Flashback

TWENTY-SIX

“I took the train out to Bobigny,” Brian explained. “I wanted to make sure no one followed me back here.” He sat down on the bed and shrugged off his jacket. The right shoulder of his shirt was stiff with dried blood, the fabric plastered to his skin. “It’s just a scratch,” he said, fumbling with his shirt.

“It looks like more than a scratch to me,” I told him, pushing his hands aside, pulling his head and unhurt arm free of the shirt. The fabric around the wound was glued to his arm. “Don’t move,” I said. “I’m going to have to soak that off.”

There were no washcloths in the bathroom, but I found a clean hand towel and ran it under the hot tap.

“Was it a bullet or glass?” I asked, laying the warm towel on his shoulder.

“A bullet,” he said, wincing at the pressure of the cloth. “But it’s just a flesh wound.”

“Still,” I told him, “you should have it looked at.”

He shook his head. “There are some antibiotics in my pack. I’ll be fine.”

“Do you have a pocketknife?”

He nodded. “In the pack, front pocket.”

I retrieved the knife and the antibiotics, then peeled the towel back and cut the arm of his shirt away. He was right; it was just a flesh wound, but a bad one, deep enough that it should have gotten a couple of stitches. The skin around it was pink and puckered, flushed with the first hints of infection.

“You need antiseptic and bandages,” I said, folding the towel, laying the still-clean side of it back on his shoulder. “I’m going to find a pharmacy.”

There was a night-duty pharmacy not far from the hotel, and I found it easily, following the desk clerk’s directions. On the way back to the room I stopped at an épicerie and bought some rudimentary dinner supplies: cheese, ham, a loaf of bread, a bag of oranges, some bottled water, and a couple of bottles of Kronenbourg.

Brian had showered and changed into a clean T-shirt by the time I got back. I doctored his cut as best as I could, swabbing it with iodine and antibacterial ointment, then covering it with clean gauze. He’d have a nasty scar, that much was certain, but other than that he’d be fine.

When I was done, I cracked the two beers and spread the preparations for our cold meal on the room’s battered little table.

“Thanks,” Brian said, tearing off a chunk of bread, then cutting a thick wedge from the small round of Camembert I’d selected.

I took a pull off my Kronenbourg. “It was my job at the abbey,” I said, “making sure everyone ate.”

“You cooked for the nuns?” Brian asked, washing the bread down with a swig of beer.

I nodded. “There were two of us who did all the kitchen work.”

“Do you miss it?”

“Yes.” I thought about the question for a moment, the inadequacy of language. To say merely that I missed the sisters and the abbey was such a gross understatement that it verged on sin. It was not just the only home I had ever known but the grounding on which my entire being was built.

“And your life before?”

I took an orange from the bag and pierced the skin with my thumb. “You mean, do I miss it?”

Brian nodded.

“There’s nothing there to miss,” I said, stripping the peel away, separating the sections.

“But you said there’s a child. You must think about the child.”

“Sometimes.”

“There’s nothing you remember? Nothing at all?”

I shook my head, but it was a lie. In truth there were pictures, flashes so brief and fragmentary I had never let myself trust them. And there were things I was sure of, too, sensations of touch and smell that were too visceral to be anything but real.

“What about you?” I asked, putting a section of the orange in my mouth. “You must miss your family.”

Brian shrugged. “I go back every few years. There’s less and less to miss. My parents were older when they had me. My dad’s got Alzheimer’s, and my mom’s so worn down from taking care of him she’s crazy in her own way.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. This is the life I signed on for.”

“Do you ever regret it?”

He took a sip of his beer. “All the time. But I’ve never been able to see myself doing anything else, either.”

“I guess I’ve sort of screwed things up for you.”

“I’ve got some money put away.”

“What will you do?”

“I don’t know. Disappear. There’s a little island off Tortola with a wreck of a bar I’ve always wanted to buy. But first we need to straighten this mess out, don’t we?”

I nodded. “Who do you think they were, the couple at the tearoom?”

“Associates of my former employer, I suppose. Contract hires, like me.”

