The Nearest Exit (11 page)

He finally stepped off the porch, and Milo followed him to the car. He moved slowly, and Milo had to measure his steps to avoid bumping into him.

“What do you think would happen if someone popped up with real evidence of our existence? Don’t strain yourself—I’ll tell you. An investigation would be launched. An official one. Senators and representatives would start asking questions. They would wonder just how much we cost—and that answer, as we both know, is embarrassing.
We would go from being a frightening story spies tell each other at night to being just another overpriced Company department whose failures start making the newspapers on a regular basis. We would become a joke, just as all the known departments already are. People—American citizens—would start blogging about us and protesting our existence.
Tell us what our tax dollars are doing
, they would say. And what excuses would we have for our epic budget and the way we have to rob art museums in order to fund ourselves in the crunch times? Please.”

He stopped, and even in the darkness Milo could see his boss’s face was as red as his hands.

“We’d be finished before we got a chance to defend ourselves. Not that we even have a defense.”

They stood in silence broken by the high grass tinkling in the wind and the dull rumble of the Lincoln. Milo felt that he should say something, but he had nothing to say. At this point Drummond seemed to just be thinking aloud, musing over the immediate and more distant future.

“I’ll contact you about Dzubenko’s other stories,” he said finally. “I’ll have you and some other Tourist check their veracity. Who knows? Maybe we’ll find out we have a Ukrainian mole, and the Ukrainians are positioning us to run up against the Chinese.”

“Or maybe there’s no mole at all.”

“Maybe,” said Drummond. “Your cover still computers?”

“Dropped that a while ago—couldn’t sustain a conversation. Expat insurance.”

“You can’t talk computers but you can talk actuarial tables?”

“If forced.”

Drummond grunted amusement but said nothing. When they reached the car, Milo unconsciously opened the door for his boss. Drummond got in and looked up at him. “We’re running things differently now. It’s not the old Tourism anymore.”

“I appreciate that, sir.”

“Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. Anyway, I don’t believe in lying to my employees. If I want something from you, I’ll tell you directly. If I don’t want you to know something, I’ll just tell you it’s above
your clearance. What’s important is that you won’t have to do a lot of second-guessing with me—I’m an obvious man.”

He’d said it earnestly, so Milo said, “That means you’re either an idealist—”

“—or a fool,” Drummond finished. “Yeah. I’ve heard it all already. And this thing with the girl, the Moldovan. Not my idea of good foreign policy, but it really was necessary.”

“I’m sure it was,” said Milo.

“I doubt you are. But it’s like any new administration. Before you can move forward you have to take care of the screwups of the previous administration.”

“Maybe you want to tell me why it had to be done.”

“Sorry,” said Drummond. “That’s above your clearance.”

Milo shut the door, then came around the other side and got in beside him. The man behind the wheel began driving along the pocked field toward the main road.

“I’m glad I met you face-to-face,” Drummond told him. “Turns out you’re smarter than your file made you out to be.”

“That’s very reassuring to hear, sir.”

Two days later, Milo broke into a white sedan parked on a secluded street in the northern Milan suburbs, a car that was perfect in its dull inconspicuousness. Some chipped paint on the left flank, a hairline crack down the rear windshield, and just old enough to be un-threatening, but still new enough to play nicely with his magic key ring. With a full tank of gas.

Earlier that day, he had bought an aerosol can of polyurethane from a vast OBI store, and after picking up the car he drove to an address on the Crocetta side of Viale Fulvio Testi, a tall apartment block beside an Esso station. He walked around one side and squatted by the whitewashed wall. He uncapped the can and spray-painted
MARIANS JAZZROOM
. While wet, it was visible, though once it dried someone would have to look hard to find it.

He tossed the can into a wastebasket and drove north. It was 6:00
P.M.
, Tuesday.

By eight, he was in a hotel in Melide, Switzerland, just south of Lugano, to rest up before the final stage of the Bührle job. He flipped through television channels, pausing on CNN, where the forty-third president of the United States had been cornered in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. In answer to a reporter’s question, Bush said, “The Kosovars are now independent.”

Drummond’s discussions had obviously gone well.

He wondered idly what Radovan thought of all of this, and suspected he and many of his friends couldn’t help but succumb to a measure of nationalism now that Kosovo, the birthplace of Serbian Orthodoxy, was at stake, but it didn’t matter now. Their fight was dead, and Milo had twenty million dollars to collect.

At one o’clock in the morning, he cleaned the room and put his few spare clothes and toiletries into the hotel’s Dumpster. Before returning the room key, he swallowed two Dexedrine.

At his rented garage in the northern Lugano suburbs, he lit his first Davidoff of the day. He considered the canvases. Degas’s
Count Lepic and His Daughters
, Monet’s
Poppy Field at Vétheuil
, van Gogh’s
Blooming Chestnut Branches
, and Cézanne’s
Boy in the Red Waistcoat
.

The decision wasn’t about which paintings Milo thought should live or die; the decision was about which paintings meant more to the museum. All four were masterpieces of similar financial value, but there was a difference. Two portrayed nature scenes, while the other two portrayed people. Museum curators and insurance adjusters know that the public’s interest lies with faces; that’s just human nature. Therefore he would give them nature, so that they would act in the hope of saving the faces.

Using gloves, he loaded the sedan with the Monet and van Gogh, then went back inside to examine the remaining two. The boy in the waistcoat looked, at a certain angle, petrified as Milo again took out his Zippo. Necessary, he told himself. Allowing the paintings to survive would only leave him open to risk, leave one more clue for the police to track down. He thought of Adriana and the risk he’d taken letting her survive, and wondered suddenly about Yevgeny’s words. For the old man, killing a girl was a practical necessity, but at the mention of stealing art he’d reached something like a moral core.
It’s the social contract you’ve broken, Milo
. What kind of man cared more about paintings than a girl’s life?

