The Truth Itself Read online

  “Sit, Suze,” she said, indicating the bed.

  The child sat.

  Kate unzipped a bag, removed the Brett Brewster passport and laid it open on the begrimed counterpane.

  “You see that kid?” she said, tapping the photograph.

  “Yes, I see him.”

  “You’re not going to like this.”

  “I’m not going to like what?”

  Then Suzie, a quick study, shook her head and raised her hands to her long black hair.

  “No.”

  Kate shrugged. “I’m sorry.”

  “If I had a dollar for every time you said that today,” Suzie said, sounding ancient.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Why?” Suzie asked, staring at the passport.

  “They’ll be searching for a woman and a girl. Not a woman and a boy.”

  “You think I look like a boy?”

  “No. But at airports they don’t really look too hard at kids, you know?”

  “Mommy . . .”

  “Suze, please.”

  All at once the girl was crying and Kate knew it wasn’t about the hair she was about to lose.

  It was about all she had lost already.

  Kate hugged her. “Suzie.”

  “Do it, Mommy.”

  Kate went to one of the bags and removed a comb and a pair of scissors. She brought a towel from the bathroom, spread it on the floor, and started to cut the child’s dark bangs, exposing the planes of her cheekbones. As her girl’s hair fell away she saw the face of Suzie’s dead father—the face of her dead husband—and it took all her strength to blink away the tears and hold herself together and finish the job.

  “Take your clothes off, Suze,” she said as she folded the child’s hair into the towel and shoved it into her bag.

  The girl stripped to her panties.

  “Everything,” Kate said, feeling like a prison guard.

  The child obeyed and Kate dressed her in tidy whities, and jeans and a shirt, dropping a pair of clumpy sneakers at her feet.

  “Put those on, Brett.”

  “Brett?”

  “That’s who you are now. Get used to it.”

  “For how long?”

  “Not long. A couple of days.”

  As the girl pulled on the shoes self-important music announced the top of the hour and CNN’s breaking news.

  A report about the school shooting opened the bulletin, the camera showing blood in the snow and scared looking kids being led from the building by police. The principal, a pretty redhead, her face hollowed by shock, said that a local woman, Holly Brenner, had disarmed the gunmen and killed them both, saving the lives of “countless children.”

  A blurred photograph of Kate filled the screen. It had been grabbed at the school’s Christmas pantomime, Kate instinctively turning away from a snap happy first grade teacher wielding her iPhone like a paparazzo.

  There were shots of her house and store being searched by sheriff’s deputies and blank-faced men in suits while the on-camera reporter said that Holly Brenner had disappeared.

  The reporter, posed in front of the school, gazed earnestly into the lens and said, “The people of this small Vermont town may not know exactly who Holly Brenner is, but there is no doubt in their minds about what she is: to them she’s a hero.”

  As Kate clicked off the TV the phone in the room rang. She ignored it and it fell silent as she packed Suzie’s discarded clothes into a bag.

  Then it rang again.

  Kate crossed to the phone and lifted it. “Yes?”

  “It is you, isn’t it?” the desk clerk said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “On the news. This woman. It is you.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Am I? Maybe I call the police?”

  “Why don’t I come over and talk to you? We’ll straighten this out.”

  “Okay. Come now. I am waiting.”

  The line went dead.

  “What’s wrong, Mommy?”

  “It’s the man at the desk. He wants more money.”

  Suzie stared at her, not buying this.

  Kate pulled on her coat and her gloves and slipped the scissors into the pocket of her jeans.

  “You stay here, baby, okay? I’m just going to see this guy.”

  Kate stepped out into a fresh fall of snow and, hunched against the cold, hurried across to the office, which glowed yellow in the gloom. The fat man stood at the window, staring out at her.

  He opened the door and let her step inside. His stink was like a dead thing in the room.

  “What do you want?” she said. “Money?”

  He smiled at her, showing bad dental work, and shrugged, his man breasts jiggling beneath his T-shirt. “Maybe.”

  He locked the door and panted his way to the counter and lifted the flap.

