Bill Granger - The November Man

“You don’t understand me,” began Margot without looking up from her toast. She was saying words that were unpleasant and she never wished to be unpleasant. There had been unpleasantness last night when she had explained to William what she was going to do. Well, that was unpleasantness enough to last for one week.

“This really is too much,” Lydia Neumann said in her best voice. It was the voice of her Aunt Millie. It defined the world with a series of boldly drawn lines. “Do all conversations you have begin with yourself?”

Margot looked up. “I beg your pardon?” She was really puzzled.

Lydia frowned, let it go.

“You don’t like me,” Margot said. She had given it a lot of thought. “You don’t understand me though. That’s what I meant. It took me a while. You have to be careful, someone like me. I mean, I have to be careful.”

“I can see that,” Lydia Neumann said.

“You don’t even understand. You think I can’t think about things or that I don’t know what I am or what my limits are. But I do. Everyone does. Everyone my age does. We know there are rules and rules and rules and God help us if we don’t learn all the rules the way we’re supposed to.”

It was the first bitterness in her voice, the first crack of the façade.

“Do you know how many people would give their life for a job like mine?”

“And how many have,” Mrs. Neumann said. Her throaty whisper made Margot shudder.

“I worked very hard. I think you have to understand that. I’m not pretty but I can look pretty. And I am willing to work very hard, even if I have to work harder than others just to stay up. You came into my life two mornings ago and you talk about flesh and blood and you expect me to enter into a very complex thing for the sake of someone I haven’t even laid eyes on for more than twenty years. And you called me a monster.”

Lydia Neumann stared at her.

“I am not a monster,” Margot Kieker said. “I am alone in the world and I am making my way by myself. I close the door of my apartment at night and it is my apartment—that’s a good thing—but that’s all I have. It reminds me that anything I have and anything I am still means I am alone. That doesn’t seem to mean much to you. You said you were traveling with your husband. And naturally, you work for the government. No one in the government has to worry too much about working too hard.”

“Don’t bet on it, honey.”

“Why do you patronize me?”

Yes, Lydia Neumann thought with a start: Why was she hostile to this pathetic creature with her too small nose and wide eyes?

Because of Hanley, came her own answer. This was Hanley’s legacy, all he had in the world to leave his world to. It made her mad. She and Leo might go to the end of their lives without children and there would be no legacy but it didn’t matter to them.

They were not alone. Until they died.

“Why did you call me?” Lydia Neumann said.

“You left your number. At the hotel that day. You said you would be here until today. I wanted you to go back but then, last night, I realized that I couldn’t let that poor man, whoever he is, just die.”

“Whoever he is is your great-uncle.”

“Some stranger who came to the house once. Do you know my mother was thirty-seven when she died? Breast cancer. I’m twenty-eight. My grandmother was fifty-one. The same thing. Do you know what I think about at night alone? Just the thought of being alone. I never smoked, I don’t drink, I take care of myself. I had a mammogram last month. Every year. The doctor said that in view of my history, it might be a better idea for me to have my breasts removed surgically before any sign of disease appeared.”

She said this in her mechanical, computer voice. It was the only voice she had. It was borrowed, without accents and with rounded consonants to sound like vowels. She was crying when she said these things.

Lydia Neumann stared at her.

Margot wiped her eye with a handkerchief of white linen. The handkerchief had her initials sewn in blue. William had given her the handkerchiefs at Christmas; it was the last gift she had expected.

“I can arrange this for you,” Mrs. Neumann said.

Margot looked up.

“With your company, your supervisor. It’ll only take a few hours; a few telephone calls. It won’t appear to be what this is about at all. I am quite well known in some very upper circles in the wonderful world of computer science,” said Lydia Neumann. She touched Margot’s pale, ringless hands. “Leave it to me.”

Denisov learned enough in three days to understand the direction of things. He merely didn’t understand the sources.

He had tapped the informal network of private intelligence operatives (called “casuals” and “contractors” in some jargon); he had caught the thrust of Alexa’s trail. It was dangerous for Alexa. She was “going into black” in the citadel of the West to kill an American agent. “Going into black” was to go illegal, off the charts, into enemy lands, into illegal jobs that no one would vouch for.

Why was it so obvious?

Denisov was a careful man and he was appalled at the carelessness of the information sources he tapped. Everyone seemed to know about Alexa’s mission; everyone seemed to agree that it was going to be very dangerous. It was as though information were suddenly free and intelligence had become a sieve. There was so much that so many knew that it was like a story agreed upon before the telling by both sides.

The last source had been Griegel, the “wise old man of Berlin.” Griegel was—How could you explain him? He was the go-between and lived quite undisturbed in his three rooms on the top floor of an ornate old residence off the Unter den Linden. He was an old man who had always been old, who smoked American Chesterfield cigarettes in a long black holder.

Griegel was alone now. His wife had died two years ago, about the time that Denisov had finally met him through Krueger in Zurich.

Griegel was one of the honest go-betweens. What information he had was given to him. He offered no bona fides because none could be given. He fulfilled the role of an international neighborhood gossip. He lived undisturbed 1.4 miles east of the Berlin Wall at the point of the Soviet War Memorial.

“Birds of peace,” said Griegel, pointing with his cigarette holder at the pigeons wheeling in the bright spring air. “East or West. All the same to them.”

The trite sentiment was expected. Griegel was a man who liked company. He held on to the company of others by delaying the inevitable moment when he would have to reveal all of substance that he knew. Like many gossips, the facts were less important than the talk; he kept stoking the talk with prods of unimportant comments.

The two men sat at a table by the balcony and looked down. At the corner of the narrow street, they could see a few of the famous linden trees for which the great Berlin street is named.

Denisov said nothing. He watched the street.

“The next summit meeting is to be in Berlin,” Griegel said. He had the sharp accents of the Berliner and Denisov raised his hand in protest—his German was too slow.

“Would you prefer English then? Or Russian?” Griegel smiled. “Unfortunately, I cannot speak Russian very well. This makes it difficult when they want to tell me things.” And he smiled. He had the wizened flat German eyes of the kind seen on some old men, with Oriental corners and merriment that is kin to mischief.

“I came to see you,” Denisov began because the old man would not start the conversation. “I am not concerned with the summit meeting. I am concerned with my own business.”