The Cutout

by Francine Mathews

  She was, Fred thought, a perfect target for recruitment. What Greta craved was a new dream, an ambition within her reach. And he was the man to give it to her.

  Like most men of his training and background, Fred Leicester believed that women who live alone and who are unhappy should be grateful for male attention. The notion of grateful women and all that they might tell was hallowed in the annals of espionage. Grateful women talk. They make room on their seat in the U-Bahn, sliding heavy buttocks toward the smoke-fogged windows. Their hearts thud painfully beneath their drab sweaters at the prospect of another commute, of Fred Leicester ducking through the train’s sliding doorways, his morning newspaper in one hand and a cooling cup of coffee in the other. Grateful women sell out the last man to neglect them without a moment’s hesitation, and feel better for the betrayal. It was Fred’s hope that with keen eye contact, a few warm smiles, a request for assistance with his stumbling German, Greta would begin to talk. She was his developmental in the middle of Mlan Krucevic’s empire, his sole prospect for Sophie Payne’s salvation. For Greta, Fred had taken the S-Bahn north from Dahlem that morning, switched stations twice, and waited with innumerable cups of coffee for the hour to be ripe.

  He stood now on the underground platform and looked toward the approaching Wittenau train. She always chose the third car from the front, always sat on the far side of the aisle. It would be easy to raise the subject of yesterday’s horror: the rail lines were shattered at Pariser Platz, all the trains were running late. She might express sympathy, perhaps, in view of his nationality; if the car was quite full, they might be forced to hang by the ceiling straps together, jostled by Fate and haphazard politics. The train would go nowhere with great difficulty Fred would suggest they get off and share a taxi. Or stop for coffee until the crowds subsided. She would agree after an instant’s hesitation, an anxious look half cast over her shoulder. It was one of Greta’s mannerisms. By this time, he knew them all.

  Grit swirled up from the platform, and Fred narrowed his eyes. The train creaked alongside. Fred tossed his half-empty cup in the trash and threw himself into the scrum. A human wall of bodies, of rigid limbs denying entry, the doors closing at last behind his back. A mad rush from the waiting commuters; an unseemly jostle at the doors. Were they so desperate for work this morning, these Berliners, for the normalcy of routine after yesterday’s bloody violence? Impossible to know whether Greta was sitting next to a window, her gaze fixed on the middle distance. Fred strained upward on tiptoe, glanced left and right, the length of the carriage. Then he made the survey again.

  Greta Oppenheimer was not there.

  She had gone to work early that morning, but the call she expected never came. Greta fixed her eyes on a slight defect in the weave of the industrial carpeting—a pull in the nylon that tufted up like a human eyelash— and knew that the door to the office would not open that day. She would sit in her chair while the clock hand moved with the invisible sun. Other people, their concerns far different, might gather in corridors above and below her; they might stand clustered at their coffee stations or lavatory mirrors, chatting aimlessly. Greta would be paralyzed with duty. Waiting for the call that meant He needed her.

  Even to herself, she could not pronounce His name. It was too powerful and immense, like the Old Testament God. He knew nothing of the way he affected her, how she hoarded the few words He spoke, turning them over in the dusk of her apartment later like scavenged treasure. He did not know that she had kept a scrap of paper merely because it bore His handwriting, that she could close her eyes and bury her face in the desk chair because He had sat in it once. He did not know that she would die for Him.

  He did not know she was alive.

  A crackle of static from the speakerphone on the desk, and Greta jerked in her chair, the blood throbbing painfully in her temples. What to do? What was required of her? There was no one else to answer. She must not fail.

  Another burst of static. Someone was buzzing for access at the street. This was unusual and thus frightening. She reached a trembling finger to the phone’s bank of buttons. “Ja?”

  “I have business with VaccuGen,” said a woman’s voice in German.

  Greta glanced upward at the small television screen that hung in one corner. The woman turned her head. She wore a nondescript coat that looked dark gray and might, in fact, have been any color. Her black hair was shoulder length. Heavy glasses masked her features.

