All the Old Knives

by Olen Steinhauer

  I let him deliver this lecture on his martyrdom, then watched him in silence before leaning closer. “Bill, when I accuse you of collaborating with America’s enemies, you’ll know it. I won’t be alone. There will be two big guys in the seats behind you holding on to your arms. And we won’t be in a pub. We’ll be in a Romanian basement. You get me? Now answer my questions before I decide to make some serious calls.”

  It was overkill on my part, and I knew it at the time. But you learn to spot weak points and press them hard. Bill wore his weaknesses on his sleeve. His move to England hadn’t just been a capitulation to Sally—it was an escape from the traumas of life in the Agency. For the past year he had relaxed into the illusion that he had escaped as cleanly as Celia had, and when I arrived to explode that myth all his old fears and paranoia bubbled to the surface. I wondered how he had even survived to retirement.

  He breathed with his mouth open, face scarlet, looking like a man being felled by a heart attack. He raised his hands in supplication. “Okay, Henry. I get it. I’m just—it still hurts, thinking about those days. Thinking about how it went to shit. I have nightmares—really. Once a week I wake up with tremors. I’m not a well man.”

  “Your health is another subject, Bill. Talk.”

  “Okay. Right. Of course we noticed the difference between Ahmed’s final message and the previous ones, and we put together what that meant. We all did—we just knew better than to say it aloud. But before I left that night Vick called me in to discuss the elephant in the room.”

  “Just you?”

  “Me and Owen. We threw around ideas. Maybe it wasn’t our embassy leaking to the hijackers—if not us, then who? Iran? The fact that they were speaking Russian on the phone was a nonstarter—this was Ilyas Shishani’s preferred language. But for a moment we toyed with the idea that the Russians were helping them out.” He shook his head. “Helping a Chechen terrorist? No way. There were six U.K. nationals on board, so we tried to pin it on London. That made us feel better for about thirty seconds, before Owen pointed out that the U.K. embassy was staying out of the dealings—they wouldn’t even know what to tell the hijackers.” He took another drink. “Of course, there was always the possibility that we were wrong. Maybe this was Ahmed, alive and well, and he’d just decided to waste a lot of time with articles and prepositions. Or maybe it wasn’t Ahmed, but he’d simply given himself away—stupidity and bad luck run international affairs as much as anything else. See?” he said, truly hoping that I could see it as he did. “We didn’t know anything, not really. We were clutching at straws.”

  “Where was Celia?”

  “Celia? She was running down contacts that didn’t bear fruit. She was spending time with you. Is she still in California?”

  “Did you discuss Vick’s leak theory with her?”

  When he shook his head again, his jowls swung like an old dog’s. “Vick said to keep it locked up tight. We had to think first about controlling the fallout. So, no, I didn’t breathe a word of it to her. Besides, until we really knew what was going on, she had to be considered a suspect.” He hesitated, perhaps wondering if that sounded like an accusation. “Everyone was a suspect: Ernst, Leslie, you. I’m not even sure why Vick decided to trust me and Owen—it’s possible he didn’t, and was trying to gauge our reactions. For all I know he sat down with others for the same conversation.”

  “He didn’t,” I said.

  Bill nodded at this, absorbing the news, allowing himself a moment to climb outside of his anxieties and look at everything from a distance. I could see him relaxing.

  “Afterward,” I said, “when those guys from Langley sat down with us, how did you explain all of it to them?”

  He blinked; the tension worked its way back into his face. He reached for his beer, but it was empty. “I didn’t.”

  “No?”

  “Well, there was no point anymore, was there?”

  “How’s that, Bill?”

  He stared at me, knowing that I was trying to provoke him but unable to do anything about it. “It was a done deal. Everything had fallen apart. If we started shouting about a mole, encouraging Langley’s suspicions, then that would be the end of all of us. If you can’t pin a crime on one person, it taints everybody.”

  “You were covering your ass.”

  “Exactly, Henry. And don’t tell me you wouldn’t do the same thing.”

