Agents of Treachery

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  I sipped my wine. I stroked her hair. I gazed into the middle distance, talking to myself more than anything now, musing out loud, summing up, if you will. “But it was . . . my childhood. You know? I was a boy there. There were, you know, friends and summer days and snowfalls. Happy memories. It was my childhood.”

  “You sound as though you miss it,” she said.

  “Oh, terribly. Almost as if it had been real.” I looked down at her again. Her sweet, gentle, young and old-fashioned face. “As I love you. As if you were real.”

  She sat up. She took my hand. “But I am real.” I was surprised. It was the first lie she’d ever told me—aside from everything, I mean. “You see me, don’t you? Of course I’m real.”

  “I’m not going to do it,” I told her. “You can tell whoever sent you. I’ve already deleted the code.” Now, again, she simply waited, simply watched me. I stroked her cheek fondly with the back of my hand. “I’ve given it a lot of thought. It was difficult to know how to approach it actually. Should I try to outguess you, determine what would activate your protocol? Or try to figure out the right and wrong of the matter—though I suppose it’s a little late for that. In the end, though ... in the end, you know what it was? It was a matter of authenticity. Of all things. But really, I mean it. When I was younger, I tried to figure out: Who am I? Who was I meant to be? Who would I have been if none of this had ever happened? But what good is any of that? Thinking that way? We all have histories. We all have childhoods. Accidents, betrayals, cruelties that leave their scars. We’re none of us how we were made. So I thought, well, if I can’t be who I am, let me at least be what I seem. Let me be loyal to my longings, at least. Let me be loyal to the things I love. Even if they are just daydreams, they’re mine, aren’t they? Let me be loyal to my dreams.”

  She didn’t answer. Of course. And the look on her face remained impossible to decipher. I found myself appreciating that at this point. I was grateful for it, though her beauty broke my heart.

  I took a final sip of wine and set the glass down on a table and stood. I touched her face a final time, my fingers lingering, then trailing across the softness of her cheek as I moved away.

  I didn’t turn to her again until I reached the bedroom doorway. And then I did stop and turn and I looked back at her. She made a nice picture, sitting on the rug, her feet tucked under her and her skirt spread out around her like a blue pool. She had followed me with her eyes and was watching me, and now she smiled tentatively.

  “Look at you,” I said, full of feeling. “Look at you. You were never more beautiful.”

  And as I turned again to leave the room, I added tenderly, “Come to bed.”

  <>

  * * * *

  THE HAMBURG REDEMPTION

  Robert Wilson

  Waking up, hitting his head on the low shelf of his hangover smacked him back into the pillow with a groan. No sooner conscious than the images flickered through the gate of his mind. He sat up with a vomital lurch and vised his head in his considerable hands. He squeezed with his eyes tight shut, and mind wide open.

  “Get back,” he said to himself. “Back inside, you fuckers.”

  A clock set in the headboard told him it was 4:06. A record. He hadn’t slept beyond 3:30 in months.

  “Where the hell am I?” he thought, aware that he was talking to himself more and more these days because it helped to keep his mind at bay.

  He got to his feet, a little dizzy. He was naked. Didn’t remember undressing. Used to finding himself fully clothed, sometimes on the bed, other times on the bathroom floor in a sweat.

  He slid open the thick, weighted blind covering the window. Night greeted him. The only immediately visible light came from the blue block letters that seemed to hang unsupported in the blackness:

  fleisch grossmarkt

  A heave from his stomach gushed a hot liquid memento of the savagery of last night’s drinking into his throat. He couldn’t swallow enough to rid his gullet of the acid. He gasped as if drowning.

  “Hamburg,” he said, his lips moving, no sound. “I’m in Hamburg.”

  He’d come here because it was home, where he’d spent the first twelve years of his life before his father, a scientist, had moved to the United States in 1964, just six months after they shot JFK. His father, who had turned his back on the collective guilt of his homeland, had embraced America and had taught him to do the same. And he had. My God, had he embraced that country. He’d hugged it so close he’d become part of the apparatus that protected it against any unseen enemy. And now? He shuddered as if a train had passed beneath him and gripped the windowsill. The guilt was rocking his foundations. Not just the guilt at what he had done, but the guilt at what he was going to do. He breathed in, steadied his thoughts by concentrating on the physical.

