Bill Granger - The November Man

The smiles faded.

“Tell me about the two Novembers,” Perry Weinstein said.

Hanley shrugged in his robe, as though to recede into it. The air was still and very cold for the time of year. When he spoke, his breath was puffed.

“Do you have a need-to-know?”

Perry Weinstein nodded. His face was grave.

Hanley thought about it for a long time. The spring seemed too sultry to him; he did not realize it was cold. The spring caressed him. The woman of the season blew into his ear and licked inside his ear and it made him shiver; another person would have thought it was cold. He could smell perfume and the peculiar touch of a woman’s fingers running up and down his arm. The woman in the season put her wet tongue into his ear and he shivered because she promised so many pleasures to him.

Hanley blinked. The reverie disappeared. The tongue and woman and smell were gone. He stared at Weinstein. “What did you say?”

“Tell me about November. Tell me what is wrong with Section,” Weinstein said.

“Wrong with Section,” Hanley said.

Weinstein waited. He was a listener.

“I have thought, for a long time, that someone inside Section does not mean us well. Does not mean well to Section.”

“Tell me,” Weinstein said.

“Nutcracker was taken from me. My nutcracker is gone,” he said. “I was given it and it was mine. My sister took it.”

“What about Section?”

“I see teeth and that face that will kill you to see you. It was my nutcracker,” Hanley said. He began to cry.

“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.

The 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.”