“Because we have a child, Milo.”
All the air seemed to leave the car.
She gave him a quick look. “What did you think would happen here? Did you think we’d fall in love all over again and you’d return to your… I don’t know. Do you even have a home?”
He didn’t answer. It was out of his hands now.
“Maybe you think we can have some kind of satisfying long distance relationship. But tell me: Could we really depend on you showing up for birthdays and holidays? You’re not working a nine-to-five.” She stopped at a light. “Unless you’re quitting. Is that it?”
“Not yet,” he managed.
Silence followed, and after they’d gotten moving again she spoke more softly. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about things, and one thing I couldn’t understand was myself. Why didn’t I go with you back in July? My husband comes to me, tells me his life is in danger, and the only way we can all stay together is if we leave the country. You made it very clear, Milo. An idiot could have understood.”
He waited.
“I couldn’t understand why my ‘no’ had come so easily. There were plenty of practical reasons, but those weren’t enough. It was my unconscious making the decisions, and my unconscious knew that, even without all the melodrama, there was something wrong in the marriage. Maybe I’d never really trusted you in the first place. Maybe my love had its limits. I don’t know, and I still don’t. All I know is that if we got back together it couldn’t stay the way it was. It would take work. We’d have to work together to figure out what was wrong and then see if we can fix it. Not that one-sided therapy we were doing before, but real, engaged therapy we’re both committed to.”
She knew how to make him feel as if he’d lost control of a debate; all she had to do was use that word of hers, “unconscious.” It made her into the adult, standing alongside Dr. Ray; it made him into the child. And as if he were indeed a child, a swift fantasy took hold, a shallow reasoning: She was confused. She was confusing herself. Their marriage had gone so well for six years, and now that a few problems had appeared she’d lost faith. Patrick-yes, her ex was obviously deluding her. So Milo would take control. He would get her to pull over and then overpower her. He would move her to a place where he had control, where he would have the time and means to convince her of her bad logic, because that’s all it was-bad logic. It left out love, and any logic that ignored love was flawed from the outset.
Then the fantasy left, as quickly as it had lumbered into his head, and he knew that this had been the problem all along-he’d been thinking like a Tourist. For Tourists, everything is possible; contradictions are minor inconveniences. Tourists, like children, believe the world is theirs. He hadn’t been like this before. The job had infantilized him.
She said, “I asked him. Yevgeny. I asked him if you could just leave your job and come back. Just like you, he said, Not yet. He said you needed more time.” She waited for him to dispute that. He didn’t. “Remember what I told you before? When we met, you were a field agent, but if you’d stayed one I wouldn’t have married you. I’m not the kind of wife who can take long absences, or worry that my husband won’t make it home at all. So, you know what I told Yevgeny? I told him that when you quit running around the world, when you finally fall back on the name you were born with, then you should come and see me. Did he tell you that?”
“No,” Milo said.
“Well, he should have. You wouldn’t have wasted a trip.”
12
She pulled up outside the Franklin Avenue A-train station in Brooklyn, from which he could ride to Howard Beach and take the AirTrain to JFK. For a full minute they sat in that awkward silence of farewell. He sat hating Yevgeny for offering him the unrealistic hope that is the lifeblood of the desperate.
Then, perhaps taking pity, Tina tugged on his sleeve, muttering, “Come here.” She pulled him close and kissed him hard on the mouth. She tasted of chewing gum. Though he knew that it was pity, he would take it in lieu of anything else. They lingered for a moment; then she pulled back. “I mean what I said. You get your life straight, come back home, and I’m willing to give it a try. But here, you understand? Not in some other country with fake names. And we work on it with Dr. Ray.”
“I understand.”
“I hope you do, mister.”
He grinned. She had offered him a plan. “Give Stef my love.”
“You sure about that?”
“Maybe you’re right,” he admitted. “I’ll give it to her myself when I can stay more than a few hours.”
