Flashback (31 page)

“Police reports,” she explained as we entered the room. “From post-revolution until the divorce.” Then, noticing my confusion, she added, as if to a small child, “From the fall of the Communist system until our split from the Czech Republic.”

She started forward, her heels tap-tapping at the concrete. “This way, please.”

We followed her about halfway down a row of shelves, then watched while she reached deftly up and pulled out a thin file folder. “Hannah Boyle,” she said, the name strangely Slavic in her mouth.

“Thank you,” I said, opening the folder and scanning the report's unintelligible writing. In several places sections of text had been blacked out with a dark ink pen.

There was a photograph paper-clipped to the first page, a picture of a crumpled white Peugeot. The car had been hit in such a way that the driver's side was completely obliterated, the engine thrust back against the steering wheel, the dash shoved back into the seat. The passenger's side, however, had been spared the full force of the trauma. The door was open slightly, as if someone had gotten out and neglected to close it. On the back windshield was an oval sticker identifying the car's home country as Austria.

The picture had been taken at night, and the background, outside the glare of the flash, was pitch-black, as if the world consisted entirely of the car and the thin border of glass-spangled asphalt, and nothing else, but I was aware of each object in that dark beyond as clearly and fully as if I were standing there. To the right, outside the frame, was the truck that had hit us, its bumper dented only slightly, its headlight smashed and broken, a tiny figure of St. Christopher on the dash. To the left was the ambulance, the emergency workers smoking cigarettes while Hannah's body lay lifeless inside.

It was a cold night, the air crisp with the smell of coming snow. Cars whipped by on the roadway behind us, some slowing to rubberneck, some too preoccupied with the upcoming border crossing to care. The broken glass crunched under the soles of my shoes. I shuddered at the crispness of the memory.

“Ouch!” Ivan said, glancing at the photo over my shoulder, his voice wrenching me back to the dusty basement room.

“Can you tell me what it says?” I asked Michala, offering her the file.

She opened the pair of gold reading glasses that hung from a chain around her neck and slipped them on, then took the folder.

“December twenty-one, nineteen eighty-nine,” she read, her finger sweeping across the text as she went. “Head-on collision on the Bratislava-to-Vienna road. It says here the driver of the lorry was drinking. The driver of the Peugeot, Hannah Boyle, an American, was killed at the scene.”

She hit one of the blacked-out passages and stopped, knitting her eyebrows together as if puzzling through a complex problem.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I don't know.” She shrugged. “A mistake, perhaps.” She skipped over the black ink and flipped forward, reading silently. “The rest is technical,” she explained. “Speed, force of impact…”

“And the parts that have been crossed out?” I wondered. The neat obliteration of the words seemed far too deliberate for the correction of an error, unless the error had been putting the information in the report in the first place. I suddenly wished I could read Slovak.

Michala shook her head. “I can't tell. I'm sorry, I really don't know.” She seemed genuine in her apology, aware that the information she was providing was less than complete, and I believed her. “Now, this is funny.”

“What?”

She motioned toward the signature on the last page, the name typed neatly underneath it. “Stanislav Divin,” she said, “the detective who signed off on this. You see these letters by his last name?”

I nodded.

“It's not appropriate,” Michala said, with the confused indignation of someone used to extreme order. “It's not normal for him to investigate an accident like this.”

“Why is that?” I asked.

She put a laquered fingernail to the man's name. “This is simply not his department. He's a narcotics detective.”

Stanislav Divin. I read the name to myself, then read it and reread it again, committing the spelling to memory. If I couldn't take the file, I told myself, I'd at least take this.

*   *   *

“Divin.” Ivan mulled the name as we made our way out the front door of the archives building.

“Do you know him?” I asked, reaching up to shade my eyes. Even thinned as it was by winter's smog, the sunlight seemed unbearably bright after our time underground.

Ivan shook his head. “He must be retired.”

“Can you ask around?” Brian said.

