Tears glittered in her eyes, but I turned away and busied myself putting the kettle on. She would be fine, I told myself. We would all be fine.
Kali had recovered enough the next morning to flounce out of the apartment without a backward glance at me, and she climbed into the waiting Uber with an air of injured martyrdom. Well, that’s that, I thought, mentally washing my hands of her. For the moment, anyway.
Now it was time to proceed with my plans. Leo would be busy introducing Kali and getting her settled, I figured. Perfect timing for my escape. I had pretty much thrown a dart at the map and decided to go to Berlin, where my grandfather had been stationed after the war. So I bought a Chunnel ticket to Paris and took an Uber to Paddington Station. Then I took the metro to St. Pancras and an anonymous express train to Heathrow, paying for the last two maneuvers in cash. Expensive and annoying, but it should throw Leo off my trail—if, that is, he was still interested in pursuing me after the nasty events and nastier exchanges of Saturday. As my plane lifted off, I gazed out the window in some satisfaction. So much for Leo Schlumberger, military intelligence or Mossad or whatever the fuck he was!
But I felt a small pang as I watched London become tinier and tinier in the distance. After my wandering life, it had become almost a home to me. I really liked its busy, narrow streets, where I could find a cabdriver with a doctorate in physics; its confused tourists looking the wrong way as they stumbled into the cab’s path; and its mini-neighborhoods clustered around lush private parks and bustling high streets. And then the clouds came together, and London was lost entirely. I closed my window shade and closed my eyes for the rest of the short flight.
When we landed in Berlin, I took another anonymous cab to the Ritz-Carlton, where my grandfather had been billeted, proffering my company credit card with some satisfaction. It was one of the very, very few perks of my job. I wouldn’t even have to take any vacation time; I could just say that I was scouting out the hotel for the sheikh.
Posh and quiet, the Ritz faced Potsdamer Bahnhof station. I was amused to see that a mini–ski slope was under construction in the center of Potsdamer Platz. Someone was hoping to relieve the gray monotony of central Berlin, but I was dubious. Even a big, garishly yellow sign for Die Peanuts Movie didn’t help. I wondered if anyone had realized what Die Peanuts meant in English.
But my spirits rose as I walked briskly down Stresemannnstrasse, past a series of blank, emotionless German government buildings—stark reminders of the Soviet era—and cut over past the Brandenburg Gate. Then I crossed the street and nodded at the serious young marines who stood at attention, their eyes constantly in motion and their hands hovering near their automatic weapons. Guarding a US embassy these days was serious business.
They let me by, though, and I walked through the heavily barred gates into a reception area guarded by still more marines, through the security queue, and, after being frisked and searched, into the embassy itself. As I entered the lobby, a tall, graying man hurried toward me, holding out his hands.
“My dear girl! Such a pleasure to see you again! Welcome to Berlin.”
He kissed me on both cheeks, European-style, then held me off at arm’s length to see me better. “You look just like your father,” he pronounced. “God rest his soul.”
I had forgotten that Henry Baynor, one of my father’s oldest friends, was a devout Catholic. My father had always treated Henry’s faith with a mixture of amusement and respect.
“It’s great to see you too, Henry,” I said. “Thanks for meeting with me on such short notice.”
“For Ned’s daughter? Anything! But come, my dear, let’s not stand here in this cold lobby. There’s an excellent beer cellar around the corner.”
Exiting the embassy was much easier than entering it. This time I smiled at the younger, cuter marine, and he almost smiled back. Then he saw Henry by my side and stiffened to attention. Henry nodded at him. “At ease, son,” he said.
The proprietor of the beer cellar clapped Henry on the back when we walked in and seated us in the back corner, where we could talk privately. Courtly and kind, Henry had friends everywhere, in every corner of the world, from the yurts of Mongolia to the rough sailors’ bars of Marseille, my father used to say. Beers and nuts appeared magically in front of us, and I sipped appreciatively. “Delicious,” I said as the cold liquid slipped smoothly down my throat.
