Olen Steinhauer - The Tourist

Over the first three weeks of Milo 's month-and-a-half incarceration, there were three attempts on his life. One was by a bald fascist who thought his hands were weapons enough, until Milo crushed them in the bars of a neighbor's door. On two separate occasions others came at him with knives made of sharpened dining utensils, while their friends held Milo still. They landed him in the infirmary with his chest, thighs, and buttocks marked up.

Two days later, the second attacker, previously a hired fist for a

Newark crime syndicate, was discovered dead-quietly suffocated, not a print on him-under the black gang's bleachers. A wall of silence sprang up around Milo Weaver. He was a thorn in their side, they said among themselves, but sometimes it's best to just let a thorn stay where it is, lest it start to infect.

Periodically, Special Agent Janet Simmons came to visit. She wanted to verify details in his story, sometimes about his father, sometimes focusing on Tripplehorn, whose body had been discovered in the Kittatinny mountain range, west of Lake Hopatcong. He asked about Tina and Stephanie, and she always said that they were fine. Why didn't they come to see him? Simmons became uncomfortable. "I think Tina feels it would be difficult for Stephanie to take."

After three weeks, while he was resting in the infirmary to repair some wound or other, Tina finally came. The nurse wheeled him out to the visitation room, and they talked through phones, separated by bulletproof plastic.

Despite the circumstances (or because of them? he wondered), she looked good. She'd lost a few pounds, and that accentuated her cheekbones in a way he'd never seen before. He kept touching the separator window, but she wouldn't be lured into this mawkish expression of desire. When she spoke, it was as if she were reading from a prepared statement.

"I don't understand any of this, Milo. I don't pretend to. One moment you tell everyone that you murdered Tom, and the next moment Janet Simmons tells me you didn't. Which one is the lie, Milo?"

"I didn't kill Tom. That's the truth."

She grinned. Perhaps the answer was a relief; he couldn't tell anything from her face. She said, "You know, the funny thing is that I could take that. If you killed Stephanie's godfather, I really could take it. I've kept a big store of faith in you for many years, and I could believe that you killed him for the best of reasons. I could believe murder was justified. You see? That's faith. But this other thing. Your father. Father, Milo. Jesus!" Whatever prepared statement she had was crumbling now. "How fucking long were you going to wait to tell me about this? How long before Stephanie found out she had a grandfather?"

"I'm sorry about that," he said. "It's just… I've lied about it since I was a kid. I lied to the Company. After a while, it was as good as the truth to me."

There were tears in her eyes, but she wasn't crying. She wouldn't let herself break down, not in the visiting room of a prison in New Jersey. "That's not good enough. You understand? It's just not good enough."

He tried to change the subject: "How's Stef? What does she know?"

"She thinks you're on a job of some sort. A long-term job.”

“And?"

"And, what? You want me to say she misses her daddy? Yes, she does. But you know what? Her real father, Pat, has risen to the challenge. He picks her up from the sitter's, and he even cooks. He's turned out to be a pretty good guy."

"I'm glad," Milo said, though he wasn't. If Patrick made Stephanie happy, then that was fine, but he didn't trust that Patrick would remain around long enough. He was not a constant kind of person. Despite himself, he asked the worst imaginable question: "Are you and he…?"

"If we were, it wouldn't be your business anymore. Would it?"

That was really all he could take. He started to stand, but the knife wound in his chest barked back. Tina noticed the pain in his face. "Hey. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine," he said, hung up the phone, and called for a guard to help roll him back to the infirmary.

On September 10, a Monday, he got his final visit from Special Agent Janet Simmons. She told him that, finally, the evidence had been pieced together. She wouldn't say why it had taken so long. The blood in Grainger's house had matched the corpse found in the hills. She'd pulled in some favors with the French and gotten a DNA match connecting the corpse to the bottle of sleeping pills in Angela Yates's Paris apartment.

"I don't understand, Milo. You were innocent. You didn't kill

Grainger or Angela. As for the Tiger, I still don't know what to think."

Helpfully, Milo said, "I didn't kill him either."

"So, okay. You killed no one. And one thing I know for sure is that you never made a deal with Fitzhugh to protect your family- that was just window dressing."

Milo didn't answer.

She leaned closer to the window. "The question follows: Why couldn't you be up-front with me? Why the parade of misinformation? Why did your father have to manipulate me? It's fucking humiliating. I'm a reasonable person. I would've listened."

Milo thought about that. During those hours on the nineteenth floor, he'd wanted to do just that. But, again, he remembered why. "You wouldn't have believed me."

"I might have. Even if I didn't, I would have checked on your story."

"And found no evidence," he said, then remembered what the Tiger had told him two months and a lifetime ago. "I had to be elusive, because no decent intelligence agent believes anything she's told. The only way I could make you believe it was if you discovered it on your own, while thinking that I never meant to lead you to the truth."

She stared at him, perhaps feeling manipulated, perhaps feeling stupid, he didn't know. These days, he knew so little. Finally, she said, "Okay. Then what about this senator? Your father sent a couple guys posing as aides to a senator, Nathan Irwin, who were then posing as Company men. Why lead me to a senator?"

"You'll have to ask him that."

"You don't know?"

Milo shook his head. "I suppose the senator's connected to everything, but my father never told me.”

“What did he tell you?”

“He told me to trust him."

She nodded slowly, as if trust were a difficult concept to swallow. "Well, I guess it worked, eventually. And tomorrow, once the paperwork's finished, you'll be free."

"Free?"

"You've been cleared, haven't you?" She leaned back in her chair, the phone pressed to her ear. "I'm giving the warden an envelope with some money. Not a lot, just enough for a bus ticket to wherever you're going. Do you need a place to stay?"

"I've got a little place in Jersey."

"Oh, right. The Dolan apartment." She looked at the frame of the separation window. "I haven't talked to Tina in a while. Are you going to see her?"

"She needs more time."

"You're probably right." She paused. "You think it was worth it?”

“What?"

"All the secrecy about your parents. It's put a halt to your career, and Tina is… well, you might have ruined your marriage."

Milo didn't hesitate in his answer, because he'd thought of little else in that prison. "No, Janet. It wasn't worth it at all."

They separated with polite words, and Milo went back to his cell to pack his few belongings. Toothbrush, a couple of novels, and his notebook. It was a small bound pad in which he'd begun to turn myth into reality. On the inside cover he'd scribbled the black book.

Had they bothered to examine it, the guards would've been baffled by the five-digit numbers that filled it-they referenced pages, lines, and word counts from the prison library's edition of a Lonely Planet travel guide. The jaunty tone of the decoded version would have surprised anyone who knew Milo Weaver: