Exposure

by Alan Russell

  “Myself.”

  “Who hired you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Graham stood up, lifted his foot to kick the man’s bad knee.

  “That won’t help,” said Bernd. “I don’t know.”

  Graham kept his foot raised for several moments, then reluctantly lowered it. “What were you hired to do?”

  “Watch for you.”

  “And how did you do that?”

  “Electronically. This apartment’s bugged.”

  “How did you get over here so quickly?”

  “I have an apartment in the building next door.”

  “How long has your surveillance been going on?”

  “A few days.”

  “How many others are you working with?”

  “I work alone.”

  “You work twenty-four hours a day without a break?”

  The man shrugged. “They sleep, I sleep. He didn’t want anyone else on the job. He didn’t even think you would show up here.”

  “He?”

  “The man who hired me.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “I told you, I don’t know.”

  “How very strange to be working a job for someone you don’t know.”

  “In my work, that’s not strange at all.”

  “So you were hired to kill me, and then kill the Thierrys?”

  Bernd didn’t answer, just gave Graham a defiant look.

  “Call the police,” Graham said to Pierre. “I’m willing to bet some agency somewhere will have a line on our Bernd here.”

  Bernd eyed both Graham and Pierre and shook his head. “You don’t want to do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “I will admit to breaking in here, but nothing else.”

  “I get the feeling the gendarmes will want to talk to you about more than this break-in, Bernd.”

  He shrugged. “That will still not benefit you.”

  “Are you wanted for another murder or two, Bernd?”

  “The only thing you should care about is that I can help you. I think you need help.”

  “How can you help me?”

  “I know things.”

  “And what do you want for telling me those things?”

  “Freedom.”

  Graham laughed.

  “Is it so funny?” asked Bernd. “I don’t think any of you want me talking to the authorities any more than I want you talking to them.”

  No one said anything. Everyone seemed to be taking the measure of the other’s eyes. Bernd was the only one who smiled.

  “You see, in this room there is plenty of guilt to go around.”

  “You are nothing but a hired killer, Bernd. You said so yourself. And you’re of no use to me if you don’t know who hired you.”

  “But I know things about the man who hired me. I met him only the one time, and that was a few years ago, but in my former profession I was taught to be very attentive and not miss a thing. I am quite good at my work, and I have not forgotten my meeting with Herr Narbe.”

  Narbe. The German word for “scar.” Graham tried to keep a poker face, but Bernd saw through it. The SOB was observant.

  “Oh, you know Herr Narbe,” he said.

  CHAPTER

  FORTY

  Jaeger studied the picture on his laptop’s monitor. Pilgrim’s eyes were closed, and his face was pale. About time, Jaeger thought. The paparazzo had proved surprisingly adept at staying alive, but his luck had finally run out. There was something apropos about his dying in Paris. Years ago he had gotten a reprieve from the car accident, but the crash had finally caught up with him. Still, Jaeger had to admire his persistence. Even with his death sentence hanging over him, Pilgrim never gave up trying to put together all the pieces in the puzzle.

  He died a few pieces short.

  Jaeger severed his connection and turned off the computer. The site would self-destruct behind him. It was designed so it would leave no “ghost,” no electronic image that could be lifted afterward.

  Would that he could get rid of all images so easily. It was galling that the paparazzo had gotten that picture of him, though he considered the circulation of his blurry photo to be more of an irritant than a problem. Jaeger blamed himself. He should have gone out better disguised. The paparazzo duped Monroe in their last telephone conversation, acting as if he was ready to negotiate. Monroe told Jaeger he was a meek lamb ready to be led to slaughter. That same lamb had attempted to fleece them.

  After the fact, it was easy for Jaeger to figure out where and how he had been photographed. He had gathered up the camera setup at the paparazzo’s apartment complex and been impressed by the system and its quality. You no longer had to be connected to get top-drawer surveillance equipment.

  His scar would now have to go, of course. He should have removed it years before, but vanity kept it on his face. In his profession, there was no place for vanity. The scar was a physical reminder of his first kill. Jaeger remembered the death of Saxe like other people remembered their first love, but even without the scar, he would still have the memory. At the first opportunity, he would visit a plastic surgeon. It was a shame he couldn’t do it in Los Angeles, the cosmetic surgery capital of the world. Along with losing the scar, he would have a full makeover. That was overdue as well. He had been killing for long enough that it was time for a change of face. He was used to altering his appearance anyway, though not permanently. Jaeger usually went out into the field disguised, just as he was now.

  But even without a plastic surgeon, it was no problem making his scar vanish. He never went anywhere without carrying his “disappearing act”—a cover-up cosmetic that made his scar disappear. There were lifts in his shoes. He now stood almost three inches taller than the man who arrived in Los Angeles. To the untrained eye, he was also packing about forty extra pounds. Padding under his clothes fleshed out his body. He packed his gums with shipping material and denture adhesive to give himself jowls. The result made him look and sound something like Brando’s Don Corleone. He also thinned his hair, giving himself the look of male pattern baldness by pulling out thousands of hairs. The self-applied tonsure made him look something like a cross between a monk and a Rogaine poster child. He darkened his remaining hair and added to his face a thick black mustache that seemed to compensate for the lack of follicles on his head.

