The Nearest Exit Read online

  The memory of losing her favorite patient wet Bori’s eyes, and she tried to hide them with a hand. The American looked down at her and placed his own hand on her shoulder, provoking jealousy in at least two of the nurses. “Please,” he said. “If Henry does get in touch with you, tell him that his friend Milo Weaver is looking for him.”

  That was the way Zsuzsa understood the event when Bori called her at the offices of Blikk, a popular local tabloid, to pass on the information about the friend. Then Zsuzsa went to the hospital and approached Jana and the others for their versions.

  Had the hospital visit been the only sighting, she would have tried to find this Milo Weaver. As it was, he kept appearing, and what struck her was that each time he appeared, though his questions remained the same, his manner and history changed.

  With the nurses, he was a friend of Henry’s family, a pediatrician from Boston. At Pótkulcs, Henry’s favorite bar, the two Csillas talked of Milo Weaver, a chain-smoking novelist based in Prague who had come down to crash at Henry’s place. To Terry and Russell and Johann and Will and Cowall, all of whom he’d easily tracked down at their regular café haunts on Liszt Ferenc Square, he was Milo Weaver, AP stringer, following up on a story Henry had filed last summer on the economic tensions between Hungary and Russia. From a Sixth District cop, she learned that he had even arrived to speak with his chief, representing Henry’s parents’ law firm, and wanted to know what had been learned about their son’s disappearance.

  Before his vanishing act, Henry had made it clear to her: Trust no one except Milo Weaver, but tell him nothing. It was a riddle-what use was trust if it meant silence? “You mean you don’t trust him?”

  “Maybe. Look, I don’t know. If someone can toss me out of my window only hours after I got that letter, then what protection can any one man offer? I just mean that you should talk to him, but don’t tell him where I am.”

  “How can I? You won’t tell me where you’re going.”

  Despite what Henry might have thought, Zsuzsa wasn’t about to follow his words blindly. She was a good journalist-a better journalist than dancer-and knew that Henry, for all his momentary fame, would always be a hack. Fear kept objectivity an arm’s length from him at all times.

  So when her editor called to tell her that an American film producer named Milo Weaver had come to the office looking for her, she reassessed her position. “Did you tell him how to find me?”

  “Jesus, Zsuzsa. I’m not completely corrupt. He left a phone number.”

  It was a way. The safety of the telephone would allow her all the distance she needed for a quick vanishing act, as quick as Henry’s had been.

  Even so, she didn’t call. This man named Milo Weaver had too many professions, too many stories. Henry’s golden letter had said to trust him, but there was a world of difference between Milo Weaver and a man calling himself Milo Weaver. There was no way for her to know which was which.

  She did have some information on him; she’d scoured the Internet months ago, after Henry’s attempted murder. A CIA employee, an analyst at a fiscal oversight office-assumedly the same clandestine Department of Tourism that Thomas Grainger had run. At the time of Henry’s attack, though, Weaver had been in a prison in New York state for some financial fraud-“misappropriation” was the most specific word she could track down. There were no photographs anywhere.

  So she settled on silence, which was just as well since she had nothing to tell. That Henry had woken from his months of sleep with weak muscles and a dry mouth and the utter conviction that They would soon be after him-yes, she could share these facts, but anyone looking for Henry would know them already. The details of his attack? Henry had run through what he remembered many times to be sure she had it all. He’d even begun exposing his own flaws, crying as he apologized for having lied to her: He never could have used her on the story.

  “You think I didn’t know that?” she’d asked, and that finally ended the embarrassing tears.

  She stayed at a friend’s house in the Seventeenth District, took the week off from work, and even skipped her regular weekend slot at the 4Play Club. She avoided all the places she knew, because if he was any good, this Milo Weaver would already know them, too.

  Despite the measure of paranoia, her exile was refreshing, because she finally had time to read, which she mistakenly devoted to Imre Kertész. With a secret agent looking for her and Henry gone, reading the Nobel Prize winner just made her think of suicide.

  On the fourth day of what she was starting to think of as her vacation from life itself, she had coffee with her friend, then watched from his window as he left for work. She left the Kertész novel by the television and showered, then dressed in some fashionable sweats. She’d decided to go out-she would have her second coffee in a nearby café. She packed her phone and Vogues in her purse, grabbed a coat, and used the house keys on the front door. Standing on the welcome mat, silent, was a man about six feet tall. Blond, blue-eyed, smiling. “Elnézést,” he said, and the perfectly pronounced Hungarian Excuse me distracted her briefly from the fact that he matched the nurses’ lush descriptions of Milo Weaver.

