The November Man (4 page)

S
he was not allowed back into the Soviet Union. The message had been left for her at the dock by a seaman in a dark-blue pea coat and stocking cap and full blue-black beard. The message puzzled her. There was a dead man on the
Finlandia
who would be found in time. Alexa had wanted to be back in Moscow in time for dinner.

She took a taxi to the Presidentti Hotel in the center of Helsinki, near the bus depot and down the street from the red granite walls of the imposing Central Railroad Station. There was a train every day from Helsinki to Leningrad. The journey took eight hours because of the procedures at the border crossing. It was the route that Lenin had taken in 1917 to return to the Soviet Union and lead the Revolution.

Alexa waited in the lobby for a long time. She amused herself by playing the slot machines and watching the herds of Japanese tourists check in after their numbing flight over the polar cap from Tokyo. They all appeared to be dressed in thin clothes with cameras and a need to bunch together, chattering like birds.

She drank Scotch at the bar. It was very expensive. After a while, an American began to talk to her but he was rather old and portly and she pretended to be French, It worked because she knew Americans never spoke foreign languages.

At noon, the contact arrived. He was a man called Alexei. She had worked with him once before and he had presumed too much based on the similarities of their code names.

He was a large, bluff man and carried the accents of Georgia. Like all Georgians, he was rather brutal, loud and crude, and Alexa worked around him carefully until she was in a position to explain her independence from him and his goodwill. He had been reprimanded, that last time, by Gorki himself.

They sat in the inner lobby of the hotel. It was a place of dark woods and square architecture and large spaces.

He had to have a drink. He sipped the chilled Stolichnaya like a thirsty man.

Alexa watched him drink with her deep, dark, glittering eyes and noted it. That would be useful sometime as well. Everything was useful to a careful woman.

“It is too late,” he began.

“Everything went all right,” she said. The responses must be kept at a minimum.

“All wrong,” Alexei said. He had thick eyebrows that bridged his nose and hostile blue-gray eyes and the overwhelming smell of cologne of the sort smuggled into Moscow in attaché cases.

Alexa had never worn perfume. Her body was clean and pure. She drank a little Scotch whisky at times and, at dinner, wine. She ate vegetables. She did not smoke.
Her breath was sweet. Her body smelled like fields of flowers and she thought the smell of her body was more beautiful—even to herself—than the appearance of it.

She waited, attentive, her hands on her lap, her legs slightly apart because it was amusing to sit in such a way and no less comfortable to her.

“You have taken care of the wrong man.”

“No,” she said. “I was certain.”

“I have information from the Committee. They could not reach you on the ship. In any case, it doesn’t matter.”

“What doesn’t matter?”

“You killed a man named Ready.” He pronounced the name with a long
e
sound and spoke it again. “He was not November.”

“I killed November—”

“Like a blue moon,” Alexei said suddenly and she saw that he was smiling. “Gorki is embarrassed.”

“What embarrassment?”

“The wrong man. There were two men called November. One was the shadow of the other. But the man we were to have killed was not the man on the
Finlandia
. He was another man. Your task, my dear, is not over.”

“I am not at fault—”

“You know how it is,” Alexei said, still smiling. “Everyone must share responsibility.”

“I was sent to fulfill a contract. I fulfilled a contract.”

Her voice was absolutely clear and chill, chips of arctic snow on a tundra at the edge of the world. It was without mercy. It had no anger in it because she could hide anger. Or fear. Or desire. She was very good at what she did.

“Like a blue moon,” said Alexei. “You were in London Station? The English have a saying for this, it is very
amusing. It is the second moon that comes in a month. Two full moons in one calendar month. It is called the blue moon and because it is rare, the English—they call this rare thing, ‘once in a blue moon.’ It is rare. But it happens all the time in nature.”

“I don’t know English expressions. I prefer the sayings of my own country. There is no more rich language than Russian.” She was annoyed by the situation. “Besides, why do they call the moon blue? Does it become blue? Of course not. I am Russian; speak Russian.”

“Russian spoken by a Muscovite,” Alexei said with sarcasm.

“Certainly,” she said. She might have been a Parisienne or New Yorker, she might have been a Chinese Mandarin or a London chartered accountant forced to share a first-class coach from Victoria with two Irish businessmen.

“Two moons of November,” Alexei said in a voice of poured gravel. “So the other one. It begins for you now. A long journey. You find him and resolve him.”

“Another contract,” she said in a dull voice. She felt tired. She had felt tired after killing the man in the compartment of the
Finlandia
. It was her reaction to death. “All right. Who is he and where is he?”

“That is a problem,” Alexei said. He was enjoying this. “The details are very few. A man with gray hair.”

“Like the man I killed—”

“Yes. But he was not the man. A man with gray eyes. A man last seen twenty-six months ago in Zurich—”

“That’s no information at all,” she said, moving the iceberg of her voice. “This cannot be serious.”

“I do not understand this matter.” Alexei suddenly confessed it. “There will be more information. Into your
mission, they tell me. Information along the way, that is the expression used. You are to go to Zurich first, there will be more information—”

“This is absurd, like a children’s game—”

“In two days’ time. The problem is with the information. I have an instinct. They are developing the information as you travel. They want you very close to the target when they have it certain.”

