After Anne left Clay Headquarters, she went off to drink herself silly. She chose the Kempinski’s bar. The smoky room off the main lobby beckoned because she knew it and she could find her way home. She was comforted by the bright laughter and the familiar gallery of celebrity photographs, and even the nimble fingering of the piano-entertainer was reassuring.
She took a bar stool and faced the wall of glittering liquor, catching the bartender’s eye, giving her order. One whiskey came, and when she’d downed it quickly, another appeared, which she sipped, thinking about the men in the conference room. Self-important impresarios of an amateur production of espionage musical comedy. The whiskey warmed her and deepened her outrage.
She nodded at the stage. “Is Chrystal here tonight?”
“Off tonight,” the bartender said. “Tuesdays and Wednesdays.” He vigorously wiped a highball glass with his towel. “Where’s your guy?”
Anne frequently came to the bar in the company of Stefan, who had a job tuning the baby grand, and they’d been fans of Chrystal’s cabaret act.
She shrugged. The witty answer she wanted to give, to avoid a serious conversation, didn’t come to mind. She pointed at her half-empty shot glass. She wasn’t sure why she’d come—a vague desire to not be alone in her apartment. A vague desire to be among people she didn’t know, the comfort of having laughing people be a distracting soundtrack to her misery.
Anne knew she had stayed too long when she was the only woman at the bar, and a sullen man at the opposite end kept looking in her direction. She knew what he thought of her—a single woman drinking by herself—but she didn’t feel enough contempt to tell him to fuck off.
She took the U-Bahn home and leaned her head against the carriage’s window. Her thoughts wandered, but she kept coming back to what she understood from the conference room. There was only one way forward. No crying, no outrage, no self-pity would alter her predicament. Her innocence was unproven and unprovable, and there was no one to whom she could make her case. She couldn’t walk away. And if she could, where would she go? The things she’d asked for. She laughed. What would she do with Krugerrands? She remembered Stefan’s jar of coins—now gone.
It was a 45-minute ride. Her mind went back to the moment in her hallway when Cooper stepped off the elevator and asked if she was Anne Simpson. It was three weeks since she’d said “yes,” but it felt like three years. So much had happened. She looked out the darkened window and saw her reflection. A stranger’s face. Her finger touched the contours of her flushed cheeks and her pale lips. Who am I?
The world before Cooper arrived had come to an end. She was now in a perilous new world with an uncertain future. Cooper’s question—“Anne Simpson?”—came to her again urgently, as if he’d just spoken. In her rational mind, she knew that nothing would be different if she had kept silent, but part of her wished she’d said nothing.
Vivid memories came to her, as if they weren’t memories at all but things she was reliving. The hotel bar with Stefan, their ride home on the U-Bahn, Stefan at her side, both of them silly with alcohol, laughing, kissing. She wanted that life back.
Late that night, she sat up in bed and looked over at the other side, expecting to find Stefan asleep, with his pillow over his face. Fear gripped her. How could this happen? His deception, his death, the man in the window across the street, the danger she was in. What terrible things had she done in a past life to deserve this?
She wanted to cry, but she was too drunk.
In the morning, Anne swung her legs over the side of the bed, feeling disoriented. She had fallen asleep in her clothes. Cigarette smoke clung to her blouse. A button was missing.
She showered, holding her hair behind her head and letting warm water flow over her closed eyes. She let the stream massage her face, relax her mind. She thought about the men in the conference room—her demands. Passport and Krugerrands. What had she been thinking? Slowly, she allowed herself to think about what she had agreed to do.
She toweled her hair on her way to the living room and stood over the torn classified ad, staring at the West Berlin address. She stood in the living room, naked, and lifted the telephone. On the third ring, her call went through.
“Hallo?” Someone had picked up.
“Hallo,” she repeated.
There was static on the line and then she heard the line go dead. She dialed again and got a man’s voice.
“I called before. My husband asked me to inquire about the job. He understands it is an American Steinway built in Queens in 1972. He can meet you.”
After giving a date, a time, and an address, she replaced the telephone in its cradle, stood, and looked out at the window across the street. Then she realized she was still naked and closed the venetian blinds.
Anne ate a breakfast of grapefruit and black coffee and set aside the classified ad. She had given the man the address Praeger provided and as she sipped her coffee, her eyes drifted to the East Berlin address she’d found among Stefan’s things. She wondered about the woman who lived there. Distracted by her thoughts, she scooped a section of grapefruit and juice squirted onto the envelope. She wiped it with her cloth napkin. At one point, she consulted a city map, but finding the street only raised more questions. She held the mysterious address in her hand, radically aware of all the information that she didn’t possess. Why on earth had she waited so long to look?
There was only one place Anne knew she had a reasonable chance of getting answers. When she left her apartment, she double-locked the front door and confirmed that she had the note with the East Berlin address and the telephone number Dr. Knappe had given her.
“They’ll spot you lickety-split dressed like that.”
Anne turned, startled, and saw Chrystal dressed in her kimono standing in the doorway. Her short black hair was slicked back and white pancake obscured the bruise on her cheek. “You scared the shit out of me,” Anne said.
“Better me than them.”
“Who?”
“Two men outside in a car. They’ve been there an hour. They’re not looking for me, I assure you, not the way I look. I have something for you.” Chrystal returned from her apartment with a pale-blue burqa that she placed over Anne and fixed the veil to leave only her eyes visible. Chrystal stepped back. “I’ve been waiting for just the right occasion. It’s perfect. Incognito,” she said. “The Turkish shopkeeper might know what to look for, but the two Germans in the car won’t have a clue.” Chrystal put on her own burqa and the two left together.