But you want positions, yes? So, Vienna station, almost entirely under diplomatic cover. Led in 2006, as now, by stalwart Victor Wallinger, chief of station, and his four disciples. Leslie MacGovern, collection management. Two operations officers: Ernst Pul, once an Austrian himself, and dear old Bill. The fourth, you’ll remember, was Owen Lassiter, who ran something to do with codes. I’m not really sure what he did, but he only lasted eight months before he found himself a pistol from the storeroom, took it home, and shot himself in the head. Owen was minor American royalty, related to that Wyoming senator, which I think made him and what he did even more of a shock. We expected a prep-school jerk, but got gloomy Owen instead. Is that why Interpol’s so interested?
HENRY PELHAM: Don’t think so.
CELIA FAVREAU: Well, I suppose they couldn’t care less.
Anyway, I’d been pulled off the street by ’05, graduating from nonofficial to official, and for more than a year I’d been working with Bill, keeping track of our networks around town, some of which I’d helped set up. We’d tapped into the Muslim community, which was by and large peaceful and hunkered down in fear, and the Russian community, which was Swiss with spies. The local gangsters helped us out on occasion, but they weren’t much fun—they only helped with business issues, not the hard intel. Our real interest was in the Bundesversammlung, and over the years we’d collected enough politicians to have a pretty good insight into the shifts and turns of national policy. Enough so that Ernst came to Bill and me to find out what was going on there, rather than going to his own networks.
HENRY PELHAM: Did you like it?
CELIA FAVREAU: What?
HENRY PELHAM: Were you happy there?
CELIA FAVREAU: You remember back then—you tell me. I was busy. I was always on the move, setting up meets and grilling reluctant sources. It was the kind of career I’d always aspired to, and while there was a hint of danger the only real risk was getting kicked out of the country. I had a boss I adored. I had a civil servant’s health plan. I had … well, I had you, didn’t I? My bestest lover and a rock to lean on when I clocked out. You were still working the street, so even if I didn’t have the thrill of danger I could experience it vicariously whenever I spent the night with you. I don’t care what they say, Henry. A girl really can have it all.
HENRY PELHAM: Apparently not. Not you, at least.
CELIA FAVREAU: Sure, but that was later. Before the Flughafen, I wasn’t thinking about the future. I was still in my thirties, and I was too busy to fret about kids. I was having the time of my life, living in a world where I could see beneath the surface of mundane reality. When Herr Fischer said something at a press conference, I was one of a handful of people who knew what he was really saying, and why. I knew which politicians had been cowed by fear or greed, and which ones had withstood those pressures. I knew who was admirable and who was not—and I knew that their public image had almost no bearing on the truth of the matter.
I knew, for instance, about Helmut Nowak. Remember him? By ’05 he’d held a seat in the Bundesrat for ten years for the Greens, and suddenly he steps down. Personal reasons, he tells his constituents. The papers speculated that he was being pushed out by the new generation of Greens—the hardcore, anticapitalist wing—but they got it wrong. It was the right that was pushing him out, in particular the Freedom Party, which had evidence of a little boy he’d diddled during his years in city government. Personal reasons, indeed.
That was the high, Henry. When I heard accepted truths I was able, very often, to turn them over and read the backside, where the secrets were hidden.
I remember before Drew and I moved away, I was talking with Sarah—Miss Western—and she was simply unable to believe that I could leave that life behind. I knew what she was getting at—most of you thought I’d gone off the deep end, or that I was marrying for money.
HENRY PELHAM: Not me.
CELIA FAVREAU: It’s all right. There may even be some truth to that story. But if you flip it over you’ll see the opposite. Coming over here and raising kids had always been my destination. My parents, before they died, taught me to be just like them, and they succeeded. Without the security of a family around me, I’m only half a person. It’s true. The problem was that my years with the Agency were like addiction. I was drunk on the thrill of secret knowledge, too focused on the next high to ever think about what was going to make me whole. You understand? The question isn’t why I moved here with Drew. The question is, Why didn’t I do this ten years earlier?
