Henry McGee Is Not Dead

by Bill Granger

  “You’re in a different country now,” Holmes said. “All that is outside and now you’re coming inside. This is a different country and different rules.”

  Devereaux let his fingers rest on the photographs of a dead man. It could have been Henry McGee, he thought. He could not form a clear picture of the man, even when it had been offered him from the files before the hunt began. Henry McGee was an illusion, a trick of ice and light and snow. Maybe Henry was dead and none of this mattered.

  “See, Henry was an expert on everything. He knows all about the Eskimos, all about everything. He even went over there a couple of times.”

  Holmes waved his arm carelessly but the direction was west and they both knew where he meant. Henry went to Siberia for R Section—it was called going into black—and he had gotten drunk one time or another and told an equally drunken seaman. It was incredible. He broke every rule of the careful agent and he survived.

  “I think he was a spy,” Holmes said. His voice was low and there was a touch of awe to it. He sipped the whiskey and coffee with reverence.

  “Why do you think he was an agent?”

  “A spy,” Holmes said. “If he wasn’t, why else would he be going over there?”

  “You said that one too many times, didn’t you?”

  Holmes made a face. He put down the cup. “How do I know it was Henry did it to me, put Canadian customs on me? Could’ve been some of you? Some of you people.”

  “We don’t do things like that.”

  “Canucks stop me in Victoria and unload me and say I’m smuggling heroin from Sri Lanka. Jesus Christ, I come off fifteen thousand miles of ocean and get a kick like that. They just seized it finally but there was this hearing and I lost my license—”

  “I know,” Devereaux said. He had read all the scripts and notes and the 201 file on Henry McGee and it was like fog on a California morning, everything in the file obscured everything else. There was a paper trail for Henry McGee, a scenic and winding paper trail that led up and down the mountains and turned in on itself and never seemed to get anywhere, like the road followed in a bad dream. It had never occurred to anyone in Section to find out where the trail led because of the beautiful scenery of the stories along the way. “That was a setup. You knew Henry did it.”

  “I thought I knew. I saw him in Seattle two months later and we had a few drinks and I was feeling down because I couldn’t get a ship and Henry said, ‘You shouldn’t talk so damned much.’ That’s when I knew he did it. I was going to kill him but you don’t know Henry, the way he looks, he looked right through me. I asked him for a chance. He said there was a supply ship going up to Deadhorse and he’d get me a berth on it and he was as good as his word. And when I came back, he was gone. He could do any damned thing he wanted.”

  Holmes said this with awe. Holmes’ ugly face was breaking out in blotches of sweat. He felt the gray eyes on him and tried to look defiant. “I told you every damned thing. You been on me eight days. Over and over and over, we look at the photographs and I tell you the same damned things.”

  “That’s the way it’s done,” Devereaux said. He had not moved. The ship shifted in the water, back and forth, up and down. The fluorescent lights made both men ugly in the closed, damp room. There were others on the ship, boots up and down the ladderways, voices. This room was set aside for the government man to talk to Holmes.

  “You get me back my rank,” Holmes said.

  “It can be done. Everything can,” Devereaux said.

  “Do I got to beg for it?”

  “What else have you been doing for eight days?” Devereaux said.

  “You’re a bastard, like Henry. But I liked Henry. He was real, he had a voice and he was real. You’re a fucking ghost.”

  “Tell me about the trips across,” Devereaux said.

  “I told you a hundred times. Henry told me when he was drunk. He was drunk and laughing about it and I didn’t see harm in telling no one, not if Henry told me, but I wasn’t supposed to and that’s why Henry got me in trouble.”

  “Henry talked too much.”

  “Stories and stories. Like he lived on telling stories, like he couldn’t even breathe if he couldn’t tell stories. He had this story about this Eskimo fisherman was out by the Diomedes and he runs into these relations from the other side and they have a camp and kill seals and talk and drink and he falls for this girl, this Eskimo from Russia. Well, the camp breaks up and everyone goes back home, and all winter, the fisherman can’t get her out of his head. He’s got a woman already and two kids but that other woman must of been some beauty. So—Henry can really tell the story so you see it—and the fisherman decides what he is going to do, so that he can have the girl and win the respect of her people and somehow get the Russians to let him into the country. You know what he does? He goes out—this time in summer, the following summer—and takes the kayak to Little Diomede and he scuttles it. He’s wearing bear grease all over his body and he jumps into the fucking water and he swims over to Russia. Well, to the big island, that is. What is it, four miles? It’s summer but that water is like freezing cold but he gets over and he gets on shore and he finds the people in their camp and—you know what happens?”

  It was a new story. Devereaux waited. Scraping the essence of Henry McGee out of Holmes, out of Nels Nelsen, out of the others was like squeezing water out of ice. You had to wait to make it melt.

  “The Russians never saw it. Got a big installation on that island according to Henry but they’re looking for big things, like submarines or shipping, not one little guy swimming across. They never picked up a blip on him. And the girl was in love with the fisherman, too, so the family arranged it and they’re living over there now, on the other side, and Henry said he’s got three kids, raising them all to be nice little Communists. Henry was so drunk when he told that story, I thought he’d fall off the barstool, we were in the white people’s bar in Kotzebue then.”

