They rode the S-Bahn southwest to the end of the line. At first it was standing room only, and they hung on to the rail, jostled together between bodies. Berlin was a circuit board of lights, sliding by the windows in strobes. At one point Harwood stumbled and felt Felix’s right arm around her, and the smooth alloy of his hand at her waist. She met his eyes, startled by the frankness she found there. Then the golden cubes of city blocks were eaten by patches of darkness that swelled as the train shrugged off the noise and thrum of the capital, seeking out its edges. Leiter and Harwood sat opposite each other on threadbare seats, legs touching. His left knee was cold and hard. She looked through her own reflection to a makeshift and, she imagined, immovable community that straggled along the railway sidings: broken-down caravans, irregular allotments, tin huts, and among it all the dim and slow movement of people caught between history’s currents, and perhaps content to be so.
When they stepped onto the platform, the air was crisp with pine. A hand-painted sign in black letter read Berlin—Wannsee. They followed a straggle of commuters into an octagonal hall painted in chipped mint green, passing beneath squat capital letters spelling ausgang in a futurist typeface washed up from the twenties. Outside, the loudest noise was the wind in the trees. A woman in her twenties with a backpacker air was locking up the station café; she waved and called hello to Felix in an Australian accent. He asked if she needed a lift home.
“I’ve got my bike, thanks, Felix.” The woman wobbled away on a secondhand thing.
Harwood looked Felix up and down. “Service with a smile?”
“Nothing less, ma’am. You mind walking? I get pent up behind a desk.”
She fell in with him, smelling the lake hidden by the regiment of trees. “How did you end up out here?”
“Let’s say I miss a big sky.”
Felix Leiter lived in a Gothic redbrick villa on the eastern shore of Wannsee lake, with the Grunewald forest pressing in to the north. Harwood eased from her boots and dropped her yellow canvas roll-top bag on a deep sofa—reading in the rental furnishings, the one rumpled chair, the game of solitaire on the coffee table, a more singular existence than she’d imagined—and passed to an arched window, hoping to sense the water. Nothingness stretched before her.
“Hell of a view in the morning,” said Leiter, flicking through a stack of vinyl on the floor.
She shot him a smile. “That an invitation?”
A one-shouldered shrug as he dropped the needle of the record player. “Play your cards right.” An old jazz number Harwood didn’t recognize crackled through the speakers. “Let’s see, what’s for dinner . . .”
They shared an omelet at the kitchen counter, bent over the plate head-to-head, as if their two ice cream spoons had conjured a lifelong comradery. Leiter was open about his role in Berlin, trying to patch up the diplomatic hash left by his predecessor, who’d been summarily banished by Angela Merkel after being discovered tapping her phone. But Harwood was struck by the tightrope of his generosity—though he told her much, none of it was information she couldn’t glean from her own intelligence reports. Afterward, he lit a fire, and opened up a cabinet to reveal a small cocktail bar. Harwood sat on the floor with her back against the coffee table. She stretched her legs out to the hearth, warming her cold toes. She made sure her dress did not ride over her knees. She watched the tension play over Leiter’s shoulders as he poured himself a Haig on the rocks and then turned to her.
“What’ll you have?”
“Would it break your heart,” she said, “if I ordered a vodka martini, shaken not stirred?”
“Only a little,” he said, and the smile reached his eyes. “Let’s see. Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. I forget anything?”
“Only the lemon twist.”
Leiter clicked his fingers. “And a lemon twist. He really is the fussiest sumbitch I ever knew.”
Harwood watched Leiter assemble the drink, seeing how he used his right hand, which gleamed white, to grip but not much else. He was avoiding her eyes. She said, “You knew Vesper, too.”
He scratched his chin. “I was there when he met her and christened the drink,” said Leiter. “I was there when she betrayed him over matters of the heart. He never knew when to fall in love. And when not to.” He handed the glass to her, hitched his trousers, and joined her on the floor. “Let’s skip the toast, I’ll only promise you my soul.”
Harwood sipped the martini, resisting the thousand memories that went with it to look Leiter squarely in the face. “Do you think I betrayed James, too?”
