Flashback

THIRTY

The call from Werner came the next evening. Brian, Ivan, and I were having dinner at a Thai place in the Old City when Ivan’s cell phone rang. The conversation was short, the Russian all business.

“It was Werner,” Ivan said when he’d hung up. “He’ll meet you at the boat terminal at Devin Castle. Morning after tomorrow, ten o’clock. He said to tell you Stringer will be there.”

I set my fork down and looked to Brian, panic flashing in my eyes. As much as I trusted Werner to deliver Stringer, I couldn’t forget what had happened at the Casbah.

“It’ll be okay,” he said. “Don’t worry.”

Ivan shoveled a forkful of fried rice into his mouth. “Werner’s a motherfucker,” he said, chewing while he talked. “But he doesn’t go back on his word. It’s all he’s got.”

I believed Ivan, but still, it seemed strange to me that Werner had agreed so readily to my request. And why, I wondered, would Stringer be so willing to meet?

“Don’t worry,” Brian assured me. “I’ll be there with you.”

Even on the bleakest of winter mornings the drive out to Devin Castle along the Danube was a pleasant one, the dark river mottled with sheets of ice, the gentle foothills of the lower Carpathians rolling northward. Snowbound and denuded as they were, stripped of all foliage, there was miraculously little sign along the Danube’s banks of the massive razor-wire fences that had scarred them for so long. Nor of the old guard towers, once spaced within sight of each other, the guards looking not outward to Austria, but in.

I had made this trip before, in different weather, at a far different time, and I had a brief but clear memory of it now, the fence crawling with summer vegetation, the river glinting in the sun. And every few hundred meters a rusty sign forbidding photographs.

The castle itself was nothing more than ruins, the remnants of what had once been a massive structure perched high atop a rocky fist, its one remaining tower balanced gracefully over the half-frozen river, like a diver about to leap. The parking lot was deserted when Brian and I pulled up in the SEAT. In fact, the whole complex was closed for the winter, the souvenir stands and little café shut up tight.

“You can take a boat out here from the city in the summer,” Brian explained as we parked the SEAT in front of the shuttered ferry terminal.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked. I wanted more than just the answer he’d given me on the boat from Tangier, more than just some vague allusion to the choice between right and wrong and the knowledge necessary to make that distinction.

Brian rested his hand on the top of the steering wheel and looked down at his knuckles. “I meant what I said that night at the Mamounia,” he told me quietly.

I thought about the desert garden, the orange trees and poinsettias, the smell of baked earth cooling in the darkness, and the stoic minaret of the Koutoubia Mosque. If I’d met Hannah Boyle at the Ziryab, Brian had said, I would have fallen in love with her, too.

And what about that night at the Continental? I wanted to ask but didn’t. No matter what Brian said, it would always be there between us.

Brian pointed across the parking lot, and I looked up to see a black Mercedes coming toward us. “You ready?” he asked.

“Yes,” I lied.

The Mercedes pulled to a stop near us, and the driver’s door opened. Salim climbed out, walked over to the SEAT, and tapped on Brian’s window. “Mr. Werner will see her alone,” he said, as Brian rolled the glass down.

Brian shook his head. “I’m coming, or she’s not.”

Salim shrugged. “Then neither one of you will be meeting Mr. Stringer today.”

I put my hand on Brian’s arm and popped my door. Somehow I had always known this would be something I would have to do alone. “It’s all right. I’ll be fine. You said it yourself.”

“Your gun,” Salim said as I climbed out of the car. Without waiting for me to surrender it, he reached into my coat pocket and pulled out the Beretta. Then he walked over to the Mercedes and opened the back door. I could see Werner inside.

I looked back at Brian one last time. “It’s okay,” I reassured him.

“You can go back to the city,” I heard Salim tell Brian as I climbed into the Mercedes’s back seat. “We will deliver her wherever she wishes when we’ve finished.” Then he closed the door behind me and walked to the driver’s door.

The town car was spacious and warm, perfumed with the smells of expensive leather and Cuban cigars. As we pulled out of the parking lot, Werner touched a button and a dark glass panel slid noiselessly to the ceiling, separating the front seat from the back.

