All the Old Knives (15 page)

HENRY PELHAM:
When did you finish?

CELIA FAVREAU:
One? One thirty? Something like that.

HENRY PELHAM:
Then you came to my place.

CELIA FAVREAU:
Yes. Well, no. First Gene and I saw the end of Ahmed on the computer. Then I came to your place.

HENRY PELHAM:
And afterward?

CELIA FAVREAU:
What?

HENRY PELHAM:
In the morning, after I headed off, you disappeared. You have to admit it was odd. That was it for us. We'd decided to move in together, and then … nothing.

CELIA FAVREAU:
Are you really going to do this?

HENRY PELHAM:
What?

CELIA FAVREAU:
Bring up
us
in the midst of an interrogation.

HENRY PELHAM:
It's not an interrogation. [Pause.] Look, I'm just going through the history. You left me.

CELIA FAVREAU:
I told you, Henry. I got cold feet. Standing in your kitchen while you were showering, it fell on me like a ton of bricks. You. Me. Together. Joined at the hip. Maybe not forever, but right then it felt like it would be forever. And I freaked out.

HENRY PELHAM:
And within seven months you'd run off to California with Drew.

CELIA FAVREAU:
Yes.

HENRY PELHAM:
How does that work? A guy you've known for years terrifies you when he wants to share an apartment, but you go off and
marry
some joker you barely know?

CELIA FAVREAU:
Henry. Stop. Don't ruin a pleasant meal.

[Sound of coughing.]

CELIA FAVREAU:
Hey
—are you all right?

HENRY PELHAM:
[voice muffled] Shit. Just … I thought I was going to throw up.

CELIA FAVREAU:
Here. Drink some water. [Pause.] Better?

HENRY PELHAM:
Yeah. [Pause.] Anyway.

CELIA FAVREAU:
You sure you're okay?

HENRY PELHAM:
Yes. Go on.

CELIA FAVREAU:
Okay. Well, I left your place. Then I went to the office and watched as everything crumbled.

HENRY PELHAM:
What were you working on at the office? Were you making progress?

CELIA FAVREAU:
I was making phone calls. Getting no answers. Listening to the noise of everyone trying to find Ilyas Shishani. You were looking for him, yes?

HENRY PELHAM:
The best I did was track down another one of his safe houses, out in Penzig. But he changed places twice a day, never doubling back. He was impossible to catch.

CELIA FAVREAU:
Just like you told Ernst.

HENRY PELHAM:
Just like.

CELIA FAVREAU:
But we did pick him up eventually, didn't we? In Afghanistan. Now he's sitting in Gitmo.

HENRY PELHAM:
So you do keep in contact with the inside.

CELIA FAVREAU:
Karl told me.

HENRY PELHAM:
When?

CELIA FAVREAU:
In June. He thought I might like to hear about it.

HENRY PELHAM:
Kind of him. [Pause.] But it's old news by now, because he's since passed on to the land of forty virgins.

CELIA FAVREAU:
Well. That's fortunate, isn't it?

HENRY PELHAM:
Is it?

CELIA FAVREAU:
[Pause.] I remember being surprised.

HENRY PELHAM:
About what?

CELIA FAVREAU:
You, Henry. Your background with Shishani. I was sure that you'd be the one to track him down, not some soldiers in Afghanistan. [Pause.] I sometimes wondered if he chose Vienna because of you.

HENRY PELHAM:
Why would he do that?

CELIA FAVREAU:
I don't know. To goad you? To try and get your help? Maybe to give himself up to you. It's just an odd thing that, of all the towns he could choose for the hijacking, he chose the one where you worked at the embassy.

HENRY PELHAM:
Oh, I've thought about that, too.

CELIA FAVREAU:
And? Any revelations?

HENRY PELHAM:
Just that I'm not the luckiest man in the world. [Pause.] Not like Drew.

CELIA FAVREAU:
[A laugh.] Henry. You sap.

