check on that. We can have someone there this afternoon. At the apartment.”

  The connection was broken. Denisov replaced the receiver. The number he called was in the San Francisco area but it was unlisted.

  He wondered if he should get his pistol out of the safe in his apartment.

  In the end, he had not wished to alter his face; it was the only familiar thing in the strange world of exile. They had said it was his choice. He had changed very little over the years, from the time he had been KGB, in that section of counterintelligence called the Committee for External Observation and Resolution. He had been in Asia, in Spain, in Ireland, and finally, unexpectedly, he had been on a beach in Florida one night with the agent from the other side who had betrayed him into this exile. Suddenly, in one night, Moscow became a dream he would never see again. It was an ache in him when he dreamed of Moscow; it was a flash of pain when he thought of Moscow while reading through some news dispatch from there. Moscow was more real now that he could never return there.

  He touched his chin. His face had betrayed him twice this morning to a stranger who did not try to hide himself.

  The old feeling of fear—so long buried under endless California days and nights—began to gnaw at him again. He could run—he could be on the first plane to Switzerland—but what was he running from?

  He left the phones and walked into the lobby again. The place was large and cheerful and pink. The sunlight seemed part of the staging.

  He crossed the lobby to the rotunda entrance and pushed through the glass door.

  And the face was very close now.

  He stared at the stranger coming toward him. He had no weapon, the stranger carried an umbrella. Yet there was no chance of rain today. They had used an umbrella in London in 1980 to place poison in the skin of an anti-Soviet radio broadcaster. The broadcaster had been a defector, just as Denisov was. Just the tip of the umbrella, an accidental brush—

  Denisov waited with the solidity of a martyr: This time, this day, this place, they had found him after all those years. It was almost a release. It would be over in a moment—the Moscow dreams, the gnawing endless hatred for the man who had pushed him into this false exile, the vague yearning for the part of his life that had been amputated.

  “Ivan Ilyich,” the man said in mocking, perfect English, a slow smile on his face. “What a pleasure to see you again.”

  Wagner thought about it for a couple of minutes after hanging up on Redbird. He pulled out the file and looked at the photographs of the dull Russian face pictured in profile and full front.

  The trouble was that everything was recorded. The government of secrets wanted to have no secrets itself. Wagner had to be damned careful all the time.

  He pushed a button on his desk and waited.

  The woman pushed open the door and took a step inside. The office was small. There was only one chair in front of the government metal-gray desk. Wagner nodded at the chair.

  She sat down and kept her knees together. She had the standard businesswoman’s suit: Slate gray skirt, white blouse, a loose bow tie of gray silk. Wagner almost smiled. There was something vaguely absurd about Karen O’Hare. She was very beautiful, with ice blue eyes and black hair and flawless pale skin. Her body was generous and yet she clothed it with extreme conservatism, as though ignoring the obvious. The absurdities in her extended to her extreme seriousness about everything. He thought
about the way she would look naked; he thought about that too often to make himself comfortable with her in the office. She didn’t understand she was just a cute piece of ass.

  Too young and too close for Wagner but he knew the others talked about her as if she had possibilities. Some women you have to take seriously, even if they’re beautiful and much better suited to being a piece of ass. And then there were people like Karen O’Hare.

  She insisted on “Ms. O’Hare” and getting to work on time and taking exactly forty-five minutes for lunch and changing into gym shoes at night for the long walk home. She wore her black hair with bangs and she was always sending off for government publications that explained exotic things and she went to night school three quarters a year.

  Absolutely great tits, everyone agreed. A great can and legs up to there. And she acted as if she wasn’t beautiful at all. How could you figure her?

  And then someone would tell about the time she was changing paper in the Xerox machine and dumped a cup of coffee into it by accident and insisted on turning herself in and offering restitution for accidental destruction of government property.

  Wagner realized he was grinning and Karen was not. He let the grin fade and pushed the file of Redbird across his desk.

