All the Old Knives

by Olen Steinhauer

  I give him a quick kiss on the cheek. “Go save the world, darling.”

  Then, five minutes after he’s left, I run to the bathroom and vomit.

  3

  The story finally out, she just stares at me, and I’m not sure what to do. This is what has kept her strong this whole dinner. It’s why I’ve been unable to make her break down like Bill.

  Did I know? No. Or maybe I suspected it. Maybe I had the feeling, after her sudden departure from my life that night, that it wasn’t just a fear of commitment pushing her away. And maybe this is why I’ve been so fixated on bringing the investigation to her doorstep and getting whatever I can out of her first. I lean back, not quite trusting myself to speak. I shift my legs, noticing the lump in my pocket.

  Shit.

  The phone. It recorded her whole story. I reach in and find the power button and press it long enough to be sure it’s off. I’ll have to edit it later, before I turn it over to Vick. If I turn it over to Vick, because I’m not sure there’s enough on there to incriminate her. Because now, I realize, I have no choice. I will tell Treble to go ahead and take care of it, and by the time he’s finished I’ll be on a plane heading home, or rushing to some all-night clinic to deal with my fucking upset stomach. If Vick traces it to me, he will just have to believe whatever version of this night I choose to tell him.

  Celia says, “You’re not going to deny it, are you?”

  I sniff, look around the restaurant. We’re the only customers, and even the staff has disappeared into the kitchen. We’re completely alone.

  She says, “You were the one who knew Shishani from before. You were the only one with a connection to him. And you knew this left you vulnerable, so you went into Bill’s office and called that number, just in case. Plant disinformation on the off-chance someone started investigating.”

  “Where’s this phone?” I ask, working off of hope now.

  “What?”

  “Nice story,” I say. “Nice way to turn it around. You see that number on my phone. But where is this phone? Do you have it?”

  “Really?”

  “What?”

  She sighs. “That’s really your defense?”

  I shrug, mouth shut.

  “What I’d like to know,” she says, “is why. I’d like to hear this now, before I go home.” She cocks her head. “You were a decent guy, Henry. You didn’t stab people in the back. And when the job forced you to betray people, it hurt you. Was this about Moscow? Were you getting the Agency back for what happened there?”

  Despite myself, I shake my head no.

  “Then what was it? It certainly didn’t make you rich. And I don’t really think you went for all of Aslim Taslam’s nonsense.”

  In the far corner, I see our waiter looking out at us. I say, “Where’s that chocolate mousse?”

  “Forget the fucking chocolate,” she says, vitriolic now. “You’re not getting dessert. Now tell me.”

  “I’m not going to tell you anything, Celia.”

  She looks past me and, feeling suspicious, I look over my shoulder. Nothing, just the front door, with blackness in its glass. Then I see two figures emerge from the dark—a middle-aged couple in matching blue windbreakers. Tourists. The man reaches for the handle, but it doesn’t budge. It’s locked. The woman taps him on the shoulder and points at a small sign in the window that, from our side, says,

  Come in we’re

  OPEN

  They’re reading the reverse.

  “What time is it?” I say as I take out my cell phone, the regular one. It’s only nine thirty. I’ve been here two and a half hours. I pocket the phone and find Celia’s eyes on me again. The other phone, the one that is fatal in so many ways, is no longer recording a thing. So why not? Evidence doesn’t matter anymore. Maybe facts will suffice. Maybe we’re finally in that quiet space where all the masks fall away and we’re left with just our skin. So I say, “I did it for you, Celia.”

  She flinches, as if I’ve raised a threatening hand. “What?”

  “You can sit there and judge me. But I did it for you. And then you walked out on me. After everything that happened on that plane, how do you think I felt?”

  She opens her mouth, closes it, then says, “I don’t understand what you’re saying, Henry.”

  “This isn’t a riddle, Cee. I did it for you.”

  But it is a riddle, in a way. Both her hands are on the table, pressing down. “Please spell it out for me.”

  Though it hurts in my midsection, I lean closer. “I did it to save your life. What I did killed many more, and in a way it killed me, too. But I saved you. I saved you because I thought we were going to be together. Then you walked.”