“Like the spy satellites,” she said.

“Yes. I suppose that is where we must now borrow our imagery from. Spy satellites. Is that what we are, my dear Alexa? This matter with two Novembers—why does it come up now? Why didn’t we know this before? I don’t understand it at all.”

“Of course not.”

“Money,” he said, handing her a packet. She opened the packet. There were Swiss francs, dozens of pieces of the colorful bits of paper engraved with stalwart drawings of stern Swiss heroes. The largest objects on Swiss bank notes are the numbers; the numbers can never be misunderstood.

“All right,” she said with a little note of defeat. It seemed fantastic to her; and wasteful. “I will need a weapon.”

“At the time,” he said. “Now, you have two days. Enjoy yourself. You will stay here tonight?”

“I don’t know—”

“Please, I would take you to dinner—”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“My dear cousin,” he began.

“We are not related,” she said, rising out of the soft chair to lift herself from her note of defeat and tiredness. “I told you that a long time ago.”

“Please, cannot we be friends?”

“Of course. We are comrades,” she said. “But I have much to do. I have to leave you now, Alexei.”

“One more message. From Gorki. He said that this one, this second November, was as dangerous as the first. Perhaps more dangerous because he has survived so long.”

“I am not afraid of anything,” she said.

“He said that I should tell you this,” Alexei said.

“Thank you, Alexei,” she said. She turned. The American was at the bar, staring at her. Because she was beautiful and she knew men had to stare at her, it had not annoyed her for a long time.

She smiled a smile of pity at Alexei, who had scrambled to his feet to be polite. It was so difficult. “Comrade,” she said. She took his hand. She let him kiss her on the mouth as he had wanted to do and felt his large hand on her back, pressing her body to him as he kissed her. She endured it for a moment. Then she broke the contact with a slight body movement and she was free. She really pitied them sometimes.

H
anley offered no resistance although they came prepared for resistance. It was a matter of following standard procedure. They placed the restraints on his thin, gray body and took him downstairs on a stretcher. He complained loudly about the treatment. So the second one, who rode in the back, gave him a heavy dose of sedation. He slept as he left the city he had lived in for thirty-five years.

The ambulance screamed its way through the heavy afternoon traffic. The ambulance prowled through the maze of traffic northwest along Wisconsin Avenue, to Old Georgetown Road where it turned west, along the road to the Beltway. The ambulance was orange and white and the lights on the roof were orange, red, and white. Across the hood was painted the word
ambulance
written backward, presumably for terrified drivers ahead who would glance in their mirrors and see a beast of a vehicle approaching with lights and flashing headlamps and not be able to guess that it was an ambulance.

Hanley slept in the early March afternoon. The trees
were forming buds along both sides of the parkway. The buds stood out like embroidery on the bare limbs. The clouds floated as brightly as sailing boats in warm waters. The wind was blowsy and voluptuous. The first garlic was growing in the shade of the forest; and the first blades of grass. There were mushrooms springing up in the soft soil beneath the elm trees.

The ambulance siren was turned off ten miles north of the capital. The lights continued to flash. The interstate journey continued for nearly two hours, through Hagerstown and the little towns once strung like garlands along the old National Route, which had been Route 40, now replaced by the prosaic Interstate 70 that forgot everything the old towns could have taught the new road.

Hanley saw none of these things. He had a long and strange dream he could never recall, except for the feeling of being lost in the dream, of being so lost to the world that he could never find home again.

The ambulance turned off at Hancock and then the journey was slowed down by fog in the deep valleys that begin west of Hancock. At the top of the road entering the second valley the ambulance began its wail again and the scream echoed back and forth across the valley. The people in the small city at the bottom of the valley who were on the street, feeling their way through the fog rolling down the hills, knew that sound.

Someone was going up to St. Catherine’s.

Sister Mary Domitilla had taken her adopted religious name from a Roman woman who lived in the fourth century, was martyred for her faith, and became the patron saint of cemeteries. In 1968, it was decided at the Vatican
in Rome that the saint had never existed. It was a blow to Sister Mary Domitilla at the time but she had learned to live with it. She had a round face and sharp faith. Her hands were always clean and she had no protruding fingernails—she clipped them nearly every night, so that the edges of her fingers were always sore. She offered the small, useless pain to God.

Sister Mary Domitilla waited at the entrance. Mr. Woods was usually on the gate, but for special cases he was replaced by Finch, the government agent. Finch operated the gates, and the ambulance, its siren now muted, slid through on wet gravel.

“I have the key to Ward Seven,” she said to the driver. She got into the passenger side of the front seat. She glanced back at the man on the stretcher.

“Violent?” she said.

“He put up a fight,” the driver said. He slipped the GMC ambulance into drive and came around the turning circle, the tires crunching the gravel.

“Is he all right?” she said.

“Yes. He’s all right.”

“Did you give him?”

“Yes.”

“He’ll be dopey.”

“We gave him less this time. The last one. Whew.” He sighed, remembering the last time.