“Do you know anyone at the NSA, anyone we might go to with the pen drive?”

Brian shook his head. “I’ve got a few contacts in Central Intelligence here, but I wouldn’t trust any of them right now. Like I said, I think this runs deeper than just one person.”

I cut myself a piece of bread and took some of the ham. I was hungrier than I’d thought, and the Kronenbourg was starting to go to my head. “What about Werner?” I asked. “Can you get in touch with him?”

Brian looked at me incredulously.

“He’s the only person I’m sure knows who our mystery man on the tape is. And he knew my mother. There was a photograph in his office, a picture of the three of them together.”

“In Pakistan?”

“Vietnam. I’d seen it before, only I couldn’t remember where, another copy. My mother must have had one.”

“He would have killed you, Eve,” Brian reminded me.

“He wants what’s on the pen drive. Maybe we can make a deal. A copy of the tape for whatever he knows.”

“This is crazy,” Brian said.

“If you have a better idea, I’m all ears.”

We ate in silence for a while, each of us mulling our own thoughts. I knew my plan was sketchy, but it seemed like the best option. I wanted my life back, and from what I could tell, Werner had a big chunk of it to give.

Finally, Brian drained the last of his beer and set the empty bottle on the table. “I’ve got a friend,” he said, the reluctance audible in his voice. “In Bratislava. A pilot. He flies for Werner sometimes. He owes me a favor or two.”

“Thank you,” I told him.

Brian shook his head. “Don’t thank me yet.”

We left early the next morning and drove east, through Strasbourg and Munich and on toward Salzburg and Vienna. It was close to midnight when we crossed the border into Slovakia, heading past the dark remnants of the iron curtain toward the Danube and Bratislava. We hadn’t bothered with papers when we’d taken the old SEAT, and it took some slick talking on Brian’s part and a one-hundred-euro note to convince the border guard that the car wasn’t stolen. It was snowing when he finally waved us through, fat wet flakes settling like dander on the guard’s dark wool coat.

We could see the space-age turret of the Novy Most long before we reached the city, the Soviet-era bridge hovering over the Danube, shadowing the old city’s quaint buildings like an invading spacecraft. On the hilltop beyond, its dour stone facade washed in light, its towers looking imperiously down on the town, sat the old Bratislava castle.

“What time is it?” Brian asked as we motored through a vast stretch of socialist suburbs on the southern side of the Danube.

“Almost one,” I said, watching the endless high-rises glide by. It was a grim utopia, the monolithic buildings no one’s idea of inviting. Here was a place built to contain, designed for easy eavesdropping and the systematic dampening of resistance. And here, once more, was a place I knew.

“I’ve been here,” I said.

Brian glanced over at me. “Do you remember something?”

“No. It’s just a feeling. A long time ago, I think. Before the end of the cold war.” I’d felt it at the border, too, a visceral reaction, a dark memory of barbed wire and Kalashnikovs, of serious young men in Soviet uniforms who’d slid mirrors under the car.

Hannah Boyle had been here as well. According to Helen, she’d died here, too. And for some reason I’d chosen her name to use as my own.

We started onto the bridge and over the river. It was snowing hard now, veiling the black water of the Danube in a lacy curtain, obscuring the waterfront and the old city beyond.

“Should we find a place to spend the night?” I asked.

“I thought we could try and hook up with Ivan,” Brian said. “It’s about time for him to be up and about.”

Our first stop was a jazz bar in the Old City, a cramped, smoky little place around the corner from the Primatial Palace. The crowd was young and hip, pale thin boys in black jeans and leather jackets and tough-looking college girls cultivating the physical style of longtime heroin addicts.

When Brian asked at the bar for Ivan, the bartender’s face turned sour. “That cocksucking Russian hasn’t shown his face here for a couple of weeks,” he spat in contemptuous English. “But if you see him, tell him I’d like the twenty-five hundred koruna he owes me.”

“Any suggestions on where we might find him?” Brian asked. “Just in case we wanted to pass your message along.”

The bartender poured out the two martinis he’d been mixing, then barked something in Slovak to a hostile-looking cocktail waitress in a black minidress and knee-high boots.

