The November Man

by Bill Granger

  Lydia Neumann entered the IBM Consumer Product Center precisely at nine A.M. At 9:02, the attractive black woman, in businesslike attire from Saks Fifth Avenue down the street, crossed to her, smiled the automatic IBM smile, and took her to see the woman visible in the glass office beyond the carpeting.

  “Hello.”

  The voice belonged to a breed of professional class raised in the last generation that has no regional inflection, no accent, no betrayal in voice of any background at all. The voice suited her surroundings and her looks. She was a white replica of the black woman with a different wardrobe. Her eyes were defined in a businesslike way by eyeliner—just enough—and her mouth by lipstick—not too much. Her clothes spoke of being a bit more expensive than one might expect from one so young. Her blouse was silk but not revealing. Her hair was mousey brown and broken up into swaths to reveal a $125 haircut.

  Lydia Neumann patted her own spikes created by Leo every three weeks or so. She sat down and didn’t smile and waited for the smile of the young woman to fade.

  “How can I help you?” The voice was eager, formless, nearly a controlled squeal. It revealed nothing.

  “My name is Neumann but you musn’t mention that again,” Lydia Neumann said. She felt the weight of what she was about to do. What did any of it have to do with her? And then she thought of Hanley.

  “All right, Ms. Neumann.” She was as uncluttered as her office. Her figure was slight and everything about her was what Mrs. Neumann hoped she would not find. Still, she had to try. It was all she could do.

  “I work. In an agency. Of government.”

  She let the words sink in. They didn’t. The young woman with the poised Mont Blanc pen and the unringed fingers and the recent Bahamian tan was not impressed because it meant nothing to her.

  It was hopeless, Lydia Neumann thought.

  And then she thought of Hanley and tried again.

  Perhaps her face reflected some anger.

  “He is all you have. And all he has,” she said.

  “I beg your pardon, Ms. Neumann?” At least she dropped the pen this time.

  “Margot Kieker,” she said, pronouncing the name of the young woman. “Your great-uncle I’m talking about.”

  The doll blinked.

  It walks and talks, said Mrs. Neumann to herself.

  “Uncle Hanley,” said Margot Kieker.

  “He has a first name—” began Lydia Neumann.

  “It doesn’t matter.” For a moment, she caught the dull trace in the voice of the doll-face. The blue-rimmed eyes blinked, while precisely defined lashes met and separated. Her eyes were very blue, Lydia Neumann saw, clear and cloudless as though they had never seen any rainy days.

  “We called him that. If anyone thought to speak of him. My grandmother… Ten years older than he was. Cancer. And then, my mother. My mother died six years ago.”

  Lydia Neumann waited.

  “Do you think it runs in families?”

  “What?”

  “Cancer,” said Margot Kieker.

  “Yes,” she said, to be cruel, to break through to the doll. But it wouldn’t work.

  “So do I. There’s nothing to do about it,” said Margot Kieker, the voice becoming soft, intimate. But not with Lydia Neumann. It was the voice of herself speaking to herself. Her eyes were seeing far away on a bright Monday morning in Chicago.

  Then she snapped awake again and stared at Lydia. “Uncle Hanley. You work with him?”

  “Yes.”

  “How is he?”

  “He’s in a hospital,” began Mrs. Neumann. She had planned what she would say to this strange creature all the way out to Chicago. They had traveled a while through the panhandle of Maryland, through the mountains that enclose the narrow valleys in the west of the state. It was the part of the state that lies beneath the weight of Pennsylvania coal country. The part where Hanley was being held in a hospital of a special kind.

  Lydia Neumann had checked on Hanley’s question. The drugs he was given were very powerful psychoactive compounds and when she had asked a friend of hers to describe them—a man who knew the secrets of pharmaceuticals—he had been uncomfortable with the question. At last, he had explained that knowledge of such drugs constituted a breach of security in itself. He wouldn’t say any more. He had worked in the secret drug experiments at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland in the 1960s and he had managed to stay out of trouble by being discreet.