A brief smile joined them; then Tina jolted. “Oh! Take this.” She popped open the glove compartment and fished out the iPod he’d given her months before, with headphones and a car-lighter charger.
“No. It’s yours.”
“Please,” she insisted. “I never listen to the damned thing, and a few weeks ago I dropped it. Broke it. Pat got it fixed, but… look, all your music got wiped.”
“After Pat touched it?”
“Ha ha. He filled it before giving it back, but I still don’t listen. So, please, take it back. He filled it with seventies crap-you’d like it. Besides, I can’t really imagine you running around the world without it.”
He held it in his hand. “Thanks. I mean it. And don’t give up on the Olympics. The more I think of it, the better the idea sounds. Tell Pat to get those tickets before they sell out.”
“I’ll do that,” she said and let him kiss her again. Once he was standing on the wet sidewalk, she lowered the window. “One last thing.”
“Yeah?”
“Cut out the smoking, will you? You taste like an ashtray.” She winked and raised the window as she drove away.
He boarded a slow train, not worrying about the time. In the cool cloud of his hope-the better hope that she had offered him-he wasn’t in a hurry to do anything. There was always a chance, even for louts like himself. He would catch an outbound flight with his Tourist passport, and even hope that Drummond was keeping watch, and that this unscheduled visit with his wife would provoke his anger, and perhaps lead to a quick dismissal.
It would weaken Adriana Stanescu’s position with his father, but for the moment he didn’t care. He’d regained that lack of empathy that Tourism drills into you.
Who knew? Maybe by morning he’d be free.
When switching trains at Howard Beach, he gave the rest of his Davidoffs to a beggar, and at JFK he purchased a ticket to Paris with his Sebastian Hall credit card. He joined the line at the security check. In front of and behind him anxious travelers sighed and grunted as they removed their shoes and unpacked their laptops and undid their belts. Milo followed suit, though he carried no luggage.
Off to the left, propped against a thick column, a television was tuned to CNN. An urban night scene: A familiar-looking building was billowing smoke. He read the rolling newsfeed at the bottom of the screen. It was the U.S. embassy in Belgrade on the previous night. Protesters had broken in and set it ablaze.
As the line brought him nearer, he heard the commentator explain that the riot was in reaction to President Bush’s validation of Kosovo’s independence in Dar es Salaam. There was a sign: KOCOBO JE CPБJA. KOSOVO JE SRBIJA-Kosovo is Serbia. One protester had turned up dead in the building, overcome by the smoke of the fire he’d been setting. Milo hoped that Radovan and his mother were all right.
He passed through the metal detector and received his shoes and disassembled phone (which got an extrasuspicious examination from the X-ray operator), then continued into the international terminal, where he had a coffee to brighten himself up. He put the phone back together, but no one called, so he scrolled through the iPod’s playlist. It wasn’t a random selection of the seventies as Tina had thought, but the entire David Bowie discography, from his self-titled 1967 release until 2003’s curiously titled Reality. Not knowing where to begin, he put it on shuffle and soon found himself whispering, “Modern love…”
Not until he was at the gate i
tself did he begin to think something was wrong. It came to him via two faces. One man, he thought, was French… or Albanian. The conflicting nationalities seemed to find a shared home in his features as he looked back at Milo with a forced nonchalance. Then the woman-she was standing by a column, talking on a cell phone, gazing at the window near where Milo was sitting. Her face seemed entirely American to him. Neither carried any luggage.
Only two faces, but they did not belong. He saw that in the way they interacted with their surroundings, as if they had no interest in the plane that taxied to the gate. The verification came a half hour later, as he stood in line with the other passengers, shuffling to where the flight attendants checked passports and tickets. Milo’s attendant ran his ticket through the scanner, which gave back a disappointed tone. She tried it again with the same result, then directed him to the desk, where he was told that, unfortunately, the plane was overbooked. There was another flight leaving in two hours. Would he like to wait for it?