  “The offices are closed,” Greta said firmly, and clicked the button off.

  More static, insistent, blaring—and Greta wished, suddenly, that she had never come into work at all, that she had stayed at home like so many good Berliners, terrified of the Turks. “What?” she snapped.

  “My business is with the lab.”

  “Your name?”

  “I’m from the Health Ministry. It’s about the mumps vaccines. The humanitarian relief.”

  Greta’s brow cleared. Of course—she had known of the vaccine consignment for Pristina; it was the one matter of legitimate business she could expect all week. It was a large shipment—ten thousand ampules at least, the first of several scheduled for the refugee population. “You are familiar with the loading dock?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Where is your truck?”

  “I was told nothing about a truck,” the woman out-side retorted. “I have come for the health minister’s personal supply. The minister is to carry it to Kosovo himself tomorrow as a goodwill gesture.”

  Greta hesitated. “I was not told,” she said.

  “Is there anyone with more authority in the office?” The woman was fumbling in her handbag, searching for her official identification; through the surveillance monitor Greta could sense her impatience. “Anyone who might be able to help me? Greta Oppenheimer, for instance?”

  “I am Greta Oppenheimer.” Surprise brought her upright.

  “Mlan told me to ask for you,” the woman said, and stared directly into the surveillance camera’s lens.

  Greta’s breath snagged in her throat. How could this creature utter the word with such a casual air? As though it were a name like any other? A name you might toss over a dinner table: Pass the cabbage, Mlan. No one knew His name, no one but the handful of faithful admitted to His presence. Certainly not this bitch, who had never laid eyes on Him, who could not possibly know Him. Heat surged through Greta’s veins and burst in a wave at her cheeks. He had told this woman her name.

  “I am Greta,” she repeated.

  “Then open the door, you crucifier of Jesus, before I freeze my tits off,” the woman spat out contemptuously.

  And Greta obeyed.

  “I haven’t got much time,” she said briskly, and tugged at the fingertips of her gloves.

  Her voice, freed of the speakerphone’s distortion, was heavy and coarse. German was not, Greta thought, her first language; but what was? She might be Russian or some other type of Slav. A woman from the East. From His homeland.

  “The minister has requested twelve dozen ampules.”

  “That’s our normal crating quantity….”

  “Good. Fetch it.”

  Greta glanced over her shoulder. She swallowed nervously. “I have no access to that vaccine.”

  “What?”

  The sunglasses were swept off, and a pair of black eyes, heavily rimmed in kohl, stared at her implacably.

  “The laboratory is closed,” Greta said. Such a vague word for the battery of electronics that encircled His kingdom, that ensured the unworthy were barred. “I have no access to the storerooms.”

  The woman’s brows came sharply together. “But this is nonsense! It was expressly approved by Mlan himself! What am I to tell the minister?”

  Greta stared at her helplessly.

  The woman fished a second time in her capacious handbag. Like her clothes, it was black. She might have been dressed for mourning, Greta thought, or an avant-garde play. The only spot of color was at her throat, a white scarf wound ti
ght as a tourniquet.

  She held up a piece of paper and began to read from it. “‘Vaccine No. 413. A box of twelve dozen ampules. To be personally called for on November tenth.’ I am at VaccuGen, yes? And you are Greta Oppenheimer?”

  “Yes.” Who never called Him by His name.

  The woman slapped her gloves on the reception desk. “Then what am I to do? Tell the minister that Mlan failed him again? Is the entire shipment locked away somewhere? Because if it is, young woman, I can assure you that the minister will have Krucevic’s balls for breakfast. The minister is expected in Pristina tomorrow, and Ernst Schuler is not a man to look ridiculous. Do I make myself clear?”

  “The shipment is in the loading bay.”

  “And do you have access to that?”

  Greta nodded.

