The Nearest Exit (52 page)

“It is you,” the man said in heavily accented English.

With a voice harder than any she’d heard in her life, Milo said, “Go back inside, Tina.”

Tina had already locked up and pocketed the key. “What?”

“Inside. Take Stef.”

“Milo Weaver,” said the man on the steps.

“
Inside
, Tina.”

Her hands were shaking, but she got the door open and pulled Stephanie, who knew better than to ask questions right now, inside. They shut the door and watched through the window as Milo took a step down and began to speak softly to the man.

The window was thin, and they could catch phrases: . . .
should go home . . . can’t solve anything . . . not at my house
. . . Then they switched to German. The word “Stanescu” came to them, and Tina realized with an unsettling shift in her stomach that Stanescu was the name of the Europe an girl who’d been killed.

Then she recalled this man’s face (it looked so different in reality) from some video on CNN, with the weeping mother.
The poor man
, Tina thought, looking down at him over Milo’s shoulder. Then the poor man reached into the Barneys bag and removed a small pistol. All the air left her and she reached for Stephanie, who was glued to the glass, saying, “He’s got a gun! He’s got a gun!” Tina pulled her tight to her stomach and tugged her backward. “Stop, Mom!”

Tina wouldn’t stop. She understood enough about bullet trajectories to know that if that man tried to shoot Milo and missed, the bullet would come at them. She wouldn’t have her daughter in the way of that. Nor would she have Stephanie watch her father get shot. Tina had watched that before, in Venice, and knew how horrible it was.

She was hardly thinking as she lifted Stephanie, kicking, onto her shoulder, and with strength she didn’t know she had carried her up two flights and used her free hand to unlock the door and get inside. Stephanie ran for the window to look down, and Tina took out her phone and dialed 911. “There’s a man with a gun,” she told the bland emergency operator as a single gunshot rang out. She dropped the phone and ran to the window, where Stephanie was screaming for her father. Tina looked down—the little man was rushing around the corner onto Seventh, and Milo was sitting on the front steps.

She rushed to the door and spun around, pointing at Stephanie, who had begun to cry. Frail girl, shaking hands. “Stay here!” Tina shouted, then fled downstairs, thinking,
I’m a terrible mother
. She couldn’t help it. She was what she was.

By the time she reached the front steps three people were standing over Milo, two with cell phones to their ears, one holding Milo’s arm and speaking calmly to him. Milo was hunched forward, a bright red hand clutching at his stomach. Blood was all over the three concrete steps, and he was making guttural sounds. She pushed the stranger aside and got close to Milo’s face. His lips were too red, and so were his teeth, and when he coughed, bloody spittle shot out onto her blouse. “Honey,” she said. “Hey, baby. Look at me.”

From somewhere in the sky, she heard Stephanie calling to her, and looked up to see her head poking out of their window. “It’s okay!” Tina called. “He’s going to be fine! Just stay there!”

Milo was speaking. It was a whisper, so she leaned close. “It’s okay,” he said, as if he were repeating her words.

“It’s not okay,” she told him, “but it will be. The ambulance will be here.”

“Ambulanza,” he said, smiling as a drop of blood rolled down his chin. It was the Italian word for ambulance, she realized, then remembered Venice just as he was remembering it.

When a fresh wave of pain hit him, he leaned forward and squeezed her arm so hard it hurt. He buried his face in her breasts. She was calmer now—panic had given way to shock—and she asked if anyone (there were now a dozen people standing around) could see the ambulance. Two stout men ran to the corner to look. She held
on to Milo’s head as he whispered something into her cleavage. She tilted his head back. “What, hon?”

“I deserve this,” he said.

“No. No one deserves this.”

“You don’t,” he said. “Little Miss doesn’t.” He coughed up more blood.

When she looked down she saw that so much blood had come out that it looked as if they had both been shot, and she knew that wasn’t good. She took his face in her hands and made him look into her eyes. “Lover? Lover. Stay awake. Okay?”

He nodded, but closed his eyes as he did so, which terrified her. She slapped him once on the cheek, hard, and his eyes opened again. “Dominatrix,” he said, smiling. Then: “Push me back.”

“What?”

“To see her.”

She pushed his shoulders slowly, but when his face contorted in pain she asked for help from one of the men standing uselessly around. Finally, his back against the steps and his head leaned all the way back, he was staring skyward. Stephanie was still looking out the window, crying, and he gave her a smile and tried to call up to her, but couldn’t get the breath for it. So he told Tina what to say.

“Little Miss! Your dad’s going to be all right! He doesn’t want you to worry, and doesn’t want you to crack your knuckles anymore!”

Stephanie paused her tears to look at her hands, which were clasped together, cracking maniacally. She released them.

By the time the ambulance arrived, nearly two dozen people were standing on either side of the street in front of their apartment, and the driver had to shout at them to get out of the way. A pair of Latino medics got out of the rear with a stretcher, and while one examined Milo’s stomach the other talked quietly with him about the sequence of events that had led to his injuries. Sometimes Tina cut in with her own version—“I went upstairs, to protect our daughter,” she said defensively, and the medic waved her away. Soon Milo was strapped into the stretcher and Tina was telling him that they would be right behind him.

She then changed and found a new shirt to replace the one Stephanie had ripped on the windowsill, the crowd had dispersed, leaving only a few curiosity-seekers staring at the bloody front stoop, which Tina tried to distract Stephanie from. Though New York Methodist was just up the street, she still used the car, chatting away in what she thought was a calming voice while Stephanie sat silently beside her, peering out the window.

