“Still,” I told him, “you should have it looked at.”
He shook his head. “There are some antibiotics in my pack. I’ll be fine.”
“Do you have a pocketknife?”
He nodded. “In the pack, front pocket.”
I retrieved the knife and the antibiotics, then peeled the towel back and cut the arm of his shirt away. He was right; it was just a flesh wound, but a bad one, deep enough that it should have gotten a couple of stitches. The skin around it was pink and puckered, flushed with the first hints of infection.
“You need antiseptic and bandages,” I said, folding the towel, laying the still-clean side of it back on his shoulder. “I’m going to find a pharmacy.”
There was a night-duty pharmacy not far from the hotel, and I found it easily, following the desk clerk’s directions. On the way back to the room I stopped at an épicerie and bought some rudimentary dinner supplies: cheese, ham, a loaf of bread, a bag of oranges, some bottled water, and a couple of bottles of Kronenbourg.
Brian had showered and changed into a clean T-shirt by the time I got back. I doctored his cut as best as I could, swabbing it with iodine and antibacterial ointment, then covering it with clean gauze. He’d have a nasty scar, that much was certain, but other than that he’d be fine.
When I was done, I cracked the two beers and spread the preparations for our cold meal on the room’s battered little table.
“Thanks,” Brian said, tearing off a chunk of bread, then cutting a thick wedge from the small round of Camembert I’d selected.
I took a pull off my Kronenbourg. “It was my job at the abbey,” I said, “making sure everyone ate.”
“You cooked for the nuns?” Brian asked, washing the bread down with a swig of beer.
I nodded. “There were two of us who did all the kitchen work.”
“Do you miss it?”
“Yes.” I thought about the question for a moment, the inadequacy of language. To say merely that I missed the sisters and the abbey was such a gross understatement that it verged on sin. It was not just the only home I had ever known but the grounding on which my entire being was built.
“And your life before?”
I took an orange from the bag and pierced the skin with my thumb. “You mean, do I miss it?”
Brian nodded.
“There’s nothing there to miss,” I said, stripping the peel away, separating the sections.
“But you said there’s a child. You must think about the child.”
“Sometimes.”
“There’s nothing you remember? Nothing at all?”
I shook my head, but it was a lie. In truth there were pictures, flashes so brief and fragmentary I had never let myself trust them. And there were things I was sure of, too, sensations of touch and smell that were too visceral to be anything but real.
“What about you?” I asked, putting a section of the orange in my mouth. “You must miss your family.”
Brian shrugged. “I go back every few years. There’s less and less to miss. My parents were older when they had me. My dad’s got Alzheimer’s, and my mom’s so worn down from taking care of him she’s crazy in her own way.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. This is the life I signed on for.”
“Do you ever regret it?”
He took a sip of his beer. “All the time. But I’ve never been able to see myself doing anything else, either.”
“I guess I’ve sort of screwed things up for you.”
“I’ve got some money put away.”
“What will you do?”
“I don’t know. Disappear. There’s a little island off Tortola with a wreck of a bar I’ve always wanted to buy. But first we need to straighten this mess out, don’t we?”
I nodded. “Who do you think they were, the couple at the tearoom?”
“Associates of my former employer, I suppose. Contract hires, like me.”
“Do you know anyone at the NSA, anyone we might go to with the pen drive?”
Brian shook his head. “I’ve got a few contacts in Central Intelligence here, but I wouldn’t trust any of them right now. Like I said, I think this runs deeper than just one person.”
I cut myself a piece of bread and took some of the ham. I was hungrier than I’d thought, and the Kronenbourg was starting to go to my head. “What about Werner?” I asked. “Can you get in touch with him?”
Brian looked at me incredulously.
“He’s the only person I’m sure knows who our mystery man on the tape is. And he knew my mother. There was a photograph in his office, a picture of the three of them together.”
“In Pakistan?”
“Vietnam. I’d seen it before, only I couldn’t remember where, another copy. My mother must have had one.”
“He would have killed you, Eve,” Brian reminded me.
“He wants what’s on the pen drive. Maybe we can make a deal. A copy of the tape for whatever he knows.”
“This is crazy,” Brian said.
“If you have a better idea, I’m all ears.”
We ate in silence for a while, each of us mulling our own thoughts. I knew my plan was sketchy, but it seemed like the best option. I wanted my life back, and from what I could tell, Werner had a big chunk of it to give.
Finally, Brian drained the last of his beer and set the empty bottle on the table. “I’ve got a friend,” he said, the reluctance audible in his voice. “In Bratislava. A pilot. He flies for Werner sometimes. He owes me a favor or two.”
“Thank you,” I told him.
Brian shook his head. “Don’t thank me yet.”
We left early the next morning and drove east, through Strasbourg and Munich and on toward Salzburg and Vienna. It was close to midnight when we crossed the border into Slovakia, heading past the dark remnants of the iron curtain toward the Danube and Bratislava. We hadn’t bothered with papers when we’d taken the old SEAT, and it took some slick talking on Brian’s part and a one-hundred-euro note to convince the border guard that the car wasn’t stolen. It was snowing when he finally waved us through, fat wet flakes settling like dander on the guard’s dark wool coat.
We could see the space-age turret of the Novy Most long before we reached the city, the Soviet-era bridge hovering over the Danube, shadowing the old city’s quaint buildings like an invading spacecraft. On the hilltop beyond, its dour stone facade washed in light, its towers looking imperiously down on the town, sat the old Bratislava castle.
“What time is it?” Brian asked as we motored through a vast stretch of socialist suburbs on the southern side of the Danube.
“Almost one,” I said, watching the endless high-rises glide by. It was a grim utopia, the monolithic buildings no one’s idea of inviting. Here was a place built to contain, designed for easy eavesdropping and the systematic dampening of resistance. And here, once more, was a place I knew.
“I’ve been here,” I said.
Brian glanced over at me. “Do you remember something?”
“No. It’s just a feeling. A long time ago, I think. Before the end of the cold war.” I’d felt it at the border, too, a visceral reaction, a dark memory of barbed wire and Kalashnikovs, of serious young men in Soviet uniforms who’d slid mirrors under the car.
Hannah Boyle had been here as well. According to Helen, she’d died here, too. And for some reason I’d chosen her name to use as my own.
We started onto the bridge and over the river. It was snowing hard now, veiling the black water of the Danube in a lacy curtain, obscuring the waterfront and the old city beyond.
“Should we find a place to spend the night?” I asked.
“I thought we could try and hook up with Ivan,” Brian said. “It’s about time for him to be up and about.”
Our first stop was a jazz bar in the Old City, a cramped, smoky little place around the corner from the Primatial Palace. The crowd was young and hip, pale thin boys in black jeans and leather jackets and tough-looking college girls cultivating the physical style of longtime heroin addicts.