 

7

The waiter returns to collect our plates, that garish smile still stuck to his face, and we assure him of the excellent quality of the cuisine. It's honest praise, though were I the chef I would have put a little less pepper in the sauce—my tongue is still tingling. My stomach has settled, though, and it makes me believe that there's still hope for me tonight. That I'll be able to make it through the evening in one piece and, perhaps, emerge stronger than before.

When the waiter offers more wine, Celia surprises me by saying yes for us both. Is it possible she's really enjoying her time with me, raking through the coals of a tragedy half a decade old? Is it possible (and is this the wine speaking?) that she's starting to feel the tingle of that old attraction, the easy repartee, the shared food and flesh?

When the wine and dessert menus arrive, I see that the old couple from earlier has left, and other than the businessman from the airport we're the only people dining here. He's digging into a steak, the
Chronicle
laid out on the table in front of him like a prop, and when he glances my way I wonder if it really is a prop, in the clandestine sense. This is what you get for coming to utopia with sinister motives in mind: paranoia. The man's eyes shift to take in Celia, a hint of lasciviousness there, before returning to his plate.

The waiter pours, and once he's gone Celia raises her glass. “To what?”

“To empty restaurants, the better for excellent service.”

“Natch.”

“What?”

She grins. “It's what the cool kids are saying. Natch—short for ‘naturally.'”

“That's ridiculous.”

“You need to visit home more often.”

We drink.

“I really needed this,” she says.

“A night out?”

“Precisely. It's been—well, it's been forever. This town is stocked with some of the best restaurants around, but we never seem to make the time.”

“Children.”

She sets down her glass. “Do I detect a hint of irony?”

I shake my head, trying my best to look innocent, but my innocence goes unnoticed. Her face changes slightly, darkens.

“I know what I've become, Henry. I'm a bore. But what I say is true. About kids, I mean. They change everything. You know that old cliché—I've been waiting all my life to meet you? Well, it applies to children. First as babies, but particularly once they've gotten old enough to have well-defined characters. It's completely true—you realize that you really
have
been waiting all your life to meet this person. There's nothing to compare to it.”

“Not romantic love?”

She shakes her head no, then clarifies. “Apples and oranges.” She takes another drink. “You think you know what love is. You've been in relationships and you've proclaimed your feelings and you've made plans for a life with someone else. But this is a different animal. There's no ego getting in the way. It's evolutionary. It's…” She hesitates, searching for the word. “It's
complete.
Beside it, romantic love is cute. Passion is just a little game. Aspirations for yourself—those, too.
Everything
is darkened by the shadow of your love for your child.”

I smile at her, and my stomach hurts again. My eyes are watery, and I reach for the wine to cover up my consternation. Because now I get it. I understand the lesson plan she's been laying out for me. She's teaching me something so advanced that she has to spell it out for me with the clarity and simplicity of
Dick and Jane.
She's teaching me that what we had, and what we lost, means nothing to her, and it hasn't meant anything to her for years. She was incomplete with me; without me, she's finally whole.

I don't know what to say. The infantile, lovelorn part of me wants specificity, wants to press her:
Are you really saying that what we had means
nothing
to you?
But that same part is terrified of the answer. If she verifies my fear, then I'll know that the choices I made, the very ones that have
defined
me for years, were not only reprehensible but senseless.

If she tells me otherwise, she'll be lying, and I'll know it.

“Well,” I say finally. “You've convinced me.”

“Of what?”

I look past her, then tug unconsciously at the tip of my nose. “That I really need to go to the bathroom.” I get up, but too quickly, and the blood rushes to my head. I swoon.

“You okay?”

I'm dizzy and I'm ill, but I don't want her sympathy. My face, I can feel, is red. “Be right back,” I mutter, and stumble off.

