The waitress takes charge, putting Z at a table in the high-flown lobby so she can go check them in. He has questions that she shows no interest in hearing. All she wants to know is if Z wants to be awake or asleep. And when he doesn’t understand, she says, “Coffee or alcohol?”
He opts for the former, and the waitress orders him an espresso and a champagne for herself. She goes off to get them a room with a confidence that truly surprises.
Z maps the lobby, looking for pattern and broken pattern, for aberrancy and awkwardness, for sturdy shoes whose quality is at odds with the suit above, for greetings overly performative, for meaningful eye contact between strangers, for furtive checkings of phones or a nervous glance at a watch. He hunts the employee in one sort of uniform inexplicably manning the wrong station.
In the midst of this, lit with hyperarousal and at his fight-or-flight best, Z sees the waitress throw her head back and laugh. He hears the sound of her laughter from across the room as their drinks arrive.
Feeling a kind of ease, Z sips his coffee and eats the micro-sized heart-shaped cookie plucked off the side of his saucer. He forces himself to savor it, even though it tastes as if it were made of some elegant mix of pistachios and butter, rosewater and sand. He tells himself—maybe the least harmful deception of late—that it is a treat.
As the waitress comes happily his way, he thinks fate should have switched their roles. She is gifted at compartmentalizing and looks more natural on the run than he does. She sits in the ridiculous bergère chair across the table. She knocks back her champagne, and, standing, leaves a few coins. “They’ll put it on the room,” she says. “Now let’s go hide in style.”
“Holy shit,” is what Z says. He’s never seen anything like it. The sitting room is extraordinarily grand, as is the view out onto Place de la Concorde.
“It’s like being on a honeymoon,” he says.
“Yes, a honeymoon where someone is also trying to kill you.”
“Like that, exactly,” Z says. He opens the door to the bedroom and says, “Holy shit,” a second time. As there is no bedroom, but a staircase leading to it.
“Come up here,” he calls. “This is unreal.”
The waitress joins him, taking it all in stride.
“Yes,” she says. “It’s very nice.”
“We can’t pay for this,” he says. “I can’t. You can’t.”
“I can,” she says. “That is, my father can and already is. It’s on his card. And, please,” she says, putting up a hand as Z tenses, “don’t start with the paranoia about him being linked to me and then me to you. I told them not to put through any charges until we leave.” The waitress goes over to the window and pulls aside the curtains. “My family, we stay here all the time.”
“All the time?”
“Since I was little.”
“I thought you were sharing a tiny place with too many roommates. Remember? No tub!”
“I am.”
“For sport?”
“To build character.”
“So you’re super-rich, then?”
“The super-rich find the ‘super’ part unpleasant to admit. It’s not polite.”
“But you are?”
“Do you think I’d have come along if I wasn’t? This is not a poor girl’s escapade. It’s for someone who does not worry about having very big problems be made to go away. Anyway, have you ever heard the average Italian speak English? Listen to me,” she says, of her fluency. “Growing up in Rome, English like mine does not come cheap. You’re the one who works in intelligence. These are some very obvious signals to miss.”
Z agrees with her, both aloud and to himself. He thinks again that they should really swap places. The waitress is so much better at all of this than him.
2002, Berlin
Joshua slaps at the night table, hunting the clock, then feels his way around the wall above the headboard, searching for the switch that sets the sconces over the bed alight.
“What time is it?” he says into the phone, now for the second time, and still without reply.
He knows Farid is the night caller, and that Farid has been holding his silence for an inordinately long stretch, breathing heavily down the line.
Joshua believes the breathing to be a kind of soft cry, a noise he could not imagine coming from this man.
“What time is it?” he says again as he collects himself, though at this point, he can see the clock flashing 3:55.
“You are the new one,” Farid says.
“I don’t understand,” Joshua tells him. “I am the new what? What’s going on?”
“You. You are new. It’s not a collaborator on the ground. Not a drone in the sky. It’s only you.”
“What is not a drone in the sky? I don’t understand, Farid.”
“Tonight, all of this, it’s a godsend, for you, yes? An added bonus beyond the strike? All of us trying to figure it out together. Everyone talking without thinking. All that new chatter for you to sift through, so you can better map relationships, better string the pictures together, moving all the tacked photos around on your boards.”
“What boards, Farid? I don’t understand.”
“It is sloppy behavior on all our parts, I know. But a leak this big must be patched. There is someone inside, the only option anyone can figure. As everything is perfectly secure on the Gaza end. Then it hits me—here in Berlin, a world away from the fighting. I am the one. I am the weak link. It’s all too neat and all too convenient, for you to suddenly arrive.”
“What’s happened?” Joshua says. “You need to tell me.”
“Even now, you continue.”
“Honestly, it’s four in the morning. I’m not continuing anything. I was asleep.”
“A massacre, Joshua.”
“I don’t understand,” Joshua says, his voice gone high, and sweating already in his bed.
“In Gaza they are pulling bodies from the rubble while the houses still burn. You hit your target. You killed my brother. Good for you, Joshua. You made him a martyr, which we can always accept. It is the children, Joshua. The building next door. The whole family dead. What have you done?”
“What are you saying, friend? We are in Berlin. I am in Berlin.”
“The Israelis dropped a bomb on my brother’s building. Only, when they leveled it, they leveled the one next door too.”
“Please,” Joshua says, his heart racing. “Take a deep breath,” he says.
He requests this of Farid but is really only trying to command it of himself. The panic—he is so bad with the panic, the panic is beginning to bubble and stir.
“There’s no one,” Farid says. “No one new in our circle. Nothing new on the ground. Nothing has changed in Gaza, nothing in Damascus, nothing in Beirut. No one can come up with anything, until—”
“Until what, Farid?”
“Until I come up with you. It’s the phones, isn’t it! You show up with your business. You show up with free money, just when we need. Computers when we need. And I take them. I take your fucking refurbished phones. And I get them to my people in Gaza. And now my brother, and all those near him, are dead.”
“Oh my God,” Joshua says, rushing to process. “You don’t really think—”
“What I don’t think is that I can get over that gate. If I thought I could make it in there to strangle you myself, I would.”