“Hans brews his own,” Henry said. “It’s the best.”
I took another long sip.
“Now, my dear, delightful as it is to see you,” Henry said, “I suspect you have more on your mind than looking up old friends. No?”
“No,” I agreed. “I mean, yes.”
“Well, then,” he said, “I am all ears.”
So I plunged in, telling him about the investigation into Sheikh Abdullah and his sons, their veiled threats, and my fear that the FBI would destroy everything I had been working for. He listened in silence, his piercing blue eyes never leaving my face. I finished with a description of Leo.
“He can’t have anything to do with the investigation,” I said. “Can he?”
Henry shrugged and held up his hands—who knows?
“But . . . why? What on earth is his interest—or Mossad’s interest—in all of this? But what else could it be?”
Henry looked grave. “And how on earth did he find out about Jules?”
Chapter 16
How indeed? We had buried Jules so deeply that it seemed impossible that she had been resurrected. Leo couldn’t possibly know. So I said, “Maybe he’s just fishing.”
“Maybe,” Henry said.
Neither of us believed it.
“He’s a historian, a researcher,” I said. “He’s probably a very good researcher.”
“You have to lose him, my dear,” Henry said. “Get him to lose interest in you. Do whatever you must.”
I knew he was right. “But still . . . if I lose him, I’ll never find out what he knows, or how he dug it up.”
“Get rid of him,” Henry said. “If you don’t, you could lose everything that you’ve worked so hard for.”
We talked for a while longer, and he promised to see if anyone at the embassy knew about Sheikh Abdullah or Leo.
“Be careful,” I warned, suddenly anxious. “I don’t want anyone to know I’m looking into this.”
He smiled at me. “But of course.”
I knew I could rely on his discretion. My father had once told me that before he retired to a desk position at the State Department, Henry had spent years as an NOC, a nonofficial cover officer, in the CIA. Most CIA officers, he had explained, worked overseas under “light cover,” such as the State Department or USAID; if exposed, they would face nothing worse than an ignominious PNG (persona non grata) ticket out of the country. But NOCs were the most deeply hidden spies, working for nongovernmental organizations and known only to the very highest echelons of the agency. If an NOC were exposed, he might face torture, death, or a future as an anonymous star on the wall of the CIA’s lobby. An avid devotee of spy novels and spy movies, I thrilled to the idea of knowing someone so glamorous.
So if anyone knew how to ferret out secrets without leaving a trace, it was Henry.
“Now,” he continued, “you should go out and enjoy this beautiful fall day in Berlin. Be a tourist. Visit our museums. See that Berlin isn’t all Soviet-era gray and dull. Relax, and I will be in touch as soon as I learn anything.”
Be a tourist! Visit museums! I had traveled the world with my father, but our travels meant trekking and skiing and rafting and doing—not passively strolling through museums to view other people’s past glories.
Henry was listing the tourist sites of Berlin for me, and my mind was wandering when I heard him say, “And then, of course, you must visit our Holocaust memorial and museum.”
My mind snapped back to Leo—his family specialized in recovering the art of Holocaust survivors, he had said—and I leaned forward with sudden interest. “Where is the mem
orial?” I asked.
The Holocaust memorial, it turned out, was a square city block of tall, dark gray granite slabs that grew higher and higher as the ground sloped toward the middle, while the spaces between them grew smaller and smaller to increase the claustrophobia and the urge to escape. At first I wandered, dodging through the slabs, supposing that they were meant to evoke gravestones, traps, ghettoes, but I found myself surprisingly unmoved. Maybe it was the children cheerfully playing hide-and-seek among the towering slabs. Maybe it was the coldness and lack of humanity. Or maybe it was all just too abstract for me; I like the concrete and the actual, not the abstract and intangible.
And then I saw Leo.
He was moving slowly but purposefully among the concrete chunks, his eyes roving unceasingly, just like those of the marine guards at the embassy. I was frozen, the proverbial deer in headlights, when he caught sight of me and his face relaxed into a smile. “Hey,” he called. “Wait up!”
