by Chris Pavone
“Yes,” Hayden says. He has no choice. “Lethal finding confirmed.”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?” Hayden puts down his book, a new paperback in German, about a well-known nineteenth-century art dealer. He shifts the sat-phone to his other hand, his better ear. Not much of him is falling apart—he’s in remarkably good shape, better than he expected to be by this point in his life—but his hearing in his right ear isn’t as strong as it once was.
“Well,” Kate says, “not zero information. There’s plenty of material on Grundtvig’s hard drive about Charlie Wolfe and his company and associates and whatnot. But there’s nothing here that gives any lead on what we’re looking for. No record of his bank account, nor connections to anyone who could be our subject. At least none that I’ve been able to find so far. And I’m pretty sure I’ve unearthed everything recent.”
Hayden sighs.
“I’m not entirely finished, though,” she says, holding out the glimmer of hope. Kate isn’t an irrationally optimistic person, but she does try to be supportive. Of Hayden, of herself. She doesn’t admit that something is a complete failure until it is a fully completed and indisputable failure.
“You someplace safe?” he asks.
“Safe. Quiet. Completely bereft of anything that could resemble charm.”
He can see it, the plasterboard walls and creaky plywood floors under musty orange wall-to-wall, a lumpy mattress, a tiny shower stall with a plastic folding door. There’s an awful lot of beauty in Europe, but there’s also no shortage of ugly.
Hayden is sure that Kate is wondering why she can’t be comfortably ensconced in the elegant apartment in downtown Copenhagen, instead of in some fleabag rest-area motel. But she understands that she’s not allowed to ask.
Which is good. Hayden doesn’t particularly want to lie to Kate more than is absolutely necessary.
“The tallest people in the world, Kate, are the Dutch. Average adult height is six-one—that’s men and women, combined average. And second are the Danish, at six-even.”
“Oh, come on,” she says. “People in Northern Europe are tall? You’re slipping, Hayden. I give that a three.”
“No one would blame you, Kate, for feeling particularly short in Denmark. Perhaps inadequate?”
She laughs. “I’ll call you if I find anything,” she says, and ends the connection.
When he rehired Kate last year, he never provided her with any specifics about what exact office she was working for, nor how she fit into the organizational structure of the Central Intelligence Agency’s European operations. She seemed to accept that she didn’t need to fill out any new paperwork, nor undergo any psychological exams or medical screening or physical training. After all, she’d been a CIA employee for nearly two decades before she resigned, and spent a couple of years as a stay-at-home expat mother. It made sense to her that she could be rehired simply, without a lot of fuss and bother, by a man in Hayden’s position.
She has no reason to think that it isn’t the CIA she’s working for. But it isn’t. Langley doesn’t know a damn thing about Kate, or her team, or this mission. They never have, and Hayden hopes that they never will.
CHAPTER 25
He parks under a towering tree on the steep hill, and walks over to the pedestrian-only street called Oberstrasse, a sidewalk really, interspersed with stairs and switchbacks, with a street sign and a proper name, and a funicular running alongside. He opens the gate to the terraced garden, and attempts a half-smile at the belligerent-looking hausfrau who always seems to be lurking in the garden or the front hall, staring disapprovingly, nodding reluctantly. He takes the tiny lift up to the third floor of the tall house, terraces and turrets, dormer windows under gabled eaves.
There’s only one door up here, already ajar, awaiting the new client on the hour. The two men shake hands in the waiting room, then settle into the office.
“So.” The therapist pushes up his lips, pressing his cheekbones up under his eyes. But the result is more a squint than a smile; Dr. Studer isn’t very good at smiling. It doesn’t seem to be an area of particular expertise here in Zurich. “Tell me, Herr Carner: what is new?”
The author shifts in his chair. Even after a few months of this, he’s still uncomfortable with the practice of psychotherapy. He has never been a believer. Plus he can’t help but think that it’s futile, considering all the truths he cannot tell. But he grew up in New York City in the 1970s, when for certain types of people psychiatry seemed to be as required as inoculations and preventive dentistry. So when he found himself with time on his hands, and emotional issues to tackle, and no price-sensitivity, he found Dr. Studer here. It has been of marginal benefit.
“Last week I completed that big project,” the author says. “After a long time working nonstop. It’s now off my chest, off my desk. In someone else’s hands.”
“And how does this make you feel?”
“At first I felt great. Elated. I felt … accomplished. But then that happiness, it ebbed away quickly, over the weekend. The project that had been my mission was suddenly no longer the thing that defined my daily routine, my reason to exist in the world. And now I have none.”
“So you are having difficulties finding focus? For your life?”
“I’m having difficulties justifying my life. I’m … not proud, I guess would be an understated way of saying it, of certain things I’ve done.”
Studer nods.
“I’ve engaged in major, ah, misrepresentations, about some important events.”
The author struggles with his own vagueness. He knows he hasn’t been a particularly forthcoming patient, probably an unsatisfying two hours per week in the life of this inscrutable psychiatrist. Even though he felt compelled to try this process, he was sort of hoping that he could just show up to an office and have someone else do the actual work, someone with advanced degrees and board-certified specialties, someone who could diagnose what was wrong and prescribe how to fix it. Perhaps with a pill and some, whatever, stretching exercises.