  “Field check,” he said.

  Below the window, traffic pounded up and down Powell Street. All the charming old streets of the charming old city were always full of traffic now. The charm was seeping out of the place day by day. San Francisco was covered with white clouds and felt chill with the damp. A cable car clanged beneath their third-floor window. Wagner glanced at it: Full of tourists, the whole fucking city was full of tourists all the time, you couldn’t eat or drink without rubbing asses with a bunch of fucking tourists. He counted himself as a native, though he had lived there only five years.

  “We got a call from Redbird. He says he’s spotted a watcher. Make the agency sweeps and make sure no one else is poaching our witness and then go down and hold his hand.”

  Karen O’Hare couldn’t let the excitement stay out of her face. She thought Wagner was doing her a favor.

  Karen was grinning like the girl who wins the poetry prize in eighth grade. It warmed Wagner despite himself. Wagner wanted to grin again but held it in.

  “This is a great chance for me,” she said. Her voice was soft, full of gee-whiz enthusiasm. Who could believe someone like her in this day and age? Wagner thought again. Her ice blue eyes were as wide as a doll’s.

  “Redbird is a little paranoid like a lot of them, he sees ghosts. He saw a ghost a year ago and sometimes he just needs someone to pat his hand and tell him everything is going to be all right.”

  “And if it isn’t a ghost?”

  Honey, how would you know the difference? The eager-beaver GS-7, reading all the government bulletins and all the agency rulebooks and playing it so hard on the square that it was painful to watch sometimes. She hadn’t missed a day of work in three years. She lived with her aunt. She dated a proctologist who was nearly as dumb as she was.

  Wagner knew she was perfect for it. She couldn’t screw it up for him if she tried; she didn’t have a clue. So Uncle could listen in on his recordings and see that Bob Wagner, GS-13 in charge of the San Francisco office of the United States Witness Relocation Program, had done his job, taken the threat seriously, sent out a perfectly qualified GS-7 to do her duty.

  And if everything went all right, she wouldn’t be hurt at all.

  6

  DEVEREAUX AT SEA

  Devereaux wore the blue down-filled parka he had picked up in Seattle, and still he felt the clammy damp come through the deck and bulkhead of the old cargo ship.

  He had lied to Rita Macklin again. Two weeks had slipped into three and the matter was not ended. He was still going through the traces of the many trails laid down by Henry McGee.

  She did not write to him because she did not know where he was. He scarcely knew himself. He would be in Santa Cruz one day, awaking in a plaster-cracked hotel room on a soft, broken bed. He traveled through the days like a zombie, driven by the pharmaceutical boosts every agent carried into the field and by the ghostly thought of Henry McGee. He was tired, as tired as he had been in the old days before he knew Rita, before he discovered how much he loathed the trade and the empty life it required.

  The rust-streaked hull heaved on the bulging gray sea, settled in a trough between waves, heaved again.

  Devereaux had never expected to see the waters again. There had been a little matter fifteen years ago involving the smuggling of very high-tech pieces from Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians up through the straits into the hands waiting at Big Diomede. The Russians owned that piece of rock and the Americans watched them from four miles east on Little Diomede. The matter was cleared and a mark was put in a file someplace.

  Devereaux had expected to be cleared out of Alaska when a second matter intervened. A dark-faced man led a tribe across the ice from Siberia and it was Devereaux’s last Alaska job to interview them. And now, after fifteen years, Devereaux was on the trail again of the dark-faced man, who had decided to call himself Henry McGee.

  Four weeks ago, a computer in Section read the name as a mark when it had been circulated through the various intelligence agencies from the morgue. Henry McGee, the computer read, and it looked in memory and found buried files and signaled the director of Computer Analysis.

  And now Devereaux was on a cargo ship on the Bering Sea. He was tired. His eyes were gray and cold, like the sea, and he thought of the lie of weeks, two going to three, three going to four. Could he ever stop the lies?