Nearly two hours later, a little before five, he parked around the corner from the E. G. Bührle, in front of the Psychiatrische Universitätsklinik Zürich. He wiped down the inside of the car, then tossed the keys down by the gas pedal and shut the door. He walked west down Flühgasse to the Tiefenbrunnen commuter train stop and on
the way found a pay phone out of the reach of street cameras. Still in gloves, he pulled up the name and number Drummond had texted him, and dialed.

After seven rings, a groggy, irritated voice said, “Ja?”

“Is this Jochem Hirsch?”

“Ja, ja.”

“Wake up, Jochem. I took the paintings from the Bührle museum.”

Silence. Then he asked, “How did you get this number?”

“Listen to me. If you go to the psychiatric clinic just down the street from the museum, you’ll find a white car with Italian plates. Inside it are the Monet and van Gogh.”

“Wait, are you—”

“This is a show of goodwill, Jochem. Two for free. You’ve had a week and a half to learn that you can’t find the paintings on your own, so you know that this is the only way. You’ll have to pay for the Degas and Cézanne. Twenty million in U.S. dollars.”

“Twenty million? I don’t—”

“It’s a deal, Jochem. They’re worth far more than that.”

Jochem Hirsch thought through his options, while in the background a woman’s voice said, “Wer ist da?”

“Shh,” was his reply.

When he spoke again, it was to state the obvious. “Twenty million is still more than you’d get for them. You know that. They’re too famous—no one would pay that much for the risk.”

“I’m not interested in selling them, Jochem. If you don’t pay the money in the next twenty-four hours, then I’ll burn the two remaining paintings. Run that by the investors and see what they think. You have a pen?”

“Wait a minute,” he said, and Milo heard him grunting, moving around his bedroom. “Yes.”

Milo recited the IBAN code he’d given to Drummond. “For your sake, I suggest you don’t share this with the press. Say the paintings were discovered by accident, by a passerby, whatever. Otherwise, half the museums you insure will start having trouble.”

“That’s very considerate of you,” said Jochem Hirsch.

“Twenty-four hours, understand? I won’t call again; you won’t hear a thing. But if the money doesn’t reach the account, then the Degas and Cézanne will be ash.”

He hung up.

The train brought him to the center of town, where he got some breakfast. He was famished, and as he ate he read a copy of
Kurier
someone had left behind. It was on the front page, which was surprising. There she was, a posed photograph, probably from the high school. Smiling as if nothing bad could ever happen to her.

Of course it was on the front page, he realized as he finished his meal. The Germans, embarrassed retrospectively, would have remembered that they had seen this potentially dangerous man talking to the very girl who’d gone missing. Evidence of foul play was all over it. Yet all
Kurier
said was that she had been seen leaving the school but had not appeared on the other side of the block, where her father had been waiting. There was nothing about Sebastian Hall or Gerald Stanley.

The Germans, he imagined, had checked in with the Company administrator that had put them onto him. Alan Drummond would have asked them to please keep it quiet.

His food settled heavily in his stomach, and as he laid down Swiss francs for the bill he took out his cell phone and typed out a message.

Check acct tomorrow this time. Will be offline until Saturday.

He sent the message, then turned off his phone, lest it receive an immediate reply, and removed the battery. On the way to the Hauptbahnhof, he picked up a copy of
Le Figaro
because he saw a photo of the dejected parents, Andrei and Rada Stanescu, dazed by photographers’ lights. The French newspaper had printed a translation of Rada’s public plea, which had been broadcast on German television:

I want to speak to the person who took Adriana. You know who you are. You can put right the wrong you have done to
her, and to my husband and myself, by placing her somewhere safe now. You don’t have to put yourself at risk by going to a police station or a post office. You can put her in a church, or somewhere with a pay phone and money so she can call us. We’ll pick her up. That’s all you have to do to end this.

Milo popped two more Dexedrine, wiped some ash off his sleeve, and boarded the eleven thirty train to Paris.

By Friday, his anxiety had nothing to do with Adriana Stanescu, a possible mole in Tourism, the art extortion that was now complete (AP reported that a clinic employee had noticed the two paintings in the backseat of an abandoned car), nor even the fact that Alan Drummond would be fuming because he’d gone offline. Those were nothing beside this interminable wait in the Manhattan rain while students with knapsacks and cell phones passed him in pairs and solo. Those old worries meant nothing compared to this.

For the first time in months, he knew exactly why he was here. “Here” was the grounds of Columbia University, across from the high, majestic columns of the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library on a drizzling but unseasonably warm afternoon. The trench coat he’d picked up at Macy’s that morning kept his body dry, but he was still shivering. He had resisted the urge for more Dexedrine; a clouded head was the last thing he wanted.

One thing that might have helped him now was self-righteousness, an emotion common to men who’ve been rejected by their wives. In some men it leads to harassing calls or intrusions at four in the morning, or even haunting a loved one’s place of work, as Milo was doing now. Self-righteousness had never been part of Milo Weaver’s repertoire, though, and if Tina came out now and told him to
leave, he would do so without argument—he felt sure of this. Self-righteousness is born of the conviction that you deserve something from someone; Milo, on the other hand, didn’t believe anyone owed him a thing.

His crime had been secrecy.

Among other things, he had hidden the identities of his parents—his real parents—from her. Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Primakov and Ellen Perkins. One a Soviet spy Milo briefly lived with in Moscow during his teenaged years; the other, his mother, a 1979 suicide in a German prison, someone described, alternately, as a Marxist terrorist, a mentally disturbed nomad, or—as he thought of her—a ghost.