The November Man Read online

  “Aberrant behavior can be a symptom of many things. It can be a cry for help,” Dr. Goddard said.

  Hanley shrank with chill.

  Dr. Goddard continued. “Fortunately, our knowledge of the mind has made wonderful advances in the past thirty years. We now understand and can categorize behavior that would have defied categorization only a generation ago. We have a powerful range of psychological drugs—a chemotherapy—that we feel, and I think you will find we are as good as our word, can help restore you to normality and to a vigorous life again. Perhaps not as before; but to return you eventually to a useful participation…”

  Eventually was such a terrible word, Hanley thought. The words went on and on. He realized he was shivering. He wanted to say he was cold, sitting in this ridiculous and humiliating hospital gown, listening to this nonsense. It was coming clear to him.

  He began to cry as the doctor droned. He had found tears easy these past weeks and months. The tears released many feelings in him. The tears made him feel weak and relieved to be helpless.

  Dr. Goddard stopped speaking.

  He saw the tears stream down Hanley’s pale, drawn cheeks.

  He understood tears. They were useful as part of the “grieving” process in which the patient understands his status as a patient, understands there is something wrong with him, understands Doctor is there to help him. Dr. Goddard did not smile outwardly because he did not want to appear to mock the grieving process. Or to stop it at the moment.

  8

  HITTERS

  Claudette was behind the bar at ten in the morning. It was too early for respectable Swiss to come in for a drink but she needed the extra hour to clean the bar. The place always smelled sour in the morning. She would open the window in the back and leave the front door open, even in cold weather, to let the place air out and remove the odor of stale tobacco and spilled beer.

  The two men walked in at nine minutes after ten. Claudette was so intent on washing the glasses that she did not notice them until they sat down at the bar.

  “Hello, dear,” said the first one. He was large and had flat fingers on his large hands. He rested his hands on the bar. “Anyone else around here?”

  Claudette stared at his lizard brown eyes for a moment and then shook her head.

  The second one was thin and quite hairless. He did not have eyebrows. He looked as though he might have been ill—except his very black eyes glittered with life. His face was tanned, which was unusual enough for Claudette to notice it.

  They both spoke French but with strong accents.

  “No one is in back?”

  “No. Not at this hour. The owner doesn’t come until the lunch hour. If you want to see the owner—”

  “No, that’s all right. You’re the one we wanted to talk to.”

  Claudette was bent over the sink as she spoke with them, washing glasses. Now she stopped. She straightened up and wiped her hands on a damp towel on the bar. She stared at the large man and then at the hairless man and waited.

  “We want to ask you about the man who comes in here at lunch almost every day.”

  “We have our regular patrons—”

  “Look, we mean the man who comes in here, sits right here at the bar every day. You know who we mean.”

  She stared at the big one as though she knew. She said nothing.

  “Are you sure no one is in back?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re all alone here, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see,” said the big one.

  “All alone,” said the hairless one. They didn’t look at each other. They were staring at Claudette very hard.

  Claudette was afraid of them. “What can I do for you?”

  “Do for us? We told you.”

  “Yeah. We were talking about the American who comes in here every day. Around lunchtime.”

  “The one who reads the papers.”

  “Gets all the American papers to read.”

  “You know who we mean.”

  “You don’t get that many Americans up in this neighborhood, not in winter.”

  She knew who they meant.

  “You got a tongue, don’t you, dear?”

  “I’ll bet she knows who we mean,” said the big one. He wasn’t smiling.

  They were silent for a moment. The silence was like a pause planned in a symphony.

  The big one said, “You see, we want to know where he lives. You know where he lives?”

  “No. I don’t know.”

  “But you know who we mean, don’t you?”

  “I—”

  “Don’t lie. I mean that. The last thing you want to do is to lie.”

  “Yeah,” said the hairless one. “The thing is, we have to find out where he lives because we’ve got something to deliver to him. You know what we mean, something special for him. Only we know he drinks here but we don’t know where he lives and his name isn’t in the telephone book.”

  “No. He has an unlisted number.”

  “It’s too bad,” said the hairless one.

  “Please,” said Claudette. Her voice sounded very thin to her. She tried again. “Please, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Is that right?”

  The big one got up then and came around the bar. He ambled like a walking bear. He was almost too large for the back way behind the bar.

  “You are not permitted—” began Claudette, her Swiss sense of order horrified by this breach.

  He picked up a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label Scotch whisky, opened it, and began to pour it into the sink. She took a step forward and the hairless one reached across the bar to grab her arm.

  “You see, dear,” said the big one. “We are permitted just about anything we want. So when we ask you where the American is, the one with gray hair who reads all the papers, you should tell us where he lives.”

  “Definitely,” said the hairless one. He had small hands that held her arm like pliers.

  “See what I mean? Anything we want to do.”

  “Anything,” said the hairless one.

  “Please,” said Claudette. “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know where the professor lives—”

  “Professor? Professor?”

