The November Man (24 page)

T
here was a tail car and a police car and then this thing. A 1973 Rambler.

Dave stared out the window of the rooming house and then rushed to the door and down the stairs. He paused on the first landing. What the hell was this about? If it came down to it, he could deny he owned the thing. But they had his name on the registration and the plates and—

He opened the door and crossed the sidewalk. It was a warm day in May.

The man in the tail car got out while the driver got out of the Rambler. The driver didn’t seem too happy.

“David Mason?”

“What’s this about?”

“Are you David Mason?”

“Yeah.”

“This is your car.”

“Maybe.”

“It is your car.”

“All right, it’s my car.”

“We found it.”

“So, you found it.”

“We’re bringing it back to you.”

“What are you, the tooth fairy?”

“Yeah, I’m the tooth fairy.” He seemed bored. “Look, this is your car and here it is. Also, here’s the bonus.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The bonus for use of the car. Twenty-two cents a mile and forty-two dollars per diem. It comes to four hundred twelve dollars thirty-one cents.” He produced a pen. “Just sign.”

“Sign what?”

“Expense account form.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Government. Got any objections to four hundred twelve dollars thirty-one cents?”

“Not one.”

“Man who rented the car from you.”

Dave caught on. “Yeah. What about him?”

“He works with us. Our… section.”

“Yeah. What do you do?”

“We’re spies,” the man said.

“Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, you’re spies.”

The man held the paper while he signed. He took back his pen and popped it into his shirt pocket. He looked at Dave as though he didn’t like what he saw.

“Boss says I got to ask you.”

“Ask me what?”

“You want a job with us?”

“You’re spies, right?”

“That’s right.”

“James Bond? Cloak and dagger?”

“Yeah. And we all wear trenchcoats.” In fact, he was wearing a trenchcoat, even though it must have been 85 degrees.

“Sure,” Dave said.

“Sure what?”

“Sure, I’ll take a job.”

“Come on, then,” the man said.

And that was that.

B
y June, Hanley was back, a little thinner but still back. He was examined by three psychologists who said his mind was perfectly sound. Of course, if the Section had wanted to prove the other argument, it had three psychologists ready to testify that Hanley was deranged.

St. Catherine’s federal subsidy was withdrawn because of certain abuses noted in a report filed with the budget office and the General Accounting Office.

Not noted in the report was the fate of Dr. Goddard. Hanley knew the signature. Dr. Goddard had been found with his throat slit. Hanley thought about it—and then put it from his mind. There was work to do. Operations was still… well, operational. Nothing had changed. Yackley was out of course, but quietly. Same with Richfield and the other division directors. The new boss of R Section was quite ruthless in the matter of personnel. Hanley understood that and appreciated it. Who could have appreciated Mrs. Neumann better than Hanley?

Even Quentin Reed, who had escaped any blame in the Weinstein affair, thought it was terrific. As he told
the National Security Adviser, “What could be better? A computer whiz to put software on the right track and at the same time score points in the FBM derby?” It meant: Female, black, minority.

The National Security Adviser had trouble with that—with all of Quentin’s jargon—but he understood the gist of it. Mrs. Neumann was the right sex for a change. And she’d ride herd on Operations, too.

T
he tourists were in Copenhagen. It was summer and the air was filled with their English chatter. They all seemed to speak English.

They came by the trainloads into the quaint dark station in the center of Copenhagen, across from the Tivoli Gardens. They filled the streets and shops. They came in surging gaggles, they filled the sidewalks, they bought everything, and the Danes smiled with good humor at them.

The English language sounded good to the man at the table in the café on Vesterbrogade, west of the train station. The café was not a usual tourist place, but now and then a couple wandered in and spoke loud English and it felt good to hear it. The Carlsberg was very cold and he drank quite a bit of it every afternoon, reading the papers in the way of an exile with a lot of time on his hands. He had been waiting all winter and spring for the time to be spent, to watch the trail, to see who might still be on it.

He spoke Danish fairly well. They knew he was a foreigner of course but they appreciated him all the more for taking the trouble to learn that difficult language.

He read the
Herald-Tribune
and the
Wall Street Journal
’s European edition. He read the
Journal de Genève
, the French-language paper from Switzerland.

He was interested in Switzerland very much.

He was not an unattractive man. He had the scar, of course, across his cheek, from ear to the edge of his mouth. And he had the limp, inflicted on him one night by a gray-haired man whose name was Devereaux. He had taken a long time to overcome the perpetual pain in his ankle. Devereaux had cut his Achilles tendon. At least the pain reminded the red-haired man every day of whom he hated more than his own life.

He thought about Alexa sometimes. She had killed poor Nils on the
Finlandia
. Poor Nils.

Nils was a find. Nils had been attracted to him in one of those cellar clubs in Copenhagen where the smoke is very thick and the beer is cold and everyone talks too loud. They had sat at a booth together and shared secrets. Or Nils had shared secrets.

They were so much alike. They had reddish hair, both of them. Nils wore a beard and Ready was clean-shaven. He could not have grown a beard because of the scar.

They had shared their bodies with each other. Nils was fascinated by Ready. Ready always had that power—over men and women. He used Nils and Nils understood he was being used and accepted the position. It was a position of deference and some might have thought it was degrading. Nils attended to Ready’s words and whims.

And then, as Ready listened at the trail for the sounds of those who followed him, he thought of the idea. Of using Nils to end the trail for once and all. To involve Nils in the job of being a spy. Ready’s spy. Ready’s goat. It
would work because everyone would believe in it so thoroughly. It was too absurd not to work. Nils became Ready because he would do the things Ready wanted him to do; he would meet the agent on the
Finlandia
; he would seduce the agent and tell Ready about the seduction.

