Flashback (34 page)

“You ran me as a contract agent, just like Patrick Haverman, just like Brian. You told me I was working for the CIA, but I wasn't always, was I?”

“You were always working in the best interests of the country,” Stringer said.

“And who decided that? I should have known the truth,” I told him.

“You knew what you wanted to know,” he countered.

It was the same thing I'd said to Brian in Spain, and I couldn't help thinking Stringer was right, that in some way I must have chosen to believe him.

“You let me go because of the baby?” I asked.

“You were always free to go.”

“But I came back,” I said, “for the tape. How did you know?”

“You called me from Tangier,” Stringer began. “You said some old friend from the business had gotten in touch with you, that he'd heard through the grapevine that Al-Marwan had an old tape on the market, something that sounded like it could have been your mother, and that he and Werner had worked out a deal for it. You needed my help.”

“And you offered it?”

“You couldn't have done it alone.”

“So you sent Patrick Haverman to me, to take the tape once we found it. Only you didn't count on him having a change of heart.”

“He was a fool,” Stringer snapped.

“And when your men didn't find the tape on me in France, you sent Brian to Tangier to find it.”

Stringer grimaced. The reserves that had held him together so far were nearly tapped. “I said you were smart. You don't really need me to tell you any of this.”

“My child,” I asked. “Where is she?”

Stringer coughed, doubling over as far as he could. Something rattled in his chest, like a stone in a piece of hollow wood. “She's with her great-grandparents,” he said. “Catherine's parents. Outside of Seattle.”

“You told them I was dead?”

“Yes.”

“Did they know why I left?”

Stringer shook his head.

“What's her name?”

He spit again, more blood this time, then forced himself upright. “Madeline.”

I closed my eyes and repeated each syllable to myself. Madeline, the name I had chosen for my daughter. Now that I had this, there was nothing more I needed from Stringer, not even revenge. Suddenly, the tiny room seemed unbearably claustrophobic, the stench oppressive. I looked to Werner, wanting out, but he took a step past me, moving toward Stringer.

“She's mine, isn't she?” he demanded, stopping just inches from the other man, his fists still clenched, every muscle in his body shivering.

For a moment I thought he was talking about Catherine, but then his face turned back to mine and I understood what he had meant.

Stringer smiled. “She was afraid to tell you,” he said, “afraid you'd want her to get rid of the baby. The last two months in Saigon she cried on my shoulder almost every night, and you never knew. I hated you for it. You didn't deserve her.

“She never thought you loved her,” he went on. “All those years later in Peshawar, she still couldn't bring herself to tell you you had a daughter.”

Werner stared down at the other man for a moment, then slowly turned away from him. He was wearing a dark suit and a long wool overcoat, but he seemed suddenly naked, as vulnerable as the bloodied figure in the chair. He turned to me and opened his mouth as if to speak, but nothing came out.

For a moment I could see the person he'd been before any of this had happened, before my mother's death had changed him. I could see the young man from the photograph, the man at Catherine Reed's side in that Saigon café. At the same time I could see the old man he'd been that morning on Slavin Hill, a defeated figure shuffling away from us through the snow.

He raised his hand slightly, like a priest about to offer a blessing; then he opened the door and stepped out into the passageway.

I stopped a moment before following him, taking one last look at Stringer. “You're not alone, are you?” I asked, thinking about what Brian had said on the boat, what I had suspected for so long. The men at the abbey, the couple at the tearoom, there was too much here for just one man.

He stared up me, grinning like a man who knows he's going to die. “We're all alone.”

“No,” I said. “I mean, in the agency, you're not the only one.”

“I know what you meant,” Stringer wheezed.

I could call Werner back in, I thought, and find out everything. I could make Stringer tell me. But the truth was there was nothing more I wanted to know, nothing more I could know.

