In a quiet office on the twelfth floor of the new World Trade Center 7, Broden played Elena a tape.
“It can’t have been an easy business.”
“It was an easy business. I was good at it. It was the easiest thing I ever did in my life.”
“Then why did you get out?”
“I don’t know, I just gradually didn’t want to do it anymore.”
“Why not? What changed you?”
“I don’t know. It was gradual.”
“If you could name one thing.” Listening to her own voice all these weeks later, Elena closed her eyes and thought, Why did you keep talking to me? Wasn’t it obvious that you were being interrogated? She was strangely angry with him.
“Well, there was a girl. Catina. I’d been thinking about getting out, but it was meeting her, it was talking to her . . . I didn’t know before her that I was really going to do it. Get out, I mean.”
“A girlfriend?”
“No, not a girlfriend. I sold her a passport.”
Broden stopped the tape.
“The tape runs out two minutes later. Did he say anything more about his other clients?”
“No,” Elena said. “Just what’s on the tape. The woman from Lisbon. And that stuff later on about the falling man.”
“Oh, I know all about the woman from Lisbon.” Broden was smiling, more animated than Elena had ever seen her. “I spoke with her at great length. Nonetheless, Elena, it’s the best tape you’ve given me. Good work.”
“Can I ask you a question?” Elena asked.
“Of course.”
“Why was Anton put in a file storage room?”
“I thought it was an elegant solution,” Broden said. “We need him close at hand, but the company wasn’t willing to keep him once the results of his background check came up.”
“What did the background check say?”
“What do you think it said? No one’s invisible,” Broden said. “There’s no such thing as operating under the radar. The background check said he’d never been to Harvard and that he and his cousin were the subjects of an ongoing criminal investigation. Water Incorporated didn’t want him, but he was judged a significant flight risk if he lost his job, so a compromise was reached: the company’s keeping him in storage while we conduct our investigation.”
“Why not just arrest him?”
“Because I don’t want to tip off Aria just yet,” Broden said. “But at any rate, I called you in to ask you something. Did he say anything to you about staying on in Italy? I expected him back some time ago.”
“He didn’t tell me anything,” Elena said. She was slumped in her chair. She hadn’t been sleeping well. She’d gone to Anton’s office with a sunflower—a rose seemed too ordinary—at five o’clock on the afternoon when he’d said he’d be back, but the room was empty with papers blowing over the floor. There was a fine layer of dust on Anton’s desk. She sat in his swivel chair and spun around once or twice, then went to lie down on the sofa. She lay there for a long time, drowsy and a little sad, watching the movement of loose-leaf paper over the floor. She left the sunflower lying on his desk, but when she came back the next day at five o’clock it remained undisturbed. She visited the empty room every afternoon for the rest of that week, lying on the sofa in the quiet, resting in her memories. She was startled by her longing. By Friday Anton hadn’t returned and the sunflower was wilted, so she dropped it out the window onto the roof of the hotel and didn’t go back again.