A short shrug. “James doesn’t have many weaknesses. As the years went on, those weaknesses became fewer and fewer. But it’s weakness that makes us human. Forces us to acknowledge our own mortality. I told him to quit. Told him this lousy job stinks. You know what it stinks of? Formaldehyde and lilies. And I thought he might quit, too. But then you came along, and he knew weakness again, but it didn’t make him cling to hearth and home. It only spurred him on.”
Another sip. She thought back to James’s fantasy of a life after this. She believed, in the early days, that he meant a life after retirement from active duty once he’d passed forty-five. Then she realized that his fantasy—which he’d make real in brief escapes—of a house on the beach with her wasn’t a retirement plan. It was just a place for them to quit the world when it was sunny and he wanted to forget, a refuge for the next few years he expected to be alive. He couldn’t imagine quitting for good. Only dying. 007 was a tragedy waiting to happen—if the tragedy hadn’t happened already, long before she ever met him. Anybody attached to James Bond would end up mourning him, and she couldn’t bear to be his last witness. She’d done that already in her life. She wanted someone who could dream of the future and mean it.
“And here’s a coincidence,” said Felix, drawing her back. “I wasn’t the only operative trailing you today. I was shadowed by a couple of hale and hearty types with the look of eastern European mercs. So you tell me, Johanna Harwood, what’s an old spy to think?”
“You tell me.”
Leiter’s jaw pulsed. “Jury’s still out. If I thought you were the reason I’m down a friend . . .” He stared into the fire. “Well, let’s just say I don’t have any neighbors, and the lake is deep.”
“If you’re trying to scare me”—she set the glass down—“you’re doing a terrific job.”
“I don’t imagine much scares you.”
Harwood grabbed the poker, nudging a log deeper into the flames. “What was Zofia scared of?”
“You favor a blunt interrogation, huh?”
“I’m on the clock till midnight. Then we can try soft.”
“Don’t make promises you don’t intend to keep, my mom always said.”
“She must have been thrilled when you went into the deception racket.”
“Was yours?”
Harwood leaned back, keeping hold of the poker. She raised it aloft a little. “I could fence with you all week, Felix Leiter, if the fate of the world didn’t hang in the balance.”
“You Double O’s, always so dramatic. I got on fine with Zofia. Kind of girl anyone would get on fine with. Hyper-smart. Not strictly present in the here and now. But only ’cause her mind’s doing bigger and better things. How can you resent her for that, when she’s gunning for the angels and she wears her optimism on her sleeve where anyone can take a poke at it? An old spy like me gets a hankering for that kind of disposition. Comes over sort of protective. Guess that’s why she confided in me about Robert Bull, private citizen of the United States of America and the Paradise Republic, security expert with a rap sheet for stalking and sexual assault in a former life, now expunged from the records. Curious company for Paradise.”
“Did you see it coming?”
“Not soon enough. My order to put Bull under surveillance was going to come into effect the morning after Zofia stopped answering her phone. Let me tell you something, 003. It means something when the CIA can’t find a person.”
“Did you find Robert Bull?”
“The Berlin police arrested him at a hospital around the corner from her apartment. Nurses called it in. Blood on his clothes and under his fingernails, most of it not his. A damaged right orbital socket. Guess Zofia got in a punch or two.”
Harwood wanted to ask whether or not Leiter had left Robert Bull in the custody of the police or disappeared him into a CIA black hole. But it would be too soon. He was dancing with her, and the rhythm was his. She raised her glass. “I’m dry.”
“Can’t have that.”
One more drink, then two. His shoulders relaxed. When the fire began to struggle, he dropped a hefty block of wood into the embers, and the rush of red glowed over his face, shading a deep frown between his eyes. She wondered if he was not simply alone but lonely. Down a friend.
She asked, “How much does it mean, Felix, when the CIA can’t find a person?”
Felix drummed the fingers of his left hand on the back of his right, a hard patter. “Believe me, I’ve put every informer from every circle of hell on the search for James. Nothing.”
“How do you explain that?”
