City of Spies (30 page)

He shifted away so he could look down at her, dark brows drawn together in concern. “Of course not.”

“But I've done terrible things,” she said. “I don't want to be like her, but part of me is. I can't help it.”

“You can be like her in many ways and still be a good person,” he said. “You can take what you loved about her and use that to make things better.”

“Mama did love us,” Pagan said, and put a hand on Devin's chest. His heart beat beneath her palm. “And your father must have loved you, somehow, some way. How could he not?”

He put his hand over hers. “This isn't about me. Or my father. I want you to know that I don't take your feelings lightly when I say I don't believe in monsters. Your mother was a human being. She had many sides to her—one side was ugly and wrong, but another was beautiful and right. That's the side of her that loved you and your sister. The bad and the good don't cancel each other out, you know. They live, side by side, in all of us.”

Pagan knew all too well the weak side of herself. It was finding the good that was challenging. “If it's all so damned gray,” she said, “how do we decide who's right and who's wrong? How do we choose a side?”

“I second-guess myself a lot,” he said, interweaving his fingers through hers. “And then I go with my gut.”

“I guess we have that in common,” she said.

He put his arms around her again and buried his face in her hair. “I still can't quite believe you're here with me. Like this. I never want to leave this room.”

“Scared you tonight, didn't I?” she said. “Sorry.”

“Never be sorry,” he said. “It's one of the reasons I love you—that you risk yourself for what you know is important.”

Those three words. He said them again. She kissed his chest. “You're the one who made it all possible, Devin Black. You're the one who gave me the chance to see what I could be, what I could do.” She scooched up and kissed him twice.

He kissed her a third time, long and hard and deep. It left her breathless.

“Let's see if we can tire you out enough to get you to sleep,” she said.

* * *

Later, she woke to find him passed out beside her. She couldn't help staring down at his long black eyelashes and his mouth, softened by sleep. Then she wrapped herself in his robe and padded into his bathroom and closed the door before turning on the light. He needed every minute of sleep she could give him.

There beside the sink lay the hair gel and the Pepsodent she remembered from her visit to his bathroom in the Berlin Hilton. Everything was spotlessly neat and organized, set in straight lines and right angles. Someone had drilled order and neatness into him. Maybe that had been his father.

There were two other things he'd brought with him in Berlin that she'd found after searching his rooms. Had he stored them in the same, secret place here in Buenos Aires? She lifted the top off the toilet tank and set it on the seat.

Sure enough. A black waterproof bag lay at the bottom of the tank. She put her hand into the cold water and pulled it out. Time for him to share with her as much as she had with him.

* * *

When she woke up it was late afternoon, and Devin was in the shower. Well, they hadn't gotten in from the night's craziness until close to 5:00 a.m. She dialed the number for the suite she shared with Mercedes. The number rang and rang until an operator picked up.

“Any message?” the woman asked.

Maybe the vet had brought Rocket by, and Mercedes had taken him for a walk or something. “No, thank you,” Pagan said. “Can I have room service, please?”

She ordered coffee and breakfast, and it arrived as Devin walked out of the bathroom, buttoning his pants, his dark hair spiky and damp.

“Any word on Dieter?” she asked.

“No sign of him yet. The cops have been alerted, but they're a bit overwhelmed right now.”

Pagan wheeled the food cart over to his side of the bed. “Time for breakfast.”

“You shouldn't have,” he said as he sat down.

“This is as close as I get to cooking,” she said, fanning a napkin onto his lap. “But I know you like your coffee black.” She poured him a cup and set it down on the saucer.

“Bacon, sausages, eggs, mushroom, tomato and porridge?” He flashed her a grin. “You must love me if you ordered a full breakfast.”

“I guess I must,” she said. He looked like the boy he was, sitting there with his hair wet and messy, his bare chest still damp from the shower. It was blissful just to look at him.

