Olen Steinhauer - The Nearest Exit

In English, he said, “Calm down. I’m not here to hurt you. I’m just looking for Henry.”

When she blinked, she felt tears running down her cheeks.

“My name is Milo Weaver. I’m a friend. I’m probably the only useful friend Henry has now. So please, don’t scream. Okay? Nod.”

Though it was difficult, she did nod.

“Right. Here goes. Quiet, now.”

He released her slowly, twitching fingers hovering in front of her face, ready to go in again. She felt the tingle of blood flowing back into her sore lips.

“I’m sorry about that,” he said as he rubbed his hands together. “I just didn’t want you to panic when you saw me.”

“So you attacked me?” she said weakly.

“Good-you speak English.”

“Of course I speak English.”

“You all right?”

He reached for her shoulder, but she turned before he could touch her again and headed into the kitchen.

He was right behind her the whole way, and as she took out a can of Nescafé and a box of milk with her unsteady hands, he settled against the door frame and crossed his arms over his chest, watching. His clothes looked new; he looked like a businessman.

“What’s the story for me?” she asked. “Pediatrician? Novelist? Lawyer? Right-film producer.”

When he laughed, she turned to face him. The laugh was genuine. He shook his head. “Depends on the situation. With you I can be honest.” He paused. “I can, can’t I?”

“I don’t know. Can you?”

“What did Henry tell you?”

“About what?”

“About the letter.”

She knew blocks of the letter by heart, because for those few days in the hospital, after waking, Henry had demanded she help him remember. His fractured memory had bonded with hers, and they had been able to reassemble enough of it. For reasons of oil, the Department of Tourism, which employed brutal “Tourists” like this one, had killed a religious leader-a mullah-in the Sudan, which had sparked last year’s riots. Eighty-six innocents had been killed.

Yes, she knew plenty, but she still wasn’t sure about Milo Weaver.

“Just that there was a letter,” she said. “There was a story in it. Something big. Do you know what it said?”

“I have an idea.”

She said nothing.

“The man who wrote the letter was a friend. I was helping him uncover evidence of an illegal operation, but he was killed. Then I was kicked out of the Company.”

“What company?”

“You know what Company.”

To avoid his heavy stare, she turned away and set water to boil, then found a bowl of brown sugar cubes.

He said, “The letter told Henry to trust me.”

“Yeah. He did say that.”

“And what about you?”

“The letter wasn’t meant for me,” she said to the spoon she dipped into the Nescafé granules, measuring them into cups and spilling some on the counter. He didn’t answer, so after a moment she turned again, then dropped the spoon. It clattered against the tiles. He had a pistol in his hand, a small thing no bigger than his fist, and it was aimed at her.

He spoke quietly. “Zsuzsa, you have to understand something. The truth is that if you don’t answer my questions, things could turn very bad. I could shoot you in the extremities. I mean your hands and your feet. If you still didn’t want to talk, I could keep shooting, a little farther in each time, until you passed out. But you wouldn’t die. I’m no doctor, but I do know how to keep a heart beating. You would wake up in your friend’s bathtub, in cold water. You’d be scared, and then you would be more scared because of the knife I’d take from that drawer behind you to make more pain. This could go on for days. Trust me on this. And in the end I’d get all the answers I needed. The answers that would only help Henry.”

His easy smile returned, but Zsuzsa’s knees went bad-first one, then the other. They buckled, and she sank to the floor, her limbs useless. Nausea hit her, and she leaned over, waiting for her breakfast to come up.

Staring at the tiles, which were filthy this close and sprinkled with coffee, she heard something click against the floor, then a rattling, scratching sound. The pistol slid into view and stopped against her hand.

“Take it,” she heard him say.

She covered it with her right hand, then used her left to push herself up. He was still in the doorway, still leaning casually, still smiling.

“It’s yours,” he said. “I’m not going to do anything at all to you. I just want you to know that I can be trusted. If you think at any point that I’m fucking with you, just raise that and put a bullet in my head. Not in my chest-I might get you before you pull the trigger again. In my head,” he said, tapping the center of his forehead. “That way, it’ll all be finished.” He got off the door frame. “I’ll be waiting in the living room. Take your time.”

It took twenty minutes for her to gather her wits and face him. She considered calling for help, but her friend didn’t have a landline, and one glance into the corridor told her that Milo Weaver had picked up her purse on his way. When she passed the front door, she saw the dead bolt was locked and the key had been removed. So she emerged with a tray of two coffees, sugar, milk, and a pistol. She found him on the couch, flipping through the Kertész. “Baffling,” he told her.

She placed the tray on the coffee table beside her purse and house keys. Then, remembering, she took back the gun and slipped it into the front pocket of her sweatshirt. “Kertész? You know him?”

“The name, sure. But I mean your language.” He looked at the page again and shook his head. “I mean, where does it come from?”

“The Urals, maybe. No one knows for sure. It’s a great mystery.”

He closed the book and placed it on the table, then dropped a sugar cube into his coffee. He sipped at it. He had all the time in the world.

“You want to know about Henry.”

“I want to know where he is.”

“I don’t know.”

He took a long breath, then drank more. He said, “I know you were at the hospital before he ran off. Four days in a row, staying hours each time. And you’re telling me he didn’t mention he’d be leaving?”

“He did say that. He didn’t say where.”

“Certainly you have some idea.”

“He called someone.”

“There’s something,” said Weaver. “Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“What phone did he use? Yours?”

She shook her head. “One of the nurses’. He wouldn’t use mine.”

“Why not?”

“The same reason he wouldn’t tell me where he was going. He didn’t want to put me in danger.”

Weaver thought about that, then grinned as if something were funny.

“What?” she said, worried.

“I just don’t know how he’s going to follow the story alone. Doesn’t he want my help?”

She had been standing all this time, the small gun remarkably heavy in her pocket-or perhaps it was just the weight of her fear of it. She didn’t like this Milo Weaver. He had none of the charm or sexiness everyone else talked about. Perhaps this was just how CIA men were. They were motivated by their missions, and whatever slowed them down-a terrified lover, perhaps-could be kicked around as needed.

Still, she did have the gun, didn’t she? That was something. That, in CIA language, was trust. As she settled on a chair, she took the pistol from her pocket and placed it on her knee.

“Of course he wants your help,” she said, “but he said that no one man can help him now. Not when the whole CIA is trying to kill him. He doesn’t expect your help anymore.”

Weaver seemed confused. “What does that even mean?”

“You tell me. Maybe you can also tell me why it took four goddamned months for you to come here and offer help. Can you do that?”