  Lydia Neumann had felt terribly frightened. When she had gone back to see Hanley the following week, her fear had increased.

  Hanley had been moved out of Ward Seven to Ward Zero. It was a ward not listed in the organizational charts of the mental hospital. He could receive no visitors. He was reported to be terribly ill and terribly depressed.

  “Your great-uncle is in an asylum. Against his will. There have been no procedures to put him there. Nothing very legal, I think. And I think he is in terrible trouble unless you go to help him.”

  “But I haven’t seen him since I was a baby. My mother never spoke of him. There was some slight. Some family business between my grandmother and him. They were brother and sister and—”

  “You are his flesh.” She said it as well as any preacher might have done. Mrs. Neumann, in her great raspy voice, said things of certainty with a certainty of expression that made no mistake about her beliefs. She was refreshing in that, even to someone as cynical as Hanley had been.

  “Flesh,” said Margot Kieker as though the word did not belong in this cool, gleaming room.

  “Flesh and blood. It carries weight in law. You are his relative and he has been committed against his will to an asylum. In Maryland. You have to get him out.”

  “But. I don’t understand. Is he insane?”

  It was the question Mrs. Neumann had pondered as well. Like an unfinished conversation, there was no answer. Let that conversation wait for a time.

  “No,” she said, without believing it. “The point is: He is very ill. He is very, very ill and I can’t see him.”

  “Are you his friend?” she said.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Neumann without thinking.

  “Are you his lover?”

  Mrs. Neumann laughed and both of them realized that laughter did not belong in this holy place full of holy things of a new age.

  Margot Kieker tried on a smile approved by the company.

  Mrs. Neumann responded. “No, dear, not his lover. I am… his friend.” To say the word again, deliberately, seemed strange to her. She had never been in Hanley’s home and he had declined all invitations to visit her and Leo. Hanley was the solitary man, enjoying his solitary nature. Or, at least, accepting it as a priest accepts the restraints on friendship and love in his vocation.

  “That’s very nice of you to be concerned about him,” Margot Kieker said. It was the sweet butter sentiment of the prairies. Then her lips snapped shut like a purse. The sentimental visit was over. The workday was beginning and Margot Kieker was fresh and starched.

  “You’re not interested in a computer then?”

  Mrs. Neumann blinked.

  Margot stared at her, the mouth poised to register an emotion—if appropriate.

  “Yes, I am interested in computers,” said Mrs. Neumann, saying too much to a stranger. She felt angry and embarrassed. She had gone out of her way to save her “friend” and it was nothing more to this creature than if she had gone across the street to buy a newspaper.

  Mrs. Neumann opened a paper file and pushed it on the desk. It was a computer printout that told most of the story of Hanley’s life.

  “Do you know what this is?”

  “A résumé?”

  “It is a print of Hanley’s 201 file. I’ve made some deletions because there are… matters that do not concern you. What concerns you is the bottom line, honey.”

  The “honey” was intended to shock but it sailed over Margot Kieker. She didn’t even blink. She guided her eyes to the place on the printout indicated by Mrs. Neuman
n. She frowned.

  “This isn’t our company’s computer. I’ve never seen that typeface in our training modules and—”

  “Look at what it says, honey.”

  This time, the edge of a frown. Mrs. Neumann figured she could get through in six or seven weeks of intense confrontation. It must be the same as deprogramming a Jesus freak: The intellectual argument never counted because there was no intelligence involved.

  “I don’t understand,” said Margot Kieker. And she licked her lip, slowly and unconsciously, reading the words.

  “His government insurance policy, his own insurance policy, his benefits, and title to a vacant bit of land in New Jersey he had acquired. It is his will. Every agent”—she almost bit her lip—“every employee in our section is required to file the will in the 201 file.”

  Margot Kieker looked up. “Why leave this to me?”

  “Family,” said Lydia Neumann.

  “But I don’t even know him.”

