The Nearest Exit

by Olen Steinhauer

  “I’m not a cop.”

  “Then I don’t have to answer a thing.”

  “In which case, I’d be very curious why you wouldn’t.”

  Mihai blinked rapidly, perhaps a sign of an upcoming lie, perhaps not. “You know what I do for a living?”

  “You’re a baker, and you help people move here.”

  He smiled. “Yes, and no. It seems I spend most of my time answering police questions about the people I help. If pressed, I would have to say my main occupation is answering questions.”

  “Then you’re experienced,” Erika said and opened a hand toward the car; Oskar was already starting it up. “Shall I occupy you a few minutes?”

  Despite his attitude, Erika liked Mihai Stanescu. He was abrupt, to the point, a quality Erika herself was often accused of. He, like his brother, was a small man, but heavier and with an excess of dark hair that grew too quickly on his face and spilled out under his neck when he took off his tie in the Kreuzberg coffee shop they settled on. Erika ordered espresso, but wished she hadn’t when Mihai ordered Trendelburger Feuergeist-“fire ghost,” an aptly named clear liquor she felt she could use right now. When she stared at his shot glass too long, he raised an eyebrow. “You are paying for this, right?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Good.” He swallowed it all in one go, then said, “Who’s the bastard?”

  She glanced at Hans Kuhn near the doorway-she’d asked him to stay back. “You didn’t meet Inspector Kuhn before?”

  “Not him.” He tapped the table with a stubby finger. “The one in the picture. The one who took my niece.”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “How sure are you about him?”

  “We have him on video talking to her just before she disappeared.”

  His cheeks and forehead flushed; then he waved to the waiter for another Feuergeist.

  “So?” said Erika.

  “You’re the one with the questions, right?”

  “You know what questions I have.”

  That seemed to throw him. He leaned back and took her in with his eyes, then leaned forward again. “You want to know if I have any suspicions.”

  “Yes.”

  “If I did, I’d tell you.”

  “Then tell me about Adriana. Why her?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Because you do,” she said. She’d been sure of it from the moment he started protecting her parents; he had the guilt of knowledge all over him. “Adriana Stanescu. Fifteen. Moldovan, like you. None of that is exceptional, but there was something special about her. It’s why she was taken. You tell me what makes her special.”

  The second Feuergeist went down slower than the first as he considered his answer. He set down the half-empty shot glass. “I have my own demands.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “Silence. What I tell you-it’s not for the public. Can you promise me this? It’s only to help you do your job, nothing else. Because this is one case I’d like to see you solve.”

  If his information proved valuable, the truth was that its public dissemination wouldn’t be her choice. The decision would move up to the second floor, and her opinion would be relegated to one of many blabbering voices that could be-and usually was-ignored. “I can promise this,” she lied.

  He drank the rest of his Feuergeist to steel himself, then began to speak.

  It didn’t take long, and when he was finished he didn’t wait for her to end the conversation. He simply stood and walked out past Hans Kuhn, who waited for some sign from Erika. She gave none. She couldn’t move from her seat, could only stare ahead into the empty distance, thinking what a truly miserable world she lived in. She flagged down the waiter and ordered a double shot of Feuergeist. Sometimes the world hardly seemed worth saving at all.

  5

  She and Oskar were on the A9 again, heading back to Munich, the winter sun setting off to their right. She’d told Mihai’s story once, a quick summation, and Oskar’s foot had weakened noticeably, so that now they were crawling in the passing lane. She suggested he speed up or move, so he switched to the right lane and even used his signal, which was in her memory unprecedented.

  “Tell me again,” he said.

  She took a breath, the Feuergeist making a small fire in her gut. “Adriana came to Germany four years ago, two years before she arrived with her parents. She was eleven at the time. Mihai wanted me to understand, so he described the poor little village they came from, that it’s riddled with despair and alcoholics and for a teenager it’s a curse of nothingness. He attributed Adriana’s stupidity to optimism, and I suppose that’s right. A modeling agency came to town. They said they were from Hamburg, but there’s no telling. They were looking for new talent, fresh faces. They told the girls that if they were chosen to work for them, there would be an official contract, and the company would take care of the passport and visa paperwork. Adriana didn’t tell her parents-she knew what they would say. They, unlike her, were patriots. They had no desire to leave or see their daughter leave Moldova. So she went with a girlfriend to the audition, in a rented warehouse on the edge of town. Two days later, she returned to find out she was one of five or so girls who’d been chosen. Her girlfriend, Mihai explained, was sick with jealousy.”

  They passed a sign for a gas station, and Erika asked him to pull over. As soon as he’d parked, she was out the door, lumbering toward the station’s clean, modern store. Oskar considered following, but instead stared through the windshield at the barren fields beyond the highway. What was most unbearable about these stories was that they always began the same way-a modeling agency, a scout for secretarial work, a company finding nannies for rich Western children-and very soon you knew where they would end up. Yet despite the repetition, no one ever learned.

  She returned with a bottle of cheap white wine with a screw top, but no Snickers-he suspected the story had killed her appetite. She settled into her seat, gasping for air, and said, “Sorry-did you want something?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “Good.”

