The Nearest Exit (28 page)

Milo listened. Despite himself, he paid attention to every word, every digression, and, worse, all the physical details. Erika Schwartz
described the design on the scarf Adriana wore when she boarded the bus headed west, and though he knew this was a detail she probably couldn’t know, it remained with him anyway, all the way through to the warehouse in St. Pauli where the initial rapes occurred, to the Berlin apartment where she was used many times a night. The scarf was decorated with flowers shaped into paisleys. She had not used the mawkish word “tears,” but she didn’t need to. He knew that a paisley looked like the drop of salty water that forms at the corner of a child’s eye, and the image just wouldn’t leave him.

Because in the end Milo Weaver wasn’t outside the moral universe, no matter how well the Company had trained him. Once, when he had been a younger Tourist, he had lived without empathy. That had held him in good stead for the first seven years, from 1994 until 2001. He had stayed alive because of it. But once he’d left to build a home, he couldn’t escape the continual reminders that his universe had become imbued with morality—bathing his infant daughter’s fat, squirming body, later walking her to school and listening to her rambling stories, making curry for his wife, vacuuming on the weekends. Simply taking out the trash every other day had reinforced a moral responsibility that he’d had to learn bit by bit. It hadn’t been a smooth transition; he’d screwed it up many times during those first years, but even his wife’s patience had taught him new lessons.

By the time Owen Mendel asked him to return to Tourism, he was too far gone. Tourism is for the young, the unmarked. Tourism is for the fatherless and childless. Milo was no longer any of these things, which was why he knew he was doomed, eventually, to failure.

Yet he was also aware. He knew why Erika Schwartz was telling her story, and why she was telling it in the way she was. She knew that he had a child. She knew how to get at him.

Knowing hardly helped, though. As he realized the full breadth of Adriana Stanescu’s cursed life, the air kept leaving his body, and his stomach seemed to collapse upon itself. He even felt paisley-shaped saltwater building up, but he willed his eyes dry and said nothing. That was important. He focused his emotions elsewhere, on the traffickers. When he felt his eyes dampening, in his head he beat these faceless creatures senseless. But their very facelessness lessened
the effect. So he drew from his memory one Roman Ugrimov, a Russian businessman who had once killed his own underaged lover, pregnant with his child, in order to prove a point. There, then, was someone real, someone he knew. So he went at the old man with his bare hands and crushed him slowly, as he never had in reality.

Was that enough? No, because Adriana’s story was bigger than a few lecherous individuals. She hadn’t been snuffed out by people as much as she had been cursed, from the moment of birth, by secret organizations. Her misery had been predestined.

He almost gave up. A large part of him wanted to throw up his hands and tell Schwartz everything she asked for, then return in disgrace to New York. It was another way of quitting Tourism. He could confess his weakness to Drummond and wait for the pink slip. Then the exit interviews. The discovery of his treasonous relationship with his father. The quiet bullet in the back of the head.

When she finished, Erika Schwartz offered another of her disturbing smiles and clapped her fat hands together like a child. “She was saved! Really, Mihai was a saint, or at least that’s what the media would call him if they got hold of the story. But you and I know better, don’t we? He was a chump. He gave up his own business for the life of a stupid little girl who shouldn’t have gotten on that bus in the first place.”

He wanted to shout
Enough!
but didn’t. Instead, he stared at her blue eyes and tried to keep his throat open and clear. He managed a single, brief sentence. “It’s a terrible story.”

Erika watched him, admiring his coldness while hating it. Was this Tourist a lover, or not? “Terrible in its own way,” she said, “but if your name isn’t Stanescu, what difference does it make?”

He blinked his red-rimmed eyes, which were the only outward sign that the story was having a real effect. Then he cleared his throat. “I suppose you’re right. It happens every day. At least she was rescued.”

“Exactly,” she said, “but you know easterners—they don’t learn. You have to pound even the simplest lessons into their heads. Her
parents, though they didn’t know the whole story, knew that she wanted to go to Germany. So they applied for a visa. And, finally, Adriana was in the West. Like every other kid, she went to school and made friends. She was foolish enough to think she had a life ahead of her. She thought that the past could remain past. Then, well, you came along. Didn’t you?”

He considered his answer. “Does anyone here have a cigarette?”

“Sounds like someone’s giving up,” said Oskar.

“Gustav,” said Erika, and the small man took out his pack, lit one, and handed it to Weaver. He didn’t seem to like the taste at first, but by the third drag was inhaling heavily.

He finally said, “I’m my own man, Miss Schwartz. Yes, I used to work for the Company, but that was a while ago, and I certainly wasn’t ever a secret agent—or whatever you think I am. You people are obviously convinced I’m something I’m not. I was just an analyst—I read magazines, mostly. It was the financial stuff that got me in trouble. They drummed me out, which was fine with me, but the pension plan was terrible. So I went into insurance—that’s something everyone needs, right? Well, not as many people as you’d think. Expats seem to think they’ll live forever. Or maybe they didn’t trust me. I’m starting to wonder about that. Can people see in your face that you’re a murderer? I mean, is it marked on there?”

It was disappointing. Would withholding the cigarette have made a difference? Probably not. It had just given Weaver a moment to reweave his idiotic story. She stood and gazed down at him. “Why don’t you watch some television? Heinrich, Gustav—please make sure he doesn’t doze.”

They nodded their assent, and she walked slowly up the stairs, Oskar behind her, impatient. No one said a thing, least of all Milo Weaver. She was starting to despair about her whole plan. Then she heard Rada Stanescu weeping on the television. It gave her hope.

