He wasn’t sure of the etiquette of the moment. Their strange earlier intimacy and mutual nudity called for more than a handshake. Leena kissed him on the cheek. Her lips made light contact with the corner of his mouth with electric effect. She led him by the arm to the huge window at the back of the apartment, which overlooked the old city toward the lake. The TV tower loomed to the left. They stared at the glittering city. He enjoyed the pressure of her hand on his bicep. He had an odd feeling that she was about to make him an outlandish offer, like: “All this for your soul.” She sat him on the sofa, offered him a drink. He took a scotch on the rocks. She joined him with what looked like a glass of water.
“You’re looking better than you did this morning,” she said.
“It’s been a while since I’ve slept like that,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about what you told me.”
“I don’t need to know.”
“I meant about being able to help each other.”
“I told you my expertise,” she said. “I think you’re an expert, too.”
“I don’t feel like an expert in anything.”
“You ask questions and you listen.”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“Nobody listens these days, unless you’re talking about them, and even then they’re selective about what they hear,” she said. “I thought, at first, you might be a policeman. A detective, you know, used to asking questions and listening… and thinking all the time. Conservative and ordered, hierarchical, but also seeing horrifying things and dealing with evil people.”
“I’m not a cop,” he said. “I’m a bullshit merchant, remember?”
“That’s part of your job,” she said. “Just to keep people from knowing who you really are.”
His face did not betray a single emotion. He sipped his scotch slowly.
“You’ve had three wives?” she said.
“The middle one only lasted a few months.”
“And you’re away a lot.”
“How would you know?”
“You’re not as American as most Americans,” she said. “You’ve assimilated the cultures you’ve been involved with. You speak German and other languages.”
“Russian and Arabic,” he said, nodding.
“And you’re fifty-… six years old?”
“Fifty-seven.”
“There’s something of the old warrior about you, Roland.”
“Did you say, ‘cold warrior’?”
“I recognize you, I mean your type.”
“Was your father in the military?”
“Before he went into business,” said Leena, “he was in intelligence. It was one of the reasons he was so successful and it was also why my mother left him.”
“And why was that?”
“She never quite knew who she was with.”
“Did she remarry?”
“A plumber,” said Leena. “And she knows exactly where she stands with him.”
“Yes,” said Schafer, “plumbers are safer than spies and more useful around the house. Did your father shoot himself because your mother left him?”
Leena shook her head slowly, as if her father’s suicide had something to do with Schafer.
“What was it?”
“I don’t know for certain,” said Leena. “And my mother couldn’t tell me anything. But two weeks after his funeral I had a visit from a woman who told me that her husband and my father had worked together in Berlin in 1979. Her husband had never come back. She implied that my father had something to do with it. It was complicated by the fact that she wanted money. She might have seen me as someone easy to exploit. That’s certainly what my ex-husband thought.”
“Did you see her again?”
“A year ago. I’d done a bit of research among my father’s ‘friends’ by then, and I’d found that there was some doubt as to his loyalty. Nothing that could be proved, but there were questions about where the capital came from to start up his shipping company,” she said. “I gave the woman some money.”
“Was he ever politically motivated?”
“Never,” she said. “You’re not a spy anymore though, are you?”
“What makes you think that?”
“Last night. It wasn’t an act. I don’t think a spy would risk getting that drunk. My father used to drink himself senseless, but only on his own.”
“I don’t work for anybody anymore,” said Schafer. “I used to be a spy some years ago, and then the Wall came down and I retrained.”
“As what?”
“An interrogator.”
“And the Arabic, was that all about the war on terror?”
“No, my third wife’s Egyptian,” said Schafer. “She speaks English, but I thought it would be fun to learn her language. We use Arabic in the house.”
“Children?”
“One daughter. Unexpected. My wife had been told she couldn’t conceive and at thirty-eight she suddenly became pregnant. She quit her job. I came out of retirement.”
“As an ex-interrogator who speaks fluent Arabic,” said Leena. “When was that?”
“2002.”
“Perfect timing.”
“I didn’t want to go back into the Company, so I joined a private security outfit. They paid more. I could get triple-time if I went to Afghanistan or, later, Iraq.”
“Abu Ghraib?”
“I was there, but not down in the cells with the 372nd Military Police Company,” said Schafer defensively. “The idea was to earn as much as I could as quickly as possible and get back to my retirement.”
“So they didn’t include a course on how money works on the human brain?” said Leena.
“How’s that?”
“The more you make, the more you need, the more you want.”
Schafer sipped his drink, shrugged. He felt something like the discomfort of incipient piles.
“So,” she said, “your spying days are over. Your interrogating days are finished. You don’t work for anybody anymore. You should be back in your retirement. So what are you doing in Hamburg, Roland?”
Silence. Not even traffic noise penetrated the density of the glazing. An invisible clock ticked somewhere. Maybe it was in his head. He didn’t know precisely why, something to do with their earlier intimacy and his strange, retrospective day, but he decided to do something uncharacteristic: to reveal himself.
“I’m atoning for my sins,” he said.
“That’s a strange thing to be doing here,” said Leena. “You’d be better off in Westphalia with Our Lady of Aachen for that kind of thing.”
“I was born in Hamburg,” said Schafer. “My parents moved to the States when I was twelve years old. Then I worked here in the eighties. It seemed like the perfect place to come to remember who I used to be.”
“And what are these sins?”
Schafer was surprised to find himself in exactly the mode he tried to engender in his interrogees: confessional. And he knew how she’d got him there. Because he wanted it.
“The company I was working for offered me a special assignment. It was a lot of money,” said Schafer. “You’ve heard of ‘extraordinary rendition’?”
Leena nodded.
“I operated in a number of ‘black sites’ in Eastern Europe.”
“What are they?”
“Places where terror suspects who’d been ‘extracted’ on the ‘extraordinary rendition’ program could be interrogated, using an ‘alternative set of procedures,’” said Schafer, the sweat coming up on his palms. “It had been decided that the Third Geneva Convention did not apply to prisoners in the war on terror.”
“You don’t have to use military speak in here,” she said. “I was brought up on collateral damage.”
“After the London bombings in July 2007 I was offered another assignment that was so secret it was only referred to by its code name: Wordpainter. There were three of us. We were referred to as the Truth Squad. We were all outside contractors and we were given a special memo.”