The Storyteller (60 page)

She vines her arms around my neck. “I’ll show you my firsthand sources if you show me yours.”

This girl is going to be the death of me. With superhuman effort, I push her away. “Sage. I can’t.”

She takes a step back, defeated. “Last night, for just a little while, I was happy. Really happy. I can’t remember the last time I felt like that.”

“I’m sorry. I love you, but it’s an enormous conflict of interest.”

Her head snaps up. “You love me?”

“What?” My face is suddenly on fire. “I never said that.”

“You did. I heard it.”

“I said
I’d love to. ”

“No,” Sage says, a grin splitting her face. “You didn’t.”

Did I? I’m so tired I don’t know what the hell is coming out of my mouth. Which probably means that I don’t have the faculties to cover up what I really feel for Sage Singer, with an intensity that terrifies me.

She places her hands flat on my chest. “What if I tell you that I won’t wear the wire unless you come back to bed?”

“That’s blackmail.”

Sage is beaming. She shrugs.

It’s easy to say you will do what’s right and shun what’s wrong, but when you get close enough to any given situation, you realize that there
is
no black or white. There are gradations of gray.

I hesitate. But only for a second. Then I grab Sage around the waist and lift her off her feet. “The things I do for my country,” I say.

It was not easy to break
into
a prison.

First, I had baked the croissants, their bitter almond filling masking the taste of the rat poison I’d mixed in. I left them outside the door where the guard stood, keeping watch over Aleks until tomorrow morning.

Then, the new captain of the guard, Damian’s second in command, would torture him to death.

Whistling like a trapped animal, I got the guard to open the door to see about the racket. Finding nothing, he had shrugged and taken in the basket of pastries. A half hour later, he was lying on his side, his mouth foaming, in the throes of death.

Nobody who looks at a shard of flint lying beneath a rock ledge, or who finds a splintered log by the side of the road would ever find magic in their solitude. But in the right circumstances, if you bring them together, you can start a fire that consumes the world.

Yes, now, I had killed a man. Surely that meant we belonged together. I would have eagerly rotted in this cell beside Aleks, if it was all the time I had left with him.

Through the cell window, I watched Aleks as he sat with his back against the dank wall, eyes closed. He was a skeleton, emaciated after a month of daily torture. It seemed his captors had tired of the game before Aleks’s body gave out; now he was not just to be toyed with, he was to be murdered.

When he heard me approach, he stood. I could see the effort it cost him. “You came,” he said, twining his fingers with mine through the bars.

“I got your note.”

“I sent it two weeks ago,” he said. “And it took two weeks before that to coax the bird onto the window ledge.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

Aleks’s hands were scarred and broken from the beatings, yet still he held me tight. “Please,” he whispered. “Do one thing for me tonight.”

“Anything,” I promised.

“Kill me.”

I drew a deep breath. “Aleks,” I said. “—

SAGE

If you had told me a month ago that I would be undertaking a covert mission as an FBI field agent, I would have laughed in your face.

Then again, if you’d told me that I would be falling in love with a man other than Adam, I would have told you you were crazy. Leo, without a reminder, asks for soy milk every time we order coffee. He turns the shower on before he leaves the bathroom so that the water is warm before I get in. He holds the door open for me and won’t drive anywhere until my seat belt is fastened. Sometimes, there’s this expression on his face, as if he cannot quite believe he got so lucky. I’m not sure what he’s seeing when he looks at me, but I want to be that girl.

And my scars? I still see them, when I look in a mirror. But the first thing I notice is my smile.

I’m nervous about taping my conversation with Josef. It is going to happen, finally, after three days of waiting. First, my sisters had to end their
shivah
calls. Second, Leo needed to secure permission to use electronic surveillance through the DOJ Criminal Division’s Office of Enforcement Operations. And third, Josef had to be discharged from the hospital.

I am going to be the one to bring him home, and then, I hope, I can get him to confess to Darija’s murder.

