All the Old Knives (16 page)

As I reach into my pocket to start up the recording again, I notice the wet handprint on the shoulder of my jacket. Treble has left his mark on me.

 

9

She's hanging up her phone when I come out of the bathroom, hand over my stomach, working my way toward her. Off to the left, Treble is taking out his wallet and examining his bill for inconsistencies. He doesn't look my way at all, and I wonder if, in my state, I imagined that whole conversation. It doesn't seem impossible, and for a moment it even seems likely. I settle into my chair and see concern in Celia's face. “You were in there a while. You're not sick, are you?”

I am, but I can manage another hour to see this through. I'll check myself into a hospital tomorrow, some place that specializes in the heart. “I'm good,” I say.

“What's that on your shoulder?”

I brush at the fading spot, which, I realize, is the physical evidence that Treble really was with me in the bathroom. “Made the mistake of throwing a damp towel over my shoulder.”

“You haven't changed.”

I smile but say, “Was that Drew?”

“The phone?” She purses her lips and nods. “He's having trouble with Evan—who, I have to admit, has reached that demanding age. Chocolate is his current obsession.”

“A reasonable obsession.”

“No obsession is reasonable,” she tells me. “When you're a parent you learn that pretty quickly.”

I'm suddenly overcome by an urge I've never had in my life: the urge to reach over and slap Celia Favreau, née Harrison, across the face. I snap, “Enough with the lecturing, okay?”

Her smile remains unhurt. “Sure, darling.” Then: “I've ordered chocolate mousse for you.”

Our dessert menus, I realize, are missing. So be it. She wants to treat me like a child, then all right. The thought of chocolate turns my aching stomach, but I'll consume it simply to keep this madwoman happy. Because I'm back now. I'm ready to see this through and wrap up Frankler. “Tell me about internal investigations.”

She thinks a moment, then sums it up with a single word. “Humiliating.”

“How?”

“Well, it's their job to toy with your emotions. They played with my femininity. Lots of old-boy jokes.
Pretty girl like you in this business? How's it in the sack with that field agent, Henry?
”

“They said that?”

“Of course. They were supposed to knock me off my guard.”

“Did it work?”

A shrug. “I told them you were so-so. Then I asked the big one if he wanted to give me a try.”

“You
didn't
.”

She's serious suddenly, and I have a sneaking suspicion she did precisely that, propositioned a man who had been sent to investigate her loyalty. I could imagine the old Celia doing that, just for fun. But she's shaking her head. “Of course not. I told them to piss off.”

This, too, I can believe. It's the old Celia we're talking about, not the madwoman she's become. “What did they say about the phone logs?”

She stares into my eyes. “They didn't say anything about them.”

“When you told them about the records, I mean.”

Again, her head shakes. “I didn't tell them about the phone logs.”

There. Finally, an admission.
For the record.
Overcoming my sickness, I give her a surprised look, the kind that innocent men like to use. “You didn't? Well, that's
odd.
Isn't it? I mean, they were trying to find out everything that happened, and you hid your own investigation from them. Why would you do that?”

She, too, senses that we've crossed a line. Her head tilts so she can get a better look at me. I wonder if she's kicking herself. “It didn't seem important, Henry.”

“Not important? You suspected there was a leak. You tried to track it down. Then when Langley arrived to find out if there
had
been a leak, you hid your investigations. I'm sorry, Cee, but that kind of logic is beyond me.”

I'm not sure what's going through her mind now. She pushes her glass to the side, which makes me think she's going to reach across the table to touch me again. A part of me still wants that. A part of me even thinks that this—I mean,
we
—can still be saved. So very unlikely, but in the realm of distant possibility. Yet she keeps her hands on her side of the table and just stares, a sad smile turning the corners of her mouth. She blinks, and her eyes are moist. Is this the beginning of a breakdown, a sudden admission of … of what? Guilt? She says, “You know why.”

“Do I?”

