The Nearest Exit (40 page)

“How about trust?” asked Dr. Ray.

“How about it?” he said ineptly.

“Of course a marriage is made of many different ideas, but they have their own biorhythms. Certain ideas come to the fore at certain
times. If you listen to Tina, you’ll hear that, for her, trust is very often the primary idea. Her lack of it, in particular. Tina—am I misrepresenting your feelings?”

She shook her head.

“Tina feels as if a large part of your life is a complete mystery to her.”

“Which is why I’ve quit my job,” said Milo.

“And that’s an excellent step,” the doctor said. “But what does that mean? Does it mean that, from this point on, she’s going to start to get to know her husband? That’s impossible if you still can’t share your past with her. You may have quit your job, but that job still possesses the last fourteen years of your life. We are the result of our histories, Milo, not the result of our present.”

This was really annoying Milo; she could see it in the edges of his heavy eyes, in the flushed cheeks, in the quick darting of his tongue. “So now I should open up the history books? That’ll land me in jail and put Tina and Stephanie in serious danger.”

“See what I mean?” Tina found herself saying. “Those national secrets again.”

“They’re a fact of life, Tina.”

“And facts dictate the limits of our behavior,” Dr. Ray said majestically. “But people have their own limits that facts cannot dictate. The question isn’t what you can and cannot tell Tina, but how this makes Tina feel, and how well you can compensate for it.”

“Wait a minute,” Tina said, no longer worrying if she was going to sound stupid. “You said Stef and I would end up in danger, but you weren’t in danger—you said that at the beginning of the session. If you weren’t, then why would we be?”

He rubbed his face. “I was lying, Tina. Of course I was in danger. Those burns on my arm? Someone was using me as an ashtray. There’s just no need for anyone to worry—I got out of it fine.”

Ashtray? The word stuck in her head, and she had trouble seeing past it. “You hear him? Is there no way for you to be honest? Not even here?”

“Tina,” said Dr. Ray, “he’s trying to be honest here. This is real progress.”

It didn’t feel like progress to Tina, though, and she was starting to wonder if Milo coming back home was really what they both needed. That opening lie about danger had been a small one, as insignificant, really, as saying “Fine” when someone asks how you’re doing, but it felt so much bigger. She pressed her hand deep into the sofa cushion. “Is it progress? Because I know how spies work. He’s told me often enough. Cover. You go in somewhere with cover, and when the enemy realizes you’re not that person, you have another cover prepared, just below it. You give that one easily. If they still don’t believe it, you have a third one ready, but you really make them work for it, because otherwise they won’t buy it. If you’re really good, you’ve got another one beneath that, one so deep that it might as well be the real you. How many layers of cover do you have, Milo?”

He looked shocked by her outburst. Or appalled. “None.”

“But you see? You see how he’s got me screwed up? I even take it a step further sometimes and think that maybe his genius lies in the fact that the original cover, the first one I’ve peeled off and thrown away, that
that’s
the real one. That I’ve long ago abandoned what really is Milo Weaver. That it’s somewhere in the trash and I’ll never find it again.”

She was crying now, and she saw Dr. Ray’s long, toned, lovely arm push a box of Kleenex across the coffee table to her. She took one but didn’t use it, just balled it in her hand and squeezed it.

Dr. Ray said, “Are you listening, Milo? Because this is what your wife is saying to you. She’s here because she wants to find the Milo she fell in love with. It doesn’t have to be the Milo she thought she knew, just a Milo she believes in.”

Milo wasn’t listening to anyone.

Through her blurred vision Tina saw him sit up, stiff, staring ahead. Not at her, or at the therapist, but somewhere else, into the middle distance. Something had landed on him, had squashed him flat. Did he—and this thought made her feel suddenly very dependent—have an insight that would save their marriage? The magic bullet? Christ, it looked like it from his expression. It looked like he had something big. A breakthrough.

“Milo?”

Dr. Ray, while reaching a hand in Tina’s direction, leaned toward Milo, frowning. “Milo, you with us?”

Then, unbelievably, Milo stood up. For the first time in known history, Dr. Ray looked confused.

“What is it, Milo?”

Tina wiped at her tears. “Milo? Hon? What is it?” She touched his arm, but he showed no sign of having felt it.

Then he sat down again, heavily, and reached for her hand. Squeezed it distractedly. To both of them, he said, “Sorry. I’m sorry. Something came to me.”

“That’s good,” said Dr. Ray.

“What?” said Tina.

“It’s not . . .” he began, then shook his head, leaning back. “It’s about something else. Not about this.”

Flatly, Tina said, “It’s not about our marriage? Then what is it about?”

“It’s—that stuff. All the stuff I’m not allowed to discuss.”

“I
have
been vetted by your people,” Dr. Ray reminded him. “What you say here stays here.”

“Not this level of clearance,” Milo said coldly. He ran a hand through his hair. “Maybe I should go.”

“I think leaving now would be a serious mistake,” said Dr. Ray. He nodded obediently, but for the rest of the session was not even there. Tina wished he had left, so that she could have at least become emotional, but when faced with a man like this, a blank-faced automaton absorbed by something so far from the topic of discussion, how could she?

On the way to her car, he broke the silence, but not with anything constructive or even encouraging. “Can you drop me off at the train?”

“Drop yourself off, you self-centered shit,” she said and got into the car. She didn’t bother unlocking the passenger’s side, just started it up and drove away.

The man, small and hairy and twitchy, was not German. This Hasad knew for a fact. He arrived driving an old taxi and entered the store with a soft worker’s cap balled up in his fleshy fists covered in too much dark hair and rose on his toes and peered around the empty store before turning to offer Hasad a brief “Guten Abend.” His accent was something eastern, like the Czechs who sometimes stopped by his store on their way to the BND headquarters on missions he was far too patriotic to ask about.

