Flashback (33 page)

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.”