by Bill Granger
When they wrote the report, they called the dead man Otis D. Dobbins because that is who all the papers on him and in the cabin said he was. The state police checked the identity of the dead man with the FBI in Washington. The FBI had a small file on Otis Dobbins, confirmed by fingerprints and an old photograph. He had once served three years for robbing a small savings and loan in Oklahoma City. Nels Nelsen said it was his friend, Henry McGee, but the police saw that Nels had become disturbed by the death and was probably thinking of some other old partner.
Despite the certainty of the police, one of the officers noted the odd name in the report of the murder. In less than forty-eight hours, it became part of a permanent computer file, achieving a bureaucratic idea of immortality.
The ambitious state policeman even ran the name past the FBI. The FBI computers blinked. The name was sorted back and forth, and finally a fourth-rate bureaucrat named Tyler in the FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue said the name did not exist in FBI files. This was a lie.
Nels Nelsen was treated at a psychiatric hospital in Anchorage for several weeks after the murder of his partner. He finally stopped insisting that Henry McGee was Henry McGee. This seemed to satisfy the nurses and they stopped giving him those horrible hot baths that made his skin turn raw.
He was very nearly ready to return to his cabin when the man from Dutch Harbor came to see him that strange spring afternoon when the light lingered strong and sure. It was light now from the hour after midnight almost until eleven at night. The light was long but the cold was still longer and lingered in the broken ice fields in the sea and in the ice still surging down the rivers from the mountains.
The man from Dutch Harbor talked of Henry McGee and what Henry McGee had been like and Nels was off guard. He corrected the man from Dutch Harbor several times when he made mistakes about the character of Henry McGee.
Nels had had his share of dealing with authorities this spring, from the state cops in Nome to the strange people who ran the psychiatric hospital. He was careful of the stranger. The man from Dutch Harbor spoke to him patiently about the stories of Henry McGee. He seemed interested most in the stories.
Nels did not know that the stranger had also ordered that the body of Henry McGee/Otis Dobbins be exhumed. But it would not have surprised him because he thought he had seen everything twice in all the years he lived in Alaska.
3
HENRY MCGEE IS NOT DEAD
He had lived nearly a year in the townhouse on Rhode Island Avenue in Washington. He had lived with Rita Macklin, a journalist with several regular clients.
Twice a week, Devereaux went to an apartment building in Alexandria and sat across a table from a man who was a professor of science at Georgetown University. They were both agents of R Section and they played a game between them that involved probabilities. It was called If. When the game was played out, the tapes of the game were delivered to the highest level inside Section and turned into transcripts called stories. The stories were studied by serious men and it was all taken very seriously, in the way that shamans once divined future events by studying the entrails of birds.
That was all the intrusion Section demanded of him for nearly a year.
He loved Rita Macklin. She was thirty-three and her hair was red. She had freckles on her nose when she had too much sun. Her skin was pale and delicate to the touch and Devereaux thought she always smelled sweet. When she woke in the morning, she would often find him lying next to her, leaning on his elbow, studying her.
The only bad thing between them was Section.
He was an agent and Hanley once said to him, “There is no such thing as a retired spy.” There were retired spies of course, living on the west coast of Florida and in southern California and in certain approved foreign countries but, in a sense, no one ever retired from the trade.
Rita Macklin felt two fears in her life.
In the first, he would die.
In the second, he would love the trade too much. The second fear was more complicated in her and she sometimes could not explain it to herself. She hated the second fear even more than the first because it made Devereaux hateful in her eyes and it made her lose her love for him and it made her, sometimes, want to leave him. And she knew that if she left him, she would be lost for all her life.
They made love to each other as though swimming naked in a secret pool, hidden in a dense woods, perhaps hidden in a cave in the heart of the woods. The water was warm and dark and they sometimes could not see each other but they touched and found each other. They were wet and exhausted and all the crowded thoughts and feelings in their lovemaking were wet and warm and made them close their eyes to better see each other.
One afternoon in spring, a man from Section called on the phone. Devereaux said nothing except “What time?” He replaced the receiver. He was standing in the hall of the townhouse and she was in the living room, watching him. She saw what it was and she began to hate him again.
The cab made slow going down Pennsylvania Avenue toward Capitol Hill. It was not the most direct route to Union Station but Devereaux said nothing. The fares in the District were low because congressmen set them for their convenience, and Devereaux felt empathy for the old drivers in their soiled shirts and hopeless gray faces.
Besides, he wanted to be late. Nothing in the trade demanded this. Hanley was merely playing spy again, the bureaucrat yearning for the trappings of the real world.
Union Station was across from the Capitol and it had once been a train station and then something else and now it was a train station again, with marble columns and the sense of impending majesty that all great train stations share.
Hanley was waiting for him in the lounge, a suitcase at his feet. He had missed his usual dry-martini-and-cheeseburger lunch and it made him look more sour than usual. That and Devereaux’s lateness.
“You didn’t bring a bag,” Hanley said.
“I travel light,” Devereaux said.
