The Nearest Exit (17 page)

Listen to the Bigger Voice. It’s the only one that will ever be straight with you
.

What did the Bigger Voice say now?

It was only later, after he had lost track of his martinis, that he succumbed to that voice and went to look for a Telekomunikacja Polska phone booth. His anger had returned. He had spent too long thinking drunkenly of injustice, and when he shoved in the zloty coins the pad of his thumb hurt. He dialed just as forcefully. It only rang twice before the old man answered with a hesitant, “Da?”

In Russian, Milo said, “You couldn’t stick to our deal, could you?”

“I was wondering when you would call. It’s not like you think. She got away.”

“How hard is it to hold on to a kid?” Milo demanded. “You lose a kid, it’s because you want to lose her.”

“She got away.”

“Bastard. She got away, then you tracked her down and killed her.”

“You’re drunk, Milo.”

“Yes. And you and I are done.”

“Listen to me,” he said. “I did track her down, but she was already dead.”

“Then who killed her?”

“Your people, I’d wager.”

“They don’t know who did it.”

“Is that what they told you?”

Milo considered some replies, but they were all too crude and childish—he didn’t want to be childish with Yevgeny. So he hung up.

He got another drink but was out of Nicorette and had to bum cigarettes off a table of pretty girls with extravagant mascara and matching platinum blond hair. They were talking politics. After an initial wave of curiosity, they soon realized that he was just another drunk American and sent him packing.

“Go to Iraq,” the sexiest one told him, and the others laughed.

He was in bed by eleven, unconscionably drunk, the television on and the spinning room stinking of the cigarettes he’d bought on the way back to the hotel. He briefly flipped to BBC World News, which was full of Fidel Castro’s retirement, and the unanimous election by the Cuban National Assembly of his younger brother, Raúl. The phrase “end of an era” was repeated endlessly. The results of the previous night’s Academy Awards distracted him from those heavier issues.

But they’re all the little voices
, his mother said.

After he drifted to sleep briefly his eyelids rose as, on the screen, a tall BBC reporter Milo recognized walked through a park alongside a Chinese man. It was Zhang Yesui, the Chinese ambassador to the UN. Though he moved and spoke with that bland diplomatic nonaggression that to outsiders looks like weakness, his words were pointed. “After learning of the pre-independence discussions between Kosovo and certain current members of the Security Council, it falls on us to suggest that these members should drop their unilateral positions in regard to other nations.”

“I believe you’re talking about the United States,” said the reporter.

“I am. The current policy of intruding on sovereign nations is counterproductive to global peace. We’ve seen it in Iraq and Kosovo and the Sudan.”

“The Sudan?”

Milo blinked, rubbing his eyes.

“It has come to our attention that certain elements within the American government had a hand in last year’s unrest, which killed nearly a hundred innocent civilians. China, along with the United Nations as a whole, considers stability in that region paramount,
and it hurts us to find that another member has been undermining our efforts for peace.”

Surprisingly, there was no follow-up question to that accusation, but more surprising was the fact that it had been made at all. Milo watched for a while longer, waiting for some reference to the ambassador’s statement, but it had slipped away, as if it had never been made.

He considered calling Drummond, but Drummond would already be dealing with the fallout. It would be one additional piece of evidence for Marko Dzubenko’s story, and certain politicians—Nathan Irwin, in particular—would be calling him up, demanding answers. For the moment, Milo was grateful he no longer worked in administration.

The worry slipped away as the fatigue caught up to him, and he flipped to a thriller dubbed into Polish and lowered the volume.

He snored so loudly that he sometimes woke himself, and when, a little after three, his door opened quietly and three visitors entered, they exchanged silent smirks over the noise. In the light of the silent television now playing soft-core pornography, they took positions around him.

One grabbed his feet; the other put him in a headlock. As Milo snapped awake they raised him briefly from the bed and slammed him down again. He tried to claw at the one holding his head but was too confused to do a thing. He felt the sharp prick of a needle in his arm.

He continued to struggle, weakening, until his arms first lost energy and then his legs. They were shadows, these men, and behind them the bright television displayed blurred bodies, bare white breasts with smeared pink nipples.

They were wrapping him now, and panic shuddered through him weakly as he imagined plastic, but it was just the bedsheets. He was so tired. He could hardly keep his eyes open. A blur of a man with a bruised eye and what might have been a mustache leaned over him and spoke in heavily accented English. “Don’t worry. We’re not going to kill you yet.”

Milo blinked at him, his vision going fast, his tongue heavy. “You’re German?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Thought so.” He tried to add something else, but his tongue would no longer cooperate.

