by Kat Parrish
That explained it. Berlin had been spy central before the Wall fell. His father had worked in Berlin at the height of the Cold War. I saw his father bicycling through a checkpoint, a student’s satchel slung over his chest. He was a handsome young man who looked a lot like his son. I saw him meeting a fresh-faced redhead at an outdoor café in the British sector of the city. She was his contact and their cover was that they were lovers. They had become lovers for real, caught up in the excitement of the work they were doing and intoxicated by sexual attraction. They’d fallen in love and married when she fell pregnant. I saw them return to the states to a clapboard house in Maine with a blue-eyed baby boy welcomed by his Russian-immigrant grandparents who had doted on him.
I saw the child growing up in New England with his mother and grandparents while his father commuted to various missions around the world. His father always brought back presents from his travels. The boy’s favorite toy had been a set of nesting dolls he’d played with like a Rubik’s Cube. The boy had idolized his father and when he’d graduated from college, he’d joined the family business.
His father was very proud of him; his mother worried about him even though he told her that he worked for the Commerce Department.
I turned back to look at the sneering man with the brush-cut. “I don’t know who this man is, but he’s not a terrorist.”
I could feel Eliades relax.
“No?” the man with the brush-cut said, challenging me, his face blank. He wanted to see how confident I was. He wanted to see if I would back down.
“No,” I repeated, and I knew it for a fact.
And I told the men in the room what I had seen. The man in handcuffs looked interested as I finished my spiel. “My mother is Scottish,” he said, “from the Hebrides. She always told me that Maine felt like home, though she hated living with my grandparents.”
“Did they grow beets?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “My grandmother made the best borscht.” He smiled then and I got a sense-memory of him sitting at a table, happily spooning up the crimson soup. I smiled back. I could feel his love for his grandparents who had fondly called him “Marik.”
The guy with the brush-cut started clapping. “Do me next,” he said and the distaste he felt hit me like a physical blow.
I don’t know what he saw on my face but Agent Eliades intervened before I could say anything. “Sir, we don’t have much time.”
The man didn’t like that, but he nodded curtly and without another word, left the room. Everyone seemed to take a deep breath.
PJ unlocked Marik’s cuffs.
“Thanks Gagarin,” Eliades said. “You were a big help.” The kid stood up and nodded at me. “Ma’am.” And then he turned and left the room.
“Sit down,” Eliades said to me. “Please,” he added when I didn’t make a move.
“I don’t like being in this room,” I said.
“Bad smells?”
Banter again. I was beginning to think that Agent Eliades used humor to keep any meaningful conversation from happening. I gave him my version of his stony-eyed look. He got the message. “Please,” he said again.
I sat down with just enough attitude to say “You are not the boss of me” in body language.
“That was impressive,” he said, and there was no trace of mockery in his voice, but no warmth either. “And that’s exactly what we need you to do.”
“Okay,” I said because there didn’t seem to be anything else to say.
PJ pushed a button set into a box mounted on the table, looked at me and asked, “Ready?” I nodded.
“Bring him in,” PJ ordered. He looked at me and asked, “Have you been able to do that your whole life?”
“Pretty much,” I said and then no one else said anything as we waited.
The first time I realized that what I do is not something everyone can do is was when I was seven. I was at a friend’s house for a birthday party and the girl’s grandmother was there, a sweet-looking little old lady who doted on my friend. She was German and called everyone “liebchen” and there were vintage photographs of her and her family all over the house. My parents admired her, and I didn’t really understand that, because she smelled really bad to me.
And during that party, when the birthday candles were lighted, the smell of the wax combined with the grandmother’s olfactory output, I was able suddenly able to isolate separate and distinct smells coming from her and I knew what they were.
Fear and charred bone and the greasy smell of human flesh burning. Later, when she was serving the cake, I said to her, “Hannelore forgives you.” I had never heard the name before, but I had heard the words in my mind when I’d been surrounded by the old woman’s aura.
The old lady had looked at me in shock and then she’d hit me. Not a slap in the face but a full-on blow that knocked me out of my chair.
Everyone was shocked of course, and she played it off, saying that she’d had a wicked, uncontrollable spasm of her hand. She’d told me she was sorry, but I could tell she wasn’t. She wasn’t sorry at all.
But because she was old and a lot of people assume that old people are feeble-minded and frail and not really responsible for what they do, everyone sympathized with her. And they believed her. And they looked at me from the corner of their eyes and wondered what I’d done to provoke such a nice old lady.
If it had been my mother who had been with me at the party, she probably would have kissed me and told me to forgive the old lady because old people sometimes do things they’re sorry for.
But it was my father and my father is not a forgiving guy. And the idea that some old lady had hit his child did not sit well with him.
He dragged me out of the party so fast that at first, I thought he was mad at me.
He took me to Baskin Robbins for ice cream and he asked me what had happened and why I’d said what I’d said. I was close to my father. I knew he’d believe me.
