Bill Granger - The November Man

“Russian spoken by a Muscovite,” Alexei said with sarcasm.

“Certainly,” she said. She might have been a Parisienne or New Yorker, she might have been a Chinese Mandarin or a London chartered accountant forced to share a first-class coach from Victoria with two Irish businessmen.

“Two moons of November,” Alexei said in a voice of poured gravel. “So the other one. It begins for you now. A long journey. You find him and resolve him.”

“Another contract,” she said in a dull voice. She felt tired. She had felt tired after killing the man in the compartment of the Finlandia . It was her reaction to death. “All right. Who is he and where is he?”

“That is a problem,” Alexei said. He was enjoying this. “The details are very few. A man with gray hair.”

“Like the man I killed—”

“Yes. But he was not the man. A man with gray eyes. A man last seen twenty-six months ago in Zurich—”

“That’s no information at all,” she said, moving the iceberg of her voice. “This cannot be serious.”

“I do not understand this matter.” Alexei suddenly confessed it. “There will be more information. Into your mission, they tell me. Information along the way, that is the expression used. You are to go to Zurich first, there will be more information—”

“This is absurd, like a children’s game—”

“In two days’ time. The problem is with the information. I have an instinct. They are developing the information as you travel. They want you very close to the target when they have it certain.”

“Like the spy satellites,” she said.

“Yes. I suppose that is where we must now borrow our imagery from. Spy satellites. Is that what we are, my dear Alexa? This matter with two Novembers—why does it come up now? Why didn’t we know this before? I don’t understand it at all.”

“Of course not.”

“Money,” he said, handing her a packet. She opened the packet. There were Swiss francs, dozens of pieces of the colorful bits of paper engraved with stalwart drawings of stern Swiss heroes. The largest objects on Swiss bank notes are the numbers; the numbers can never be misunderstood.

“All right,” she said with a little note of defeat. It seemed fantastic to her; and wasteful. “I will need a weapon.”

“At the time,” he said. “Now, you have two days. Enjoy yourself. You will stay here tonight?”

“I don’t know—”

“Please, I would take you to dinner—”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“My dear cousin,” he began.

“We are not related,” she said, rising out of the soft chair to lift herself from her note of defeat and tiredness. “I told you that a long time ago.”

“Please, cannot we be friends?”

“Of course. We are comrades,” she said. “But I have much to do. I have to leave you now, Alexei.”

“One more message. From Gorki. He said that this one, this second November, was as dangerous as the first. Perhaps more dangerous because he has survived so long.”

“I am not afraid of anything,” she said.

“He said that I should tell you this,” Alexei said.

“Thank you, Alexei,” she said. She turned. The American was at the bar, staring at her. Because she was beautiful and she knew men had to stare at her, it had not annoyed her for a long time.

She smiled a smile of pity at Alexei, who had scrambled to his feet to be polite. It was so difficult. “Comrade,” she said. She took his hand. She let him kiss her on the mouth as he had wanted to do and felt his large hand on her back, pressing her body to him as he kissed her. She endured it for a moment. Then she broke the contact with a slight body movement and she was free. She really pitied them sometimes.

Hanley offered no resistance although they came prepared for resistance. It was a matter of following standard procedure. They placed the restraints on his thin, gray body and took him downstairs on a stretcher. He complained loudly about the treatment. So the second one, who rode in the back, gave him a heavy dose of sedation. He slept as he left the city he had lived in for thirty-five years.

The ambulance screamed its way through the heavy afternoon traffic. The ambulance prowled through the maze of traffic northwest along Wisconsin Avenue, to Old Georgetown Road where it turned west, along the road to the Beltway. The ambulance was orange and white and the lights on the roof were orange, red, and white. Across the hood was painted the word ambulance written backward, presumably for terrified drivers ahead who would glance in their mirrors and see a beast of a vehicle approaching with lights and flashing headlamps and not be able to guess that it was an ambulance.

Hanley slept in the early March afternoon. The trees were forming buds along both sides of the parkway. The buds stood out like embroidery on the bare limbs. The clouds floated as brightly as sailing boats in warm waters. The wind was blowsy and voluptuous. The first garlic was growing in the shade of the forest; and the first blades of grass. There were mushrooms springing up in the soft soil beneath the elm trees.

The ambulance siren was turned off ten miles north of the capital. The lights continued to flash. The interstate journey continued for nearly two hours, through Hagerstown and the little towns once strung like garlands along the old National Route, which had been Route 40, now replaced by the prosaic Interstate 70 that forgot everything the old towns could have taught the new road.

Hanley saw none of these things. He had a long and strange dream he could never recall, except for the feeling of being lost in the dream, of being so lost to the world that he could never find home again.

The ambulance turned off at Hancock and then the journey was slowed down by fog in the deep valleys that begin west of Hancock. At the top of the road entering the second valley the ambulance began its wail again and the scream echoed back and forth across the valley. The people in the small city at the bottom of the valley who were on the street, feeling their way through the fog rolling down the hills, knew that sound.

Someone was going up to St. Catherine’s.

Sister Mary Domitilla had taken her adopted religious name from a Roman woman who lived in the fourth century, was martyred for her faith, and became the patron saint of cemeteries. In 1968, it was decided at the Vatican in Rome that the saint had never existed. It was a blow to Sister Mary Domitilla at the time but she had learned to live with it. She had a round face and sharp faith. Her hands were always clean and she had no protruding fingernails—she clipped them nearly every night, so that the edges of her fingers were always sore. She offered the small, useless pain to God.

Sister Mary Domitilla waited at the entrance. Mr. Woods was usually on the gate, but for special cases he was replaced by Finch, the government agent. Finch operated the gates, and the ambulance, its siren now muted, slid through on wet gravel.

“I have the key to Ward Seven,” she said to the driver. She got into the passenger side of the front seat. She glanced back at the man on the stretcher.

“Violent?” she said.

“He put up a fight,” the driver said. He slipped the GMC ambulance into drive and came around the turning circle, the tires crunching the gravel.

“Is he all right?” she said.

“Yes. He’s all right.”

“Did you give him?”

“Yes.”

“He’ll be dopey.”

“We gave him less this time. The last one. Whew.” He sighed, remembering the last time.

“Sister Duncan is there.”

“That’s good. He’ll sleep it off. He’s all right,” the driver said.