The November Man (11 page)

“I can get your nutcracker back to you,” Perry Weinstein said.

“No. You’re telling me that but you can’t. It was lost a long time ago.”

“Tell me about the Section. Tell me what’s wrong with Section.”

“Is it safe to tell you?”

Weinstein waited.

“I tried to tell November. He wouldn’t listen to me. I think he knows, though.”

“Knows what?”

“That there is something wrong. With Section.” Hanley felt the cold around him, pressing on his pale skin. “I need to tell someone.”

“Tell me,” said Perry Weinstein.

And Hanley began then, in a slow voice, to tell him everything he could remember.

T
he cities of the Eastern Bloc are dark at night. There is light but just enough. In the center of old Prague was a red star, illuminated at night, revolving slowly around and around. From the top story of the restaurant in the Intercontinental Hotel—the only modern hotel in Prague—the Soviet visitors and their women of the evening could view the red star revolving above the old church spires. Even above the spires of the old cathedral on the hill.

The restaurant was expensive and glittering. The wines served were from Hungary and Romania and were not very good. The cuisine was French with a heavy touch. Everything about the restaurant was a parody of poshness because parody is the only thing possible in such a society.

Alexa thought it was crude. She honestly loved Paris, for example, and all its excesses; she loved Moscow out of an inborn love for the ancient city that seemed part of her roots; but she saw the rest of the world for what it was. And Prague was a sad old city, neglected too long and full of sorrows buried in the ancient stones.

Perhaps Gorki would have understood. Gorki was a
complex man and she was his protégée in the Resolutions Committee. She would have explained her feelings to him on any night but this one. She was too nervous.

He had seduced her in the beginning, as she expected, but had never treated her as his mistress or even his property. Gorki was a detached man who sampled pleasures, never gorged on them.

She thought Gorki had sent men to have her killed. She wanted to understand why. He had seemed surprised to hear her voice when she telephoned.

Prague was a short plane ride from Moscow and from Zurich. They had agreed to meet there because Gorki did not want her to return to Moscow. Not yet.

Gorki put down his glass of brandy—French, not the Hungarian version offered on the menu—and looked across the white tablecloth. Her eyes had never left his face. He was a small man with the delicate manners of the Oriental Soviet. No one who worked for him knew his past and no one wanted to speak too much about it.

He stared at Alexa until she looked away, out the wall of windows.

“All organizations have their duplications,” Gorki said in a quiet voice as though summarizing some lesson. “I have wanted this American agent dead for a long time. The two men you killed—by mistake, dear Alexa—were backup to you and the unfortunate agent in Helsinki failed to explain that to you.”

“Why?” she said.

“Alexei claims no knowledge of the two men but the truth is quite different.” He spoke Russian with patient clarity, as though each word had been painfully learned and was reluctantly released in speech.

“I could have been killed,” she said.

“It was such a waste—”

“I still don’t understand—”

“Nor I,” interrupted Gorki. “But I understand this: November is still alive and that is not acceptable.”

“So I go back to Lausanne,” she began. She had eaten very little. She wore a dark dress with long sleeves that framed her pale features and made her skin seem more like porcelain. She watched Gorki as though she felt she had to be certain that he was telling her the truth; it was the first time she had felt suspicious.

“No. He has left Lausanne.”

“What happened?”

“He left Lausanne. He left the country after four days. He talked to Swiss police. He went to London, we think. Today or tomorrow he flies to New York on the Concorde. We think. We have this information—”

“What are you going to do?” Alexa said. Her words were soft, but she stared at him very hard.

“You,” said Gorki. His lynx eyes glittered at the table. The wine steward came and Gorki waved him away.

“You have watched him so closely, then why—”

“Because this is a delicate matter,” Gorki began.

She saw that he was lying to her. Why was he lying? What part of what he said was a lie and what was the truth?

She felt the same coldness she had felt the first day in Zurich, after the killings, when she tried to decide what to do next. Her first thought had been to contact Moscow but she had elected to do nothing at first. The newspapers were full of information about the killings. She could not understand who the men had been. Even now. She did not
believe Gorki at all; she had flown to Prague as though flying to a rendezvous with her own death.

“Who is November?”

“He was our mole in the R Section,” began Gorki.

She waited, her disbelief suspended. Her long fingers held the edge of the white tablecloth as though holding on to reality.

“It is very complex. Seemingly, over the years, he had performed a number of actions against our interest but that was to be expected. He had to be useful. To them and to us. However, most importantly, we began to suspect two years ago that he had changed allegiances—that he had been found out and that he was being used now by R Section to feed us disinformation that we would believe, because we would believe him to be our man. Much as the British did with the German spy network in Britain in the Patriotic War.”