  “Come,” he said, wagging a pink hand, and she followed him into a small living room crowded with threadbare furniture and stuffed animal heads.

  She couldn’t help but think of Norman Bates in Psycho.

  The clerk lifted a smeared bottle of Canadian Club from the table and waved it at her. “You want?”

  Kate shook her head and he drank from it, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand.

  “You’re pretty,” he said and rubbed a paw over the zipper of his jeans and she knew what it was that he wanted.

  She smiled at him and said, “You have a bedroom?”

  “Whoa,” he said, “you catch on fast.”

  She stepped toward him, angling her body so that he couldn’t see her free the scissors from her pocket.

  “Why waste time?” she said.

  He smiled and set the bottle down and grunted as he put a heavy hand on her back, saying, “Whyn’t you take your clothes off?”

  She allowed him to pull her close, almost gagging on his stink—sweat, stale urine and something darker and more disgusting. When she was right in under him she plunged the blades of the scissors into his chest, severing the aorta where it branched from his heart.

  He stared at her, his eyes glassing over and she stepped back in time to watch him fall like an imploding building, upsetting the table, the whiskey bottle shattering on the floor.

  Kate kneeled and pulled the scissors from him, the blades making a sucking sound when she yanked them free. She wiped the blades clean on his T-shirt, pocketed the scissors, and went through to the front office, opened the cash register with her gloved fingers and took a thin pile of cash from it, leaving the empty tray jutting out like a tongue.

  - - -

  Kate quit the office, shutting the door after her, hearing the lock click. She hurried across to their room. Suzie sat on the bed looking pale and vulnerable with her cropped hair.

  “We have to go, Suzie.”

  “Brett.”

  “Yeah, Brett. Sorry.”

  “Go where?”

  “The airport. In Montreal.”

  Kate cleaned the room of any sign of their presence and they went out to the car and drove into the dusk.

  “Are we ever going home?” Suzie said, huddled down in her seat, her face hidden in the shadow of a baseball cap.

  “Yes, we’re going home, just not right now.”

  “And where is that?”

  “Where’s home?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know. Not yet. But it’s out there, waiting for us.”

  “You promise?”

  “Yes, I promise.”

  SEVEN

  Lucien Benway stood at the window of Amman’s Kempinski Hotel eating pitted dates from Saudi Arabia as he watched the cars far below scuttle like scarab beetles.

  He was freshly showered and dressed in a pair of lightweight slacks and a silk shirt that his wife Nadja’d had made for him in Paris.

  Benway wondered what she was doing at that moment. Was she in bed with a man, or had her relationship with the reporter heralded an era of unprecedented sexual exclusivity?

>   He’d been made aware of the seriousness of the affair when Morse had alerted him that Nadja was using a disposable cell phone. How the pale man had known this Benway neither knew nor cared.

  Two nights ago, when his wife was taking one of her very long baths, soaking herself in unguents and lotions, a Dvořák’s piano concerto playing on her docked iPod, Benway had found the burner phone in the Chanel bag in her bedroom and, scanning the text messages, discovered an exchange that had left him stunned.

  I’m boarding now for Amman. What’s your answer?

  I’ll tell you when you return.

  Leave him, Nadja. Leave the poison dwarf.

  She had not replied and the reporter had sent another, a minute later: I love you.

  Her reply was like a blade through Benway’s heart: I love you, too.

  In the twenty-one years they had been together she had never once said those words to him.

  Absurdly, standing at the window of the Jordanian hotel room, he felt the sting of tears in his eyes and the stream of cars below in Abdul Hamid Shouman Street blurred.

  Benway placed the dates on a table, wiped his eyes with a monogrammed handkerchief, turned from the window and crossed to the minibar that was concealed in a cabinet beneath the mute TV. He kneeled, feeling the familiar twinge in his spine where a fragment of a Druze mortar (a memento of an ambush in Moukhtara during the Lebanese Civil War when Benway was supplying weapons to the Maronite Phalangists) was embedded against his twelfth thoracic vertebra—it was a constant source of agony and often triggered metal detectors but the surgeons had refused to remove it, deeming the risk of paralysis too great—and dropped two ice cubes into a crystal glass.

