The Traitor's Story (4 page)

History

By the time they reached Harry’s building they’d been walking for ten minutes. The girl seemed fine but, once inside, she started to shiver violently. Her teeth were chattering, which appeared to amuse her, as if she couldn’t believe how cold she was.

Finn removed his coat now, and put it around her. He felt the weight of the gun in the left-hand pocket and took it out, slipping it into his waistband—something he’d promised himself he would never do.

They took the stairs, and as soon as Finn rang the bell Harry opened the door. He had his coat on and looked ready to make his excuses, but then spotted the girl and did a double take.

“Are you going out?”

Harry was still distracted by the girl as he said, “Jack and a couple of the others are meeting up for an early drink. I said I’d join them if I could.” It was the kind of invite Finn had received for the first six months, but once he’d become serious with Sofi the offers had slowly dropped off.

Harry stepped back as he started to take his coat off. “They won’t miss me. Come in.”

Finn ushered the girl in and closed the door. “She could use some coffee or something to warm her up.”

“Sure, I’ll put some on.”

He disappeared into the kitchen. Finn showed the girl into the living room and gestured toward the sofa. She took Finn’s gloves and scarf off before sitting down, but kept the coat on.

Harry popped his head around the corner, but before he could speak, Finn said, “Do you have a sweater that might fit her?”

“Er, sure.” He looked at the girl, then threw Finn a look, making clear he was intrigued, that he was eager to hear what this was all about. But he went into his bedroom and came back a minute later with a heavy red sweater, which he threw across to Finn before diving back into the kitchen.

Finn caught it, and held it out for the girl. She smiled, standing to remove the coat, the two items swapped like prisoners. Finn took the gun out of his waistband and put it back in the coat, which he hung up in the hall.

The girl was still standing when Finn went back in, the sleeves of the sweater hanging down. She held them up for him to see how big it was on her, and smiled shyly before sitting down again. The color suited her, and now that he looked at her properly, he saw that she was incredibly beautiful—big blue eyes, high cheekbones, flawless skin.

Harry came in carrying a tray and said, “Here we go.” He put it on the coffee table, and Finn sat down in the armchair facing the girl. Harry sat at the opposite end of the sofa to her, but she tensed up and looked at Finn as if wanting reassurance. He nodded and smiled, and she seemed satisfied with that—it almost made Finn fearful that she should be so trusting so soon after what had just happened to her.

“So, you gonna introduce me?”

“I don’t know her name. She’s Russian.” Harry had been about to reach for the coffee pot but stopped, his eyebrows raised. “I went into that church on the square, she came in a little while later. She’d escaped from some guy—I’m guessing she’s being trafficked. I intervened, but . . .”

“But?”

“The guy recognized me. One of Karasek’s.” He glanced at her briefly. She was looking on, mesmerized by their conversation though she clearly understood none of it. “I killed him, Harry. I didn’t even think about it. I knew she was in trouble, and look at her, she’s a kid. It would have got back to Karasek that it was me.”

“Witnesses?” Finn shook his head. Harry turned to the girl and spoke a few words. She looked astonished, her eyes lighting up as she asked him if he spoke Russian. Harry nodded and she told him her name: Katerina.

Harry introduced himself and Finn, and she said, “Finn,” and smiled, shy again as she said something else in Russian.

As Harry poured the coffee he said, “She thanked you for saving her life.”

“You’re welcome,” Finn said to her, then turned back to Harry. “Ask her what happened.”

The story spilled out of her without much need for encouragement, her voice wavering occasionally, a pause to wipe a tear
from her cheek—but the whole thing was retold with a remarkable
stoicism.

She was an orphan from some provincial Russian city, southeast of Moscow. She’d been offered the chance to become a model, a plausible offer given her looks, but she’d been drugged and brought to Estonia. It wasn’t such an unusual story for Finn or Harry, given that their job was dealing with organized crime.

But after one brief exchange, Harry looked momentarily lost and said to Finn, “I asked her if she’d been attacked by the people who took her.”

“And?”

Harry shook his head.

“But the guy you killed, he told her Karasek wanted her for himself—that’s the only reason she hasn’t been raped. Karasek wanted her.”

“How old is she?”

There was another brief exchange, but this time Harry was so shocked that he asked the question again and she laughed as she repeated her answer.

“She’s thirteen. Can you believe that?”

“I thought thirteen or fourteen, but you’re right, she could pass for older.”

“When you first brought her in I thought eighteen or nineteen.”

“She’s a child. If you’d seen her afraid, you wouldn’t have doubted it. Thank God I was there, thank God . . .” He paused, trying to think what it was that he was grateful for. “You know, two weeks ago I wouldn’t have intervened.”

“Yes, you would. It’s who you are.” Harry smiled. “It would have been wrong, probably, but you still would have done it. Anyway, at least now you know you were right to kill the guy.”

