“Wait,” said Toby. “Are you telling me you fucked this guy … this Peter?”
“Have you ever worked undercover?”
Clearly, he hadn’t, but that didn’t loosen the knot of his disapproval.
“Look,” she said. “I’m not going to stand here and justify my sex life to you.”
He raised his hands. “I’m just saying—you didn’t even know who he was.”
“I don’t know who you are, Toby, but I know I’m not going to fuck you. I don’t need a biography to decide who I’m going to sleep with. Do you?”
Even in the darkness she could see his cheeks flush in embarrassment, or maybe it was anger. He looked toward the high, lit windows that had an ecclesiastical feel. One of them, near the roof, was shattered. He said, “I get it. I’d be shaken, too.” He took a measured breath. “But you at least sent in Peter Kožul’s name, right? What came up?”
Rachel decided—and it was a decision—to let him off the hook. She remembered Layla dropping her off in the Mission, where the pulse of Latin music finally pushed the angular Scottish pop out of her head. She smiled at her neighbor, Miguel, who smoked on the front stoop, and he gave her a wink as she entered and climbed the narrow steps to the little studio apartment that had been her home for the last four months—the mattress in the corner, her secondhand dresser, and the desk she’d found abandoned on the street a week after arriving in town, which Miguel had kindly helped her carry up. But she never used the desk, instead, like today, taking her laptop to bed, where she piled pillows against the cracked wall to support her back and worked her way through the Word document that had been her raison d’être in San Francisco. A research project that had come to her while staring at a pile of divorce papers in a D.C. lawyer’s office.
“Headquarters got in touch around two o’clock yesterday,” she told Toby.
“About Kožul.”
“Yeah,” she said, though that was only part of it. What she didn’t tell Toby was that Bernard, her SAC, had opened the conversation by telling her that someone had called the office looking for her. Who had called?
“Gregg Wills.”
Sitting on her mattress, the smell of roasting corn wafting through her window, her stomach had contracted painfully at the sound of her ex-husband’s name. “What did he want?”
“Something about boxes he found in the beach house?”
“Did you believe him?”
“That’s my problem, Rachel. I believe everybody.”
Down in the street, she’d heard two boys fighting over a basketball.
“What do you want me to tell him?”
“Tell him I don’t care about any boxes.”
Not even a full day later, Toby stepped closer, a look of concern on his face. “You all right?”
Shit, she thought, and continued walking under the gaze of those windows. She said, “Peter Kožul, forty-two years old. Entered the US back in December on a Serbian passport. Student visa.”
“He’s a student?” Toby asked.
She shook her head. “He’s not even Peter Kožul.” Now Toby looked surprised, which made her feel as if she was getting back some control. She said, “His passport was flagged because the numbers lined up with a batch of forgeries used by the Zemun clan a few years ago.”
“Serbian mafia?”
She nodded. “Same guys who killed Zoran Đinđić, back in ’03.”
“Who?”
“Pro-Western politician, shot in Belgrade. You really don’t remember?”
Toby considered this, fingers pulling at his lower lip. She didn’t know anything about Toby, not really. He was an emergency phone number, nothing more. Maybe his specialty was so narrow that the Byzantine power plays of Balkan politics were simply beyond him.
“What’s your focus, Toby?”
“I mostly track Russians.”
“In San Francisco?”
A shrug. “Their consulate likes to keep an eye on emigres. Turn or blackmail them. The usual—and we keep an eye on them.”
“You’re an expert?”
“Three years in Moscow. I know my shit.”
“I see,” she said. “And over the space of three years in Moscow you never worked undercover?”
Toby raised an eyebrow, but he wasn’t here to talk about himself. He wanted to talk about her. “You work under Bernard Treptow?” When she nodded he grinned. “I thought we’d cleared out all those Russia-hating Cold War geriatrics.”
“Apparently not.”
“So who,” he asked, “is Peter Kožul, really?”
“We don’t know. He never smelled like organized crime to me. No prison tattoos, no speeches about ethnic injustice, no historical lectures about the fourteenth century.” In answer to his questioning look, she said, “The Battle of Kosovo.”
He gave her another look but didn’t ask a thing. Instead, he reached into his jacket and took out a pack of Marlboros, offered them to her, and when she refused lit one for himself. The snap and crackle of burning tobacco, and then a breeze tugged the smoke back and forth across his features before ripping it away.
“So, no,” she told him. “I don’t really know who he is. I’m not even sure he’s Yugoslav.”
Toby drew on his cigarette as they reached the front corner of the house. There was the circular driveway and three parked cars—Peter’s Jeep, Layla’s Subaru, and a black Mercedes that made Rachel wonder what Toby did when he wasn’t moonlighting for the FBI. In the center of the ring slouched a crumbling concrete fountain, long out of use, that had probably been put up by some Hollywood producer in a sad imitation of European glory days.
“Up here,” Toby said.
Rachel knew what he was doing, leading her here, and though a part of her resisted she knew it was the only way. He wanted her to take him through it, step by step, on location.
“What was on the agenda?” he asked.
“Agenda?”
“Yeah. You guys talked politics, right? Call the meeting to order, read the minutes from last session, lay out the night’s topics?”
On another night she might have laughed. “They were never as organized as that. They were joined by conviction and friendship. They caused a little trouble and flirted with real action, but they were never really organized.”
“Armchair revolutionaries.”
“I don’t think any of them actually owned an armchair.”
He cocked his head at that, then continued to his Mercedes. Opened the passenger door and took out an SLR camera. He smiled at her and swept a hand toward the still-open front door. “Shall we?”