“Well, you looked over those records yourself. Didn't you?”

I'm trying to remember if I told her this or not. It doesn't matter. I nod.

“And what did you find, Henry?”

“Why don't you tell me?”

She inhales through her nostrils, then sighs. “You found a call at nine thirty-eight from Bill's phone. To Jordan.”

“You saw it, too?” I ask, pressing.

“Of course I saw it.”

“So you lied to me.”

“We lie, Henry. That's what we do.”

I feel a tingle of pleasure. Here we go. “You found this call, but you didn't tell anyone about it.”

“I was going to, but then I changed my mind.”

I wave that away. “Celia, I'm not going to be coy. This doesn't look good at all. Everyone in the embassy knows that two people used that office during the incident. Bill and you. The fact that you then covered up your findings does not play to your advantage. You need to give me a reason—a good, solid reason—for why you hid the evidence from the rest of us.”

Her eyes are about to spill over with tears, but she's holding them back. She's also holding on to herself with her arms, defensive. She doesn't want to answer, so I continue.

“There are only two possibilities Interpol would consider here. A) You were protecting Bill, who you loved like a father. B) You were protecting yourself. So which is it, Cee? A or B?”

 

CELIA

 

1

First in Arabic, then in English, he says, “Everybody calm down!” But this is hard, because we've just watched him stand up and shoot the pretty stewardess, the one who served us drinks and cooed over Ginny and gave Evan a coloring book and crayons, through the chest. All of us watched as she skipped backwards in shock, then, realizing what had happened to her, she dutifully crumpled to the ground.

I'm not one of the screamers, but it doesn't matter. Six, maybe seven, women have taken over that duty for me. I suppose I'm lucky, having been trained for things like this. I know where my responsibility lies. When Evan says “What's that?” in his terrified voice and Ginny jerks in my lap and begins to cry, I turn back to them and pull their faces close to mine. “Listen. Okay? Are you listening?” They're nodding—unsure, desperate. “You will stay in your seats and be quiet. There is a bad man on the plane, and if you get out of your seats he will hurt you. Understand?”

They grab at me, pulling me closer, in the way they do that always makes me think they're trying to climb back into the womb. I squeeze them as if I can actually help them hide in there, where safety might lie.

“Everything will be all right. Okay? Mommy won't let anything happen to you. Okay?”

They're nodding with vehemence. The force of my voice has stopped Ginny's crying, but her eyes are streaming. Both of them are crying silently. My eyes have gone achingly dry.

That's when I see, up ahead, three more men climbing out of their seats, shouting for calm.

 

2

I wake, hands flailing, as my phone vibrates silently across the bedside table. On the other side, Drew is deep in retirement sleep, the one that lingers until late morning. For months after we moved, he continued to wake at six, as if there were still an office requiring his presence, but eventually the slow, hypnotic atmosphere of Carmel seeped into even his corporate brain, and now—eight thirty, I see—he's still out.

It's a
+
44 number, followed by 20—London. I carry the shivering phone into the living room, padding in bare feet across the pine floor, finally answering, “Yeah?”

“Cee?”

“Who is this?”

“Cee,” the voice—old, faraway—repeats. “Celia, it's me. It's Bill.”

“Bill?” I ask, briefly thinking that I'm still in dreamland, but I'm not. I never dream about Carmel. “
Bill.
Jesus, how are you?”

“Fine, Cee. Fine. You sound good.”

“I sound confused.”

“You haven't been confused a day in your life.”

It's knee-jerk charm, for Bill learned to work with women from a young age. The only woman it never helped him with was his own wife, and this thought gives me a hopeful idea. “Is Sally all right? Nothing wrong with her?”

“She's fine. Excellent health.”

Oh well. “Where are you?”

“London,” he says. “We moved last year.”

“But you hate London.”

Silence, maybe embarrassed. “Well, it was important to Sally.”

“Oh, Bill,” I say involuntarily, though I know he doesn't want my pity.

