“Really?” he said, though he knew what she meant.
“Like they’re living in their own little compound, surrounded
by barbed wire. They pretend they’re keeping everyone out, when
in fact they’re locked in.”
It was a nice way to put it, and it made him think of Tom
Grainger’s delusions of empire—Roman outposts in hostile lands.
Once they hit the A1 heading southwest, Angela got back to
business. “Tom fill you in on everything?”
“Not much. Can I get one of those smokes?”
“Not in the car.”
“Oh.”
“Tell me what you know, and I’ll fill in the rest.”
Thick forests passed them, pines flickering by as he outlined his
brief conversation with Grainger. “He says your Frank Dawdle was
sent down here to deliver a briefcase full of money. He didn’t say
how much.”
“Three million.”
“Dollars?”
She nodded at the road.
Charles continued: “He was last seen at the Hotel Metropolin
Portorož by Slovenian intelligence. In his room. Then he disappeared.”
He waited for her to fill the numerous blank spots in that
story line. All she did was drive in her steady, safe way. “Want to tell
me more? Like, who the money was for?”
Angela tilted her head from side to side, but instead of answering
she turned on the radio. It was preset to a station she’d found
during her long drive from Vienna. Slovenian pop. Terrible stuff.
“And maybe you can tell me why we had to learn his last whereabouts
from the SOVA, and not from our own people.”
As if he’d said nothing, she cranked the volume, and boy-band
harmonies filled the car. Finally, she started to speak, and Charles
had to lean close, over the stick shift, to hear.
“I’m not sure who the orders started with, but they reached us
through New York. Tom’s office. He chose Frank for obvious reasons.
Old- timer with a spotless record. No signs of ambition. No
drinking problems, nothing to be compromised. He was someone
they could trust with three million. More importantly, he’s familiar
here. If the Slovenes saw him floating around the resort, there’d be
no suspicions. He vacations in Portorož every summer, speaks fluent
Slovene.” She grunted a half-laugh. “He even stopped to chat with
them. Did Tom tell you that? The day he arrived, he saw a SOVA
agent in a gift shop and bought him a little toy sailboat. Frank’s like
that.”
“I like his style.”
Angela’s look suggested he was being inappropriately ironic. “It
was supposed to be simple as pie. Frank takes the money down to
the harbor on Saturday—two days ago—and does a straight phrasecode
pass- off. Just hands over the briefcase. In return, he gets an
address. He goes to a pay phone, calls me in Vienna, and reads off
the address. Then he drives back home.”
The song ended, and a young DJ shouted in Slovenian about the
hot- hot- hot band he’d just played as he mixed in the intro to the next
tune, a sugar- sweet ballad.
“Why wasn’t someone backing him up?”
“Someone was,” she said, spying the rearview. “Leo Bernard.
You met him in Munich, remember? Couple of years ago.”
Charles remembered a hulk of a man from Pennsylvania. In
Munich, Leo had been their tough- guy backup during an operation
with the German BND against an Egyptian heroin racket. They’d
never had to put Leo’s fighting skills to the test, but it had given
Charles a mea sure of comfort knowing the big man was available.
“Yeah. Leo was funny.”
“Well, he’s dead,” said Angela, again glancing into the rearview.
“In his hotel room, a floor above Frank’s. Nine millimeter.” She
swallowed. “From his own gun, we think, though we can’t find the
weapon itself.”
Fearless, gripping, at once darkly funny and tender, spanning three continents and numerous lives, Americanah is a richly told story set in today's globalized world.
The story of an American family, middle class in middle America, ordinary in every way but one. But that exception is the beating heart of this extraordinary novel.
The most mature work yet from an incomparable storyteller, TransAtlantic is a profound meditation on identity and history in a wide world that grows somehow smaller and more wondrous with...
First time novelist Vaddey Ratner captured my heart and senses in this novel based on her childhood in Cambodia. Her story transcends any news story...
read more
From the first page, I was drawn in by the lyrical writing of the author and mesmerized as the narrator, eight year old Raami, remembered the years...
read more
Trite but true, all good things must come to an end. I so wanted to keep reading the wonderful prose, the settings that let one think they are part...
read more
Kenn Nesbitt is new Children's Poet Laureate(Jun 12 2013) Kenn Nesbitt has been named the new Children's Poet Laureate: Consultant in Children's Poetry to the Poetry Foundation, which noted that the two-year position...
Full Story