  “Then for the love of the Savior, take me to it,” the woman snapped, “before I call Mlan myself. No one will notice a carton more or less, and it’s as much as my life is worth to return to the ministry empty-handed.”

  When the woman had scrawled some initials on a notepad and left with the box under her arm, Greta went slowly back to her desk. It was a brief excitement; it had afforded her the sound of a human voice. She was not likely to hear one again that day.

  But in this she was wrong. She had not been reseated in the reception area twenty minutes when the static burst out again. She glanced up at the street monitor and saw the figure of a balding, middle-aged man, the collar of his good cloth coat turned up against the cold November day.

  “May I speak with Greta Oppenheimer?” he asked.

  “I am Greta,” she replied. And was suddenly filled with foreboding. Never had she been requested by name. And now twice in one day—

  “I have come for the mumps vaccine,” the man said.

  “Your colleague has already been here,” Greta replied.

  “What colleague?”

  “From the Health Ministry. For the vaccines. The minister himself sent her.”

  “My dear young lady,” said the man, amused, “someone has been having a joke with you. Do you know who I am?”

  He turned his face fully into the range of the camera positioned above his head. Greta stared intently at the monitor; a sickness rose in her throat.

  “Ernst Schuler,” she whispered.

  The Minister of Health.

  FIVE

  Bratislava, 10:15 A.M.

  AS DARE ATWOOD HAD PREDICTED, Sophie Payne was no longer in Prague.

  Her captors had tried to take her to Hungary, driving out of the city at one o’clock in the morning, after the American flag in the embassy garden had been raised to full mast and the President was known to be cooperating. They had injected her with the Anthrax 3A antibiotic and bundled her into the trunk of Michael’s car, heading first east through the night and then, abruptly, when it became clear the Czech border guards were searching everything that approached the Hungarian border, south. They skirted the Tatras Mountains and ended, after many hours, in Bratislava, which had once been called Pressburg and known the glory of the Austrian empire. Now the city was famed for recidivist Communism and thuggish politics, for the Semtex explosives manufactured on its outskirts, for dispirited pottery and rudimentary wine. The ancient vines trailed through the hills like bony fingers, scrabbling for a purchase in the dust.

  They had intended to reach Budapest but chose Bratislava by default, because Vaclav Slivik knew a woman in the Slovak State Orchestra. Many years ago, when Olga Teciak was a young woman of twenty-four whose sloe eyes and graceful limbs were utterly bewitching against the prop of her cello, Vaclav had pursued her violently, and she was enough in the thrall of the past to accord him some kindness now. When he knocked on the door at 4:33 A.M., unheralded and un-apologetic, she was so disoriented as to let him in.

  It was only after the guns appeared that Olga understood what she had done. But by then, her doom was sealed.

  Sophie lay now on the woman’s cracked tile floor, her hands and feet bound, her mouth gagged. The bathroom smelled faintly septic, an odor of decay unsuccessfully masked with ammonia. Olga’s apartment was one of a series of similar faceless cubicles in one of the mass of faceless Soviet-built concrete towers strung across the Danube from the historic heart of old Bratislava. The complex as a whole could boast the highest suicide rate in the country. It looked like an architect’s embodiment of despair. And at the moment, Sophie found the mood to be catching. She had crossed yet another border. No one, it seemed, was following.

  They had carried her into Olga’s home in the early-morning darkness with a hood over her head. Olga was not permitted to glimpse her face. Any ministrations required by the captive were offered through the proxy of young Jozsef, who, like Sophie, had suffered the indignities of Anthrax 3A and thus possessed some inkling of how to remedy them. The first thing the boy was permitted to do was to remove the gag from her mouth; the second was to offer her coffee, the very smell of which turned her sour stomach. He was sitting by her now, knees hunched up under his chin, eyes blazing darkly in his frail white face. He was staring at her, as though struggling to frame her meaning in words he could understand. Sophie was conscious of his gaze, but she kept her eyes fixed on a patch of damp that had stained Olga’s ceiling the color of weak tea.

