“There is no Henry McGee,” Devereaux said.
“There was. God, I still get nightmares. Is that what you had all those years? When you’d be sleeping next to me and then suddenly start speaking? You never screamed, you spoke.”
“What did I say? You never told me.”
“You would say things like, ‘Yes, I’ll kill you and then I’ll kill your children.’ Horrible things I couldn’t believe. You would say things in such a clear, flat voice that I was afraid.”
“Nightmares,” he said.
“And now I have them, too.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. He held her. They wore nightclothes because the cabin was cold despite the fire. She wore a flannel gown that could not be considered glamorous and he wore a large terry cloth robe that only hid his scarred body. Not glamorous and not at all sexy, either of them. Except they suddenly had an urgent need for each other and when they suddenly made love on the rug before the fire, when they moaned in delight and kissed each other to tears, it was not surprising at all. They were the only people in the world; they had finally found each other in the sharing of pain and in the sharing of the nightmares that now haunted both of them.
55
Deborah Cummings, forty-one, a lawyer for the Justice Department who met a guy named Mac in a bar at the Willard Hotel in December and thought he was the most fantastic talker she had ever met and who also thought, like Mencken, that marriage was nine-tenths talk anyway, told her parents she was marrying this old geezer and they were as shocked as everyone else in the world, Mac included.
56
They were in Berlin again.
The day was clear and bright and Marie Dreiser had been shopping on the Ku’damm and she had been drinking a little, too, with one of the boys she met in the hotel bar on the Panserstrasse. The boy wanted to go to bed with her, and who wouldn’t, she looked better than she had ever looked, had even put on weight in the right places. That’s what money did for you.
Devereaux had said she could only have a million dollars. Well, a million dollars was all right.
Devereaux had killed Dwyer and the red-haired girl didn’t know anything about it. Dwyer had to die if the bargain was to be fulfilled because he was about the size and weight of Henry McGee. But Marie knew and that was all right, too. Devereaux and Marie had set the fire in the flat and the cops weren’t too particular when they found the bodies.
“We’re both killers, lamb,” Marie had said to him.
“Just so you understand that,” Devereaux had said.
“It doesn’t matter to me, lamb.”
The final act of terror had been played out just the way Devereaux had promised her in the flat that morning she had killed Maureen and saved his life. Terror for a life; revenge as a dish eaten cold. It was all right, everything was all right.
Marie knew she was a little drunk going home but that was all right, too.
They had a lovely apartment and it suited her. She loved to hear the trains rumble on the elevated tracks at night. It reminded her of the little rat girl she had been in Berlin, living in basements and coal cellars, amidst the rubble of progress, grabbing a few crumbs of comfort from this one or that one, prostituting her body to save it.
She always wanted to remember because it kept her bitterness alive.
The driver of the cab took her change and bid her a good day and she opened the door and walked up the steps. She carried a package that contained silk underclothes and another that contained pâté de foie gras. She might have champagne tonight and pressed toast. She might do anything she wanted tonight.
She might let him make love to her.
She still liked that. She still liked that strong body filling her.
She entered the apartment and he stirred at the sound of her.
He was really beautiful, she thought.
“What time is it?” he said.
“What do you care? You’re not concerned with time, are you, love?”
“I just asked,” he said.
“Time I decided to come home. Did you clean the bathroom?”
He nodded at her.
She came to him and kissed him. He raised his lips to her. He wore a robe because he had no other clothes. He had not been out of this flat for three months. All of winter had enclosed them in the fastness of Berlin and he had wondered and schemed and tried to figure out what he could do but it was still beyond him. Prison had not been so unyielding to him; but this was a prison of soft touches and plenty of food and nights spent thinking of all the days when the images of life were around him.
Now there was only darkness. He had lived all of his life in sight and now there was nothing and he was a child in the womb again, aching to be born into the world.
But she would decide that. She decided everything.
Henry McGee remembered the last moment of sight, when he had pushed open the door of the flat and been greeted by a blinding light, the light of God or death, a light that had filled his eyes until they were blinded to lesser visions.
Blind.
A man even without clothing. A fugitive from the world hidden by a mad girl who controlled all of his universe. Could he call the police? This is Henry McGee, I am a murderer and wanted by a dozen countries. I am the man who killed all those people in Ireland. I am… what, exactly? Would prison be kinder for a blind man? Or would they kill him?
The problem was with killing himself. He could not do it. He had picked up a kitchen knife a hundred times and knew he could end it then but he could not. Too much of life remained in him to want to end his life. He hoped. He tried to figure a way. And he kissed his mad girl who was now only a sight remembered and was only touch and smell to him.
She kissed him again.
He wanted her, the life came to him again in a rush. He reached up for her to pull her face to his.
And she pulled back and he groped the darkness with his fingertips.
“Don’t,” she said. And she was laughing.
NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
The story of Henry McGee can be found in earlier books available from the publisher. They are: Henry McGee Is Not Dead and The Man Who Heard Too Much.
The November Man chronicle has included the story of Marie Dreiser in The Man Who Heard Too Much.
Rita Macklin has appeared in every book in the chronicle except the first, The November Man (now published under the title Code Name November).
The Irish Republican Army was first part of the chronicle in The November Man (now published under the title Code Name November).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
An award-winning novelist and reporter, Bill Granger was raised in a working-class neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. He began his extraordinary career in 1963 when, while still in college, he joined the staff of United Press International. He later worked for the Chicago Tribune, writing about crime, cops, and politics, and covering such events as the race riots of the late 1960s and the 1968 Democratic Convention. In 1969, he joined the staff of the Chicago Sun-Times, where he won an Associated Press award for his story of a participant in the My Lai Massacre. He also wrote a series of stories on Northern Ireland for Newsday — and unwittingly added to a wealth of information and experiences that would form the foundations of future spy thrillers and mystery novels. By 1978, Bill Granger had contributed articles to Time, the New Republic, and other magazines; and become a daily columnist, television critic, and teacher of journalism at Columbia College in Chicago.