  The hairless one smiled and twisted the skin beneath his grip.

  Claudette winced with pain. The bar was dark. She noticed they had closed the front door when they entered.

  “I like that,” said the big one. “You think he’s a professor of something because he spends all his time reading? Ha. He was a professor.”

  “A long time ago.”

  “But he hasn’t been in a classroom for a long time.”

  “And he needs a refresher course.”

  “He needs a review of old lessons.”

  “We were sent out to teach him a few things.”

  “It’s too bad you don’t know where he lives. It would make things simpler.”

  “Yes,” said the hairless one. Her skin had a burning sensation beneath his hand. He let her go and her arm was ugly and red.

  “Well, we’ll go now.”

  She stared at both of them.

  “One thing, dear. I don’t think you would want to tell him we were here looking for him. I mean, this is to be a surprise. Understand?”

  “Yes. We don’t want you to tell him a thing.”

  “Because if you tell him we were here, we’ll be coming back here.”

  “Definitely,” said the hairless one.

  Devereaux sat at the bar, watching Claudette move anxiously up and down the bar, serving beer and wine and schnapps while the owner pulled out plates full of steak haché smothered in onions and gravy, prepared in the minuscule kitchen at the rear.

  The owner had not noticed the missing bottle of Scotch. He would in the afternoon, she knew, and he would question not Claudette but Monique. Monique would be innocent but Claudette felt, at that moment, too afraid to intervene in the coming storm. She hurried
; she was clumsy; she broke two glasses and the owner scowled at her.

  When she served the professor, she did not look at him. This was not usual.

  Monsieur le professeur.

  The dinner hour progressed and everyone could have seen that Claudette was upset; save that no one engaged in the hurried business of eating chopped steak and onions and potato salad in a little dark café had the time to observe Claudette’s distress.

  Devereaux ordered a second bottle of chilled Kronenbourg.

  She pulled the green bottle out of the cooler and opened it and took him a fresh glass chilled in ice, the way he preferred it.

  “Merci, Claudette,” he said. He had never spoken her name before. She blushed for a moment.

  Devereaux stared at her for a grave moment.

  “Is there something wrong, Claudette?” he said at last. The voice was low like morning fog. It was remarkable: In six months, he had not exchanged two dozen words with her. He had never called her by her name, though she had offered it from the beginning.

  She thought he was concerned. She was touched. Her fantasy of herself and her professor returned, burning to the surface. It pleased her that he was concerned and made her brave.

  Devereaux was not concerned. He was observing her as he observed all his surroundings, trying to spy what was unusual. He would walk down a street and refocus his gaze automatically every few seconds: First street, then walk, then buildings, then mailbox, then lamp post, then car, then street… It was the technique learned painfully over the years. It had to do with survival. In a way, it served to slow down the sense of life rushing past. With the senses focused intently on the surroundings, the mind worked on the unconscious and semiconscious problems that were presented.

  “I am a little upset, monsieur,” she said.

  He said nothing.

  “Monsieur, it concerns you—” she blurted.

  He almost smiled.

  But then she spoke slowly about two men who had entered the café at nine minutes after ten in the morning and who had frightened her. She tried to remember what they said and the professor’s gray eyes did not leave her face. She felt like a schoolgirl under his gaze. She told him everything; it was important to hold nothing back.

  She told him the last part, about not telling Devereaux any of these things. His eyes gazed into hers as she told it, and it seemed to her that he must understand how brave she was, how uncaring for her own safety.

  Devereaux wanted to know what they looked like and she told them. She had been too frightened of the large man to notice much about him. But she remembered details about the hairless man. Devereaux began to construct an image of him.

  He listened to the woman’s trembling voice for a long time, and when she had finished her story he took her through it again, questioning her to extract every bit of information. As she talked the instincts rose in him and made his face tingle.

  He thought he had accepted the idea of impermanence but he had not; he was unprepared for what Claudette said about the two men. They were emissaries from the world he had hoped to leave behind. It was too bad: He saw Rita and the boy, Philippe, and he saw himself as though all three were framed in an old photograph kept in an album as a souvenir.

  It was probably over now.

  And while these melancholy feelings came in waves over his consciousness, another part of his mind was deciding where to run and how to run.

  He felt as he sometimes had felt on fall mornings in the old place in the Virginia mountains, when the air was crisp and dry and the leaves in the forest on the hill crackled with the alert movement of animals. He felt aware of all things around him. It was what he had been trained for.

  “It’s all right, Claudette,” he said at last.

  “Monsieur le professeur, I am afraid. For you, not for me.” This was true, she felt. The steadiness of his gaze and the concern she read in his eyes had warmed her.

  “There is nothing to be frightened of—”

  “If they come back—”

  “They won’t come back,” Devereaux said. “If they know this place, they could watch for me easily enough. They had some other reason for saying what they said to you.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “Neither do I.” He tried a smile. “But it’s going to be all right.”

  “What will you do?”