I turned and darted away, thinking I could lose him in this travesty of a maze. Perhaps he would be affected by the symbolism of the grim place and would lose his concentration long enough for me to slip away. How on earth—how in the name of God—had he tracked me down?
Leo was no longer a mild mystery and a potential bed partner, I realized belatedly; he was an impending disaster. I flashed back to my sudden certainty that he was Mossad when we were in the car chase; in the cold light of day, my certainty had eased back into suspicion only, and I had relaxed my guard once more. I was tired of seesawing on Leo—nice guy, nuisance; man of mystery, Oxford don; Mossad spy, obsessed historian—but I knew this: Whatever or whoever he was, he was a danger to me and my mission.
Perhaps I could lose him in the small museum underneath the memorial. Surely that would distract him from his pursuit of me? I bought my ticket and raced down the stairs to the underground bunker that housed the museum, noting with satisfaction that he was nowhere in sight.
But once in the small, dark museum, I was the one who lost my concentration. The Germans were unsparing of themselves, and I found myself admiring them for that. There was no whitewashing of the horrific things they had done. No excuses. No revisionist theory. I paused before an exhibit showing a photograph of one family—squirmy toddler, self-conscious adolescent, worn parents, and stooped grandfather—who had been completely obliterated in Treblinka. All of them dead, murdered in the gas chambers.
Helpless victims were my worst nightmare. I could take whatever happened to me and my colleagues—it was what we signed up for—but the plight of the helpless seared my soul. Uncomprehending children and grief-stricken mothers; little boys grown old before their time; fathers driven to madness by their inability to protect their families: This was what I saw in Chechnya and Syria and so many other hellholes. My mission, inherited from my father, was to make the world safer for the helpless—otherwise, their plight would drive me mad.
That was why my responsibility for Kali was so horrifying. I thought that Leo could take care of himself, like me, but I knew that Kali couldn’t. I couldn’t erase the image of her curled in a fetal ball on the floor of the pub basement, or sobbing and terrified in the back seat of the car, and I knew myself to be responsible for her—the ultimate helpless victim. It was too much for me. That was why she had had to go.
Somehow I was not surprised when Leo came up beside me and put his arm around my shoulders. “Don’t cry, motek,” he said gently.
I relaxed for a moment against his shoulder. But just a moment; then I stiffened and pulled away, scowling at him. “I never cry,” I snapped. “Just leave me alone, will you?”
“I wish I could,” he said.
Loath to disturb the funereal silence of the museum, I pressed my lips together and marched off. He was only a few feet behind me when we ascended into the sunshine above.
“Dinner?” Leo suggested. “I know a charming little rathskeller not far from your hotel. . . .”
Oh my God. “I would not have dinner with you,” I said clearly, “if you were the last man on Earth.” Or at least not until he explained how he had found me again. I could dismiss his presence on the Sunday in Bradford as that of an obsessed historian who thought I had something he needed, or even, possibly, as coincidence. But this was over the edge; for the first time, I saw him as a real danger. Get him to lose interest in you, Henry had said.
He shrugged and spread his hands in a charming Gallic gesture. “Drinks, then?”
I turned my back on him and stalked away, but of course he stayed right by my side.
“Why are you so angry at me?” Leo asked reasonably. “You must have known I would follow you.”
But I didn’t think you would find me, I thought.
Why was I so angry, though? Suddenly it occurred to me that I wasn’t angry so much at him as at myself—for the thrill that had raced through me when I first spotted him at the memorial. We had understood each other so completely in the car when he was shot. It was almost as if our bodies and brains were in perfect rhythm with each other, acting on the same instincts.
I had to face the truth: There was a small part of me that didn’t want to get rid of Leo.
But I couldn’t trust him either.
More seesawing.
So I said to him, “If you’re not going to leave me alone, then how would you like to visit the Spy Museum? You should be right at home there.”