“He makes you nervous,” Werner observed, motioning to the dark silhouette of Salim’s head.

I laughed at the absurdity of the statement. “It’s hard to imagine why.”

Werner shook his head. “I’m sorry about what happened in Morocco. I hope you understand; that film was very important to me.”

“Sure,” I quipped. “No hard feelings.”

Werner watched me for a moment, like a fighter sizing up an opponent. “You know, you look like her,” he said finally. “I should have known all along. There was one night at the Casbah when I saw it, but it was so brief, and I never imagined.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I told him, unable to bear his satisfaction at knowing.

“It was the photograph,” he continued, “that gave you away. At the war memorial you said she was the woman from the photograph in my office. Only, as you know, her face is blurred in that picture.”

I looked away from Werner and out the window toward the snowy hills. We were heading farther away from the city, and the land here was striped with row upon row of vineyards, each plot perfect in its geometry, each plant clipped and gnarled, bound neatly to its makeshift cross.

“But there was another photograph, a better one,” Werner went on. “Catherine kept that one. You’ve seen it, haven’t you?”

I turned back to face him. “Where are you taking me?”

“To a friend’s villa,” he explained. “Where you can talk with Mr. Stringer.”

“He’s agreed to this?” I asked.

Werner smiled. “In a way, yes.”

We drove on in silence for several kilometers, moving slowly north along the flanks of the hills. Then the Mercedes turned onto a dirt road and began a gradual upward ascent.

“You know I wouldn’t have told her,” Werner said as we pulled through an old gate and onto the grounds of a sprawling villa. “If I had known she would be in danger. If I had known what was really going on.

“Your mother was not someone who let that kind of thing stop her,” he explained. “Fear, I mean. You are like her in that respect.”

Suddenly, I wanted more than anything to remember my mother, to know her as Werner had, this woman who couldn’t sit still for the time it took a camera’s shutter to open and close, this woman who had made her living telling the story of war. I wanted to understand what she had seen in Werner, what she had come to love. There must have been something, a person in him that I could not see. Of course, it occurred to me, I might never have known her, at least not that intimate part of her.

“Did you love her?” I asked, repeating the question I’d put to Werner at the war memorial.

“We were lovers,” he said. “In Vietnam and then again in Pakistan. But we were realists, too. I’m not sure our lives would have allowed us anything more.”

The Mercedes looped around toward the back of the villa, stopping near one of the building’s rear entrances. Werner opened the door, then climbed out, motioning for me to follow. “This way,” he said.

We entered the house through the kitchen, a large industrial space renovated to serve the modern banquet. I could see little of the villa, but the few glimpses I was offered, open doors that led to long corridors and high-ceilinged rooms, hinted at a level of opulence I had never before encountered. What staff there was, if any, was silent and invisible. Salim had left us at the car, and from what I could tell, Werner and I had the whole building to ourselves.

Beyond the kitchen was a short corridor that led to a large pantry and, finally, a locked doorway. Werner drew a key from his pocket and undid the lock, opening the door to reveal a flight of stone stairs that disappeared downward into cold, musty darkness. I shivered, reminded of the days at the Casbah, my subterranean cell.

“Don’t worry,” Werner said, flipping a light switch, illuminating the grotto below. “I have no intention of harming you. You have my word.”

What had Ivan said? It’s all he’s got.

We started down together, Werner leading the way into the villa’s ancient wine cellar. The cave was stocked to overflowing, the walls filled from floor to ceiling with bottles, each shelved neatly like a book in a library. We’d kept a cellar at the abbey, but this was nothing like the sisters’ meager cave. Centuries of mold covered the racks and stone walls, dripping like wispy stalactites, cocooning everything in a soft gray web. The air was thick with a primordial stench, the odor of rich and unfettered decay, the smell of the grave.

“In Soviet times,” Werner explained, motioning to the staggering collection, “this villa belonged to the party.”

They’d had more than a proletariat’s appreciation for wine, I thought, as we turned down a narrow passageway and stopped before another locked door. Werner once again drew a key from his pocket.

