All the Old Knives (2 page)

I turn up the radio. Robert Plant wails about the land of ice and snow.

Though my rental could easily sweep down the road in a handful of minutes, I move to the right and take it easy, the wind gusting in from all sides. It's a comfortable road, so much more accommodating than the roads I've been driving the past decade—the windy, traffic-clogged European lanes where people pull up onto the sidewalk and leave their cars angled, so you have to be a pro to get by without scraping. Also, this road is full of California drivers—easygoing, in no hurry, so unlike European men in their tiny cars, riding your tail in a ridiculous show of machismo. It's easy driving; it feels like an easy life. I can see why she retired here.

Vick said as much in his office up on the embassy's fifth floor, high above Boltzmanngasse. “She's gone,” he said. “She's happy. You're wasting your time.”

What could I say to that? “I know, Vick. Two kids, after all.”

“No, I don't think you do know. I think you're still holding a torch for that woman.”

Vick never quite forgave Celia for leaving the station as suddenly as she did, which is why he tends not to say her name anymore. “We're still friends,” I said.

Vick laughed. Behind him, a bright Austrian sky filled the window. A plane was riding low, heading toward Flughafen Wien, where in the morning I would be strolling the corridors with my shoulder bag, noticing, as I always did, the Austrian efficiency that had completely airbrushed away the trauma of 2006. “No,” Vick said finally. “You
aren't
still friends. That's not how breakups work. And she'll be able to tell, just like I can, that you're still head over heels. After five years, a marriage, and kids, you're the last person she wants to see.”

“I think you've got a warped history of romantic entanglements, Vick.”

This, at least, provoked a smile. “Let's send Mack. You give him the questions, and he'll bring the answers gift wrapped. You don't need to go.”

“Mack won't know if she's lying.”

“He's good at his job.”

“He doesn't
know
her.”

“You don't, either. Not anymore.”

I wasn't sure how to rebut that. I couldn't tell him why I needed to go myself, but I at least should have had a ready-made line in my pocket, something rational and irrefutable to throw at him. It's a sign of my eroding capabilities that I had nothing.

He said, “She'll get a restraining order.”

“Don't be ridiculous.”

“If I were her, I would.”

We both let it rest a moment. The plane was gone. I said, “Look, it's an excuse to get out of the basement for a few days. See an old friend. I'll ask her some questions about Frankler, and Uncle Sam can pay for dinner.”

“And then you'll wrap it up?” he asked. “Frankler, I mean.”

Frankler was the investigation that had kept me in the basement nearly two months, and as I had done plenty of times during our years together, I lied to Vick. “It's tricky. We're trying to cover our asses here—I just want to make sure every inch is covered.”

“But you don't have a suspect, right? No actual evidence of wrongdoing?”

“Just one man's word.”

“A terrorist's word.”

I shrugged.

“And soon afterward he drowned in a pail of water,” Vick said. “So it's not like he's going to be taking the stand.”

“True.”

“Then close it down. Chalk 2006 up to bad luck.”

He was even more eager than I was to end this thing. “I'll find out if Celia has anything to add, and when I get back I'll push on for another week. Okay? Then we'll close it.”

“You're eating up our budget, you know.”

“Really, Vick? I wander around the basement all day, pulling out old files.”

“You fly, too.”

“Twice. Over two months I've taken two trips to talk with old hands. Bill Compton and Gene Wilcox. That's hardly extravagant.”

He stared at me with those lazy eyes, hesitating, then said, “You ever think about what you'd do if you actually pinned it on someone?”

I had thought about little else. But I said, “Why don't you tell me?”

Vick sighed. I've known him my whole Austrian decade, and he uses sighs the way others crack knuckles or chain-smoke. “You know the score, Henry. We can't afford the embarrassment of a prosecution, and it's not like we're going to do a prisoner swap with the jihadis. Ideally, I wouldn't even want Langley to hear about it.”

“So what you're saying is you'd like me to execute the traitor.”

He frowned. “I don't believe I said anything of the sort.”