  “Flesh and blood,” Mrs. Neumann preached.

  “But I don’t understand,” Margot Kieker said.

  “No.” Softly. “No.” Defeated. “You don’t, do you? But you are going to have to. Or are you some kind of a monster?”

  18

  NOVEMBER IS COMING

  Claymore Richfield, the director of research for R Section, gathered the signals (written on “yellow-for-caution” paper) and put them down neatly on Yackley’s desk at 9:06 Eastern time Friday morning. He arranged the yellow three-by-five notices in such a pattern that they formed an outline of a Mercator map projection. The first signals—and sources—moved from the east to the west.

  “He doesn’t move at all unobtrusively, does he?” Yackley thought to say. He felt fear closing him in a bag. He stared hard at the photographs of his wife and daughter on the desk as though they might be obliterated at any moment.

  “So it appears,” Claymore Richfield said, tapping his stained front teeth with the eraser end of a Number 2 pencil. The tap had a beat—the exact beat of “Sweet Georgia Brown” in fact—but it just sounded like tap, tap, tap to Yackley. He looked up in annoyance at Richfield, who was staring out the window at the mass of the Bureau of Engraving across the street. Even old Engraving inspired Richfield: He had in mind a hard, holistic dollar to replace the paper dollar, just as various credit cards were now designed. The “hard dollar” would inspire public confidence in currency again, he reasoned, and make it more difficult to stash or make illegal transactions. A “hard dollar” would be harder to counterfeit as well. The people at Treasury were appalled by the idea.

  “So it appears,” Yackley repeated. “Does that mean the information isn’t any good or does that mean we don’t care enough to check on bona fides?”

  “Not in this case,” Claymore Richfield said. He had been pressed into temporary service as acting director of Computer and Analysis during Mrs. Neumann’s absence.

  “What do you mean?”

  “There is unusual traffic. Some of it radio, radio computer, some of it routine filings. Devereaux left Switzerland openly on Tuesday, told the police his destination, used his own passport. He even contacted his lawyer. He made himself the talk of the town. On Wednesday, he appeared in London and used Economic Review facilities for all sorts of inquiries that are—at the moment—still secret. He paid for them in cash and ER has a policy about this sort of thing.”

  ER was the London-based research tank and resource center used by public and private intelligence agencies from countries on both sides of the Curtain.

  “What could he be preparing for?”

  “Perhaps nothing,” Claymore Richfield said. “He’s a good one, our November.”

  “He’s not ‘our’ November. He’s a goddamn renegade agent, he’s killed two of our men—”

  “Our chasers,” corrected Richfield. “Casual laborers.”

  “Two of our men,” repeated Yackley, trying to raise his voice a tone or two, to impress the other man. It was pointless. Claymore Richfield wore Levi’s when he met the President at the White House. He was a loyalist to Yackley but a difficult one.

  “Thursday, he flew into Toronto on Air Canada out of London. That’s been the end of it. Of course, he used his own passport. We picked up all the routine entries out of Toronto—as usual—and there he was. Using ‘Devereaux’ even.” Claymore Richfield smiled at that. “He’s coming our way. He’s in Washington by now.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I don’t. We can’t sweep the hotel registers as easily as the French used to do. But he’s here. I sent along a couple of boys from Operations to do the police routine. For all I know, he’s at the Watergate by now,” Richfield said, referring to the famous hotel and office complex above Georgetown.

  Yackley bit his lip and said nothing.

  There were some things he felt he couldn’t say to Richfield.

  It was time to consult Perry Weinstein again. Quickly. About the matter of sanctions.

  19

  METHODS

  Devereaux had been professor of Asian Studies at Columbia University in New York City when he had been recruited to R Section in 1966. The lure had been Asia. He would go to the land of blood-red morning suns and the eternal fog that hung over the endless rice paddies; he would go and squat down in the rich delta earth with peasants with wizened faces and flat and serene eyes and attempt to understand that part of him that yearned for Asia as for a lover. He would be an intelligence agent, of course, but that was the means; it was never the end.

