Page 48 of The Other Woman

“And it never occurred to you to tell me?”

“I would have ended up like that Kirov fellow.”

“You might still.” The sun was hovering a few degrees above the horizon, blazing through the trees. Navot reckoned they had about twenty minutes of daylight at most. “What if Sergei Morosov had been lying to you, Werner? What if they’d been planning to kill my chief?”

“Official Austria would not have shed a tear.”

Navot clenched and unclenched his fist several times and counted slowly to ten, but it was no good. The blow landed in Werner Schwarz’s fattened abdomen where it would leave no mark. It went deep. Deep enough so that Navot, at least for a moment, wondered whether his old asset would ever get up again.

“But that’s not all Sergei told you, is it?” Navot asked of the figure writhing and choking at his feet. “He was fairly confident I would come calling on you after Kirov was killed.”

Werner Schwarz gave no answer; he wasn’t capable of it.

“Shall I go on, Werner, or would you like to pick up the story? The part about Sergei telling you to leave me with the impression that MI6’s Head of Station in Vienna had a girlfriend in Switzerland. They killed her, too, by the way,” lied Navot. “I suppose you’re next. Frankly, I’m surprised you’re still alive.”

Navot reached down and effortlessly hauled the fat Austrian to his feet.

“So it was true?” gasped Werner Schwarz. “There really was a girl?”

Navot placed his hand in the center of Werner Schwarz’s back and sent him stumbling along the footpath. What remained of the sun was now at their backs. Mikhail led the way through the fading light.

“What are they up to?” asked Schwarz. “What are they playing at?”

“We haven’t a clue,” answered Navot untruthfully. “But you’re going to help us find out. Otherwise, we’re going to tell your chief and your minister that you’ve been working for Moscow Center. By the time we’re finished, the world will believeyouwere the one driving the car that killed Alistair Hughes in Bern.”

“This is the way you treat me, Uzi? After everything I’ve done for you?”

“If I were in your position, I’d watch my step. You have one chance to save yourself. You’re working for me again. Exclusively,” added Navot. “No more double and triple games.”

Their shadows were gone, the trees were all but invisible. Mikhail was a faint black line.

“I know it won’t change anything,” said Werner Schwarz, “but I want you to know—”

“You’re right,” said Navot, cutting him off. “It won’t change anything.”

“I’ll need a bit of money to tide me over.”

“Careful, Werner. The snow is slippery, and it’s dark now.”

31

Andalusia, Spain

That same afternoon, in the bone-white town in the mountains of Andalusia, the old woman known derisively asla locaandla rojasat at her desk in the alcove beneath her stairs, writing about the moment she first set eyes on the man who would forever alter the course of her life. Her first draft, which she had tossed onto the grate in disgust, had been a purple passage full of violins and beating hearts and swelling breasts. Now she adopted the spare prose of a journalist, with an emphasis on time, date, and place—half past one o’clock on a chill winter’s afternoon in early 1962, the bar of the seaside St. Georges Hotel in Beirut. He was drinking vodka and V8 juice and reading his post, a handsome if somewhat battered man, recently turned fifty, with blue eyes set within a deeply lined face and an excruciating stammer she found irresistible. She was twenty-four at the time, a committed communist, and very beautiful. She told him her name, and he told her his, which she already knew. He was perhaps the most famous, or infamous, correspondent in Beirut.

“Which paper do you write for?” he asked.

“Whichever one will print my stories.”

“Are you any good?”

“I think so, but the editors in Paris aren’t so sure.”

“Perhaps I can be of help. I know a good many important people in the Middle East.”

“So I’ve heard.”

He smiled warmly. “Sit down. Have a d-d-drink with me.”