We watched each other a moment. I said, “Well, let's hope I don't find anyone to blame it on.”

He sighed again and gazed at my hands; I moved them into my pockets. “What does Daniels say?” he asked.

Larry Daniels was the one who'd brought up the theory in the first place. He'd flown in from Langley two months ago in order to have a sit-down with Vick about some new material that had been taken from a prisoner in Gitmo, one Ilyas Shishani, who had been picked up during a raid in Afghanistan. Among the many items he'd spilled, he told the interrogators that the 2006 Vienna Airport disaster had been aided by a source within the U.S. embassy. We'd all been around then—Vick, me, Celia, Gene, and Celia's boss, Bill. After listening to Larry's pitch, Vick had asked me to head the investigation that he'd code-named Frankler.

“Larry's twenty-eight,” I reminded him, just as I had when he'd given me Frankler. “He's building a case off of a terrorist's disinformation. He's also desperate to fill his CV.”

“Then let's bury it right now. It'll piss off Daniels, but his bosses would be happy to knock him down a few pegs while avoiding a scandal.”

It was an idea I'd toyed with for two months. I didn't like Larry Daniels—few who'd met him during his occasional appearances in Vienna did. He was small and itchy to look at, with oily hair and a high, raspy voice. He emanated the conviction that he knew better than anyone else in the room what was going on. But he was also smart, and if I buried Frankler Daniels would dig it up again and dust it off and make a stink. More important, he would take the investigation out of my hands, and that was something I couldn't allow.

I said, “How do you think we'd look once Daniels started shouting around Langley? I've got to follow this as far as it goes—not talking to Celia would leave a gaping hole. He would shove us into it.”

Another sigh. “Just try to wrap it up quickly, will you? Tomorrow's giving us enough headaches without having to pick apart yesterday. Remember that when you're harassing your girlfriend.”

But I was already ahead of Vick, and wrapping up Frankler is what makes me slow down in the thickening traffic and peer at signs, trying without success not to think about Celia, and what kind of a meeting she's anticipating. A few hours of reminiscence, something official, or … something more interesting?

On the radio the DJ tells me he's busy getting the Led out, and I'm surprised that in the last three decades, ever since I played that old transistor radio in my high school bedroom, DJs haven't come up with a better way of proclaiming their love for Zeppelin. He goes on, predicting a “Beatles Block” in the next hour, and telling his listeners to call in for his “awesome two for Tuesday.”

Really? Did commercial radio reach its creative peak in 1982? I switch it off.

To my left is a high school, and on the right a sign points me into the trees and down Ocean Avenue, which rolls downhill toward the coast, splitting the town of Carmel-by-the-Sea in half. The speed limit drops to twenty-five, and I ease along between two tricked-out SUVs. Carmel long ago rid itself of traffic lights, so every few blocks a four-way stop hides among the trees and cottages. I feel like I've been slipped a mild tranquilizer. It's the freshest air I've breathed in my life.

Eventually, after brief views of small homes through the trees, the shopping district appears, cut down the center by a median strip full of cultivated trees and lined on either side with cottage-themed local stores. Chains are prohibited, and the town center looks like a cinematic version of a quaint English village. Not a real English village, mind, but the kind in which Miss Marple might find herself stumbling around, discovering corpses among the antiques. I drive through the center, all the way down to the sea, passing retirement-aged shoppers dressed like golfers as they walk their little dogs, then take the sandy parking loop to get a glimpse of the clean, white beach and rough waves in the quickly fading light. There are tourists driving behind me, so I only get a moment of serenity before heading back up into the center.

I park near the corner of Lincoln and wait behind the wheel as evening descends. A smattering of locals and tourists, each one his own particular shade of white, wander the sidewalks. I'm in the middle of an idealized vision of a seaside village, rather than the real thing. An image of an image, which is a perfect place to live if you want to be something other than what you once were.

But it's nice, and I wonder if I should have reserved a room for the night instead of a seat on the red-eye back to San Francisco. I can see myself waking in this village and joining the golfers for their dawn constitutionals along the shore. The morning breeze, the sea—the kinds of things that can clean you out after a decade in the Vienna embassy. A salt wash for the soul.