  He looked nothing like the bounty poster that was supposed to represent Lanie Byrne’s stalker.

  But now he could go out and be that very person.

  By phone, John Hunter checked out of the airport Hilton. He never went anywhere without multiple sets of identification. It was Dan Turner that checked into the Westin Bonaventure.

  Jaeger hadn’t left his room at the Bonaventure since his arrival. His time was spent researching Lanie Byrne. The brothers had helped in that search, though from a distance, getting their hands on every article ever written on her and scanning it into a file that Jaeger downloaded. The German was sure that by finding Lanie, he would find the paparazzo. But now that Pilgrim was dead, he could focus his efforts on the woman. He supposed the actress hadn’t accompanied him to Paris because her face was too recognizable. She was in seclusion now, but not at the Grove. Lanie wouldn’t know her knight was dead. Bernd had cleaned up so that no one would learn about the death for at least a few days. That meant Lanie was waiting for a dead man to return to her.

  But where was she waiting?

  Jaeger methodically searched for that answer. Reading the countless articles made him realize how much time America spent kneeling at the altar of stardom. By dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse, Lanie would get that much more written about her.

  For all the articles, though, there was very little of substance. Lanie was no Greta Garbo, no recluse, but she had managed to maintain some semblance of a p
ersonal life. She gave freely of her image, being one of the most photographed people in the world, but not of herself.

  Still, among all the articles, Jaeger gleaned some things that interested him. In one interview, Lanie confessed that several times a year she became a “runaway.” Lanie said she escaped “to her place in the mountains.” The spot wasn’t identified, save that it was “a few hours’ drive outside of LA.”

  In another interview she discussed the “pressure cooker” that was Hollywood. “You know how Superman always gets away to that Fortress of Solitude of his?” she said. “I sort of have the same thing. There are times when I need to be by myself and commune only with nature. When I am ready to jump out of my skin, I know it’s time for a vacation, time to recharge my batteries and return to Eden, to Shangri-la.”

  Mountains, not too far from LA, and Shangri-la.

  It was nice of Lanie to provide Jaeger with the next best thing to a road map.

  CHAPTER

  FORTY-ONE

  Graham looked down to the city below. His Lufthansa flight was on a holding pattern over Berlin’s Tegel Airport. The city looked gray and uninviting, but maybe his own doubts were coloring the picture. Berlin was shrouded in a yellow-gray smog. Graham reminded himself that few cities looked good from the air, but he couldn’t shake his foreboding.

  As his plane began its final approach, the cloud cover cleared some and Graham got a better look at the extended urban landscape. He wondered if there was any chance of finding what he was looking for. He was going on the word of a hired assassin. Bernd said West Berlin was where Schmiss was born and raised. That’s what both of them were calling him now: Schmiss. It was the name of a particular kind of scar. All Graham had to do was look for the needle in a haystack.

  Or something just as pointed, if not more visible: a sword.

  “Tell me about Schmiss.”

  “You ask a lot of questions for a dead man,” Bernd said with a laugh.

  Odile’s pain pills had kicked in and were making Bernd talkative.

  “The news of my death was greatly exaggerated,” Graham said.

  “Let’s hope Schmiss doesn’t think so,” said Bernd.

  Odile had lightly powdered Graham’s face; his eyes were closed, his face slack. In less than a minute the picture came to life, but Graham’s image didn’t. He was supposed to be dead. They had scanned the photo, saved it to a computer file, and sent it to the e-mail address Bernd had provided. Bernd had said that would be message enough. If Schmiss believed he was dead, that might give Graham the time he needed.

  It helped that Pierre Thierry had spent most of his life negotiating minefields and was used to dealing with factions that totally distrusted each other. It also helped that his own ass was on the line, and that he had a vested interest in all of them coming to some accord.

  In the end, an agreement was ironed out. It was probably fair, because no one was completely satisfied with it. Bernd would tell what he knew, but only if the police were kept out of it. As a young man Bernd had been a Stasi agent, an East German intelligence officer. German unification had ended his livelihood and he’d had to find a new use for his skills.

  “For someone like me,” said Bernd, “you take what work is offered you. Nothing about this job was personal. When I was offered the assignment, I took it. But it was never more than a job.”

  “Just following orders, is that it, Bernd?” asked Graham.

  “Are there any saints in this room?” asked Bernd.

  He knew damn well—everyone knew—there were not. None of them would be there if that was so.

  Herr Hartmann was an official in the Immatrikulationsbüro of the Freie Universität in Berlin-Dahlem. He stayed seated as Graham approached him at his desk and gave him his biggest smile. A Texas twang suddenly emerged in Graham’s best aw-shucks good old boy routine.

  “Herr Hartmann?”

  The man, immaculate in a dark blue suit, nodded. He was a balding, middle-aged man with pursed, thin lips.