“You have a minute?”

I'm in the kitchen now, pushing the phone between my ear and shoulder so I can fill up the coffeepot. “For you? Always.”

“I've got…” He hesitates, breathing heavily. “Listen, I've been out of the game for over a year now, and maybe I'm just getting paranoid. But I thought I should call you.”

The coffeepot is full. I shut off the faucet and pour the water into the coffeemaker, then lean against the counter. “Talk to me, Bill.”

“It's Henry. Pelham,” he adds, as if he has to.

“Go on.” My voice has flattened. No one's said that name to me in years.

“He was here. In London. Putting me through the wringer.”

“You? Why?”

“127,” he says, his own code for what the rest of us just call the Flughafen. I get off the counter and move to the dining room and sit down. “He tells me there's someone in Lyon asking for a full report, but I made some calls. He's lying. It's internal.”

I wonder if I'm going to be sick. Not just Henry, but the Flughafen. And internal investigations. To calm myself, I look through the sliding doors to my backyard, where everything is in the eternal bloom of seasonless California. “Why did he lie?” I ask my flowers.

“To relax me, I suppose. But that didn't help. I … well, I broke. I'm no good at this anymore. He started laying down accusations.”

“Oh, Bill.”

“No, it's all right. I didn't handle it well. I'm out of practice. But I'm okay—that's not why I'm calling. You're the one I'm worried about.”

“You don't have to worry about me,” I tell him, because in a way I believe that. I've lived five years on the edge of the continent, and over those years I've shed one skin and grown into another. Marriage, children, and a new network of responsibilities in this lush village on the sea. I don't pretend the past no longer exists, but other than a visit from a man named Karl two weeks into our stay, and a phone call from him in June to tell me that an archenemy of world peace had been captured, the Agency has left me alone. Though I'm sure I still have enemies on the other side of the globe, none of them have been hurt deeply enough to seek revenge.

But this is Bill—he wouldn't say these things without a good reason. “What do you mean?”

“I think he's after you.”

In the foreground the tulips are doing well, but farther back, between the jungle gym and the privacy fence, the hibiscus are in need of water. It's been a dry autumn. “How do you mean?”

“He played with me. He accused me of being in touch with the Chechen. Calling from the embassy. I panicked. I was playing to his script the whole time. It was just a way for him to push further and turn the conversation to you.”

The magnolias are still in good shape, but I'm worried about pests. Around this time of year the moths appear in swarms, leaving eggs that will hatch in a week, sending out oak worms that will cover the trees and walls and doors as they devour everything in sight. I say, “How did he turn the conversation to me?”

“Did you ask for the phone logs? The embassy phone logs.”

Instead of answering, I say, “Why?”

“Because he told me you did, Celia. He said there was a call from my phone to Jordan that first evening.”

“I see.”

“Well? Is this true?”

“Yes, Bill. It's true.”

“And you covered it up?”

“Yes.”

“But … why? You know I wasn't in league with those bastards! You
know
that. Right?”

I'm losing track of my garden. What needs to be tended to, and what doesn't? I lift my feet off the cold floor to the chair, raising my knees to my chin, one hand around my ankles, the other holding the phone. “At first, I didn't know. Not for sure. But soon afterward I knew.”

“Then why didn't you tell me?”

“I should have,” I admit.

“Yes,” he says, then pauses. “Look, I didn't call to berate you. I'm calling to warn you. I thought I was under attack, all this about the phone call. Then he asked about you. Only after he left did I realize that he was just verifying what he already knew: that I didn't know about you checking the logs. He was narrowing down his suspects. Down to you.”

It occurs to me then that we're on an open line. Though I haven't taken the possibility seriously before, I now wonder if someone is sitting in a landscaping truck up the street, listening to everything. I try to remember what we've said, what can be used as evidence, but the thump of my heart is distracting me. Then I hear something else—
“Mommy”
—it's Ginny's voice. I get up.