The Swimmer (21 page)

‘Sounds good,’ she said. ‘Assuming he gets in touch.’

‘He will. Keep me updated on this. I want to follow it closely. If we need someplace for him to lie low, I can take care of that. And when the storm hits, we’ll hand off your day-to-day stuff to your colleagues. A few more billable hours would do them good.’

Gabriella nodded, thinking that soon her colleagues would have even more reason to dislike her than they already did.

Paris, France

The high-speed train from Brussels slowed, almost silently, under the art nouveau ceiling of Europe’s busiest train station, Gare du Nord in Paris. Klara turned to Mahmoud, who was still sleeping deeply. She untangled her hand from his. The intimacy of an hour ago still hung like a shadow, unfamiliar and foreign.

Mahmoud woke up with a start and looked around.

‘Are we there?’ he said, gazing out the window onto the crowded platform.

He looked more rested. An hour of sleep seemed to have done him good.

‘Yes,’ replied Klara. ‘Now we’ll see if we guessed right.’

‘There are police officers out there,’ Mahmoud said. ‘I thought you said they don’t usually check passports here at the station?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Klara replied. ‘Only if they suspect something fishy. Aren’t routine checks prohibited by the Schengen Agreement?’

‘You’re the hotshot EU expert,’ Mahmoud said and shrugged. ‘But I hope you’re right. Otherwise things might get a little complicated.’

‘Because you’re wanted for murder?’ whispered Klara. She looked at Mahmoud wide-eyed, feigning innocence.

‘Can you stop saying “wanted for murder,”’ hissed Mahmoud. ‘Seriously, it’s not a joke.’

Klara couldn’t help giggling, nervously. The whole situation was too absurd not to joke about it. They stood up and joined the flow of passengers walking through the center aisle.

Klara felt the adrenaline starting to pump through her veins. So far so good. It was unusual to have your passport checked in Paris; she’d been here probably ten times and never been checked. The EU’s goal of a Europe without borders seemed to be working so far. Many people commuted between Paris and Brussels every day. But she’d never traveled together with a person wanted for a crime. She could see on Mahmoud’s face that he was stressed: his muscles were tense, and he was grinding his teeth almost imperceptibly, as if he was chewing a tiny piece of gum.

They stepped down from the train and moved with the other passengers through the turnstiles at the far end of the platform. Klara struggled to keep from looking at the two policemen who stood watching the new arrivals. They didn’t seem very engaged; they mostly seemed to be gazing aimlessly out over the sea of people.

She and Mahmoud had almost reached the turnstiles, when Klara heard someone yelling behind her. The sound of running steps approaching the platform.

‘Monsieur, Monsieur! Arrêtez!
Stop!’ she heard a man shout behind them.

She felt as if her heart had stopped, as if it had suddenly dislodged from her chest and fallen down on the platform in front of her. Panicked, she glanced sideways at Mahmoud. He met her gaze. Resolute. Hard. His eyes had a determination that frightened her. He slowly turned around.

But the person wasn’t shouting at Mahmoud. Instead, one of the train conductors caught up with another passenger and handed him a bag that he’d apparently left at his seat. If she’d been able to breathe, she would have let out a sigh of relief.

Mahmoud didn’t seem relieved. Instead he took firm hold of her arm and led her brusquely through the turnstiles and into the station.

‘Just do exactly as I say,’ he said. ‘Do not turn around. We’re being followed.’

Northern Virginia, USA

Is this really how it ends? Not with a bang, but a whimper. A ten-hour flight, a week of mandatory vacation, a pat on the back and an empty, gray desk under the unforgiving fluorescent lights of a cheerless office?

‘We’ll get you an office soon,’ Susan tells me without meeting my eyes.

But the days go by and the room remains as elusive as my new tasks. Sympathetic glances, whispers around the coffeemaker. They don’t know who I am—everyone here is younger than me—but the rumors have preceded me.

I’m the old field agent sent home because he wasn’t able to make the tough calls required by war, who didn’t have the stomach for Afghanistan. It doesn’t surprise me. We’re all spies. What do we have if not our rumors, our half-truths, our fragments taken out of context?

