Olen Steinhauer - The Nearest Exit

“Listen,” he said, raising his hands. “You don’t need to do this. I just want to talk.”

Without breaking her movements, she said, “You gay?”

“No.”

“Well, you paid for it,” she said as she slipped out of her blouse like a candy bar losing its wrapper. “I never cheat anyone.”

She was left in a black lacy bra and the miniskirt, and then she unwound the skirt to reveal a very small black thong. He could only think of one way to make her stop, and unlike twenty years ago he now had the courage to speak.

“I lied,” he said.

“What?”

“The story about me being a private investigator. It’s not true.”

She lowered her arms so they half-covered her bra. Smile gone. “What’s your name again? Sebastian?”

“No. It’s Milo Weaver.”

She cocked her head, as if he’d tapped her cheek. “Milo Weaver?”

“A couple months ago someone came here claiming to be me. I’d like to know who he was.”

Zsuzsa waited, staring with big eyes, giving no sign she knew anything about any of this.

He said, “You’re probably confused-I would be, too. And I can’t give you much more than my word. This guy who was pretending to be me-he was looking for your friend Henry. I think he’s the same guy that tried to kill him back in August. I think he’d come back to finish the job.”

Her face twisted, and she stepped back.

Milo started to get up-“Want to sit?”-but his movement provoked her to raise her arms in a defensive motion, so he settled back down.

“James Einner?”

He blinked at her. “What?”

“The man who tried to kill Henry. Before he attacked Henry, he said his name was James Einner. Who is he?”

“I don’t know,” Milo lied.

“But you know who he works for.”

“I have suspicions.”

“CIA?”

“Very likely.”

“So do you. You did. You used to work for the CIA.”

“That’s true.”

She breathed through her nose so loudly that he could hear it over the music. “It’s about the letter, isn’t it?”

“I think so. But I don’t know what was in the letter. I don’t even know who sent it.”

She said, “Thomas Grainger.”

Milo stared hard. “Grainger sent Henry a letter?”

“You know this man.”

Milo tried to get the facts straight, the timetable. By the time he was in jail in August, when Gray received the letter, Grainger had been dead for weeks. “He was a friend. He’s dead now.”

“I know.”

“You know?”

“The letter said that if Henry received it, it meant that he was dead.”

Milo wasn’t looking at her; instead, he was staring at his own knees, assembling and reassembling the known facts, which were still too few. Then her platform shoes stepped into his field of vision. She said, “Is Henry dead? Did that man kill him?”

Milo looked up, and Zsuzsa’s mascara was bleeding at the corner of her eye. “I don’t know. You haven’t heard from him?”

She shook her head.

“Where did he go? How could he just disappear? He’d have to have resources.”

“He told me nothing. He wanted to protect me. He just told me he would go away for a while, and that I should only answer questions from Milo Weaver.”

“From me?”

“Or that other guy. I don’t know the difference anymore.”

“Why me? I don’t get it.”

“The letter,” she said as if he were dense. “Thomas Grainger’s letter said that Henry could only trust Milo Weaver, because Milo Weaver was already looking into it.”

“It?”

“The story he told Henry. About the CIA and the Sudan and Tourists.”

Milo stared hard at her. “That’s what the letter was about?”

“Henry said we would be like Woodward and Bernstein. Or maybe I said that. We were going to write the story together.”

Milo considered just how much she’d been through in the last half year. Her boyfriend was tossed off a terrace, put in a coma, then revived only to disappear immediately afterward. During those few days before he vanished, he must have talked endlessly about CIA conspiracies, China, and assassinations in the Sudan. And Tourists. Because of her obsessive search for him, she’d lost her newspaper job and now spent evenings stripping. At least it was safer than international intrigues. Until now. A new Milo Weaver had stormed her safe haven.

Her tears had disappeared, and she’d fixed the mascara smear without him noticing. She was looking at a clock on the wall. “Your fourteen minutes are up.”

“I’ll buy fourteen more.”

“No way. I don’t even know who you are.”

“Anything I can say to convince you?”

“Nothing,” she said. Without making a show of it, she unclipped her bra and slipped out of it, standing over him so that he was watching her breasts from below. She bent slightly to remove her thong, gingerly unhooking it over her heels, then stood straight, hands on her hips, staring down at him, showing off the geometric perfection of her sculpted pubic hair. It was, he reflected later, the pose in which she might feel most powerful when dealing with a man. It worked, because a trembling weakness slithered through him.

“You paid for it,” she said, then collected her discarded clothes and walked naked out through the curtain.

He found Parkhall up against the stage, grinning wildly at a pair of blondes gyrating across one another like Greek wrestlers, sharing a bottle of baby oil. To Milo, he said, “Fantastic, isn’t she?”

“Which one?”

“Zsuzsa, you idiot. My God. How a loser like Henry Gray got on with her… it’s a mystery for the ages.”

“I’m heading out,” Milo said, but he didn’t leave. Parkhall convinced him to buy a ludicrously priced bottle of Törley champagne, which they shared with a girl named Agí, who turned out to have an in-depth knowledge of European economics. Parkhall went into interview mode, as if she were a government finance minister, and Milo had a suspicion that Agí was going to show up in one of his Times pieces as a “parliament member speaking under condition of anonymity.”

The champagne went down weakly, so Milo ordered a gimlet. A gaggle of loud English hooligans in the front got on his nerves, and the sight of so much flesh left him with a vague but lasting impression of skin covered in fingerprints, like overused shot glasses.

The American-run 4Play Club, he learned from Parkhall, marketed itself to non-Hungarians for the simple reason that Hungarians wouldn’t pay as much for what they had to offer. There were other clubs in town, but most were dark and potentially dangerous fleshpots run by the Russian mafia, where you would receive an outrageous bill, and then big men would walk you all the way to the cash machine. The majority of the customers were young Englishmen, part of the weekend vacationer boom made possible by cut-rate European airlines. Since it was often cheaper to fly to and get loaded in Eastern Europe than to spend a weekend drinking at London pubs, some cities had become flooded with these kids bursting with beer and itching for fights. They had done so much damage to Prague that laws had been passed to keep them out. Now the hooligans had discovered Budapest.

James Einner, he thought. Of course they’d sent James to get rid of Henry Gray. He was the only living Tourist, besides Milo, who knew anything about the Sudanese operation.

James had only been following orders, just as Milo had only been following orders when he mailed a package to Theodor Wartmüller that resulted in the death of Adriana Stanescu. When James returned in December to finish the job, he’d remembered the letter-only trust Milo Weaver-and used that name. Knowing all this did nothing to curb Milo’s anger. He drank and watched the endless parade of flesh and, though he would soon leave it, hated everything to do with his lousy business.