Bill Granger - The November Man

Perhaps her face reflected some anger.

“He is all you have. And all he has,” she said.

“I beg your pardon, Ms. Neumann?” At least she dropped the pen this time.

“Margot Kieker,” she said, pronouncing the name of the young woman. “Your great-uncle I’m talking about.”

The doll blinked.

It walks and talks, said Mrs. Neumann to herself.

“Uncle Hanley,” said Margot Kieker.

“He has a first name—” began Lydia Neumann.

“It doesn’t matter.” For a moment, she caught the dull trace in the voice of the doll-face. The blue-rimmed eyes blinked, while precisely defined lashes met and separated. Her eyes were very blue, Lydia Neumann saw, clear and cloudless as though they had never seen any rainy days.

“We called him that. If anyone thought to speak of him. My grandmother… Ten years older than he was. Cancer. And then, my mother. My mother died six years ago.”

Lydia Neumann waited.

“Do you think it runs in families?”

“What?”

“Cancer,” said Margot Kieker.

“Yes,” she said, to be cruel, to break through to the doll. But it wouldn’t work.

“So do I. There’s nothing to do about it,” said Margot Kieker, the voice becoming soft, intimate. But not with Lydia Neumann. It was the voice of herself speaking to herself. Her eyes were seeing far away on a bright Monday morning in Chicago.

Then she snapped awake again and stared at Lydia. “Uncle Hanley. You work with him?”

“Yes.”

“How is he?”

“He’s in a hospital,” began Mrs. Neumann. She had planned what she would say to this strange creature all the way out to Chicago. They had traveled a while through the panhandle of Maryland, through the mountains that enclose the narrow valleys in the west of the state. It was the part of the state that lies beneath the weight of Pennsylvania coal country. The part where Hanley was being held in a hospital of a special kind.

Lydia Neumann had checked on Hanley’s question. The drugs he was given were very powerful psychoactive compounds and when she had asked a friend of hers to describe them—a man who knew the secrets of pharmaceuticals—he had been uncomfortable with the question. At last, he had explained that knowledge of such drugs constituted a breach of security in itself. He wouldn’t say any more. He had worked in the secret drug experiments at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland in the 1960s and he had managed to stay out of trouble by being discreet.

Lydia Neumann had felt terribly frightened. When she had gone back to see Hanley the following week, her fear had increased.

Hanley had been moved out of Ward Seven to Ward Zero. It was a ward not listed in the organizational charts of the mental hospital. He could receive no visitors. He was reported to be terribly ill and terribly depressed.

“Your great-uncle is in an asylum. Against his will. There have been no procedures to put him there. Nothing very legal, I think. And I think he is in terrible trouble unless you go to help him.”

“But I haven’t seen him since I was a baby. My mother never spoke of him. There was some slight. Some family business between my grandmother and him. They were brother and sister and—”

“You are his flesh.” She said it as well as any preacher might have done. Mrs. Neumann, in her great raspy voice, said things of certainty with a certainty of expression that made no mistake about her beliefs. She was refreshing in that, even to someone as cynical as Hanley had been.

“Flesh,” said Margot Kieker as though the word did not belong in this cool, gleaming room.

“Flesh and blood. It carries weight in law. You are his relative and he has been committed against his will to an asylum. In Maryland. You have to get him out.”

“But. I don’t understand. Is he insane?”

It was the question Mrs. Neumann had pondered as well. Like an unfinished conversation, there was no answer. Let that conversation wait for a time.

“No,” she said, without believing it. “The point is: He is very ill. He is very, very ill and I can’t see him.”

“Are you his friend?” she said.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Neumann without thinking.

“Are you his lover?”

Mrs. Neumann laughed and both of them realized that laughter did not belong in this holy place full of holy things of a new age.

Margot Kieker tried on a smile approved by the company.

Mrs. Neumann responded. “No, dear, not his lover. I am… his friend.” To say the word again, deliberately, seemed strange to her. She had never been in Hanley’s home and he had declined all invitations to visit her and Leo. Hanley was the solitary man, enjoying his solitary nature. Or, at least, accepting it as a priest accepts the restraints on friendship and love in his vocation.

“That’s very nice of you to be concerned about him,” Margot Kieker said. It was the sweet butter sentiment of the prairies. Then her lips snapped shut like a purse. The sentimental visit was over. The workday was beginning and Margot Kieker was fresh and starched.

“You’re not interested in a computer then?”

Mrs. Neumann blinked.

Margot stared at her, the mouth poised to register an emotion—if appropriate.

“Yes, I am interested in computers,” said Mrs. Neumann, saying too much to a stranger. She felt angry and embarrassed. She had gone out of her way to save her “friend” and it was nothing more to this creature than if she had gone across the street to buy a newspaper.

Mrs. Neumann opened a paper file and pushed it on the desk. It was a computer printout that told most of the story of Hanley’s life.

“Do you know what this is?”

“A résumé?”

“It is a print of Hanley’s 201 file. I’ve made some deletions because there are… matters that do not concern you. What concerns you is the bottom line, honey.”

The “honey” was intended to shock but it sailed over Margot Kieker. She didn’t even blink. She guided her eyes to the place on the printout indicated by Mrs. Neumann. She frowned.

“This isn’t our company’s computer. I’ve never seen that typeface in our training modules and—”

“Look at what it says, honey.”

This time, the edge of a frown. Mrs. Neumann figured she could get through in six or seven weeks of intense confrontation. It must be the same as deprogramming a Jesus freak: The intellectual argument never counted because there was no intelligence involved.

“I don’t understand,” said Margot Kieker. And she licked her lip, slowly and unconsciously, reading the words.

“His government insurance policy, his own insurance policy, his benefits, and title to a vacant bit of land in New Jersey he had acquired. It is his will. Every agent”—she almost bit her lip—“every employee in our section is required to file the will in the 201 file.”

Margot Kieker looked up. “Why leave this to me?”

“Family,” said Lydia Neumann.

“But I don’t even know him.”

“Flesh and blood,” Mrs. Neumann preached.

“But I don’t understand,” Margot Kieker said.

“No.” Softly. “No.” Defeated. “You don’t, do you? But you are going to have to. Or are you some kind of a monster?”

Claymore Richfield, the director of research for R Section, gathered the signals (written on “yellow-for-caution” paper) and put them down neatly on Yackley’s desk at 9:06 Eastern time Friday morning. He arranged the yellow three-by-five notices in such a pattern that they formed an outline of a Mercator map projection. The first signals—and sources—moved from the east to the west.

“He doesn’t move at all unobtrusively, does he?” Yackley thought to say. He felt fear closing him in a bag. He stared hard at the photographs of his wife and daughter on the desk as though they might be obliterated at any moment.