13
She talks fluently and without reservation, giving voice to Celia 1, the woman who knew how to command a conversation from its start to her inevitable victory. The Celia who knew how to spin a story, invent on the fly, and draw you deep into a maze of fabrication imbued with so much authenticity that you never, not even years later, knew whether or not you had been taken for a ride.
Which makes me wonder about the differences between these two women. Are there any? Celia 1 was a professional manipulator, while Celia 2 is disarmingly earnest, which leads to the inevitable suspicion that Celia 2 is the fake here, a puppet whose strings are being caressed and manipulated by the woman who once shared my bed.
Or is it as she insists? Was Celia 2 always there, behind the constructed shell that was Celia 1? Am I finally face-to-face with the real Celia after all these years?
This, I have to admit, is a heady prospect. It calls into question the very idea of love. Who have I been carrying around inside me all these years? Celia 1? Does that mean I’ve adored someone who never existed? Did I sense, in some deeper way, the other Celia hiding just beneath the surface, and fall in love with Celia 2? Or—and this is the worrisome option—did one construction allow me to more easily build the woman I wanted to love? Is my Celia, the one that has kept me up nights, just a reflection of my desires?
All this tangled self-questioning, I know, is not a sign of great wisdom, nor is it a sign of my earnestness, for I would never admit to asking the questions. Certainly not to her. Instead, it’s a sign of my confusion. I’m sitting here, across from the pick that’s been chipping away at my heart, and I’m not sure what to do. There is the job, the one I’ve flown around the world to complete—in my pocket, after all, a cell phone is recording all our words. But then there’s my emotional health. It lies in my senses. I watch her speak, occasionally smell her scent, and feel the rare touch of her hand, all the while asking myself the most basic question: Do I still love this woman? Is she, as I once believed so deeply, the only person to whom I would gladly tie myself unto death? I feel, as I listen to her self-assured speech, that this is so.
Then what about the job? What about Treble, my secret weapon?
“Intelligence as drug,” I say. “I like that. Vick as a pusher. Me as…?”
“You’re the pusher, Henry. Vick’s the kingpin.”
“Right. Which makes you…?”
“A reformed addict,” she says without a moment’s hesitation. “And I hope you’re not trying to draw me back into that miserable life.”
I shake my head. I might feel a breathless urge to drag her back to Vienna with me, but seeing her here, in her element, the idea grows more and more outlandish. I am, in spite of the wine, giving up my dreams. I say, “Tell me about the Flughafen.”
If I want to put a damper on our conversation, this is the way. It’s a subject that’s avoided conscientiously in various parts of the world: Vienna, London, and Carmel-by-the-Sea. It’s like bringing up the rape of a loved one in mixed company, for all of us are mixed, each having experienced the Flughafen incident in our own particular way. The subject makes some of us clam up. Others grow tense and shift quickly into anger. Bill it brought to tears.
Celia, on the other hand, leans forward. This is something new. She downs the last of her wine, and I wave to the waitress, pointing at our glasses. Celia says, “What do you want to know about the Flughafen?” Her tone is light, airy, conversational.
“How abou
t we start with the wide-angle shot? Then we can zoom in for details.”
“Everybody knows the wide-angle shot,” she points out.
“Still,” I say, “it’s good to be sure we’re on the same page.”
“I thought we were always on the same page, Henry.”
The waitress approaches with fresh glasses, a smile on her face. Perhaps the bartender’s making clever jokes at my expense. Perhaps I’m helping him get into her pants. Or maybe her smile has nothing to do with me, and I’m not really the center of the universe. Unlikely, but possible.
Celia lifts her glass as the waitress recedes. “To you trying to get a defenseless mother drunk.”
I tap her glass with mine.
Her smart-ass toast has me dreaming again.
CELIA
1
Through his windows I can see that it’s a bright, breathless morning. The kind that invigorates from the moment you open your eyes to it, the kind that gives you, if only briefly, a sticky-sweet surge of optimism. That feeling holds on, even after I’ve cast my eyes on the man dozing quietly beside me. A year-long mistake—that’s what he felt like last night, and my last conscious thoughts before sleep were about escape, how to dislodge myself from his embrace. And now? It’s like magic.