  4

  I rush through the apartment and find everything of mine. Underwear, toothbrush, sanitary pads, the works. I stuff it all into my purse, swallow coffee, and rush out. Remembering, I go back in and scoop up the keys from the kitchen counter and leave again, locking up this time. I find my car on wet Florianigasse, and only after I get inside do I think to be wary. I look around, wondering if he knows what I know, then wondering what that might mean. I wonder if all this recent affection, this invitation to move in with him and to start envisioning a future for us—is all this just a way of taking me off the scent?

  But no—his old Mercedes is gone. And, no—he doesn’t know. How could he? For all he knows I’m waiting in the apartment, pining for him.

  I start to drive back home before changing my mind and returning to the embassy. It’s four thirty in the morning, and I half expect the place to be empty. But of course it’s not. Bill is still gone, but Vick is in his office, making calls to America. Ernst is catching a nap in his office, feet propped up on the corner of his desk. I even find Owen sitting in the break room when I get more coffee. He says, “I didn’t expect to see you.”

  “I’m like a dog,” I tell him. “Always come back.”

  He tries on a smile; it doesn’t fit. Mine doesn’t, either.

  “Anything?” I ask.

  He shrugs. In front of him on the table are a sticky roll and a cup of milk. He eats like a child. “Merkel flew her prisoners here, so now they’ve all been collected. Some prison outside of town. They’re not telling us which prison, which we’re not happy about.”

  “They’re probably not happy we waited to tell them about Ahmed.”

  He shrugs.

  “Are they going to give in?”

  Owen takes a bite of the roll. “Ernst doesn’t think so. He says that it’s just a ruse to buy time.”

  “Then what’s the plan?”

  “Well, the attack is off. They’re scared of Ahmed’s last message, before he was killed.”

  “Do we believe it was him?”

  Another shrug. “I don’t. But the Austrians don’t take my word as gospel. The question is,” he says quietly, “how did they get him?”

  Despite myself, I settle into the chair opposite him. “What’s the answer?”

  He raises his brows. “You? Me? Ernst? Bill? Or maybe he just did something stupid.”

  Here it is, my first chance to say it, but I don’t. Instead, I give a pleasant smile and climb to my feet and wander back to my desk, just outside Bill’s office. I settle down heavily. I yawn into the back of my hand and wonder why I’m not marching into Vick’s office and giving up my lover. My ex-lover. Because that’s what he is now.

  Yet I’m saying nothing. Why? Is love really so stupid? Bill’s love certainly is, locking him up tight with a monster. And mine? Maybe it is. Maybe—and this is a new thought, a sort of revelation—this is the problem. Maybe love is the wrong way to live. Maybe anything that infects good sense is to be shunned. It’s a possibility I’ll examine closer, when there’s time.

  Now, though, I have to let my good sense take over, so I swallow a last sip of coffee and get up, coming out of my self-absorption in time to notice that the office, even running on a skeleton crew, is noisy. Ernst is crossing from one side of the floor t
o the other—from his office toward Vick’s—and Leslie is leaning over Gene’s desk, shouting, “Ask them! Don’t go on hearsay! Ask them if it’s true!” Owen is walking out of the break room, a paper napkin to his mouth, his eyes on the floor as he listens to one of his young code breakers talk quietly into his ear. I go to Leslie, the closest, and break into her tirade. “What’s going on?”

  Her eyes flash at me, and I read hatred there, as if by interrupting her I’ve broken international law. I’ve never met this Leslie before. She says, “Go ask Daddy,” then turns back to Gene and says, “Follow up with Heinrich! Now!” Gene types frantically.

  I follow Ernst to Vick’s office, and through the blinds I see our chief of station with his chin on a fist, elbow on his desk, watching Ernst march around the room, talking and waving his hands, so that he looks more Italian than Austrian. In the open cabinet, the television is set to ORF, as it has been all day. I knock on the door and walk right in. Ernst says, “I told you. I told you all—” before stopping to glare at me. I ignore him.

  “What is it?”

  Vick raises his head and leans back, stretching. “Close the door, Cee.”