Finn hadn’t given it any thought. He’d killed a man half an hour earlier, had sliced through the side of his neck and watched him bleed to death. But for the time being at least, it carried no weight whatsoever within his thoughts. He was too busy wondering what to do now.

Harry was clearly thinking along the same lines because he said, “Whatever Karasek had in mind, he’ll be peeved as hell about losing her, and peeved that someone killed one of his guys, too. Of course, he could think the girl had done it herself.”

Finn thought back to the dead guy. The knife wound could have been inflicted by a determined girl of her age, but Finn had given him a beating beforehand.

“No, he’ll know it was someone else.”

“And you’re sure no one saw you in the church?”

“Absolutely.” Now that he said it, he realized he should have checked the church before leaving, not that there was much he
could have done, short of killing any witnesses. He supposed he would
find out soon enough if he had been spotted. “Anyway, that’s less of a concern than what I do with her now.”

The girl asked Harry something. He answered and she poured herself more coffee, and held the mug between her hands as if still trying to get warm.

“There’s the authorities of course, but Lord only knows where she’d end up.” Harry looked preoccupied for a moment, as if mentally going through his address book before saying, “None of my old Russian contacts would be much use. I did know one or two who might have been able to help, but . . .”

The solution leapt out at Finn—a hundred attendant questions coming with it, but a solution all the same. And it hardly mattered that he didn’t know how it would work, because he knew immediately that it was the girl’s only real hope.

“I know one. A Russian.”

Harry laughed. “We all know Russians, Finn, but that’s—”

“I mean a Russian who could help.” He looked at Katerina, gave her an encouraging smile. “Could she stay here a while? I can’t take her home with me. Even if we could understand each other, how would I explain it to Sofi?”

“How long for? I mean, yeah, of course she can stay. But how long? What’s your thinking?”

Finn nodded, realizing that one way or another he was about to test his friendship with Harry to the limit. They’d known each other eighteen months, had bonded from the start, had been through a lot in that time, but this was the point at which Harry might begin to doubt he knew Finn at all.

“The Russian I know, he’ll be in Stockholm, I think a week from now. We could go on the overnight ferry, no need to get her a passport. He’d be able to deal with everything from there.”

Harry made a show of accepting that much, or of at least deferring acceptance for the time being, but said, “Can you trust him? You know, the girl just escaped who knows what, we don’t wanna hand her over to someone who’ll sell her to the highest bidder.”

There was no question in Finn’s mind. “I trust him completely, Harry. I trust him as much as I trust you. Maybe even more.”

Harry laughed at the slight. “Do you trust him more than Jerry de Borg?”

Finn smiled. It was one of their private jokes—“Jerry de Borg”, their stock invented explanation for everything that went wrong.

“Maybe not, but Jerry de Borg isn’t a powerful Russian.”

Harry laughed again, but then stopped abruptly and stared at Finn in shock.

“You sly bugger!” Finn hadn’t expected him to take even this
long to work it out. “It’s you! Jesus, I thought they’d suspect me . . . I
suspected Perry, but it’s you.” There was an implicit acceptance in the tone of Harry’s response, the suggestion that the crime had been stripped of all seriousness by Finn’s involvement, but the shock was still there and he shook his head. “You’re the least likely.”

“Because?”

“You don’t speak Russian. You’ve only been here eighteen months, flitting around the Med for five years before that.”

“Which is, of course, where I met him, and he speaks pretty good English.” Finn sat forward in his chair, put his coffee mug back on the tray and said, “Look, Harry, I never sold him anything. We’ve been in business together, and yes, I made things happen, things I’m not going into now, but I never betrayed my country—never, you have to take my word on that. Now, if you want to hand me in, fine, you’re my friend and I’ll accept that, but let me get this girl safe first.”

“I am your friend, so why on earth would I wanna hand you in? If you say you didn’t do anything to damage our country, then I believe you. Just swear to me you didn’t compromise anyone and that’s enough.”

“I swear.”

Harry seemed to accept that, but asked almost as an afterthought, “Why did you do it?”

“Boredom, I suppose.” Harry laughed. “I’m serious, you know. Flitting around the Med, as you described it, all very nice, but I felt like the big game was somewhere else. I met Alex, we had a shared interest in history, he’s a nice guy . . .”

“A
nice guy
.”

“Actually, yeah. I know his background, I know he’s been ruthless and could be again, but he is a nice guy. And, as embarrassing as it sounds, it was exciting, you know?”

Harry took it all in and sighed. Katerina had been watching them avidly and she looked at Harry now, knowing it was his time to respond, waiting for his words as readily as if she’d understand them.

“So he tipped you off? That’s why you quit?”

“Yeah. The timing could’ve been better. Me and Sofi and all that, but I have to admit, I’d been starting to worry it was bound to catch up with me.” Finn laughed at a reality that still seemed out of kilter with his own view of his actions. “I could go to prison.”

