The Cutout

by Francine Mathews

  The second floor was less claustrophobic. A gallery ran around the open stairwell, with doorways opening off it. Some were dark, some glaringly lit. A jangle of guitar chords floated through one yawning entry; Caroline peered inside.

  A man stood before a table, blowtorch raised. He wore a steelworker’s metal helmet and canvas overalls, but his arms were bare; a hammer and sickle was tattooed on his right bicep. Before him on the table was a mass of metal; beyond it, entirely nude, a woman posed in a chair. A boom box played at maximum volume— German techno rave—and the man was shouting his own lyrics, enthusiastically off-key. A window was open to the night, cold enough to raise gooseflesh on the model’s thigh; her teeth, when she glanced at Caroline, were chattering.

  Caroline turned to go, but the woman in the chair barked an unintelligible word, and the man wheeled, thrusting his visor skyward, and shouted in her direction. Caroline stopped in the doorway. The blowtorch was switched off. Another word in broken German, and his bloodshot eyes were staring at Caroline from a face streaming with sweat.

  She managed a few sentences. She was looking for an artist—a man who worked in wood. Did he know someone named Mahmoud?

  He jerked one thumb over his shoulder, toward the other end of the building, and then pointed at the floor. Downstairs.

  The naked woman in the chair lit a cigarette, as though it might keep her warm.

  Caroline followed the thread of a Billie Holiday song filtering into the corridor, followed it down another flight of steps, the darkness viscous like fog against her face. Bye, bye, blackbird, Holiday sang, her voice as plaintive as midnight rain. And then Caroline glimpsed the door to the café.

  It was named, incongruously, America.

  A yawning hole, a boîte de nuit, dense with conversation and smoke. The ceiling was very high and painted black. So were the walls. Against them, canvases of massive figures sprang to life, more vivid than the people ranged around tables below. A woman with red hair and blue fingernails tapped cigar ash into her wineglass. Caroline was sharply aware of loneliness. Of herself, poised on the threshold of a place not her own. And of the pulse in her head, beating faster now.

  There was an empty stool near the corner of the bar. She made her way through the tables, her shoes sticking to the spilled beer on the floor.

  “What can I get you?” the bartender asked in German.

  “Radeburger,” she replied. A Dresden beer she remembered Eric ordering.

  He nodded and slapped a glass on the counter. Poured the beer with precision, as only a German can, until the head was two inches thick. She was afraid to lift the glass, afraid of making a fool of herself, and so she smiled at him and laid some money on the counter. He took it without a word and punched some buttons on the register, his eyes scanning the room beyond. All his movements were quick and thoughtless; he was a man who knew his own mind. He was also a careful man. The cash register faced outward and there was a mirror over the bar, so that on the rare occasions when he had to turn his back, he could see what needed to be seen. Was the fear of crime so universal in Berlin—despite the Volksturm parading on the sidewalk, despite the heedless woman sitting naked upstairs—or was the caution habitual, something to do with this man’s life?

  “Do you speak English?” she asked.

  He shook his head, unsmiling.

  “You’re from the States,” he said, in German again. “American girl.”

  Caroline nodded.

  He whistled tunelessly under his breath, eyes roving. As she followed his gaze in the mirror over the bar, she realized he was watching the helmeted police.

  “Do you know a man named Mahmoud Sharif?”

  The whistling died away, and his eyes slid back to her face. “Mahmoud? Why do you want Mahmoud?”

  “You know him?”

  He turned away from her without a word and disappeared through a doorway to the left of the bar. Caroline found the courage to lift her beer. After her first sip, she gained confidence. After the second, an older and much larger man was standing where the bartender had been.

  “You’re the lady who asked about Mahmoud.”

  This time, the words were in English.

  “Yes. Do you know him?”

  “Do you?” The man was white-haired, with an enormous mustache curling up at the tips and muddy brown eyes swimming in false tears. “I weep for you,” the walrus said: “I deeply sympathize.” He wore a dingy shirt with a soiled collar. A brown apron spattered with grease. Was he a short-order cook or the café owner?