  Benway stood and uncapped the liter of Cutty Sark he’d had sent up. His erstwhile mentor, Mrs. Danvers (who’d taught Benway most of the dirty tricks of the trade he now plied with such relish) had introduced him to the pleasures of the whiskey.

  There were far superior Scotches, but there was something about pouring a Cutty that had taken on the weight of ritual and the habit had endured.

  The ice hissed and crackled as the liquid kissed it and Benway returned to the window and sipped his drink slowly, staring out at the desert that stretched out far from the city.

  A rap on the door had him turning and he deposited the drink on the desk beneath the mirror and crossed the room.

  He opened the door to reveal Morse, who smelled of carbolic soap and wore clean clothes.

  Benway had to quell an irrational spike of annoyance that the man had taken the time to freshen up before reporting to him.

  “Come in,” he said, stepping back.

  Morse nodded and entered the room, standing beside the bed at parade rest with his feet spread and his hands clasped behind his back, still a Marine though he’d last worn the uniform a quarter of a century before.

  “Sit,” Benway said, indicating the red armchair by the window.

  “That’s okay, sir,” Morse said.

  Morse had long refused to call Benway by his given name and his use of the honorific was polite but not obsequious, and he could—when the mood took him—make it sound condescending in the manner of an English butler paying mock deference to his supposed betters in one of TV shows Nadja, ever the Anglophile, binge-watched while washing down Godiva chocolates with Russian vodka before disappearing on one of her trysts.

  “I insist,” Benway said and Morse inclined his head and sat with his hands on his knees.

  As Benway topped up his drink at the counter he observed Morse—all bony limbs and impassive, pale face—in the mirror.

  On first being introduced to the man many years ago, Benway’s beautiful and pathologically promiscuous wife had shaken his hand and deadpanned “A pleasure, Mr. Morose” in her husky Balkan voice and the name had become a private joke between them and so apt was it that Benway still had to work hard not to say it to the cadaverous man’s pallid face.

  “Scotch?” he asked, although in all their years together he’d never seen Morse drink alcohol.

  “No thank you, sir.”

  Benway perched on the edge of the bed, the toes of his shoes not quite scraping the blue carpet.

  “So,” he said. “How did it go?”

  “Smoothly. I got our towelheads to dump him across the Syrian border and some splinter group’ll claim responsibility.”

  Benway, these last two years a pariah who’d had to endure the very public severing of all links to Langley, the Pentagon and the White House, earned his crust as an independent contractor with a very questionable client list, mining the fissures in the Islamicist facade where allegiances shifted like sand and dollars and weapons and promises of everything from drone strikes to blonde women bought both dubious loyalty and easy betrayal.

  “I feel I should apologize,” Benway said.

  “For what?”

  “That thing earlier was personal. I shouldn’t have involved you.”

  “He was a leftist scumbag, sir. He won’t be missed.”

  “Still.”

  “And not even a real journalist. A blogger.”

  As Benway laughed at Morse’s unexpected snobbery his cell phone rang and he reached across to where it lay blinking and whirring on the bed.

  “Yes?” he said, standing. “Jesus Christ.”

  This atypical blasphemy was enough to get Morse staring at him.

  Benway killed the call and reached for the TV remote, thumbing the buttons until he had CNN on the screen.

  He was looking at a photograph of Kate Swift. The picture was blurred and her hair was long and dyed blonde. But it was her.

  “The FBI will sit on Swift’s identity for a few more hours,” he said, turning to Morse, all thoughts of his wife and her treachery banished from his mind. “But the window is closing. I want eyes on Mrs. Danvers. Immediately.”

  EIGHT

  At seventy-seven Philip Danvers, who had spent his entire adult life scrotum-deep in the mire of human iniquity, frailty, treachery, turpitude and just plain vileness, had lost all capacity for surprise.

