Olen Steinhauer - The Nearest Exit

Schwartz settled across from Milo. Her cheeks and forehead were red, and he wondered if stairs really were that hard on her. What kind of health was she in? Might a few well-placed words bring on a heart attack? Oskar, too, seemed flustered. Perhaps they’d been arguing-another thing that might work to his advantage.

She said, “I will act based upon my suppositions, while my suppositions will be based on my limited knowledge. Does that seem reasonable to you?”

“Sure.”

Schwartz opened her plump hands. “For the moment, we’ll set aside the events in Zürich. Let’s stay with Adriana. My supposition is that you were asked to kill her. Maybe you were asked to kidnap her, and then the order was changed-the distinction doesn’t matter right now. What does matter is that, like any hired gun, this was probably all you knew. The name of the victim, perhaps the method of disposal. Simple facts, from which you could improvise as you wished, so long as the orders were followed.”

Milo stared at her, a blank slate. Then: “This is crazy. When my embassy finds out-”

“Please,” she said, raising a hand. “As I’ve made clear, what interests me is the why of her murder. Not the how. The who, I hope, will become clear once I know the why.” She blinked, as if confused. “I did make that clear, yes?”

Milo didn’t answer, but Oskar said, “I believe you did, Erika.”

“Good.” She crossed her hands in her lap and then, noticing crumbs, flicked them away. “So what I’m realizing now is that you, Mr. Weaver, won’t be as much help to me as I’d hoped. You’re a killer, which means it’s not your purview to know the why of your orders. I also doubt you know anything about the girl you killed. Which is why I’m going to tell you about her.” She smiled. “Don’t get me wrong-I don’t think anyone as versatile as yourself will have his heart softened by a story or two. I just think it’s a good thing for humans to know the full measure of their actions. Does that sound pompous?”

“Certainly not,” said Oskar.

Something upstairs had convinced her to try this new angle. Maybe it was guesswork, or just the acute senses of an experienced interrogator, but she had decided to tell Milo the one thing that he had been desperate to know: the story behind Adriana Stanescu. So he said, “It sounds very reasonable.”

“Excellent,” said Erika. “It took some digging, but I had help from Adriana’s uncle, Mihai. He, you have to understand, isn’t like us. He doesn’t have the apathy-is that the right word?” Milo didn’t answer, so she went on. “Mihai doesn’t have the apathy that we from intelligence are full of-the apathy toward individuals that our job requires. No, Mihai Stanescu is sentimental to the extreme, particularly when it comes to his dead niece. He doesn’t understand-as you and I do-that good little girls and boys must sometimes disappear when important things require it. Because, really, Milo-despite all the claptrap from priests and politicians about the value of the little children, the fact is that the world doesn’t change when they die. The value of the dollar remains the same. Your American Idol doesn’t lose ratings. The stores remain fully stocked. And children disappear all the time.”

Though he held on to his stolid expression, Milo wondered where she was going with this. It wasn’t just a story.

She said, “Take, for instance, the so-called tragedy of sexual trafficking. Thousands of women and children-and let’s not soften the blow with vagaries; they’re sometimes as young as six months-disappear every week and end up in whorehouses, sold as sexual slaves, or videotaped for Internet sites. They are abused, raped, tortured and sometimes killed for the pleasure of a certain demographic. Does this change the value of the euro?” She shook her head, and her discomforting smile reappeared. “Certainly it does not. People like you and me, we understand this.”

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What could she read in Milo Weaver’s face? Very little. Either he truly was a pro-she’d decided to set aside the term “Tourist” for now-or he had no idea where her monologue was heading next. Perhaps he really didn’t know Adriana’s past.

“A case in point. Of one such girl who went through what the media would certainly call a tragedy if they caught wind of it. But, really, Stalin aside, tragedy is when thousands of people are killed, and when their deaths bring down financial institutions-that’s tragedy. This is more… I don’t know. A blip in the moral universe? Something like that, though for people like us, there really is no moral universe, is there?”

Milo looked like he was going to answer, but didn’t. Oskar stared at the side of his head. Heinrich and Gustav were mesmerized by her speech; she almost expected them to start taking notes.

“Ah, well, the story,” she said. “It began in Moldova, as you’d expect. At that time Adriana was only eleven.”

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Milo listened. Despite himself, he paid attention to every word, every digression, and, worse, all the physical details. Erika Schwartz described the design on the scarf Adriana wore when she boarded the bus headed west, and though he knew this was a detail she probably couldn’t know, it remained with him anyway, all the way through to the warehouse in St. Pauli where the initial rapes occurred, to the Berlin apartment where she was used many times a night. The scarf was decorated with flowers shaped into paisleys. She had not used the mawkish word “tears,” but she didn’t need to. He knew that a paisley looked like the drop of salty water that forms at the corner of a child’s eye, and the image just wouldn’t leave him.

Because in the end Milo Weaver wasn’t outside the moral universe, no matter how well the Company had trained him. Once, when he had been a younger Tourist, he had lived without empathy. That had held him in good stead for the first seven years, from 1994 until 2001. He had stayed alive because of it. But once he’d left to build a home, he couldn’t escape the continual reminders that his universe had become imbued with morality-bathing his infant daughter’s fat, squirming body, later walking her to school and listening to her rambling stories, making curry for his wife, vacuuming on the weekends. Simply taking out the trash every other day had reinforced a moral responsibility that he’d had to learn bit by bit. It hadn’t been a smooth transition; he’d screwed it up many times during those first years, but even his wife’s patience had taught him new lessons.

By the time Owen Mendel asked him to return to Tourism, he was too far gone. Tourism is for the young, the unmarked. Tourism is for the fatherless and childless. Milo was no longer any of these things, which was why he knew he was doomed, eventually, to failure.

Yet he was also aware. He knew why Erika Schwartz was telling her story, and why she was telling it in the way she was. She knew that he had a child. She knew how to get at him.

Knowing hardly helped, though. As he realized the full breadth of Adriana Stanescu’s cursed life, the air kept leaving his body, and his stomach seemed to collapse upon itself. He even felt paisley-shaped saltwater building up, but he willed his eyes dry and said nothing. That was important. He focused his emotions elsewhere, on the traffickers. When he felt his eyes dampening, in his head he beat these faceless creatures senseless. But their very facelessness lessened the effect. So he drew from his memory one Roman Ugrimov, a Russian businessman who had once killed his own underaged lover, pregnant with his child, in order to prove a point. There, then, was someone real, someone he knew. So he went at the old man with his bare hands and crushed him slowly, as he never had in reality.