Henry McGee Is Not Dead

by Bill Granger

  On the clapboard was written, in Russian, Denisov kills Alexa.

  In the second photograph, Alexa was sprawled on the bed in the motel room. Her hands were tied to the posts of the bed and she was naked. She wore a gag in her mouth.

  In the third color photograph, there was a scarf around her throat and her face was very pale, even though the outline of the perpetual suntan could still be seen. The gag had been removed. Her cheeks were puffed out and her eyes seemed to protrude.

  “Dead,” he said.

  Karpov smiled.

  “Not at all.”

  Denisov was very pale, very cold. The stone thing would never leave his belly. He would have to carry it in his belly all his life.

  “Not at all,” Karpov repeated. He took out a fourth photograph. Alexa sat on the bed but now she was dressed in her jeans and halter and she still looked frightened. She was holding up a photograph.

  “Take this. Our eyes fail us in middle age.”

  It was a small looking glass.

  Denisov examined the photograph.

  Alexa was holding the third photograph, the one that showed her dead. She was not smiling.

  He knew Alexa. He had slept with her. They were exiles. He saw the dull fear in her eyes in the photograph.

  “If Alexa were to be murdered, perhaps even more horribly than in the photograph, then it would be you who killed her. Perhaps you did not do it but we could convince certain people that you had killed her. What would the Americans do to you?”

  Denisov said nothing.

  “Perhaps they would kill you. Perhaps they would want to know how you had compromised their famous program. Whatever would happen, Ivan Ilyich, you would not be a man with a choice.”

  “She did not call you, then,” Denisov said. His voice was very dull, very tired. It was eleven in the morning on a rare spring day in Santa Barbara when you can see all the way to the tops of the wooded hills above the town.

  “As I told you, Ivan Ilyich,” Karpov said.

  “I have no guarantee.”

  “None.”

  “But if you wished to kill me, you could do so now. Or kill Alexa.”

  Karpov permitted a small smile.

  “Why is November important? To your important friend?”

  “I don’t know. I am only the messenger, Ivan Ilyich.”

  Had Denisov said that before to others? He had been the messenger, the watcher, the assassin in his time, moving in the cogs of some vast machine, blind and deaf, moving his little part of the great mechanism because he had to do it.

  He saw the truth in Karpov then.

  He had no other way for now but to betray November. Perhaps Moscow would have mercy for him; perhaps there was understanding, even glasnost. Perhaps his old wife was there, still waiting for him.

  Perhaps his dreams would stop.

  8

  ALEXA IN HOLLYWOOD

  For a long time after it happened, Alexa thought to tell Roger about it.

  She had never met a man more powerful than Roger, even the gray man she had known once, even Denisov.

  She saw that men and women were afraid of Roger but it was more than that: They craved him. Roger was like sunlight or life or dope.

  Roger had a telephone in his car, as well as champagne. His driver was a large homosexual former professional football player named Erik. Roger had six cars and three houses on the West and East coasts. He went to England often. He had taken Alexa with him.

  Alexa was a Muscovite. In her former life, she had killed people for the committee. There had been satisfaction in that job, until she had delivered a wet contract on the wrong man and until the committee had decided to resolve her.

  Alexa was Russian beautiful, which meant she had deep and wild dark eyes and black hair and an intense, almost religiously beautiful face. She was very dangerous and that made her attractive as well. Roger liked her accent, her beauty and the way she made love. Roger craved the danger in her. She knew she made love as no woman—even no man—had made love to Roger before.

  Roger’s new deal was putting together Burt Reynolds, Paul Newman, and Sally Field in an updated remake of Animal Crackers, with Sally Field in the Chico Marx role. Everyone was intrigued with the idea. Roger was trying to convince the producer to convince Newman’s agent to convince Newman that there was a lot of dignity in the Harpo role. The whole thing sounded absurd on the face of it, which is why everyone took it seriously. Even if the picture was never made, Roger would make a million dollars on the deal. The deal was more important than any movie.

  What could Roger have done? Alexa thought.

  She had been very afraid. She could count the times in her life she had been afraid and they were not many.

  Alexa ran along the beach. Los Angeles was full of haze. A weak sun tried to poke through the brown air. The boys were on the beach already, showing their tanned good looks to passersby of both sexes. The faint odor of corruption came from the sea and there were dead fish on the sand. Alexa ran along the beach with strong strides, her legs flashing beneath her shorts with the sureness of tailor’s scissors. She ran until she was utterly exhausted, until she wanted to sob. She had run this way every day since the incident and she had not told Roger about it. Deep in her, she knew that all of Roger’s power and his world and his wealth were illusions. Roger could do nothing, Roger would have been afraid and that would have shattered the illusion for Alexa.

  They awakened her at four in the morning in her bed. There were two of them. They had small automatic pistols and one had injected her with something even before she could speak. When she awoke, she had been in a hotel room and they had taken her nightgown off. She spoke to them in English.

  And then she spoke to them in Russian.

  They had smiled when she spoke Russian; they had understood her.

  She did as they told her to do. When the second one knotted the scarf around her neck, she thought they intended to kill her.