  It came to her, but too late. He’d reached out, hand tight over her mouth, and shoved her against the wall. With a backward kick he closed the door. He glanced to each side as she tried in vain to bite his fingers, then struck him with her purse. She shouted into his palm, but nothing useful came out, and with his spare hand he ripped the purse from her and threw it at the floor. He only needed one hand on her mouth to keep her still; he was remarkably strong.

  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?”

  Weaver thought about it, his face settling into a blank stare. Then he set the cup back down on the tray. He stood. Zsuzsa stood, the pistol in both hands.

  “Thanks,” said Weaver. “You have my phone number in case he gets in touch?”

  She nodded.

  “Don’t underestimate me, and make sure he doesn’t either. I can help him get to the bottom of this, and I can protect him. Do you believe that?”

  Despite everything, she did.

  “Can I have my gun back now?”

  She wasn’t sure.

  His smile returned, and she thought she caught a measure of that famous charm. “It’s not loaded. Go ahead and shoot me.”

  She stared at the pistol, as if by looking she could know. Then she pointed it vaguely in his direction, but pulling the trigger was a far thought. Finally, Weaver stepped forward and snapped the pistol from her hand. He pressed the barrel into his own temple and pulled the trigger. Twice. Zsuzsa flinched as two loud clicks cut through the room, and later she would realize that the most frightening thing that morning was that Milo Weaver didn’t flinch at all. He knew the gun was empty, but still… not flinching seemed somehow inhuman.

  He scooped up the keys and let himself out. She watched him from the window as he left the apartment building and crossed the dead grass. He was speaking on a cell phone, no expression, no hesitation in his stiff shoulders or his relentless gait. He was like a machine.

  Part One. JOB NINE

  SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 10 TO MONDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2008

  1

  He felt that if he could put a name to it, he could control it. Transgressive association? That had the right sound, but it was too clinical to give him a handle on it. Perhaps the medical label didn’t matter anyway. The only thing that mattered was the effect it had on him, and on his job.

  The simplest things could trigger it-a bar of music, a face, some small Swiss dog crapping on the sidewalk, or the smell of automobile exhaust. Never children, though, which was strange even to him. Only the indirect fragments of his earlier life gave him that punch in the gut, and when he found himself in a freezing Zürich phone booth calling Brooklyn, he wasn’t even sure what had triggered it. All he knew was that he had lucked out: No one answered. An early breakfast somewhere, perhaps. Then the machine picked up. Their two voices: a minor cacophony of female tones, laughing, asking him to please leave a message.

  He hung up.

  No matter the name, it wa
s a dangerous impulse. On its own, it was nothing. An impulsive-maybe compulsive-call to a home that’s no longer home, on a gray Sunday afternoon, is fine. When he peered through the booth’s scratched glass at the idling white van on Bellerivestrasse, however, the danger became apparent. Three men waited inside that van, wondering why he’d asked them to stop here, when they were on their way to rob an art museum.

  Some might not even think to ask the question, because when life moves so quickly looking back turns into a baffling roll call of moral decisions. Other answers, and you’d be somewhere else. In Brooklyn, perhaps, dealing with Sunday papers and advertising supplements, distractedly listening to your wife’s summary of the arts pages and your daughter’s critique of the morning’s television programming. Yet the question returned as it had so many other times over the last three months: How did I end up here?

  The first rule of Tourism is to not let it ruin you, because it can. Easily. The rootless existence, keeping simultaneous jobs straight in your head, showing no empathy when the job requires none, and especially that unstoppable forward movement.

  Yet that bastard quality of Tourism, the movement, is also a virtue. It leaves no time for questions that do not directly relate to your survival. This moment was no exception. So he pushed his way out, jogged through the stinging cold, and climbed into the passenger seat. Giuseppe, the pimply, skinny Italian behind the wheel, was chewing a piece of Orbit, freshening the air they all breathed, while Radovan and Stefan, both big men, squatted in the empty rear on a makeshift wooden bench, staring at him.

  With these men, the lingua franca was German, so he said, “Gehen.”

  Giuseppe drove on.

  Each Tourist develops his own personal techniques to keep from drowning-verse recitation, breathing exercises, self-injury, mathematical problems, music. This Tourist had once carried an iPod religiously, but he’d given it to his wife as a reconciliation gift, and now he was left with only his musical memories. As they rolled past the bare, craggy winter trees and homes of Seefeld, the southern neighborhood stretching alongside Lake Zürich, he hummed a half-forgotten tune from his eighties childhood, wondering how other Tourists dealt with the anxiety of separation from their families. A stupid thought; he was the only Tourist with a family. Then they turned the next corner, and Radovan interrupted his anxiety with a single statement. “My mother has cancer.”