Olen Steinhauer - The Nearest Exit

So when Einner said that he was closing in on a copy in Bern, Milo could chart the clues that had brought him so far. A name engraved on the rear of a tombstone outside Malmö, Sweden. An address included in the records of that name, of a nonexistent patient in the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire, a Toulouse teaching hospital. On one of the exterior walls of that address in the north of Milan, the hardly visible polyurethane words MARIANS JAZZROOM. Einner was nearly there. Milo wondered, with a tinge of despair, just what he would make of his collected wisdom.

Einner was in the toilet when the knock on the door came. It was 11:00 P.M.

“Get that, will you?” Einner called, as if this were his room. “And don’t ever say I don’t take care of you!”

Through the peephole, Milo saw a wide-angled view of two women with faux-fur coats, short skirts, and tiny purses. They not only dressed the same but looked the same, and when he opened the door he realized they were twins.

With a rough working-class accent, one said, “James ’ere?”

“Be right out!” he called over the flushing toilet. “Make them some drinks, Sebastian!”

Milo invited them in and scooped up his phone. They peered around the room as if they’d never been in a hotel before, which he seriously doubted. One alighted on the lines of cocaine. “My kinda party, innit.”

“I’ll be back with the ice,” Milo said. They were already sitting down at the table, tightening the ten-pound note, when he closed the door behind himself. On his way down the corridor to the stairwell he heard Einner saying, “Where the fuck?”

Milo kept on until he had reached the hotel bar. He was suddenly ill, and for some inexplicable reason kept imagining James Einner with his throat cut. He drank gimlets to wash away the image. When he returned two hours later, the room was empty, but it stank.

The phone woke him at six. “Yeah?”

“Riverrun, past Eve.”

“And Adam’s.”

Drummond cleared his throat. “Looks like it’s verified.”

“Bad news.”

Milo heard papers shuffling through the line-if he was calling from New York, it was 1:00 A.M. there. “You’re going to Warsaw for the next one. It’ll take a little more time.”

“Okay.”

“How’s Einner treating you?”

“We’re old friends. But you knew that, of course.”

“Are you?” he said, then sighed. “Listen, I’ve gotten some word from a friend in Germany.”

“Friend? This have to do with-”

“It has to do with you, Hall. Your ethnic radar might not be so bad. Someone in German intelligence was looking for you, but I’m assured that it’s being taken care of.”

“Why were they looking for me?”

“It doesn’t matter. You should be clear now. If you do see them again, let me know. Got it?”

“Sure. That’s good news.”

“Good?”

“If the Germans are shadowing me, then a Chinese mole is no more likely than it was the day before yesterday.”

“It means we’re still deciding, Hall, which means you’re still vetting.”

He popped aspirin, a multivitamin, and two Nicorette-he’d left the Dexedrine in the hotel trash-then checked out. He tipped the doorman who found him a taxi, and nearly dozed on the ride to the airport, half dreaming of James Einner and his two friends.

Milo hadn’t slept with a woman since October, and that had been a clumsy, desperate attempt with his wife. A part of him wondered if he’d made a mistake sidestepping a night of mindless sex, if only because it carried no investment. Simplicity: just an easy trajectory toward orgasm. Unlike that last attempt in October, it might have been fun.

Fun.

You’re the least happy Tourist we’ve got.

His phone shivered on the M4, and he read the Warsaw instructions.

He was just in time to catch an eight twenty British Airways flight, and when he touched down at Frederic Chopin Airport a little before noon, he was nearly sick with hunger. The official guarding this Schengen entry point gave his Sebastian Hall passport a little more of an examination than he was used to, but in the end it was all the same. “Business or tourism?”

The answer rolled off his tongue without thought.

He picked up a bottle of Coke and a cheese sandwich, which he gobbled down before reaching the Avis rental counter. As he took the long, traffic-jammed road toward town, he drank the Coke too fast and it burned the back of his throat. At least it woke him up.

He’d last been to Warsaw in 2000, during that earlier time when he was known as Charles Alexander. Despite what James Einner and others believed, back then he was more anxiety and suicidal bluster than efficiency and purpose. Back then he took whatever drugs could keep him going-pills, powders, and the occasional syringe. He’d felt as if it were someone else’s body he was abusing.

Then he remembered why he’d come to Warsaw in 2000 and understood why he had walked out of his room the previous night. He felt childishly proud, knowing that Dr. Ray, the marriage counselor, would be impressed by his self-knowledge.

He’d come to buy information from a Lebanese traitor in the Bristol Hotel. The Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon had just ended, and in the inevitable internal shake-up that followed, this man feared for his position. So he was preparing for retirement by selling pieces of his extensive library of secrets to the Americans, the British, and the Israelis.

The purchase had gone smoothly, and at the end of it the door to the suite’s second room burst open and two Polish prostitutes danced in with bottles of champagne. The Lebanese grinned-he’d arranged a party to celebrate their newfound cooperation.

Milo hadn’t resisted, and it had been fun in its peculiar way, but it had been only as pleasurable as it could be for someone so disconnected from himself. Early the next year, though, he learned that, six months after their meeting, the Lebanese traitor had been found on a cannabis farm at the northern end of the Beqaa Valley, his throat cut and his tongue removed. Last night, he realized, that image had been triggered by the women, and he had somehow imagined that if he stayed Einner would end up mutilated.

How do you like that, Dr. Ray?

He came gradually into town, the open fields and sooty buildings slowly replaced by modern, postwar architecture. It was after two by the time he checked into the immense Marriott tower-he had no desire to revisit the Bristol-and while he knew he should immediately begin working on Dzubenko’s Warsaw story, he decided to take the rest of the day off. He had a vodka martini in the hotel’s Panorama bar, then lifted a complimentary Tribune and headed out to CDQ, an arty bar where he could drink in peace to the strains of what the pretty bartender told him was Charlotte Gainsbourg’s latest album, 5:55. Serge Gainsbourg’s daughter was an inspired coincidence, because until last year he’d listened incessantly to the father’s songbook, which had been a sure way to find a better mood. With everything that had gone bad, though, even his musical salvation had been contaminated, and he hadn’t listened to it since. Yet here he was, among the young art crowd of Warsaw, gazing at skinny girls and ugly paintings, listening to the daughter of the man who had once been able to bestow upon him so much joy. He ordered another drink and found a corner with enough light to read the Tribune.

The first article that caught his eye extensively quoted Reuters about the discovery of Adriana Stanescu’s body on a road that led to Marseille. The details, Milo noticed, were sketchy, and the press releases by the Berlin police suggested that Adriana had been captured and killed by human traffickers with Russian connections. He stuck more Nicorette in his mouth and tried to chew away the shakes.