Milo considered protesting, but seeing the man and woman waiting among the now empty seats, he really didn’t care. That’s what hope can do to you.
“Sure,” he said. “I can wait a couple hours.”
Her smile showed that she appreciated his understanding.
As she worked on his new itinerary, he glanced back to see the woman lean down to speak to the man. Her jacket fell open to reveal the grip of a pistol in a shoulder holster. The man twisted in his seat to stare directly at Milo. He stood up. The ruse was over.
Milo thought, Drummond must really be pissed.
“Don’t worry about the reservation,” he told the clerk. “I’ll take care of it later.”
She was baffled. “What?”
He was already heading toward the couple, who met him halfway. The woman spoke.
“Come with us, please, Mr. Hall.”
The French-Albanian grunted his agreement, then followed him while the woman led the way through a locked door by a shop full of NYC caps and T-shirts and into the secret back corridors of JFK.
Unlike many of the guests these corridors were built for, he wasn’t pushed through with a hood over his head, and for that he was grateful. They took so many turns that, when they finally deposited him in a windowless room with an aluminum prison toilet in the corner, he had no idea where he was. They left him to think over his flaws. There were so many, he didn’t know where to begin. So he thought about Tina, but that inevitably drew him back to his flaws, and Dr. Ray, on whom the marriage now depended. The truth, which Tina had no way of knowing, was that their sessions would never truly work until Milo quit being so dishonest.
His dishonesty didn’t take the form of outright lies but of silence, and it was something Dr. Ray sometimes noted, saying, “Milo? Would you like to add something to that?” Milo would usually answer, “No, I think Tina covered it pretty well,” even when she hadn’t.
A case in point was Tina’s description of how they had met and fallen in love more than six years ago. The story had all the elements of high melodrama. Tina, eight months pregnant and single, in Venice for a last vacation. She meets an older man, a gentleman, who it turns out has stolen millions of dollars from the U.S. government. He brings her along to a meeting that goes disastrously wrong. Milo and Angela Yates, his partner, are there to arrest the man, and a teenaged girl is thrown off a high balcony to her death. Shots fired-Milo is hit twice-and the stress brings on Tina’s labor.
The convergence of all these events made the story absolutely unbelievable, but Milo had no argument with Tina’s retelling of those facts. They happened. It was during the mundane part of the story, the epilogue, that their versions differed. Tina woke in her Italian hospital room to find Milo asleep in a chair beside her bed and saw on the television that two planes had hit the World Trade Center. Milo woke up, and they watched together, and then…
“The event, it joined us in a way that nothing else could. Two strangers. We’d just been through a terrible moment together, and then we were witness to something even worse, grander. It tied us together forever. I know that sounds corny, but it’s true. We fell in love at that moment.”
“Milo? Anything to add?”
“What could I possibly add to that?” he’d said, though he’d been thinking the same thing he thought every time she retold that story: That’s the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard.
Milo stared at the bare walls and felt desire. Not for Tina, or even escape, but for that pack of cigarettes he’d optimistically ditched at Howard Beach.
13
A pair of suits arrived, ignored his request for dinner, and led him out. More hidden corridors, then he was taken outside to where the whine of planes soaked the cold, wet air. A black Ford Explorer awaited them, and he climbed into the back. The two men joined him on either side, and another put the SUV into gear and began to drive.
Questions are only useful when the answers will lead somewhere. In this case, there was no point. He’d jumped the Tourist train, and now he was going to pay for it.
They stopped near one of the domestic terminals, and Drummond climbed into the passenger seat, wearing a disheveled tux. Milo wondered if he’d been dragged from the opera, but it was two in the morning. He didn’t bother looking at Milo, just pointed at the windshield, and the driver got going again.
“You seriously fucked up, Hall.”
Milo didn’t answer; he was serene.
“Did you think we wouldn’t know? That we wouldn’t figure it out?”
Milo cleared his throat; his hunger had subsided. “Did you get the money?”