* * *
My father had met my mother in college. She’d been a botany major he’d tutored in Shakespeare; she’d introduced him to vegetarian cooking and the joys of tantric sex. They got married and opened a gardening business in West L.A. and as my mother had developed a reputation for being a plant whisperer, he’d taken on more and more of the duties of raising me.
So in between bites of ice cream, I told him what had really happened.
I told him that whenever I was near Jana’s grandmother, I could smell bad smells. And I told him that at the party I’d smelled something particularly bad and that when I smelled those smells I knew things about her grandmother.
I saw her as a child, a scrawny blonde, blue-eyed child. And I saw her playing with a pretty dark-haired girl with big brown eyes. Her friend was named Hannelore, and everyone called her Hanni for short. I could tell that Jana’s grandmother—her name was Ilse—hated Hannelore, but I couldn’t figure out why. Hani smelled good, like baked bread and the flowers that grew in the window box of their flat.
Ilse and her parents lived next door to Jana’s grandmother. They also had a tidy window box filled with flowers but inside their apartment, the furnishings were a bit shabby.
I realized that Ilse’s family was Christian, and Hannelore’s family were Jews and that was a bad thing to be at the time.
I don’t know how I knew this, but I knew that Hannelore’s family were pretending to be Christians too, and everyone in the apartment building was helping them keep their secret. They had a crucifix on their living room wall, next to a picture of Hitler. Everyone in the apartment house had a similar picture.
People liked Hannelore’s family. But Ilse was jealous of her friend. Her father had bought Hanni a pearl ring for her birthday and Ilse coveted it. She asked Hannelore to let her wear the ring, but Hannelore wouldn’t give it to her.
“You’ll be sorry,” Ilse threatened.
And not long after, Ilse had told a boy she knew in the Hitler Youth that a “dirty Jewish family” lived in her apart
ment building.
So, Hannelore and her family were taken away and a “German” family moved into their apartment and the family had a son and he and Ilse were soon the best of friends.
Her parents suspected their daughter had denounced Hannelore and her family, but they’d excused her, saying that she was too young to understand the harm she’d done.
And really, they thought it was better to have a decent, Christian family living in the apartment anyway.
Ilse’s parents had been wrong. She had understood exactly what was going to happen to Hanni and her family. No one really talked about the camps, but everyone knew that when the Jews were taken away, they went somewhere, and bad things happened to them.
And they never came back.
The only thing she hadn’t quite realized was that when Hanni and her parents were taken away, the soldiers would grab everything of value in the home and take it for themselves.
She’d been hoping to steal Hanni’s ring before anyone noticed it was in the apartment.
When I finished my story, my father looked at me for a long time and I couldn’t read his expression.
“I don’t know whether what you have is a gift or a curse,” he said slowly at last, “but I do know that it’s going to make your life more complicated.”
He noticed my scoop of pralines and cream was starting to melt, so he dug into his own dish of chocolate mint chip.
We didn’t talk any more about my extra-sensory sense of smell that day. I didn’t really know what “complicated” meant at the time.
I do now.
I never got invited back to Jana’s house.
My reverie was cut short when the door to the office opened and a tall black guy entered with the “person of interest.”
I guess I’d expected the prisoner to be wearing one of those orange jumpsuits like the detainees at Guantanamo.
Instead he was dressed much like PJ and Eliades, in a T-shirt and jeans.
The T-shirt was a solid color pocket tee—something you can buy at any big-box store in a three-pack for five dollars.
He was young and clean cut, with close-cropped hair that looked like it might be curly if allowed to get longer. He was not handsome, but he was striking, and his eyes burned with hatred when he saw me. It was clear he wasn’t happy to see a woman.
The black guy pushed him into a seat opposite an empty chair and then stepped back, nodding at Eliades and PJ. Everyone looked at me.
“Hi,” I said to the prisoner, because I had no idea how this was supposed to work.
“Are you the lady from the embassy,” he asked, and my heart sank. I could smell the lie on him. He was trying to play me and had decided to go for the sympathy card by pretending to be an innocent abroad. But the stench of death was on him, clinging so close that I knew it was personal. And I could also smell something metallic and gritty. Something...
Radioactive.
My blood chilled. This was the guy Eliades wanted all right. “No,” I said. I pulled out the other chair at the table and sat down facing him, catching his gaze and holding it. “I’m not from the embassy.”
The emotion flowing from him was so strong and tangible I could almost taste it.
Agent Eliades stepped closer to the table. I couldn’t see him, but I could sense his presence behind me. His breathing was measured, his heartbeat slow and steady. I felt my own heartbeat slowing down to match his. Synching up with him. Something must have changed in my face because the prisoner shifted his gaze from me and stared over my head at Eliades.
I could smell his hatred of Peter and his contempt for me and it was so strong that it was masking the scent of his aura. I knew I had to break through that screen, or this wasn’t going to work. “My name is Vetiver Quinn,” I said. “I’m here to ask you a few questions.” The prisoner didn’t say anything, but he returned his gaze to me.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
He didn’t answer.
