All the Old Knives

by Olen Steinhauer

  But with Celia? I can’t imagine speaking to her that way. Not after a glass of wine and a suddenly overwhelming urge to urinate. Not still blazing from the sight of her earlobe, her shoulder-length chestnut hair, her shoulder. Christ, that shoulder.

  Ponytail offers drinks, and once Celia orders a Syrah attention turns to me. What do these women want? “Henry?” Celia asks, and it takes the sound of her voice—soft, familiar, provocative—to bring me out of my funk.

  I point at the bar. “Same thing I had up there. Chardonnay … I don’t know. Ask the beard. Bartender.”

  Ponytail smiles and nods and withdraws.

  “You must be tired,” Celia says, trying not to judge. “Is the conference a bore?”

  Again, I hesitate, then remember the lie: Santa Cruz. “Online encoding. Al Qaeda communication techniques. You know—JPEG of a rose turns out to be a jihadi message. That sort of thing.”

  “Snore.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Anyone else there? Anyone I know?”

  I shake my head, not up to making the lie any more elaborate. I’m getting a feel for my limitations tonight. Outside the window it’s night, the little shops subtly lit, turning slow-wandering shoppers into silhouettes. Inside, we’re sharing the restaurant with only that one old couple. “Popular place?”

  She follows my gaze. “Weekends, with the tourists, you can’t get a table. Middle of the week, it’s dependably dead.” She bobs her brows. “Why I chose it.”

  I nod, trying to seem appreciative, then blunder into an actual conversation piece. “You must be happy here. Looks like the kind of place where it’s easy to be happy.”

  Her head, more gently curved now, padded by the decadence of easy living, rocks. “Looks that way. I mean, it is. Really. Just different.”

  “From Vienna?”

  “Of course. But from L.A. From San Francisco. From most places. People don’t come here for enterprise.”

  “They come here after enterprise.”

  Two hands, wrists joined, open up beneath her chin. I’m correct—correct enough, at least.

  I say, “Not boring?”

  “You stay busy. Ask anyone who has kids. There’s no time for boredom.”

  “And reflection?”

  She shakes her head, smiling. “I’m not going to be cornered.”

  I think, No time for noticing that chill down your spine at one in the afternoon? I have the depressing suspicion that she would have explained it away by an oncoming cold and taken some multivitamins or ginseng root to protect herself from my molestations. Not that it would have helped. Not that anything would have.

  “There’s really not much to say,” she goes on. “You’ve seen the films. You’ve read the books. Parenthood’s a forty-hour-a-week job with another forty hours overtime. I don’t remember the last time we went out to the movies.”

  We, she says. It’s we now.

  Of course it’s we.

  “Social life?”

  “Mothers meet other mothers. We discuss mothering. We obsess over our health and the health of our kids.”

  “So you’ve really done it.”

  “It?”

  “You’ve left everything behind.”

  I can see from the lowering of her hands and the sudden lack of expression in her face that my words are not as light as I mean them to sound. Then the curtain comes down, the smile returning, and she tilts her head and stares at the high frame of the window beside us for maybe three full seconds. Then back to me. “Yes, I suppose I have. That stuff—Vienna, the Agency, the things we did there—that’s not here. It’s an entirely different universe.”

  She leaves it hanging, so I say, “And?”

  “And that’s the way I want it, Henry.”

  7

  Ponytail returns with our glasses, mine sweating cold, and gives me a coy smile, almost like flirtation, but not really. It’s more like pity. The bartender, I gather, has told her of my thwarted desire. I’ve ended up in a town that pities gin drinkers.

  Celia sips her Syrah and washes it around her mouth expertly, tongue undulating to spread the manna over all her bitter and sweet buds. I try to stay away from association and largely fail. I gulp down Chardonnay like a barbarian as she says, “You didn’t answer about Matty.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Well?”