Wasn't that the true nature of memory and knowledge, the thing I'd never quite understood? Wasn't that what Heloise had tried to tell me that night in the convent's library, looking up at the peeling walls? That the past is a puzzle for everyone, a tattered collection of memory and desire. That even those people we most long to understand remain no more than a sum of those static moments we've chosen to hold them in. A figure on a boat, a face in the darkness above one's bed at night, a woman in a Saigon café. All I wanted now was the life I'd left, and my daughter.

Stepping toward Stringer, I reached into my jeans and pulled out the pen drive. “You're wrong,” I said, slipping the drive into the breast pocket of Stringer's shirt. It was Werner's now, as was Stringer, to do with whatever he wanted. “We're anything but alone.”

*   *   *

Werner and I didn't speak on the way back to the city. It was afternoon when we reached Bratislava, snowing again, the white flakes immolating themselves in the black oblivion of the Danube. Whatever there was to be said between us would not be spoken that day, and we both knew it, both understood the importance of silence, the danger of the one word,
father,
that hung between us.

When we pulled up in front of Ivan's apartment building and I reached for the door handle, Werner leaned across me and put his hand on mine. “I did love her.”

“I know.” I nodded. I should not have wanted to give him such a gift, but I did it anyway.

“Please let me help you,” he said. Reaching for his wallet, he pulled out a handful of one-hundred-euro notes.

He pushed the money toward me, but I shook my head. “I'm fine,” I told him. “I'll be fine.”

“Whidbey Island,” he stammered. “It's where Catherine's parents live. She used to tell me about it. They have a house on the water.”

“Yes,” I said, opening the door, setting one foot on the curb. “I know. And a sailboat.”

Werner put the money back in his billfold, took out a business card, and forced it into my pocket. “Whatever you need,” he said as I climbed out.

I stepped to the front entryway of the building and scanned the roster of names, my finger hovering over Ivan's bell while I listened to the Mercedes drive away. When the car was gone, I turned and started up the sidewalk, my feet following the creeping dawn of recognition toward SNP Square.

*   *   *

The weather had chased everyone inside, and the sprawling triangle of the square was oddly deserted for midafternoon. A tram pulled to a stop, and a handful of passengers climbed off, scurrying away, flakes sticking to their fur caps. The old bronze monument to the infamous
Slovenské národné povstanie,
the 1944 uprising against the Nazis, was barely visible through the thickening scrim of snow; the “Angry Family,” as Bratislavans called it, blurred beyond distinction.

I gave you a life with meaning,
I heard Stringer say as I stood on the edge of the square and looked out across the vast white space toward where the crowds had gathered throughout that November so many years earlier. I could feel the heat of innumerable bodies pressing against me, the tidal surge of it, so many people wanting the same thing. The uprising this time not against the fascists but against those who had defeated them.

How could I have said no to the life Stringer offered me? How could I have said no when my mother had died so far from home, her life so full of meaning? When the world was finally shifting, turning like that mammoth ferry of my memory, its great prow sliding forward while I held my breath?

Here was my beginning, I thought, a girl in a crowd of thousands, orphaned and untethered, an American in a country that was brimming with the promise of what America had to offer. Stringer was right; I had heard what I wanted to hear. And this is where it had brought me, where it had brought all of us. This moment of collective forgetting.

A church bell sounded somewhere, a low chime ringing over the snowbound city, and the pigeons that had gathered on the SNP monument scattered, rising upward with a papery clamor of wings. Shivering, I pulled the collar of my coat up around my bare neck and started back to Ivan's.

THIRTY-ONE

Winter is softer here than the winters I've known, almost tropical in its liquidity. Sometimes it rains for days, not a downpour but a gentle, obliging mist that settles in a whispering thrum on the deepwater bays and pebbled inlets of the island. Some mornings, when I can't sleep, I get in my rental car and drive down to Mukilteo or over to Keystone and watch the early ferries come and go from the docks. There's a ritual to it that reminds me of the abbey, each crew member in his or her place, each rope secured. The way the chains clang, and the ship groans and creaks against the wooden pylons and rubber bumpers, and the deckhands call out to one another often sounds like a kind of prayer.

