All the Old Knives (17 page)

“Thanks, Bill,” I say as I head back to the living room and toward her room. “I'll keep an eye out. Gotta run.”

I hang up on him and push open the door to find Ginny, not quite two, sitting up in her bed, a white IKEA piece with raised sides to keep her from rolling out. Her hair is tangled across her damp face, and she's breathing in quiet sniffles, up from a bad dream.

 

3

I scramble eggs and gaze out at my garden while at the table Evan plays Angry Birds on the iPod and Ginny crunches toast slathered in peanut butter. Despite my fears, Ginny doesn't seem to be sick, and getting both of them dressed is a welcome distraction from Bill's call. Drew, ever old-school, brings a
Times
from the front yard and pecks me on the cheek as he throws away the paper's protective bag. “The liberal media machine is in full swing,” he tells me.

“Is it?”

“Not that it's a surprise,” he says as he settles at the table in front of his coffee. He shakes open the paper. “Old news is new news. Mitt made some innocent statements in Israel linking economic success and a nation's culture, and they're claiming—again—that he has contempt for Palestine.”

I look up, frowning. “What?”

Drew grimaces at me, looking a little older and a little stupider, but I know it's only a look. It means nothing. “It only took—what? Forty years?—for the Jews to build a great nation. That's not chance—that
is
culture. Mitt makes a statement of fact, and now he's a bigot.”

I give him a smile, still not quite sure what he's talking about, but it doesn't matter. His phone will ring soon, and he'll head back to his office to work on the computer in defense of his dear Mitt.

“Mom?” says Evan, eyes not rising from the screen.

“Yeah?”

“Can I have Nutella?”

“No.”

“Okay,” he says.

Ginny, quite clearly, says, “One two three.”

“Did you hear that?” says Drew, dropping the paper and smiling wildly. To Ginny: “Say it again!”

Ginny stuffs bread into her mouth, peanut butter a caramel-colored glaze across her cheeks.

“She heard it on
Sesame Street,
” I tell him. “It's a song—One two three, count with me…”

“Still, though.”

“Yes,” I agree. “She's a genius.”

From the bedroom Drew's cell phone rings. He gets up, saying, “And so it starts,” then walks off.

I serve up the eggs, giving Evan the big-boy fork he's been demanding lately, and use the little-kid spoon to feed Ginny. But Evan doesn't want to break his game, so I take the iPod away from him and put it on the counter. “Breakfast first.”

He groans.

Afterward, Evan takes his game into the living room and, after cleaning her off, I put Ginny in the playpen we keep by the sofa and tell Evan to keep an eye on her. Still fixated on exploding birds laying waste to green pigs, he grunts his acquiescence. I head back to the dining room and start to clean up.

It's while I'm at the sink, trying to get peanut butter off of Ginny's plate, that it comes back to me. Henry putting poor Bill into a state in order to direct an investigation in my direction. What's he up to? Is he trying to pin something on me?
That?
Unlikely. If he knows anything, he knows that I've been kinder to him than anyone. I've allowed him to live freely. And that, I realize now, may have been a mistake. Generosity sometimes is.

I take a breather and sit at the table, remembering our last night together. I remember standing at that pay phone and calling that number in Amman and hearing that voice speaking Russian and knowing—
knowing
—that it was Ilyas Shishani. Then returning to the embassy and sitting in Bill's office and thinking harder than I'd thought in a very long time. I thought about reasons.
Why
would Bill be in contact with a radical Islamist? Why would he give up our one asset on the plane? Money? Threat? Blackmail? Why would
any
of us call a member of Aslim Taslam to give up one of our own? It made no sense.

Did it connect somehow to Sally's pretend illness? Was she even in the hospital?

I called the Krankenhaus and asked for Sally Compton's room. After a moment, the nurse on duty said she would put me through. I hung up, then heard a knock on the door. It was Gene, his collar undone, bleary eyed. I waved him in. “Celia, there's something you need to look at.”