“We are supposed to look like travelers. To blend in with the scenery.”
Devereaux sighed and sat down. He ordered Finlandia, which the barman did not have. He settled for the American vodka and stirred the ice slowly when it came. He did not look at Hanley and Hanley stared at a television set at the end of the bar.
Hanley was director of Operations in Section. There was no R Section, of course, any more than there was a covert-operations intelligence directorate in the Department of State that arranged arms transfers to Afghan rebels. Any more than CIA sanctioned persons. Any more than there were spies. Everything in the trade could be explained as a figment of imagination, which is what the spies wished you to believe.
“You’ve had a good long rest. It’s time to come back,” Hanley said.
“I might choose not to,” Devereaux said.
“You play If very well but we can always find players for If. I thought of you because I thought of the stories we make out of your If games.”
Devereaux said nothing.
Hanley looked at him, a little smile at the edge of the dour mouth. He was small and bald and his eyes were absolutely cold. His voice was as flat as Nebraska, where he had been born.
“Aren’t you curious?”
“It doesn’t matter. You’ll tell me anyway.”
“It involves Henry McGee.”
“I don’t remember the name.”
“You remember everything.”
It was perfectly true. Sometimes the vodka made him forget but the vodka had its limits and then it would be time to remember again.
“Henry McGee disappeared four years ago.”
“He went across?”
“We assumed so,” Hanley said. “Quite a disappointment, our Henry. We had been running him for nearly ten years.”
“And he was running you,” Devereaux said.
Hanley stared at the martini glass. “We wanted him badly. We chased him for nearly two years, every trail. Clues kept turning up. We weren’t discouraged. We wanted
to find him.”
“To ask him why?”
“To ask him many things,” Hanley said. “It became a continuing embarrassment. We found Henry McGees but they were never the right ones. We were intended to find them. Henry McGee was very clever at setting down trails. We had to follow the trails. We found a Henry McGee in Santa Cruz, California, drunk on a beach. Yes, he was Henry McGee but the trail had been forged. Henry McGee—the real one, the one we were interested in—was playing with us. He turned Operations upside down. It was very bad for a while. We began not to trust each other. That’s a bad thing.”
“Especially since you are so worthy of trust.”
“We shut it down. We buried the files. We buried Henry McGee and did not admit we had made a mistake. We did the right thing.”
Devereaux was not expected to say anything.
“Three weeks ago, our man in Dutch Harbor flew to Anchorage to investigate a little matter. A trapper, one of the old-timers in the bush, was found shot to death. He went by the name of Henry McGee. We had never known about him. His name was really Otis Dobbins. He was a storyteller.”
“So Henry McGee decided to trigger your files,” Devereaux said. “You should not have put in computers.”
“Henry McGee is out there. He must be. There’s no reason to spark a new trail for us. We had buried him. Here.” He tapped the brown envelope on the bar top. It resembled the closed envelopes used by lawyers for their cases and was marked Ultra.
“You aren’t supposed to take that out of the building,” Devereaux said.
“It’s all we know about Henry McGee, the last four years. The stuff we buried. If Henry means to do us more harm, we have to find him. All the names are in here, all the contacts he had made. We went over them for two years.”
“Why not rehire your original chasers?”
“Burned out. It’s no good. One of them wanted to keep on with it when we closed the matter but we gave him Eurodesk in Paris. We can always give them Paris.”
“I like things the way they are,” Devereaux said. He pushed the empty glass to the bar tray and the barman came down. “I like the game of If, I might even be good at it.”
“If becomes stories, our scenarios for the day after tomorrow. I thought about you right away. I would have made you a chaser four years ago but you were listed as dead then. It was your last chance to get out. Now you have to find Henry McGee.”
“What did you call him?”
“Storyteller. That’s why I thought of you.”
“I saw him fifteen years ago.”
“Fifteen years ago,” Hanley repeated. “Henry was supposed to be a Siberian, coming across the ice bridge in the straits, leading a sorry pack of Siberian Eskimos. You did the initial questions.”
Devereaux said, “I was in Kotzebue and you sent me to Little Diomede and I took Henry to Anchorage. Why was I in Kotzebue?”
“Some matter, not important.”
Devereaux remembered it then. He remembered everything. Hanley was right; it was some matter that was not important. But he had been the closest man to the Siberian refugees and he had questioned Henry McGee. The other services got to them as well—especially the CIA and FBI—but Henry McGee belonged to Section.
“It was cold and depressing. The snow was piled up against the winter entryways and there weren’t any windows in the grocery store. Kotzebue was just frozen and full of people who wanted to survive the winter. They walked across the ice from Siberia and they were all ragged and half starved, and the thing about Henry was his eyes. He called himself Chukchi. Then he told his stories. He was really Henry McGee and he had been in a fishing boat and it wrecked and he went ashore in Siberia, it was at Kivak. He lived with them for three years and convinced some of them to come across. He promised them snowmobiles, he said all the Eskimos had snowmobiles.”
