All the Old Knives (21 page)

I blink at him, not sure I can do much more than blink. “Sure. I get it.”

“You remember,” he goes on, “how you told me about trust? Yes, you even defined it for me, as if it were a new concept. I have to tell you, it wasn't. I was very familiar with it. But later, I realized you were right—it did need to be defined. You understand?”

I shake my head. “No, Ilyas. I don't understand.”

“Well, maybe you do need help remembering. Because not long after those terrible fifty-seven hours at the Dubrovka Theater there was a knock on my door. No,” he says, shaking his head. “Not a knock. A sudden
boom
!” He claps his hands together, sprinkling ash across the table. “Boots! Seven men dressed scalp-to-toe in black, with automatic rifles. Spetsnaz—very tough men, you understand. The Russians brought me in, and for two months I did not see the sun. Two months, I am not kidding. I was questioned. I was tortured. My leg,” he says, tapping one of them, “was broken and reset badly. I was accused of being a terrorist. Me! A terrorist! Can you imagine? Timid little Ilyas, the Chechen immigrant who bakes bread for a living and gives away his friends' names to the Americans … a
terrorist
? Perhaps you told them I was a terrorist?”

I shake my head. “I would never tell them that.”

“No,” he says, waving his cigarette, “I didn't think you did. This would not be in your interest. Apparently, though, you
did
tell them everything about our relationship. Because, you know, my interrogators told
me
all about our relationship. Told me things that not even surveillance would be able to discover. This, I have come to realize, is the American definition of trust.”

There it is. In the intelligence world, when you betray people you endeavor to do so only to organizations that know how to keep a secret, because it's more important to keep an image of innocence than the reality of innocence. The FSB had not bothered to protect me. So, staring into his weary eyes, two bottles of Coke between us, I tell him the truth. It's the only defense I have. I was under orders, I explain. It was a politically tricky time. “I protested. Afterward, I wrote a letter of complaint to Langley.”

He raises his hands. “Oh! A letter! And
afterward
! That does make me feel so much better, Henry. I didn't realize you were such a prince.”

He's right—I know this. Were I in his shoes, I wouldn't be so kind. I wouldn't sit down to have a chat with the person who had betrayed me. I might invite him to the Gloriette in order to give my act some regal splendor, but I would not talk. I would come out from behind the counter with a baseball bat and crush my betrayer's legs, arms, and skull. This conversation, I think, shows that Ilyas is a better man than I am.

I don't know how much time passes—twenty minutes? An hour? I tell him details, painting the entire picture of the schizophrenia of foreign policy in Moscow, the anxiety in the embassy, my frustration. Admirably, Ilyas allows me time to say it all. Only afterward will it occur to me that he predicted all of this; my speech is right on schedule. When the excuses finally cease, he says, “Look at me, Henry.”

I do so, but it's hard.

“You and I,” he says, speaking slowly so that I can understand everything, “are forming a new relationship, and this is the conversation that will define it. Are you listening?”

“Do I have a choice?”

He smiles. “Of course you have a choice. You always have a choice. You can walk out of here right now and wait to find out what you didn't want to listen to.”

“Okay, I get it. Tell me.”

“Good.” He leans back and lights his third cigarette. “This is what we will do. You will give me a phone number that I can use to call you. One of your untraceable phones. Using that number, I will call sometimes to ask for information, and you will give it to me. You will see the number I'm calling from, but that number will not lead you to me. Very simple, no?”

I look at his cigarette, the glowing ember, and say, “It sounds simple, but I'm guessing it's not. Let's say I refuse.”

He raises the index finger of his free hand. “Yes! Now we get to it. This part is actually very simple, too. If I call you and you refuse to answer my questions, then Celia Harrison, that beautiful woman you share your bed with, will die.” He sits up straight, almost boyishly excited. “In a heartbeat.”