  Matty leapt into my life a week before Celia packed her bags and walked out on all of us. Austrian, twenty-six, five foot two. Energetic beyond any proven laws of physics, a manic without the required depressive periods. “She exhausted me to death.”

  Celia leans back, regarding me. “She was a bit much, wasn’t she? Quite the talker.”

  “Scientologist, too.”

  This draws her back, hands on the edge of the table. “You’re kidding.”

  “She was desperate to become an Operating Thetan. I ran into her a few weeks ago, and she’d made it to something called the Wall of Fire. I suppose she’s communing with the aliens now.”

  This earns a measured laugh. “Anyone else in Henry’s life?”

  Sure, I think. There was Greta and Stella and Marianne and Linda, each three-night stands, each one leaving me with fantasies of a wife and mother in California. I say, “No one.”

  “Not a confirmed bachelor, I hope.”

  “Baptized, maybe.”

  “And the old office?” she asks, deftly swinging away from sore points.

  “Vick runs it like a fiefdom. Nothing changes.”

  “What about Bill?”

  Bill Compton was her chief during most of her time in Vienna. When she worked the street Bill received her reports, and once she moved inside he became her mentor, maybe even a father figure. “Well, he retired over a year ago. You didn’t know?”

  Finally, a flash of something that resembles embarrassment—something to cut through her self-satisfaction. “We haven’t talked.”

  The relief sparkles through me, though I hide it well. I worried that Bill had called her, and the fact that he didn’t makes my job here that much easier. She’s unprepared. “He lives in London now,” I say.

  “Sally’s doing, I bet.”

  “Exactly. He hates it.”

  “She’s an Anglophile bitch.”

  I don’t know Sally well enough to reply, but the venom in Celia’s voice is unexpected. Five years, and she’s still angry with Bill’s wife. Maybe the old life doesn’t disappear so easily.

  But she’s changing the subject. “They still have you on the street?”

  “Not for a while,” I say. “I’m entirely air-conditioned now.”

  “Must be a nice change.”

  “Safer, I suppose.”

  “I remember quite liking the change,” she says. “But I was never good at beating the pavement.”

  “Now you’re being modest.”

  She shakes her head, serious.

  “These days,” I tell her, “I’m wasting my time with dusty files. Vick has me looking into the Flughafen disaster.”

  She blinks, straightens, then relaxes again before speaking. “Langley’s asking?”

  I shake my head and begin my lie. “Some new hotshot at Interpol is raising a stink. He thinks we have some serious soul-searching to do.”

  I’ve turned Langley into Interpol so that it won’t feel quite so serious. So that she can still feel as if she’s out of our reach. Yet the mere mention of the Flughafen is enough to bleed the humor out of her face. I can see this in the angle of her mouth, the crinkle at the corner of her right eye. “I’d say we did some pretty serious soul-searching back then,” she says. “You remember?”

  I nod.

  “It was a witch-hunt.”

  I can’t disagree with her.

  “We barely got out of that with our lives, Henry, and now you’re telling me some idiot from Lyon has decided to start it up again?”

  “He fancies himself a historian. He’s searching for inconsistencies.”

  “History is fu
ll of inconsistencies. How old is he?”

  “Young. And yes, point taken. He hasn’t outgrown his hatred of human contradictions.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Well, I did. But he’ll learn. For the time being, it’s been decided that I should give him a rococo analysis of failures and successes. A little bit of everything. And since I’m here, I might as well ask for your perspective. You mind?”

  She straightens again, but doesn’t relax afterward. “Is this an interview?”

  “I’m buying you dinner, Celia. I was in Santa Cruz, and seeing you was an opportunity I didn’t want to miss. I also happen to be trying to close the book on this, because I don’t want anyone to open it again. None of us do. To that end, I’ve been talking to as many people as I can. Stuff the report full of perspectives. Be definitive. Make Interpol’s head spin.”