“Sister Duncan is there.”

“That’s good. He’ll sleep it off. He’s all right,” the driver said.

Ward Seven was detached from the pile of old red brick buildings that formed St. Catherine’s. Ward Seven was built of cinder blocks and had very small windows. It
was two stories high and there were bars on the windows because the patients were violent. That’s what everyone in the town in the valley believed, when they thought about St. Catherine’s at all. St. Catherine’s had always been in the valley and always apart from it; it had been there so long that people in the town could remember when it was called the Insane Asylum. That was before a more humane time.

The buildings of St. Catherine’s were done in a neoclassical style popular at the end of the nineteenth century. There was a small church called “the chapel.” Ward Seven was located at the rear of the property, near the electrified fence that ran through Parson Woods. The ward was isolated in another way as well. There was a fence within the fence, so that there was a space between the outer electrified fence, so that there was a space between the outer electrified fence and the inner nonelectrified fence. This was useful on days when there were visitors to St. Catherine’s. The power to the fence was shut off and three Dobermans ran in the alley between the fences instead.

Sister Mary Domitilla fed the Dobermans. She called one Victor, after a childhood dog; the second was Spot, after a childhood book; the third was St. Francis of Assisi, after a saint whose reputation had fared better than her namesake’s.

Hanley awoke in darkness, sweating. He was in a bed like a hospital bed. He wore a hospital gown, open in the back. He felt uncomfortable and he had a headache. He realized his feet were manacled to the sides of the bed. His eyes were wide in the darkness.

The room was furnished like a motel, save for the bed.
There was a pressed-wood dresser done in walnut veneer with a mirror. There was a straight chair. Above the desk was a portrait of sunny Spain complete with Man of La Mancha with pike. On the opposite wall was a couch. It depressed Hanley to see the couch; wherever he was, they expected him to remain here for a time. Above the couch was another bit of factory art, this time a watery portrait of a Paris street.

He saw clearly in the darkness. The door to his room was closed but there was a light that came from a built-in neon tube above the Paris scene and ran the extent of the wall. The tubing was shaded but it gave enough light for someone to check on the guest in the hospital bed from the square of window in the door.

There was a thin small window high on the third wall to Hanley’s left. It was protected by three vertical and two horizontal steel rods that might be considered bars.

The headache overwhelmed him for a moment with nausea. He blinked, gagged, held his breath. The nausea passed. He waited and let the sweat drop down his face, blinding his eyes with salt.

He blinked at the harshness of his body sweat.

He felt very dry. He found he could move his hands. He reached for a table lamp to his left and turned it on.

On the table was a remote control device for a television set. He glanced up and saw the set was on a platform between the wall to his left and the wall opposite that carried the bad painting of Paris. He turned on the set. The set crackled for a moment in darkness and then flicked on. It was the David Letterman show. So that’s what time it was.

He flicked through the channel selector to get some idea of where he was. The network program flipped to a
movie, flipped to a second movie, flipped to a religious program, flipped to a station off the air. No identification. He might be in any place in America; he was lost.

He remembered the two men now. One with rimless glasses and the other with a blue stubble of beard. It was important to remember what they looked like. The trained operative in the field was an observer of insignificant details.

The trained operative.

All of it a charade. Meaningless. There are no spies at all.

Hanley groaned and turned off the television set. The image of Victor Mature evaporated. The peculiar sickness came over him again. It was a sense of déjà vu with a physical reaction in his stomach; it put his brain out of control. He sweated. His body felt cold. He closed his eyes to get out of it. His brain stopped, filled with light, then colors, then triangles built within other triangles. He opened his eyes. He shivered.

He thought of November. And he saw an image of a nutcracker, the one he had owned as a boy, the nutcracker with outrageous teeth set in that fierce mouth.
The better to bite you with, my dear.

He had to reach November.

He stretched out his hand and felt a water pitcher on the table next to the bed. The pitcher was made of plastic; so was the glass. He sniffed the water in the glass before he drank it. It tasted like water to him. He was very thirsty and drank another glass; and then another.

He could not move his ankles. They had cuffed him. He tried to move against the restraints.

They couldn’t do this to him.

He wept again.

When he was through crying, he looked at the table again. There was a call button on it. Also, a plastic toilet used in hospital situations.

He would not stand for it.

If spies ceased to exist, nothing mattered. Then why torture him like this?

Nutcracker, he thought. He had to keep Nutcracker in his brain and tell them nothing. He had to reach November.

But his mind was drifting again. He was a child. He was back in Nebraska and he could smell the earth. It was summer and he stood in a Fourth of July cornfield with the stalks knee-high all around him. The corn smelled sweet and tempting; it even smelled of growth in the rich field. The child saw the bees above the stalks where they kept their nests. All was alive, all was nature, all was part of one single great sense that was seeing and hearing and smelling and touching. The touch of corn silks tickled his palm. The farmhouse was white. A red Ford pickup truck with flared fenders stood in the soft brown earth of the long drive that wound up to the house from the country road. The child saw and heard the world in that moment and understood perfectly.

Hanley wept.