  He merged onto the highway but returned to the passing lane. His foot was working better, and he wanted to get back to Munich as soon as possible.

  “Where was I?” she said.

  “She’d gotten the modeling job.”

  “Yes,” Erika said as she unscrewed the wine, the cap’s aluminum seam popping. “All the successful contestants sat for photographs, gave their names and addresses, and then the agency left town. A week later, they returned with fresh passports and told the girls they had five hours to collect their stuff and get to a bus in the center of town.

  “There were other girls already on the bus, girls from nearby villages. By the time they reached the border with Romania, there were probably a total of thirty or forty. Though Adriana couldn’t have known this part, you and I and Mihai all know that their long border stop was for bribes. They crossed Romania, stopped again, crossed Hungary. They reached the Austrian border.”

  She took a long draft from the wine bottle. Oskar waited.

  “You know, we like to think we’re better than those easterners, but all it takes is a little money. Money is the great equalizer, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose it is.”

  After another sip, she said, “They arrived in Hamburg two days later. They were herded off the bus into a warehouse in the more dangerous part of St. Pauli, gave up their passports, and were told that a lot of money had been invested in them. As soon as they paid it back, they would be free to start their modeling careers. Then, one by one, they were raped.”

  She took another swallow and spoke to the road ahead.

  “There was a man and a woman who worked together, looking over the girls and making notes on a clipboard. They were deciding which girls would go where. Adriana was shipped to a whorehouse outside Berlin. This, according to Mihai, was a sign that they liked her looks. The occasional government functionary made it to their establishmen
t and would pay well for an eleven-year-old as pretty as she was. Not so fast.”

  Though on this stretch of the A9 there was no speed limit, Oskar hadn’t realized he had slowly accelerated to something far above any safe speed. He let off the gas and glanced at her. “Sorry,” he said, then noticed she was already halfway through her bottle. “Maybe you should slow down, too.”

  Erika followed his gaze. She wedged the bottle between her thighs and rested her hands on her knees. “One of the worst curses for anyone in our profession is imagination. We should all be born without it.”

  “Go on.”

  “Is there any need?” she asked. “You know what happened next. Five to ten men a night, and if they paid enough-and most did-they could do with her what they liked. Adriana was checked after each visit, because a bruise would cost the visitor extra. Adriana made a lot of money for them. But then…” Unconsciously, she removed the bottle from between her thighs and held it near her lips. “She was lucky, wasn’t she? She had an uncle who had been in Germany for years, a man who was familiar with the criminal classes. He got a call from his brother, that Adriana had gone missing. He’d learned from her jealous girlfriend that she was modeling in Germany. And while Andrei was too much of a villager to understand a thing, Mihai immediately understood. He did his homework. Among the immigrants he helped out, some had contact with the flesh road. They tracked her to Hamburg, and then to Berlin. And then…” She paused again, ignoring the bottle. “I didn’t ask him why he didn’t just call the police. I think I know why, but it would have been good to hear it directly from him.”

  “He doesn’t trust cops.”

  “Yes, but that’s not it. It’s his brother. Adriana’s father is a dunce, and if the police raided the place and sent her back to Moldova with an escort, then he would learn what had happened to his daughter. Mihai wanted his brother to remain in blissful ignorance. He still wants it-that’s why he demanded silence from me. It’s why he took matters into his own hands four years ago. He approached the men who ran the Berlin house and made them an offer. If they gave up this one girl, then he would give them the use of his bakery to launder money. They thought he was crazy and suggested a counteroffer. They would give him the girl if he gave them his shop. He would continue to run it, but for a salary, and all profits would be deposited into their bank.”

  These were the details she’d skipped on her initial telling, and Oskar waited impatiently for Mihai’s reply. “Well?”

  “What could he do? He signed the ownership papers over to them, then took Adriana back to Berlin. He nursed her until she was fit enough, then smuggled her back into Moldova. It was a secret between them-her parents would continue to believe she’d been pursuing a modeling career.”

  Oskar considered that, but however he looked at it, it still made no sense. “Andrei didn’t suspect? No one’s that stupid.”

  “I said the same thing. Mihai thinks Andrei suspected but was too horrified to ever ask the question. But he did change. A month after her return, he called to ask if Mihai could help them get papers to move to Germany. He wanted to do it, he said, for Adriana, because if she could run away to go to Germany, then leaving was very important to her.”

  “The man lives with blinders.”

  “Don’t we all,” said Erika. “When I asked Mihai for names, he seemed very nervous-it was the first time during our talk that he was. But he gave me one. Rainer Volker, the man who owned his bakery. Ring a bell?”

  “No. He doesn’t own it anymore?”

  “He’s dead now, so he doesn’t own a thing,” she said wistfully as she gazed at the gray sky ahead of them. “His name didn’t ring a bell with me either, but when we got into the car, I remembered him from a piece in the Hamburger Abendblatt. Last month-first week of January, I think. Rainer Volker was found shot to death down by the Elbe. You know what the article said he was?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “A philanthropist.”