After tonight, though, it'll take more than a pretty beach to scrub my soul clean, and I suspect that by the time I settle into my return flight all I'll want to do is run from Carmel-by-the-Sea as fast as my little legs can carry me.

After raising the roof with another button press and locking it into place, I take a phone out of my shoulder bag. It's a Siemens push-button I abandoned years ago for the lure of touch-screen technology. It's neither shiny nor minimalist, but it has an excellent microphone I sometimes use to record conversations inconspicuously. I power it up, check the battery, and set up the recording software. I'm the kind of person who likes a record of his life. If not for posterity, then in order to cover my ass.

Back in Vienna I used cash to refill the Siemen's prepaid SIM, and now I dial a number I used a week ago; before that I hadn't used it in more than three years, when I made the call for Bill Compton, who was once Celia's boss. After three rings a gruff-sounding man answers. I've never seen him, so I don't have a face to imagine. I say, “Is this Treble?”

He thinks a moment. His own code name changes depending on the speaker, so in his head (or, for all I know, on an old envelope beside his phone) he goes through a list of names. Treble means that he's speaking to … “Hello, Piccolo. How are you?”

“We're still on?”

“A small roadster,” he says. “Very feminine. In Carmel-by-the-Sea.”

“Exactly.”

He hesitates. “You said there were a couple mopeds and an older Chevy, right?”

“But they won't need any work.”

“Yes, yes.” His manner doesn't instill confidence, and I wonder how old he is. “Yes, it's all fine. I'm there.”

“In Carmel?”

“Of course.”

I hadn't expected him to arrive so soon.

“When do you need it, again?” he asks.

“Not immediately, but in the next few days.”

“Okay, then.”

“There's a chance,” I say quickly, worrying about his memory, “that it won't be necessary.”

“Yes, you told me this before.”

“In that case, I cover travel and half your regular fee.”

“I know. It's fair.”

“Good. I'll call you again soon.”

“Be seeing you,” he says, and when he hangs up I think,
I sure as hell hope not.

 

4

I arrive at Rendez-vous a half hour early, taking the existence of a bar as a hopeful omen, though I see no bottles. I'm intercepted by a young, hardly there woman in black with a ponytail atop her skull and an iPad in her hand. Even though the restaurant behind her is completely empty, she says, “Reservations?”

“Yes, but I'm early. Just getting a drink.”

“Name?”

“Harrison—I mean, Favreau.”

“Seven o'clock,” she says approvingly to the iPad. “I can seat you now, if you like.”

During the flights I sustained myself with an image of my terminal point: a stool and a long bar to support my exhausted frame. It's what I want Celia to see when she arrives—a man in a man's place. “I'll wait at the bar,” I say as I slip past the waitress and, with relief, station myself at the end of the pounded-iron counter. A pert young bartender, also in black, who has sculpted his three-day beard so carefully that it looks like a layer of paint, smiles thinly. I order the gin martini I've been anticipating for the last twenty-four hours.

“Sorry. We only have wine.”

“You're kidding me, right?”

He shrugs, reaching for a laminated pamphlet that lists the bottles at his disposal. It's wine country, after all. I start to read through the vineyards, but the compound names quickly blur—I don't know a thing about wine. I shut the menu. “Something very cold and strong.”

“White or rosé?”

“Man, I don't care. Just make sure it's dry.”

I watch him take a bottle from the fridge and waste a lot of time fooling with the opener before getting it open and pouring. He's not elegant about it, the wine glug-glugging and splattering a bit on the counter. Aware of the spectacle, he gives me an embarrassed smile. “First day on the job, sorry.” Which makes me like him, just a little bit.

He slides over what proves to be a tannin-heavy Chardonnay from deep inside Carmel Valley—Joullian Estate—in a glass foggy with chill. Beside it he places a dish of macadamia nuts, then winks, still embarrassed, before heading off again. In his place a wall-length mirror gives me a full view of the restaurant.