I followed him back through the maze of cubicles to his desk and stood beside him as he shook his mouse, waking up his terminal. He was on the ORF Web site, an article with embedded video just under the title, in German, “Third Death at Airport.”

“It's two minutes old,” Gene told me as he clicked
PLAY
and raised the volume on his speakers. I leaned closer to get a better look.

It was low-light grainy, but clear enough to make out. A long shot of Flight 127 parked on the empty tarmac. In the darkness behind the plane lay an open, flat field and, farther, the lights of distant buildings. The whole airport had been shut down.

The camera was on a tripod, perfectly stable, and the image looked like a photograph. Then a hole appeared in the side of the plane—the forward entry door, opening. The cameraman, realizing he finally had something, zoomed straight into that hole, so we could see the shadowy form of a man standing in the opening. It was hard to make out his features, but he looked elderly, gray hair contaminating the blackness. White shirt, sleeves rolled up, and beige slacks. Mustache, dark skin. Then, without warning, the head blurred as if it had been knocked hard from behind—a distant
thump
sounded—and the man tumbled out of the doorway and dropped from the frame.

The frame jiggled as the cameraman tried to figure out what to do. It moved sharply down, so that we could see the body crumpled on the tarmac, then moved up again to the doorway. Another figure stood there, also dark-skinned, but much younger. We would later identify him as Ibrahim Zahir. Like the dead man, he wore a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves. He also held a pistol. A hissing sound filled Gene's speakers as the gain on the microphone was raised. The man shouted in English, “Take away your spy!” Then he pulled the airplane door shut.

“Mom! She's being bad!”

I break from my reverie and rush to the living room. Ginny's stacked her plastic building blocks against the corner of her playpen, forming an approximation of steps. She's standing on the top one and trying to get her leg over the edge of the gate. At that same moment, Drew wanders in and says, “Look at our little genius!”

Evan shifts on the sofa so that his back is toward us. I worry he's getting jealous of the attention his little sister is showered with. Drew goes to pick up Ginny, and I continue to the bedroom to change. As I slip into jeans that once upon a time were loose on me, I open my laptop. As I'm buttoning my blouse, the machine dings an incoming e-mail. When I see Henry's name, I have to sit down. He's going to be in my neck of the woods.

 

4

Two days later, I'm sitting at a picnic table on the terrace outside the Carmel Academy of Performing Arts while Evan is inside taking ballet lessons. He's the only boy in his class, but it took only a couple of lessons for him to get over this fact—he's the center of attention. Ginny is safely with Consuela at My Museum, getting active and social, which means I have forty-five minutes to make up my mind. From my purse I take out the white, embossed card I was handed two weeks after we arrived here. Just the name in small caps—
KARL STEIN
—and a phone number.

I haven't answered Henry's e-mail yet. What I know and what I suspect about his interests are muddy, and it's taken me two full days to decide what's to be done. I called Bill, and his answer was definitive: “Do not meet him under any circumstances. Don't give him an opening.”

But Bill speaks from fear. His desire is to run from all fights. He's retired, after all, and all he wants is peace during his final years. I can understand this, because unlike Drew I want the same thing. The last thing I want is to be drawn into Henry's double-dealing. There's a significant difference between Bill and me, though. I have children, and once you have children your life begins all over again. You start to take care of your health and welfare with a new imperative—the imperative to be around to protect them from the world. It's no longer about living well now, but about living well for as long as humanly possible. Therefore, a quick fix is no solution. Problems must be dealt with head-on. Threats must be neutralized.

I've already made up my mind, yet I still hesitate. It's something in the air, and in the leafy beauty all around me. It's in the quiet calm that has come to define my life, even when the kids are acting up. There's a silence here, between the words, that I've grown to depend on, and if I make the call it'll be shattered.

There's no choice, though. Not really. If I withdraw, Henry will follow me because by now he's desperate. He's terrified in the way that only the truly self-absorbed are, and I won't be able to shake him so easily. He will come here. He won't just shatter the silence; he'll try to shatter everything that I have.