  She glances across the restaurant. The old couple is digging quietly into appetizers; the tables around us are empty. Against the corner of the bar, our waitress is chatting with the bartender. Staring in that direction, Celia says, “Did you talk to Bill?”

  “Yeah, I talked to Bill. He wasn’t happy about dredging it up, either.”

  “I don’t seem happy?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, I am,” she says, producing the broadest and least convincing smile I’ve ever seen. Her hands stretch across the table and squeeze the fingers of my left hand. “I’ve got my bestest lover here, and we’re talking about things that no longer exist for me. It’s like discussing dreams we’ve had.”

  “Like you do with your therapist?”

  She hesitates in midbreath, rethinking whatever quick response is lying inside that deft mouth of hers. She withdraws her hands. “Have you been investigating me, Henry?”

  “You live in California. You’ve seen some things. It was a shot in the dark.”

  Again, she hesitates. Does she believe me? Probably not. Or maybe, I think hopefully, five years in leafy bliss have dulled her senses, made her willing to believe anything that promises hope. She leans her head to the side, chestnut hair scattering against her clean neck, and says, “You haven’t been here in a while, have you? Home, I mean.”

  “Been a few years.”

  “Well, it’s not like it used to be. Trust me on this. These days, people misinterpret the pursuit of happiness. They think it means the right to be happy. The therapists are minting money. The pharmaceuticals, too.”

  “Pharmaceuticals have always minted money.”

  “Not like now. Example. I go to see my primary doctor just after we arrive. I tell him I’ve got a sensitive stomach. Hell, I changed my diet completely when we came back here, so it would be a surprise if I didn’t get some gas. He asks if I’ve been upset lately. Of course I’ve been upset, I tell him. I got married, I moved back to a country I hardly know anymore. My life is upside down. As I’m telling him this, he’s writing on his prescription pad, then he rips it off and hands me a prescription for Xanax. Just like that. They give out mood enhancers like they’re M&M’s.”

  “Do they work?”

  “Of course they work. I went off of them for both pregnancies, and those were the worst eighteen months of my life.”

  “The worst?”

  “I’m exaggerating. We do that here. We also use the word ‘love’ for things we’re only fond of. You have to get used to it.” She raises her glass and smiles a weary one. “Welcome to California. Don’t take any of us at face value.”

  “I’ll be sure to remember that,” I say, wondering if she’s forgotten how well we used to lie.

  8

  I met Celia in 2003, after I’d transferred to Vienna. She’d landed the previous year, following a successful stint in Dublin, and had requested Vienna because it was, as she put it, “the most civilized city on the Continent.” She would later change her mind about this, but the illusions of young operatives are easily forgiven.

  I came from the opposite direction, limping out of Moscow with the grinding memories of the Nord-Ost siege stuck in my head. Upwards of fifty Chechen Islamic militants took over the Dubrovka Theater in late October 2002 during a performance of Nord-Ost, a Russian version of Les Misérables. Holding eight hundred and fifty hostages, they demanded the withdrawal of Russian troops from Chechnya in order to end the war that had been going on for three years. After fifty-seven hours, the Russians pumped gas into the theater and went in. Nearly all the terrorists were killed, as were a hundred and twenty-nine hostages, most as a result of the gas and the decision, inexplicable to most, not to tell treating doctors precisely what the victims had inhaled.

  One American numbered among the dead—a forty-nine-year-old from Oklahoma City who’d come to meet his Russian fiancée—and in Washington and at the embassy we kept repeating his name, a kind of mantra as we joined the international condemnation of the Russian Special Forces, whose actions had led to so many unnecessary deaths. Vladimir Putin and his spokesmen raised their hands to quiet us all down and reminded us of the threat of international terrorism that, only the previous year, had felled two towers in Manhattan. Putin began sounding as much like our own president as he possibly could.