“The name on his passport is Thomas Blake,” PJ said.
“Well, that’s a lie,” I said without thinking.
The man who called himself Thomas Blake practically snarled. “Who is this whore?” he demanded, his accent pure working-class London.
I smelled disinfectant and putrefaction. The stench of a hospital overwhelmed by patients, as frenzied as a war zone. I saw Thomas working there as an orderly. No. As a nurse.
A place name came to me. “Croydon,” I said and that got a reaction from the man sitting in front of me.
“He’s from Croydon.”
Eliades must have signaled the black agent because he nodded his head and left the room.
Next, I saw Thomas in a crowd of young men, attending services at a mosque, surrounded by throngs of other men—some African, some Middle Eastern-looking, some with pale skin like his. I lost his scent in the urgent, teeming mass of smells and then I caught it.
The sweetness of the desert rose, which grows worldwide but is native to ...
“Yemen,” I said. “He’s been in Yemen.” Terrorists have training camps in Yemen, I knew. ISIS and Houthi fighters were turning the country into a butcher’s shop. If Thomas had been there recently, that was bad news.
Thomas’ eyes widened. “What nonsense are you talking?” he asked, trying to cover his guilty reaction with annoyance. But that unguarded moment had broken his concentration and now I could read him more clearly.
I caught the powder and hand soap scent of his mother and the bloodrot of the cancer that had killed her. I saw him at her funeral, a lost and lonely figure among the mourners. I saw him turning away from the minister reading the service at the gravesite and embracing a motherly woman wearing a hijab. She smelled like orange flower water, sumac, and pomegranate molasses.
I saw him speaking with an imam and later, studying with him and reading the Qur’an late into the night. I smelled the bitter black coffee that fueled those study sessions and the harsh tobacco of the cigarettes he smoked.
“My condolences on the death of your mother,” I said. For a second genuine confusion replaced the anger in his eyes but then it flared again, brighter this time.
“Witch,” he said. And then he said other things. And then I started getting all sorts scent cues telling me exactly where he’d been since arriving in California. And I felt his satisfaction that his plan was coming to fulfilment. I needed to press him. There wasn’t much time.
“How did you like Disneyland?” I asked. I didn’t break eye contact with Thomas, but I could feel Peter’s tension behind me. “Did you go on Space Mountain? That’s my favorite ride but there’s always such a long wait.”
Thomas didn’t answer but now he was thinking about Disneyland and his memories were coming clear to me, the moments delivered in bursts of scent—the flowers of the floral clock at the entrance, the smell of the metal track of the monorail overhead, the smell of suntan lotion.
I could smell the chocolate-covered frozen banana he’d eaten. “I like those frozen bananas too,” I said. And that’s when he freaked out and came over the table with his cuffed hands curled into claws.
I lurched back in my chair, but PJ was already moving, grabbing Thomas and slamming him back into his chair as he cursed.
I didn’t have to be a linguist to understand what he was saying.
And suddenly his actions were transparent to me as I smelled dampness and electricity and excited children.
“It’s hidden in a ride called “It’s a Small World,” I said. And I knew that location had been chosen because it was one of the rides meant specifically for small children and if a bomb went off, the children would be the first to die.
“You’re evil,” I said, but he wasn’t listening, and neither was anyone else.
Eliades was on a phone, speaking urgently.
The black agent had returned with a laptop in hand and the brush-cut guy trailing him.
Brush-cut gave me a nod.
My little parlor trick had impressed him.
>
He looked at Eliades.
“E.T.A.?” he barked.
“Team’s scrambled out of Pendleton,” Eliades said. I knew that was about 45 minutes away from the park.
Brush-cut turned to the black agent with the laptop. “We’re up, sir,” he said and turned the computer so that Brush-cut could see the screen.
I realized we were looking at a drone’s eye view of Disneyland, heading straight for the iconic white towers of Cinderella’s castle.
When I was in fifth grade, a friend of mine had won a contest to stay at the secret Cinderella hotel room inside the castle. I’d been so jealous.
Thomas looked rapt as he stared at the images the drone was sending back.
“Get me over that ride,” Brush-cut said.
“Sir, it’s an inside ride,” laptop guy said.
“I know it’s a god-damned inside ride Wilson,” Brush-cut snapped. He was starting to feel the pressure. I could smell his sweat.
“Pendleton team will be on the ground in ten,” PJ said, tracking the progress on his phone.
There’s an app for that, I thought. Of course, there is. And I couldn’t help thinking that this whole situation felt like being in a super-realistic video game, a first-person shooter where the goal was to find a dirty bomb instead of a rod of lordly might.
“Target is in sight,” PJ said.
Brush-cut looked at PJ impatiently, as if he thought it was the agent’s fault that he didn’t already have boots on the ground.