All the Old Knives (20 page)

“Anything?” I ask.

He shrugs. In front of him on the table are a sticky roll and a cup of milk. He eats like a child. “Merkel flew her prisoners here, so now they've all been collected. Some prison outside of town. They're not telling us which prison, which we're not happy about.”

“They're probably not happy we waited to tell them about Ahmed.”

He shrugs.

“Are they going to give in?”

Owen takes a bite of the roll. “Ernst doesn't think so. He says that it's just a ruse to buy time.”

“Then what's the plan?”

“Well, the attack is off. They're scared of Ahmed's last message, before he was killed.”

“Do we believe it was him?”

Another shrug. “I don't. But the Austrians don't take my word as gospel. The question is,” he says quietly, “how did they get him?”

Despite myself, I settle into the chair opposite him. “What's the answer?”

He raises his brows. “You? Me? Ernst? Bill? Or maybe he just did something stupid.”

Here it is, my first chance to say it, but I don't. Instead, I give a pleasant smile and climb to my feet and wander back to my desk, just outside Bill's office. I settle down heavily. I yawn into the back of my hand and wonder why I'm not marching into Vick's office and giving up my lover. My ex-lover. Because that's what he is now.

Yet I'm saying nothing. Why? Is love really so stupid? Bill's love certainly is, locking him up tight with a monster. And mine? Maybe it is. Maybe—and this is a new thought, a sort of revelation—this is the problem. Maybe love is the wrong way to live. Maybe anything that infects good sense is to be shunned. It's a possibility I'll examine closer, when there's time.

Now, though, I have to let my good sense take over, so I swallow a last sip of coffee and get up, coming out of my self-absorption in time to notice that the office, even running on a skeleton crew, is noisy. Ernst is crossing from one side of the floor to the other—from his office toward Vick's—and Leslie is leaning over Gene's desk, shouting, “Ask them! Don't go on hearsay! Ask them if it's true!” Owen is walking out of the break room, a paper napkin to his mouth, his eyes on the floor as he listens to one of his young code breakers talk quietly into his ear. I go to Leslie, the closest, and break into her tirade. “What's going on?”

Her eyes flash at me, and I read hatred there, as if by interrupting her I've broken international law. I've never met this Leslie before. She says, “Go ask Daddy,” then turns back to Gene and says, “Follow up with Heinrich! Now!” Gene types frantically.

I follow Ernst to Vick's office, and through the blinds I see our chief of station with his chin on a fist, elbow on his desk, watching Ernst march around the room, talking and waving his hands, so that he looks more Italian than Austrian. In the open cabinet, the television is set to ORF, as it has been all day. I knock on the door and walk right in. Ernst says, “I told you. I told you all—” before stopping to glare at me. I ignore him.

“What is it?”

Vick raises his head and leans back, stretching. “Close the door, Cee.”

I don't know if he wants me inside or outside, so I just close it behind myself and stand waiting. Ernst is glaring. Vick says, “The Austrians think they're dead.”

“Who?”

“Everyone. The passengers, the hijackers. The crew. Everyone.”

What I imagine at this moment is an explosion, a great fireball of destruction, but on the muted television a local government official is signing some kind of legislation. “How do they know?”

“They don't know, not for sure. But about five minutes ago—”

“Ten,” Ernst corrects.

“Ten, right. Well, they started up the engine. The plane didn't go anywhere, didn't light up, but the Austrians started receiving signals. A message came through.
Aslim Taslam does not negotiate.
The engine is still running. They've got hi-res cameras focused on the cockpit, and they recorded the pilots dying. Both of them, sitting right in their seats.”

“Shot?” I ask.

Vick shakes his head sadly, and Ernst, impatient, breaks in. “No one touched them. They suffocated.”

“Respiratory failure,” Vick says, as if that makes it any clearer.

I look from Vick to Ernst and back again. “They turned on the plane,” I say as it crystallizes in my head, “to start up the ventilation system.”

Vick nods slowly. “That's what we think. It's what the Austrians think. But we can't go in if we don't know.”