  The feeling in Washington was that Russia was making an excellent point, so we relaxed our stance. Not everyone in the embassy was happy with this. My station chief, George Lito, said, “Henry, you know what’s gonna happen now, don’t you? If we don’t raise a stink, then the Russians will dig deeper into Chechnya and keep shooting until the republic’s razed to the ground.” George was right: A decision to downsize Russian troops in Chechnya was quickly reversed, and a couple of weeks later new large-scale operations in Grozny and elsewhere were put into motion.

  But that didn’t stop us from assisting them. Under orders, we helped the FSB identify anti-Putin and pro-Chechen activists in the States, and more than once I sat down with agents to discuss dealings we’d had with Russian human rights organizations that questioned the official versions of events. Under direct orders from George, I even gave up a Chechen source, Ilyas Shishani, who had given us privileged access into Moscow’s closed Chechen community over the previous year. Soon afterward, Ilyas disappeared from the face of the earth.

  Around that time in Moscow, a couple of politicians joined with a handful of journalists and former FSB officers to investigate the Dubrovka Theater disaster. Their study concluded that the FSB had used at least one agent provocateur—Khanpasha Terkibayev—to direct the terrorists to the theater. Sergei Yushenkov, a liberal politician, interviewed Terkibayev about his involvement. Soon afterward, Yushenkov was shot to death in Moscow, and Terkibayev died in a car accident in Chechnya. I was furious, but George just shrugged. “It was decided as soon as Putin made his speech. The rest of us, we’re just following history.” I was thin-skinned back then; I sent an angry cable to Langley to make my frustration part of the record, then requested a transfer to someplace a little quieter.

  And it worked. For a while it did. After Moscow, agent management in Vienna was like a vacation, and when I met Celia Harrison in Vick’s office, I was convinced I’d finally ended up in the right place. I had learned from dealing with my agents how to handle women of interest, and so I asked Celia questions about herself. She was an orphan, having lost both parents in a car accident as a teenager, and she was wise enough to know that she’d come to the CIA to replace the parental structure that had been stolen from her. Ireland had been her first foreign posting, and she’d thrived there.

  When she admitted to having become a fan of rave music while in Dublin, I insisted on taking her around to the local venues. I escorted her to Flex, the Rhiz, and the Pratersauna, and with a steady supply of mixed drinks and Advil I was able to survive the pounding noise and underaged crowds. I eventually grew to enjoy it myself. We danced—when was the last time I’d really danced? Celia fit so perfectly into my hands that I believed that not only had I come to a more peaceful place, I had become someone different in Vienna. For the first ti
me in memory, I was learning to enjoy myself.

  Yet she and I took time. In a handful of alcoholic slips we made out behind clubs, but she kept me at arm’s length. I soon learned that while she was giving me a little of herself, she was also giving much more of herself to other men. I had to learn to set aside jealousy. I learned how not to possess a woman.

  I’m still not sure how we moved from friends to lovers—whatever alchemy took place, it happened in her head. She had moved to a desk in the embassy, working under Bill, and our time together was suddenly cut in half. I pined for her, but I’d grown used to that ache. I suspect that absence really did make her heart grow fonder, for in a Turkish restaurant in Wieden she said, “I’m tired, Henry. Take me home.” Only once we reached her apartment did I understand the full meaning of her words.

  And there it was, precisely as I had hoped when I met her in Vick’s office. We were in love, and for more than a year we made a sort of life together, piecing together hours under the cover of clandestine life in a foreign land. For once I was satisfied, which is really all anyone can ask for.

  Then 2006 happened. During the two months leading to the Vienna Airport debacle, the newspapers came alive with reminders of Moscow. Two more members of the Russian investigating team that had looked into the Dubrovka Theater disaster were assassinated. Anna Politkovskaya was shot in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building. In London, Aleksandr Litvinenko was poisoned by exposure to polonium-210. My anxieties returned: the fear, the shame. I even brought up the subject to my Islamic contacts, and they shook their heads, unmoved. The tragedies that civilization faces come at an alarming rate, and dwelling on something three years old is akin to fretting about Roman history.