going to kill him.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Who’s hired you to keep tabs on me?”
“You know I can’t tell you that.”
Milo picked up the pipe and swung it against Raleigh’s broken leg. As the echoes of his screams started to fade, Milo returned to the phone. “You’ll tell me now, Cy. Otherwise, Raleigh dies right here. Then, over the next week, members of your family start disappearing. At the end of the week, I come for you.”
The boss made a sighing sound. “Don’t you think that’s overkill?”
“You’ve caught me in a very poor mood.”
“Fuck,” said Cy.
“En hivja a rendorseget!” called the upstairs voice.
A half hour later, Milo was back in Buda, joining the crowded, steep subway escalator up to Moscow Square as he chewed Nicorette. Faces passed him heading down into the earth, a whole range of faces, all the varieties of Caucasian. His anger had left, and with it the adrenaline shakes. Now all he felt was a stoic animosity. Why hadn’t he figured it out before? Who would give a damn about where Milo Weaver was at any time? Not the Chinese, and not the Germans. Alan Drummond didn’t need to track him all over the place. There was only one person who cared about what Milo was up to. Senator Nathan Irwin. He lived in fear that Milo would sit up one day and present the evidence that tied the senator to last year’s Sudanese debacle. Irwin, like any careful politician, was covering his ass.
For the rest of today at least, Irwin would have to depend on guesswork.
Moscow Square had the intense feel of a transportation hub. Teenagers met in small groups, others walked quickly to buses and trams, and small, dark men in leather jackets sold things from rickety tables and from beneath their jackets. There was something seedy about this open, triangular space, and the smell of fried food and the incessant traffic around its border just added to that feeling. The one blessing was an unseasonable warmth in the air, a premature spring day.
He browsed a magazine stand and walked the circumference of the square, stolidly ignoring vendors who approached with cell phones, Easter trinkets, shoes, and books. For the benefit of blue-clad Hungarian policemen, he kept moving. On one side, traffic jammed the roads leading around old buildings with billboards for McDonald’s, Raiffeisenbank, and Nespresso, with an enormous George Clooney taking a pleasing sip. The other side rose precipitously to Castle Hill, where tourists boarded squat electric buses to take them all the way up into that rarefied district.
A little before two, he chose a spot near the steps leading up to the castle road, stuck his hands in his pockets, and let his slack face be seen from as many angles as possible. No one seemed to notice him, or care. Everyone was heading somewhere or selling something.
Henry Gray approached from behind, trotting down the steps in a light, airy manner that was decidedly not Hungarian. “Sorry I’m late,” he said without any sign that this was a potentially life-threatening rendezvous; it threw Milo. He stuck out a hand, and Gray took it casually, a single pump before releasing.
He was in his midthirties: narrow face, dark sideburns, thinning on top. His green eyes looked as if they had been put on with CGI. Three-or four-day beard. He looked like a hundred other young expats.
“And you are?” Milo asked to be sure. “Henry Gray. And you’re Milo Weaver. You look just like your photographs.”
“My photographs?”
“Yeah,” he said as he pointed across the square and began to walk, “but your nose wasn’t so fucked up.”
24
Milo walked with him along a crowded crosswalk to a small, busy side street that led to a mall-Mammut Mall, with its signature woolly mammoth logo. “I used to go to the pubs when I first came. Sorozos. Dark, gloomy places. After a while they just tire you out. Then the cafes. The bonus there is all the pretty girls, and nowadays the coffee is actually good. But that’s tiring, too-there’s always some social aspect to it. Now, it’s easiest to just go to the mall for a drink.” Gray smiled, as if he hadn’t had a chance to speak with an American in a while. “Moved all the way to Central Europe, just to become a suburbanite!”
They took escalators to the third floor, then crossed a glassed-in bridge over another street to enter the modern half of the mall, where overpriced restaurants tempted shoppers. Gray headed directly to Leroy’s, the darkest of the bunch, full of smoking women and their overdressed hangers-on. Gray ordered a mojito, so Milo ordered the same, and as they waited Milo cut into another monologue about the virtues of shopping malls. “Why’d you disappear, Henry?”
“Disappear?”
“From the hospital. You didn’t even tell Zsuzsa where you were.” Gray considered that, then smiled when the waitress returned with two tall drinks stuffed with fresh mint, lime, and long brown straws. He took a sip and said, “What do you think? You think that when I woke up I’d just go back to my life like everything was fine? This guy, he meant to kill me.”
“You mean James Einner.”
“You know who he is?”
“I can probably find out.”
“Good. Good.” Another sip. “Anyway, James Einner messed up. I knew that. And sooner or later he was bound to find out that I’d woken up. What was I going to do? What would you do?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Me, I’m a journalist. If I can’t track stories, I don’t want to keep living. It’s the only thing I know how to do. The only thing I want to do.”
“So what did you do?”
Gray wrapped his lips around the straw and arched his brows. “You don’t know already?”
“All I know is, you got a letter from an old friend of mine, Thomas Grainger. Then this other guy, James Einner, tried to kill you. When you woke from your coma, you disappeared, and someone showed up looking for you, pretending to be me. Maybe it was Einner, maybe not. Then, yesterday, you called Zsuzsa while I was at the club, looking for you. How did you know I was there?”
“That was a coincidence. I didn’t know you were there. Not for sure.”
“So what triggered the call?”
“I told her. I was done. I’d finished my story.”
“And you told her to trust me.”
“Of course I did. The letter said to trust you.”
“The one from Thomas Grainger.”
“Exactly,” Gray said, then smiled. “I see what you’re thinking. If some other guy showed up pretending to be you, how could I be so stupid as to sit with you now?”
“No, I wasn’t thinking that, but it’s a good point.”
“I’m not entirely gullible,” he said with satisfaction. “First, the photograph-I know you are who you say you are. Of course, there’s always the possibility that maybe Grainger didn’t know you as well as he thought he did, right?”
“Sure.”
“That’s why I’ve got backup.”
“Right now?”
He nodded, then glanced around. There were enough people in the restaurant and just outside in the mall itself that his backup could be anywhere. “They’re good at hiding,” he said.
“Who?”
“The Chinese.”
It felt like the kind of non sequitur a conspiracy theorist like Gray would make; then it didn’t. “Why the Chinese?”
