tried as the man took a step forward and shot him once more in the forehead.
His vision went first; then everything began to shut down. But death, like love, is relative. In those final seconds so much can come, and like a judgment he never even knew he had made against himself, his last thoughts replayed a road and trees to the south of Gap, France. The accident he’d set up. Finding the French agent dead against the steering wheel, the girl in shock. Offering his help. Carrying her to his SUV. Her saying nothing. Stopping again and telling the girl that they needed to get out. “A friend lives right through there. Through those trees. He’s a doctor.” Then carrying her because her legs weren’t working well enough. Her slow questions, and the smell of her surprisingly pungent sweat. Holding his breath and thinking only of the next step. Walking, until he saw the two trees, crossed, as if they’d been waiting for years just for this. “Sit down here a sec. I need to rest.”
“Where is this house,” she said flatly.
“Right through there,” he said, and when she looked away he stepped close and reached out, but she had already turned back, eyes large. Thinking only of the next step, he turned her away again and lifted her up and grabbed her jaw and pulled sharply until the crack came and his legs were liquid and he fell with her and all was finished.
I know what you’re thinking, because each Tourist reacts the same way to this story. You don’t believe it. Or, if you do, you think this man was unbalanced from the beginning. You’d be wrong. He was the best. He was better than you can ever hope to be.
If you think this could never happen to you, you’re as much of a fool as he was.
14
Two weeks later, on the day after the final Panikhida, which ended the forty-day mourning period within the Eastern Orthodox Church, Andrei Stanescu touched down at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, United States. His single beat-up handbag, bought at a market in Ungheni for their move west, held some basic toiletries, one change of clothes, and a crumpled map of Manhattan and its boroughs marked up by his indecipherable shorthand. He showed his Moldovan passport to a brisk and humorless border guard behind Plexiglas, who asked him some questions about his visit. They were nothing. In his life he’d been asked serious questions by border guards and militia and government officials. This was nothing.
“What is the purpose of your stay?”
“Excuse me?”
“Your stay. Why are you here?”
“For to see America.”
“So you’re a tourist?”
“Yes. A tourist.”
He peered at the fresh visas-the Schengen visa that had recently been renewed, as well as the American tourist visa that would allow him two months to do as he pleased. In fact, there was only one thing he was pleased to do, and besides, the two hundred and fifty dollars in his pocket would not last him two months. It would last long enough. Then? Then he would either use the return ticket or he wouldn’t; that part wasn’t up to him. It was up to God.
He was better now than when he tracked Erika Schwartz and cornered her at that convenience store in Pullach. He hadn’t been thinking straight. He’d come off three days of no sleep, and in that time he hadn’t even called in to work; his taxi had sat unused until he drove it to Munich to demand some kind of satisfaction. Though, as promised, she did call in the morning with the unfortunate news that there were no tenable leads on his daughter’s murder, he knew the sound of a brush-off, and knew that this was what she was giving him. He didn’t know why, because when they’d talked outside the church he’d believed that this was a woman who wanted to make a little justice in an unjust world. He’d been wrong.
He’d prepared in advance and knew to go to the AirTrain station. The price, as expected, was five dollars. At Howard Beach, he bought a plastic two-dollar subway ticket from an angry Negro behind another window, who kept telling him to use the machines against the wall. But Andrei was firm. He pushed the five-dollar bill through the window and repeated, “Ticket. Hoyt Street Fulton Mall.”
“Okay, man. Here’s the MetroCard. Now you find Hoyt your own self,” he said, pointing at a map on the wall.
He understood far more English than he could speak, most of it learned from subtitled movies that filled the television back in Moldova. He also understood maps, for during his two years of obligatory military service he’d excelled in all forms of navigation. So finding Hoyt Street station from where he stood was not difficult. There, he saw, he could change trains and change again after another stop until he reached Fifteenth Street-Prospect Park in Brooklyn.
“It will be easy,” Rick had told him in slow, watery Russian-a language Andrei knew all too well. “Getting there is the easy part. Getting prepared is easy. After that, it’s up to you. It’s your show. You know what they say about the pure-hearted, Andrei. You have nothing to worry about.”
It had been a surprise when the Alligator dispatch operator radioed him with a pickup from Tegel and said that the caller had requested him in particular. “Me?”
“Yes, you, Andrei.”
The smiling, fat Chinaman waiting with no luggage at all decided to take the passenger seat-carsickness, he explained-so Andrei cleared off his loose receipts, his jacket, and the paper bag that had held his lunch, and the man settled in with a loud series of grunts. “Tiergarten, bitte.”
While Andrei drove, the man rested his gloved hands on his lap and asked in Russian if Andrei spoke Russian. That should have been a sign, but Andrei just shrugged. “Da.”
“Dobriy,” said the Chinaman. “Mr. Stanescu, you don’t know me, but I requested you be my driver today.”
“I heard that,” Andrei answered. “Your story has been heard around the world, even in my country.”
“If you’re a journalist I’ll let you out here.”
“Please. I’m no journalist.” He reached into his coat and removed a square purple envelope and began to unseal it. “I’m a friend. Or, at least, I hope you’ll consider me one. I’d just like to help you.”
The Chinaman hadn’t been the first person to recognize him. Sometimes in the middle of a ride, a passenger would get a fresh glimpse of him in the rearview mirror and gasp as his memory clicked. Usually his fares chose silence, though sometimes-and it was more often women who did this-they opened their mouths and began long, pointless monologues on what he must be feeling, and how they felt when they learned of his daughter’s death. He never knew what they expected from him in return-appreciation? He doubted they understood that what they really provoked from him was hatred.
So he said, “Help isn’t possible, sir. Please don’t trouble yourself.”
“I’m not the only one, am I?” said the Chinaman, reading his mind. “Forget about the others. They’re fools. There’s only one way to help a man in your position. Here,” he said, nodding at the side of the road. “Pull over a moment.”
They had just left the highway and entered Charlottenburg, not far from Sophie-Charlotte-Platz. “Why?” asked Andrei.
“Because I don’t want you to have an accident when you see this.”
He pulled over, wondering how much time he should allow before kicking this bastard out of his taxi. He didn’t need to see anything to risk having a wreck. All he had to do was be reminded of Adriana. The man opened the envelope and removed a single photograph. It was familiar, too familiar, but clearer than the one Erika Schwartz had shown him. The man-that man-talking to Adriana by the entrance of the courtyard. She was beautiful. He touched the photograph, touched her, and then the Chinaman took it away, saying, “He killed her.”
“No,” Andrei answered, not even wondering how a Chinese man had gotten hold of the image. “It was someone else.”
“Who told you that?”
“German intelligence.”
The Chinaman smiled and shook his head. “Spies protecting spies. This man, the one who killed your daughter, is an American spy.”