A short laugh. “I tell myself that James finally took my advice and is enjoying a permanent vacation on some tropical island beyond the scope of Langley or London or anywhere. It’s either that or cry into my whisky, and I was taught by my daddy’s belt never to do that. Matter of fact, James is the only person ever to see me bawl. Visited me in the hospital after . . .” He raised his right arm.
The chill that Harwood first felt when Bond described discovering the shape of a body on Leiter’s hotel bed returned to her. The shape had been covered in a sheet. When Bond snatched the shroud from the face, there was no face. Just something wrapped round and round with dirty bandages, like a white wasps’ nest. More bandages wrapped around the torso, blood seeping through. The lower half of the body was draped in a sack; the sack was mostly empty. Everything was soaked in blood. A piece of paper protruded from the gap in the bandages where the mouth should have been, like a thank-you card sticking out among a bunch of lilies. The card read: he disagreed with something that ate him. As Bond recalled sitting on the edge of the bed waiting for the paramedics, watching over the body of his friend and wondering how much of it could be saved, there was a quietness rarely heard in his voice, as if he were back in the hotel room, enjoined in the wait for death.
She said gently: “Anyone would cry.”
Felix gave her a brief smile. “Worse things happen at sea.” Then he broke into laughter that blew through the room like a gale, sweeping Harwood up in it. But his gaze lost its focus, seeming to watch the scene from a great distance. “You want to know the meaning of terror, try the moment a great white bumps into your legs with all the weight of a tank, and you know it’s just getting started. I thought I was gone for sure. Wrestling with sharks might make a good story for parties in Washington, but I’d rather have the sunken pirate treasure and a pretty girl to tell about. James gets all the luck.” He inspected his drink. “He was there when I came to. Holding the hand I had left. That’s a good parlor trick he’s got. Just when you need a friend . . .”
“I haven’t given up. Neither’s Moneypenny.”
“You haven’t gotten married, either. James told me the fella’s a genius.”
Harwood found a hearty tone. “He likes to think he is.”
“Still, not smart enough to watch his partner’s back.”
“It wasn’t Sid’s fault, whatever happened to James.” Harwood’s hand floated to the pocket of her dress, to her silenced phone, wondering how Sid was getting on with Ruqsana trying to trace Zofia’s last movements on the other side of Berlin. They’d said goodbye at the edge of the Barbican, a lingering kiss in the snow, and then boarded separate planes. “James told Sid he was going to check a lead by himself and would be back soon.”
“That’s how you get eaten by sharks,” said Leiter, knocking back his drink. “I was posted here because I lost my gun hand and I can’t run a man down anymore. This is my reward. A house by the lake. A game of spies. Now you’ve come to play a hand, you and your boyfriend. You put him outta the way so you can bat your eyelashes at me. Why should I trust either of you? Bashir failed to follow basic protocol and let his partner follow a lead alone. He was the last person to see James alive. James told me he hoped to meet up with you, the famous real deal, after that mission for a last goodbye. Good money says one or both of you sold James down the river.”
“Are you a gambling man, Felix?”
“Less and less.”
“Say you get me access to Robert Bull, say I interrogate him, if I’m a double agent—or whatever it is you think I am—you can follow what I do with that information and then you’ll have all the proof you need that I’m either a traitor, or an ally. If you stop me now, we lose any chance of finding Zofia and discovering whatever it is that Paradise has gotten himself into.”
“Pretty confident of your interrogation skills.”
“Did you think you’d end tonight by telling me you cried when you woke up in the hospital?”
He scratched his chin. “Can’t say I did.” Leiter’s attention traveled to the poker, lying on the floor at her fingertips. “Can’t say I haven’t noticed you’ve kept yourself armed most of the evening, too.”
A tap-tap-tap on the windows announced rain.
“You don’t have any neighbors,” said Harwood, “and the lake is deep. A woman takes her precautions. Besides, that list of people James trusts, the list of people you think might have lulled him into a false sense of security before his fall—that list includes you, Felix.”
Flares spread across his cheeks. “You think I’d do him a lousy turn?”
“No.” Harwood slid the poker away. “I’m trusting you. Why don’t you give it a try?”