She nodded; she knew the reference to World War II when British intelligence managed to triple every German agent in Britain, creating an entirely traitorous network of German spies working for the British and still feeding their German controls information.

“The important matter now is that he has to be dealt with. It was to be done in Switzerland, before he had any warning. Unfortunately, he has been warned now by the killings and by R Section itself. His cover is blown as far as we’re concerned.”

She waited and the cold feeling grew in her. Gorki spoke in a sharp whisper, the words glittered, he was constructing a story that seemed entirely plausible. And yet Alexa knew it was a lie, it had to be a lie from the beginning. And if it was a lie, then it meant Gorki wanted to eliminate her.

He wanted to kill her.

The thought fastened to her like a leech. She felt the blood draining from her face. She went very rigid and pale and cold in that moment.
He wanted to kill her.

“You have had the training of an illegal agent and that is what you will become again,” Gorki said, staring at his cognac. It seemed he did not want to look at her. “In the packet is identification. A French passport, papers, driver’s license… all the paperwork. It seems better to travel to Montreal from Paris first and then shuttle to Washington. The Canadian entry is much easier.”

“But our own people… in Washington—”

“This is not a matter for them. It is too delicate for more usual channels—”

She felt the words like blows; they were all lies. Gorki was isolating her and there was nothing she could do about it.

He had sent the killers in Lausanne not to kill the American but to kill her.

A rush of guilt overwhelmed her. It must be some flaw in her that exacted this punishment; some failure.

She was a woman of great beauty and cunning. In that shaken moment, she fell back on her resources.

She reached her hand across the white linen and touched the parchment fingers.

Gorki looked at her for a moment, as though he could not understand the gesture. He looked into Alexa’s glittering eyes. Eyes that could not be disguised, he thought. Eyes that will always give her away.

Gorki smiled at her as though she might have been a child.

“My dear Alexa,” Gorki said, removing his hand. “I
fly back to Moscow in an hour. There is so little time. Believe me—” He spoke in a soft voice and then interrupted himself with silence. His eyes spoke regret. He smiled. “Perhaps—” Again, silence intervened. He rose and she saw he had left a packet on the table. Instructions and identification and money—the usual precautions.

But Alexa felt failure. Acute and cold. He was instructing her to follow a trail of lies to her own death. What was her failure?

And what was her alternative?

She shuddered. She looked up. Gorki was already threading his way through the tables, past the Party officials and their girlfriends, his thin frame silhouetted against the black window that looked out on blackened Prague. And the great red star turning slowly, slowly, above the church spires and the steeples.

F
or a long time, the bulky man in dark cashmere coat and homburg hat walked along the seawall that jutted out into the Channel in Dover.

Dover was having a British spring with drab days and the threat of rain in the air. The Channel was choppy and gray, the way it always seemed to be. The great gulls groaned madly above the waves crashing into the seawall and the chimney pots of the town boiled up with curls of smoke. It was a day for hot tea and cold sandwiches and the huddled conversations of the public house. It was a day for dampness, wet wools, and the red noses that come with sniffles and deep spring colds.

The bulky man in dark had his hands folded behind his back as he patrolled the seawall and felt a touch of spray now and again on his ruddy face. His eyes were mild as a saint’s behind rimless glasses. He looked like a man of great kindnesses. He might have been one of those millionaires who gives all to the poor. In the case of Dmitri Ilyich Denisov, all those assumptions about him would have been wrong.

Once he had been an agent from Moscow; then, again, he had been made a reluctant defector to America. He was certainly a killer; he was certainly ruthless; he certainly broke laws as part of his new trade in the world of supplying those things to the world that the world wants but does not want to allow to be traded.

Denisov had once battled a nemesis named November, an American agent who had embarrassed him, nearly killed him, used him twice, and who had also given him a complete set of Gilbert and Sullivan recordings to while away his days in American exile. Gilbert and Sullivan was the only thing that had kept Denisov’s sanity in those terrible first days when the American questioned him over and over and he felt the deep sense of loss: He would never be in Russia again, nor walk Moscow streets, nor smell the home smells, nor sleep with his wife, nor hear his son and sister argue for the privilege of the morning bathroom. They were things he thought he would never miss and then, on a beach in Florida, an agent named November had arranged to deprive him of everything that defined his life.

It had happened a long time ago.

Now, out of the grayness, came the hideous roar of the beast that crosses the Channel. The hovercraft was in the waters, propellers turning and the whoosh of air pounding the waters flat beneath it, the hull like a rubber inner tube inflated and absurd. The roaring of the beast grew and the hovercraft seemed to lumber sideways toward the landing apron.

“Time,” Denisov said aloud, in Russian. He had a pistol, as always, and he felt for it in the pocket of his large overcoat. He turned and walked back along the
seawall and down the road to the terminal where the hovercraft would crawl ashore, resembling some link in the chain of being turning from sea monster to creature of the land.