In the face of a morning like this, I forget his jealousy and his self-pity, his tender ego and his slovenly habits. In this light, Henry is a man in the encyclopedic sense, a creature of near-infinite possibility for endeavor, and for change. In those minutes before he finally opens his eyes and yawns into the back of his hand, I nearly believe that I’m an adjective I would never, at night, apply to myself: lucky.
You don’t get these mornings often in the gray Austrian winter, and you learn to appreciate them, even when you know better than to pin your hopes on the future. It’s a double-edged sword. While our expectations for the future are all that really keep us going, the failure of those expectations is the source of all our sadness.
There: His eyes open. I say, “Hey.” Henry says nothing, just squints at me, at the window, then with a quiet groan pulls the pillow over his head.
Expectation will get you every time.
I pad off to the kitchen and set water to boil, thinking about this. Not expectation, really, but this: this thing Henry and I have, now more than a year old. Sometimes it’s best to begin at the beginning.
I’d arrived a year before him, so it was up to me to show him the town and introduce him to agents he would be managing. Given where he’d come from, Vick asked me to connect him with the Russian community, but after a few meetings I could see that he was troubled. The wife of a Ukrainian businessman began needling him about America’s role in Putin’s success, and he snapped at her: “Don’t fucking accuse foreign powers of not doing what you can’t do for yourself.” The woman, startled, gripped her purse to her stomach, and I had to break in to calm everyone down. She eventually moved back to Kiev, but before leaving she became one of Henry’s best sources.
Though I’d arrived first, it gradually became obvious that I was the junior officer when it came to working assets. I approached my agents the way I had in Dublin, with calmness and reassurance. This usually worked, but when it didn’t I never blamed myself. Espionage isn’t accounting; success is never assured. Henry, on the other hand, took failures personally, and despite—or because of—his emotional approach, he won more often than he lost. Agents could read his commitment in his face; they knew from his outbursts that he was human. And they responded.
No matter how much success you have with your sources, a case officer’s life is still full of downtime, and Henry and I spent half our working hours in the cafés of Vienna—the Hawelka, the Museum, the Sperl, the Prückel, changing regularly for security. After exhausting work topics, we discussed things we knew better than to talk about. Where from? How here? Where to? That last one was the most difficult for me, for I had only the vaguest outline of where I was heading. Family? Sure, eventually. The States? Someday, after I’ve had my fill here.
Once it began in earnest, his flirtation was a marvel of clumsy seduction. I mentioned once, casually, that in Dublin I’d fallen in with the rave crowd and, despite Neanderthal doormen and tripped-out Irish youth, I’d been surprised by how much I enjoyed dancing to the blip-beeps of European house music. That was all it took for him to drag me to slick clubs all over Vienna, where I had to witness his awkward moves and try not to be embarrassed for him. Yet he wore me down, not so much by seduction as by persistence. When a man truly wants you, and is willing to hang on for months, waiting in the wings as you try out other men, you can’t help but be intrigued. I even grew to appreciate his ridiculous dance moves.
The sex—beyond some groping in Austrian alleys—didn’t come until I moved into the embassy and my free time came at a premium. Only with that abrupt loss of time were we able to put our few hours to better use. Or maybe it was just that, after I’d realized what a good agent-manager he was, I wanted to establish my bureaucratic superiority before letting him climb on top of me. I don’t know. I just know that now, a year and three months later, I wake sometimes in his cluttered apartment on busy Florianigasse, open his refrigerator, and see it stocked with things I’ve added to his collection: soy milk, organic (“bio” they call it here) cheese and eggs. I have a drawer, too—top right—with spare panties and an emergency stash of feminine hygiene products, as well as a toothbrush. Some would call this progress, but it’s not. I’ve stored these things in his apartment for nearly a year, just as he lodges a toothbrush, a comb, underwear, and socks in my place. We’ve been joined in Purgatory for a long time.