  “Go away for a while, Claudette. But I’ll be back.”

  As he stood up he saw that she knew he was lying to her in that moment, and it made him feel a peculiar emotion, one he could not place at first. Yes, he realized: It was sadness. This café, even Claudette’s presence in it, had become one of his touchstones, though he had not consciously attempted to create touchstones in a foreign land. It was weakness to need such things. Was he becoming weak? Did he need the ritual of morning newspapers, this café, the old man who played chess on the pavilion outside Ouchy?

  He left a ten-franc note and Claudette thought to say something else, something to draw them together. But there was nothing to say.

  Devereaux was in the street, standing for a moment framed in the door of the café. The day was brilliant. The sun was high and there was a warm breath of wind from the French side of the lake. The sun glinted on the perpetual snowfields in the high reaches of the mountains.

  There was no need to return to the apartment. Whatever had to be arranged could be arranged from another place. He considered the pistol sealed in plastic and strapped to the underside of the toilet tank lid. He would find another weapon. He had his passport, his bankbook.

  He walked down the hillside to the Avenue de la Gare and went into the first branch of the Credit Suisse and withdrew 10,000 Swiss francs. Because he wanted the money in denominations of 100 francs, there were 100 bills and the wad was thick enough to split in two—half in his inside jacket pocket, the other half in the lower “cargo” pocket of his denim trousers.

  While he made these preparations for flight, he tried to see what was unusual around him. He had lived long enough in Lausanne to find the oddities in the colorful scenes on the street.

  There were old women in black coats hurrying to do their shopping and men in brown caps, smoking curved pipes, and businessmen with their coats open to the warm breeze, walking with the light step of their younger days. What did not fit this scene?

  And he saw the two men sitting in the Saab down the street, watching the life surge around them.

  Two men at noon on a weekday in a car bearing the license plates of Bern. This was Vaud; they were far from home. They were sitting in an expensive Swedish car in the middle of the day on a side street, waiting for someone. They had to be waiting for someone. In a rental car most likely. Businessmen from abroad.

  They seemed to be parked just on the periphery of his activity.

  He thought about the crude warning given Claudette in the café. It was stupid, almost self-defeating. It invited him to flee, which was what he was doing.

  Why?

  KGB, like the other espionage services and some terrorist organizations, passed through Switzerland easily on their way to activities in the north and—more likely—the south of Europe. But incidents of terror in Switzerland were rare enough to be nonexistent. The reason was simple: Switzerland was a compact, orderly country with a fierce military tradition and an absolutely cold-blooded approach to dealing with terror. It was not acceptable, not negotiable, and, in the long run, not worth the effort on the part of terrorists. Devereaux considered all this information in a split second, as a computer might, except that the mind worked faster when it was trained to consider information with both thought and feeling.

  Devereaux crossed the broad avenue to the long, red stone train station. A white-gloved policeman held up his hand against the traffic.

  Devereaux stopped at the kiosk where he usually bought the papers and chose the current copy of the Economist. Exactly as a potential railroad passenger might, choosing a magazine to kill the time on the train. H
e paid and turned around and saw the Saab parked illegally at the curb by the Continental Hotel across the way. He walked into the train station, across the concourse, to the ticket windows. He stood in line behind two schoolgirls who were talking to each other between giggles. When he reached the window, he bought the ticket for Zurich. He stood with the ticket a moment and looked in a glass window of a confectionary shop inside the terminal. He saw the two men at the entrance of the station.

  Devereaux crossed the concourse to the platforms. The train for Geneva was just pulling into the first platform. It didn’t matter: They had seen him buy the ticket, they had observed him walk to the platform. They would draw the right conclusion.

  He climbed aboard.

  The train waited.

  He went to one of the windows and watched.

  The two men stepped onto the platform and they stared at the train, at the very car where Devereaux waited. They looked at each other and then looked up and down the platform. At the last moment, they started across the concrete platform toward the waiting train.

  Perhaps they had miscalculated and thought he would flee by auto.

  Devereaux opened the door at the end of the car and dropped from the train onto the platform as the electrified express to Geneva quickly picked up speed. A conductor at the far end of the platform frowned at Devereaux. He walked over and shook his finger and told him about the dangers of jumping from a moving train. Devereaux had broken the rules in a country of rules.

  Devereaux crossed the platform slowly, watching the train swing out east of the city in the tangle of tracks. He entered the concourse and looked around. There were the usual crowds of midday travelers. The trains were swift and frequent so that all classes and ages took the trains as a matter of course. Devereaux tried to see if there was anything different he could find in this crowd around him. There had been two men. Perhaps there were more. He was a patient watcher, falling easily back into the habits of a trade he had sought to quit more than once. The habits couldn’t die—they merely became rusty through disuse.

  Outside the station, the sun was still blindingly bright. The passersby were shedding themselves of heavy morning coats and scarves and soaking up the sun and the warm southern breeze. There was a cheerful feeling on the Avenue de la Gare.