  “Why did Henry tell you stories? Why did he get mad when you repeated his stories?”

  “Henry said the story proved that true love conquers all. We laughed about that because Henry didn’t have an ounce of love in his body, he was just a good man to be with, to be drinking with. Then he said something I never did forget. He said all the spies and watchers in the world are always looking for the wrong thing. Like a little kayak going across to Siberia would get across because nobody was looking for it. He said people were looking for what they believed in instead of what was. I was drunk when he said it and I swear to God, I understood it then but I don’t now.”

  Devereaux said nothing. Stories and chance remarks. Philosophies and jokes. Henry talked and talked and broke the rules and got away with it.

  Holmes stared at the empty cup, thought about whiskey again, thought about getting back his pilot’s license. He hated Henry McGee from time to time, and at other times he wished Henry was back.

  “Henry was crazy. Is crazy. Crazy lonely. He had to make a friend. I was his friend but he had lots of friends. It was like he was coming down off something. He’d go away for six months and come back looking like he’d been run over by a herd of caribou, looked like shit, all beat up but his eyes were bright. Crazy eyes. He’d drink two whiskeys and he started to talk, he could talk all night, and you had to listen to him because you knew every damned word he said was the truth. It was like—”

  Devereaux had not moved his hands but the fingers tensed now around the edges of the photographs.

  “Like listening to God or something,” Captain Holmes said.

  7

  DENISOV’S CHOICE

  “The matter is simple,” the agent said.

  Denisov spread his hands. He waited.

  The agent said he was Karpov. It didn’t matter because Denisov did not believe him. Karpov had followed him down the beach, back to Figueroa and the strip of coffee shops and bars near the pier. They had talked as the fog lifted on the bay and they could clearly see the oil platforms squatting in t
he water. The sun was rising over the hill above the town and the day was warmer. Karpov had a line of sweat on his lip and another line of sweat on his narrow, high forehead, but he still wore his topcoat and hat. The complete spy, Denisov thought, packaged by Moscow.

  “If we intended to eliminate you, it could have been done simply,” Karpov said.

  “The umbrella touch,” Denisov said.

  “That. Or the simple way.”

  “No, I do not think so.” Both men spoke in the drawled accents of Moscow Russian, which is as snobbish a dialect as Parisian French. “You want two things: First, me. And second, you do not want the American agencies to understand how you have penetrated their Witness Protection Program.”

  Karpov smiled. “Then you understand.”

  “Because it is not a simple matter,” Denisov said. He stopped at the same café where the Soviet agent had sat that morning, watching him. He hesitated because he thought of the call he had made to the San Francisco number. Should he cancel the call now? Was the danger past?

  Denisov sat down at the table by the window. He ordered coffee and Karpov did the same.

  “This is what they call coffee. Everything in this country tastes the same. Perhaps it all is the same,” Karpov said. His face was very narrow and his eyes were very large. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, as did Denisov.

  “You have been in America long. It is the custom to complain about the coffee. It is very subtle of you.” Denisov did not raise his voice. “I drank coffee in Moscow that was leavened with sawdust. Is such coffee no longer served? Is coffee so free now? And tea, I do not miss the tea very much. I do not know what I miss at all.”

  “Return to your homeland, Ivan Ilyich.”

  “Do you remember the saying ‘A man with two countries has no country at all’? Perhaps it is true, Karpov. Perhaps there is no home.”

  “A great deal of effort was made—” Karpov began in a low, angry voice.

  Denisov tore open a packet and poured sugar in the coffee. “Yes. You tell me this is a simple matter. I am a simple man. Perhaps you must explain to me why this simple matter requires so much effort. I have been gone from service for six years. It is too long to care. I am not important, not to you, not to Gorki.” “Gorki” was the permanent code name of the man in charge of the Committee for External Observation and Resolution in the apparatus of espionage in Moscow. Its headquarters were not on Dzerzhinsky Square, where the KGB was; like all departments of the state, it was both centralized and chaotic in structure. Denisov had been its agent until Devereaux had arranged his unwilling defection in Florida on a warm January night.

  “You will be told in time.”

  “I do not think so.” Denisov made the words precise. Moscow-television Russian, the language without misunderstanding.

  “You will not come back? Your wife is in Gorki.” Karpov meant the city this time, the traditional place of exile.

  Denisov did not think of her. He stared at the spoon in the black coffee and stirred while he did not think of his wife and did not remember how she looked and smelled and sounded and how she slept next to him all those years. No, he did not think of her.

  “It is impossible. You cannot fool another Russian, you know.”

  Karpov sat in silence for a moment. Denisov looked at him with soft contempt. Had he appeared so clumsy in America years ago? Karpov’s clothes did not fit very well and his large, dark hat was ill-suited to the climate.

  Denisov looked around him. The café was filled with ferns and light wood panels. The menus were large and colorful bits of plastic, describing cute salads and hamburgers for vegetarians. What did it all look like to a drone like Karpov?

  “Glasnost,” began Karpov.