“There had been a wreck, a fishing boat was lost,” Hanley said.
“All of Henry’s stories were true. All of the stories could be proven,” Devereaux said.
Hanley looked at the crystal ball in his drink.
Devereaux said, “What happened to the others? To the Siberian Eskimos?”
“They were studied. They began to miss their homeland. Someone came up with the idea of diverting them. We turned them over to the National Geographic for a while and they liked that.”
“Did the women have to bare their breasts?”
“What has that got to do with it?”
“My subscription has lapsed; I wanted to see if traditions continued,” Devereaux said.
They were silent in the dark lounge. The afternoon travelers straggled to the trains. The Metroliner for New York was nearly filled and the milk run from Boston was just coming in. The faces were tired, intent on travel, on getting home, on rest, on trail’s end. Nobody paid any attention to them, even if Devereaux had no suitcase.
“You didn’t believe him,” Hanley said.
“No.” He tasted the vodka. “I didn’t believe him.”
“You said he had too many stories.”
“Too many stories, not enough secrets.”
“He was a spy from the beginning.”
“That’s what you think,” Devereaux said.
“He is coming back, that’s why that old trapper was shot. Henry McGee had to die so that our records would be reactivated. It was a signal to us. Like the fox coming back to the hounds and barking at them. We have to chase him again.”
“You have chasers. I don’t want this. I want to play If with the professor and invent stories for your pleasure.”
“You don’t miss the field?”
The question was soft, almost sly.
Did he miss it? Not at all. The field had burned him out and now she was the only important thing. He thought of Rita Macklin’s frown when he had put down the phone in the hall.
“You have to do this, you know,” Hanley said.
“It’s a free country,” Devereaux said.
“Not really. Not in this case. You warned us about Henry and we took him in, he had so many good stories about the other side and he had contacts. We sent him into black three times to Siberia and he was very good, he worked out very well for us.”
“Except he wasn’t your man,” Devereaux said.
“Kill him,” Hanley said.
“I won’t be your killer.”
“Then bring him in and we will take care of it.”
“You have wet men. I won’t be your wet man.”
“You belong to us, November.” The use of the code name for the agent—the name in permanent file—was intended. It was more than a reminder of obligations.
“I can’t,” Devereaux said.
“But you must. You belong to Section,” Hanley said.
It was not a matter of spelling it out. There were controls that operated all the puppets in the end. Rita Macklin, in one sense, was a control for Section; so was the boy, Philippe, who attended university now and whom Devereaux had rescued once from the hell of a Caribbean island. The cases of the agent called November might be parts of the control if it came to it.
“I can’t do this,” Devereaux said.
But they both knew he must.
She tried to sound concerned.
“Is it dangerous?”
“It’s a little trip. A few questions. Very low stuff.”
“That’s a lie,” Rita Macklin said.
“Yes.”
“You said you’d never lie to me.”
“Yes. Not about the things that count.”
“I hate this. I hate the secrets outside me. You have me in this world and you still go outside me.”
“It’s a little business,” he said. He put the extra pair of trousers in the bag and closed it. He did not show her the pistol, a nine-millimeter Browning automatic with a thirteen-round clip. It was the new issue of Section and despite Devereaux’s aversion to automatics, it had been issued to him.
“Don’t leave me.”
“Two we
eks. Or three.”
“Don’t leave me for this.”
She put her body against him. She pressed her breasts against him and held him low against his back and pushed her pubis against him and buried her lips on his neck. He clung to her.
“Two weeks,” he said. “Or three.”
“You do it because you love it.”
“It’s dead in me,” he said, “it’s been dead for years.”
“You won’t say you love me.”
“Words are for lies,” he said. He kissed her wetly and she opened her mouth to him. For a moment, they might have been on the verge of making love.
She pushed him away.
He tried to see it in her eyes, without any words. He saw and it cut right down through his chest, into his guts, and he was bleeding all over. He saw it in her eyes.
“Two weeks,” he said.
“I’m going to get rid of this place,” she said.
“Do you want to?”
“I love you,” she said.
Devereaux stared at her.
She was crying now; then she came to him and held him. He held her. Now they made love and when she was sleeping, naked, in the moonlight that streamed through the bedroom window, he put on his clothes and took the bag and his gun and went away.
4
KOOLS
Kools heard the plane bank in the darkness. Kools knew the motions of the plane through its sounds. It was in the brief night of spring, a hundred miles above the Arctic Circle. It still snowed a little during the daylight, although it was spring. The clouds, sullen and gray during daylight, had blown in behind the snow front and stretched across the breadth of Kotzebue Sound, which was open now but still full of ice floes.
Kools put two red lanterns on the far shore of the nameless lake. The lanterns were fifty paces apart. The wind died and the cold rubbed against Kools’ brown unsmiling face. His parka was damp already with his own odor and the smell of the animal skins. Kools put his mittened hands under his armpits and did a slow, shuffling dance on the frozen tundra to keep himself warm. He waited and listened to the plane’s motor like a hunter listening to forest sounds.