It was, like many of the stores and vacation dachas his father took him to, a KGB-only place. Inevitably, the best-looking dancers worked there, and Yevgeny was dismayed by the look on his face. “Why the attitude, Milo? Come on. This is your day.” But his father’s encouragement and the steady stream of mixed drinks made no dent in his misery as he looked over these beautiful girls from all over the Russian Empire who had, he imagined, run into some kind of trouble that had left them with no alternative than to take off their clothes for lascivious secret policemen. Lust was overcome by sympathy and pity.
He fixated on one, a morose-looking brunette his father told him was Siberian, and felt an absurd desire to take her away and save her. Misinterpreting his interest, Yevgeny called her over and ordered a private dance in one of the back rooms, promising a tip if she sent him back a man.
How did Yevgeny know that his eighteen-year-old son was still a virgin? He worked for the KGB, and those people knew everything. Or maybe he was just old enough to know that the most secretive, bitter teenagers were still unfamiliar with that one thing that makes life most interesting.
He could still smell the acrid smoke and lubricant from that velvet-curtained room, where she showed him everything and then began to unbutton his pants. He knew what he had to do-he had to tell her to stop, to talk with her about her family, about what had brought her to this terrible end, and help her find a way out-but he could not move. Afterward, when she collected the tip from Yevgeny, he overheard her say in her harsh Novosibirsk accent, “Sweet kid you got there.” Milo felt his heart cease beating.
Zsuzsa Papp, though, evoked none of those missionary feelings. When she came over to kiss Parkhall’s cheeks, she walked like someone who’d been to prep schools all her life. Confidence and entitlement and, with the kiss, a vague whiff of solicitude toward her inferiors. Somehow she filled out her floor-walking costume-a black miniskirt, red silk blouse, and platform shoes-without looking like a whore.
“Come to unwind, Terry?”
“Absolutely. And to bring someone who wants to meet you. Sebastian Hall.”
She settled her condescending eyes on Milo. Below them, high cheekbones showed a faint flush. “A fan?”
“Soon to be, I’m sure,” Milo said as he shook her limp hand. “I’m a private investigator. Looking for your friend, Henry Gray.”
The flush in her cheeks neither expanded nor contracted. “Someone’s hired you?” Her tone suggested that this was unlikely.
“An aunt,” Parkhall informed her. “What’s the name?”
“Sybil Erikson. From Vermont.”
A smile fixed itself to her face as she said, “Just a second,” and led Parkhall a few feet away. As they talked, Parkhall became flustered, making excuses for Milo’s presence. Then Zsuzsa returned wearing the same smile. “Why don’t you buy a private show? Otherwise we stay out here, and I’ll have to look like I’m chatting you up.”
A private dance, it turned out, cost fifty euros, or fourteen thousand forints, for fourteen minutes. She led him by the hand around tables and the main stage to a booth sectioned off by a heavy curtain, and he felt as if it were twenty years ago. There was a single plush chair, which she told him to sit in, and she took a moment to catch the rhythm of the ballad from the main room. She began to dance.
“Listen,” he said, raising his hands. “You don’t need to do this. I just want to talk.”
Without breaking her movements, she said, “You gay?”
“No.”
“Well, you paid for it,” she said as she slipped out of her blouse like a candy bar losing its wrapper. “I never cheat anyone.”
She was left in a black lacy bra and the miniskirt, and then she unwound the skirt to reveal a very small black thong. He could only think of one way to make her stop, and unlike twenty years ago he now had the courage to speak.
“I lied,” he said.
“What?”
“The story about me being a private investigator. It’s not true.”
She lowered her arms so they half-covered her bra. Smile gone. “What’s your name again? Sebastian?”
“No. It’s Milo Weaver.”
She cocked her head, as if he’d tapped her cheek. “Milo Weaver?”
“A couple months ago someone came here claiming to be me. I’d like to know who he was.”