Ivan took a long pull off his cigarette, exhaling loudly. “Sometimes, man,” he growled, glancing at his friend, “I wish you hadn't saved my life.” Then he reached into the pocket of his leather coat and pulled out his cell phone.

*   *   *

Whoever Ivan was trying to reach had evidently gone home for the day, but the Russian assured us he'd left a message and that we'd hear something the next morning. It was late when we got back to the apartment. I got cleaned up and changed into my new clothes; then we went out for an early dinner at a place called Montana's Grizzly Bar, an American burger-and-steak house bizarrely situated in the medieval tangle of streets that lay in the eastern shadow of the castle.

“Montana!” Ivan remarked as the waitress delivered our food. He waved his fork at the campy decor, the mangy stuffed animal heads and American beer signs, then looked at me. “What part of America are you from?”

“I don't know,” I said.

Ivan stopped for a moment, his fork plunged into his bloody T-bone, his knife in midair. “What the fuck?” he started to say, but then he looked at Brian and whatever glance they exchanged said to leave it at that.

We left Ivan at the bar after dinner, our early departure softened by the arrival of three British flight attendants, and walked back to the apartment.

“We meet Werner in the morning,” Brian reminded me as we crossed Hlavne Square, our feet marking the dusting of fresh snow that had fallen while we were in the restaurant. The burghers' houses that ringed the square were tucked in for the night, eaves edged in icicles, windows aglow. “Do you know what you're going to say?”

I shook my head and took a breath of the cold, dry air.

Brian turned his face toward me. “We need a plan,” he said. “We'll make a plan.”

“Yes,” I told him, but in truth I wasn't thinking about Werner or the meeting. Instead, I was thinking about Hannah Boyle's white Peugeot, about the way the car's passenger door had been slightly ajar, and the long black ink stains on the police report. I was close to something, I could feel it, close to the place where all this had begun.

TWENTY-EIGHT

It had snowed heavily overnight, and from the top of Slavin Hill the Old City looked quaint as a miniature Christmas village, its baroque spires and Gothic rooftops cloaked in cottony white. The sun was shining, the sky crisp and blue, the golden crown atop the steeple of St. Martin's cathedral glistening in the morning light. A tram ran along the river, then turned inland, stopping to unload a cargo of tiny figures before continuing on. Above it all, the castle sat gray and silent, watching the Danube and the plains beyond for the next invading force, as it had for some six hundred years. Only the hypermodern bridge, shuddering with rush-hour traffic, and the ugly high-rise suburbs across the river broke the illusion of perfection.

As early as it was, the war memorial was almost deserted, the only visitors besides us two old men sweeping snow from the wide steps, their stooped frames dwarfed by the monument's immense pillar. A bronze plaque in several languages informed the ignorant of the six thousand Soviet war dead the memorial commemorated, boys who'd perished pushing the Nazis out of western Slovakia.

“Nine o'clock,” Brian said, glancing at his watch, stamping his feet to ward off the cold.

I pushed my hands deeper into the pockets of my new coat, my right fingers brushing the stock of the Beretta, my left fingers finding the memory card that Brian had copied the contents of the pen drive onto the night before. We'd left the original at Ivan's apartment.

Two figures appeared from behind the memorial and started across the wide plaza in our direction. As they drew closer, I recognized them both. One was Werner. Beside him was my old friend Salim.

“You ready?” Brian asked.

“He's brought his thug,” I whispered, curling my palm around the Beretta, resting my thumb next to the safety.

“I thought we asked you to leave your goons at home,” Brian said as Werner and Salim neared.

Werner stopped walking. “Mr. Aziz is my personal assistant.”

I shook my head.

“Come on,” Brian announced, grabbing my arm. “Let's go.”

Werner let us walk toward the edge of the plaza. “Let's be reasonable,” he called out finally, dismissing Salim with a wave of his hand. The younger man started back toward the memorial.

“We're willing to trade,” Brian said as we retraced our steps. “But we do this on our terms.”

