The Nearest Exit (51 page)

I know what you’re thinking, because each Tourist reacts the same way to this story. You don’t believe it. Or, if you do, you think this man was unbalanced from the beginning. You’d be wrong. He was the best. He was better than you can ever hope to be.

If you think this could never happen to you, you’re as much of a fool as he was.

Two weeks later, on the day after the final Panikhida, which ended the forty-day mourning period within the Eastern Orthodox Church, Andrei Stanescu touched down at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, United States. His single beat-up handbag, bought at a market in Ungheni for their move west, held some basic toiletries, one change of clothes, and a crumpled map of Manhattan and its boroughs marked up by his indecipherable shorthand. He showed his Moldovan passport to a brisk and humorless border guard behind Plexiglas, who asked him some questions about his visit. They were nothing. In his life he’d been asked serious questions by border guards and militia and government officials. This was nothing.

“What is the purpose of your stay?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your stay. Why are you here?”

“For to see America.”

“So you’re a tourist?”

“Yes. A tourist.”

He peered at the fresh visas—the Schengen visa that had recently been renewed, as well as the American tourist visa that would allow him two months to do as he pleased. In fact, there was only one thing he was pleased to do, and besides, the two hundred and fifty dollars in his pocket would not last him two months. It would
last long enough. Then? Then he would either use the return ticket or he wouldn’t; that part wasn’t up to him. It was up to God.

He was better now than when he tracked Erika Schwartz and cornered her at that convenience store in Pullach. He hadn’t been thinking straight. He’d come off three days of no sleep, and in that time he hadn’t even called in to work; his taxi had sat unused until he drove it to Munich to demand some kind of satisfaction. Though, as promised, she did call in the morning with the unfortunate news that there were no tenable leads on his daughter’s murder, he knew the sound of a brush-off, and knew that this was what she was giving him. He didn’t know why, because when they’d talked outside the church he’d believed that this was a woman who wanted to make a little justice in an unjust world. He’d been wrong.

He’d prepared in advance and knew to go to the AirTrain station. The price, as expected, was five dollars. At Howard Beach, he bought a plastic two-dollar subway ticket from an angry Negro behind another window, who kept telling him to use the machines against the wall. But Andrei was firm. He pushed the five-dollar bill through the window and repeated, “Ticket. Hoyt Street Fulton Mall.”

“Okay, man. Here’s the MetroCard. Now you find Hoyt your own self,” he said, pointing at a map on the wall.

He understood far more English than he could speak, most of it learned from subtitled movies that filled the television back in Moldova. He also understood maps, for during his two years of obligatory military service he’d excelled in all forms of navigation. So finding Hoyt Street station from where he stood was not difficult. There, he saw, he could change trains and change again after another stop until he reached Fifteenth Street–Prospect Park in Brooklyn.

“It will be easy,” Rick had told him in slow, watery Russian—a language Andrei knew all too well. “Getting there is the easy part. Getting prepared is easy. After that, it’s up to you. It’s your show. You know what they say about the pure-hearted, Andrei. You have nothing to worry about.”

It had been a surprise when the Alligator dispatch operator radioed him with a pickup from Tegel and said that the caller had requested him in particular. “Me?”

“Yes, you, Andrei.”

The smiling, fat Chinaman waiting with no luggage at all decided to take the passenger seat—carsickness, he explained—so Andrei cleared off his loose receipts, his jacket, and the paper bag that had held his lunch, and the man settled in with a loud series of grunts. “Tiergarten, bitte.”

While Andrei drove, the man rested his gloved hands on his lap and asked in Russian if Andrei spoke Russian. That should have been a sign, but Andrei just shrugged. “Da.”

“Dobriy,” said the Chinaman. “Mr. Stanescu, you don’t know me, but I requested you be my driver today.”

“I heard that,” Andrei answered. “Your story has been heard around the world, even in my country.”

“If you’re a journalist I’ll let you out here.”

“Please. I’m no journalist.” He reached into his coat and removed a square purple envelope and began to unseal it. “I’m a friend. Or, at least, I hope you’ll consider me one. I’d just like to help you.”

The Chinaman hadn’t been the first person to recognize him. Sometimes in the middle of a ride, a passenger would get a fresh glimpse of him in the rearview mirror and gasp as his memory clicked. Usually his fares chose silence, though sometimes—and it was more often women who did this—they opened their mouths and began long, pointless monologues on what he must be feeling, and how they felt when they learned of his daughter’s death. He never knew what they expected from him in return—appreciation? He doubted they understood that what they really provoked from him was hatred.

So he said, “Help isn’t possible, sir. Please don’t trouble yourself.”

“I’m not the only one, am I?” said the Chinaman, reading his mind. “Forget about the others. They’re fools. There’s only one way to help a man in your position. Here,” he said, nodding at the side of the road. “Pull over a moment.”

They had just left the highway and entered Charlottenburg, not far from Sophie-Charlotte-Platz. “Why?” asked Andrei.

“Because I don’t want you to have an accident when you see this.”

He pulled over, wondering how much time he should allow before kicking this bastard out of his taxi. He didn’t need to see anything to risk having a wreck. All he had to do was be reminded of Adriana. The man opened the envelope and removed a single photograph. It was familiar, too familiar, but clearer than the one Erika Schwartz had shown him. The man—
that
man—talking to Adriana by the entrance of the courtyard. She was beautiful. He touched the photograph, touched her, and then the Chinaman took it away, saying, “He killed her.”

“No,” Andrei answered, not even wondering how a Chinese man had gotten hold of the image. “It was someone else.”

“Who told you that?”

“German intelligence.”