Zsuzsa waited, staring with big eyes, giving no sign she knew anything about any of this.
He said, “You’re probably confused-I would be, too. And I can’t give you much more than my word. This guy who was pretending to be me-he was looking for your friend Henry. I think he’s the same guy that tried to kill him back in August. I think he’d come back to finish the job.”
Her face twisted, and she stepped back.
Milo started to get up-“Want to sit?”-but his movement provoked her to raise her arms in a defensive motion, so he settled back down.
“James Einner?”
He blinked at her. “What?”
“The man who tried to kill Henry. Before he attacked Henry, he said his name was James Einner. Who is he?”
“I don’t know,” Milo lied.
“But you know who he works for.”
“I have suspicions.”
“CIA?”
“Very likely.”
“So do you. You did. You used to work for the CIA.”
“That’s true.”
She breathed through her nose so loudly that he could hear it over the music. “It’s about the letter, isn’t it?”
“I think so. But I don’t know what was in the letter. I don’t even know who sent it.”
She said, “Thomas Grainger.”
Milo stared hard. “Grainger sent Henry a letter?”
“You know this man.”
Milo tried to get the facts straight, the timetable. By the time he was in jail in August, when Gray received the letter, Grainger had been dead for weeks. “He was a friend. He’s dead now.”
“I know.”
“You know?”
“The letter said that if Henry received it, it meant that he was dead.”
Milo wasn’t looking at her; instead, he was staring at his own knees, assembling and reassembling the known facts, which were still too few. Then her platform shoes stepped into his field of vision. She said, “Is Henry dead? Did that man kill him?”
Milo looked up, and Zsuzsa’s mascara was bleeding at the corner of her eye. “I don’t know. You haven’t heard from him?”
She shook her head.
“Where did he go? How could he just disappear? He’d have to have resources.”
“He told me nothing. He wanted to protect me. He just told me he would go away for a while, and that I should only answer questions from Milo Weaver.”
“From me?”
“Or that other guy. I don’t know the difference anymore.”
“Why me? I don’t get it.”
“The letter,” she said as if he were dense. “Thomas Grainger’s letter said that Henry could only trust Milo Weaver, because Milo Weaver was already looking into it.”
“It?”
“The story he told Henry. About the CIA and the Sudan and Tourists.”
Milo stared hard at her. “That’s what the letter was about?”
“Henry said we would be like Woodward and Bernstein. Or maybe I said that. We were going to write the story together.”
Milo considered just how much she’d been through in the last half year. Her boyfriend was tossed off a terrace, put in a coma, then revived only to disappear immediately afterward. During those few days before he vanished, he must have talked endlessly about CIA conspiracies, China, and assassinations in the Sudan. And Tourists. Because of her obsessive search for him, she’d lost her newspaper job and now spent evenings stripping. At least it was safer than international intrigues. Until now. A new Milo Weaver had stormed her safe haven.
Her tears had disappeared, and she’d fixed the mascara smear without him noticing. She
was looking at a clock on the wall. “Your fourteen minutes are up.”
“I’ll buy fourteen more.”
“No way. I don’t even know who you are.”
“Anything I can say to convince you?”
“Nothing,” she said. Without making a show of it, she unclipped her bra and slipped out of it, standing over him so that he was watching her breasts from below. She bent slightly to remove her thong, gingerly unhooking it over her heels, then stood straight, hands on her hips, staring down at him, showing off the geometric perfection of her sculpted pubic hair. It was, he reflected later, the pose in which she might feel most powerful when dealing with a man. It worked, because a trembling weakness slithered through him.
“You paid for it,” she said, then collected her discarded clothes and walked naked out through the curtain.
22
He found Parkhall up against the stage, grinning wildly at a pair of blondes gyrating across one another like Greek wrestlers, sharing a bottle of baby oil. To Milo, he said, “Fantastic, isn’t she?”
“Which one?”