“There was this thing that happened, back in college—at university. That was the first major instance.”
“Of?”
“Of, um …” There’s an idea just beyond the tip of his consciousness … “Of, I guess, redefining reality. Of taking an event, and just sort of turning it into something else. Something advantageous, instead of dis-.”
He suspects that the doctor has no idea what this means, but neither of them particularly cares. They’re not here for the doctor to learn things; the point is the patient’s enlightenment.
“I came to the realization that all events, all facts, were to some extent negotiable. And throughout my life, this concept, this ever-present opportunity, took increasing control of my consciousness, and my career. I’ve spent the past two decades negotiating reality. Manipulating other people’s perceptions of it.”
Studer looks like a lecture student who has lost the thread of the professor’s argument, but is hoping that the topic will expire without anyone asking him any questions.
“I’ve led a dishonest life. An amoral life. And sadly there aren’t very many people who care, on a personal level. I’m childless and divorced, and have pretty much no relationship with my ex-wife. My father died a long time ago. And Mom, she sort of washed her hands of me. I still see her once a year, but we don’t really talk.
“I don’t think there’s anything I can do, on a personal level, to improve anything with anyone, and I accept that. But on an impersonal level, I’m finding my legacy … um … unpalatable.”
Studer nods vigorously. “And you would like to set the record straight, as they say.” He seems relieved to be returning the conversation to a more practical level.
“Yes, I would.”
“And may I ask, Herr Carner: Why? Why do you want to set the record straight?”
“Because I want to do the right thing. For once.”
“Is it the right thing? Will it help anyone?”
The author doesn’t respond.
“Or will it serve only to assuage—is this the correct word?”
“It is.”
“To assuage your conscience?”
He has wondered exactly the same thing, many times. Every day. But he already made the decision, irrevocable.
The Accident Page 147
They drove wordlessly through the quiet streets near the lake, then into downtown. Charlie was becoming more sober by the second. The bright red color was draining from his cheeks, and instead he was looking increasingly ashen.
They pulled to a stop at a traffic light. The car was facing in the direction of their university, up at the top of the hill. But Charlie was gazing off to the side.
“My father is over there,” he said. “In that hotel.”
The two boys stared at the unremarkable structure a few blocks away.
“He’ll know what to do,” Charlie said.
“Um … Are you sure?”
“I am. I think.”
So Dave pulled the vintage Jaguar around a corner and into a mostly empty parking lot. They walked as calmly as they could through the lobby, to the elevator. Charlie pushed the button for the top floor. He looked down at his feet and noticed a blood spatter on the top of one of his boat shoes. He knelt down to wipe it up, but he realized he had nothing to wipe with. He paused, thinking, then rubbed the splotch with his thumb until it looked like just another commonplace stain on an unremarkable shoe.
CHAPTER 26
“Jesus!”
Isabel pushes the door open. “Get in,” she says.
“What the—?”
“Get. In.”
Jeffrey stands there, dumbstruck, not moving, his coffee toppled at his feet, his bag strap tugging at the crook of his arm.
“Goddamnit Jeffrey! Get the fuck in this car! Right now!”
He finally obeys, folding himself into the taxi, panic all over his face.
Isabel turns her attention back to the driver, who’s staring at her in the rearview. “It’s okay,” she tries to reassure him. “We’re just … you know.”
The driver doesn’t respond.
“Herald Square, please.”
“What’s going on?” Jeffrey demands. “Where are we going? Did you say Herald Square?”
Isabel yanks a notepad out of her purse. “What do you think of the manuscript?” she asks, but doesn’t pay attention to Jeffrey’s answer as she scribbles, and thrusts the pad at him:
This a.m. at b’fast did a stranger interact w/ you? Touch you?
He reads, nods, writes: Borrowed my pen.
Is pen w/ you?
He reaches into his breast pocket, holds up the Sheaffer for her to see.
“So are you going to want to publish the thing?” she asks aloud, continuing to scribble. “Or not?”
They’re listening.
Jeffrey looks shaken. “I’m definitely intrigued,” he says, “but …”
She writes again: My asst Alexis just murdered.
“I know,” she says, staring at Jeffrey as he reads her note, mouth falling open into an O, brow deeply furrowed. “There are an awful lot of buts.”
The traffic leading into Herald Square is a mass-merge of taxis and trucks and angry impatient drivers of jumbo SUVs with Jersey plates, leaning on their horns pointlessly.
Isabel takes her compact out of her handbag. She holds up the mirror, surveys the reflection out the back windshield. The white Toyota, which was a few cars back when they were down in the Village, became entangled in traffic in north Chelsea, and is now nearly a block back and a few lanes over.
“Driver, this is good,” Isabel says, placing another ten-dollar bill in the pass-through. She pushes out the door, and turns to check on Jeffrey, and the Toyota. She thinks she can see the passenger watching her, buzz-cut and sunglassed, across the stalled rows of glinting steel, the air shimmering with exhaust.