 

7

I listen to this, the slow story, so full of details, and I can see him growing weaker. It doesn't matter that what I'm doing is justified—it still breaks my heart. I want to get up and go, but it's not time yet. I want to leave all of this behind and never look at it again, but I know now that it doesn't work that way. I'll carry this night for the rest of my life. I'll flash on it while I'm putting Ginny to bed, and when I'm watching Evan's ballet recitals. My job will be to make sure it doesn't suffocate me, because that's what kids do—they force you to keep going.

I'm surprised. Of course I'm surprised. While I don't want to believe it—while I want this to be another of his lies—I think about those crowded Viennese streets. How many shadows trailed me that day? Was Ilyas Shishani among them, or only the men who reported to him? No, he wasn't watching me himself—he was too busy organizing the murder of a hundred and twenty people, and making calls to my lover.

But this isn't what gets at Henry. He's not haunted by the deal he made with Shishani—he's haunted by what followed. Not the murders, but the end of our relationship. It's a monstrous level of selfishness, and I want to tell him this, but the words don't quite make it out. He's being broken down enough tonight.

“What do you think?” he asks.

I think that I hate you.
I say, “You were in a difficult situation.”

“That's all?”

“That's all.”

Behind him, through the window, I see Karl walking up the sidewalk and stopping at the front door. He uses keys to unlock it, and the noise of the tumblers distracts Henry. He turns back. “Who's that?”

Though he doesn't really need an answer, I tell him. “It's Karl. With a
K.
”

He frowns, thinking. Given his condition, it comes to him very quickly. “What's he doing here?”

“Watching over me.”

Henry looks back, but Karl doesn't come in. He's only there to unlock and guard the door, so that I can leave. Freddy emerges from the kitchen and goes from window to window, closing the blinds. Henry sees this, too, and he sighs. “You set me up.”

“You tried to do it first.”

He looks bad. His skin is a pattern of crimson and alabaster. I take my purse from the back of the chair and hold it in my lap, looking at him.

Henry says, “
Shit.
”

While it is not part of the script, I tell him, because given our history and what's to follow, it feels like the right thing to do. These days, I try to follow my conscience more often than my calculations. I'm still working at it. “Henry, listen to me.”

He's glaring at me.

“Your veal was poisoned. You don't have much longer.”

This time he's slower on the uptake. His features contract. He shakes his head, and I can tell from his expression that the movement aches. It's so hard to watch someone die.

I say, “You know how it is. They don't want a trial.”

He looks back at Freddy, who's closed the last of the blinds. But Freddy, too, doesn't want to watch any of this. He takes a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and goes out the front door to join Karl.

“You're killing me?” he asks, his voice weak and innocent. “You're…” He doesn't finish the sentence.

“I'm sorry,” I tell him, because I am. Then I stand up. I can't watch this anymore. “Thank you, though.”

He looks up, eyes beginning to leak their tears, veins running through the white orbs. “What?”

“For not letting Ilyas Shishani kill me,” I say. “It was the wrong decision, but I do appreciate it.”

Unexpectedly, the corner of his lip rises in a half smile. “Don't be too thankful,” he says. There's bitterness in his voice, but less than I would expect.

“Good-bye, Henry.”

He doesn't reply. I walk out of the restaurant on rubber legs, trying to keep myself straight, sure that he's watching, though when I reach the door and look, his back is to me. He's staring at the far wall, just sitting there.

Karl opens the door for me, and I step out into the cool night. “Well?” he asks as he closes the door.

“He knows.”

Freddy shakes his head, smoke drifting out of his mouth, and Karl says, “You
told
him?”

I nod.

He peers through the glass door. Henry is still sitting. “Well, I suppose it doesn't matter. Five minutes, maybe ten, then we'll go in and clean up.”

I nod.

“You can go home, if you'd like.”

I'd like. “We're done?”

He raises his hands, palms out. “Done. You need a ride?”

“I need to walk.”

“Fair enough.”

“What about the waitress?”

Karl rocks his head. “That was a mistake. She figured out what was going on. Inevitable, I guess, with the way we kept trying to turn people away, and the fact that no big party arrived. But the problem was that she saw Freddy dosing the veal.”