The hovercraft was late, delayed on the French side as usual. Now they were going to build a railroad tunnel between France and England and the day of the ferries would soon be over. Denisov thought he would not miss it. He hated the hovercraft and detested the slow ferries with their cafeterias full of dreadful English food. He made the crossing twenty times a year. He could afford to fly, naturally, but there were reasons to take the land-and-sea route.

He saw the other man enter the green customs line marked
Nothing to Declare
. The man had only a small suitcase and he was stopped and told to open it. He did so. Denisov watched this and smiled. They never could find a thing. It was the first thing you learned, no matter what side you were on. If clumsy assassins like the Palestinians could do it, how much better the professionals could be.

Like us, Denisov thought with something like affection. Of course, he would just as gladly have killed the other man if it had been to his advantage.

At the moment, he was curious.

Devereaux crossed into the glittering and cheaply modern terminal which was typical of so many bad buildings put up by the British in the 1960s and 1970s.

He fell in beside Denisov without a word and then passed him as though they were strangers. Everyone is careful in the trade. Was Denisov watched? Devereaux
became a second set of eyes behind his back, to see who the watchers might be.

Denisov waited in the terminal, puzzled, looking for a face of a friend.

Disappointed, Denisov turned and walked out in the gray day full of spray and the cry of sea gulls. Devereaux was nowhere to be seen. Devereaux had gone around the building, waiting for Denisov’s retreat.

The other passengers pushed to get on buses that would deliver them to the train station in Dover and the tedious ride up the tracks to London. The pushers were French, of course; the English can tell the rude continentals from their own people.

The green buses belched black smoke and rattled away from the curbing.

Denisov was halfway up the road to the public house with the sign of the flying fish.

No one behind; no one before. No unaccounted plain cars full of intent men who seem to be waiting for someone. No careless men in trench coats pretending to light cigarettes into the face of the channel winds.

And Devereaux followed. They both knew the way to play this particular game.

Denisov sat in a corner of the dark, dirty, and quite somber public house with a pint of Bass ale before him and a copy of the
Wall Street Journal
’s European edition. There was a little time to kill before Devereaux joined him. He was a large, lethargic man, accustomed to waiting.

His eyes followed the lists of the stocks, up and down, searching for the acronyms of his holdings.

Devereaux sat down with a large glass of vodka,
chilled with ice. The English had grown more relaxed about ice in the last few years; they had given it away in public houses with less reluctance and less sense that they were surrendering the Crown Jewels.

Denisov did not look up from the paper. “You seem unchanged by the years,” he said in the voice that still contained a stubborn, thick accent. He spoke English very well because he loved the language (which is why he had loved the merry cynicism of Gilbert); but accent cannot always be lost, perhaps as a reminder to the speaker that he is still a stranger in a strange world.

“It’s old home week talk now?” Devereaux said.

Denisov sighed. Tribune stock—listed Trbn—was up 1½. He folded the paper shut. “You have no time for sentiment. For cheers? For
l’chaim
?” Denisov smiled, lifted his glass, nodded, and sipped.

Devereaux watched him. He was the careful agent now, not the careless man who had wandered through his days in Lausanne. He had been so careless because he had believed in his own myth, that he could shake the traces of the old trade.

He thought now all the time about that unfinished (perhaps unspoken) conversation he would have with Rita Macklin someday, if he survived this time.

“You are too serious,” Denisov said. “Lighten yourself.”

“Lighten up,” Devereaux corrected.

“Yes,” Denisov said. “Your message was insistent.”

“I would not have interfered with your life unless I had to,” Devereaux said. Denisov did not understand that this was going to be a serious matter after all.

“Of course.” He said it with irony. “I thought you wanted my company.”

“Two men are killed in Lausanne. The day before they are killed, they go to a place—a brasserie—and they terrorize a young Swiss girl with a stupid dialogue about how they are looking for me.”

“I see. The girl—is she pretty?”

“She’s young, which is better,” Devereaux said.

Denisov stared at him without expression for a moment and then put a smile on his face. On purpose. He was an amiable bear, like the trained bear in the Soviet circus; and yet, a bear is a bear, with teeth and claws and strength and the instincts to kill when killing is necessary.

“So. These men.” Denisov stared at his beer. “Do you owe them money? Perhaps they are brothers of the young girl and they wish her to stop seeing you. I think that you must be careful about who you go to bed with when you are in a foreign country.” He smiled. “There are different customs.”

“Yes. You’d know about that. The widow in California.”

“I have so much to thank you for,” Denisov said. The edge was bared. It was steel and cold and it killed. Denisov stared at Devereaux.

