The music. He had never heard it before yet it was so much a part of his past from the first moment he heard it that it was as though he had known it all his life. If he had admitted it, perhaps he was only delaying the moment of meeting Rita and setting the game in motion in order to be alone a while longer, listen to the music and watch the sun setting in the blood-tinged sea. To remember Asia again because that is what the music turned his thoughts to: Only Asia had stirred him in his life; and the music, however distant from that place, drew him back to his own youth.
In Asia, Devereaux had allowed a pleasant veneer of idealism and duty to cover what later emerged as his native cynicism. He had wanted to believe then that service to the Section meant more than it did; he had gone to Asia on assignment to find the truth, however naïvely he would put it in later years. He had found it. He had peeled back layers of lies from the reports he stole from filthy offices and from the words of insolent, corrupt bureaucrats in Saigon and Hue and the other places; he had sifted through the natural lies of the villagers and found little grams of truth hidden by thieves who worked the streets of Phnom Penh and Hue; he had taken the truth at last from the farmers who squatted on their thin haunches in the cold, sunken rice paddies, who gave up the truth without a struggle. In the end, he had found too much of the truth and it was too horrible not to change him, finally and irrevocably.
Devereaux stared at his drink. Perhaps patriotism had moved him at last to give in to the insistent little recruiter for the Section. Perhaps that or just a vague, restless idealism that did not seem to be satisfied with the dull, safe life of a professor of Asian studies at Columbia University.
So one day a small man in a brown suit with a bow tie fastened to his white shirt stopped him on the steps of the library and engaged him in a fantastic conversation. The little man hinted at a world of spies.
Devereaux had listened and been persuaded because he was ready to be persuaded then; because he wanted then to believe all the words the man in the dull brown suit told him. He put aside his lectures on Asian culture and the ethics of the East to find out how little he had really known of that world. This is the real world, the little man had told him, this is knowledge you won’t get out of a book or a report.
Knowledge came with a price.
Devereaux picked up his drink and finished it and signaled for another.
The little man knew all about him. In the Section, the little man said, they had discussed him and they had decided that Devereaux could be a useful man. Devereaux had listened quietly while the little man recited all that he knew about him.
“You have no parents—”
“Of course I do. Everyone is born,” Devereaux had said. And the little man laughed like a merry teapot singing on the stove. Devereaux so amused him.
The little man who never gave him a real name told him about himself, Devereaux’s self, about a childhood on the streets of Chicago’s South Side, about gangs and troubles with the law, and about near murder committed once. Devereaux did not correct him or add that he had killed first at the age of thirteen when there was no other way to resolve the problem at hand. The little man did not know everything.
And yet. Despite it all, perhaps because of Great Aunt Melvina who took him in at last, perhaps because it was only his fate, Devereaux improbably entered an academic world.
“Do you see the pattern, a wonderful pattern?” the little man bubbled. “Violence, gangs, loyalties and lies. And then you reverse all this and achieve academic distinction, assume a mantle of intelligence.…” The little man stopped, he was starting to laugh again. Devereaux so amused him.
And in the end, Devereaux sealed off another part of his life and plunged into the world of shadows and embraced a new world of lies and ordinary deceits and little murders. Was the new world less a fantasy than the academic world he left behind or the long-ago world of a kid on the slum streets of Chicago? What had he expected to find besides agents and double agents, moles and networks, controls and operations both covert and overt?
All that had happened a long time ago and Devereaux wondered why he thought about it now. But it was the music. And the lingering afternoon. And the vodka that he drank to conceal memory and dull conscience and which whimsically betrayed him now.
If he had once had a fragile faith in his new life of secrets, it was broken in Vietnam.
In everything he saw of the war — in all the secrets he extracted from friends and foes — he saw a betrayal of intelligence. It was a war fought against logic, against reasonable self-interest, against the facts, against the truth of things as they really were. He had found a nugget of truth buried at the core of lies and he had told them the truth; told them in Saigon first where the Section reports were funneled through the vast CIA apparatus, and then told them the truth in Washington. But they chose not to believe it because to believe Devereaux would have broken their faith in a war they would not win.
Devereaux had been taken out of Asia at last, after the final Tet offensive that he had so ruthlessly predicted in one of his last reports (which had been ruthlessly suppressed by the National Security Adviser) a year before it happened. They did not know what to do with him but they knew they would never send him back to Asia; so he had been cast adrift in the cold sea of the West, a hollow man in exile stripped even of the faith he needed to fool himself into making his life a comfortable lie.
Even his code name within R Section seemed to suit his chill, bare existence: “November.” He was the November Man in Section nomenclature.
“November” suited his looks as well; perhaps that was why an anonymous ciphers clerk in the Section had linked him with the code name. Devereaux’s hair was black and gray, as it had been since college days. He was in his early forties and, despite the heavy intake of alcohol, still fit. His face was perpetually pale and drawn and crosshatched with worry lines. His eyes were large and remote and calm, gray as the Arctic sea, cold and unyielding.
November.
The music rose to a frenzy, spreading across the patio like a potion, infecting all who heard it.
The pale woman in her white bathing suit and robe let the old man touch her and kiss her and she seemed to shiver at his touch. The drummers made spastic gestures like puppets twitched to life by gods. The drums made echoes of thunder. The sun was very far away and fading too quickly and the sky was filled with red, strange light across the clouds.
At the moment it seemed unbearable in its frenzy, the music ceased without warning. There was a moment of sheer silence while the players stood, transfixed, their black skins gleaming with sweat and passion.
Then applause began, scattered and broken at first.
No, Devereaux thought, pulled back out of his reverie. Not that. There should be silence or wailing but nothing as polite as applause. The music had been too wild and pure for mere applause.
He put his drink down; he had to leave.
He got off the stool, pushed change into the trough and turned just as Rita Macklin appeared and sat down at the next stool.
Three times in six days he had followed her to this bar; and it was here he finally approached her. He had made contacts like this hundreds of times as an agent. Yet now he didn’t know what to do or say.
“They shouldn’t applaud,” Devereaux said.
She looked at him quickly and then ordered a gin and tonic. “Yes,” Rita said. “I was listening to it as I came down the beach. And then they spoiled it by clapping.”
Did she understand? For a moment, Devereaux did not speak. But this was the moment of contact, he had to make a move. At last, he let a smile appear and said, “Rita Macklin.”