They had spent an hour in the waiting room, receiving occasional reports from a tired doctor who assured her that Milo would live, but there would be a long recovery time. The bullet had entered the small intestine. After she left, Stephanie sank into a disturbing silence, and Tina remembered something from their last session with Dr. Ray. Milo had begun to fade again, worrying her, but then he launched into a non sequitur. “Back when I was still working, I sometimes had these lapses. I’d be in some city, and some unexpected detail would throw me. A dog, a car, some music—always something different.”

“How do you mean, throw you?”

“Divert me. I’d suddenly feel a physical need to call home. To talk to Tina and Stephanie. I even called a couple times, but luckily they didn’t answer.”

“You never mentioned this,” Tina said.

“Because it was reckless,” he told her. “Which is why it disturbed me. I didn’t want to call, but I had to.” He looked at Dr. Ray. “Any idea what that was?”

Dr. Ray frowned, then shrugged as if the question were entirely preposterous. “Well, it sounds like love to me. Doesn’t it?”

The memory faded as a man in a gray suit with disheveled hair and pink hands stepped into the room. He looked around the crowd of waiting families, finally alighting on them, and came over. He gave Stephanie a smile and nodded at Tina. “How’s Milo?”

“Who are you?”

“Oh, sorry. Alan Drummond. Milo used to work for me.”

“In the Department of Tourism?”

His face went blank. “I’m not sure what you mean.” Stephanie leaned against Tina’s arm and yawned.

“I’ve finally made an honest man of him,” Tina said. “Not that it matters now. The department doesn’t exist anymore, does it?”

Alan Drummond moved his mouth as if he were trying to find a way to spit out his tongue. “Are you going to tell me how Milo is? I heard he was shot.”

“Stomach. He’ll pull through.”

“Good. I’m glad.”

“Are you?”

A flash of anger passed through his features; then he took the free chair beside Tina. “Yes, Tina. I happen to like the guy.”

“Then maybe you should be out catching the guy who did this.”

“As you pointed out, I’m unemployed now. But for the sake of argument, who did this?”

“A little man. His name is Stanescu.”

“You’re sure?”

“Milo said that name when they were talking.”

“They talked?”

“Not long. In German. I recognized the man from television. Then he shot Milo.”

Remembering, Tina looked down at Stephanie, whose eyes were closed. She was listening, though; Tina was sure of it.

She said, “The name—does this have to do with . . . you know. The girl?”

Drummond didn’t look like he understood, then he worked back in his memories and finally got it. “Oh, no. I’m sure it doesn’t.”

Christ, but these people could lie so well.

Though she picked up a bottle as usual and even exchanged a few words with Herr al-Akir, when her home phone rang at nine thirty-five, she hadn’t even opened the bottle. Instead, she was sitting at the kitchen table, her cell phone beside her landline, staring at the two phones. Waiting.

She had expected the call to come later, and when she heard Berndt Hesse’s hoarse voice—he’d never been used to long bouts of talking—she thought he sounded confused. “Can you get over to Schwabing?”

“If it’s necessary, Berndt. What’s wrong?”

“I’d rather tell you in person. Come to Theodor’s house. You . . . you know where it is?”

“It’s been a long time, and it’ll take me a while. Could you remind me of the address?”

She drove the half hour to the northern Munich suburb without speeding, and on the way considered calling Oskar. She wanted to at least know if she should be prepared for failure, but there was no point to it. Either it had gone according to plan, or it hadn’t.

Instead, she thought of Milo Weaver, and the unexpected connection that had come to her after their brief phone call two weeks ago. She’d hung up, and like a spotlight the realization had swept over
her body. No, she had never known Milo Weaver, but his name had come up during an interrogation with an American woman, a terrorist. Three decades ago.

Ellen Perkins, in 1979, had been stewing in a German prison because she was one of those many young people who believed that with a gun, Marx, and some catchphrases, an entire civilization could be torn down. However, this one had a son she had secretly shipped off to America to live with her sister. Over the interrogation table, Erika had explained that she knew about the boy, Milo, and tried to use this knowledge to leverage a little cooperation.

Perkins had been harder than she looked, and the day after the interview she hanged herself in her cell, using the pants of her own prison uniform. She knew how to kill a conversation.

Then, almost thirty years later, she’d interrogated the son. What a truly remarkable world it was.

Theodor Wartmüller’s Potsdamer Strasse apartment was high up in one of the many postwar buildings that had been rebuilt to prewar specifications. Two blue Bundespolizei BMWs were parked at awkward angles on the sidewalk in front of it, and farther down the street was a van from N24, the twenty-four-hour news channel. There were also people who, having seen the police and the man outside the building with a huge camera on his shoulder, were standing around, full of dumb curiosity. It took her ten minutes to find a parking space on the next street and walk back, passing Teddi’s MINI and cutting through the crowd, waving her BND card to the policeman on duty at the front door. A reporter she recognized from television asked if she believed the story about Wartmüller. She said, “No comment,” and continued inside.

The entryway was empty, though another policeman—a local one—stood at the elevator and checked her ID again before letting her take it up to the fifth floor. It was there that everyone had collected. Berndt, Franz and Birgit, Gaby from the public relations department, Robert from Administration, Hans from Operations, Claudia from Fraud. No one was speaking aloud. Only whispers filled the living room of Wartmüller’s immense apartment. They
were grouped around objects—an art nouveau floor lamp, a Restoration sofa, the drinks cabinet. When she entered, they all looked at her, but only Berndt detached himself from Hans to come over.

“About time you got here.”

“What’s going on?”

He shook his head. “Paintings. From the E. G. Bührle Museum.”

“The robbery in February?” she said, trying to sound shocked. “What does that have to do with Teddi?”

“Two paintings. The final missing ones. They were found here in his apartment.”

Erika shook her head. “What do you mean,
found
? No one just
finds
something. You come in and search for it. How did that happen?”

“Anonymous call to Interpol. Interpol brought it to the Feds. They arrived with a warrant a few hours ago.”