“Fair enough,” Werner agreed. “You have the film?”

I pulled the memory card from my pocket and held my hand out for Werner to see, then slid it back into my coat. “Here's the deal,” I said. “First, you tell me who they are, the man and the woman on the tape. Second, I want a meeting with him. I don't care how you arrange it; just make it happen.”

Werner looked at me with a mixture of pity and contempt. “My dear,” he said. “What makes you think I know the man on the tape?”

“You do,” I assured him.

“Sadly, I was robbed of the film before I got a chance to watch it. That said, I must admit I lack your conviction.”

“You mean you don't know what's on here?” I asked.

“To the contrary,” Werner corrected me. “I know exactly what is on the film. That's why I agreed to buy it. There's a murder, is there not?”

“Yes,” I said. “A woman, a journalist. A friend of yours. The man was a friend of yours, too.”

Werner rubbed his gloved hands together. His nose and cheeks were red from the cold, his lips pale and dry. “For a woman who remembers nothing,” he observed, “you know quite a lot.”

“The picture in your office in Marrakech,” I told him, “of you at Les Trois Singes. The man and the woman on the film are the same.”

Werner pulled the collar of his coat up around his neck. It was a distraction, a gesture meant to conceal, but for the briefest of moments he looked like a man who'd just taken a hard punch to the gut.

“You were in love with her, weren't you?” I asked, remembering the photograph of the three of them, the way both men's heads were turned in the woman's direction, the looks on their faces.

“You're certain this is the man?” he asked stonily, ignoring my question.

“Yes.”

Werner hesitated for a moment, looking past us toward some point on the far bank of the Danube, as if expecting the Hussites to come riding in at any moment. “Robert Stringer,” he announced. “That's his name.”

“And the woman?” I asked.

“Catherine,” he said, his eyes hard on my face, his expression answering my earlier question. “Catherine Reed.”

There it was, I thought, a name. If I had nothing else, I had that. “Who were they?” I asked.

“Catherine was a journalist, like you said. An American.”

“And Stringer?”

“When we first met in Saigon, he was working for USAID.”

“And in Pakistan?”

“Officially, he was with the Asia Foundation.”

“And unofficially?”

“Everyone knew he was CIA.”

“Even Catherine Reed.”

“Catherine knew.”

“And Stringer's side business with Naser Jibril?” I asked. “Did everyone know about that?”

Werner shook his head.

“But Catherine knew?”

“Because I told her,” Werner said, fumbling with his coat again.

“But you said you didn't know it was Stringer on the film,” I reminded him.

“I didn't,” he agreed, stopping for a moment before continuing on. “In my business, one hears things, a lot of it rumor, some of it fact. A friend of mine in the Pakistani border guard told me there was an American moving empty arms crates into Afghanistan. The guards were all thrilled because they were getting twice the regular payoff. It didn't sound right to my friend, and it didn't sound right to me, so I told Catherine, as a favor. I thought there might be a story there.”

“But you didn't have anything to do with Stringer's little pipeline?”

Werner shook his head. “I told you, I didn't even know it was him.”

“And it never occurred to you that your favor might get Catherine killed?”

Werner shivered visibly. “I've told you enough,” he said. “I'll arrange your meeting with Stringer. It will be my pleasure, but we're done here. You'll give me the film now.”

I took the memory card from my pocket. There was little use in holding on to it, now that Werner knew it was Stringer on the tape. “One more thing,” I said. “Leila Brightman worked for Stringer, didn't she?”

“You really don't know, do you?”

“No,” I told him.

“You worked for Stringer then, just like you were working for him when you stole this film.”

“You're wrong about that,” I said. I held my hand out and offered him the memory card. “I went to your Casbah on my own.”

He took the card and stashed it in the inside pocket of his coat. “And why would you do that?” he asked.

I hesitated for a moment, part of me wanting to tell him the reason, that this woman he had loved I had loved as well. But something got the better of me. “I had my reasons,” I said.