  6

  Radovan Pani ć had been home less than a week, making arrangements for his mother’s cancer treatments in Vienna, when he learned from a friend in a smoky Novi Beograd café that the parliament of Kosovo, the Serbian province they had fought a humiliating war to keep, was holding a vote on independence that coming Sunday. Radovan, distracted by the details of the Zürich heist and finding a visa for his mother, had stayed away from newspapers.

  The result was a foregone conclusion, because the Serb-dominated northern region of Kososvo was too much of a minority to hold any sway. Had there been a public referendum, they might have all boarded buses to offset the vote, but since it was a parliament vote the only idea anyone had was to send buses of Kalashnikovs.

  As Sunday grew nearer, his more optimistic friends pointed out that the results didn’t matter. Kosovo had already declared independence before, in 1990, and only Albania had recognized it. This time around, no one would, because Article 10 of the UN Security Council’s Resolution 1244, which had ended the Kosovo War, gave Kosovo “substantial autonomy” within Serbia, which negated the possibility of real independence.

  “That’s historical record,” said one, clutching his cigarette in a fist. “Internationally recognized. Go ahead and let them play their game. They’ll end up with egg on their faces.”

  The optimists weren’t worried. The others-and they were far more numerous-included friends and most of the politicians he heard on television. The world, they reminded him, had long ago singled out Serbs for eternal punishment. They adored the Muslims in Kosovo because they had been fooled by their crying women and those alleged mass graves. The Americans, who after 9/11 should know better, would once again let their stupid political correctness get the better of them.

  Radovan preferred optimism. With a mother being slowly eaten by cancer, it was the one stance that could give him some measure of peace. However, he was also a career criminal who knew the world didn’t always bow to your optimism. The result of the vote that chilly Sunday one week ago was no surprise to anyone. What followed was.

  Afghanistan was the first to recognize the Republic of Kosovo. Then Costa Rica and, of course, Albania. There were jokes, because sovereignty is only as strong as the nations that agree with it. Then France said yes. The French president was of Hungarian stock, and Hungarians hated Serbs more than most, so perhaps it was an anomaly. Breaths were held. Turkey-more Muslims, so what else could you expect? Then, in Dar es Salaam, George W. Bush, that ignorant cowboy, said, “The Kosovars are now independent.”

  Exhale.

  By then Radovan had settled most everything with his mother’s Austrian visa and had a final appointment for the following Monday. So, with her blessing, he took to the streets with his friends and shouted and raised his fists. They cursed the UN and the USA and sang Orthodox hymns and war songs. Each night, exhausted and pleased with themselves, they got drunk and told their Kosovo stories. Some had been there for the fighting, and Radovan drank in their tales of burning villages and Muslim terrorists and tracking down soldiers who had gone MIA. Others were amateur historians-most Serbs these days were amateur historians-who could recite a litany of dates that tied the region more tightly to the Serbian breast. The 1389 battle against the Ottomans on Kosovo Polje-Kosovo Field, or the field of the black birds-figured heavily in any discussion, so that any Serb could, and would, proclaim that they had been fighting for Kosovo for the past six hundred years, ever since that first gloriously lost battle.

  When a crowd is convinced it has been truly wronged, little can stop it from smashing windows and pulling up sidewalks. When the injustice reaches back into medieval times, and the humiliation has lasted six centuries, then the anger is buoyed by religious fervor. You break glass not only for yourself but for all who have come before you, and when, on Thursday night, one of your comrades, a functionary with the Radical Party, suggests a visit to the American embassy, there is no choice but to go.

  All Radovan’s ancestors hung behind him, watching with pleasu
re as he went to give a history lesson to the monolith nation that thought history was something you only read about in books. History, his lesson would say, was the blood that kept you alive. History separated you from the beasts. This was tonight’s lesson.

  It was beautiful. The ease of their entry was breathtaking, for the marines guarding the unassuming building on Kneza Miloša drew back like troublemakers hoping that in the rear of the room the teacher wouldn’t notice them. Then the windows were shattered, drunk professors scaling the facade, legs flailing at the sills as they slid inside. They ran cheering through the narrow, dark corridors of the empty building, banging against locked doors that likely held the darkest secrets of the American empire, and when they couldn’t get them open someone-Dejan? Viktor?-decided the best way was to burn it down. If there are no students, then what use is the schoolhouse? Perhaps in the morning, when the students see the pile of ashes, they just might understand.

  By the next day, though, no one understood, and their own policemen collected them in the streets and knocked down apartment doors looking for the professors of history. One died in the embassy fire, consumed by smoke, but Radovan didn’t know that one. Some Bosnian rounded up with him said the dead man was a martyr, but with a crushing hangover accentuated by the cold morning light, Radovan couldn’t be sure of anything.

  Now, the Sunday after the vote, he was still here: a group cell in the Belgrade District Prison on Bačvanska ulica.

  Occasionally, policemen arrived to take away this or that prisoner for questioning. The ones who returned said they were asking who had organized the attacks on the Croatian and American embassies, as well as the attempted attacks on the Turkish and British embassies, but the pressure depended on which interrogator you got. Some didn’t care for those mysteries and just sat discussing minor offenses, like the trashed McDonald’s and other stores along Terazije.