  Caroline sat a little straighter and set the beer glass down in front of her. “Mahmoud and I have a friend in common. This friend asked to be remembered to Mahmoud.”

  The man regarded her steadily, as though her next words were preordained. And so she said them.

  “Could I leave a message?”

  “A note, perhaps?”

  “That would be fine.”

  Without taking his eyes from her face, the Walrus pulled a pad of paper from the pocket of his apron and a pen from behind his ear. “There. You write it, I’ll see that he gets it.”

  “When?”

  He shrugged.

  “If time were unimportant, I could find Mahmoud myself tomorrow.”

  “When time is important, it is also very expensive,” the Walrus said.

  She handed him a five-hundred-mark note.

  He pocketed it without a glance. “I will deliver your message tonight.”

  Caroline wrote:

  I am Michael O’Shaughnessy’s cousin from London. I have come in search of him on urgent family business. Michael has told me that you know where he may be found. I will be waiting in Alexanderplatz by the base of the television tower tomorrow morning at 8:00.

  She signed the name Jane Hathaway. Her backstopped Agency identity.

  She folded the piece of paper precisely in two and handed it to the Walrus. He tucked it without comment into the capacious apron pocket and vanished through the darkened doorway. In an instant, the younger man had reappeared, his face impassive, his eyes still roaming over the café.

  She left the Radeburger unfinished on the counter.

  Part III

  THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 11

  ONE

  Budapest, 3:14 A.M.

  THE AMERICAN VICE PRESIDENT had seen enough of 30 April’s hangouts to recognize a legitimate operational base. The one in Budapest was no improvised effort, no apartment borrowed from a cast-off lover. This was a nerve center, Sophie knew, entirely window-less, possibly underground. It had a private garage with cameras and infrared detection devices mounted almost invisibly above the doors; it had comfortable furniture, beds, showers, a sound system, a supply of food and clothing, a weapons arsenal, and an impenetrable security cordon ensuring that a klaxon would sound throughout the complex if she attempted escape.

  With the prison came a certain amount of freedom. She was allowed to move about her bedroom and bath—nothing in either room could be used to effect escape or suicide. She lay on the bed and stretched her hands toward the ceiling. And felt the surface pressing down. In such a place it was impossible to guess the hour of day. Whether it was raining out or not. Whether the world believed she was already dead.

  “You will be comfortable?” Jozsef asked her anxiously. The bruises under his eyes were painful to see. Sophie’s fever had abated; she was weak, she ached for sleep, but her thoughts no longer rippled like silk through a liquid brain.

  “Comfortable enough,” she answered.

  He smiled—the swift, tentative look she’d come to recognize—and turned away. “I will bring you breakfast in a little while. Not like in Bratislava. Real food. And coffee.”

  There was the sound of running water, an oddity in the muffled underground atmosphere; it seemed to come from within the wall. And something else: a voice. She turned.

  “Michael,” Jozsef explained simply. “He talks to himself in the shower. Your bathroom is next to his.”

  Sophie
nodded. “I think I may shower myself.” How long had it been? Two, three days? How long since the explosion in the square? Was anyone in the United States doing anything?

  “If you need me, press the button.” Jozsef pointed to a panel near the bed. “The black one, not the red. The black is an intercom, and you can ask for help. Or for a book. Whatever you need.”

  “A newspaper would be nice.”

  The boy hesitated. “That is a little difficult.”

  Because it would tell her too much? Or because one of the men would have to leave the compound to buy it?

  Jozsef took a remote control from his pocket. The door to her room slid back, then slid shut behind him. She was entombed.

  She forced herself to move and went into the bathroom. Michael was still talking. She sat down on the toilet seat and leaned her head against the tiled wall.

  It was never possible that we would let her go, Jozsef’s voice whispered in her brain.

  The woman named Olga and her child were dead. With them had died Sophie’s final hope.

  She had seen my father’s face.

