All the Old Knives (19 page)

“Did I?”

She's cool now, tears gone. Hardening right before my eyes.

She says, “I'm not sure what you think you can do here tonight. I've been able to figure out some of it, but not all. You obsess over one small thing—me neglecting to inform everyone that someone used Bill's phone to call Shishani. You fixate on this, and then you go corner Bill. You get him to admit he doesn't know about it, which means that if I didn't tell him, I didn't tell
anybody.
Right? Very good. But where next? Do you think that the only conclusion that can be reached is that I was in cahoots with Shishani?” She shakes her head. “Have you really been that cloistered?”

“You tell me, then,” I say, standing up to her despite a resurgence of pain in my stomach. “Tell me what other conclusions there are.”

She smiles again. She straightens. “You know what I thought when I found that phone number? I thought the obvious—Bill had been selling us out. I didn't understand why, or how he'd ended up roped into this mess, but he was guilty. Then Ahmed was killed. I was beside myself. So I came straight home—to your home. To you. You remember?”

I blink at her. My vision's a little blurry, but I don't want to start wiping my eyes. I don't want her to think I'm getting teary. “Yeah,” I say. “I do remember.”

Because I do. I remember every act of sex we engaged in. I've lived off of those memories.

She's nodding slowly. “That, Henry, was when I knew.”

 

2

He's pushing into me, hauling up my left leg, gripping my ankle in his sweaty hand. Straining. The veins of his strong neck are standing out in the darkness, and down here below it feels like he's splitting me open. This is all my doing, for when I arrived at his apartment I said nothing and went straight for his body. And it's nearly working; it's almost enough to push away Bill's sad face and the gut-wrenching betrayal I feel. All I want to do is escape into sex, so that I can disappear and not have to face questions of moral outrage. I want it all to be simple. A boy and a girl fucking in an unmade bed with the Viennese night hanging outside.

Then it's over. He's gasping beside me, saying something about what kind of apartment he thinks we can afford, how close to the Danube, and what a crazy good idea it is. I say, “Sure. Yeah,” but I'm still stuck in indecision. I want to tell him about Bill. I want Henry to sit across from me, still pink-skinned from all his exertion, and make it simple for me. Either:
A traitor is a traitor, Cee. You've got to bring it to Vick.
Or:
This is Bill we're talking about. Let's take it to him first
. I want him to take responsibility for deciding what to do, because in Moscow he became familiar with betrayal and trickery, while in Dublin I lunched with émigrés and danced to electronic music and learned how to stomach heavy ales without getting sick.

When he gets up, kisses me hard on the mouth, and tells me he's going to shower, I wonder why he doesn't see my indecision. Can't he read it in my face, or is it too dark in here? How long does it take for a man to learn the ciphers of your moods? A year? Ten? Never? I suppose it's something I'll be finding out.

As the hiss of water runs in the bathroom, I pull on my clothes and stumble into the kitchen, where only this morning I made coffee and thought about leaving Henry. Now I'm staying, and I just want a little coffee so I can think through everything rationally. I fill up the machine with water and grounds, then turn it on. That's when I hear the
d-ding! d-ding!
of a phone ringing. It's not mine, nor is it the melody of Henry's Nokia. Frowning, I step out of the kitchenette into the living room and pause, listening.
D-ding!
Then nothing. Yet it's enough to send me over to the coat rack, where my overcoat and Henry's hang limply. I pat Henry's coat—in the breast pocket is a hard lump. I pull it out just as the screen illumination is turning off, a flash of phone number disappearing. No, it's not Henry's regular phone. It's a Siemens. Gray and too big to be comfortable. It's the second phone that all field agents keep—prepaid in cash, anonymous. But I haven't seen this one before, so maybe it's a simple burner, to be thrown away once the minutes have been used up. Before putting it back, I press the menu button, and the screen lights up. Along the bottom of the screen it asks me to unlock the phone in order to use it, and right above the request, in the middle of the screen, it says
MISSED CALL
and displays a long phone number that begins
+
9626.

