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.
“Don’t we all,” he agreed. Then he looked at Brian. “I will call Ivan in the next day or two.”
“We’ll be waiting,” Brian said.
Werner nodded and turned from us. It took him a while to cross the plaza, his heels kicking snow as he went. Alone, against the stark white plaza, with the monument and its monolithic pillar looming in front of him, he looked tired and defeated, just an old man on a winter morning. When he reached the memorial, he stopped and looked back at us, lingering briefly before disappearing from our view.
“Do you trust him to make this meeting with Stringer happen?” I asked Brian, as we started back toward where we’d parked the SEAT.
“Do you?” Brian asked.
“Yes,” I told him.
He nodded. “So do I.”
Ivan was already up and gone when we got back to the apartment, but he appeared almost immediately with breakfast supplies: fresh eggs, pastries, a loaf of bread, and a brand-new bottle of Russian vodka.
I’d been hard asleep and hadn’t heard him come in the night before, but from Ivan’s wan face and shaky hands I could tell he’d had another late night. There was a dark red bruise on the side of his neck, an oval the size and shape of a woman’s lips. I could see why some people found Ivan annoying, but there was also something fundamentally endearing about the Russian. There was an honesty to him, an unapologetic glee to his self-destruction that just made me like him.
“How did your meeting with the big guy go?” he asked, setting the food down, taking his coat off. “Everybody get what they wanted?”
“I hope so,” I said.
One of Ivan’s best qualities was his discretion. He hadn’t asked either of us why we’d wanted to meet Werner, just as he hadn’t pushed me on Hannah Boyle, and I was grateful to him for it.
“You got any plans for the next couple of days?” Brian asked.
Ivan shook his head. “I don’t have a flight until next week.”
“Good,” Brian told him. “We have some more business with Werner. He’s going to call you in the next day or two.”
“No problem, boss.” Ivan smiled, but I could tell he wasn’t at his cheery best. He set the pastries on a plate, put a pot of water on the stove to boil, and slumped down at the kitchen table with a cigarette. “I think I’m getting too old for this crap,” he admitted.
Brian laughed. “I think that happened a long time ago.”
Ivan’s cell phone rang, and he reached into the pocket of his coat to answer it, flashing Brian the middle finger of his free hand.
“Ivan,” he grunted into the receiver. A garbled voice crackled back at him.
Ivan mumbled something in Slovak, then got up and opened one of the kitchen drawers, pulled out a pencil and a piece of scrap paper, and scribbled a hasty note. A brief conversation ensued, with much laughter on Ivan’s side; then Ivan snapped the phone shut and turned to us.
“Got it,” he said triumphantly.
“Got what?” I asked.
“Stanislav Divin,” he said. “I talked to my friend at the police department while you guys were out. That was him calling back with Divin’s address. Apparently, he’s retired to the countryside, bought himself a little farm.” He handed me the piece of paper. “Some shithole outside of Kosice.”
I looked down at the paper, at Ivan’s barely legible scrawl. “Where’s Kosice?”
“Eastern Slovakia,” Brian offered. “Near the Hungarian border.”
“Can we get there by tonight?” I asked.
Brian looked at his watch. “There and back, if we leave soon.”
TWENTY-NINE
Catherine Reed. I said the words to myself as I peered out the SEAT’s back window at the fallow fields rushing by. The snow was thick and downy, the land beneath sculpted into shallow ripples by the last pass of the plow. Off in the distance the ghostly peaks of the Carpathians rose up through the ever-present Slovak industrial haze.
If all else failed, at least I had the name. That, coupled with what little else I knew, that Catherine had worked for CNN in Islamabad, that she’d died there in the summer of 1988, would surely be enough to find out more. Someone would know what had happened to her daughter, what had happened to me.
What did people do in situations like that? There would have been grandparents, aunts and uncles, a father. The same people who were taking care of the child I had left behind. Though I would have been old enough to take care of myself, I thought, calculating the best guess at my age against the timeline of history. I would have been somewhere around nineteen or twenty in the summer of 1988.
A truck passed us, barreling down the highway, spewing snow across the front windshield of the SEAT, and I felt my heart power up into my chest. The little car shuddered, pushed sideways by the truck’s wake. For an instant I thought of the Peugeot, the body crumpled like an aluminum can. But there was more to my fear than the fear of dying.
I could find her, I thought; not the little girl at the Cluny abbey, not this shadow daughter of my imaginings, but a real child. A real person, out of whose life I had walked one day, into whose life I somehow expected to return. She was out there, some part of her no doubt having forgotten, some other part waiting for me.
“Maniac,” Brian swore, struggling with the wheel as the truck disappeared down the highway.
Stanislav Divin’s farm was some twenty kilometers outside of Kosice, a ragtag little homestead nestled in the foothills of the Low Tatras. The address Ivan had given us was vague at best, and it took some time to make our way through the villages north of Kosice, stopping occasionally so that Brian could ask directions in his imperfect Slovak.
It was nearing sunset when we turned through Divin’s battered gate and started down the unplowed drive to the house. The property was worn but tidy, the outbuildings patched and repatched. It wasn’t much in the way of a farm, just a chicken coop, a small barn, and a couple of broken-down Skodas, but it was exactly the kind of place a city cop would dream of retiring to. I could only imagine it in the summertime, with the mountains green in the distance and the smell of freshly mowed hay.
Not wanting to scare Divin off, we purposely hadn’t called in advance, and I was relieved to see lights on in the house and a thin line of smoke snaking up from the chimney. As we pulled up to the house, the curtains in one of the front windows opened and a gray face peered out at us from behind the glass.
“I guess they know we’re here,” Brian said as he cut the engine and we climbed out of the SEAT.
The front door opened, and a woman in a wool shirt and pants appeared on the porch. She was close to Divin’s age, or what I would have guessed his age to be, a robust seventy-something, stocky and self-reliant. His wife, most likely.
Brian started toward the house, calling out in Slovak as he went, his tone light and genial.