Free The November Man by Bill Granger

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 morningand 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 hillcrackled 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. Thesun 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