Olen Steinhauer - The Nearest Exit

When she arrived at the Pullach office she rolled slowly through the parking lot. There-his bright red MINI. She took her time hobbling to the building and emptied her pockets into a small plastic basket before walking through the metal detector. It blipped, and with the guards’ magic wand they discovered a ballpoint pen that had slipped through a hole in her pocket to settle in the lining of her quilted coat. When one offered her back the metal items she’d removed, she asked to keep the basket for a little while. With a wry grin, the guard told her that that was fine.

She placed the basket on her desk and, without sitting, called up to the second floor. Wartmüller was in, she was told, but on another line. She asked if he would please call her as soon as he had time.

As she waited she found herself unable to do a thing. She turned on her computer and stared at the blue start-up screen but still didn’t sit. When her desktop appeared, she didn’t even bother checking her e-mail, only gazed at the artistic flower photo that was the background to her daily work. Her phone rang.

“Erika? I heard you wanted to talk to me.”

“Outside, if you don’t mind.”

“Now?”

“If that’s at all possible.”

He considered it. “Not too long, though. I’ve got a conference call with Berlin soon.”

“Then you could probably use a cigarette.”

“Probably right, Erika.”

She returned to the front-door guards, who expected her to hand over the plastic basket, but she hadn’t brought it. All she did was stop a few feet short of them and turn around to face the corridor. When Wartmüller appeared, tapping the filter end of a cigarette against his knuckle, they shifted, suspecting now that they were in serious trouble.

“Hello, Erika.”

“Theodor.” She turned to the guards and pointed at the metal detector. “Is this still on?”

They nodded-of course it was on. Regulations required it to be on.

“Good,” she said and walked through it. The light above her head flickered green. Wartmüller continued around it. “You saw that, sir?”

“Sure,” said Wartmüller, frowning. “You really are an oddball, aren’t you?”

She smiled and continued through the door he held open.

As they crossed the road, heading to the park, Wartmüller began to talk about the party at the consulate. There had been an American musician there, over on a Fulbright grant to research Swabian folk music. So that’s what he played. “Unbelievable! I mean, none of us would listen to that stuff for money, but can you imagine being forced to listen to it sung with one of those flat midwestern accents? Jesus, what were they thinking? Next time I’m getting you an invitation. You’ll only believe it if you see it with your own eyes.”

It was the friendliness that grated on her. That catty camaraderie was Wartmüller’s best weapon. It had the nasty effect of making everyone feel like a partner in this man’s worldly ways. It made her feel a partner in everything he did, and only now did she fully understand what that meant.

He lit a Marlboro as she settled on the same bench from yesterday, then sat beside her. “So,” he said.

“You want him quiet,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“You want Milo Weaver sent away so he won’t fill in the blanks of Adriana Stanescu’s murder. You want… yes,” she said and nearly smiled, then stopped herself. It had come to her before, but now she felt sure. “Blackmail, I suppose. That’s really what provokes these things.”

“It must be too early for you, Erika. You’re not making sense.”

“You have a history,” she told him. “An open history. The rumor mill is full of Theodor Wartmüller’s sexual adventures. Not all of them are legal, are they?”

He grinned around his cigarette. “Please, Erika! You’re embarrassing me!”

“There was a place in Berlin. Very expensive. You could go there and be assured of confidentiality. You weren’t the only one-no. Politicians and directors, businessmen. Actors, maybe. A who’s-who of the sexually deviant rich.”

He exhaled smoke and knotted his brows. “That’s what the dance with the metal detector was about, wasn’t it? You wanted me to know you’re not wired.”

“Exactly.”

He thought about that, going through his options.

She said, “There was a girl at the club. You were being blackmailed with photos of her and you, yes?”

He didn’t answer.

“So you asked your friends in the CIA to get rid of her.” She paused. “Of course you would do that. You couldn’t kill her yourself, and if you’d asked one of us to do it-even Franz or Brigit-we would ask why. And we both know how rumors get around the office.”

“Yes,” he said distantly. “We do.” He took a long drag.

“Theodor,” she said. She made her voice as soft as she could manage. “I just want to understand.”

He flicked away some ash, but the movement was clumsy, and the whole cigarette tumbled to the ground. He sighed. “This hasn’t been going on so long. Just since December.”

“Of course it hasn’t,” she said, though she wasn’t entirely sure what he meant.

He patted his jacket and came up with his crumpled pack. He took his time lighting another one. “A letter. To my home. A package, really. It contained a letter and photographs. It asked for money to be transferred to an offshore account. The photos were stills from a video-that was obvious. Me and a girl in bed. The light was poor, but it was clear enough who I was, and who she was. She was very young-too young. That was obvious, too. I could still remember that night, and I knew that on the video it would look like…” He took another drag. “It would look like I was forcing myself on her.”

“Like you were raping her.”

“Something like that.”

“And the girl was Adriana Stanescu.”

Wartmüller stared at the ashy end of his cigarette. “I didn’t know her name. This was a private club. Berlin. I wasn’t the only customer. It was-at least, it was supposed to be-extremely confidential. Like you said. It had a reputation for this. I believed, as did the other customers, that I had no reason to worry.” He shook his head. “For that price, confidentiality should have been assured.”

Erika looked past him to where a figure moved along the edge of the park. An old woman with a tiny dog. What was an old woman with a dog doing on the grounds? She said, “When was this?”

“December. I told you.”

“No. The night with the girl.”

He exhaled. “Four years ago? Something like that.”

“And who sent the extortion letter?”

“That was the question, wasn’t it? I had our lab go over the envelope, but I wasn’t about to show the letter or the photos.”

“Of course.”

“Mailed from Berlin. No recognizable prints. Address from a laser printer-nothing to tell from that. So I went back to the club myself. The thing had been shut down. I backtracked and found out who had been running the club back then.”

“Rainer Volker.”

Wartmüller halted in midsmoke. “You are good, aren’t you?”

“Was he the one?”

“Before I got a chance to talk to him, I got a call from one of my American contacts.”

“Who?”

When he exhaled, smoke drifted from his nostrils. “Owen Mendel. Turns out they had been watching Volker. They learned what he was up to, that he was blackmailing me. It wasn’t their business, really, but Mendel understood that I couldn’t take care of it through BND channels. He offered an exchange of services.”

“An exchange?”

“He makes my problem go away, and in return I lobby for a little more cooperation with the Americans. The cooperation that was lost, mind you, because of your obsession with Afghan heroin.”