  “I’m not the one being questioned, Bill. You’re the one in the hot seat. You’re the one who lied to Investigations.”

  “How about Vick?”

  “Vick’s not here right now. Owen, of course, is dead.”

  He opened his mouth to state the obvious, then decided against it, not wanting to make himself look any worse.

  I said, “Let’s go back to Celia. Why was she looking at the embassy phone logs?”

  Bill leaned back, eyes narrowing. “I didn’t know she did that.”

  “First night, after you left the office. Looked through them all.”

  He shook his head again, cheeks wagging. “I had no idea. Did Vick tell her to do it?”

  “No, but he let her do it. What do you think she found?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I wonder,” I said, cocking my head, “what she would do if she discovered the boss she adored had placed some questionable calls from his phone. Calls to Jordan, say.”

  He blinked again. “What?”

  “You see, Bill, I went through the records myself. Just a week ago. There was a direct call, from your line, to a number in Amman. About half a minute long, nine thirty-eight in the evening.”

  His mouth hung open, damp and stupid.

  “It boggles the mind,” I went on. “That someone so immersed in clandestine affairs would call from his own office phone. You said it yourself, though—stupidity runs international relations as much as anything else.”

  He tried to speak, but I kept going. “Took a while to trace it. I had to call in some favors from the Jordanians to get them to go through their records. The number was only in existence for a week, leading to an unoccupied studio apartment in Amman. It was disconnected two days after the Flughafen. My contacts tell me it was set up as a relay. They don’t know what number it was patched to, but I can make some guesses.”

  His hands released the empty pint glass and settled, palms down, on the scratched tabletop. “Jesus.” The color returned to his cheeks. His hands floundered. “What are you saying? Christ, Henry. Are you looking for a scapegoat? I never locked my office door—you know that! Anyone could have used my phone. You, Celia, Vick, Owen, Leslie, Ernst … are you interrogating Ernst? You should. He was the one who kept walking off to call his Austrians.”

  I hadn’t talked to Ernst, and I had no plans to do so. My conversation with Gene two weeks earlier had shone a dim light on the technique and nuance needed to close the door on Frankler, and I didn’t want to be distracted. “I’m not going to play the name game, Bill. We don’t do that. We look at the evidence. We follow the evidence. Speculation is for jackasses. And this whole life you’ve built for yourself—your cute town house and English pubs and dinner clubs—it can disappear like that.” I snapped my fingers, actually snapped them, and he flinched. “So don’t fuck around with me, Bill. You don’t want to end up on the wrong side of my investigation. You know we don’t take prisoners anymore.”

  There it was: the glassy eyes. The tear forming on the red, swollen ledge of his lid. I had him. He was mine.

  “Now talk to me about Celia.”

  3

  “You really found nothing?” I ask pointedly.

  She shrugs, noncommittal. “I had to check, but only an idiot would use an embassy phone.”

  “Yeah. An idiot.” And no one would mistake Celia Favreau for an idiot. So how to explain it?

  More pointedly: How to explain it without explaining it to her? How to encourage her to build the trap all by herself and then jump into it? What I need is for her to come out with it, from A to Z,
in her deliciously detailed voice. Another drink, I think. Another drink to loosen the tongue. I lean closer and open my hands. “Let’s say that someone wasn’t an idiot, but they still chose to use the embassy line. How would you explain that?”

  The briefest of pauses, lips pursed, brows falling. “You tell me, Henry.”

  “Who knows?” I shake my head, getting into the role. “We’re talking about one fucked-up individual. Smart or not, the logic has to be pretty twisted.”

  “That’s why I’d like to hear it from you, Henry.”

  We—both of us—are saved by Ponytail. She arrives holding aloft a tray full of California delicacies. As she serves them, announcing their names and reminding us of the education she’s already bestowed upon us, I notice a hitch in her voice. The pitying smile is gone. Her hands, oddly, have lost their fluid grace, and I wonder if the bartender has been a little too forward with her back in the kitchen.