  I don’t know if he wants me inside or outside, so I just close it behind myself and stand waiting. Ernst is glaring. Vick says, “The Austrians think they’re dead.”

  “Who?”

  “Everyone. The passengers, the hijackers. The crew. Everyone.”

  What I imagine at this moment is an explosion, a great fireball of destruction, but on the muted television a local government official is signing some kind of legislation. “How do they know?”

  “They don’t know, not for sure. But about five minutes ago—”

  “Ten,” Ernst corrects.

  “Ten, right. Well, they started up the engine. The plane didn’t go anywhere, didn’t light up, but the Austrians started receiving signals. A message came through. Aslim Taslam does not negotiate. The engine is still running. They’ve got hi-res cameras focused on the cockpit, and they recorded the pilots dying. Both of them, sitting right in their seats.”

  “Shot?” I ask.

  Vick shakes his head sadly, and Ernst, impatient, breaks in. “No one touched them. They suffocated.”

  “Respiratory failure,” Vick says, as if that makes it any clearer.

  I look from Vick to Ernst and back again. “They turned on the plane,” I say as it crystallizes in my head, “to start up the ventilation system.”

  Vick nods slowly. “That’s what we think. It’s what the Austrians think. But we can’t go in if we don’t know.”

  “Sarin,” Ernst says. “It’s sarin. They need to order doses of atropine and pralidoxime. Now.”

  “Maybe,” Vick says.

  But this time Ernst is right. I can feel it.

  5

  She says, “A hundred and twenty people killed. What? For me?” She shakes her head. “You are talking in riddles, Henry.”

  Of course I am, because after years of silence it’s not easy to say these things aloud. But maybe she deserves the real story, the truth behind the truth, the kind of thing that, once upon a time, was her bread and butter. Maybe a final wish is in order. Maybe—and I know how desperate this is, how adolescent—if she knows, she will understand. For a moment, I hold on to that thought. I let my childishness take over and embark on a brief journey into an alternate future. It begins with me telling her, in detail, exactly how I saved her. Her guilt, as she finally comprehends what she’s done to me, is accompanied by tears. She gets up and crouches beside my chair, holds on to my aching stomach, squeezing, her tears marking my shirt. She pets me, then climbs up, whispering Thank you, and begins to kiss me with grateful fervor. Then she takes my hand and says, Let’s go.

  This fantasy is the most enjoyable moment of the day, but I can see from her face that even in close proximity there is no psychic connection. She never felt my late-night molestations, and she feels nothing now. She is on a different plane. I say, “I talk in riddles because that’s what I deal with every day.”

  Not even a hint of a smile. No acknowledgment of my wit.

  I reach a hand across the table, but there are no slender fingers for me to grab. She stares into my eyes, as if my hand doesn’t exist. I say, “You have no idea what I went through. After you left. You have no idea—”

  “Your feelings were hurt?” she snaps, and my hand draws back. “You had a broken heart? You want me to cry for you? Is that what this dinner is about?”

  “No, Cee. Listen. I—“

  “Shut up!” she shouts, holding up a hand, flat, palm facing me. “Enough, okay?”

  Over in the corner, I see the waiter leaning back against the kitchen door, arms crossed over his chest, watching my humiliation. I’ve still got some pride, so I raise my chin at him. “You like watching, asshole?”

  Impassive, he retreats into the kitchen, but not before a smile slips onto his face. Then it occurs to me that he hasn’t brought us the bill. Or maybe he brought it when I was in the can, and Celia took care of it.

  She’s not even looking at me now. She’s leaned back, arms across her stomach, and is staring past me at the front door again. If we were a comic strip, she would have a black scribble of smoke above her head. Still looking past me, she speaks quietly, as if only partly to me. “When they were all killed, I didn’t know what to do. I thought … well, I don’t know exactly what I thought. Maybe you were innocent. Maybe it wasn’t Ilyas Shishani on the other end of that phone number. It was some other Russian speaker. I can’t say I believed this, but I wanted to believe it. Stranger things have happened. So I buried it. I buried the call from Bill’s phone in order to protect you. After all, they were dead, weren’t they? Putting you in front of a tribunal wasn’t going to bring them back to life. Was it?”

