Olen Steinhauer - The Nearest Exit

Guten Abend, Frau.

Her answer: an indecipherable grunt.

That will be ten euro sixty.

No reply, no smile, nothing to suggest a man was even standing in front of her. Only the exact-change deposit on the counter, sometimes a ten-euro bill with fifty and ten cents, sometimes a precollected pile of coins, but always exact. Then she’d pocket the candy bar, grab the bottle by the neck, and ignore his farewell as she shuffled her enormous weight out the door.

Tonight, though, would be different.

Ekhard Junker, his sweets distributor, had raised the price of their Snickers bars five cents. So tonight, after six months, she would put down too little money with those plump, gnawed fingers, and Hasad would have the pleasure of informing her that she’d paid too little.

This, at least, would be something.

He had lived in Munich since the mideighties, arriving with a wave of Turkish laborers that came to do those jobs the West Germans considered beneath them. Construction, mining, recycling collection, staffing convenience stores. For a long time, Hasad had regretted his decision to leave Ankara. The Bavarians were a petty, closed race of pale bigots. The money he sent back to his parents and wife couldn’t be ignored, though, so he stuck it out, finally sending for his family in 1992. By that time, Germans from the East were taking over previously Turkish jobs-nothing was beneath those Ossis-and many of his friends talked seriously about returning home. Not Hasad. Unlike his friends, he hadn’t pissed away his earnings on liquor and nightclubs. He’d saved, and began scouring the Süddeutsche Zeitung for property. He was going to run his own business.

When he finally settled on this store in Pullach, an industrial suburb south of Munich, the building had been empty a year. The owner, a clever Bavarian who’d decided he was too good for the service industry, tried to squeeze as much as possible out of Hasad, but he clearly didn’t know what he was in for, because the art of negotiation is a Turk’s birthright.

It wasn’t all anise and cinnamon, though. After two years, in late 2001, chilly tall men from the German foreign intelligence service, the BND, whose headquarters was just up the street, began visiting. They checked and rechecked his immigration papers, the deeds to his business, and his financial spreadsheets. They asked about his friends, sometimes flashing photographs of dour-looking Arabs, wondering if he, or someone he knew, might be under the sway of radical Muslim clerics.

Over the years, as his business blossomed (he’d opened a second location on the eastern edge of Munich last year, run by his son, Ahmed), their visits became less frequent, their expressions steadily more apologetic. “Just the way it is,” one of them, a soft-spoken German Muslim, admitted. “When you’re this close to the center of operations, you’ve got to expect it.”

In the last half year, though, they’d left him alone. Either they were finally convinced of his loyalty or they no longer cared. For that same amount of time, he’d nightly faced this obese, mute woman who was now trudging back to him, the chilled Riesling in one hand, a Snickers bar in the other. He gave her the same nightly smile of welcome, and as usual she ignored it.

In all honesty, she annoyed him more than those tough guys from the intelligence service ever had. Looking into her weary, grouchy face, cheeks covered in downy hair that made her almost mannish, he couldn’t imagine that she’d ever been attractive in youth. Add to that a personality of indistinct grunts and a genetic inability to smile-no. He couldn’t imagine that any man had ever loved this woman. She had a haircut like a young boy’s, trimmed around the ears, and unplucked, shabby eyebrows. She was the type who drank her white wine and chewed her candy and fingernails in a dusty house full of cats and cat hair, whose only enjoyment came from insipid German soap operas.

She placed the wine and candy on the counter and reached into her cheap, plastic-looking purse for the money.

“Guten Abend, Frau,” Hasad said, smiling as he typed the items into the register.

Her grunt, as ever, said nothing as she plopped down a small pile of coins. Hasad counted the money, fingers dancing. She reached for her supplies, and he cleared his throat, raising a warning hand.

“Moment, Frau. As you can see,” he said, pointing at the register’s display, “the price is ten sixty-five. It’s the Snickers. It’s more expensive now.”

She raised her heavy-lidded eyes to the display, then turned to him. “When did this happen?”

Her voice, surprisingly, was high and melodic. He had to fight the urge to shout, Success! Instead he said, “This morning, the distributor raised his price. I have no choice but to do the same.”

“Oh.” She nodded, perhaps confused, then went back to her purse.

As prescient as he’d been so far, Hasad couldn’t have predicted what followed.

The front doors slid electrically open as a young, broad-chested man in a suit jogged in, out of breath. Hasad recognized him from those old question-and-answer sessions. One of the ruder interrogators, who wore his authority with about as much humility as an Ankara cop-which is to say, with no humility at all.

Instinctively, Hasad raised his hands, but the man didn’t even notice him. He instead went to the woman.

“Director Schwartz. Sorry to bother you, but there’s a situation.”

Unlike this damp-faced visitor, Frau Schwartz-no, Director Schwartz-wasn’t in a rush. She was rooting around for Hasad’s five cents. “What kind of situation?” she said into her purse.

“Gap.”

She looked up at the man, who was a head taller, and blinked. Hasad would later reflect that she seemed angry, though at the moment he was too busy dealing with his shock. The obese alcoholic with all the cats was the boss of these tough young men.

She said, “You have five cents?”

The man colored and groped in his pockets.

She turned to Hasad with an apologetic smile. Were it not for the strange, unnerving way that expression twisted her features, he would’ve been elated. “I’m sorry, Herr al-Akir. I have to run. But this gentleman will pay the balance.” She grabbed her wine and Snickers and walked directly out to the parking lot, where she climbed into the rear of a waiting BMW.

There was a sudden clap as the man banged a five-cent coin on the counter. At that moment, the car roared off, and he stared, aghast. They had left without him.

Hasad didn’t even notice the money. He was consumed by a single thought: She knew my name.

“Well?” said the man. “My receipt?”

As the BMW turned back onto Heilmannstrasse, Erika Schwartz stared at the small, mustached man sitting next to her in the backseat. “Well?”

Oskar Leintz had a printed page in his lap that was almost destroyed by nervous folding and unfolding. “She’s dead.”

“When?”

“Body was found a half hour ago.”

“In Gap?”

“Outside. On the way to the airport. The French agent is dead, too.”

“Press?”

“Too late. They’re already running with it.”

While Oskar and Gerhardt, the driver, showed their papers to the guards manning the reinforced concrete gate, she took out her cell phone, and by the time they reached the modern building known as the Situation and Information Center, she had finished with Inspector Hans Kuhn of the Berlin Kriminalpolizei. “I don’t get it,” he kept repeating. “It makes no sense.”

“Of course it makes sense,” she snapped. Despite their long-standing friendship, the Berlin detective’s mawkish helplessness could be irritating. “We just don’t know the logic behind it yet.”