  “Pan-seared red snapper with a kale and assorted fruit mélange for the lady,” she announces, then swallows awkwardly as she motions to my plate. “For the gentleman, slow-roasted veal brisket in a pepper sauce with Parmesan risotto and spinach.” Then, in a sudden unpredictable spasm, her left hand brushes the edge of my lip-stained wineglass. It totters and tips over. Since my reactions have already been dulled by—how many? Four? Six?—glasses of the stuff, all I can do is watch it fall. It’s mostly empty, but a splash of Chardonnay splatters across my veal, leaving clear dimples in the brown sauce.

  “Oh!” She leans down. “I’m so sorry.” She picks up the glass and reaches toward my plate. “We can make up another one.”

  I block her movement, her buffed fingernails briefly scratching the back of my hand, and give her my most charming smile. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Celia cranes her neck, examining the damage. “It’ll go perfectly with the meat.”

  The waitress mutters, “But,” as I hold up my hand.

  “Really,” I say. “No worries. I’m sure I’ll love it.”

  Again, she hesitates, hovering beside the table until Celia gives one of her famous smiles as she lifts her fork. “That’s all. Thanks!”

  As Ponytail departs, I see her look over her shoulder at me, the embarrassed horror all over her face. In the foreground, the cheapskate businessman is looking into my face, frowning with disapproval over the rim of the San Francisco Chronicle.

  “Do they torture waitstaff in this town?” I ask.

  “She’s nervous from all your ogling,” Celia says, sliding a bite of fish into her mouth. “Mmm. You should try this.”

  “I wasn’t ogling,” I mutter, wondering about this, then turn to find Celia holding out her fork, laden with white, flaky snapper. I taste, admit it’s delicious, then cut off a forkful of pink veal. Absolutely tender, untroubled by the splash of wine. Relaxing again, I scoop up a bite for Celia, but when I hold it out she shakes her head and waves it away.

  “I don’t touch land animals anymore.”

  “How very Pacific Rim.”

  “You’re a bigot.”

  “I call it as I see it,” I say, then: “You enjoyed that bacon, didn’t you?”

  “You told me to live a little.”

  “Then live a little more.”

  She slowly shakes her fork at me, but there’s no smile to accompany it. “I’ve lived plenty.”

  For a while we eat in silence, each of us transfixed by the rich blend of flavors on our plates. We were, back in Vienna, great lovers of new restaurants. Not foodies, per se, for I knew very little about what we were consuming. We were simply able to appreciate good food, and were willing to pay for it: Zum Schwarzen Kameel, Mraz & Sohn, Kim Kocht, Steirereck … and the Walter Bauer, which we visited only once, during those anxious hours before the final catastrophe at the Flughafen. The same night that she would later ask Gene Wilcox for the phone logs and discover the call to Amman from her boss’s phone. Why she never shared this information with Vick, or any of us, is one of the mysteries I have come here to answer.

  It was a night of endings. Our last dinner out together and, some hours later, before things turned really bad on the tarmac, our final act of sex. Not the best nor the worst, but had I known then that that would be the end of our time together I would have worked harder. I would have given more and taken more. I would have committed more to memory, because afterward memories were all I had.

  4

  A young man with hipster sideburns approaches with wine, offering refills. He’s skinny, no older than twenty-five, and on his temples are the pink scars of acne. We accept, and as he pours I say, “Is the waitress all right?”

  “Sir?” he says to the glasses.

  “The one who brought our food. She seemed … I don’t know. Distraught.”

  He raises his eyes to meet mine, showing off a smile so wide that it strikes me as tacky. “Oh, she’s all right. Actually,” he adds, lowering his head and his voice to a clandestine level, “she’s two months pregnant. She’s getting morning sickness all day long. Unpredictably. She’s heading home early.”

  “Oh. Wish her well, then.”

  That garish smile. “I’ll do just that.” Then he’s gone.

  “I dream about it sometimes,” says Celia, holding a forkful of kale and fruit mélange a few inches from her mouth, frozen into a reflective pose.