  Denisov held up his hand. “I can read. I know what glasnost is, even if you tell me it is something else. If you tell me the truth, then I will know it is the truth. Believe me, Karpov, you are too subtle for your own good.”

  “You have been found, damn you. You’re no longer free to decide.”

  Denisov felt a great sense of calm. For the first time in months, he thought of Alexa, who lived in Los Angeles now and was the friend of a man who made motion pictures. Alexa had been an agent as well. How many others were there in the vastness of the country, living with disguised faces and new names and the green government check in the mail once a month?

  “I made a call this morning, before you introduced yourself. It is a telephone number we can use when we feel we are threatened. Already, there is an alert.” Denisov said this in a flat voice, drawling out Moscowese again. “Why do you threaten me in the middle of the morning in this café in California? Do you think we are in the basement of Lubyanka?”

  Karpov glared at him with large hazel eyes, and when the glare brought no response, he put his small hands on the table. He said nothing. He swallowed and cleared his throat. His voice was softer now.

  “I am authorized to light all the candles in the church,” he said.

  Denisov understood the term.

  “There is a man called November.”

  “That is not a name.”

  “November,” repeated Karpov.

  Denisov waited.

  “November, who defected you.” He said this in English because the Russian is too clumsy, too ambiguous.

  “Yes,” Denisov said.

  The rock music blared from loudspeakers in the bright, California café but the room was silent for both of them.

  “He has gone to Alaska. In a little while, he will want to go to Siberia. To the district of the Far East, to be exact.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Because we have arranged it,” Karpov said.

  “Why?”

  “An important man to the Soviet peoples wishes to arrange his disappearance. No, I do not intend to say that; I mean, to arrange his acceptance in the Soviet Socialist Republics. To do this thing, he will need a guide. He will have a guide.”

  “He will not call me,” Denisov began. “Besides, I would refuse him. I have no contact with him.”

  “As you refused in Chicago last year? As you refused in the matter in Zurich?”

  “What do you know of me?” But Denisov felt afraid now. The background music in the café seemed louder and it penetrated his fears.

  “Everything, Ivan Ilyich. I tried to tell you.”

  Fear was cold in his belly. It was like a large, round stone in his belly. It was making everything in his body cold. In a little while, he would be so cold that he would have to shiver.

  Denisov was not a believer, even if he had the eyes of a saint. He saw the imperfections of systems from the first; it was the reason he had become a rich man, even while an agent for the committee. But perhaps he had really believed in his sanctuary in California. Perhaps all the fern-filled cafés and the women with perfect bodies had convinced him of this system and his safety, leaving only the dreams of Moscow for night and sleep.

  The system had betrayed him. It was the only way they had found him after all these years.

  “You want to know, don’t you?” Karpov said.

  “Yes.”

  “Alexa,” Karpov said.

  Denisov’s heart seemed to stop. Alexa was beautiful, voracious, a fellow exile, a former assassin for the committee. She had been trapped in the spiderweb of America as well. She had once opened her bed to Denisov but it was more in friendship than deep love. Alexa’s beauty and the depth of her feeling made her precisely right for the motion picture business in Los Angeles. He saw Alexa in his mind and realized that she could have done everything Karpov said.

  He could not speak for a moment and could not let Karpov see this. He had the flat expression of the perfect agent. He waved to the waitress—a girl whose hair was layered in strikingly different colors—and she poured him more coffee with a pretty pout on her face. Karpov took the coffee as well. He was smiling at his cup because he knew he had scored on Denisov.

  “So I am betrayed twice,” Denisov began.


  “Do not speak of betrayal—”

  “By the program, by Alexa.”

  “Perhaps by Alexa both times.”

  “Impossible.”

  “She wishes to come home.”

  “Impossible. She has Hollywood.”

  “It is not relevant.”

  “Why will November call me?”

  “He will see he needs you.”

  “Why do you want him? What is he? An old agent, such as myself. What do we know about anything? We have no knowledge you do not have now.”

  “Perhaps,” Karpov said.

  “Glasnost?” Denisov referred again to the ambiguous Russian term that could mean “openness” in one context, something else in another. “You have the Washington Post for glasnost, you have books, spies who never stop talking, corruptible congressmen.… Is there a part of the American apparatus you do not understand yet?”

  “A friend of the Soviet Union—”

  “Who is he?”

  “That, I cannot tell you.”

  “You wish me to guide November? If he really does call upon me? To betray him?”

  “Of course.”

  “For what?”

  “For your life.”

  “I have that.”

  “That is not certain.”

  Denisov paused.

  “I told you we are not in the bowels of Lubyanka. You may kill me here or not but I live now and the odds are against you. Put your umbrella away, Karpov; it is no threat. It never rains in California.”

  Karpov did not blush. He just became more pale.

  “Here is the threat, comrade.” Just clear, deep, bureaucratic Russian now, the kind used for orders and threats and pronouncement of sentences.

  And he took out the photographs.

  In the photographs, Denisov saw Alexa sitting in the straight-backed chair of some typical American motel room, facing the camera, her hands holding the movie clapboard in front of her chest. She was naked and her eyes were very wide, as though she were frightened.