So I take my phone and type out Karl Stein's number. As it rings, I wonder if the number's still in service. Maybe he's switched phones, and I'll end up talking to some teenager who's never heard of Karl Stein and is only worried about getting a call from some girl he's crushing on. Maybe this will be harder than I expect.

I needn't worry—he answers on the fourth ring.

“Karl Stein,” he says.

“Karl, hi. This is Celia Favreau. We last talked in June, and—”

“Celia,” he says with a rising pitch to his voice. “Cee to her friends. You still living in paradise? Carmel?”

“Yes. I am.” A mother and daughter are lumbering up the stairs, the girl's tutu stained with grape juice. I turn away and lower my voice. “Do you remember the conversation we had some years ago? About Bill Compton.”

“Of course, of course,” he says, all joviality. “I also remember you told me to go fuck myself.”

“Sorry.”

“Happens more often than you might think. Don't worry about it.”

“Listen,” I say, realizing I can't say it all on this phone. “I need to talk with you. But not on an open line.”

“You want me to fly out there?”

“Maybe. Well, not if it's not necessary.”

“I always like an excuse to get out of the office,” he says, all old-boy in-jokiness, then settles down. “But if you just want to talk securely, I can text you an address in Pacific Grove. You go there and ask to use the phone. Sound like a plan?”

“Sounds fine,” I say. “I'm not sure when—”

“Ginny and Evan,” he says, and I imagine he pulled up my file as we spoke. “Kids do put a strain on our time.”

“You're not kidding.”

“No worries. Just call as soon as you get a chance. I'll have my phone on me 24/7.”

“Thank you, Karl.”

Not until that afternoon, after a black woman leads me up the stairs of a Pacific Grove condo to a simple little room with an encrypted satellite phone, and I'm finally able to use all my words to tell Karl Stein exactly what my problem is, does it occur to me that Karl probably has kids himself. Unlike Henry, he knows that the world is a lot bigger than his own needs.

 

5

I wake, terrified and swinging, but instead of Suleiman Wahed I'm hitting Drew. He's saying, “Celia!
Celia!
” and trying in vain to catch my wrists. The orange haze clears, and my fists slow down, finally allowing him to catch them. He holds my hands tight and watches my face until my breaths gradually come under control. My back and face are drenched in sweat. “Hey,” he says. “You with me?”

I nod, and he lets go.

He props his head on a hand, elbow in his pillow, watching as I sit up. “The plane?”

I nod again and get to my feet, then keep walking until I'm at their doors. I check on them—first Ginny, because she's smaller, then Evan. They are exactly where I left them last night, untouched. In the bathroom I strip out of my wet nightie, splash water on myself, dry off with a spare towel, and head back. The clock radio tells me it's five in the morning. Drew's eyes are closed, but when I climb into bed he opens them. “Want to tell me about it?”

“I want to go back to sleep.”

“Have you talked to Leon about it?”

“Of course,” I say, not wanting to get into it. “But I don't need a shrink to tell me why I dream about that plane.”

“Maybe you need one to help you stop dreaming about that plane.”

He's trying be helpful, I know. Constructive, the way he once ran his arm of the General Motors Corporation, seeking out problems and banging them back into shape. But I say, “Don't start.”

“Start what? I just think you shouldn't have to suffer.”

How to explain it to him? Could I tell him that my hope is that after this evening I won't be cursed by this dream anymore? No, because he'll ask why. He'll want to know how dinner with my old lover will translate into peaceful nights. Then, because I can't tell him more, I'll have to deal with his jealousy, for a man of his age can't help but see a threat in every younger man who comes along. So I just turn my back to him and close my eyes. “Don't worry about me,” I say.

I wait for the sound of him settling his head back on the pillow, but it doesn't come. Just silence. He's staring at the back of my head, waiting. Sometimes this man drives me crazy. So I turn to find him watching me with glazed eyes, as if he's about to weep. But Drew Favreau doesn't weep—it's not in his DNA. This is as close as he gets.

“What?” I say.