  The hotel, yes, the hotel, it came back to him because he hadn’t been too drunk when he arrived, was a converted water tower in the Sternschanzenpark. He twisted his head round a little and saw the lights of the huge TV tower off to the left. He nodded as these certainties emerged. His feet firmed up on the carpet. Strange how comforting chain hotels had become to him, although this colossal nineteenth-century cylinder, with its cavernous entrance, had a moving metal walkway up to the raw brick reception, with sound effects of dripping water, which had so unnerved him that he’d had to grip the moving rubber banister with both hands.

  No headache yet, just queasiness and a vast thirst. He opened the minibar, took a bottle of water from the cube of light, and drank it down. Tears came to his eyes. His brain had started to work in unusual sequences, and instead of the usual horrific scenes he had to work at to suppress, he saw cool, still water, mountain streams, the innocence of his seven-year-old daughter in perfect, uninterrupted sleep. He knew now he would be unlikely ever to see her again. Hence the tears. Not wholly sentimental. The water was cold.

  “What are you doing over there?”

  The voice from the other side of the dark room went through him like a cold spear. He even tottered back the few inches to the wall. Someone else is in the room? The stupid logic resounded.

  A movement.

  “Don’t turn the light on,” he said quickly, an order.

  “I’m just reaching for my water . . . OK?”

  Female voice. Perfect English. Very slight German inflection. What the hell is she doing here? He sniffed the air. No smell of woman.

  “You don’t remember a thing, do you?” she said.

  Nothing from him.

  “Hey, dark matter,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “Black hole. You don’t remember a thing, do you?”

  “No,” he said. “Who are you?”

  “Leena,” she said. “Who are you?”

  “Didn’t I give you a name?”

  “A name,” she said. “You’ve got different ones for each port of call?”

  Silence. An even worse start to the usual horror of consciousness.

  “You did tell me your name,” she said. “But why wouldn’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, trying to think which one he would have used.

  “Roland Schafer,” she said. “Your surname means ‘shepherd’ in Old German. Did you know that?”

  He did. An image of his father flashed through his mind: shepherding him and his sister to the International School, where they were being prepared for the American educational system. He had his hands on their heads. He could even remember the pressure of his father’s touch, and rather than being comforted by it, he felt strangely ashamed.

  “And what sort of a name is Leena?” he asked.

  “It’s short for Marleena.”

  “Like Dietrich?”

  “Nearly. You’re showing your age now, Roland,” she said. “We met in a bookshop. Do you remember that?”

  “No, I don’t,” he said, but he did; he just had to play things carefully for the moment.

  “You did drink a lot. I mean, really a lot,” she said. “I almost had to ca
rry you back here.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Not far, but it was very cold last night, and once I got you up here and undressed and into bed I thought . . . what the hell?”

  “What the hell what?”

  “I might as well sleep here,” she said. “Can I turn on the light yet?”

  “I haven’t got a towel.”

  “I’ve seen it all, Roland,” she said, and clicked on the standard lamp, which cast a light onto the empty armchair next to him. He slid into it, ran his hands through his gray, wire-wool hair. Shook his face free of any tells.

  Her hair was long and blonde. She was maybe just touching thirty, which was all he could tell from the darkness of her corner. She threw off the duvet. Her nudity startled him. Upturned nipples. She swung her body around, picked up something from the floor, and fiddled with it while his view was obscured by her naked back.

  “I’ve got to pee,” she announced, and walked past him without the slightest self-consciousness.

  She was nearly muscular with defined shoulders and her breasts in no need of a bra. Her abdominal muscles were well delineated above black panties. The mechanics of her thighs’ sinews were evident, and her buttocks had a declivity at the side. Only as she headed to the bathroom did he see a slight difference between her right and left leg.

  “Were you an athlete?” he asked.

  “I was,” she said, and disappeared.

  His paranoia cut in sharply. Who is she? What is she doing here? Who sent her? Do they know something?

  She returned, throwing him a towel, and got back into bed. This time, because he knew where to look, he saw that her right leg was a prosthetic from the knee down.

  “The surgeons didn’t think I’d ever walk again,” she said. “But they always say that to make you more determined.”

  “Did we cover this last night?” he asked.

  “You know, you drank nearly a whole bottle of grappa single-handed.”

  “Grappa?”

  “It wasn’t an Italian restaurant, if that’s what’s confusing you.”

  Memory wipe. Too much of that lately Pity it only wiped the present clean but not one bit of the past.

  “I used to be an athlete,” she said. “Before the car accident.”

  “Track and field?” he guessed.