Except, of course, he would never live to tell a soul. The Soviets must have thought Ready very stupid to believe they would give him a second chance.

The trail was cold now. Ready slept and no one knew he was alive at all.

So, mostly, in the long lingering summer afternoons of Copenhagen where there is a smell of fish on the sea breezes and the chatter of tourists in the narrow streets and wide plazas, Ready thought about new things. About Devereaux and his girl. About the time to come when Ready would be awake again. And what he would have to do to Devereaux and to his woman to make up for all he had suffered.

I
s this what being a spy is about? It’s not so bad.”

“There are no spies,” Devereaux said.

Rita was bare-breasted because this was a very upper-class French resort called the Baie des Anges—the Bay of Angels—down the Riviera from Nice. The resort was formed by a series of enormous buildings curved around a very small harbor full of very large boats. The buildings resembled ocean liners with stepped decks. It was all very exclusive and monstrously expensive and he had taken her hand one afternoon, led her to a plane, led her here. She looked around her, to make certain all the other women had not suddenly slipped on their halter tops. All was well; breasts were naked. She wore a small red bikini bottom. Devereaux stretched on the chaise next to her; he had his eyes closed.

“I said this is a pretty good life.”

“It’s all right,” he said. The sun was very warm and they were both dark now.

“I feel odd. Not wearing a top.”

“You’d feel odder if you did.”

“You like to look at naked women, don’t you?”

“Yes,” he said.

She closed her eyes for a long time and felt the sun on her breasts. With her eyes closed, she said, “Do you think it will be like this for a while? I mean, don’t we get a breather?”

“Sure,” he said. “This is the breather.”

“But things always turn out bad in the end.”

“There are no happy endings. I knew someone in New York once who wanted to believe in happy endings. It was the saddest thing you ever saw.” And he smiled at her.

Rita waited for a while, feeling the sun on her body.

“This is the way it had to be.” She frowned when she said it. She wasn’t talking about this. She was talking about the matter they didn’t really talk about anymore.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Everything you told me. Everything you didn’t tell me. It was supposed to save R Section. And nothing happened at all.”

“Nothing.” His voice was lazy in the sun. The babble around them was full of French voices and the occasional German grunt. The Mediterranean Sea beyond the pool was blue, deeper blue than it had ever been before.

“It turned out to be meaningless.”

“If Perry Weinstein had remained, it wouldn’t have been. Perry was moving up the ladder. He was that close to real power. This was a skirmish in the war. It could have been more than that. If Weinstein had won it.”

“De Big Cold War. What is it, exactly, De Big Cold War?” She used an Amos ’n’ Andy accent.

“Skirmishes. Little battles. It doesn’t mean very much.”

“People died.”

“Yes.”

“People always die.” She was smiling at him because she was mocking him. It was what he might have said. His eyes were closed but he returned her smile. The smile came in her voice.

“It’s a condition of life,” he said.

“You’re a philosopher.”

“I wish I could promise you happy endings.”

She said, “Would you like to go up to our rooms and make love?”

“You mean in the middle of the day?”

“Yes,” she said.

He stood up and waited for her. She put on her top to walk back to the buildings. It was all so beautiful.

“You never want it to end,” she said.

He said nothing.

They held hands as they walked back, among the half-naked bodies all around the pool. They looked exactly like what they were. Friends and lovers.

An award-winning novelist and reporter, Bill Granger was raised in a working-class neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. He began his extraordinary career in 1963 when, while still in college, he joined the staff of United Press International. He later worked for the
Chicago Tribune
, writing about crime, cops, and politics, and covering such events as the race riots of the late 1960s and the 1968 Democratic Convention. In 1969, he joined the staff of the
Chicago Sun-Times
, where he won an Associated Press award for his story of a participant in the My Lai Massacre. He also wrote a series of stories on Northern Ireland for
Newsday
—and unwittingly added to a wealth of information and experiences that would form the foundations of future spy thrillers and mystery novels. By 1978, Bill Granger had contributed articles to
Time
, the
New Republic
, and other magazines; and become a daily columnist, television critic, and teacher of journalism at Columbia College in Chicago.

He began his literary career in 1979 with
Code Name November
(originally published as
The November Man
),
the book that became an international sensation and introduced the cool American spy who later gave rise to a whole series. His second novel,
Public Murders
, a Chicago police procedural, won the Edgar
^®
Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1981.

In all, Bill Granger published thirteen November Man novels, three nonfiction books, and nine novels. In 1980, he began weekly columns in the
Chicago Tribune
on everyday life (he was voted best Illinois columnist by UPI), which were collected in the book
Chicago Pieces
. His books have been translated into ten languages.

Bill Granger passed away in 2012.

Code Name November
(previously published as
The November Man
)

Schism

The Shattered Eye

The British Cross

The Zurich Numbers

Hemingway’s Notebook

The November Man
(previously published as
There Are No Spies
)

The Infant of Prague

Henry McGee Is Not Dead

The Man Who Heard Too Much

League of Terror

The Last Good German

Burning the Apostle

Drover

Drover and the Zebras

Public Murders

Newspaper Murders

Priestly Murders

The El Murders

Time for Frankie Coolin

Sweeps

Queen’s Crossing

Chicago Pieces

The Magic Feather

Fighting Jane

Lords of the Last Machine
(with Lori Granger)