They’d had more than a proletariat’s appreciation for wine, I thought, as we turned down a narrow passageway and stopped before another locked door. Werner once again drew a key from his pocket.
“You may ask Mr. Stringer what you like,” he said, holding the key to the lock. “I believe he is ready to tell you whatever you might want to know.”
There was something in his voice that I recognized instantly, a tone I’d heard that morning in his office in Marrakech. No, I thought, Stringer had not come here of his own accord, and he wouldn’t be leaving of it either.
Werner opened the door to reveal a small square room, lit wanly by a single bulb. It was, in fact, much like my quarters at the Casbah, sparse and bare, furnished with a cot, a chair, and a bucket. Seated in the chair or, more accurately, slumped in it, his arms bound behind him, his feet bare, was a man in his late fifties with a thick mop of salt-and-pepper hair.
There had obviously been some attempt to tidy both the room and the man for my visit, but the reality of the situation was undisguisable. The smells of vomit and feces lingered in the small space, and there was blood on the man’s face and filthy shirt. From the looks of him, Robert Stringer had been Werner’s guest for some time. No doubt Werner’s men had found him not long after our meeting on Slavin Hill.
“Hello, Cathy,” Stringer said, looking up at me. His left eye was swollen nearly shut, his lower lip puffy and split. “I’ve been expecting you.”
I must have blanched at the name, because Stringer’s cracked mouth opened in a weak but contemptuous grimace.
“Yes,” he sneered. “Catherine Reed, same as your mother.”
“It was you who sent the men to the abbey,” I said, looking for something, anything, that would justify Werner’s cruelty. I knew all too well what it meant to be on the receiving end of Bruns Werner’s hospitality.
Stringer looked at Werner, then back at me. “Yes,” he admitted.
“Had you thought I was dead?” I asked.
“It’s what I was told, yes.”
“By the men in the car, the ones who put me in the field that day. They worked for you, too?”
Stringer nodded.
“Where was I going?” I asked.
“You were coming to Geneva,” Stringer said. “To meet me. You’d called from Morocco to say you’d seen the tape and me on it. You were upset. I told you I could explain.”
“You didn’t know then that I’d left the pen drive in Tangier?”
“No,” Stringer said.
“But you knew I’d been to Werner’s Casbah, that I had the tape. How?”
Stringer opened his mouth to answer, but I stopped him. “No,” I said. “Let’s start at the beginning.” I thought for an instant, trying to understand where that might be, in the warehouse in Peshawar or years earlier. “You knew my mother in Vietnam,” I said finally.
Stringer glanced at Werner again, and in the look that passed between them I understood that the two men had never been friends, that from the beginning she had come between them.
“We were friends,” Stringer said, the last word hard and bitter in his mouth.
Of the two men in the photograph, he had seemed the more likely choice for Catherine, tall and lean, so much more elegant than the awkward Werner, and yet it was Werner my mother had picked.
“You would have liked to have been more, wouldn’t you?” I asked. “Is that why you had her killed in Peshawar? Because she loved someone else?”
Stringer cleared his throat and spit. A dark globule of phlegm and blood landed on the stone floor at Werner’s feet. “Catherine died because someone sent her snooping where she didn’t belong. She came to me beforehand, you know,” he said, addressing Werner. “She said you’d given her a line on a story, some American using the CIA pipeline in an unusual way. I tried to tell her it was garbage, tried to get her to let it go, but she wouldn’t. You know how Catherine was.”
“So you stood by while Jibril’s men killed her?” I asked.
Stringer raised his head and looked directly at Werner. There was a recklessness to him that came with being so badly broken. “She shouldn’t have come.”
Werner clenched and unclenched his fists, rage in his every pore, though whether at himself or at Stringer, I couldn’t tell.
“Tell me about Hannah Boyle,” I said. “I was with her that night, wasn’t I?”
“Sharp as a tack,” Stringer said, leaning forward, straining against his ropes. “You were always so smart.”
“I talked to Stanislav Divin. He told me about the hashish.”
“I was just keeping a promise. Catherine didn’t tell you she had a daughter, did she?” he asked Werner, then turned back to me. “When she came to me in Peshawar, she told me she was afraid. She asked me to look out for you if anything happened to her.”
“And you did, only not in the way she might have meant.”
Stringer’s eyes flared. “If it weren’t for me, you’d still be sipping gruel in a Slovak prison.”
“You got Divin to take my name off the report,” I said.
“I saved you,” Stringer told me. “You may have survived the accident, but by the time I found out what had happened you were sitting in a cell in Bratislava looking at twenty more years. I made a deal for you. It wasn’t easy.”
“Only your generosity didn’t come without strings.”
“I gave you a life with meaning. It was what you wanted, what you all wanted. There were so many idealists here then that this country stank of them, and you wanted in as much as anyone else. Just to be part of it, instead of some pathetic life trucking drugs across the border. And I gave it to you.”
“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.