“You may ask Mr. Stringer what you like,” he said, holding the key to the lock. “I believe he is ready to tell you whatever you might want to know.”

There was something in his voice that I recognized instantly, a tone I’d heard that morning in his office in Marrakech. No, I thought, Stringer had not come here of his own accord, and he wouldn’t be leaving of it either.

Werner opened the door to reveal a small square room, lit wanly by a single bulb. It was, in fact, much like my quarters at the Casbah, sparse and bare, furnished with a cot, a chair, and a bucket. Seated in the chair or, more accurately, slumped in it, his arms bound behind him, his feet bare, was a man in his late fifties with a thick mop of salt-and-pepper hair.

There had obviously been some attempt to tidy both the room and the man for my visit, but the reality of the situation was undisguisable. The smells of vomit and feces lingered in the small space, and there was blood on the man’s face and filthy shirt. From the looks of him, Robert Stringer had been Werner’s guest for some time. No doubt Werner’s men had found him not long after our meeting on Slavin Hill.

“Hello, Cathy,” Stringer said, looking up at me. His left eye was swollen nearly shut, his lower lip puffy and split. “I’ve been expecting you.”

I must have blanched at the name, because Stringer’s cracked mouth opened in a weak but contemptuous grimace.

“Yes,” he sneered. “Catherine Reed, same as your mother.”

“It was you who sent the men to the abbey,” I said, looking for something, anything, that would justify Werner’s cruelty. I knew all too well what it meant to be on the receiving end of Bruns Werner’s hospitality.

Stringer looked at Werner, then back at me. “Yes,” he admitted.

“Had you thought I was dead?” I asked.

“It’s what I was told, yes.”

“By the men in the car, the ones who put me in the field that day. They worked for you, too?”

Stringer nodded.

“Where was I going?” I asked.

“You were coming to Geneva,” Stringer said. “To meet me. You’d called from Morocco to say you’d seen the tape and me on it. You were upset. I told you I could explain.”

“You didn’t know then that I’d left the pen drive in Tangier?”

“No,” Stringer said.

“But you knew I’d been to Werner’s Casbah, that I had the tape. How?”

Stringer opened his mouth to answer, but I stopped him. “No,” I said. “Let’s start at the beginning.” I thought for an instant, trying to understand where that might be, in the warehouse in Peshawar or years earlier. “You knew my mother in Vietnam,” I said finally.

Stringer glanced at Werner again, and in the look that passed between them I understood that the two men had never been friends, that from the beginning she had come between them.

“We were friends,” Stringer said, the last word hard and bitter in his mouth.

Of the two men in the photograph, he had seemed the more likely choice for Catherine, tall and lean, so much more elegant than the awkward Werner, and yet it was Werner my mother had picked.

“You would have liked to have been more, wouldn’t you?” I asked. “Is that why you had her killed in Peshawar? Because she loved someone else?”

Stringer cleared his throat and spit. A dark globule of phlegm and blood landed on the stone floor at Werner’s feet. “Catherine died because someone sent her snooping where she didn’t belong. She came to me beforehand, you know,” he said, addressing Werner. “She said you’d given her a line on a story, some American using the CIA pipeline in an unusual way. I tried to tell her it was garbage, tried to get her to let it go, but she wouldn’t. You know how Catherine was.”

“So you stood by while Jibril’s men killed her?” I asked.

Stringer raised his head and looked directly at Werner. There was a recklessness to him that came with being so badly broken. “She shouldn’t have come.”

Werner clenched and unclenched his fists, rage in his every pore, though whether at himself or at Stringer, I couldn’t tell.

“Tell me about Hannah Boyle,” I said. “I was with her that night, wasn’t I?”

“Sharp as a tack,” Stringer said, leaning forward, straining against his ropes. “You were always so smart.”

“I talked to Stanislav Divin. He told me about the hashish.”

“I was just keeping a promise. Catherine didn’t tell you she had a daughter, did she?” he asked Werner, then turned back to me. “When she came to me in Peshawar, she told me she was afraid. She asked me to look out for you if anything happened to her.”