Leo, either a great actor or a nonspy, looked honestly bewildered, and then his eyes narrowed in suspicion. “And why are you interested in the Spy Museum?”
“Why not?” I retorted childishly. I had been reading a John le Carré novel when Leo first found me, so I thought he had already divined my secret, half-ashamed passion for spies. Argo was my favorite movie ever (the brief glimpse of Ben Affleck’s naked torso alone was worth the price of admission); Three Days of the Condor wasn’t far behind it. When Henry was reeling off his list of tourist attractions, the Spy Museum had jumped out at me.
We exchanged glares of mutual distrust.
Leo shrugged. “On y va,” he said. “Let’s go, then.”
The small museum was located, incongruously enough, in a small shopping plaza across Potsdamer Platz, underneath Toys “R” Us and next door to H&M. I especially loved spy gadgets and was immediately drawn to an exhibition of cameras and guns that could be hidden inside anything from a mitten to a ballpoint pen.
“These look like movie props,” Leo said dismissively, coming up beside me. “I doubt they were ever used. I thought spies mainly spend their time bribing dodgy informers with stacks of American dollars.”
I knew that was true and gave him points for admitting that he knew something about the field, though I resented him for piercing my spy novel-fueled fantasies. “They used this stuff during the Cold War,” I said. “Didn’t the CIA try to blow up Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar?”
“Yes, and that worked out so well,” Leo said dryly. “How do you know, anyway?”
“Everyone knows about the cigar,” I retorted as we moved past the lipstick telephones and gun purses.
“Yes, but do you seriously think spies went around garroting each other with piano wire and shooting knives out of desk pens?”
I did, actually, but I certainly had no answer for him. So I closed my mouth firmly, annoyed with him for ruining this fascinating exhibit.
It was getting cooler and darker when we stepped back into the shopping plaza. Defiantly, I headed for the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, even though my feet were killing me by then, and made him trail me through the exhibits about all the people who tried to flee East Germany and the tragic results that usually ensued. Leo rebelled when I started reading, word for word, every exhibit about human-rights abuses in the world today.
“Come on,” he said. “I know you’re not that interested in this stuff. You’re a spy buff. Let’s go get a nice Sacher torte and discuss our mutual interests.”
“We have no mutual interests.”
“Al
l evidence to the contrary,” he countered.
I considered. We had tried talking before, of course, and it hadn’t worked. On the other hand—I felt another flip-flop approaching—I needed to know how he had found me in Berlin. And how he had connected me to Jules. “If I must,” I said ungraciously. “But you’re paying.”
“With the greatest of pleasure,” he said.
Chapter 17
“How did you find me?” I demanded as we sat down, before even putting my napkin in my lap or reaching for my water.
An approaching waiter, hearing my tone, shied away.
“And don’t give me coincidence,” I added. “I’m not an idiot.”
“I’m aware,” he said. “All right, cards on the table, then. I told you I was in military intelligence; well, I still have lots of friends there. I called in some contacts, and they found your flight and hotel reservations. From there, it was easy to follow you to the memorial.”
I digested that, thinking hard. It might even have been true. “But why? Why go to all this trouble? You know I’m not Jules.”
Now he paused to consider his words. “I know you’re connected to Jules,” he said finally. “I know you know something.”
Again, I had to give him points for honesty—and insight. “But I’m not,” I said, a little helplessly. “I don’t.”
“So you say,” he said. “So you say.”
The waiter, encouraged by our calmer tones, descended again, and we chatted our way through a delicious dinner, comparing our most and least favorite world leaders (he had a grudging respect for Vladimir Putin; I felt the same about Xi Jinping). He told me more about his sisters and nieces and nephews, and I told him more about my father and our adventures. It was the most I had talked about my father in years, and I found it almost pleasurable to recount our times together. Leo listened without comment, toying with his cutlery as the waiter removed our plates.
“You certainly lived an interesting life together,” he said neutrally. “You don’t think that was perhaps too much adventure for a child?”
The Long-Lost Jules Page 10