The only ones I know are those of my colleagues who rose through the ranks. Who accepted the proprieties and mastered the shifting alliances. Who have always done better in their town houses than in the shadows. Whose goals from the very beginning were breakfast meetings with presidential advisers and dinner parties with ambassadors. They didn’t interest me back then, and they don’t interest me now. Nevertheless, they stop by dutifully, glance at my tidy desk while they avoid meeting my eyes, their fingers drumming on the red plastic of my empty inbox.

‘Your expertise will be invaluable here,’ they say, making a quick calculation of how many years are left until they can finally put me out to pasture. Someone recommends a contact at some private company in Iraq.

Everything is privatized now.
Contractors.
Fieldwork and big money. ‘Your expertise would be invaluable there.’

But I can’t bring myself to apply. Just sitting up and putting my feet on the floor after another twelve hours of whiskey- and pill-induced sleep is all I can manage. And barely even that. I don’t so much as glance at the pool when I drive to work. Perhaps I’ve forgotten how to swim? God knows I’ve willed myself to forget everything else.

And I don’t dream every night anymore. Not even the recurring nightmares, from which I used to wake up feverish, the sheets kicked off the bed, manically groping my chest, searching for imaginary bullet holes, broken bones, grief. I miss them. When I do dream it’s about the mountains. An endless panning shot of gravel and grass in fractured Technicolor, Yves Klein-blue skies, snowcapped peaks, and roads that lead nowhere but farther away. I wake up wanting nothing more than to travel along them.

So go the days, the nights. The endless moments turn into weeks and then years. The monotonous drone of the highway follows me around like tinnitus. When Abu Ghraib has been in the headlines nonstop for a month, I finally get my office. Not a word, nothing. But it is a vindication. A barely audible whisper. A gesture of reconciliation or a bribe. That’s how I want to read it. As if they can’t really be sure of me. But they know exactly how sure they are of me. They’ve always known. Who but the most unswervingly loyal would still be here?

We change presidents and as a natural consequence the organization is shaken until everything falls into the exact same place it was from the beginning. No, that’s not true. Things change. The madness finally lifts like a cloud of steam and leaves us as we once were. Rational and street-smart rather than evangelical. And we sit back and read about what we’ve created in the
Washington Post
. An alternative, private, for-profit war machine. Those endless subcontractors. The scope is shocking, even to those of us on the inside, who should know.

Slowly I force myself back into the pool, slowly I learn to swim again. Lap after lap, until I no longer keep track, until my arms are so tired I can hardly lift the remote control of the plasma TV in my apartment, which is furnished like an affordable hotel room down to the smallest detail.

Slowly, barely even noticeably, I exchange whiskey for tea, sleeping pills for five times twenty push-ups on the soft carpet of my bedroom floor, twelve hours of dreamless sleep for seven hours of choppy nightmares, sadness, and a shaky, skipping version of life. Until I’m not drinking at all anymore. Not even coffee.

Langley and the swimming pool and AA meetings in depressingly fluorescent-lit classrooms in Palisades or Bethesda. I don’t have much more. Evenings watching cable television and eating takeout. One day at a time. That’s what became of my life. It’s not much. It’s almost nothing.

I carry Damascus with me in the locket you gave me, which hangs around my neck. It never leaves me for a second. Everything I’m running from. Everything I’ve abandoned and sacrificed. It fills me with emptiness. Every Friday I search our records for my daughter’s name. Let her name whirl through our endless database while I close my hand around the locket. I pray the only prayer I have, the only thing that matters to me now: Good God almighty, let there be zero results.

It’s a week before Christmas. I’ve bought some twinkling electric lights to put out on my balcony in an awkward approximation of normality. The cardboard box of lights is big but so light I can carry it in one hand as I grope in my pocket for the keys to my Mazda in the gray, perpetual twilight of the mall’s parking garage. My footsteps echo on the concrete.

There’s a man standing next to my car. A hundred ingrained reflexes are transmitted and multiplied through my spine, my nerves. A hundred opposing impulses of violence and escape. The man straightens up, turns to me, stretches like someone who’s been in the same position for a long time. It’s an inviting movement, the slow gesture of someone from whom you have nothing to fear. I hear my steps slow in the echo. Finally, I stop. Twenty yards from the car. Just the rustling of a giant fan somewhere. Just the traffic three floors below us. Just a trembling moment, threatening to capsize.