  “Do you speak English?”

  Another nod.

  “Say,” Graham said, “I was told that you’re the man who might be able to help me. You see, I’m in town on business and my wife asked me if I could swing out here. See, she’s big into genealogy and she’s trying to track down all of her relatives in Germany for this big family reunion we’re going to have. Now, Rebecca has a second cousin who went to school in Berlin, and she wanted to see if I could get his address.”

  Herr Hartmann considered what Graham had said. His face gave away nothing. As much as Graham was smiling, the man showed no teeth in return.

  “Which university?”

  There were five universities in the Berlin area with dueling fraternities. Graham took a stab at one of them. “Guestphalia.”

  “What is his name?” he asked.

  “I’m feeling real stupid here,” Graham said. “His name just fell out of my head. It’s one of those long German names—no offense, of course. I have it back at the hotel.”

  Herr Hartmann said nothing.

  “You know what, though? My wife said he was one of those fencers. No, that’s not quite right. One of her relatives said he was a dueler. Guess there’s some kind of special swordplay that goes on at that university, is that right?”

  Herr Hartmann gave him a slight nod.

  “So all I’d need is an album, or a yearbook, or some records of when that boy was auf dem Haus. He went there about a dozen years ago, give or take a few years.”

  “We have no yearbooks,” the man said, emphatically shaking his head as if the very idea was reprehensible. “And without a name, I cannot access any records. And even with his name, I am afraid those records are closed.”

  Before his very eyes, Graham could sense the Berlin Wall arising anew.

  “I’ve come a long way,” Graham said.

  Hartmann looked at him impassively, even coldly.

  “There’s nothing anywhere with pictures?” Graham asked. “I met him a few years ago. I’d recognize his face in a picture.”

  Graham was all but holding a cup out and asking for alms. Hartmann breathed heavily through his nostrils, as if sniffing out the request.

  “At most of the corps houses,” Hartmann finally said, “there are some photographs.”

  Herr Hartmann flared his nostrils, seemed to smell out the situation one more time, then lifted his hand to the phone. “Let me see if someone over there can help you.”

  The woman didn’t speak English. For Graham, that was a blessing. He’d used up his allotment of smiles while trying to tell his cover story. Over the phone, Herr Hartmann did the explaining to Frau Mueller. Apparently she was a sort of housemother to the Corps Guestphalia.

  She led Graham into the banquet hall and pointed to a wall. There, row upon row, were the pictures. Hundreds of them. Graham thanked the woman and walked up to get a closer look.

  Hanging in small frames were face shots of the current members of the corps. The past was not documented nearly as well, though there was no shortage of alumni pictures and reunion shots. There were also group photos from years past. Those interested Graham the most. Some of the pictures had names, and some didn’t. The gaps in documentation meant Graham was in need of luck, and lots of it. He was supposed to extrapolate a face from the past, and find a match with the Schmiss he knew. And his starting point had been determined by a former Stasi agent who had tried to kill him. His chain of investigation was made up of one questionable link after another.

  Graham had no other option but to study the pictures.

  “Schmiss is a Berliner,” Bernd had told him. “Born and raised in West Berlin.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “My work,” said Bernd, tapping his head. “Schmiss is very good at hiding his accent. He speaks Hochdeutsch, upper-crust German without the accent,
but that time I met with him his Berliner came out.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Instead of pronouncing ‘what’ as ‘was,’ Berliners pronounce it as ‘vut.’”

  “That’s all?”

  “There were a few other things. Most Germans pronounce ‘that’ as ‘das,’ ‘da,’ or ‘dies.’ Berliners say ‘det,’ ‘dit,’ or ‘ditte.’”

  “How do you know he’s from West Berlin?”

  “On the western side the ‘ich’ is more emphatic. They pronounce it as ‘ick’ or ‘icke.’ If he was from East Berlin, it would sound like ‘iche.’”

  “I’ll accept that he’s a West Berliner,” Graham said. “He and a million other men. What else?”

  “His scar is interesting, isn’t it?”

  “You tell me.”

  Bernd adjusted himself a little and grimaced. He was sitting in a high-back chair. His bad leg was elevated. After coming to their agreement, Bernd had been untied. He also demanded the return of his gun, but that was one condition that wasn’t met. Graham was doing his interrogating across the table from him, the gun at his side.

  “I have seen its like before, but not so often on the face. It is more common to see that kind of scar above the hairline. That usually means the man has to be balding before such a scar can even be noticed.”

  Bernd seemed to find that funny. He laughed to himself.

  “On rare occasion, though, I have noticed similar horizontal cuts. They’re almost always on the left cheekbone. And the recipient is invariably a West German or Austrian male.”

  “So what the hell does all that mean?”

  “It means you’re looking for a Turn-und Rasierverein.”

  Graham tried to translate the words. “Gym and barber association?” he asked.

  Bernd shook his head in amusement. He was smiling as he passed his index finger in a cutting motion across his throat: “A gymnastics and shaving club.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “A dueling fraternity. Swords.”

  “A fencing club?”