Olen Steinhauer - The Nearest Exit

“And?”

He got up and started unboxing the video camera. “And I’ll see if I can hook this thing up to the television.”

As he settled on the floor and took out the camera and instructions and the pages of obligatory, multilingual warnings, she said, “So when did he hit you?”

“Drescher?”

“Yes, Drescher.”

He touched his brow, grinning. “The light in his stairwell doesn’t work. I would have told you immediately, but you might not have let me in.”

“You tripped and fell.”

“I’d like to see how well you negotiate those stairs.”

It took about fifteen minutes-

Oskar, despite his boyish love of modern technology, wasn’t adept at using it-and during that time room service delivered another bottle of Pinot Blanc with two wineglasses. The young girl who brought it up seemed amused at first by the scene in front of her: wine for two, an enormous old woman, and a scrawny, mustached man in his thirties sitting on the floor. Then she noticed the video camera and the man’s swollen eye, and her amusement seemed to turn to disgust; she was gone before Erika could dig out a tip.

Oskar had cued up the tape back at Drescher’s, at 16:13. The camera didn’t shoot straight across Gneisenaustrasse but at an angle, so that it could take in the store’s front door. From that angle the foreground included the sidewalk, parked cars, and the swish of traffic speeding past bare trees lining the median. The background was dominated by the apartment building and its wide courtyard entrance.

“There he is,” said Oskar, pointing to a black BMW turning into the courtyard.

She squinted at the hazy image, then reached for her reading glasses. “Did you get a license number?”

“It’s clearer on the way out.”

He fast-forwarded to 16:27, when a man emerged from the courtyard, checked his watch, and tried to look inconspicuous. He kept his head slumped between his shoulders, so that his face was hard to make out, but Erika guessed he was in his late thirties or early forties, 180 to 190 centimeters tall, dark-haired. Not heavy. Just like half Europe’s male population.

Erika was momentarily shaken when the man seemed to look directly at the camera, at her, and she said, “Does he see the camera?”

“I noticed that, too,” Oskar said as he took a sip of wine. “I don’t think so. I think he’s looking at this car.” He touched, in the foreground, the dark blue, almost black, front hood of some unknown make of automobile.

Between then and 16:37, the man disappeared from view again before reappearing and looking to his right, taking note of something and disappearing again. Among assorted people passing on the street, Erika spotted Adriana Stanescu. After all the photos that had been pasted across Europe over the last week, she didn’t need to see her in close-up to know. Tall for her age, almost swaggering with the public confidence that consumes pretty teenaged girls. She briefly considered telling Oskar that, many, many years ago, she had been as pretty as this Moldovan girl, then wondered why she would consider it, particularly when Oskar wouldn’t believe her.

As she passed the courtyard, the man stepped out again and spoke to her. She didn’t stop immediately, but with the man’s second statement she paused and turned to him. Then he-and this struck her as remarkable-took a card out of his pocket and showed it to her. Business card? Driver’s license? Then she remembered-he’d pretended to be her father’s co-worker, which would require some ID. Even then Adriana hesitated, and Erika dug her chewed nails into her palms, muttering, “Good girl. You’re no one’s fool.”

History had already written this story, though, which made it all the more difficult to watch. The man stepped aside to let her in first and then followed.

“It’s fast,” said Oskar, finishing his glass.

It was. Three minutes later, at 16:45, the BMW rolled slowly out to the street. One driver, no visible passengers. It turned right and left the frame.

“Just a sec,” said Oskar.

The BMW reappeared on their side of the street, heading in the opposite direction toward Mehringdamm. Then it was gone.

“Watch this,” said Oskar.

“Watch what?” she asked, a sudden depression filling her.

Then she saw it: The blue car in the foreground, an Opel with Berlin plates, pulled out into the traffic and drove in the same direction.

“Oh,” she said.

They went through the tape two more times, Oskar making note of the most crucial time code: 16:39, when the man’s face was most visible. At that moment he was speaking with Adriana, his head raised to show what an open, friendly person he was.

At 16:46, as he headed toward Mehringdamm, they got a clear shot of the BMW’s tags, which Oskar noted along with the Opel’s tags at the tail end of 16:47.

By the time she called the Berlin office for an all-night courier, it was nearly one, and she was finally feeling a buzz from the wine and the realization that they were very close to something important. The courier brought an envelope, in which they put the cassette and a note asking the Pullach office to use its face-recognition software to identify the man talking to the girl at 16:39. She doubted they would come up with anything-the software was notoriously buggy-but at least they could clean up the image.

The courier sealed the envelope in their presence and predicted that it would arrive by seven in the morning. He, too, seemed to note Oskar’s black eye, the empty wine bottles and glasses, and the video camera, but he was too well trained to show his emotions.

Erika knew surprisingly little about the Orthodox Church, most of her understanding coming from a single conversation she’d had in the eighties with a Romanian informer who had come to Vienna to discuss the terms of his employment. He’d been a professor of sociology, or whatever Nicolae Ceauşescu’s communist regime chose to call that field of study, and he was trying to explain why his price was so high: The Romanian mind was too conspiratorial for him to be able to do anything safely.

Her job that day had been to keep his fee as low as possible-the West German economy was raging, but pressure from the Greens was throwing all future BND budgets into question.

The professor had been a talker; she could hardly get a word in at all. A stream of sociocultural lessons poured from his mouth. On the subject of the conspiratorial Romanian mind, he started with the obvious variable: the Securitate, the regime’s feared secret police, which, according to rumors Erika didn’t believe, employed in some fashion a quarter of the population. When he saw this didn’t sway her, he turned to religion and democracy.

He said, “Democracy functions in Protestant nations. It barely functions in Catholic nations. It doesn’t function at all in Orthodox nations.”

It was a troubling statement, as West Germany’s boisterous ally on the other side of the Atlantic based its entire Cold War philosophy on the notion that all nations and cultures could, and should, embrace democracy.

“It’s about independent thinking,” the professor explained. “How God’s word is interpreted. You Protestants, you believe that all it really takes is a Bible to work through who God is and what He wants. The Catholics read on their own, but they require a pope to help them through the difficult parts. They can’t absolve themselves of sin; the Church has to do that for them.”

“And Orthodoxy?”

He smiled. “An Orthodox church represents the link between the earthly and the spiritual. The dividing line is at the front of the church, at the iconostasis. Medieval images of Christ and the saints gaze out, as if heaven is on the other side of the screen, and the Holy peer through. Judging. Then it happens. The priest steps behind the screen into the sanctuary. After a little while, he steps out again to share what he’s learned. You see?”