  “About what?”

  “Flight 127. It’s the stuff we don’t know that gets to me—what happened inside the plane.” She gives up on the food and settles the fork on her plate. “Their whole technique, separating the children. I certainly had nightmares about it back then, but now, with Ginny and Evan, they’ve become unbearable. I mean, there’s nothing particularly creative about my nightmares. It’s just as you’d guess. I’m on the plane with my kids, Suleiman Wahed gets up, shoots Raniyah Haddadin, then orders everyone to calm down. Then he asks for the children.” She pauses again, reflecting. “What would I have done? Probably the same as everyone else. I would’ve held on to hope. I would have grasped at the notion that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, if I did as these men asked, everything would turn out okay. After all, even jihadis love children, right? They wouldn’t hurt any of them unless they were provoked. So, like everyone else on Flight 127—except, of course, Ahmed—I would have listened carefully and followed their commands. I would not have provoked. I would not have tried to stage some coup. I would have been obedient and submissive.”

  I nod at this, knowing that her words are having the desired effect on me. She’s asking me to put myself in the victims’ shoes, to imagine their terror the way she imagines it on bad nights. But it’s not necessary because she’s not as special as she’d like to think. We’ve all had those dreams—me, Bill, Vick, Ernst, Leslie. Even Gene, I’ll wager. In the last months, revisiting the files, the nightmares have been pummeling me three and four times a week.

  “But in my dream,” she continues, “I’m not submissive. I’m maternal. I’m angry and violent. Maybe you know, or maybe you don’t, but when your kids become the center of your life, your access to violence increases tenfold. The very idea of someone taking them away or harming them becomes justification for any kind of violence you can imagine. Torture. Murder. Mass murder. Genocide. All these things become acceptable when your children’s safety comes into question.”

  “Genocide?”

  She shrugs. “I don’t think I could give you a genocidal what-if, but maybe. Murder, though—that one is easy.”

  “I’ll remember not to come between you and your kids.”

  She smiles, eyes crinkling, then picks up her fork and eats. I do the same, chewing, thinking back to the event that marked us all. With veal still on my tongue, I say, “You didn’t answer my question earlier. About why a traitor would be dumb enough to use an embassy phone.”

  She thinks about this, and I notice her earlier reluctance has faded away. The wine, I suppose, is relaxing her, making her more confident. “I think it’s obvious,” she says. “D
on’t you?”

  “Well, I’m the idiot at the table.”

  She shrugs again. “To undermine the Agency presence at the embassy, of course.”

  “Ah,” I say. “That makes sense. Make the evidence blatant.”

  “But the question’s moot, isn’t it?”

  I blink at her.

  “Because there was no call from an embassy phone.”

  I nod at this lie, briefly in awe of her absolute self-control. What does she know? She knows, because I’ve told her, that I’m investigating the Flughafen disaster. She knows, because I’ve hinted at it, that I’ve seen the phone records. Yet look at her—the slender wrist leads to the tendons of her hand, everything perfectly still. She is at peace, entirely. Or she plays at peace perfectly. I wish, again, for a different history between us. Despite everything—despite my call to Treble and the knowledge that this is the night that will truly end everything between us—I’m swept up in mawkish romantic thoughts. How can this be?

  It can be because in each man’s life there are only a few women who can turn him inside out, who can cripple him with a smile. These are weaknesses, but they’re also a sign of humanity. Without these flaws, a man doesn’t really live.

  But he can try.

  When she cocks her head, examining me, I start to feel it in my stomach. A tightening, twisting, as if her look has provoked a sudden wave of bitter acid. She knows, I realize. She knows exactly what I’m up to. I’m going to have to be careful.

  5

  I’m finishing my food, thinking through what comes next, and when I look up I find her staring at me. She’s different now, in the way a face changes with the shift of clouds over the sun. Her eyes are damp, and when I say, “Are you crying, Cee?” she shakes her head, wipes under her eye with the edge of her forefinger, and says, “Just thinking.”