  “No, you little whore,” he had said in a mild voice. “Not yet your time. Perhaps tomorrow or never. Now put this cotton in your mouth and fill your cheeks and stick out your tongue as though you have been strangled. If you are a very good actress, you little whore, you won’t be killed. We have no instruction to kill you unless you are not convincing and we have to strangle you to produce the desired effect.”

  She had tried to be a good actress.

  When they were satisfied, one of them threw her a pair of jeans and a top taken from her closet and she put them on. They gave her the last photograph to hold in her hand. She had looked at her strangled self in the photograph. She saw herself dead.

  She felt the sobbing pain as she ran. Soon, she would be at the end of running and the pain would be all in her chest and her muscles would twitch and even her knees would hurt.

  She realized how alone she really was. Roger was her illusion. To involve him in the real world would be to destroy him. Everything was gossamer.

  She fell to the sand, gasping for breath. One of the boys on the beach looked at her and thought about coming over. She rose to one knee, heaving for breath, staring at the flat ocean and the dull brown sky and the weak sun.

  What frightened her most in the days since the incident was knowing that they knew. She had been debriefed by the Americans and treated very well. She had not forgotten her old life but her new life had suited her. She never thought badly about killing people because it was what she had been trained for, like a soldier. Now she did not have to kill anyone. Roger said once, “Wouldn’t you ever like to kill someone, just to see what it was like?” It was one of the strange things Roger would say when he was drunk or when he had taken too much cocaine.

  Alexa had responded, “But it’s like nothing, Roger.”

  “What’s not like nothing?”

  “To kill someone,” she had said. “It is like killing a chicken. They are alive and then they are dead, all to some purpose. To kill someone for purpose is to feel nothing.”

&n
bsp; Roger had known then that she had killed someone. It had thrilled him even more than the cocaine and he had made love to her. Sometimes, when he was on top of her, taking his own pleasure, demanding that she give him pleasure, Alexa could close her eyes and feel helpless and that pleased her, even stirred her more than the pleasure of the flesh. But that feeling of helplessness was only an illusion. When she had been helpless and naked in the hotel room and held the signboard in front of her and read what it said—Denisov kills Alexa—she had felt only hollowness. There was no pleasure, after all, in being helpless.

  She must confront this.

  She walked slowly back up the beach, her breath returning, streaming with sweat. Her hair was wet with sweat and glistened. She wore white shorts and a light green top and was barefoot. She was tall and dark and so striking in appearance that Roger said she should be a movie star except it would bore her to tears to be a movie star.

  Alexa opened the door of her car—Roger let her drive the older of the two Porsches—and slipped onto the leather seat. It would be warm again in Los Angeles without satisfaction. The sun would not burn off the smog and the bowl of the city would be filled with brown air and endless cars on endless roads. She loved Roger and films and parties in Malibu but this other part she did not like at all.

  Denisov kills Alexa.

  But what was it all about? They had explained nothing. They had dumped her in front of her apartment and threw her nightgown after her and drove off in a small, black Chevrolet. Four photographs, taken with a Polaroid camera in an anonymous motel room. For what purpose?

  Alexa kills Denisov.

  She thought about it. She could not be afraid all the time. She would get a gun and go north to find Denisov in Santa Barbara and kill him. Or ask him why the photographs were taken. Or do something else to make her not be so afraid.

  She had felt so weak and helpless.

  It made her mad. And she was angriest when she thought of Denisov.

  9

  KAREN’S CLEVERNESS

  “My name is Karen,” she said.

  Denisov stared at the young girl. This was ridiculous.

  She opened her notebook and held a pen in her left hand. Her black hair was in bangs, her shrewd blue eyes waited.

  “How old are you?” Denisov said.

  She blinked. She looked at the blank sheet and then at him. “Twenty-six.”

  Denisov said something in Russian.

  “I didn’t catch that?”

  “It is nothing.”

  Denisov stood at the window of his living room and looked down at the lush vegetation on the side street. He lived on the third floor of an apartment building halfway up the hill from the beach. He had lived there all his years in exile. Where would he live now?

  He thought again of the little apartment in Moscow, his wife rattling pots and pans in the kitchen, the constant bickering between his son and his sister over bathroom rights. He wanted only peace. He wanted afternoons alone in the apartment on winter days when all were gone, afternoons of Gilbert and Sullivan and drinking vodka in warm apple juice, afternoons of thought and dreams. He could do that now, dismiss this child, await his call back from exile. Karpov had showed him the way it was: If they had wanted to kill him, they would have killed him. He must show he is redeemed. He must bring November across.

  “What did he look like?”

  “Who?” Denisov turned from the window and looked at her sitting very businesslike on a straight chair at his little dining table. He thought she looked too young for this business. Perhaps they had not taken him seriously, that was why they had sent this child.

  “Mr. Raspoff—”

  It was his American name, the one on his driver’s license and Social Security card and his Blue Cross card and his American Express card. How clever everyone was, to give him a new identity, to suggest that cosmetic surgery could be ordered up, to give him this safe place of exile.