  Sophie, too, had seen Krucevic. She could describe him and his men. Whatever the dance of negotiation that went on above her head—whatever Jack Bigelow was prepared to do or say—she would never be released.

  And so the knot of grief like a clenched fist. Grief for the unknown woman and her daughter, of course, but grief, too, for the stupid hope that had sustained her.

  She had fabricated a dream—that Michael could be trusted, that he was a traitor buried deep in the Krucevic camp. She knew now that he was as brutal as the man he served.

  He was still talking to himself on the other side of the bathroom wall. Sophie closed her eyes and listened.

  Caroline awoke, as she always did when adjusting to European time, in the middle of the night. She lay in the sterile darkness of the hotel room and listened to the whoosh of an elevator shaft, the rumble of ice from a machine in the corridor. She was twenty-three floors above the streets of Berlin; she might have been anywhere. She had laid down the first planks in a trap meant for her husband, without knowing exactly what to do if he happened to fall into it. She had exhibited herself to television networks; she had asked the Walrus to contact Mahmoud Sharif. She had set a process in motion; and for an instant, alone in the hotel room dark, she felt a shaft of panic. What if that process spun out of control? What if Eric came headlong when she least expected him?

  As though she had willed it, the telephone rang at her bedside.

  She groped for the receiver.

  “You’re a difficult woman to find.”

  She could not speak. Then her pulse, which seemed to have stopped for an instant, throbbed wickedly through her veins.

  “This is the fifth hotel I’ve called,” Eric said, “and it’s not easy for me to use a phone.”

  She sat up. “Jesus God, where are you?”

  “In the bathroom. Hear the water?” He must have held the cell phone up to a shower head; she had the dizzying sensation of being run through the wash. “I have a habit of humming to myself in here. It masks a host of ills. Monologues, tirades, illicit phone calls. Particularly at three A.M., when everyone else is asleep.”

  “Eric, where the hell have you been for the past two years?”

  “Two years, six months, and thirteen days, Mad Dog. I think you know. I’ve been with him. The guy you’re looking for. And he’s been all over the map.”

  “Christ,” she breathed. “You sure do take this shit in stride.”

  “I killed a child today, Mad Dog.”

  Caroline tightened her grip on the receiver.

  “She was six years old. Her name was Annicka. She was frightened and alone and I took her into the back room and comforted her. I rocked her in my arms and sang a song in English she could never have understood.”

  “Where’s Sophie Payne, Eric?”

  “I told her that everything was going to be all right, that she would see her mama soon.”

  “Don’t tell me this. I don’t want to hear this.”

  “And while she buried her face in my shoulder and sobbed, I put a silencer to her temple and I pulled the trigger.”

  “You should have put it to your own head first.”

  “I considered that.”

  Anguish and love and rage welled up in Caroline’s throat, choking the words she might have said.

  “Welcome to Berlin, Mad Dog.” He sounded faintly amused—affectionate, even—but it was the voice of a stranger in Eric’s mouth. Dare Atwood had miscalculated. She had sent Caroline out to bring the rogue agent home—but Caroline could not tempt Eric any longer.

  “How did this happen to us?” she whispered.

  “I imagine we chose it.”

  “Bullshit,” she retorted. “You chose, and the rest of us trailed along—me, Sophie Payne, that little girl you shot to death. Why, Eric? Why not be a hero for once and turn the gun on Krucevic?”

  “Because getting him for the kidnapping of Sophie Payne isn’t enough, Mad Dog.” His voice had dropped to a whisper, difficult to pick out against the background of rushing water. “I want to get him for everything. I want the plans, the network, the proof of complicity at the highest levels. I want Fritz Voekl’s balls in a sling.”

  Fritz Voekl?

  “And how many more children will you kill?” For an instant, she expected him to hang up. Nothing but the sluice of water pouring over the damned.

  “Her mother was already dead,” he told her. “And Annicka could describe Krucevic if anyone asked. He could not allow her to live.”

  “Then let him pull the fucking trigger.” “It was me or Otto. I couldn’t put Annicka into Otto’s hands.”