“And you did, only not in the way she might have meant.”

Stringer’s eyes flared. “If it weren’t for me, you’d still be sipping gruel in a Slovak prison.”

“You got Divin to take my name off the report,” I said.

“I saved you,” Stringer told me. “You may have survived the accident, but by the time I found out what had happened you were sitting in a cell in Bratislava looking at twenty more years. I made a deal for you. It wasn’t easy.”

“Only your generosity didn’t come without strings.”

“I gave you a life with meaning. It was what you wanted, what you all wanted. There were so many idealists here then that this country stank of them, and you wanted in as much as anyone else. Just to be part of it, instead of some pathetic life trucking drugs across the border. And I gave it to you.”

“You ran me as a contract agent, just like Patrick Haverman, just like Brian. You told me I was working for the CIA, but I wasn’t always, was I?”

“You were always working in the best interests of the country,” Stringer said.

“And who decided that? I should have known the truth,” I told him.

“You knew what you wanted to know,” he countered.

It was the same thing I’d said to Brian in Spain, and I couldn’t help thinking Stringer was right, that in some way I must have chosen to believe him.

“You let me go because of the baby?” I asked.

“You were always free to go.”

“But I came back,” I said, “for the tape. How did you know?”

“You called me from Tangier,” Stringer began. “You said some old friend from the business had gotten in touch with you, that he’d heard through the grapevine that Al-Marwan had an old tape on the market, something that sounded like it could have been your mother, and that he and Werner had worked out a deal for it. You needed my help.”

“And you offered it?”

“You couldn’t have done it alone.”

“So you sent Patrick Haverman to me, to take the tape once we found it. Only you didn’t count on him having a change of heart.”

“He was a fool,” Stringer snapped.

“And when your men didn’t find the tape on me in France, you sent Brian to Tangier to find it.”

Stringer grimaced. The reserves that had held him together so far were nearly tapped. “I said you were smart. You don’t really need me to tell you any of this.”

“My child,” I asked. “Where is she?”

Stringer coughed, doubling over as far as he could. Something rattled in his chest, like a stone in a piece of hollow wood. “She’s with her great-grandparents,” he said. “Catherine’s parents. Outside of Seattle.”

“You told them I was dead?”

“Yes.”

“Did they know why I left?”

Stringer shook his head.

“What’s her name?”

He spit again, more blood this time, then forced himself upright. “Madeline.”

I closed my eyes and repeated each syllable to myself. Madeline, the name I had chosen for my daughter. Now that I had this, there was nothing more I needed from Stringer, not even revenge. Suddenly, the tiny room seemed unbearably claustrophobic, the stench oppressive. I looked to Werner, wanting out, but he took a step past me, moving toward Stringer.

“She’s mine, isn’t she?” he demanded, stopping just inches from the other man, his fists still clenched, every muscle in his body shivering.

For a moment I thought he was talking about Catherine, but then his face turned back to mine and I understood what he had meant.

Stringer smiled. “She was afraid to tell you,” he said, “afraid you’d want her to get rid of the baby. The last two months in Saigon she cried on my shoulder almost every night, and you never knew. I hated you for it. You didn’t deserve her.

“She never thought you loved her,” he went on. “All those years later in Peshawar, she still couldn’t bring herself to tell you you had a daughter.”

Werner stared down at the other man for a moment, then slowly turned away from him. He was wearing a dark suit and a long wool overcoat, but he seemed suddenly naked, as vulnerable as the bloodied figure in the chair. He turned to me and opened his mouth as if to speak, but nothing came out.

For a moment I could see the person he’d been before any of this had happened, before my mother’s death had changed him. I could see the young man from the photograph, the man at Catherine Reed’s side in that Saigon café. At the same time I could see the old man he’d been that morning on Slavin Hill, a defeated figure shuffling away from us through the snow.

He raised his hand slightly, like a priest about to offer a blessing; then he opened the door and stepped out into the passageway.

