The Tourist

“KGB?” She stared at him. “You already know about this guy. How?”

Charles touched the envelope of Dexedrine in his pocket for comfort. “I hear things.”

“Oh. I don’t have clearance.”

Charles didn’t bother answering.

“You want to run this, then?”

“I’d rather you did. I don’t carry a Company ID.”

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Angela said as she rang the front bell.

She showed her State Department ID to a bald, cliché-ridden bodyguard with a wired earplug and asked to speak with Roman Ugrimov. The large man spoke Russian into his lapel, listened to an answer, then walked them up a dim, steep stairwell of worn stone. At the top, he unlocked a heavy wooden door.

Ugrimov’s apartment seemed to have been flown in direct from Manhattan: shimmering wood floors, modern designer furniture, plasma television, and double-paned sliding doors leading to a long terrace that overlooked an evening panorama of Venetian rooftops to the Grand Canal. Even Charles had to admit it was breathtaking.

Ugrimov himself was seated at a steel table in a high-backed chair, reading from a notebook computer. He smiled at them, feigning surprise, and got up with an outstretched hand. “The first visitors to my new home,” he said in easy English. “Welcome.”

He was tall, fiftyish, with wavy gray hair and a bright smile. Despite heavy eyes that matched Charles’s, he had a youthful vitality about him.

After the introductions, he led them to the overdesigned sofas. “Now, please. Tell me what I can do for my American friends.”

Angela handed over her photograph of Frank Dawdle. Ugrimov slipped on some wide Ralph Lauren bifocals and tilted it in the failing evening light. “Who’s this supposed to be?”

“He works for the American government,” said Angela.

“CIA, too?”

“We’re just embassy staff. He’s been missing three days.”

“Oh.” Ugrimov handed back the photo. “That must be troubling.”

“It is,” Angela said. “You’re sure he hasn’t come to see you?”

“Nikolai,” said Ugrimov, and in Russian asked, “Have we had any visitors?”

The bodyguard rolled out his lower lip and shook his head.

Ugrimov shrugged. “Nothing, I’m afraid. Perhaps you can tell me why you think he would come here. I don’t know this man, do I?”

Charles said, “He was looking into your life just before he disappeared.”

“Oh,” the Russian said again. He raised a finger. “You’re telling me that someone at the American embassy in Vienna has been looking into my life and works?”

“You’d be insulted if they didn’t,” said Charles.

Ugrimov grinned. “Okay. Let me offer some drinks. Or are you on the job?”

To Charles’s annoyance, Angela said, “We’re on the job,” and stood. She handed over a business card. “If Mr. Dawdle does get in contact with you, then please call me.”

“I’ll be sure to do that.” He turned to Charles. “Do svidaniya.”

Charles repeated the Russian farewell back to him.

Once they were down the steps and in the dark street, the air moist and still warm, Angela yawned again and said, “What was that?”

“What?”

“How’d he know you spoke Russian?”

“I’m telling you, I need a new name.” Charles looked up the length of the street. “The Russian community’s not so big.”

“Not so small either,” said Angela. “What’re you looking for?”

“There.” He didn’t point, only nodded at a small sign at the corner indicating an osteria. “Let’s take a long walk around to there. Eat and watch.”

“You don’t trust him?”

“A man like that—he’d never admit it if Dawdle came to him.”

“Watch if you want. I need some sleep.”

“How about a pill?”

“First one’s free?” she said, then winked and stifled another yawn. “I have embassy drug tests to contend with.”

“Then at least leave me one of your cigarettes.”

“When did you start smoking?”

“I’m in the midst of quitting.”

She tapped one out for him, but before handing it over said, “Is it the drugs that do it to you? Or the job?”

“Do what?”

“Maybe it’s all the names.” She handed over the cigarette. “Maybe that’s what’s made you so cold. When you were Milo, you were a different person.”

He blinked at her, thinking, but no reply came to him.

6 (#u091b7d02-b9dd-575e-8bcc-09ecba9ad902)

He spent the first part of his night watch at the little osteria, looking down Barba Fruttariol, eating a dinner of cicchetti—small portions of seafood and grilled vegetables—and washing it down with a delicious Chianti. The bartender tried to start a conversation, but Charles preferred silence, so when the man rattled on about George Michael, “certainly the greatest singer in the world,” he didn’t bother contradicting or agreeing. The man’s banter became dull background noise.

Someone had left behind a copy of the day’s Herald Tribune, and he mused over the stories for a while, in particular a statement by U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that “according to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions,” which amounted to about a quarter of the Pentagon budget. A certain Senator Nathan Irwin from Minnesota, breaking party ties, called it “a damned disgrace.” Not even that could hold his attention, though, and he folded the paper and put it aside.

He wasn’t thinking about suicide, but about the Bigger Voice, that thing his mother used to discuss with him during her occasional nocturnal visits in the seventies, when he was a child in North Carolina. “Look at everyone,” she told him, “and see what guides them. Little voices—television, politicians, priests, money. Those are the little voices, and they blot out the one big voice we all have. But listen to me—the little voices mean nothing. All they do is deceive. You understand?”