Bill Granger - The November Man

It is true that most urban slums are inhabited by blacks and that the presence of two white men—like the two white men who now entered the house on Eleventh Street N.E.—might appear odd to the neighbors. But one of the men—the man with the graying hair and the hard face—that man had already turned the right color. He was green. He had green and it came up front. And he was Syndicate, there was no doubt about that. You can tell the Syndicate because those boys look right through the back of your head. So don’t mess with the man—this was the advice of Junius Falkner to his nephew—don’t mess with the man, let him have the room he wants, just you go ’bout your business and you say none to him. Even if the other white man was blindfolded.

It was not what Sellers had expected at all.

Devereaux tore off the blindfold. The room was illuminated by three lamps fed off a single outlet. The single outlet looked like an octopus with streams of wires running from the core. There was a television set and a linoleum floor and a single bed with a swayback mattress covered with dirty sheets. There was a second mattress on the linoleum itself. There was a wooden table, painted green, and three chairs. Rooms like this always have three chairs. The single window was bolted with burglar bars and there were roaches above the sink on the far wall. The far wall was only eleven feet from the entry door.

The room smelled of neglect, dirt, and fear.

Sellers thought, for the first time, that the fear might be coming from him.

The gray man indicated one of the straight chairs. Sellers sat down. He was still blinded. He blinked and his eyes teared.

“I suppose you can’t see very well. Do you want me to describe the room?”

Devereaux’s voice was flat but it was not heavy. It was the voice of a doctor asking a patient how he felt and not really caring because the doctor already knew the diagnosis.

“Where the hell are we?”

“Where people don’t look for other people.”

“But we’re still in the District?”

“Perhaps.”

“Man, you made me ride around in a trunk. That’s shit, you know, man?”

“Sellers. What do you do?”

“I drive an ambulance.”

“That isn’t what I asked you.”

“I drive an ambulance.”

Devereaux hit him very hard, probably as hard as he had been struck by Captain Boll on that warm spring morning in the Lausanne police station. The difference was that Devereaux had expected the blow; the room was bright; Devereaux knew where he stood with Boll… there were so many differences. And this blow came down hard on the bridge of Sellers’ nose and broke it. They both heard the crack.

Sellers made a fuss. The blood broke down both nostrils and he tasted his own blood and his eyes teared because of the pain. He held his face, and when he tried to get up Devereaux shoved him back down on the chair at the table. He finally began to sob. When you taste your own blood, the reality of the situation penetrates.

Devereaux waited without a word for a long time. Sellers was such a small part of whatever it was that was happening. He was the corner of a package that had come unraveled and had to be worked loose before you could get to the rest of the wrapping.

Devereaux’s code name had been the last name on the sheet of paper in Hanley’s desk. Why the question mark? And what did the other names mean? They were obviously the names of other R Section agents—but why were they listed together? And what was Nutcracker?

The questions nagged while he waited for Sellers to think through the pain. The questions made Devereaux impatient.

He pulled Sellers’ oily black hair up until Sellers almost had to rise out of the chair.

“Oh, Christ,” he screamed.

And Devereaux banged his face on the edge of the table again, breaking again that which had already been broken.

Sellers passed out.

When he awoke, he was on the floor, bathed in blood, and the swimming image of the other man remained. It was as horrible as the endless nightmare he had once floated through during a long and terrible acid trip.

“All right,” he said. “Jesus, man, don’t do that again, I can’t even breathe, I’m breathing my own blood.”

“Who do you work for? What do you do?” It was the quiet voice.

“I work for Mr. Ivers. I swear to God about that. I just work for a guy named Ivers who comes around every day and he tells me what to do. Sometimes it’s a straight pickup. You know, an old lady in a nursing home finally stops straining the family budget and we pick her up—old ladies are light, you know, like birds—and we take them to the funeral home. Sometimes we do funeral work. You know, a pinch. All over the place.”

“This isn’t getting me anywhere,” Devereaux said. His voice was very soft and it frightened Sellers to hear it.

“All right. All right, man, lay off, will you? Sometimes. Sometimes we get a pickup order.”

“What’s a pickup order?”

“Special stuff. It’s a government order. Got stamps on it. You know, all that tiny print and them pictures of eagles on them.”

“Where do they come from?”

“Orders from all over. Orders from Defense, orders from Treasury. You’d be surprised.”

“And what are the orders?”

“Man, I don’t want to get in trouble, you know?”

Devereaux said, “If you tell me everything I want to know, and it’s the truth, then I won’t kill you. If you don’t tell me everything, or you try to lie to me, then I will kill you but it will take a long time. And in the end, you’ll still tell me everything I want to know.”

“Who are you, man?” Sellers was sniffling because of the blood and the fluids in his mouth and nose. His sinuses hurt; that was the least of it.

“The last man you ever wanted to see,” Devereaux said.

They waited. The building was full of sounds. There were children running in the halls, shouting and threatening; there were television sets full of canned laughter.

“We get pickup orders. They use our service. We take them where we’re supposed to take them.”

“Where’s that?”

“Couple of places. There’s a place in Virginia, down near Roanoke, called the U.S. Center for Disease Isolation Control and Rehabilitation. That’s for ones that got contagious diseases, you know. The ones you don’t send to Atlanta. We got to wear masks and rubber gloves when we handle them. We don’t get many of them but I don’t like those cases.”

“And who are these people?”

“I don’t know.”

They waited.

“I really swear to God I don’t know. I mean, I got guesses, but I don’t know.”

“Go ahead and guess.”

“Man, it’s plain, isn’t it? They fucked up with the government, man, didn’t they? You got to get rid of people sometimes. I mean, nobody says that to me but what the fuck do you think it would be about? You gotta be a genius to see that or what?”

Silence. This time the waiting was exhausted. There was no menace to it.

“Tell me about the other places,” Devereaux said. In another part of the building, someone was listening to a very loud rendition of The Cosby Show . The children were laughing. A warm spring night in the capital of the United States.

“St. Catherine’s. That’s out beyond Hancock in Maryland? You know where—”

But Devereaux knew suddenly. He was listening but he knew. The R Section had its training base in the rugged mountains of western Maryland, the same line of Appalachians that ran down from Pennsylvania and the deep mining valleys, down through the panhandle, down into Virginia and North Carolina and eastern Tennessee. He had heard vague rumors then about government contracts with various hospitals, to take care of mentally unhinged agents. And now, their directors.