On weekends I sometimes stay till midmorning, but on schooldays I leave at seven-thirty and drive toward Greenbank, toward the corner where Madeline and her great-grandmother wait together for the school bus. She's a serious child. I can tell from the way she holds her lunchbox, from the way she peers impatiently down the road. Sometimes when I go by, the two of them are talking, Madeline looking up at the older woman with a puzzled scowl, her sharp little eyebrows drawn together in an inverted V. She doesn't seem to miss me, and for this I'm grateful, but I also know this is part of the careful way she carries herself, and that sometimes when she's looking down that road she's imagining me coming around the wooded corner to meet her.

It's only a matter of time before I run out of money, a week or two at most before my thirty-nine-dollars-a-night room at the Bay View Motel taps the last of my savings and I'll have no choice but to stop the car. But for now, I keep driving. I had not intended to wait like this when I came. My first day back I drove straight from the Seattle airport to Greenbank. But when I pulled up to the house and saw Madeline's bicycle on the porch and the old metal swing set in the front yard, something caught in my chest, and I knew I wasn't ready yet.

I'm gone to them, I tell myself each morning when I drive by. What does another day matter? Another week?

In the afternoons I go to the beach at Deception Pass and watch the seagulls riding the air currents beneath the high trestle bridge. Sometimes I think about Brian, about his mouth against mine when he kissed me that first time in Marrakech. It seems right to me that we should each have found an island, that he is somewhere on a beach as well, with the soft green hills of Tortola in the distance. That night at Ivan's when I told him about the meeting with Stringer, he listened without saying what I knew we both were thinking, that nothing was over, that Robert Stringer was only a tiny part of something larger.

Dr. Delpay told me once that memory resides mainly in our sense of smell. I didn't understand him at the time, but I'm beginning to. There is something about the air here, the all-pervasive smell of the sea, the sweetness of wet cedar, the rich must of rain-soaked underbrush, that is so perfectly familiar. I know now that I will never remember everything, but I'm beginning to glimpse my past.

The last few days, I've grown bold enough to sit in the park across from Madeline's school and watch her with the other children at recess. Last night I walked into the woods behind my grandparents' house and spied while the two of them made dinner and Madeline sat on a stool at the counter, her feet dangling off the ground. It was just like watching myself.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As ever, my heartfelt gratitude to the innumerable people at Henry Holt, SobelWeber, and Orion responsible for turning my ugly duckling manuscript into a beautiful book. Thanks to Nat Sobel, Judith Weber, Jack Macrae, and Jane Wood for their tireless readings and rereadings. A special thank-you to the incredible Vicki Haire for her superhuman copyediting skills. Thanks also to my family and friends, especially my husband, Keith, and my adoring cat, Frank.

Also by Jenny Siler

Easy Money

Iced

Shot

 

Available from
St. Martin's/Minotaur Paperbacks

ELECTRIFYING PRAISE FOR JENNY SILER'S NOVELS

Flashback

“The complex puzzle of a life forgotten powers this beautifully written spy novel … An air of lyrical melancholy hangs over the novel … The plotting is deft, the characters believable and, in the end, Eve finds who she was, even if she remains unsure of what that means or what she will become.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Unexpected depths of both intrigue and emotion, all of which keeps
Flashback
a cut above its genre.”

—Houston Chronicle

“Eve is a winning character—and Siler's prose remains as bracing as in her earlier books.”

—Seattle Times/Post Intelligencer

“Siler has outdone herself in
Flashback
.”

—The Denver Post

“Fans will think Ludlum with this exciting thriller starring a wonderful protagonist who ensures that the plot freshens up the trite amnesiac victim in peril. The story line is exciting … A terrific taut thriller.”

—Midwest Book Review