She set her tray on the bar and lit a cigarette, giving Brian the once-over, her eyes flicking briefly and dismissively in my direction. “Lately he’s been hanging out at Charlie’s Pub,” she said. “Over on Spitalska. You know it?”

Brian nodded.

The waitress took a long drag off her cigarette, then let the smoke filter slowly out through her nostrils. “Will you give him a message from me, too?” she asked. “Tell him Yana says to go fuck himself.”

“Your friend Ivan’s a popular guy,” I said as we made our way back to the SEAT.

“I never promised Mr. Congeniality,” Brian countered. “Besides, he’s not all that bad. People don’t like Russians here.”

“He does seem to have a way with the ladies.”

“You picked up on that, huh?”

“Speaking of ladies, I think that waitress had the hots for you.”

Brian smiled. “She’s not really my type. I’m more a marked-for-death amnesiac kind of guy.”

“Thanks,” I said. “But seriously, how do you know this Ivan character?”

“I hitched a ride out of Khartoum with him a few years ago. We had to lay over for twelve hours at Lake Victoria waiting for a load of frozen tilapia. He and I just kind of hit it off.”

“And what were you doing in Khartoum?” I asked as we reached the Seat and stopped walking.

Brian put his hand on the car’s roof, suddenly serious. “You really want to know?”

“Yes,” I told him.

“I was escorting a shipment of small arms to the SPLA,” he said grimly. Then he unlocked the SEAT’s door and slid into the driver’s seat.

I slipped in beside him and tugged my door closed. Brian started the engine, pulling away from the curb.

“Did you really believe it?” I asked, as we rattled down the narrow, cobbled streets. “I mean God and country and all that. Weren’t there times when you didn’t know?”

A cluster of snow-dusted bar hoppers stumbled into the street in front of us, and Brian braked to a stop. We watched in silence as they crossed our headlights, arms linked for warmth and balance, breath rising in one great cloud, like steam from some giant engine.

“Are you asking about me?” Brian said finally. “Because I can’t tell you how you felt, whether you knew or not.” The last of the group raised a mittened hand and waved his thanks to us, then stepped up onto the sidewalk and out of our lights.

“That wasn’t fair,” I said.

Brian sighed. “I’ve never pretended our system is perfect, but it’s the best I’ve ever seen.” He shifted the Seat into gear and eased forward on the slick cobbles, then gestured to the world beyond the car windows, the snowy streets and dark Hapsburg buildings. “The alternative didn’t work out too well here.”

“No,” I agreed, though I wasn’t sure the failure of the Soviet system was a justification for greed. Such logic seemed cynical at best. “Were you here?” I asked. “During the cold war.”

Brian shook his head. “That was before my time. I watched the Berlin Wall come down on a TV in the base canteen.”

I’d seen news footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the crowds at the Brandenburg gate. Several of the sisters at the convent had been old enough to remember when the city had been divided, and had talked of brothers and sisters separated from each other.

“My family in the Czech Republic lost everything after the war,” Brian said as we pulled to a stop across from a brightly lit building fronted by four movie marquees. “That’s when my grandparents came to the U.S., after the Communist coup in nineteen forty-eight. My father was still a boy.” He cut the engine and looked over at me. “Here we are.”

I could see why the notorious Ivan had chosen Charlie’s as his home base. The clientele here was far less sophisticated than at the little jazz bar, and conveniently more transient. A good portion of the women were obvious non-locals, Americans and Brits searching for something off the well-beaten Prague and Budapest path. Ivan could piss people off here to his heart’s delight, secure in the knowledge they’d be gone in a week or two, and that someone just as willing would take their place.

The large club was a model for sensory overload, crammed with big-screen televisions, pulsating with loud pop music. There was no dance floor, so people gyrated among the tables, lit cigarettes waving dangerously about. I followed Brian to the bar and waited while he flagged down one of the bartenders, a suspiciously tan woman in a halter top and hip-hugger jeans.