They leave the loud bright sunny avenue onto a shady side street, the sidewalk crowded with late-lunchtime jovial groups spilling out of the restaurants in another of the city’s micro-neighborhoods, Koreatown.
Isabel looks back over her shoulder, and sees the Toyota’s passenger wending his way through the bumper-to-bumper of Sixth Avenue, pursuing.
“Come on,” she urges Jeffrey, “let’s go.” She picks up her pace, sidesteps a group of tourists gawking up. They hustle down the street, a half-block ahead of their lone pursuer. The car will still be stuck in traffic.
At Fifth Avenue she grabs Jeffrey’s wrist, yanks him around the corner, another sun-splashed wide avenue with broad sidewalks, with buses and taxis, trucks and motorcycles, whiffs of diesel mingling with the aromas of honey-roasted peanuts and hot dogs soaking in their salty steel baths under striped umbrellas. Fifth Avenue is thick with crowds of visitors from all over the globe, cameras and guidebooks, pamphlets and maps, milling and staring up and snapping photos of the most famous building in America.
“Here,” she says, ushering Jeffrey through the doors and into the lobby and to the counter. She hands over her credit card and collects the tickets.
Isabel had been here before, not terribly long ago, with Tommy. The little boy used to regularly ask, “Mommy, when can we go to the top of the world?” She didn’t know exactly what he meant, what he was asking to be allowed to do. But she figured this experience was as close as possible to that elusive ideal.
On that prior visit, she learned that if there was one worthwhile extra expense in this already extravagant city, it was paying a premium for the express ticket that grants cutting-the-line privileges; there are a lot of lines here, and they’re all long. So now she and Jeffrey enter the special queue for the cutting-the-liners.
Isabel nods at the X-ray machine and the metal-detector, glances around at the large police presence in the Art Deco lobby. “We’re getting ourselves some privacy, and some safety. I’m sure that the guy following us is armed.”
“There’s a guy following us?”
“And unless he’s willing to ditch his weapon, he’s not going to be able to keep up with us. Plus I’m sure he didn’t preorder tickets.”
Jeffrey is spinning his head around, looking for the pursuer.
“Plus we’re about to find out if he’s an actual law-enforcement officer, in which case he’ll flash his badge.”
That man is standing at the lobby’s front doors, trying to figure out how to proceed. He puts a cell phone to his ear, starts talking. Isabel feels like she should wink at him, or nod. But this is not a game, not at all. So she turns away, before she’s tempted to make eye contact.
Then she turns back, an instant flash of recognition, something about the way the guy is standing, and she realizes: this is the delivery messenger, the person who brought the manuscript to her office. Is he now pursuing her?
She joins Jeffrey for the feet-shuffling march to the elevator, tries to breathe normally during the long ascent, then steps out into a highly un-scenic floor and then up again and out into the bright sunshine, again, this time on the 102nd floor of the Empire State Building.
They stand there perched at the top of the world, a quarter-mile into the sky, with the city spread beneath, the rivers and harbor and ocean, the buildings and highways and bridges, the endless sprawls of Queens and Jersey.
Isabel explains her plan cursorily, in this panicked and rushed state, scrawling on a notepad in the middle of all these people, all this sunshine and wind. She can see that Jeffrey doesn’t completely understand her, and doesn’t know if he should—if he can—commit to this course of action.
You have a better idea? she writes. She shoves the pad at him.
He turns his eyes away from the expansive view, and glances down. He shakes his head. The wind whips into the notepad, fluttering the pages.
Isabel holds up her hand, bends her fingers, beckoning something. Jeffrey nods. He reaches into his pocket, removes his pen, places it on the ledge.
“Ready?” she asks.
>
He doesn’t look okay, nor ready. But he says, “Sure. Let’s go.”
They turn away from his antique Sheaffer, bound to be discovered within seconds by some stranger, pocketed, toted along to somewhere else. They make their way quickly through the thick shifting crowds and down the elevator and out into the street. Isabel doesn’t see the white Toyota, but she doesn’t spend a lot of time looking. It doesn’t really matter.
They hustle around one corner and then another, picking their way through the midafternoon crowds of this low-rent version of Midtown, stale air being pushed through the revolving doors from the low-ceilinged claustrophobic lobbies of nondescript buildings occupied by vocational schools and shady accountants and cut-rate matrimonial attorneys, with barbers providing ten-dollar haircuts and delis selling five-dollar lunches.
They descend into the damp chill of the subway tunnels, the burst of wind that precedes the screaming arrival of the uptown local, then after a few stops exit directly into the basement of Bloomingdale’s. They fight through the aggressive and nauseating gauntlet of Fragrance, and into the nakedly crass ogling at Jewelry. Isabel looks around at the women leaning on the counters, engrossed in their assessments of gold and silver, watches and necklaces.
An overweight woman is examining a trio of bracelets sitting on a black velvet pad. A large forest-green bag dangles from the woman’s chunky shoulder, the bag’s maw wide open. Isabel pauses at the counter. She reaches into her handbag and removes her mobile phone, a familiar plastic presence in her palm.
“They’re beautiful,” Isabel says to the woman, who smiles at her, nonplussed, then turns away. Isabel slides her phone gently into the woman’s green bag, and slinks away.