“I doubt that very much.” Harry smiled, his alternate theory not needing to be voiced. Then he looked suddenly decisive, as if it had all been settled. “We’ll sit down and talk about this one day, properly, but our priority now is getting Katerina to safety.” She watched more attentively at the sound of her name. “She can stay here. But the quicker you sort things with Naumenko, the better for all of us.”

“I’ll do my best.” Finn took his wallet out and emptied all the notes onto the table. “Buy her some clothes—she’s got nothing.”

“Put your money away, I can buy—”

“Just in case they’re watching your accounts. I give cash to Sofi all the time, so they’d think nothing of me drawing a few thousand extra krooni here and there.”

“Okay, fair point.”

“Katerina.” She looked at him and he said, “You’ll stay with Harry for a few days.” Harry translated and she nodded as if being given important instructions. “You’ll be safe here, but you mustn’t leave the apartment. Soon, I’ll take you to a Russian friend, a good man who’ll help you. If you want to go home he’ll help you do that.”

Her reply came back, simply put and all the more mournful for it, and Harry translated, “She says she has no home.”

“Then he’ll find a good family for you to go to, or—he’ll help.”

Finn stood up, gesturing for her to stay sitting, but as Harry stood too she said hesitantly, “Finn. Thank . . . Thank you.”

Finn nodded, but at the door he said to Harry, “If there’s a problem, or if you think they’re looking like investigating you—”

“I’ll just point them in your direction.” Harry laughed. “I know, if there’s a problem, I’ll call. But there won’t be. We can do this.”

Finn nodded and thought back to the body in the church, to the blood gulping out onto the floor. He’d seen people killed before, but that made it no less mystifying to contemplate the life he’d ended himself.

“I killed someone, Harry. How about that?”

“Well, you could say you killed someone, could say you saved someone—depends which way you look at it. Just a shame it wasn’t Karasek himself.”

“I’ll leave that job for you.” Finn started to walk along the cor
ridor. “See you tomorrow.”

“Usual place, usual time,” said Harry, and closed the door.

Finn started down the stairs, at a loss as to what he’d just done. He’d guarded that secret so carefully for so long and yet he’d just given it up, albeit to someone he could trust—someone he thought, or hoped, he could trust—and all because of a girl he didn’t know, a girl for whom he had also killed a man. But she needed help, it was as simple as that, and those two acts had been the only way he’d seen of giving it. What else could he have done?

Chapter Five

For the last half an hour he’d been thinking about Arnaud Amaury. More specifically, he’d been wondering if he could make a case for Arnaud suffering from Asperger’s. Here was a man who’d struggled to connect with the people, who’d been ridiculed and humiliated but who, when faced with an intractable religious problem, had hit upon a chillingly logical solution without any recourse to human emotion.

The Cathars had been a small but growing heretical minority, dispersed among the wider population, indistinguishable from them. And that wider population had been unwilling to surrender people they’d probably known their whole lives.

That had been Amaury’s problem: how to identify the Cathars. To a man who believed that true Christians had nothing to fear in death, the solution was simple—put the entire city to the sword and let God identify the heretics. Was that an autistic response, or just that of a committed believer in an extreme age?

Realistically, and for a modern readership, it was probably easier to paint him as a psychopath. Finn supposed he could portray Amaury as a magnificent, Kurtz-like character—and Béziers had not been his only atrocity—but that hardly squared with a man who’d also been a figure of fun.

Perhaps he had to accept that there was no humanizing Arnaud, not in the modern understanding of humanity. He would be able to paint the Pope sympathetically enough, and the two fictionalized figures on either side of the Béziers massacre, but not Arnaud.

Finn considered a different approach. He imagined his various human figures, all of them with hopes and fears and preoccupations that would be recognizable to his readers, and all of them engaged in a dance of death around the monstrous enigma of Arnaud Amaury himself—cold, murderous, unknowable.

That was the solution. He scribbled “monstrous enigma” in his notebook. He hesitated for a moment and then wrote another note, instructing himself not to use “dance of death” anywhere in the manuscript—it was too flowery, too clichéd, much too likely to be picked up on and ridiculed by reviewers.

He pushed himself away from his desk and strolled through into the living room. He didn’t bother turning on the lights, but stood looking out over the lake as dusk fell. Lights were already on here and there—a peaceful evening at the end of a peaceful day.

He smiled at the strange trajectory of his thoughts, seeing them as a passive observer might, because his day had hardly been peaceful. The Portmans’ daughter was missing, his own girlfriend had left him, and yet at some level he did feel at peace. He’d enjoyed making inquiries, had enjoyed exploring a mystery that was not of his own making, a reminder in some way of the life that might have been his.