  The means became the ends. Then the means obliterated the ends. The Asian earth was pounded by death from skies, the paddies turned red with blood, the jungle crawled over all—over civilization, over conqueror and defeated, over the living and the dead. Over Devereaux. He had gone to Asia to find his soul; instead, he had lost it there.

  Devereaux had learned to think during the years in school in which he had earned his doctorate in history. He had always known how to think on the level of the street: On the street, thought was part of instinct, part of conditioning. It is thought that makes the fighter choose the combination that breaks the defense of his opponent and lets him come inside and tear away the flailing arms and land hammerblows on face and chest and belly until the weight of the other cannot stand any more; those who don’t understand call it instinct, as though instinct were something that could not be developed as part of thought.

  Devereaux knew the street and knew street thinking; he had just grown lazy in that regard in the idyllic months of Lausanne. He had allowed himself to be circled and nearly trapped.

  The other part of thought was reason and the key was research. There was no other way around it. With a certain number of facts, a certain number of theories could be put together.

  He had the facts now. Not all of them. It was not so difficult.

  He sat in the glow of a single lamp in Hanley’s living room. The apartment was unchanged from the day nearly three weeks before when two men had come to take Mr. Hanley away. They were described by the doorman and by the super in the building.

  No. No one had seen Mr. Hanley again since they came to take him away in the ambulance. Yes, he had been home a lot; he had been ill. Yes, Mr. Hanley continued to pay rent on his apartment; probably part of some government insurance plan. No. No one had come to visit Mr. Hanley or his apartment after that first day. They mentioned the name on the ambulance that had taken Hanley away. He took down the name and looked it up.

  The answers were so prosaic that they were undoubtedly true. Devereaux had very little difficulty in gaining entry to Hanley’s flat. He had various badges and cards of authority; he had authorized papers to search the premises. Besides, people wanted someone to be in that flat again. It wasn’t natural for a flat to be empty all this time. It just wasn’t right.

  Devereaux spent three hours in going through Hanley’s life, scattered in the apartment, to find a clue. Not to his disappearance. That would be solved in time. But to Devereaux�
��s part in it.

  Once again he was the scholar on the trail of just a few facts. He was the student in study hall at the University of Chicago again. He was waiting as he pushed his way through graduate theses, through long-forgotten letters written by long-forgotten people, through books that had not been removed from the stacks for decades: He was waiting for first the one fact and then the second and then the third to fall from the pages in patterns and for the patterns to be seen at last in his mind.

  Sometimes the patterns had come very late at night, in the room he lived in on Ellis Avenue down the street from the university complex. Sometimes they came in thoughts before sleep; sometimes, the pattern fell out with morning coffee. But the pattern was always apparent at last because Devereaux had prepared his brain to receive it.

  There were insurance policies set out on Hanley’s desk. Hanley had a desk as plain as the desk in his office. His whole apartment was furnished with plain and useful furniture, without regard for elegance, grace, even beauty. Perhaps all the furniture had been left here by a previous tenant; it had that feeling of anonymity, like the man himself.

  The perfect spy.

  Devereaux smiled. He read the policies and noted the name of the beneficiary: Margot Kieker.

  The policies were laid on his desk because Hanley was thinking about death. In that sense, his telephone calls to Devereaux had been honest. And if he had not been in his apartment for three weeks—and had been off the job for weeks before that—then Hanley had not set the operation against him.

  But who had? And for what purpose?

  There was so little of Hanley in the apartment with pearl-gray walls and mournful tall windows and dark furniture and large bare rooms.

  Save a single sheet of paper found in a spring-locked false panel beneath the last drawer on the right side of his desk. Devereaux would have missed it. He had shifted his weight in the brown leather chair at the desk and accidentally kicked at the drawer and the panel had dropped. After it dropped, he began to dismantle the desk and the other furniture in the room. He did the job as quietly as he could. He broke apart the desk and the bureau in the bedroom.