  “Not bad,” she said. “I was a pole-vaulter. You look like someone who keeps himself in good condition ... or at least used to.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I do weights. I used to play football.”

  “You should get back on them before it’s too late,” she said.

  “You’re going to have to tell me what happened from the top,” he said. “I don’t remember a goddamn thing.”

  “I remember it all,” she said. “That’s my problem. Photographic memory. I even remember unconsciousness—the four days of coma I had after the car accident, although that wasn’t too bad because they were the best four days of my life. They had to wrench me out of that world and back into this one.”

  “Why?” he asked, surprised to find himself interested.

  “Because I was loved by a man for the first time in my life.”

  “Did you know him?”

  She blinked at the question because she’d always assumed it.

  “Yes,” she said. “I felt I’d known him my whole life.”

  “Then he must have been your father,” he said, letting the paranoia kick back in again, didn’t want to drop his defenses this early in the game.

  “You didn’t notice the leg last night, either,” she said, swerving away from the ugly little ditch he’d opened up in front of her, “but I was wearing trousers. You did notice other things, though.”

  “What?” he asked, looking at her closely.

  She threw back the duvet again, crawled to the corner of the bed nearest him, and pulled her hair away from the left side of her face.

  “Remember?”

  He didn’t and he would have done. She had a dent in the left side of her head, and there was scar tissue in front of her left ear around the temple. She traced a line with her finger that went across her left eye.

  “It’s glass,” he said.

  “They wanted to reconstruct the dent but I’d had enough of operations by then,” she said, sitting back on her heels. “Fifteen on my arms, legs, face, and brain. I said I’d wear my hair long. Have you ever had sex with an amputee?”

  “I’m not operational in that department at the moment,” he said.

  “You’re in the military,” she said.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “‘I’m not operational in that department,’” she repeated. “And you didn’t answer my question. Two classic military conversational gambits.”

  “I’m off sex,” he said. “And I’ve never had a physical relationship with somebody who’s lost a limb. Was your father in the military?”

  “My father?” she said, and paused as if she could categorize him in a number of ways. “My father was the chief executive officer and owner of Remer Schifffahrtsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG, Hamburg.”

  “Was?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Do you like older men?” asked Schafer, more calculating now.

  She cocked her head to one side, sized him up.

  “I like them,” she said, shrugging, so that her breasts quivered. She fell backward and rolled under the duvet as if for protection. These questions about her father got under her skin.

  “When did you have this car accident?” he asked.

  “Four years ago. I was twenty-six, married, a successful businesswoman driving to work, and I got hit by a bus from the side. I was four days in a coma, six months in the hospital. I had to learn to walk and talk again.”

  “Your English is perfect.”

  “I was married to an Englishman. It was strange, because after the accident I had to work at my German.”

  “And the Englishman didn’t love you?”

  “You listen to people, Roland. I noticed that last night. And you say things that other people might think, but would never dream of voicing.”

  “But, crucially, I don’t remember.”

  “You’re right. He didn’t love me.”

  “He left you?”

  “After the accident.”

  “That was bad.”

  She shrugged.

  “Who looked after you?” he asked. “Your parents?”

  “My mother and her boyfriend.”

  “Was your father already dead?” asked Schafer, unable to resist his instinct to pursue a weakness, and she nodded. “How long ago was that?”

  “Four years.”

  “So . . . before your accident.”

  She brought her knees up defensively.

  “You know, you sound like someone who has to ask a lot of questions . . . for your work,” she said. “But you’re not a journalist.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “You don’t stroke me to get your answers,” she said. “And you’re brutal.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I ended up naked in a hotel room with a woman who’s as good as a stranger, with one leg, one eye, and me with no recollection of how we got here.”

  “So when was the last time that happened to you?” she asked quizzically.

  They nearly laughed, like people for whom humor had become an offshore island. He felt strangely calm, which he hadn’t for some time. His instinct was telling him he could relax, which was making him paradoxically more vigilant.

  “When we left the restaurant, you asked me to come back to your hotel with you,” she said, “because you thought you were being followed.”

  “I said that to you?”

  “Yes, and amazingly, I still came back with you.”

  “I’ve been a little paranoid lately.”

  “You mean it isn’t true?”

  “What do you think?” he said, squeezing some derision into his voice.
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  “I don’t know. I don’t disbelieve people just because they’re a bit weird because . . . I’m a bit weird myself. I know what it’s like to be disbelieved.”

  “At least you’ve got a good excuse.”