I stopped a moment before following him, taking one last look at Stringer. “You’re not alone, are you?” I asked, thinking about what Brian had said on the boat, what I had suspected for so long. The men at the abbey, the couple at the tearoom, there was too much here for just one man.

He stared up me, grinning like a man who knows he’s going to die. “We’re all alone.”

“No,” I said. “I mean, in the agency, you’re not the only one.”

“I know what you meant,” Stringer wheezed.

I could call Werner back in, I thought, and find out everything. I could make Stringer tell me. But the truth was there was nothing more I wanted to know, nothing more I could know.

Wasn’t that the true nature of memory and knowledge, the thing I’d never quite understood? Wasn’t that what Heloise had tried to tell me that night in the convent’s library, looking up at the peeling walls? That the past is a puzzle for everyone, a tattered collection of memory and desire. That even those people we most long to understand remain no more than a sum of those static moments we’ve chosen to hold them in. A figure on a boat, a face in the darkness above one’s bed at night, a woman in a Saigon café. All I wanted now was the life I’d left, and my daughter.

Stepping toward Stringer, I reached into my jeans and pulled out the pen drive. “You’re wrong,” I said, slipping the drive into the breast pocket of Stringer’s shirt. It was Werner’s now, as was Stringer, to do with whatever he wanted. “We’re anything but alone.”

Werner and I didn’t speak on the way back to the city. It was afternoon when we reached Bratislava, snowing again, the white flakes immolating themselves in the black oblivion of the Danube. Whatever there was to be said between us would not be spoken that day, and we both knew it, both understood the importance of silence, the danger of the one word, father, that hung between us.

When we pulled up in front of Ivan’s apartment building and I reached for the door handle, Werner leaned across me and put his hand on mine. “I did love her.”

“I know.” I nodded. I should not have wanted to give him such a gift, but I did it anyway.

“Please let me help you,” he said. Reaching for his wallet, he pulled out a handful of one-hundred-euro notes.

He pushed the money toward me, but I shook my head. “I’m fine,” I told him. “I’ll be fine.”

“Whidbey Island,” he stammered. “It’s where Catherine’s parents live. She used to tell me about it. They have a house on the water.”

“Yes,” I said, opening the door, setting one foot on the curb. “I know. And a sailboat.”

Werner put the money back in his billfold, took out a business card, and forced it into my pocket. “Whatever you need,” he said as I climbed out.

I stepped to the front entryway of the building and scanned the roster of names, my finger hovering over Ivan’s bell while I listened to the Mercedes drive away. When the car was gone, I turned and started up the sidewalk, my feet following the creeping dawn of recognition toward SNP Square.

The weather had chased everyone inside, and the sprawling triangle of the square was oddly deserted for midafternoon. A tram pulled to a stop, and a handful of passengers climbed off, scurrying away, flakes sticking to their fur caps. The old bronze monument to the infamous Slovenské národné povstanie, the 1944 uprising against the Nazis, was barely visible through the thickening scrim of snow; the “Angry Family,” as Bratislavans called it, blurred beyond distinction.

I gave you a life with meaning, I heard Stringer say as I stood on the edge of the square and looked out across the vast white space toward where the crowds had gathered throughout that November so many years earlier. I could feel the heat of innumerable bodies pressing against me, the tidal surge of it, so many people wanting the same thing. The uprising this time not against the fascists but against those who had defeated them.

How could I have said no to the life Stringer offered me? How could I have said no when my mother had died so far from home, her life so full of meaning? When the world was finally shifting, turning like that mammoth ferry of my memory, its great prow sliding forward while I held my breath?

Here was my beginning, I thought, a girl in a crowd of thousands, orphaned and untethered, an American in a country that was brimming with the promise of what America had to offer. Stringer was right; I had heard what I wanted to hear. And this is where it had brought me, where it had brought all of us. This moment of collective forgetting.

A church bell sounded somewhere, a low chime ringing over the snowbound city, and the pigeons that had gathered on the SNP monument scattered, rising upward with a papery clamor of wings. Shivering, I pulled the collar of my coat up around my bare neck and started back to Ivan’s.