 

8

With my forehead against the tile wall beside that view of Santorini, I watch with moderate surprise as my clear stream turns pink. I let out an involuntary “Oh!” before remembering the phone. I take it out and find that it's still diligently recording everything—forty-six minutes' worth of conversation, and a man urinating. I pause it, pocket it, and stare with fascination at the last of the pink urine disappearing. I don't even look up as I hear the bathroom door open and close behind me. I'm wondering what my liver's doing now. I've been a heavy drinker for far too long, and now, I suppose, my organs are starting to rebel.

Beside me, the businessman unzips his fly and pulls out his member. I straighten up, woozy. The man says, “You all right?”

I nod, zip myself up, and walk carefully over to the sinks. The man says something I don't hear over the rush of the faucet. I splash cold water on my sweaty face. Then he appears beside me and repeats himself: “I said,
Is everything going to plan, Piccolo?
”

I look at him in the mirror. Heavy, just as I remember from the airport, with a few days' beard on his cheeks. Tired-looking, as if he's been traveling a long time. “Treble?”

He smiles, nodding.

“What are you doing here?”

“Scouting the territory,” he says as he dispenses soft soap into his hand and massages it in. Then he raises a soapy finger. “Oh! You mean, how did I
know
who you were? Isn't that what you meant?”

I nod, feeling utterly stupid.

“You used the old phone,” he says. “In the old days you called for Bill Compton, and it was just a matter of putting it together.”

“I'm not the only one who called for Bill Compton.”

“Sure,” he says, “but I started watching incoming flights. I saw you arrive.”

The stupid agent puts it together, finally. “You weren't on my plane.”

“Thought it was a good time to change cars, but I've been here for days. She lives over on Junipero and Vista. Hey, did you realize that most of this town doesn't even have street addresses? Crazy. No mail delivery, and if you want a pizza delivered you have to tell them the street corner, and how many houses north or south of it. Weird place. They almost didn't let me come in. In the restaurant, I mean. Guess I'm not dressed well enough.”

I look at his open-collared shirt, his wrinkled jacket and baggy pants. He doesn't look so bad to me, but my standards are tragically low.

He says, “You were in here. The waitress tried to tell me they were expecting a large party, so I had to make a scene. Eventually, the bartender came over and told her I could stay.” He sniffs, then wipes his nose with a thumb. “Snobs.”

“Yeah,” I say, then turn off the water and dry my hands with some towels folded in a perfect tower beside the sink. “Look, I didn't expect to run into you.”

“Everyone has his technique,” he says, smiling. “I shadow first.”

“Right,” I say, but that's not what I'm thinking. I'm thinking,
You don't look right.
But what is right? Men like these, you never see. All you see is the results of their visits. So, without anything to go by, we tend to cast them from fiction. Matt Damon, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Jean Reno. Not a guy who looks like an overfed Willy Loman, or like my father's depressed drinking buddies who watched the games on our TV as Dad burned dogs on the grill, the friends who passed around Lee Iacocca's autobiography as if it were a map to a treasure that had eluded them all.

No—Treble is not supposed to look like this.

“So?” he says, closing the tap. “Are we still on?”

I chew my lower lip, thinking about it. “I don't know.”

He claps a hand on my shoulder. “And if it's called off?”

“Half your fee.”

“Plus travel.” He winks and walks out of the bathroom. I stare at myself in the mirror for a full minute, thinking about Treble and code names and cell phones and Celia, about her new religion, the one rooted in the upbringing of children. From international intrigue to diapers. From governmental secrets to Barney. From dangerous streets to private-school admissions. Is this really the woman who has directed my dreams for the last half decade?

That's when it cuts me, a knife to the brain—Celia Favreau has gone off the deep end. She's crazy. Nuts. I shake my head, letting out a snort of self-pity at the pure waste of imagination I've heaped into my fantasies of her, and the choice I made to save her, the one that still haunts me a half decade later.

Self-pity, yes, but also a touch of relief, because doing this to a madwoman seems less wrong. We don't feel as much sympathy for people who don't see the world the way we do. We can't. And the ones who are certifiably insane—well, killing them is a kind of mercy. Arguably.