  I watch her looking past me and say, “We don’t do tribunals these days.”

  “I know,” she says. Her eyes are wet again when she focuses on me. “But then you chose that one piece of evidence—the phone call—and scared poor Bill half to death. You thought that by making a call from his line you would frame him … or me. But I’m betting you didn’t know that by pushing the issue you would hang yourself. Did you?”

  “Nobody’s hanging me,” I tell her.

  She smiles at that—actually smiles—and says, “If that’s what you want to believe.”

  Though I made up my mind a while ago, it’s now truly apparent that I can’t go back on the decision. Celia will not survive this night. She can’t. She’s put it all together, and though she put it together years ago and said nothing, I can’t depend on her silence now. Therefore, the decision is not really my decision. It’s an evolutionary choice. Either I abide by the need for self-preservation or I die. There’s no decision at all.

  So it doesn’t matter. Enlighten the doomed. “Do you really want to know?”

  She blinks at me, waiting.

  6

  It is December 7, 2006—two months after the murder of Anna Politkovskaya in her Moscow elevator, two weeks after the death of Aleksandr Litvinenko in London, his bald, hospitalized head a fixture of the press during his month-long battle with polonium-210. It’s not about blame—these deaths are certainly not my fault—but about association. How the reminders of Moscow can draw me back into the grinding duplicity that, in the end, is how I define that chapter of my life.

  I wake with Celia looking down at me. She’s smiling, and with the anxiety that overwhelms me these days, I react to that beautiful face by covering my head with a pillow. She leaves to get coffee, and I scold myself. I’ve been doing this for weeks, each newspaper and Internet site reminding me of Moscow, and as a result I’ve been pushing her away. Occasionally, she asks what the problem is, but I don’t want to speak about Moscow. I don’t want to make it any more real than it already is.

  So I say nothing, and when she returns with steaming cups we talk about our plans for the day. I pretend to care, because I know that in my right mind I do care,
particularly about her. That’s when I notice a blinking light on my phone. A waiting message says

  Schloss Schonbrunn—GLORIETTE—10.00

  There’s no doubting what it is—a request for a meet at the Schönbrunn Palace, at the axis point of the gardens. There’s a café there that I’ve visited a couple of times, but never for work. Who am I meeting? I don’t know the number.

  So I cut the morning with Celia short and drive westward to reach the sprawling palace grounds, which in the blustery winter are empty. I fight the wind heading across the park. The Gloriette section is closed for the season, but the gate is unlocked, and when I reach the imperial arches of the Gloriette itself the door to the café is also unlocked. I open it, looking into the dark interior, where chairs and tables have been stacked against a far wall. It’s dead. Then I hear it: the click of heels against tile. A man in a heavy, quilted coat emerges from behind the dark counter, limping and smiling, saying, “Henry!”

  It takes a moment to process his face. He’s aged in the past four years, his dark features ashen and gray. He’s grown fitter as well and, in the way of thin people, more intense. He looks like a weary but improved version of the man I knew in Moscow. He’s smiling, approaching me rapidly, a hand out. I accept it, and we shake. Unexpectedly, he embraces me and kisses my cheeks. “Ilyas?” I say. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  I’m scared—I know he’s no longer the gentle baker I once met with, but he’s doing a good job impersonating that once-innocent man.

  “Come,” he says, his voice full of warmth, pulling me deeper inside. He grabs two chairs from the wall and sets them on either side of a table. “I’m sorry—they’ve cut off the electricity, so there’s nothing warm to drink. But I remembered,” he says, taking from his deep coat pockets two plastic bottles of Coca-Cola. “You still drink it?”

  “Not often enough,” I say, accepting one and sitting across from him.

  How do I feel? It’s complicated. There’s fear, yes, but more. I’m unnerved, for out of the past one of those Moscow faces has emerged, one of the few I was actually fond of. But Ilyas was part of those Russian conversations that ruined me. Ilyas was one of those insidious compromises that forced me to finally flee Russia.