  “You should drink something,” Jozsef said at last. “Water, maybe?” He said it in German, which was the language his father preferred him to speak. It was also, by happenstance, the language of Sophie Payne’s childhood, and she answered him almost without thinking.

  “Where is your mother?”

  He was silent for the space of several heartbeats. Then, fearful, he hunched himself tighter and whispered, “Belgrade. I think she is still in Belgrade.”

  “Does she know where you are?”

  He did not answer.

  Sophie reconsidered the patch of damp. The iron taste of blood was in her mouth and in her nostrils. Conversation was difficult. Her brain balked at the effort to concentrate. But the issue of Jozsef’s mother recurred, as though it might be important.

  “Did you want to leave her?”

  “He took me. In the night. He held my mother’s throat to the knife. He said terrible things to her, terrible. She was weeping. I could not even say good-bye.”

  “How long ago?”

  “I think it was before Christmas. But we never had Christmas, so I do not really know.”

  “It’s still November, right? It must be. So you’ve been gone almost a year.”

  Again, he did not answer. The knees stayed hunched under his chin, as though all that kept him alive was the tight grip of hand on wrist.

  “You should drink something,” he said again.

  “A little water.”

  Watching him sway and then recover as he stood up, Sophie remembered that Jozsef, too, had been injected with the bacillus. He would be feeling the same persistent ache in every joint, the pounding at the temples. And looking at the little-boy knees (he wore thin cotton shorts, no socks on his crabbed feet), she remembered Peter at eight, his bare feet filthy from running through the long grass around the Vineyard house, screen door banging in his wake. The sound of his voice, high-pitched as a bobwhite’s at dawn, calling across the meadows that ran down to the sea. The memory suffused her with peace and longing; longing not so much for Peter—who had become a singing wire, taut with strain and the life of his own ideas—but for the simple things Sophie had once held like water in the palm of her hand.

  “Here,” Jozsef said. He placed the rim of the glass against her lips. She stared into the dark wells of his eyes. This child was as much a prisoner as she was. But no power and no government would bargain for his release.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Around ten o’clock in the morning.”

  He tugged her upright, supporting her with an unexpectedly wiry strength. She drank the tepid water, too thirsty to argue with its taste, and felt the boy’s rapid pulse fluttering against her like a bird
.

  When she escaped Krucevic, Sophie decided, Jozsef must leave with her.

  The bathroom door slammed open, the edge jamming painfully against Sophie’s leg. She grunted and spurted water on Jozsef’s fingers.

  “Mrs. Payne,” Michael said. “You’re awake.”

  “Yes.”

  Jozsef dabbed at her wet face with a wad of toilet paper.

  Michael nodded toward the boy. “Is he treating you right?”

  “What a question.”

  He slid into the room. With Sophie prone on the floor and Jozsef hunkering by her, there was scarcely space for the man’s feet. Michael bent down and untied her hands; when she tried to bring them forward, every nerve ending from shoulder to wrist screamed in protest.

  “Okay, Joe, your dad has some breakfast for Mrs. Payne.” Michael, too, spoke in German; it seemed to be the terrorists’ lingua franca. “Go get it for us, would you?”

  The boy vanished through the doorway.

  “I’ve been instructed to let you use the facilities,” Michael told Sophie. “If you scream or attempt to leave by the window”—this was a mere mail slot of a metal frame, incapable of accommodating a three-month-old baby—“you will be shot.”

  “Fine,” she said wearily. “That sounds like heaven right now.”

  “Good girl,” he muttered under his breath in English. “If you can joke about it, you’re still alive. And I will not let you die at this man’s hands, do you understand?”

  Arrested, she stared at him. He stared back. She did not know what to read in his eyes.

  Then he raised his handgun to shoulder height, muzzle pointed at the ceiling. “I’ll be just outside,” he said impersonally.