Leo has been arranging all the details from my house, where we moved back in as a team after that first night in the hotel. It was by unspoken
agreement that we decided he would check out of the Marriott and come stay with me, instead. Although I was ready to fight off my sisters’ comments and questions, I didn’t even have to do any damage control. Leo had had Pepper and Saffron charmed after ten minutes of conversation about how a famous thriller writer had shadowed him, taken pages of notes, and then completely ignored reality to create a bestseller that, while wildly inaccurate, had shot to the top of the
New York Times
list. “I knew it!” Saffron had told him. “My book club read it. We all felt there was no way a Russian spy would ever make it into the DOJ with false credentials.”

“Actually, that’s not the biggest stretch. But the main character, the one who has a full closet of Armani suits? No way, not on a government salary,” Leo had said.

Of course, I couldn’t really explain Leo’s presence—or Eva’s for that matter—without telling my sisters about Josef. And to my surprise, that made me an instant celebrity.

“I can’t believe you’re hunting Nazis,” Saffron said last night, the last meal we would share before she and Pepper left for the airport in the morning to return to their respective homes. “My little sister.”

“I’m not really hunting them,” I corrected. “One sort of fell into my lap.”

I had called Josef, twice, at Leo’s suggestion, and explained my absence with the truth. A close relative had died unexpectedly. I had family business to take care of. I told him Eva missed him; I asked him what the doctors said about his condition; and I arranged the details of his hospital discharge.

“Still,” Pepper agreed. “Mom and Dad would be delighted. Considering all the fuss you made about not going to Hebrew school.”

“This isn’t about religion,” I tried to explain. “It’s about justice.”

“They don’t have to be mutually exclusive,” Leo said amiably. And just like that, he steered the conversation away from a critique of me and to an analysis of the last election.

It’s an odd luxury, knowing someone’s got my back. Unlike Adam, whom I was always defending to others, Leo effortlessly defends
me.
He knows what will upset me before it even happens and like a superhero, bends the track of the runaway train before it strikes.

This morning, when Pepper and Saffron leave, I have a box of freshly baked chocolate croissants for them as a care package. My sisters hug Leo good-bye; then I walk them out to the driveway, to the rental car. Pepper embraces me tightly. “Don’t let this one get away, Sage. I want to hear how everything turns out. You’ll call me?”

It is the first time I can remember my sister soliciting contact, instead of just criticizing me. “Absolutely,” I promise.

In the kitchen, Leo is just hanging up the phone when I return. “We can pick up the van on the way to the hospital. Then while you’re getting Josef—Sage, what’s wrong?”

“For starters,” I say, “I’m not used to getting along with my sisters.”

“You made them out to be Scylla and Charybdis,” Leo says, laughing. “They’re just ordinary moms.”

“That’s easy for you to say. They’re mesmerized by you.”

“I hear I have that effect on Singer women.”

“Good,” I reply. “Then maybe you can use that magic to hypnotize me, so that I don’t screw this up today.”

He comes around the counter and rubs my shoulders. “You’re not going to screw this up. You want to go over it again?”

I nod.

We have done dry runs of this interview a half dozen times, some with the recording equipment to make sure it works properly. Leo has played the role of Josef. Sometimes he’s forthcoming, sometimes he is belligerent. Sometimes he just shuts down and refuses to talk. I say that I’m losing courage; that if I’m going to bite the bullet and actually kill him, I need to be able to think about what he did as a concrete example, not a global genocide; that I need to see a face or hear a name of one of his victims. In every scenario so far, I’ve gotten him to confess.

Then again, Leo is not Josef.

I take a deep breath. “I ask him how he feels . . .”

“Right, or anything else that seems natural. What you
don’t
want is for him to think you’re nervous.”

“Great.”

Leo sits down on the stool beside mine. “You want him to open up without leading him on.”

“What do I say about my grandmother?”

He hesitates. “Normally I’d tell you not to bring Minka up at all. But you did mention a death in the family. So play it by ear. If you do mention her, though, don’t let on that she’s the grandmother who was the survivor. I just can’t be certain how he’ll read that.”