  Why not an American name, he had asked long ago. Mr. Gilbert. Mr. Sullivan. But the man in charge of such things had smirked. “No one would believe an Irishman with a Russian accent,” he had explained. So much for disguises.

  When he had undergone the long debriefing in the place where they did these things outside of Washington, he had felt utter despair. The babble of English around him, the cold-eyed men who stripped his soul and memory, the thought of living forever in this utterly foreign country—he thought to kill himself for the first time in his life. He had sat in his bare, clean room in the middle of the Maryland mountains, sipping a glass of vodka, and he had thought of killing himself because the loneliness was driving him mad.

  Perhaps they knew this.

  Perhaps that is why they had permitted Devereaux to visit him.

  Devereaux had brought a very good phonograph and a collection of albums. The Mikado and Pirates of Penzance and HMS Pinafore and lolanthe and Yeoman of the Guard.… He had sat with Denisov that single afternoon and Denisov had played the first of the recordings and listened to the English words even as he had done in his Moscow apartment on winter afternoons.

  “The man who lives in two countries has none,” he said aloud.

  Karen O’Hare started to write it down and stopped. She said, “What did you say?”

  “I saw a man twice in the past two days.” He described the man who ran the cleaning shop down the street. “He stared at me as though he knew me. This upsets me.”

  “Which is why I’m here. It upsets us as well.”

  “Who is us, Miss O’Hare?” The voice was not kind.

  “You know as well as I do.”

  “I do not know. Is possible they know me now? Is possible they find me after years like these?” His English was good but in moments of stress, he dropped words, reversed syntax, became the stage Russian.

  “No, Mr. Raspoff. It is not possible. No one has ever been located who was put in the program.”

  “I am touched by your faith in the program. I am not so sure of it. You see, I am doubter and you are believer. If possible, it can be done.”

  “Now you’re the believer,” Karen O’Hare said. She was young, damnit, but it wasn’t her fault. She wasn’t stupid, even if Wagner back in the office thought she was just someone with big boobs.

  Denisov blinked at that and came over to the table and sat down across from her. She was beautiful, he thought. And, without meaning to, he thought of Alexa, naked, holding a chalkboard with Russian words that read: Denisov kills Alexa.

  “I am the paranoid,” he said softly. “I am seeing ghosts and have bad dreams. I know this. This was told to me before. But sometimes, it is that I need to say these things to someone.”

  “Yes,” she said. She put down the pen. “We checked all the agencies. No one has a mark on you. Believe me, nothing has happened for six years, why would anything happen now?”

  He had asked Karpov the same question.

  Karpov had said it had nothing to do with Denisov, it had to do with getting November into the Soviet Union.

  “Perhaps you are right.”

  Karen stared at him.

  Denisov tried a smile.

  “Perhaps I am just alone.”

  Karen felt a deep blush inside her and struggled to keep it off her skin.

  “I am seeing the ghost,” he said.

  What was this?

  “No, Mr. Raspoff,” Karen said. She stared into his mild saint’s eyes. “You have had experience, I looked up your 201, I don’t have access to it, just to the précis, just to know who you are. I know who you are. You’ve been around the block.”

  “Block?”

  “A way of speaking,” she said. Her voice had lost its gee-whiz quality. It would have surprised Wagner, surprised everyone back in the office on Powell Street.

  “I took down this description and I’m going to be around for a day or two, looking into this thing. I’m staying down at the beach—I’ll give you a number—and I’m going to call in a few people on this thing. If the progra
m has been compromised—and I don’t think it has but something has been done to arouse your suspicions—then I want to know about it and my superiors want to know about it.”

  “It is all right,” Denisov began.

  “It is not all right. Besides, I can take you to dinner on the expense account and it’s legitimate—”

  “It is all right,” Denisov began again.

  “I’m sure it is.” She drew back from the table a little, let him look at her. “You’ve had a fascinating life. The little I saw in your 201. Not that everyone has access to your 201, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that I had an NTK—”

  “Is what?”

  “Need to know.” He was looking at her but he didn’t look happy. Karen O’Hare knew how she looked to men. There was something wrong.

  “We can have dinner, we can talk, maybe I can listen to your stories.” Her eyes got dreamy, the way she intended. She had learned a few tricks in her adolescence, only the most instinctive. She had watched other girls at school and this is what they did to make men do what they wanted. It had horrified her when she first discovered the trick, but she had learned it in the same mechanical way she learned the twelve-times tables.

  He stared at her and saw the face of Karpov. He felt like a dying man invited to a party full of lively people. She wouldn’t understand. Twenty-six years old. He saw Alexa naked on the bed, strangled, her tongue lolling from her puffed face. Would they invite Alexa back as well? A reunion in Moscow of all the exiles, reluctant and not, who had returned?

  “Please, it is well that you came but I think about this too much and I think it is not what it was when I call the number in San Francisco.”

  “I don’t think so either, Mr. Raspoff. Just checking it out. I want to be sure I closed all the doors and locked them. That’s just a way of talking. I want to be sure that you’re reassured. Besides, it’s nice to be in Santa Barbara, it’s a nice time of year, maybe I can get some sun, you never saw a suntan on a San Franciscan.”