It was too loud for me to hear their exchange, but the woman said something to Brian, the now-familiar look of disgust on her face telling me we’d most likely found our man. Sneering, she pointed toward a table in the far corner of the bar where a wiry man with slicked-back hair and a long leather coat was drinking with two blondes.

“There’s our man,” Brian said, starting toward the threesome.

Whatever favors Ivan owed Brian must have been far less odious than his debt to the bartender at the jazz bar. The Russian spotted us well before we’d reached the table, and stood up with his arms out in a ready embrace, seeming genuinely pleased by the interruption. After clamping Brian in a bear hug, he turned to the two blondes and dismissed them, then motioned for us to sit.

“Son of a bitch.” Ivan grinned, punching Brian jovially on the shoulder. His accent was pure Russian, almost a caricature of itself, the i in bitch long and hard so that the word came out sounding more like beach. “What the fuck are you doing in this shithole?”

“We just drove in,” Brian said, then motioned to me. “This is my friend Eve. Eve, meet Ivan.”

Ivan looked me over, then flashed Brian a look of collusion. “This cocksucker saved my life,” the Russian bellowed, hooking his arm across Brian’s shoulders, leaning close enough to me that I could smell the liquor on his breath. “Did he tell you that?”

I shook my head and glanced at Brian.

“It’s a long story,” he said.

Ivan downed the remaining contents of his glass. “You here on business or pleasure?” he asked, scanning the crowd.

“We need a favor,” Brian told him, shouting to be heard above the music.

Ivan caught sight of a cocktail waitress and waved to her, holding up three fingers, making a circular motion around the table. The woman nodded and started for the bar.

“A favor?” Ivan said, raising his eyebrows, pulling a pack of Marlboros from his coat.

“You still flying for Bruns Werner?” Brian asked.

“Sometimes, yeah.”

“We need you to arrange a meeting with him.”

Ivan laughed. “Go fuck yourself, man.”

“I’m serious,” Brian told him.

The waitress appeared and set three shotglasses on the table. Ivan paid her, then waved her off. “Drink!” he exhorted us, picking up his glass and draining it with a quick tilt of the head.

“What is it?” I asked Brian, sniffing at the clear liquid.

“Slivovitz,” he said. “Plum brandy. Nasty stuff.”

I took another sniff and drank most of the shot. It was rough and potent, like the brandy the Tanes made from what was left of the wine pressings each fall.

“Look,” Ivan said. “Werner’s a good client. I can’t afford to screw things up with him.”

“He’ll want to see us,” Brian assured him.

Ivan was skeptical. “The two of you?”

“Yeah.”

The Russian lit a cigarette and leaned forward in his chair. “You’re not going to tell me what this is about, are you?”

Brian shook his head.

“Motherfucker,” Ivan said, looking far too serious before his mouth split into a wide smile. He leaned over and put his meaty hand on Brian’s shoulder. “I just can’t say no to this man,” he said to me. Then he looked up and waved to the waitress, signaling for another round.

It was almost four when we left Charlie’s and stumbled the few blocks to Ivan’s apartment, stopping at the SEAT to pick up our bags. Ivan’s place was an old Soviet-era flat, boxy and plain, the two rooms and small kitchen no doubt built to house a family of four. But it was roomy enough for Ivan and his collections of bad pornographic art and electric guitars.

Ivan insisted on a nightcap before leaving us to the fold-out couch in the living room. It was after five before we could coax him into calling it a night. He seemed deeply disappointed by our lack of stamina, saddened by our frailty. After we’d settled into bed, we heard him slip out the front door. He returned sometime near dawn, but not alone. Half asleep, I heard the front door click open and the sound of hushed female laughter.

Whoever she was, she was gone when Brian and I woke late the next morning to the sound of singing, the smell of frying eggs, and the unsightly spectacle of Ivan’s hairy body and scrawny legs clothed only in some old blue slippers and a pair of leopard-print bikini underwear.

The Russian finished the last chorus of “Material Girl,” then turned to us, spatula in one hand, cigarette in the other, like the fry cook in some bad pornographic movie.

“Good morning, my sleepyheads,” he said jovially.