I bury my face in my hands. “Can’t you just interrogate him?”

“Sure,” Leo says. “But I’m pretty sure he’ll know something’s up when I show up at the hospital instead of you.”

The plan is for Leo to be parked in a van across the street from Josef’s house. That way the receiver—a box the size of a small briefcase—will be in range for the transmitter of the body wire. While Leo is hidden in the van, doing surveillance, I will be in Josef’s house.

We have a safe word, too. “And if I say
I’m supposed to meet Mary today . . .
”

“Then I run in and draw my gun, but I can’t get a clear shot without hitting you. So instead I break out the jujitsu moves that got me a blue ribbon in seventh grade. I toss Josef off you like a cheap coat and pin him against the wall by the neck. I say,
Don’t make me do something we’ll both regret,
which sounds like a movie line, and is, but I’ve used those before in tense law enforcement situations and they actually work. I release Josef, who collapses to my feet, and confesses not just to all war crimes at Auschwitz but also for being responsible for the colossal mistakes New Coke and
Sex and the City 2.
He signs on the dotted line, we call in local law enforcement for an arrest, and you and I ride off into the sunset.”

I shake my head, smiling. Leo actually does carry a gun, but he has assured me that ever since Camp Wakatani in fifth grade any weapon is really for show; that he could not hit a target the size of Australia. It’s hard to tell with him, but I imagine he’s lying. I cannot imagine that the DOJ lets him carry a weapon without having learned how to use it efficiently.

Leo looks at his watch. “We should get going. You ready to get suited up?”

It’s hard to wear a wire when it’s summertime. My usual outfit, a tank top and jean shorts, is too tight to hide the microphone that will be taped underneath my shirt. Instead, I have opted for a loose sundress.

Leo hands me the transmitter—it’s the size of an iPod mini, with a small hook that can be affixed to a waistband or belt, neither of which I have. “Where am I supposed to put it?”

He pulls aside the neck of the dress and tucks the transmitter into the side of my bra. “How’s that?”

“
So
comfortable,” I say.
“Not.”

“You sound like you’re thirteen.” He threads the wire with the tiny microphone under my arm and around my waist. I pull down the top of the sundress so that he has better access. “What are you doing?” Leo says, backing away.

“Making it easier for you.”

He swallows. “Maybe
you
should do it.”

“Why are you so shy all of a sudden? Isn’t that like locking the barn door after the horses are gone?”

“I’m not shy,” Leo grits out. “I’m trying very hard to get us to the hospital on time, and
this
doesn’t help. Can you just, you know, tape it down? And pull up your damn dress?”

When the microphone and transmitter are in place, we make sure the channels are synced to the receiver that Leo will have in the van. I am driving the rental car; Leo sits in the passenger seat with the receiver on his lap. We go first to Josef’s house, where we drop off Eva and test the transmitter for distance. “It works,” Leo says when I get back in the car, having filled Eva’s water bowl and spread her toys around the living room, promising her that Josef is on his way.

I follow the GPS directions to the parking lot where Leo is meeting someone from the DOJ. He is quiet, running through checklists in his mind. The only other car there is a van, making me wonder how the other officer will get back home. It’s blue, and says
DON’S CARPETS
on
the side. A man gets out of the driver’s side and flashes his badge. “Leo Stein?”

“Yup,” Leo says, through the open window. “Just a sec.”

He hits the power button so that the window rolls up again, so that our conversation is private. “Don’t forget to make sure that there’s no background interference,” Leo says.

“I know.”

“So if he likes to listen to CNN or NPR make sure you turn it off. Power down your cell. Don’t grind coffee beans. Don’t use anything that could affect the transmission.”

I nod.

“Remember that
why
isn’t a leading question.”

“Leo,” I say, “I can’t remember all this stuff. I’m not a professional . . .”

He mulls for a moment. “You just need a little inspiration. You know what J. Edgar Hoover would do, if he were alive today?”