He stuffed a large bite into his mouth. Through the food, his accent was waxing Scottish, which meant he was relaxed, and happy. “I'm starving, and you're amazing.”

“Had to butter you up, along with the toast, before asking you all sorts of personal questions,” she said, pulling a chair over to sit on the opposite side of the food cart.

“No black pudding?” He made a tsking noise before taking a large bite of toast. “Can't answer personal questions without beans and black pudding.”

“Couldn't find either one in Buenos Aires,” she said. “Although any food where the main ingredients are blood and intestine might not ever make it to my breakfast table.”

“What in heaven do you think sausages are?”

He couldn't stop smiling at her, which made her smile, which made him smile, in a wonderful endless circle. It would've been kind of sickening if she wasn't so damned full of joy.

“Here come the personal questions,” she said. She hated to break the mood, but she might not get another opportunity to ask him about what she'd found in the bathroom. “Are you ready?”

“Fortified, anyway,” he said, eyes narrowing with joking wariness. “One can never be fully prepared for an ambush.”

“I found this,” she said, and took the plastic Baggie from where she'd put it in the nightstand.

His chewing slowed down as his face smoothed into a familiar suave blandness. “Had to look again, didn't you?” He shrugged and began to cut up a sausage. “It's the best place to hide things in a hotel room.”

She opened the black bag and pulled out a second plastic bag. “You are so thorough. Did someone beat you to make you tidy?”

“My father smacked me a few times,” he said readily enough. “He was a stickler for organization, so it became a habit. Mum knew better than to hit me.”

“Mama never hit us,” Pagan said, thinking back. “Daddy, neither. But I think we pretty much always did what we were told.” She pulled his pistol out of the second bag and laid it carefully on the tray. “What kind of gun is this?”

“Walther PPK,” he said, still eating, but getting more serious by the moment. “Standard issue, no serial number.”

“And this.” She pulled out a small glass vial stopped with cork. Inside it a shiny, squashed bullet rattled around. “Who shot this at you?”

It was a guess. She had no idea why he kept a flattened bullet with him wherever he traveled.

He finished chewing and swallowed his egg, looking at the bullet in her hand. When he looked up at her, his blue eyes were almost black, his jaw tense. “I'm the one who fired that bullet.” His voice was low. “I shot my father.”

Pagan set the glass vial with the bullet down gently on the food tray. This was why he never talked about his father. This was why he identified with her so much. They had both hurt their fathers. Pagan had accidentally killed hers. Maybe Devin had done the same.

She wanted to put her arms around him, but she sensed that might either break him, or shut him up. “What happened?” she asked.

Devin put his fork down and spoke with careful emotionlessness. “It was during our last heist, on a large estate in the south of France. A buyer had asked my father to acquire several paintings being kept there as part of a private collection. What we didn't know was that the buyer was working for the French police and Interpol. My father had long been an irritant to many police forces all over Europe, and they had decided to get him once and for all.”

“How old were you?” she asked.

“Thirteen,” he said. He was speaking in a crisp English accent now, one that enabled him to control every syllable he uttered. “I was better at climbing than my father, so he sent me in first, over the fence, and then up the wall to the second-story window, to cut the alarms. It was after I let him inside that the police surrounded us.”

He got off the bed with an abrupt movement and walked over to the closet to take a shirt off its hanger. “My father wouldn't surrender. They had us with our backs to the wall, guns out. We had nowhere to run, and he wouldn't stand down. Instead, he...” He drew a breath in sharply. “He grabbed me and held me in front of him. As a shield.”

Pagan was standing up, hand over her mouth, like some melodramatic silent movie actress of old. But she couldn't help it.

Devin unbuttoned the shirt and slipped it on. “He managed to get through two rooms that way, holding my arm up behind my back, right on the edge of breaking it, pulling me with him. The police followed us every step, waiting for him to make a mistake.” His English accent was fraying into Scottish as he spoke. His once-vacant expression was pinched with pain. “But I knew him. No one ever executed his plans with more precision and discipline. He wasn't going to make a mistake. So I made it for him.”