Hasad al-Akir nodded politely at the fat old woman. As this night was like all other nights, she didn’t even acknowledge him as she lumbered past the counter to the wall of refrigerated glass doors in the back. There were plenty of customers he conversed with, whose names and backgrounds he knew, customers who even addressed him as
Herr
al-Akir and asked how his family was. Not this one. Despite her appearing every working evening punctually at seven and buying the same bottle of Rheinland Riesling and a Snickers candy bar, their conversation never broke from the same routine.

Guten Abend, Frau
.

Her answer: an indecipherable grunt.

That will be ten euro sixty
.

No reply, no smile, nothing to suggest a man was even standing in front of her. Only the exact-change deposit on the counter, sometimes a ten-euro bill with fifty and ten cents, sometimes a precollected pile of coins, but always exact. Then she’d pocket the candy bar, grab the bottle by the neck, and ignore his farewell as she shuffled her enormous weight out the door.

Tonight, though, would be different.

Ekhard Junker, his sweets distributor, had raised the price of their Snickers bars five cents. So tonight, after six months, she would put down too little money with those plump, gnawed fingers, and
Hasad would have the pleasure of informing her that she’d paid too little.

This, at least, would be something.

He had lived in Munich since the mideighties, arriving with a wave of Turkish laborers that came to do those jobs the West Germans considered beneath them. Construction, mining, recycling collection, staffing convenience stores. For a long time, Hasad had regretted his decision to leave Ankara. The Bavarians were a petty, closed race of pale bigots. The money he sent back to his parents and wife couldn’t be ignored, though, so he stuck it out, finally sending for his family in 1992. By that time, Germans from the East were taking over previously Turkish jobs—nothing was beneath those
Ossis
—and many of his friends talked seriously about returning home. Not Hasad. Unlike his friends, he hadn’t pissed away his earnings on liquor and nightclubs. He’d saved, and began scouring the
Süddeutsche Zeitung
for property. He was going to run his own business.

When he finally settled on this store in Pullach, an industrial suburb south of Munich, the building had been empty a year. The owner, a clever Bavarian who’d decided he was too good for the service industry, tried to squeeze as much as possible out of Hasad, but he clearly didn’t know what he was in for, because the art of negotiation is a Turk’s birthright.

It wasn’t all anise and cinnamon, though. After two years, in late 2001, chilly tall men from the German foreign intelligence service, the BND, whose headquarters was just up the street, began visiting. They checked and rechecked his immigration papers, the deeds to his business, and his financial spreadsheets. They asked about his friends, sometimes flashing photographs of dour-looking Arabs, wondering if he, or someone he knew, might be under the sway of radical Muslim clerics.

Over the years, as his business blossomed (he’d opened a second location on the eastern edge of Munich last year, run by his son, Ahmed), their visits became less frequent, their expressions steadily more apologetic. “Just the way it is,” one of them, a soft-spoken German
Muslim, admitted. “When you’re this close to the center of operations, you’ve got to expect it.”

In the last half year, though, they’d left him alone. Either they were finally convinced of his loyalty or they no longer cared. For that same amount of time, he’d nightly faced this obese, mute woman who was now trudging back to him, the chilled Riesling in one hand, a Snickers bar in the other. He gave her the same nightly smile of welcome, and as usual she ignored it.

In all honesty, she annoyed him more than those tough guys from the intelligence service ever had. Looking into her weary, grouchy face, cheeks covered in downy hair that made her almost mannish, he couldn’t imagine that she’d ever been attractive in youth. Add to that a personality of indistinct grunts and a genetic inability to smile—no. He couldn’t imagine that any man had ever loved this woman. She had a haircut like a young boy’s, trimmed around the ears, and unplucked, shabby eyebrows. She was the type who drank her white wine and chewed her candy and fingernails in a dusty house full of cats and cat hair, whose only enjoyment came from insipid German soap operas.

She placed the wine and candy on the counter and reached into her cheap, plastic-looking purse for the money.

“Guten Abend, Frau,” Hasad said, smiling as he typed the items into the register.

Her grunt, as ever, said nothing as she plopped down a small pile of coins. Hasad counted the money, fingers dancing. She reached for her supplies, and he cleared his throat, raising a warning hand.

“Moment, Frau. As you can see,” he said, pointing at the register’s display, “the price is ten sixty-
five
. It’s the Snickers. It’s more expensive now.”

She raised her heavy-lidded eyes to the display, then turned to him. “When did this happen?”

Her voice, surprisingly, was high and melodic. He had to fight the urge to shout,
Success!
Instead he said, “This morning, the distributor raised his price. I have no choice but to do the same.”

“Oh.” She nodded, perhaps confused, then went back to her purse.

As prescient as he’d been so far, Hasad couldn’t have predicted what followed.

The front doors slid electrically open as a young, broad-chested man in a suit jogged in, out of breath. Hasad recognized him from those old question-and-answer sessions. One of the ruder interrogators, who wore his authority with about as much humility as an Ankara cop—which is to say, with no humility at all.