  “It’s flattening out,” Holmes said. Devereaux turned to him, a chipped mug of coffee in hand. Holmes had changed. His red face was a more normal color and his eyes looked peacefully at the churning sea. His right hand was bandaged and swollen from the mugging in Seattle. There would have been no berth for him on the ship without the telephone call to the freight line from an important man in Washington.

  “How can you tell?”

  Holmes grinned. “The clouds, the smells, the way the water changes colors. Bering is very shallow, all the way through the straits, you can see the colors change all the way to bottom.”

  “I don’t see the bottom,” Devereaux said.

  “Henry McGee taught me that. You can see the bottom the way you see the light on the water. I thought it was a trick and maybe it is. Taught me a lot of things I thought I already knew. He was like a magic man, a shaman or something.”

  “And got you to lose your ship,” Devereaux said.

  For a moment, Holmes’ face flushed again and he licked his lips. It had not been very easy for either of them.

  They had left the kid in the alley beneath the public market steps and they had not gone back to Holmes’ hotel. Holmes had not wanted to talk about McGee and the trouble McGee caused him in the end because it made Holmes look stupid and because he still admired the sonofabitch and couldn’t deny it.

  Devereaux persuaded him.

  He showed him words and then alternatives to words.

  Holmes had said it was like being in fucking Russia.

  Devereaux had said it was, in a way.

  When Holmes understood the way it was, it went easier for both of them. And now they were making the long climb north toward the breakup of the ice on the straits.

  Devereaux followed Holmes below to the cabin and they both sat down at the Formica-topped table. Holmes picked up the coffeepot. Devereaux shook his head. Holmes poured himself another cup and sat down on a bench. Every day there was this time: Holmes sighed, waiting to get it over with.

  Devereaux took out the photographs again. He put them face up on the table.

  “I told you six days ago I was sure,” he said. “That ain’t Henry McGee. That ain’t even close.”

  Otis Dobbins’ eyes were closed in the photographs and his hands reposed on his naked belly. He was in the morgue in Fairbanks and the photographs were in Polaroid color. He was very p
ale because the blood had been siphoned out of his body.

  “He called himself Henry McGee for nearly two years. He convinced a lot of people, both in Nome and in Anchorage. Why would he use that name, tell those stories that matched with things the real Henry McGee knew?”

  Holmes had thought about that on the trip north. He wanted to get this man off his case, he wanted to forget about the little Indian prick who tried to knife him in Sea City, wanted to be left alone for a while. Henry McGee was a long time ago.

  “I was thinking and I guess it was Henry did it, made the guy up. I mean, he took a guy and convinced him to be Henry.”

  Devereaux stared at him. The ship groaned against the sea. There was a clammy feeling inside the cabin. Tomorrow they would be in Norton Sound, crossing north toward Nome.

  “Could Henry do that?”

  Holmes began to smile. The G-man didn’t understand about a man like that. G-man, whatever his name, was just a government man and that means he wore blinders. Holmes let the smile get big enough to show all his discolored teeth. He got up and went to the locker on the bulkhead and opened it with a clang. He took out a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and splashed some in the coffee cup and looked at Devereaux. Devereaux shook his head.

  “Henry McGee could do anything he wanted. Which is why I figure he was doing something for you or you wanted him to do something for you, which is why you’re looking for him now.”

  “Don’t figure too much,” Devereaux said.

  “Why is Henry McGee important to the government? To you?”

  Devereaux could scarcely remember the face of Henry McGee as he had been fifteen years ago. Just a man who told stories, and Devereaux took them down and made his report. His conclusion had seemed too cynical to the people in Section. Do not trust him, Devereaux had finally written. He has no secrets, only endless stories. The argument against Henry McGee was buried in those words and no one in Section chose to dig under the words. They had decided fifteen years ago that Henry McGee was bona fide and that he would be a useful man because of his years in Siberia and his skill at insinuating himself with native groups.