Maybe his enjoyment of that process had encouraged him to see Hailey Portman’s disappearance as something more than it was. He didn’t doubt that she might be in more danger than she’d ever imagined when she’d set out, but it was unlikely there was anything more sinister at play here than the whims and desires of a willful fifteen-year-old girl.

Finn glanced down as someone came into view on the street below, then did a double take because the figure looked familiar. He was wearing a kind of multicolored, felt bobble hat, with flaps hanging down over his ears and ending in tassels. Was it South American in design? He wasn’t sure, but he recognized it and the memories clicked into place now as he realized he
had
seen Jonas before.

He was on the opposite side of the street, but he was moving about and he came a little closer and then out of sight. Finn opened the door carefully and stepped out onto the balcony, bringing Jonas back into full view. The kid looked agitated, walking up and down as if he expected something to happen.

For some reason, when Finn had listened to the Portmans describing Jonas, he hadn’t thought of this boy. He couldn’t see him clearly in the dusk, but he remembered him well enough—taller than Hailey, wide-shouldered but slim, a good-looking kid with bone structure and lively eyes, someone he imagined hitting the slopes every weekend in the winter, though it had probably just been the hat feeding that impression. Finn had only met him briefly, a couple of times at most, but even if it was just his own prejudice at work, he wouldn’t have had him down as someone in the outer reaches of the autism spectrum.

Jonas looked at the entrance to the building as if he’d seen movement, but looked away again and resumed his pacing. Finn had vaguely registered him and Hailey as boyfriend and girlfriend, and he wondered now if Ethan and Debbie had been blind at even that fundamental level to their daughter’s private world.

Certainly, the boy in the street below looked like the stereotypical lovelorn youth. Jonas knew Hailey was missing, so Finn couldn’t quite make out what he was doing here. Did he expect her to show up, or was he engaged in his own private search for her? For all Finn knew, the little vigil below was the kid’s way of focusing his thoughts.

Finn didn’t want to move, but he became suddenly aware of how cold an evening had pursued the spring-like day. A chill breeze was pushing in off the lake, needling him through the thin material of his shirt.

He thought about stepping inside to get a sweater, but Jonas stopped moving below, checked his watch then appeared to check his phone, and looked up at the building, not at the Portmans’ apartment but at the one next to it, immediately below where Finn was standing. He looked at his watch again, then back at the same apartment, an air of confusion about him.

Finn tried to think who lived in that apartment but had no idea—in truth, he knew only the Portmans, and that was through Adrienne. He knew a few others by sight or to say hello to, but had no notion of which apartments they occupied.

His thoughts stuttered as he realized he’d been spotted. Jonas had looked at his watch again, briefly gone a floor too high when he’d returned his gaze to the building, and spotted Finn standing there. The kid took a step backward and looked both ways along the street, apparently deciding what he should do.

Finn stepped farther out onto the balcony and called down, “Hey, Jonas, wait there a second.” He ignored him and started to walk. Finn wondered if it had been a mistake to use his name. But he’d used it now—too late. “Jonas!” The kid stopped and turned, looking up at him. “Just a second . . .”

He ran through the apartment, the sudden rush of warmth spurring him to grab his coat on the way out. He didn’t wait for the elevator, but tore down the stairs and put his coat on as he ran through the lobby. It didn’t surprise him that Jonas was no longer outside the front of the building.

Finn headed quickly in the same direction, breaking into a run, and got to the end of the street before he gave up. Jonas was nowhere in sight—he’d obviously broken into a run himself as soon as Finn had disappeared from the balcony.

He crossed the street and walked back on the far side, letting his breathing and his heartbeat level out again. His throat and lungs felt spiked by the sudden influx of cold air, a feeling that was at once both refreshing and queasily redolent of his time in the north—anything that reminded him of his former life had a way of making the ground feel unsteady beneath his feet.

When he reached the spot where Jonas had been standing, he looked up at the building. He was drawn first to the Portmans’ apartment. The lights were on, the blinds open, and Finn recognized their living room even from the street, so he had no doubt that Jonas would have done.

It confirmed what Finn had already suspected, that Jonas hadn’t been looking at the apartment below his by mistake. But it didn’t tell him what exactly the boy
had
been looking at, because the apartment in question was in darkness. He glanced up a floor to his own, also dark.

Jonas had checked his watch a few times, with what looked like agitation or impatience. He’d expected to see something in that apartment, something that he believed was connected in some way to Hailey’s disappearance, or that would perhaps help him to find her.

Finn doubted Ethan and Debbie would hold much store in what Jonas thought about this, and for all Finn knew, he was indeed borderline dysfunctional, prone to delusions. But he was following a trail of some sort, so whether he was reliable or not, he clearly knew more about Hailey’s disappearance than her parents realized.

Finn took one more look at the building, then checked his own watch and went inside to find Monsieur Grasset.