“Sarin,” Ernst says. “It's sarin. They need to order doses of atropine and pralidoxime.
Now
.”

“Maybe,” Vick says.

But this time Ernst is right. I can feel it.

 

5

She says, “A hundred and twenty people killed. What? For
me
?” She shakes her head. “You
are
talking in riddles, Henry.”

Of course I am, because after years of silence it's not easy to say these things aloud. But maybe she deserves the real story, the truth behind the truth, the kind of thing that, once upon a time, was her bread and butter. Maybe a final wish is in order. Maybe—and I know how desperate this is, how adolescent—if she knows, she will understand. For a moment, I hold on to that thought. I let my childishness take over and embark on a brief journey into an alternate future. It begins with me telling her, in detail, exactly how I saved her. Her guilt, as she finally comprehends what she's done to me, is accompanied by tears. She gets up and crouches beside my chair, holds on to my aching stomach, squeezing, her tears marking my shirt. She pets me, then climbs up, whispering
Thank you,
and begins to kiss me with grateful fervor. Then she takes my hand and says,
Let's go.

This fantasy is the most enjoyable moment of the day, but I can see from her face that even in close proximity there is no psychic connection. She never felt my late-night molestations, and she feels nothing now. She is on a different plane. I say, “I talk in riddles because that's what I deal with every day.”

Not even a hint of a smile. No acknowledgment of my wit.

I reach a hand across the table, but there are no slender fingers for me to grab. She stares into my eyes, as if my hand doesn't exist. I say, “You have no idea what I went through. After you left. You have no idea—”

“Your
feelings
were hurt?” she snaps, and my hand draws back. “You had a broken
heart
? You want me to cry for you? Is that what this dinner is about?”

“No, Cee. Listen. I—“

“Shut
up
!” she shouts, holding up a hand, flat, palm facing me. “Enough, okay?”

Over in the corner, I see the waiter leaning back against the kitchen door, arms crossed over his chest, watching my humiliation. I've still got some pride, so I raise my chin at him. “You like watching, asshole?”

Impassive, he retreats into the kitchen, but not before a smile slips onto his face. Then it occurs to me that he hasn't brought us the bill. Or maybe he brought it when I was in the can, and Celia took care of it.

She's not even looking at me now. She's leaned back, arms across her stomach, and is staring past me at the front door again. If we were a comic strip, she would have a black scribble of smoke above her head. Still looking past me, she speaks quietly, as if only partly to me. “When they were all killed, I didn't know what to do. I thought … well, I don't know exactly what I thought. Maybe you were innocent. Maybe it wasn't Ilyas Shishani on the other end of that phone number. It was some other Russian speaker. I can't say I believed this, but I wanted to believe it. Stranger things have happened. So I buried it. I buried the call from Bill's phone in order to protect you. After all, they were dead, weren't they? Putting you in front of a tribunal wasn't going to bring them back to life. Was it?”

I watch her looking past me and say, “We don't do tribunals these days.”

“I know,” she says. Her eyes are wet again when she focuses on me. “But then you chose that one piece of evidence—the phone call—and scared poor Bill half to death. You thought that by making a call from his line you would frame him … or me. But I'm betting you didn't know that by pushing the issue you would hang yourself. Did you?”

“Nobody's hanging me,” I tell her.

She smiles at that—actually smiles—and says, “If that's what you want to believe.”

Though I made up my mind a while ago, it's now truly apparent that I can't go back on the decision. Celia will not survive this night. She can't. She's put it all together, and though she put it together years ago and said nothing, I can't depend on her silence now. Therefore, the decision is not really my decision. It's an evolutionary choice. Either I abide by the need for self-preservation or I die. There's no decision at all.

So it doesn't matter. Enlighten the doomed. “Do you really want to know?”

She blinks at me, waiting.

 

6

It is December 7, 2006—two months after the murder of Anna Politkovskaya in her Moscow elevator, two weeks after the death of Aleksandr Litvinenko in London, his bald, hospitalized head a fixture of the press during his month-long battle with polonium-210. It's not about blame—these deaths are certainly not my fault—but about association. How the reminders of Moscow can draw me back into the grinding duplicity that, in the end, is how I define that chapter of my life.

