“Completely.”
Arkadin folded away his phone, disentangled himself from Devra, and went up to the bar. “A double Oban on rocks.”
The bartender, a huge man with tattooed arms, squinted at him. “What’s an Oban?”
“It’s a single-malt scotch, you moron.”
The bartender, polishing an old-fashioned glass, grunted. “What does this look like, the prince’s palace? We don’t have single-malt anything.”
Arkadin reached over, snatched the glass out of the bartender’s hands, and smashed it bottom-first into his nose. Then, as blood started to gush, he hauled the dazed man over the bar top and proceeded to beat him to a pulp.
I can’t go back to Munich,” Petra said. “Not for a while, anyway. That’s what he told me.”
“Why would you jeopardize your job to kill someone?” Bourne said.
“Please!” She glanced at him. “A hamster couldn’t live on what they paid me in that shithole.”
She was behind the wheel, driving on the autobahn. They had already passed the outskirts of the city. Bourne didn’t mind; he needed to stay out of Munich himself until the furor over Egon Kirsch’s death died down. The authorities would find someone else’s ID on Kirsch, and though Bourne had no doubt they’d eventually find out his real identity, he hoped by that time to have retrieved the plans from Arkadin and be flying back to Washington. In the meantime the police would be searching for him as a witness to the murders of both Kirsch and Jens.
“Sooner or later,” Bourne said, “you’re going to have to tell me who hired you.”
Petra said nothing, but her hands trembled on the wheel, an aftermath of their harrowing chase.
“Where are we going?” Bourne said. He wanted to keep her engaged in conversation. He felt that she needed to connect with him on some personal level in order to open up. He had to get her to tell him who had ordered her to kill Egon Kirsch. That might answer the question of whether he was connected to the man who’d gunned down Jens.
“Home,” she said. “A place I never wanted to go back to.”
“Why is that?”
“I was born in Munich because my mother traveled there to give birth to me, but I’m from Dachau.” She meant the town, of course, after which the adjacent Nazi concentration camp had been named. “No parent wants Dachau to appear on their child’s birth certificate, so when their time comes the women check into a Munich hospital.” Hardly surprising: Almost two hundred thousand people were exterminated during the camp’s life, the longest of the war, since it was the first built, becoming the prototype for all the other KZ camps.
The town itself, situated along the Amper River, lay some twelve miles northwest of Munich. It was unexpectedly bucolic, with its narrow cobbled streets, old-fashioned street lamps, and quiet tree-lined lanes.
When Bourne observed that most of the people they passed looked contented enough, Petra laughed unpleasantly. “They go around in a permanent fog, hating that their little town has such a murderous burden to carry.”
She drove through the center of Dachau, then turned north until they reached what once had been the village of Etzenhausen. There, on a desolate hill known at the Leitenberg, was a graveyard, lonely and utterly deserted. They got out of the car, walked past the stone stela with the sculpted Star of David. The stone was scarred, furry with blue lichen; the overhanging firs and hemlocks blocked out the sky even on such a bright midwinter afternoon.
As they walked slowly among the gravestones, she said, “This is the KZ-Friedhof, the concentration camp cemetery. Through most of Dachau’s life, the corpses of the Jews were piled up and burned in ovens, but toward the end when the camp ran out of coal, the Nazis had to do something with the corpses, so they brought them up here.” She spread her arms wide. “This is all the memorial the Jewish victims got.”
Bourne had been in many cemeteries before, and had found them peculiarly peaceful. Not KZ-Friedhof, where a sensation of constant movement, ceaseless murmuring made his skin crawl. The place was alive, howling in its restless silence. He paused, squatted down, and ran his fingertips over the words engraved on a headstone. They were so eroded it was impossible to read them.
“Did you ever think that the man you shot today might have been a Jew?” he said.
She turned on him sharply. “I told you I needed the money. I did it out of necessity.”
Bourne looked around them. “That’s what the Nazis said when they buried their last victims here.”
A flash of anger momentarily burned away the sadness in her eyes. “I hate you.”
“Not nearly as much as you hate yourself.” He rose, handed her back her gun. “Here, why don’t you shoot yourself and end it all?”
She took the gun, aimed it at him. “Why don’t I just shoot you?”
“Killing me will only make matters worse for you. Besides…” Bourne opened up one palm to show her the bullets he’d taken out of her weapon.
With a disgusted sound, Petra holstered her gun. Her face and hands looked greenish in what light filtered through the evergreens.
“You can make amends for what you did today,” Bourne said. “Tell me who hired you.”
Petra eyed him skeptically. “I won’t give you the money, if that’s what you’re angling for.”
“I have no interest in your money,” Bourne said. “But I think the man you shot was going to tell me something I needed to know. I suspect that’s why you were hired to kill him.”
Some of the skepticism leached out of her face. “Really?”
Bourne nodded.
“I didn’t want to kill him,” she said. “You understand that.”
“You walked up to him, put the gun to his head, and pulled the trigger.”
Petra looked away, at nothing in particular. “I don’t want to think about it.”
“Then you’re no better than anyone else in Dachau.”
Tears spilled over, she covered her face with her hands, and her shoulders shook. The sounds she made were like those Bourne had heard on Leitenberg.
At length, Petra’s crying jag was spent. Wiping her reddened eyes with the backs of her hands, she said, “I wanted to be a poet, you know? I always equated being a poet with being a revolutionary. I, a German, wanted to change the world or, at least, do something to change the way the world saw us, to do something to scoop that core of guilt out of us.”
“You should have become an exorcist.”
It was a joke, but such was her mood that she found nothing funny in it. “That would be perfect, wouldn’t it?” She looked at him with eyes still filled with tears. “Is it so naive to want to change the world?”
“Impractical might be a better word.”
She cocked her head. “You’re a cynic, aren’t you?” When he didn’t answer, she went on. “I don’t think it’s naive to believe that words-that what you write-can change things.”
“Why aren’t you writing then,” he said, “instead of shooting people for money? That’s no way to earn a living.”
She was silent for so long, he wondered whether she’d heard him.
At last, she said, “Fuck it, I was hired by a man named Spangler Wald-he’s just past being a boy, really, no more than twenty-one or two. I’d seen him around the pubs; we had coffee together once or twice. He said he was attending the university, majoring in entropic economics, whatever that is.”
“I don’t think anyone can major in entropic economics,” Bourne said.
“Figures.” Petra was still sniffling. “I have to get my bullshit meter recalibrated.” She shrugged. “I never was good with people; I’m better off communing with the dead.”
Bourne said, “You can’t take on the grief and rage of so many people without being buried alive.”
She looked off at the rows of crumbling headstones. “What else can I do? They’re forgotten now. Here’s where the truth lies. If you omit the truth, isn’t that worse than a lie?”