“My bad,” says Freddy.

“Yes,” Karl says disapprovingly. “Anyway, I don't think she understood right away, but on the way to your table she put it together.” He shrugs. “Admirable, really. She was thinking on her feet. Not many people like that.”

“So what happened to her?”

“She's fine,” he says. “Don't worry. We're just trying to figure out what to do with her.”

“Don't hurt her.”

“Hurt her?” He grins, waving the idea away. “I'm of a mind to offer her a job!”

We look up at the sound of footsteps. It's a young man in a long coat, his hair glistening—it looks like it needs a good wash. I assume he's going to keep going, but he stops beside Freddy and says, “Thank you, Celia. You've done us a great service.”

“Who the hell are you?”

He doesn't look like he wants to answer, but Karl speaks for him. “Larry's one of us.”

I don't care anymore. I don't care who anyone is, or whether or not they think I've done a good job. I just want to go home.

I look inside again. He's just sitting there, elbows on the table, as if he's a deep thinker—which he isn't, not really. Or maybe he's already dead.

 

8

She walks right out of my line of sight, but I don't turn to watch her leave. I'm trying to remember that word, the one she used to describe the kind of person she was. Yes: jettisoner.

I have been jettisoned.

I place my arms on the table and press my fingers together. When, I wonder, did I lose control? The beginning, I suppose, when I first laid eyes on her, getting up from that bar over there.
Are you leering?
she asked me, and she had me figured out. But the beginning wasn't tonight—it was six years ago, when love strong-armed me into a pact with Ilyas. Not only love—guilt, too—but still. Or even earlier, sitting down with Ilyas in the back room of his bakery in the Arbat District, offering him my Marlboros, and saying with wild confidence,
We've got this thing in America we call trust.

I have to go to the bathroom, but I'm too tired to stand. So I let it go, a warm blush down the inside of my thigh. As if it matters, I take the Siemens out of my pocket and place it on the table in front of me. A gray dead thing.

I'm just thinking, dreaming really, of everything. Of the one-eyed instructor at the Farm, crouching in the mud of the obstacle course, shouting pirate wisdom. Of an ankle in my hand, the knotty protrusions pressing into the meat of my thumb. Of sweat. Watching the footage in Vick's office of the first Austrian cameraman entering Flight 127, the bodies frozen in chairs, scratching at the windows, lying in the corridor. Of Celia's barren little apartment, so empty of history. That final call from Ilyas after the sarin had killed everyone—
You've helped the cause of God, Henry. That is no small thing. You will be rewarded in Heaven.

But I don't believe in Heaven
.

Then it doesn't matter either way, does it?

It matters, I realize as a sharp ache cuts into the back of my head, blinding me for a second. It matters because doors are closing everywhere. The door to Bill's office, to my Viennese apartment, that plane on the tarmac, this restaurant. When they all close, there will be nothing left. Water turning to steam, swept away by the clean sea breeze.

I wish I could go down to the beach. I hate this restaurant. I don't want to die here.

What was the right decision? Let her die back then? How could I have done that? How could I have known what they were preparing to do? How could I have predicted what would come next?

Then I'm thinking of her children, because those are what really took her from me. Those little monsters turned what she had with me into a mere shadow of what she has with them. What did she say?
Beside it, romantic love is cute. Passion is just a little game
.

Oh, Christ. I can't feel my legs anymore.

From somewhere, I hear
d-ding! d-ding!
It takes a moment, because my eyes are closed now, and I haven't received a call on that phone in years. I open my eyes and see the little screen alight. I can't read what it says, and I wonder if it's her, calling to tell me it was all a joke. But how would she know this number? I pick it up.

“Hello?”

“Piccolo.”

“Uh, yes.”

He waits, and I know I sound different. He's waiting for me to verify who I am. I'm not sure who I am—I'm trying to listen for my heartbeat. I'm failing.