I wake with Celia looking down at me. She's smiling, and with the anxiety that overwhelms me these days, I react to that beautiful face by covering my head with a pillow. She leaves to get coffee, and I scold myself. I've been doing this for weeks, each newspaper and Internet site reminding me of Moscow, and as a result I've been pushing her away. Occasionally, she asks what the problem is, but I don't want to speak about Moscow. I don't want to make it any more real than it already is.

So I say nothing, and when she returns with steaming cups we talk about our plans for the day. I pretend to care, because I know that in my right mind I
do
care, particularly about her. That's when I notice a blinking light on my phone. A waiting message says

Schloss Schonbrunn—GLORIETTE—10.00

There's no doubting what it is—a request for a meet at the Schönbrunn Palace, at the axis point of the gardens. There's a café there that I've visited a couple of times, but never for work. Who am I meeting? I don't know the number.

So I cut the morning with Celia short and drive westward to reach the sprawling palace grounds, which in the blustery winter are empty. I fight the wind heading across the park. The Gloriette section is closed for the season, but the gate is unlocked, and when I reach the imperial arches of the Gloriette itself the door to the café is also unlocked. I open it, looking into the dark interior, where chairs and tables have been stacked against a far wall. It's dead. Then I hear it: the click of heels against tile. A man in a heavy, quilted coat emerges from behind the dark counter, limping and smiling, saying, “Henry!”

It takes a moment to process his face. He's aged in the past four years, his dark features ashen and gray. He's grown fitter as well and, in the way of thin people, more intense. He looks like a weary but improved version of the man I knew in Moscow. He's smiling, approaching me rapidly, a hand out. I accept it, and we shake. Unexpectedly, he embraces me and kisses my cheeks. “Ilyas?” I say. “What the hell are you doing here?”

I'm scared—I know he's no longer the gentle baker I once met with, but he's doing a good job impersonating that once-innocent man.

“Come,” he says, his voice full of warmth, pulling me deeper inside. He grabs two chairs from the wall and sets them on either side of a table. “I'm sorry—they've cut off the electricity, so there's nothing warm to drink. But I remembered,” he says, taking from his deep coat pockets two plastic bottles of Coca-Cola. “You still drink it?”

“Not often enough,” I say, accepting one and sitting across from him.

How do I feel? It's complicated. There's fear, yes, but more. I'm unnerved, for out of the past one of those Moscow faces has emerged, one of the few I was actually fond of. But Ilyas was part of those Russian conversations that ruined me. Ilyas was one of those insidious compromises that forced me to finally flee Russia.

“What are you doing here?” I repeat.

His smile doesn't leave. “You look so good, Henry. Imperial cities become you.”

“And you're in excellent shape.”

“Thank you,” he says, shrugging as he drinks his Coke. I drink my own; it burns. He says, “Looks are deceiving. I've got a limp, you saw. A present from Vladimir Putin.”

“Putin?”

He smiles again, toothily, and takes out a pack of Marlboro Reds. He offers one; I decline. He lights his. “I am only here briefly,” he says. “To see you.”

“I'm honored, Ilyas.” Though I'm not. The shock is wearing off, and I'm left with what has become of Ilyas Shishani: I'm sitting with a wanted terrorist.

He raises the smoldering cigarette next to his ear. “Do you remember Moscow, Henry? We had what could best be called a tense relationship.”

“I don't remember it that way. We had conversations.”

“Yes. But do you remember how it started out? When I wasn't sure I wanted to share what I knew with an American? Remember what you said?”

Of course I remember, but I say nothing.

“You told me that all it took was a phone call, and the Russians would be on me in a heartbeat. You used that word—‘heartbeat.' So I cooperated. Yes, we had some laughs, and yes, you did donate some money to my life, but our relationship was defined by that first conversation. ‘Heartbeat'—that word never left my head,” he says, tapping his temple with his cigarette hand. “You see my point?”