They had been spies against each other. And one day, when there was no other way, Devereaux had “defected” Denisov. Denisov had been trapped in America because Devereaux had made it so. He had lived on his hatred of Devereaux for three years—before Devereaux came to him in his hidden lair in California and decided to use him. Devereaux had let him free because it suited him to do so after Denisov had been used.

Once, in a car in Zurich, he had the chance to kill Devereaux. And he had hesitated. Why had he hesitated? He still hated him but he saw there was no hatred on the
other side. Devereaux did not hate; therefore, Denisov thought, he could only use. Denisov was in the arms trade now and he was a rich man and he pitied Devereaux, who could only use. And who had scruples, in an odd way.

“So tell me about these men if you have to,” Denisov said, shaking out of his thoughts.

“They go to my apartment the following day. They are killed there.”

“By you.”

“By a woman. A woman who kills in the professional way. There is a picture of her.”

Captain Boll of the Swiss army had commissioned a drawing of the woman based on the description by the unfortunate young thug who had been hired to break a window in a building and lure the concierge out of it. He had been arraigned on various charges and he would go to prison for at least two years and he said the likeness was very good.

Denisov stared at the drawing for a moment.

There are some faces—even captured in an imprecise drawing—that are unforgettable.

He felt a strange stirring. He looked up. His face betrayed nothing. His hand framed the drawing on the table. Alexa.

“She might be beautiful,” Denisov said.

“Yes.”

“It is she who killed those men?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I think she came to kill me instead.”

“I don’t understand this.”

Devereaux stared at the Russian in silence. Denisov
was very good. The eyes hid everything. Denisov glanced again at the drawing. For a moment. But it was too long a time, Devereaux thought. And the hand on the table still framed the picture.

“Who is she?” Devereaux said.

“I don’t know.”

The silence shared the space between them.

“How are things?” Devereaux said.

“Well.”

“Business is booming.”

“Perhaps,” Denisov said.

“Perhaps you are too busy.”

“No.” Carefully. “Not too busy.” And his hand on the table around the drawing was still.

“I want to know about her—”

“You are the agent, not I.”

“You’re close to the trade,” Devereaux said. “To old sources and new ones.”

“Perhaps.”

“I set you up. With Krueger.”

“I am so grateful.”

“I don’t expect to pay in gratitude,” Devereaux said.

“You have your sources, comrade,” Denisov said. “Why do I become involved?”

Devereaux said, “I defected you in Florida because there was no choice. And I sprung you from your golden prison in California because I had to use you. You’re free, Denisov, freer than you ever were in the old trade.” He paused, the eyes gray and level and even mocking: “I need to know about her. About two other men. And I need to know about a nutcracker.”

This was too much. Denisov started. His eyes widened.
He knew too much to hide it this time. It was the last word he had expected the other man to utter.

And then Denisov smiled, a strange and dominating smile that broke in waves across the cold harsh presence of the other man.

“Nutcracker involves you?”

Devereaux stared at Denisov for a long time. “A man I once knew called me twice in Lausanne. Before these things happened. He babbled to me and I have been trying to remember the things he said. He talked about old spies and fictional spies and he sounded deranged.”

“And he told you something about Nutcracker.”

“He said he had a nutcracker when he was a child. It was such a strange thing to say. Even in the context. I thought about it then and now. I wanted to see what you knew. And you know, don’t you, Russian?”

“I heard a rumor. In London three weeks ago. You know we have our gossips in the arms trade. Something is up. But no one knows what it is.”

“But Nutcracker. It means something?”

“Why should I tell you anything?”

“What moves you, Russian?”

But Denisov saw. He smiled and it was genuine. “You are outside, are you not? That is what this is about. You are outside and you cannot go back to R Section and ask them for help. Is that it? I feel so terrible for you, my friend. It is bad for you, is it not?” The smile was very good and wide and open. “Is someone to kill you and you cannot save yourself?” The syntax was breaking down. “I think it would be terrible to make your woman weep for you. But then, these things must happen.”

“How much money?” Devereaux said.

“Let me enjoy myself for a minute,” Denisov said. “It gives me pleasure to think you must need me. I owe you so much.”

“Fifty thousand dollars,” Devereaux said.

The smile faded. The blank face of the careful agent replaced it.

“There is an aerospace company in California. They are to award the contract. I mean, they will receive the contract for a certain plane. I think no one knows this now except your government. So for four thousand shares of stock, perhaps I will become even more a capitalist.”

“That’s insider trading, Denisov. It’s against the law.”

Denisov did not smile.

“You can’t fix Wall Street,” Devereaux said.

“There is no free dinner.”

“Free lunch.”

“Agreed,” Denisov said.

“It will be done,” Devereaux said. “Now tell me about Nutcracker.”