  So, when, as he stood in the raw cold before the plinth-mounted head of the Nazi eagle outside Berlin’s decommissioned Tempelhof Airport, holding forth in his still-powerful Brahmin bray to the entranced group of gray hairs who had winged their way from their retirement homes in Florida and Arizona and parted with good money to tramp around Berlin and Vienna with him on his tour of Cold War hotspots—absorbing his insider’s view that came with years spent spinning webs of deceit in American intelligence—he saw his granddaughter appear through the mist holding the hand of a child of indeterminate gender, bundled up against the cold, he barely missed a beat in his vivid description of the Berlin blockade.

  She wasn’t really his granddaughter, his carefully hidden sexual proclivities had exempted men of his generation from parenting, unlike the same-sex couples of today who merrily adopted and used surrogates, and he would never let her know that he thought of her thus, but in his dotage he had secretly come to see himself as the patriarch of a uniquely dysfunctional family.

  And if in this family of his geriatric imagination Kate Swift was his granddaughter, then Harry Hook was his beloved if wayward son and Lucien Benway his deeply regretted bad seed.

  It was Benway—the mean little jockey’d always had an unerring instinct for the lowest blow—who’d started calling him Mrs. Danvers, after the shrewish housekeeper in du Maurier’s book and Hitchcock’s film Rebecca, and the name had stuck.

  But if surprise was no longer on the menu, self-doubt was the dish du jour and as Danvers, without pausing his schmaltzy but crowd-pleasing vignette about the candy bombers—the U.S. pilots who’d parachuted Hershey bars to the ragged little kinder who’d lined the fence of Tempelhof, gazing up in awe at the Skymasters thundering overhead—glanced beyond his flock at the woman feigning interest in the sweeping façade of the airport, designed by its Nazi architect to conjure a raptor in flight, and saw that child whose mittened hand she clutched was a bo
y, he silently berated himself for allowing his imagination free rein.

  Mother and son walked away and Danvers, on autopilot, understood that the news reports he’d caught in his hotel room about that business at the school in Vermont—certain that the blurred photograph of the woman who’d prevented another Sandy Hook was his once-upon-a-time protégé, Kate—had fueled his aging imagination.

  But he still felt in his water (the water that, during his many bathroom breaks, dripped and spattered from him in weak and stuttering piddles, dammed by a malignant prostate that was busy killing him) that it was Kate and that she would reach out to him.

  He dismissed this thought and smiled and nodded at the young German tour guide, signaling her that he was about done, before he again addressed his audience.

  “So, my friends, it’s back to the coach. Enjoy your last night in Berlin. I’ll see you tomorrow in Vienna, where I trust you shall all be wearing trench coats and whistling ‘The Harry Lime Theme’.”

  Shrugging off a few questions with resolute politeness, Danvers walked south toward the Tempelhof U-Bahn station, his characteristic long-legged stride hobbled by his illness.

  He never rode with the others in the coach at the end of the day, savoring what would almost certainly be his last visit to Berlin, a city he had once loved for its claustrophobia and intrigue.

  He’d been unable to quell a tinge of regret when he’d watched the razing of the Wall on TV in a hotel room in Islamabad with Harry Hook, whom he’d been mother-henning through one of his earlier escapades. (Hook had scripted a magnificently Machiavellian plot to co-opt an Iranian physicist—in Pakistan to acquire P-1 centrifuges from the A.Q. Khan rogue nuclear supply network—as an asset, which pivoted on the scientist ending up in a threeway with a pneumatic ghazal singer and a polysexual former cricketer. Nobody except Harry had believed it would work, but it had, brilliantly—yielding video that, if it’d reached the eyes of the Ayatollahs, would surely have resulted in the physicist’s death-by-stoning for this zina crime—leaving Danvers looking like an oracle for having recruited the wunderkind Hook.)

  Walking carefully along the icy sidewalk he couldn’t shake the feeling he was being followed, and as he passed a city toilet cubicle he glanced behind him and was sure that he saw the woman and the boy standing by a railing amidst a clump of chained bicycles, shooting a photograph on a cell phone.