Erika slept upstairs in her bedroom, while Oskar took a downstairs guest bedroom. Heinrich and Gustav took turns on the cot, allowing Milo to stretch out on the sofa, but even though they had cut off the sound the video loop of Adriana Stanescu’s media coverage greeted him whenever he opened his eyes.

In the morning, drinking coffee in the kitchen, Erika mused over whether or not to have another talk with Weaver before work. She decided against it. As she told Oskar, “This man will expect a morning chat—and I’ll lay odds that over the night he’s come up with something clever, some piece of information he’ll share with me. Something about our operations, maybe. Some information that looks like a favor. When I follow up on it, it will alert his people. So I won’t even go downstairs. I don’t want to be tempted.”

“What do we do with him?”

“Show him videos until I get back. I want him to remember every frame.”

Once Oskar had passed on the order to Heinrich and Gustav, Erika drove him back to his car in the Perlacher Forest, and they arrived at work fifteen minutes apart.

Everything she did felt like busywork. Even her noon conference call felt like busywork, and that included Berndt Hesse and the minister of the interior, Wolfgang Schäuble. They discussed two
topics: Sunday’s news that Fidel Castro had retired from power, and the minister’s conviction that the controversial
Jyllands-Posten
Muhammad cartoons should be reprinted by German newspapers—an issue that couldn’t raise Erika beyond a dull ambivalence.

The one thing that provoked emotion was the BND operator telling her that Andrei Stanescu was on the line for her. She told the operator to please tell him she was out, and to refer him in the future to Dieter Reich. Again, the stutter hit her, and the operator said, “Could you please repeat that last bit?”

She had sent Oskar off to wait in the forest and was preparing to leave when she heard a voice. “Erika? Want to take a walk?”

She looked up from her desk, surprised to find Teddi Wartmüller filling the doorway. Surprised he had condescended to visit her office instead of summoning her to his. He was looking as elegant as ever, a black overcoat hiding his long frame, but he was tired, too. “Right now?”

“I’d appreciate it. I’m off to a black tie dinner in an hour.”

“Black tie?”

“American consulate, and they don’t appreciate lateness. Grab your coat. I’m dying for a cigarette.”

He waited patiently, watching her close the folder she’d been browsing and then work her way into a standing position.

He peered around the office. “Oskar not in?”

“Interviewing some new applicants.”

“Anything promising?”

She shrugged as she slipped into the vast quilted coat that hid her own frame. “Too early to know.”

“That’s how it always is,” he said pointlessly, then stepped aside so that she could leave the office first. As they continued down the long corridor, he remained behind her, which gave her the unsettling sense that she was being shadowed. He said, “This should only take a few minutes.”

“It’s no problem at all.”

They nodded at the front-door guards hovering around the metal detectors and crossed the empty lane to a small park on the edge of the grounds lit in the early evening darkness by lamp poles
amid the trees. By the time they arrived, Erika was out of breath, and he suggested they share a nearby bench. She was very aware of her own weight when the bench creaked and sagged and Wartmüller had to take the far end lest he slide into her.

“So,” she said.

“Yes,” Wartmüller answered, then peered across the shadowy grounds. He licked his teeth and took out his Marlboros. “It was a nice trick, cornering Dieter like that, but I don’t think that’s the way we should be running things here.”

“No?”

“No. And I’d like you to give back the American.”

“American?”

He lit a cigarette, taking his time. “Milo Weaver.”

“Oh, Milo Weaver,” she said. “I don’t know where he is.”

Wartmüller pursed his lips and gave a disappointed
tsk-tsk
. “Please, Erika. He’s in your basement. Oskar is probably tending to him now. I certainly hope he’s not damaging the man—he’s not, is he?”

Erika didn’t answer. Had she let something slip? Perhaps all it had taken was a bit of suspicion and a review of the neighborhood security tapes—the excuse for the van had probably been weak. Perhaps Weaver had been visible from the road when they transferred him into the house. Or maybe Gustav had stupidly stepped outside for a smoke. “Listen, Theodor. If I did have Milo Weaver, I wouldn’t keep him in my house. I’d use one of our nice, secure cells.”

He continued to smoke, staring into the distance. “You want to play it this way, fine. Don’t admit a thing. Remember that I’m a friend. I’m not interested in undermining your career. I simply want the man set free—no paperwork on this at all. I’ve also received assurances that the Americans won’t seek retribution. Just make sure he’s in one piece, okay?”

She stared hard at the side of his face. “The Americans talked to you about him? Are they the ones who say I have him?”

“Do you really think there’s anything you can do without the Americans knowing, Erika? If they really want to know? We have a staff of six thousand. The CIA? At least twenty thousand. Not to
mention their technology: A satellite can follow you home and take pictures of your house, while the infrared watches you go to bed.”

“That’s ludicrous, and you know it.”

He flicked away his cigarette. “Don’t ask me how they know. To someone my age, it’s all magic. Just know that they know, and please give them back their man. None of us can afford their wrath just now.”

Erika watched him head back to the building. She breathed in the cold. She wasn’t prone to cursing, but at that moment a stream spewed from her. Then she got up and put all her frustration into stamping out Wartmüller’s smoldering cigarette.

She bought her wine and Snickers from Herr al-Akir, making no effort to ease his anxiety, then picked up Oskar. He began with his complaints, but she cut him off and explained the situation.