A pause, then he said, “Yes, we got it. Kudos on a fine job there.” Another pause, longer this time, and when Drummond spoke again he turned to face Milo. “Who do you think you are? Don’t let your job title go to your head. I knew where you were as soon as you sent that last message from Zürich. We watched you hop the train to Paris, where you lifted a passport, then wander around Charles de Gaulle waiting for your plane. They’re called video cameras. You used the passport of a Monsieur Claude Girard-he looked enough like you for it to work. JFK? Simple stuff. You were followed all the way to Columbia.”
“I didn’t know seeing your family was a crime.”
That was greeted by the rumble of engines and wheels humming across tarmac. Beyond the driver the colored lights of airplanes taxied endlessly in the blackness.
A queer grin filled Drummond’s face. “When I found out who you were meeting, I called off the tail. I’m not an ogre. An employee feels the need to take a day to see his wife, that’s not a problem. You’d finished your work, and the next assignment hadn’t been sent yet. Sure, I was pissed off that you did it behind my back, but you guys are paranoid. It’s to be expected. No. Visiting your wife wasn’t a problem. This,” he said, lifting a gray folder from his lap. “This is the problem. Adriana Stanescu.”
“Oh.”
“Who were you working with? Who was holding her?”
Milo looked at the guard to his right, who had a military buzz cut and a wide, clean-shaven jawline. Neither he nor the one to his left carried a gun, which made this somehow less tragic. The doors just beyond them were unlocked. Though he had no plans to make a break for it, he charted possible escape routes, figuring where he had to land blows, and in what order, to get out of here-and in which direction, then, to run, but this geometry of escape was only academic, a way of distracting him from the question.
“Well?”
“Some guys. From the Bührle job.”
“Their names?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me.”
So Milo gave him two names-the German, Stefan, and the Italian, Giuseppe-then changed the subject. “Where did you find her?”
“You don’t know?”
“I didn’t have time to find a safe house, so it was up to those two. Where was it?”
“France. In the mountains.”
“Which ones?”
“It do
esn’t matter.”
It does to me, Milo wanted to say, but Drummond was right. The details were beside the point. He should have known from the start that, once the frustrations of temporary parenthood kicked in, Yevgeny Primakov would cut and run. Let the girl go, and let Milo face the consequences. Perhaps he’d decided that, son or not, Milo’s occasional intel wasn’t worth the trouble.
Milo was struck by another How did I end up here? moment, because even in his business it was a strange thing for your own father to cheat you.
He considered giving up the old man’s name. It would end his obligations, making his job so much easier. He could give more, too: Yevgeny Primakov, my father, is running a shadow agency within the United Nations. That would certainly ruin Yevgeny’s day.
Milo wasn’t ready for that level of vindictiveness, though. Not yet. Nor was he ready to be turned into a triple agent, informing on Yevgeny, which was the least Drummond would demand.
“Will you put her back?” Milo asked.
“What?”
“Adriana. I failed that test, but there’s no need to make her pay for it. Drop her off somewhere in Berlin and let it go.”
They had reached the end of the tarmac, far past the airport buildings, and the driver turned the Explorer in a long arc and headed back again. Drummond’s grin had returned, and he said to the driver, “Do you hear this guy?”
He rocked his head in a kind of answer.
To Milo, he said, “Test? What are you talking about?”
“Enough, Alan. There was no reason to kill that girl, not unless you had a Tourist you couldn’t trust. Not unless you wanted a last test before you put him on to more serious work.”
“Ha ha.” The laugh sputtered forcibly out, and Drummond had to wipe spittle from his lips. “Christ, the ego on this man! You think I’d kill a teenager just to find out if you were loyal? Do you really think that?”
Milo just stared.
“Jesus, Weaver,” he said, mistakenly letting his real name slip out. “The whole world really does revolve around you, doesn’t it?” He shook his head. “No. I knew it would be tough on you, sure, but we wanted her killed for the most excellent of reasons.”
The Nearest Exit Page 9