“Zsuzsa, you idiot. My God. How a loser like Henry Gray got on with her… it’s a mystery for the ages.”
“I’m heading out,” Milo said, but he didn’t leave. Parkhall convinced him to buy a ludicrously priced bottle of Törley champagne, which they shared with a girl named Agí, who turned out to have an in-depth knowledge of European economics. Parkhall went into interview mode, as if she were a government finance minister, and Milo had a suspicion that Agí was going to show up in one of his Times pieces as a “parliament member speaking under condition of anonymity.”
The champagne went down weakly, so Milo ordered a gimlet. A gaggle of loud English hooligans in the front got on his nerves, and the sight of so much flesh left him with a vague but lasting impression of skin covered in fingerprints, like overused shot glasses.
The American-run 4Play Club, he learned from Parkhall, marketed itself to non-Hungarians for the simple reason that Hungarians wouldn’t pay as much for what they had to offer. There were other clubs in town, but most were dark and potentially dangerous fleshpots run by the Russian mafia, where you would receive an outrageous bill, and then big men would walk you all the way to the cash machine. The majority of the customers were young Englishmen, part of the weekend vacationer boom made possible by cut-rate European airlines. Since it was often cheaper to fly to and get loaded in Eastern Europe than to spend a weekend drinking at London pubs, some cities had become flooded with these kids bursting with beer and itching for fights. They had done so much damage to Prague that laws had been passed to keep them out. Now the hooligans had discovered Budapest.
James Einner, he thought. Of course they’d sent James to get rid of Henry Gray. He was the only living Tourist, besides Milo, who knew anything about the Sudanese operation.
James had only been following orders, just as Milo had only been following orders when he mailed a package to Theodor Wartmüller that resulted in the death of Adriana Stanescu. When James returned in December to finish the job, he’d remembered the letter-only trust Milo Weaver-and used that name. Knowing all this did nothing to curb Milo’s anger. He drank and watched the endless parade of flesh and, though he would soon leave it, hated everything to do with his lousy business.
At twelve thirty, Zsuzsa appeared onstage to the unbridled joy of the MC, who referred to her as a “shining example of Hungary’s national product” before mixing in Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy.” The English boys seemed to agree.
He watched the entire performance, about halfway through realizing he was hypnotized by it. She moved to the off-beats rather than the drums, and it created the illusion of a movie that’s gone slightly out of sync. By the time she was down to her heels and thong, his eyes were red and tired, and he closed them. As he faded, an unexpected memory came to him: his and Tina’s first visit with Dr. Bipasha Ray, back in September.
It had been during a downpour, and he’d had to run from the train, coat over his head, to make it on time. Tina’s car was parked outside the therapist’s Long Island residence, and when the doctor opened her door Milo saw Tina sitting dry and composed on the couch, watching him closely. Examining him. He wasn’t sure why until he looked into Dr. Ray’s face.
He didn’t know what he had expected. Some elderly Indian specialist, perhaps, or some awkward social outcast. Bipasha Ray, who was actually Bengali, looked like a Bollywood film star, breathtakingly gorgeous. Rounded chin, blue eyes between her impossibly dark lashes, a summer dress. Her toenails-later, they would refer to her as “the barefoot therapist”-were painted bright red. He shook her hand and came inside, apologizing for dripping on the hardwood floor, and for the rest of the visit felt as if Tina were inspecting his every interaction with her.
The next day when they met for lunch, Tina seemed almost outraged by Dr. Ray’s beauty. “I wonder how many marriages she’s ended. I mean, couples come in, their relationship fragile, and I’ll lay odds half the men fall in love with her by the third session.”
“Erotic transference?” he’d asked and wondered if he might have a problem with that. He never did. How could he? The therapist’s beauty, and Tina’s close, continual watch, kept him guarded at all times. He didn’t have the time or energy to fall in love with Dr. Ray.