“You took his gun,” she said. She didn't know how she knew that, but she could see the scene in her mind with perfect clarity. Young Devin would have been tall and very thin, his father taller, more solid and utterly relentless.

His eyes met hers for the first time since he'd started telling her what happened. In them, hurt mixed with a strange satisfaction. “I had to break my arm to do it, but yes. I got his gun. He'd positioned himself right near a window, and he would probably have made it through because I was still blocking the police from getting a clear line of sight. So I shot him.”

She sat there, trying to absorb what he said. No wonder MI6 had recruited him. “What happened to your father?”

“They took him to a hospital, and he died while they had me in custody.”

He was looking blankly at his ties as she walked up and took his hands in hers. “I'm so sorry,” she said. “I knew we had a lot in common, but I didn't know how much until now.”

He met her eyes, but there was no forgiveness in them, for himself or for his father. “The difference is that you didn't mean to hurt anyone,” he said. “I aimed for my father's heart. Missed it by an inch or two, but my hand was shaking.”

“I might've done the same if my father had used me as a shield,” she said. “He trained you to be a thief, used you to make a profit and then he betrayed you. You were a child. He's to blame, and you know it.”

“I know it,” he said. “And I don't.”

She knew exactly what he meant. All too well. “So you went to work for the British government. To be as different from him as possible.”

“Am I really that different?” He released her hands to grab a tie. His nose was wrinkled again in self-disgust. “I recruit and use people, the way my father used me. I utilize the skills I learned from him to blackmail, strong-arm and spy. I continue to steal, only now it's information instead of art.”

“But you don't do it to profit yourself,” she said. “You do it for your country, for a higher purpose.”

“That's what I tell myself,” he said. “Sometimes I even believe it. When I read your story and saw your talent on screen, I thought, ‘There's a girl who's also looking for redemption. I can use that.'” He shook his head. “I didn't see you as a person with a painful past. I saw you as a tool to use in our cold little war against Communism.”

There it was again. Thinking about people as if they were things like tools instead of human beings. She'd seen how that turned into evil.

But this was Devin, not some Nazi war criminal or Communist dictator. Heck, Pagan herself had used Emma Von Albrecht as a way to investigate her father. Did that make her evil?

“Why you do it makes a difference,” she said. “You do it to help, not to hurt.”

“Help us. Hurt them,” he said. “It's two sides of the same coin, and I'm constantly flipping it, not sure which side I prefer.”

“You could quit,” she said. “We both could. You could finally be a self-important studio executive. Just like you always dreamed!”

In spite of himself, he laughed. “How do you do that?” he said, taking her hand again. “You could make me laugh at the end of the world.”

She lifted their hands so that they stood palm to palm, and interlaced her fingers with his. “We stopped a nuclear bomb from going off in the middle of Berlin, Devin.”

“Okay, so it's hard to see a downside to that.” Keeping hold of her hand, he selected a narrow black tie from all the other narrow black ties. “Gold stars for all. But most especially for you—for going to see Emma last night. If you hadn't, we might not have caught them.”

“You can always rely on me to defy your orders,” she said.

“You are dependable in that way.” He dangled the tie around his neck, and kissed her. “But I can recall several things you did last night exactly as I asked you to do them.”

“I take requests in bed,” she said, kissing him back. “With you. When I feel like it.”

“Noted.” He was smiling in a way that put the Cheshire cat to shame as she took the ends of his tie in her hands and began to tie it for him.

“Why January 30, 1933?” she asked, remembering the handwritten note in that terrible basement that said,
Twenty-nine years to the day
. “Did you ever figure that out?”

“Pope did. He's good for something. January 30, 1933, was the day Hitler became chancellor of Germany. A strange way to commemorate something—killing everyone in Berlin.”