It doesn't hit me then, not entirely, and this delay is a sign of either my exhaustion or my feelings for Henry. I wonder offhand where the call is from, but the smell of brewing coffee has reached me, and I'm more interested in that. I put the phone back in his pocket and turn toward the kitchenette before stopping in the middle of the living room.
+
962—Jordan. 6—Amman.

I take out the phone again and look at the number. And I know, because when I discovered Bill's treachery I kept looking at the number, trying to find ways for the digits to rearrange themselves to prove his innocence. They never did. Now I'm reading that number on Henry's spare phone.

“Where are you?” I hear, but it's back in the bedroom. With adrenaline pumping in my head I replace the phone and rush back to the kitchenette. The pot is half full. Trying to control my voice, I say, “Making coffee.”

“Good idea,” he says. “I'm going to have to hit a club downtown, see if I can't find some Moroccan I've been hearing about.”

By now he's walking down the hallway toward me, clad in a waist-high towel, smiling, hair glistening.

“What's wrong?” he asks as he reaches me, two strong hands touching my shoulders, then sliding down to my elbows. His breath smells minty.

Everything is wrong, but for him I choose a single tragedy. “Ahmed was killed. I found out just before I came here.”

His smile wavers, sliding away, and then he purses his lips as if he's trying to keep something in. Is he? “Shit,” he says, then repeats himself.
“Shit.”
He gives my elbows a final squeeze and turns away, heading back to the bedroom, not letting me see his face. Only now, after that phone number, do I wonder about this. He says, “I'd better get moving, then.”

I want to follow him. I want to corner him in the bedroom and tell him more. Tell him,
They told us to take away our spy. They knew. How did they know, Henry?
But I don't do that, because for the first time in our relationship I'm scared of Henry Pelham. So I stay in the kitchenette and pour two mugs of coffee and drink one as I wait for him to come out of the bedroom. When he finally does, he's dressed, and I hand him his cup. Distractedly, he thanks me. What's he thinking? Is he thinking of a Moroccan he needs to track down? Or is he thinking of Ilyas Shishani, his controller? Is he thinking—and this just occurs to me—that the one thing he needs to do is to make sure no one captures Shishani, so that he isn't implicated?

“What are you going to do?” he asks.

“Go home, take a nap, then get back to the office.”

“You can do that here, you know.”

I nod, feeling like the only thing to do is to agree with him. “If that's okay with you.”

He smiles as he comes over and gives me a kiss that now tastes of coffee. “We might as well get started on cohabitation.”

I smile back and watch as he opens the drawer beside the oven and takes out his spare keys. Ceremoniously, he places them on the counter. I tilt my head regally to show that I recognize what this moment represents.

When he puts on his coat, I come over and, like a dutiful wife, smooth his collar. I'm really very good at this. He grins. “Off to work, honey!”

I give him a quick kiss on the cheek. “Go save the world, darling.”

Then, five minutes after he's left, I run to the bathroom and vomit.

 

3

The story finally out, she just stares at me, and I'm not sure what to do. This is what has kept her strong this whole dinner. It's why I've been unable to make her break down like Bill.

Did I know? No. Or maybe I suspected it. Maybe I had the feeling, after her sudden departure from my life that night, that it wasn't just a fear of commitment pushing her away. And maybe this is why I've been so fixated on bringing the investigation to her doorstep and getting whatever I can out of her first. I lean back, not quite trusting myself to speak. I shift my legs, noticing the lump in my pocket.

Shit.

The phone. It recorded her whole story. I reach in and find the power button and press it long enough to be sure it's off. I'll have to edit it later, before I turn it over to Vick.
If
I turn it over to Vick, because I'm not sure there's enough on there to incriminate her. Because now, I realize, I have no choice. I will tell Treble to go ahead and take care of it, and by the time he's finished I'll be on a plane heading home, or rushing to some all-night clinic to deal with my fucking upset stomach. If Vick traces it to me, he will just have to believe whatever version of this night I choose to tell him.