A change in music woke him, and he drowsily paid his tab, realizing that Parkhall had put all his drinks on it. He reached the door before Parkhall caught up with him. “Hey, man. Where you going?”
“Hotel. I’m beat.”
“Well, you did something right. Zsuzsa wants a word with you.”
Milo didn’t feel up to that mix of seduction and scorn. “She can find me at the Ibis.”
Parkhall looped an arm over his shoulder. “You don’t get it, do you? She wants a word with you in the private booth. You lucky cunt.”
It took another fifty euros-he was nearly broke now-but soon he was in the same place where they’d talked before, and Zsuzsa was already waiting. She was dressed for home, the makeup cleaned off, her hair up, and a fur-lined coat hanging from the back of the chair, where she sat. “All right, Mr. Weaver,” she said, her arms crossed tightly. “Now you.”
“Now me what?”
“The clothes. Off with them.”
“For this I pay fifty euros?”
He did as she asked, thinking of mothers who tell their children to always leave the house wearing clean underwear. He paused when he was down to his T-shirt and underwear, but she flicked a long, painted nail and waited until he was completely naked. He felt cold, and wondered how the girls took to the iffy heating here, if they complained, or if the exertion of dancing made it bearable. He thought of a lot of things to avoid speculating on how he looked.
“Why is your arm bandaged?”
“I burned myself cooking.”
“Okay,” she said. “Put them back on.”
“What was that?” he asked as he stepped into his underwear.
“Checking for a gun. Or a wire.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I don’t know who you are, Mr. Weaver. I do remember your name from that letter, and I remember a man who used your name. But you? Maybe you’re James Einner.”
Milo had gotten one leg into his pants. “If you don’t trust me, then why are we here?”
“One thing I’ve learned is that I’ll never find Henry on my own.”
Milo buttoned his shirt.
“When I was dancing, it occurred to me that I’m going to have to trust someone. Why not you? I like your face.”
“Thanks.”
“Your body’s a joke, but your face is almost believable.”
“Oh,” he said.
“This is hard for me,” she said philosophically. “I’m shaking. See?”
She showed a slender hand, but in the dim light it looked perfectly still.
“And I lied.”
“You lied?”
“Yes,” she said. “I
don’t trust you at all.”
“Then why-”
She raised her hand in a silencing motion. “He said to trust you. He called me. Just now, just after I danced.”
“Who’s he?”
“Who do you think, Mr. Weaver? Henry.”
He stared at her. “You’ve been in contact with him all this time?”
She shook her head but didn’t say anything. Briefly, she focused on some point between them, thinking. She said, “I was starting to believe he was dead-and then he calls.”
“Now? Why now?”
She snapped out of it and shrugged. “It’s a coincidence, isn’t it? The other time you showed up just after he’d woken. Now, he calls the same night you’re here. Remarkable.”
Remarkable, yes, but Milo didn’t believe in a coincidence like this. James Einner had arrived in town because he had learned that Gray had woken. That was cause and effect. It was explainable. But Henry calling while Milo was in town? “What did Henry say?”
“He said he’s done.”
“Done with what?”
“His work. It’s done.”
“The story? He’s done with that?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask. I’m just happy he’s alive.” She didn’t sound happy, though.
“It’s good news.”
She looked at him, the corner of her lip rising slightly. “Don’t patronize me.”
“Sorry. But it is good news, for us both.”
“What do you have planned?”
“I just want to talk to him.”
“And then?”
“And then leave. I’ve got a family I want to return to.”
She smiled and said, “That’s charming.”
“Now you’re patronizing me,” Milo said as he kneeled to tie his shoes. “Can I meet him?”
She considered that. Henry had told her to trust him, but Zsuzsa was the one with the power now, and she seemed to be toying with it, estimating its weight. “I’d like to see him first.”
“Why don’t we go together?”
She shook her head, then grabbed her coat. “Tomorrow at Moskva tér. You know where it is?”
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