Bill Granger - The November Man

Ward Seven was detached from the pile of old red brick buildings that formed St. Catherine’s. Ward Seven was built of cinder blocks and had very small windows. It was two stories high and there were bars on the windows because the patients were violent. That’s what everyone in the town in the valley believed, when they thought about St. Catherine’s at all. St. Catherine’s had always been in the valley and always apart from it; it had been there so long that people in the town could remember when it was called the Insane Asylum. That was before a more humane time.

The buildings of St. Catherine’s were done in a neoclassical style popular at the end of the nineteenth century. There was a small church called “the chapel.” Ward Seven was located at the rear of the property, near the electrified fence that ran through Parson Woods. The ward was isolated in another way as well. There was a fence within the fence, so that there was a space between the outer electrified fence, so that there was a space between the outer electrified fence and the inner nonelectrified fence. This was useful on days when there were visitors to St. Catherine’s. The power to the fence was shut off and three Dobermans ran in the alley between the fences instead.

Sister Mary Domitilla fed the Dobermans. She called one Victor, after a childhood dog; the second was Spot, after a childhood book; the third was St. Francis of Assisi, after a saint whose reputation had fared better than her namesake’s.

Hanley awoke in darkness, sweating. He was in a bed like a hospital bed. He wore a hospital gown, open in the back. He felt uncomfortable and he had a headache. He realized his feet were manacled to the sides of the bed. His eyes were wide in the darkness.

The room was furnished like a motel, save for the bed. There was a pressed-wood dresser done in walnut veneer with a mirror. There was a straight chair. Above the desk was a portrait of sunny Spain complete with Man of La Mancha with pike. On the opposite wall was a couch. It depressed Hanley to see the couch; wherever he was, they expected him to remain here for a time. Above the couch was another bit of factory art, this time a watery portrait of a Paris street.

He saw clearly in the darkness. The door to his room was closed but there was a light that came from a built-in neon tube above the Paris scene and ran the extent of the wall. The tubing was shaded but it gave enough light for someone to check on the guest in the hospital bed from the square of window in the door.

There was a thin small window high on the third wall to Hanley’s left. It was protected by three vertical and two horizontal steel rods that might be considered bars.

The headache overwhelmed him for a moment with nausea. He blinked, gagged, held his breath. The nausea passed. He waited and let the sweat drop down his face, blinding his eyes with salt.

He blinked at the harshness of his body sweat.

He felt very dry. He found he could move his hands. He reached for a table lamp to his left and turned it on.

On the table was a remote control device for a television set. He glanced up and saw the set was on a platform between the wall to his left and the wall opposite that carried the bad painting of Paris. He turned on the set. The set crackled for a moment in darkness and then flicked on. It was the David Letterman show. So that’s what time it was.

He flicked through the channel selector to get some idea of where he was. The network program flipped to a movie, flipped to a second movie, flipped to a religious program, flipped to a station off the air. No identification. He might be in any place in America; he was lost.

He remembered the two men now. One with rimless glasses and the other with a blue stubble of beard. It was important to remember what they looked like. The trained operative in the field was an observer of insignificant details.

The trained operative.

All of it a charade. Meaningless. There are no spies at all.

Hanley groaned and turned off the television set. The image of Victor Mature evaporated. The peculiar sickness came over him again. It was a sense of déjà vu with a physical reaction in his stomach; it put his brain out of control. He sweated. His body felt cold. He closed his eyes to get out of it. His brain stopped, filled with light, then colors, then triangles built within other triangles. He opened his eyes. He shivered.

He thought of November. And he saw an image of a nutcracker, the one he had owned as a boy, the nutcracker with outrageous teeth set in that fierce mouth. The better to bite you with, my dear.

He had to reach November.

He stretched out his hand and felt a water pitcher on the table next to the bed. The pitcher was made of plastic; so was the glass. He sniffed the water in the glass before he drank it. It tasted like water to him. He was very thirsty and drank another glass; and then another.

He could not move his ankles. They had cuffed him. He tried to move against the restraints.

They couldn’t do this to him.

He wept again.

When he was through crying, he looked at the table again. There was a call button on it. Also, a plastic toilet used in hospital situations.

He would not stand for it.

If spies ceased to exist, nothing mattered. Then why torture him like this?

Nutcracker, he thought. He had to keep Nutcracker in his brain and tell them nothing. He had to reach November.

But his mind was drifting again. He was a child. He was back in Nebraska and he could smell the earth. It was summer and he stood in a Fourth of July cornfield with the stalks knee-high all around him. The corn smelled sweet and tempting; it even smelled of growth in the rich field. The child saw the bees above the stalks where they kept their nests. All was alive, all was nature, all was part of one single great sense that was seeing and hearing and smelling and touching. The touch of corn silks tickled his palm. The farmhouse was white. A red Ford pickup truck with flared fenders stood in the soft brown earth of the long drive that wound up to the house from the country road. The child saw and heard the world in that moment and understood perfectly.

Hanley wept.

Lausanne is a wonderful city. It is in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, beneath the mountains, above the shores of Lac Leman, which is also called Lake Geneva in honor of its principal city at the southwest corner of the lake. It sprawls up the hills on several terraces. The lower town is connected to the upper by a system of funiculars (called the Metro) and elevators. Lausanne is an easy place to live in. There seem to be no strikes, no graffiti, no intolerance, no rudeness, no hustle (though enough commerce to satisfy all who wish to be satisfied by commercial transactions), no crime, no cuisine. They serve the same poissons from the lake in Lausanne that they serve 7.5 miles across the lake in Evian, in France, and they are satisfying without being as good. Everything in Lausanne is old shoe. It is a city with a university and a cathedral, some good restaurants and some solid hotels, some intrigue (though not as much anymore as one might think), and a place where a man named November shed his identity as an American field officer with R Section and went to ground.

His name was Devereaux. It was his surname when he had not been in the Section. It did not matter what his Christian name might have been.

He did not know, on the fifth of March, that a woman called Alexa was on her way to Switzerland to kill him.

He did not know that the man who had been his control for nineteen years in R Section—a cold and close-pursed man with a flat voice and bare manners named Hanley—was residing in the violent wing of a private hospital that once had been called an insane asylum.