Like some of those Czechs, he dressed in an oversized trench coat, but the material was even worse than what the Czechs wore. Yet his shoes, Hasad noticed, were so well shined that they reflected the fluorescent lamps in the ceiling.

He walked to the rear of the store and began browsing slowly. Sometimes he picked up and examined a candy bar or a bag of chips, but always returned it to its spot.

At first, Hasad worried. The trench coat might have hidden a gun, though before worrying about his life Hasad calculated how much money was in the till. Then, when the man opened and closed his coat quickly three times to fan himself, he realized there were no weapons about the portly body.

He was sweating—that, too, could be seen from a distance. The hair on his head and the bits that emerged from his cheap sweater
were glistening with it as he crouched to read the label on a packet of Holland Toast.

He was still going about his research when Frau—
Direktor
—Schwartz arrived. She nodded to Hasad as she charted her route to the back of the store and collected her Riesling. To his surprise, he saw that she was buying two, and when she turned back to look for her Snickers, she caught sight of the man, who said, “Erika Schwartz.”

She froze. Hasad worried she would drop the bottles, but instead her grip tightened—he saw how her pink fingers whitened from the pressure. Then they relaxed and she said, “Grüss Gott, Herr Stanescu. I didn’t know you were in Munich.”

No answer. From his angle Hasad could see something wild in Herr Stanescu’s eyes, as if he expected that her arrival would bring him great wealth. He was in one aisle while she was in the next, and they spoke over the potato chips. Then the man opened his mouth, but instead of speech a low animal moan came out and he began to weep.

She said, “You should probably go home, Herr Stanescu. We’re doing all we can.”

Stanescu—Hasad finally remembered. The girl from the newspapers, the girl killed by Russians. Then he recognized this man from the photographs—the poor girl’s father, Andrei. He nearly fainted.

Through his sobs, Andrei Stanescu said, “I call him and I call him but he doesn’t answer. Herr Reich isn’t answering.”

“I’m sorry, but I told you before—I’m not on the case anymore. Trust me, Herr Reich is working diligently on it.”

“I need answers—can’t you see? I am dying!”

“You should go home.”

“Where is the man?”

“Herr Reich? He—”

“No!” he shouted, anger suddenly replacing that deep sadness. “The other man! In the picture! The one that kill her!”

“That was a mistake,” she told him, and Hasad noticed that now only one bottle was in her hand, and she held it upside-down, like a club. He moved to the left and, below the counter, gripped a heavy nightstick he kept for emergencies. She said, “It happens sometimes.

Yes, he talked to your daughter, but he had nothing to do with her kidnapping.”

“Don’t tell me that!” shouted Andrei Stanescu. He marched toward the front of the store, toward Hasad, but only stared at Director Schwartz. As he rounded the end of the aisle, effectively blocking her exit, Hasad caught the heady stink of some brandy all over him.

“What are you doing?” Director Schwartz asked calmly.

“I’m sick!” he said. “I am sick of all . . . of
Germans
. Of you. You think I am a stupid immigrant what listens happy to all your lies. I’m not. No one cares about a little girl who is killed by the man in that picture. No one!”

“I assure you, Herr Stanescu—”

“Assure, assure! I’m sick of all that assure! I’m dying. You tell me now where is that Russian and I will take care of it myself.”

“Herr Stanescu,” she said, her voice firmer now, “you have to get him out of your head. He was a tourist, asking Adriana for directions. He’s not even Russian.”

That seemed to take some of the wind out of him; from behind, Hasad saw his shoulders sink. “Not Russian?”

“No,” she said gently. “He’s American.”

“American?”

Hasad loosened his grip on the nightstick.

“But then who did it?” Stanescu asked, returning to his pitiful demeanor.

Director Schwartz blinked at him, then pursed her lips. “I’ll tell you what. In the morning I’ll sit down with Herr Reich and go through the case with him. Then I’ll call you at home and tell you everything I’ve learned.”

Andrei Stanescu, defeated, stared at the tiled floor. “I do not believe you.”

“Of course you don’t,” she told him, “but I am being honest. Herr Reich took over the case because it was considered that important. If he’s not answering your calls it’s because he’s busy tracking leads. Tomorrow, I will find out his progress and report it to you. But you have to go. Now. Do you understand?”

He shook his head; he understood nothing.

“In a couple of minutes men are going to come through that door, and if you’re still here they’ll arrest you. When you started yelling I pressed a panic switch,” she said and opened her free hand to reveal a key ring with a button attached to it. “If you’re gone when they arrive, I’ll tell them that pressing it was an accident.”

Stanescu raised his head.

“Do we have a deal?”

He nodded.

“Expect my call around ten. If I haven’t called by eleven, you call me. Okay?”

Andrei Stanescu didn’t nod again, just turned around. In his face Hasad saw not hope but the indistinct despair he knew from his own immigrant circles, often when jobs had been lost or residency applications turned down. He shuffled to the doors, which opened automatically for him, and slipped off into the night.

He hadn’t, until then, realized that he’d been holding his breath. He met Director Schwartz’s eyes as she picked up her second bottle from the shelf and brought both to the counter. “Well,” she said.

“Should I call the police?” he asked.

She shook her head. “He’s just grieving. There’s no need to make his life any worse than it is.”

“You handled that very well.”

“Thank you, Herr al-Akir. But he was never dangerous.”

He began to ring up the wines. “And the Snickers?”

“Not to night. I might try to lose some weight.”

“Good luck with that, Director Schwartz.”

He took her money and watched her head for the doors before calling out, “And the men? Should I expect them soon?”

“Men?” she said, turning back.

“The ones you called.”

“Oh!” She smiled, took out her key ring, and pointed it through the open doors. She pressed, and her Volvo winked in reply.