Words come with coffee, me sitting on the edge of the bed, him supported by a pile of pillows. He says, “Time?”
“There’s a little more. No need to hurry.”
He sips, then frowns. “This isn’t that soy milk, is it?”
I shake my head.
“Tastes funny.”
“Arsenic,” I say with a wink. “You busy today?”
He frowns at the window—he, I know, interprets the blazing sun differently than I do, because he’ll be spending much of his day in its glare. It’s a burden. “Vick’s got me looking into some bank-related stuff.”
“Bankers.”
“Yeah. Right?”
A smile, finally. It’s a rare thing, but when it comes it changes the whole shape of his face, sparking little flashbacks:
Laughing at the expense of politicians in the Café Prückel.
Sharing bites of beautifully sculpted catfish and cherries swimming in vanilla custard at the Steirereck.
Necking, uncaring, in a cobblestoned alley near Fleischmarkt Straße, when the snow breaks.
In bed, his sweat-slick hand gripping my ankle as he moves his hips deeper, smiling.
The images fade as he takes his phone off the bedside table and scrolls through messages.
“You want breakfast?”
He reads the messages, eyes narrowing, and shakes his head. “Looks like I’m gonna have to go.”
Which is another way of saying that I have to leave, too.
2
Though it’s nearly nine when I arrive, Bill isn’t in the office. He’s usually in by eight thirty, which over the past year I’ve interpreted as his need to escape Sally’s reach as soon as possible after waking. I know him, and I know her, and I carry within myself a fear of ending up in a relationship like theirs. Sally is a bully of the worst sort, for she never lays a hand on Bill, never gives her bullying a properly physical manifestation. She beats him with words and body language and selectively brutal silences. Bill, with all his Agency experience, should know better, but apparently he doesn’t, and I sometimes think that I’m the one who’s been given the responsibility of carrying the anger he’s not strong enough to shoulder.
It may not be fair, but over the past year I’ve grown to truly hate Sally. Occasionally, I even broach the subject with Bill, cornering him in a subtle imitation of her aggre
ssion, so that he will sit in one place and listen. He does, but then begins to tell me stories of her history. Her mother, for instance, a glowering monster of a role model who tortured Sally all her life. Sally’s first husband, Max, he of the literally backhanded rebuttals. But I remain unmoved. I am not of the childhood-trauma camp. We’ve all had hard times. My parents wrapped their Subaru around an electrical pole when I was fourteen. Things happen. The only thing that matters is how we deal with the now. Either we face the difficult moral decisions with ever-stronger responses, or we do not. This is what separates the mensch from the asshole. Full stop.
In my virtual in-box, among the detritus of diplomatic spam, I find a flash from Langley to Vick, duly forwarded to the rest of the staff with a request to meet in his office at nine thirty. It’s from Damascus station, a terse summary of a conversation with a source they’ve christened TRIPWIRE.
Source TRIPWIRE: Expect within next 72 hours an airline-related event on flight heading to Austria or Germany. Departure port uncertain—Damascus, Beirut, Amman possibilities. Group: Aslim Taslam, though the primary actors likely recruits from outside Somalia. Likelihood: HIGH.
I’m not an expert on the myriad Islamist cells that salt and pepper the planet, but Aslim Taslam has made headlines in recent years. Former members of Somalia’s Al-Shabaab, they split off from the group over an ideological dispute (some reports suggested it had to do with the use of drug money to finance operations), and under their new name they approached Ansar Al-Islam, the Sunni organization formerly in Iraq, now based in Iran, for assistance. Perhaps prodded by the Iranian government, Ansar Al-Islam has given Aslim Taslam financial and logistical support, sharing networks and operational planners. With growing anxiety, Langley has watched from a distance, noting heightened cooperation between what would otherwise be antagonistic terrorist groups. In the past year, Aslim Taslam has been responsible for deaths and explosions in Rome, Nairobi, and Mogadishu. The group is on its way up.
All the Old Knives Page 5