The Chinaman smiled and shook his head. “Spies protecting spies. This man, the one who killed your daughter, is an American spy.”

“No, he’s a tourist.”

“That’s what they call them. But he’s a spy.”

“How do you know this?”

“I know everything about this man. If you’d like, I can share that information with you.”

Andrei looked again at the photo in this stranger’s hand and felt as if he might vomit. Confusion was beginning to set in. He swallowed, wondering why all the spies he knew were obese. “Who are you?”

“Call me Rick. And know that I’m sickened by what this man did.”

“Where is he now?”

“Back in America.”

“Then it’s no good. I can’t go there.”

“I can help with that.”

It was too stuffy in the car, and Andrei got out to light a cigarette, but the rush of traffic kept blowing out his matches. He moved to the sidewalk and got it lit and took a deep drag. The Chinaman
didn’t bother getting out, just rolled down the window and stared at him with his Asian eyes. Andrei walked away, puffing on his cigarette, then returned. Above the roar of traffic the man called Rick began talking, and he had to squat beside the window to hear. He, too, was a father. Or he had been until those same spies had killed his only son. “I felt like you, but I knew the only way to ever get back my life was to deal with it. You can stay here, Andrei. You can forget we ever talked. But it will never leave you—trust me. It will make you sick at night when everything is quiet and you remember her again.” Rick’s eyes were wet, as if this were how he had spent his own nights, but perhaps that was just the wind. “The only way to make some kind of peace is to know that you’ve done everything you can do.”

“Are you religious?” Andrei asked.

“I believe in the order of things.”

Andrei nodded at this, then tossed away his cigarette and got behind the wheel again. Rick rolled up his window. Andrei said, “You’re talking about revenge.”

Rick thought for a moment, then quoted:
“And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.”

That had been six days ago. Now, as he switched trains in Brooklyn, examining the signs above his head to make sure he didn’t lose his way, he repeated that verse. It was busy here, and he was just another speck in the mass of many nations that poured through the New York transportation system every day.

Until Prospect Park, everything had been predicted, for he had sat down with Rick and gone over each moment in his journey westward. He’d made his illegible notes on the map Rick supplied, and circled the corner of Garfield and Seventh Avenue. First, though, he had to go to the park.

He’d taken an early flight, and with the change in time zones it was still only a little before three in the afternoon. The day was bright but chilly, and as he settled on a bench he saw couples and people with dogs, some on leads and others running loose. Dogs of
a confusing variety of breeds. There were also businessmen on cell phones. It was, he realized, much like Germany, and he wondered why so many Moldovans he knew were desperate to come here. He thought of Vasile, another taxi driver, who would be sick with jealousy if he knew where Andrei was. But no one knew. Rick had been insistent about this. “Not even Rada.”

Poor Rada, who woke up that morning and couldn’t help but dress in black again, despite the end of the official mourning. This man, Milo Weaver, hadn’t just killed Adriana. He’d killed Rada. He’d killed Andrei, too.

So when he left that morning with his small bag he’d explained that he was taking over Vasile’s morning shift. As if she knew, she’d asked him to call someone else to take it over. She wanted him at home, with her—she had already called in sick again. She wasn’t sure she could bear the empty apartment alone today. He’d had to be firm—“Calling in sick like this, you’re going to lose your job. Someone has to earn money”—but he’d given her the kindest kiss he could manage.

“Andrei?” said a voice with an accent that skipped over the rolled
r
in his name.

He looked up to find another Chinese man. A skinny man, taller than he’d expected, wearing a trench coat. He carried a paper shopping bag with

BARNEYS
NEW YORK

written on it.

“Ja?” he said, then remembered where he was. “Yes. I am Andrei. You are Li?”

“About time,” the man said, then launched into a stream of English Andrei couldn’t understand at all and set the bag at his feet. He ended with “Okay?”

Andrei nodded. “Yes. Thank you.”

For a second the man stared at him, his face full of doubt, then turned and walked away.

Andrei waited, breathing through his mouth because his nose had become stopped up, and watched the dogs racing across the park, stumbling and jumping over one another and chewing on each other and pinning each other down. Tongues lashed against their faces as they ran, and their eyes were huge with pleasure.

She recalled Venice. After all, it was the three of them again—the three of them and a strange man. Angela Yates was the only missing actor, and she was dead. She’d been dead for eight months.

That was later. At the moment it occurred, she recalled nothing. It was a moment unto itself, with no past or future, and her instincts took over: She reached for Stephanie and pulled her close.

They had just left the apartment. It was nearly seven—they were running late for their reservation at Long Tan, and Little Miss was talking. “If you park in a driveway and drive on a parkway, then . . .” She didn’t finish her sentence. Not because of what happened, but because she couldn’t find the words to express how much the English language had let her down. A minute later, Tina would share her inarticulateness.

He didn’t stand out. In a city like New York few people stand out, but the small man in the soiled, waist-length jacket sitting on their stoop with a leather bag and a shopping bag from Barneys looked like any number of visitors in this city of visitors. Beyond him, a black couple pushed a baby carriage along the sidewalk, and across Garfield the Vietnamese florists were checking on the breathtaking variety of flowers arranged on the sidewalk outside their convenience store every day. The man, hearing them come out, turned to look. He had a round, flabby face and deep-set eyes, and besides the stubble
that went nearly up to his eyelids he had plenty of hair. The hair on top of his head looked oily.

Tina turned to lock the door while Milo told Stephanie, “Language doesn’t always make sense. Take Russian, for example—”

He stopped because he, too, had noticed the man now staring at them. With a hand that moved as if it were a separate creature entirely, Milo grabbed Stephanie by the arm and pushed her behind him, placing his own body between this man and his girls.