The man stands still and raises his open hands with infinite slowness, in a timeless gesture of peace, good intentions. But it’s only when he takes a few, short, slow steps toward me that I see who he is. Twenty-five years of shifting alliances. But I still know who he is.

The mustache is shorter. His face is lined and older. It’s not his appearance that unmasks him. It’s what seeing him does to my memory of a previous moment. How his gestures, his movements, bring me back, brings the past back. It’s connection through pattern recognition, memory through context.

‘Salam alaikum
,’ he says.

I clear my throat and take out the key to the car. Unlock it with a click, a beep.

‘Alaikum salam
.’

We sit in the car. Two shelved spies in a Japanese car, in an American shopping mall, in a world that wriggled away from us, in this unpredictable present that we don’t know how to relate to. At first, we say nothing. We just sit there. Not even looking at each other. Ultimately, it’s up to me to begin.

‘How’d you find me?’ I say in Arabic.

He glances at me, obliquely from above. A flash of disappointment in his eyes.

‘How I found you? I’ve been in the US for quite some time. I have contacts. You know how it works with our background. If you want to find someone, you do.’

I feel stupid. I should never have asked. I’ve insulted him, his skills, what’s left of a life he might no longer lead.

‘So,’ I say. ‘You live here now?’

He nods, sighs, raises his arms.

‘I saw which way the wind was blowing. Already after 9/11. It was only a matter of time. And your colleagues were accommodating.’

‘And now?’ I say. ‘What are you doing now?’

He smiles wryly and leans back in the seat.

‘Now I teach Arabic at a community college in St George’s County. My wife is a nurse again.’

He stops, shakes his head, clearly uncomfortable with that particular part of his new life. Finally, he shrugs.

‘She’s American now and seems to like it. It went quickly for her. It’s the American dream, right? Hard work, two cars, and a small house in Millersville?’

He smiles again. A smile that’s ironic but not resigned or bitter. It’s the smile of someone who’s long understood the importance of not fighting against the current, of not asking why or complaining about how life has changed. It’s the smile of a refugee.

‘It turned out differently than we imagined,’ I say. ‘Everything turned out differently.’

He nods. ‘It’s been a long time since Stockholm.’

The diving bell has hit bottom. The reason he sought me out, which must have been harder than he lets on. I nod.

‘Twenty-five years ago,’ I say. ‘It feels like yesterday.’

‘Do you remember that you asked me about something before our meeting? That you asked me to look into something? As a favor. Between spies.’

‘Of course.’

My heart rate has now doubled in speed. I try to swallow, but my mouth has stopped producing saliva.

‘It was brave. You took a risk. Contacting someone you didn’t know. Adding a personal inquiry onto an official meeting. It’s rare. Right?’

He turns in his seat and looks me straight in the eye.

‘Anyone who makes such an inquiry is either ignorant or trying to fool themselves. Do you agree?’

‘What do you mean?’ I say.

He shakes his head gently. He looks tired, old.

‘You’re not ignorant. You had your suspicions. Founded suspicions. And you knew that I would never be able to verify them. That it doesn’t work that way. You knew I would give you an empty answer. Something that is not a lie and not the truth. Still you asked. Still you asked who killed your girlfriend, the mother of your daughter. You asked me when you didn’t even know who I was.’

‘I was desperate,’ I say carefully. ‘I was willing to do anything.’

He shakes his head again and opens his backpack, pulls a beige folder out of it. Balances it on his knees. I close my eyes. Lean back, feel the blood pulsing through my body.

‘You asked me because you knew that my answer would be empty. That it would be possible to interpret however you wanted to. You wanted to be able to choose the easy way. Lie or truth. You chose the path of least resistance. Who am I to judge you for that?’

I don’t say anything. Barely even breathe.

‘And maybe I should let it be. What good will it do now?’ he says. ‘To bring up the past? It has been such a long time. But this life turned us into instruments. Nothing more. Constantly ready to act on whatever they chose to share with us. Constantly ready to switch sides, switch ideology, or methods.’