The League of Night and Fog by David Morrell

didn’t jeopardize his pride, you protected him.”
    Erika stepped close to Misha. “Is that true?”
    “You married a good man.”
    “I knew that already,” she said. “Is Saul right?”
    “What harm was done? We took care of our own and made him feel he had worth.”
    “No harm at all,” she said. “Unless …”
    “He wasn’t working on anything for us, if that’s what you mean,” Misha said. “Though I’d have welcomed him on an assignment. Nothing violent, of course. But for stakeouts or routine intelligence gathering, he was still a first-rate operative. You have to remember, Erika. Your father’s retirement was
his
choice, not ours.”
    “What?”
    “You mean you didn’t know?”
    She shook her head.
    “Despite his age, I could have bent some rules and kept him,” Misha said. “We’re not so rich with talent we can afford to throw away a seasoned specialist. But he
asked
for retirement. He
demanded
it.”
    “I don’t understand,” she said. “His work meant everything to him. He loved it.”
    “No question. He loved his work and his country.”
    “But if he loved his country so much,” Saul asked, “why didhe choose to live here? In Vienna? Why not in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem or … ?”
    Erika agreed. “That bothered us. Saul’s arrangement with his network was if he stayed out of sight they’d leave him alone, and the other networks would leave him alone as well. In exchange for the information he gave them, they agreed to ignore the rules he’d broken. As long as he lived where we did, in a village on the edge of the world. But my father didn’t need to live here. Repeatedly we asked him to join us, to add to our family, to watch his grandson grow up. And he repeatedly refused. It didn’t make sense to me. The comforts of civilization weren’t important to him. As long as he had hot chocolate and tobacco, he’d have been content anywhere.”
    “Perhaps,” Misha said.
    Erika watched his eyes. “Is there something you haven’t told us?”
    “You asked me to explain it again, so I will. After your father missed his morning schedule and didn’t complete the evening rendezvous, the café owner—Saul’s right, he
is
one of ours—sent an operative who works for him to bring some sandwiches and hot chocolate as if your father had ordered them over the phone. The operative knocked on the door. No answer. He knocked again. He tested the doorknob. The lock had not been secured. When the operative unholstered his weapon and entered, he found the apartment deserted. The sheets”—Misha pointed toward the door to the bedroom—“were tucked in, stretched taut, in military fashion.”
    “The way my father always makes his bed,” Erika said. “He’s addicted to order. He tucks in the sheets as soon as he wakes up.”
    “Correct,” Misha said. “Which meant that whatever had happened, your father either didn’t go to bed the night before, when he came back from the café, or else he made his bed the morning of his disappearance and for some reason didn’t go to the café again as he normally would have.”
    “So the time frame is twenty-four hours,” Saul said.
    “And Joseph wasn’t sick at home. The operative briefly concluded that something had happened to Joseph while he was coming to or from his apartment. A traffic accident, let’s imagine. But the police and the hospitals had no information about him.”
    “A moment ago, you used the word ‘briefly,’ ” Saul said.
    Misha squinted.
    “You said, the operative
briefly
suspected Joseph had left the apartment and something happened to him. What made the operative change his mind?”
    Misha grimaced, as if in pain. He reached in a jacket pocket and pulled out two objects. “The operative found these on the coffee table.”
    Erika moaned.
    Saul turned, alarmed by her sudden pallor.
    “My father’s two favorite pipes,” Erika said. “He never went anywhere without at least one of them.”
    “So whatever