Celia says, “You're not going to deny it, are you?”

I sniff, look around the restaurant. We're the only customers, and even the staff has disappeared into the kitchen. We're completely alone.

She says, “You were the one who knew Shishani from before. You were the only one with a connection to him. And you knew this left you vulnerable, so you went into Bill's office and called that number, just in case. Plant disinformation on the off-chance someone started investigating.”

“Where's this phone?” I ask, working off of hope now.

“What?”

“Nice story,” I say. “Nice way to turn it around. You see that number on my phone. But where is this phone? Do you
have
it?”

“Really?”

“What?”

She sighs. “That's really your defense?”

I shrug, mouth shut.

“What I'd like to know,” she says, “is why. I'd like to hear this now, before I go home.” She cocks her head. “You were a decent guy, Henry. You didn't stab people in the back. And when the job forced you to betray people, it hurt you. Was this about Moscow? Were you getting the Agency back for what happened there?”

Despite myself, I shake my head no.

“Then what was it? It certainly didn't make you rich. And I don't really think you went for all of Aslim Taslam's nonsense.”

In the far corner, I see our waiter looking out at us. I say, “Where's that chocolate mousse?”

“Forget the fucking chocolate,” she says, vitriolic now. “You're not getting dessert. Now tell me.”

“I'm not going to tell you anything, Celia.”

She looks past me and, feeling suspicious, I look over my shoulder. Nothing, just the front door, with blackness in its glass. Then I see two figures emerge from the dark—a middle-aged couple in matching blue windbreakers. Tourists. The man reaches for the handle, but it doesn't budge. It's locked. The woman taps him on the shoulder and points at a small sign in the window that, from our side, says,

Come in
we're

OPEN

They're reading the reverse.

“What time is it?” I say as I take out my cell phone, the regular one. It's only nine thirty. I've been here two and a half hours. I pocket the phone and find Celia's eyes on me again. The other phone, the one that is fatal in so many ways, is no longer recording a thing. So why not? Evidence doesn't matter anymore. Maybe facts will suffice. Maybe we're finally in that quiet space where all the masks fall away and we're left with just our skin. So I say, “I did it for you, Celia.”

She flinches, as if I've raised a threatening hand.
“What?”

“You can sit there and judge me. But I did it for you. And then you walked out on me. After everything that happened on that plane, how do you think I felt?”

She opens her mouth, closes it, then says, “I don't understand what you're saying, Henry.”

“This isn't a riddle, Cee. I did it for you.”

But it is a riddle, in a way. Both her hands are on the table, pressing down. “Please spell it out for me.”

Though it hurts in my midsection, I lean closer. “I did it to save your life. What I did killed many more, and in a way it killed me, too. But I saved you. I saved you because I thought we were going to be together. Then you walked.”

 

4

I rush through the apartment and find everything of mine. Underwear, toothbrush, sanitary pads, the works. I stuff it all into my purse, swallow coffee, and rush out. Remembering, I go back in and scoop up the keys from the kitchen counter and leave again, locking up this time. I find my car on wet Florianigasse, and only after I get inside do I think to be wary. I look around, wondering if he knows what I know, then wondering what that might mean. I wonder if all this recent affection, this invitation to move in with him and to start envisioning a future for us—is all this just a way of taking me off the scent?

But no—his old Mercedes is gone. And, no—he doesn't know. How could he? For all he knows I'm waiting in the apartment, pining for him.

I start to drive back home before changing my mind and returning to the embassy. It's four thirty in the morning, and I half expect the place to be empty. But of course it's not. Bill is still gone, but Vick is in his office, making calls to America. Ernst is catching a nap in his office, feet propped up on the corner of his desk. I even find Owen sitting in the break room when I get more coffee. He says, “I didn't expect to see you.”

“I'm like a dog,” I tell him. “Always come back.”

He tries on a smile; it doesn't fit. Mine doesn't, either.