Olen Steinhauer - The Tourist

"So she wouldn't work with you," Simmons said, thinking she understood.

"Quite the contrary! As I said, Ellen was smart. Jordan was just foreplay. If you understand my meaning. Her little ragtag group would learn to shoot and blow things up, but afterward they would need support. At the time, Moscow was generous. She wanted to use me. I, on the other hand, was failing in my duty already. You see, I'd fallen in love with her. She was ferocious."

Simmons nodded, as if all this made sense to her, but it didn't. She was too young to have known the nuances of the cold war, and her parents' stories of the revolutionary sixties made it sound like the Decade of Cliche. Falling in love with a revolutionary meant falling in love with a suicide bomber chanting disconnected verses from the Qu'ran. That was a few steps beyond her imaginative abilities. "Her father, William-Ellen didn't talk to him, did she?"

All the good humor bled from Primakov's face. "No, and I never would have encouraged her to do so. That man is a true shit. Do you know what he did to Ellen? To Ellen and her sister, Wilma?"

Simmons shook her head.

"He deflowered them. At the age of thirteen. It was their comingof-age present." Decades on, the anger was still with him. "When I think of all the good people who died, who were killed by my people and your people over the last sixty years, I find it humiliating-yes, humiliating-that a man like that continues to breathe."

"Well, he's not living well."

"Living at all is too good for him."

She wouldn't make Weaver's ten o'clock interview at the MCC, so she excused herself and called from beside the cash register. Fitzhugh answered after two rings. "Yes?"

"Listen, I'm running late, maybe a half hour."

"What's going on?"

She almost told him, but changed her mind. "Please, just wait for me in the MCC lobby."

By the time she returned, Primakov had finished half his breakfast. She apologized for the interruption, then pushed on: "So. You became Ellen's lover."

"Yes." He wiped his lips with a napkin. "In the fall of 1968, for about two months, we were lovers, to my delight. Then, one day, she was gone. She and her friends had simply vanished. I was in shock."

"What happened?"

"Arafat himself told me. They'd tried to sneak out that night. They were caught, of course, and held in a little room on the outskirts of the camp. He was called to make a judgment. Ellen explained that she and her friends were taking the fight out of the Middle East and into America. They would attack U.S. support for Israel at its roots."

"You mean, kill Jews?"

"Yes," said Primakov. "Arafat believed it and let them go, but Ellen…" He raised and shook his hands in evangelical praise. "What a woman! She'd fooled one of the world's great liars. She wasn't interested in killing Jews-Ellen was no anti-Semite."

After a year in a PLO training camp, daily indoctrination, and maps of Israel marked up with targets? Simmons wasn't sure she believed that. "How do you know?"

"She told me herself. Six months later, in May 1969."

"And you believed her."

"Yes, I did," he said, and his sincerity almost made her believe as well. "By then, I'd been transferred to West Germany to look into those revolutionary student groups that were just starting to destroy banks and department stores. One day in Bonn, I heard that an American girl was looking for me. My heart leapt-really, it did. I wanted it to be her, and it was. She was alone now, on the run. She and her friends had robbed a bank and set fire to a police station. She fled to California, for help from her beloved Black Panthers. They told her she was insane. Then she remembered Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin's bombing of the Schneider department store the previous year. She thought she'd find some common sentiments in Germany." He sighed, licking his lips. "And that, my dear, she did. Then, within a few weeks of her arrival, she heard about a chubby Russian asking a lot of questions."

"Chubby?"

He looked down at his thin frame. "I didn't worry enough in those days."

"How did the meeting go?"

Primakov rocked his head, smiling at this thought or that. "At first, it was all business. As Ellen would say, sexual affairs that obstruct the normal processes of the revolution are nothing more than destructive bourgeois sentimentality. Maybe she was right, I don't know. All I know is that I was even more in love with her, and when she demanded an outline of West German revolutionary activity, I obliged instantly. I introduced her to some comrades who, generally, thought she was a wreck. They thought some of her more radical views showed signs of imbalance. You see, German freedom fighters worked as a family, but by then Ellen was rejecting even the notion of family as bourgeois. Anyway," he said, "we became lovers again, then she got pregnant. Toward the end of sixty-nine. She was on the Pill, but I suppose it slipped her mind occasionally. She was, after all, very busy planning the overthrow of all Western institutions."

Primakov stroked his cheek again, and Simmons waited.

"She wanted an abortion. I argued against it. I was becoming increasingly bourgeois in those days, and I wanted a child to bind us together. But with that shit as a father, how could she ever view families in a positive light? So I said, If revolutionaries don't have children, how is the revolution to continue? I think that finally convinced her. The name Milo was her idea. I later learned that Milo had been her beloved dog when she was young. Strange. That was also when she changed her own name to Elsa. It was partly for security-I supplied new papers-but it was also psychological. A baby was her entree into a new revolutionary world. She felt she should be reborn as a liberated woman."

"You stayed together?"

Again, he rocked his head. "That's the irony, you see. I wanted Milo because I thought he would pull Ellen closer to me. But now, she was one hundred percent liberated. I was just a petit-bourgeois male. An occasional penis-that's what she called me. She had other occasional penises at her disposal. I became one of a crowd."

"That must have hurt."

"It did, Special Agent Simmons. It truly did. At best, I was an occasional babysitter, while she went off with her comrades to start their famous trail of destruction. I'd gained a son, but I'd lost her. Finally, in a fit of frustration, I demanded-demanded, mind you- that we get married. What was I thinking? I'd made the final bourgeois compromise, and she didn't want her son poisoned by my wicked ideas. By then it was seventy-two, and the Red Army Faction was in full swing. Moscow was breathing down my neck to get control of these kids. When I told them it was out of our hands, they recalled me." Primakov opened his hands to show that everything was out of them. "I was desperate by then. I even tried kidnapping Milo." He laughed quietly. "Really, I did. I assigned two of my best men to the task, but by then a new agent from Moscow had started sniffing around. He notified the Center, and they abruptly changed my agents' orders. My own men were now to take me, at gunpoint, back to Moscow." He took a long breath and let it out loudly, staring across the now-busy restaurant. "That, my dear, is how I left West Germany in disgrace."

"What do you know about what followed?"

"A lot," he admitted. "I still had access to reports. I followed Ellen's career the way little girls follow their favorite pop singers. The RAF trials were headlines all over Europe. Ellen wasn't picked up, though. I heard that she had fled to East Germany with her baby, then that she had returned to join the Movement 2 June. And then, in 1974, police discovered the body of Ulrich Schmiicker in the Grunewald, outside Berlin. He'd been killed by his own Movement 2 June comrades." He paused, frowning. "Was Ellen there? Did she take part in Schmucker's execution? I don't know. But within three months she resurfaced in North Carolina, at her sister's house. She asked Wilma to take Milo as her own. Ellen must have known that things wouldn't end well for her, and this was the only way to protect him. She made no demands for a radical education, only insisted that he not be brought, ever, to his grandparents. And he never was."