  “Eric, tell me where you are.”

  “Get out of this, Mad Dog. While you still can.”

  “Eric—”

  But he was gone.

  After that, she didn’t pretend to sleep. She turned on all the lights, even the ones in the bathroom, and sat propped in bed with the covers pulled up to her armpits, shivering uncontrollably.

  How many people had Eric murdered? Not terrorists, whom she could dismiss as so many bodies in a war—but how many men and women? How many little girls? She’d thought of the dead in Pariser Platz as blood on Mlan Krucevic’s hands, not her husband’s. She knew now that she had been comforting herself with a lie.

  She reached for the phone at her bedside and punched in an Agency number. He answered on the first ring.

  She imagined him sitting there, silk tie loosened, hand to his salt-and-pepper brow. There would be beads of sweat breaking out on his forehead, the result of malaria endemic in his bloodstream. It would be dinnertime in Virginia. He’d be thinking of Kentucky bourbon, neat. She closed her eyes in relief.

  “Hey, Scottie.”

  “Caroline.” A glance at his Rolex, swiftly calculating the time difference.

  “I just heard from our fair-haired boy.”

  “How?” He was instantly alert.

  “Phone call.”

  “Change your hotel, Carrie, and watch your back. Did you get his location?”

  “Are you kidding? He wasn’t calling on business. He’d just killed a child and needed to justify it.”

  “If he calls back—”

  “Scottie,” she interrupted, as though he couldn’t possibly have understood the terrible thing she had just said. “Scottie, have you ever killed anyone?”

  “Aside from Athens, I’ve never even carried a gun. Caroline, did you ask him how our missing friend was doing? Did he say anything that might help us find her?”

  “No. He shot the breeze and told me to go home.”

  There was a creak as Scottie shifted in his desk chair. “He gave you nothing.”

  “Squat,” Caroline agreed. “But he’ll make contact again. He’ll have to. I’ll make myself a nuisance.”

  “The call was a warning, Caroline. Your next contact could be a bullet in the brain.”


  “Scottie,” she cried. “How did this man we both love turn out to be someone we never even knew? Can you tell me that? Have you got a clue?”

  “Carrie, remember the open line,” Scottie urged her softly.

  She drew a shuddering breath and raked her fingers through her hair.

  “This isn’t your fault,” he said. “It’s not my fault. Neither of us can fix it. So concentrate on what you can fix. Okay?”

  “It’s part of the training,” she said through her teeth. “You tell these guys that working for the enemy is the ultimate betrayal—of their friends, their country, themselves. And at the same time, their job is to convince other people to do exactly that: to sell out everything that matters.”

  “The line, Caroline,” Scottie repeated.

  “Who can live with that kind of paradox? No wonder people go nuts.”

  “It’s the nature of the game.” His reproof was like a slap. “Do as we say, not as we do. Cynics handle it best—or idealists. People who can live with an inherent contradiction. The others quit after their second tours. Or drink heavily and stay.”

  “So which was our fair-haired boy? Cynic? Or idealist?”

  “He’s out there murdering children, Caroline.”

  The truth, inexorable. But she tried one last time.

  “Let’s say he wants the Big Man. And all the marbles. To do that, he’d have to close his eyes to a certain amount of evil. But that wouldn’t necessarily mean that he was evil himself, would it?”

  “The ends justify the means? I have heard that sentiment so many times in my life, Caroline, and it still sounds infinitely attractive. And false. We saw the means in Berlin two days ago. No ends justify so much spilling of blood.”

  Now who had forgotten the open line?

  “He wants you to feel sorry for him. He’ll use that against you. He has no right, Carrie. He cut you out of his life, remember? He cut both of us out. And I for one don’t give a shit about his reasons.”

  But Caroline did. Caroline wanted to know why, more than anything in the world. As though knowing the reasons for deception and betrayal might negate the horror of what had happened, might put her life back into the neat little box in which she had lived. Bitterness flooded her mouth.