Ashley Bell: A Novel (53 page)

In the headlight-silvered fog, which slowly but deliberately spiraled like galaxies in formation, Mrs. Hoffline-Vorshack stood within a pocket of clear air, as in one school of religious painting a saint always stood—or levitated—within a shining nimbus. Judging by all the available evidence, the former English teacher was no more saintlike than a worm, and in fact the worm had the moral advantage of not knowing the difference between right and wrong.

The “we” in her threat—

We can take you down and break you down so completely, no one could ever put you together again. And we will.

—put her in Terezin’s neo-Nazi cult and eliminated any chance that the selection of her husband as the builder of Terezin, Inc.’s new headquarters had been a coincidence.

“Where’s the girl?” Bibi asked. “Where are they holding her?”

“As if I’d tell you.”

“Tell me.”

“As if you need me to tell you.”

“Does that mean something?”

“You know.”

“Don’t riddle me.”

“Don’t
make
me a riddle.”

Bibi raised the pistol in her right hand.

“Gidget breaks bad,” said Hoffline-Vorshack.

“By God, I will,” Bibi said. “I’ll shoot you.”

She didn’t know whether or not she meant the threat. Earlier she had stabbed the brute who beat her and tried to rape her, stabbed him to death, but that had been in desperation. And he’d been a stranger. It would be harder to kill someone she knew, even someone like this awful woman. Familiarity bred contempt, but it also bred civility, even if a reluctant civility.

Hoffline-Vorshack’s face was a nest of snaky emotions—venomous contempt, hatred, arrogance. She ventured no closer, although her posture was belligerent. “You want to know something, you silly little goob, you ignorant spleet?” Never before had the former teacher used surfer lingo. “You’ve got this all wrong. You aren’t putting it together right. If I was still teaching school and you were still in my class, I’d give you a D on this, and that would be a generous grade.”

Bibi took the pistol in a two-hand grip. “Where is Ashley Bell?”

“You think you understand Bobby Faulkner, the mother killer? You think you’ve got his psychology down pat, you have a handle on his Terezin ID and the cult he’s building? Gidget, you don’t know shit. You’re pathetic. It’s not a cult. It never was a cult, not anything as clichéd as a cult.” Bibi’s hair frizzed in the fog, but in the bubble of clear air that Hoffline-Vorshack occupied, her tumbling blond tresses looked worthy of a shampoo commercial. “Look around you,
BeeeBeee
”—she made the name sound positively cartoonish—“look around and maybe you’ll notice your cult has morphed into some kind of giant conglomerate that’s building an über-expensive headquarters in the campus style. Maybe you’ll realize there must be thousands of people involved in this operation, tens of thousands,
hundreds of thousands.
Does that make any sense for a crackpot Nazi cult? We’re not crackpots, Gidget.”

“But you are fascists.”

“Everyone’s a fascist these days, sweetie. The word has no power to sting anymore. The country has embraced all the fascist dictators we once shunned. Kissed and made up. It’s respectable now. It’s the true and preferred way.”

Bibi raised the pistol, aiming it not at the woman’s chest any longer, but at her face, from a distance of six or seven feet. From Hoffline-Vorshack’s perspective, the muzzle must look like a black hole with planet-rending gravity. “Where are they holding the girl? I’m not going to ask again.”

“Good. You’re not going to ask again. I’m tired of listening to you ask.”

All of her life, Bibi had kept a governor on her anger, had consciously negotiated between the gracious, complaisant aspect of her nature and the darker part of herself that sometimes wanted to strike out, strike back. Her tendency to arbitrate herself into a courteous reaction, or at least one of quiet anger, was motivated not by a noble inclination, but by fear that she would lose control of herself. She suspected that, should she lose control, she had the capacity to do great damage out of proportion to the offense she had suffered, though no evidence, either internal or external, existed to support that suspicion.

“Where is Ashley?”
she demanded.

A bark of laughter escaped Hoffline-Vorshack. “You just asked again. You said you wouldn’t ask again, and you just did. Listen, Gidget, you don’t need that little Jewess. You never have needed her. Don’t you know a red herring when you see one, when you have actually dragged it across the trail yourself?”

Bibi was building toward rage. She loathed this woman. Marissa Hoffline had been a bad teacher. She would never in a thousand years have won any organization’s teacher-of-the-year award. And now she was doing an equally bad job of being a wealthy wife, utterly without gratitude for the grace that had befallen her, transformed by money into an ogre of privilege and self-satisfaction. And she wouldn’t stop talking. If she kept talking, she was going to spoil everything. If she kept talking, talking, talking, she was going to say something that Bibi didn’t want to hear.

“You don’t need the little Jewess, Gidget. Just do what you need to do. Confront the terrible truth, accept what you need to accept about yourself,
know
yourself, and then do the deed that needs to be done.” Hoffline-Vorshack’s face was such a portrait of self-righteous satisfaction that Bibi wanted to hit her. Hard. Again and again. Shut her up. Kill her. But it would be murder, not killing. There was a difference.

The anger that Bibi had long dreaded to express, swollen now to rage, was a consequence of repressed fear. She understood that much at last. Captain’s memory trick didn’t in fact burn away traumatic experiences. It flushed them down a deep memory hole, where they—and the fear associated with them—festered in the dark. For seventeen years, the fear had been at a low boil, until it became a thick and bitter reduction of fear, became enduring terror, became a suppressed anxiety laced with helpless foreboding.

“Know yourself, Gidget,” Hoffline-Vorshack repeated.

“Shut up.”

“Learn your secrets.”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

The former teacher said, “You know I’m right, Gidget. He asked you what you needed most, and you said to forget. But what you needed most back then wasn’t to forget. And it’s not what you need now.”

The Spanish Colonial Revival house with its many charms. The hallways and rooms fortified with books. The kitchen table around which more conversations had been held than meals had been eaten. Toba’s gentle and winsome face, her generous smile, her unfailing kindness. This was a pleasing place, comforting to mind and heart, but at this moment, Pax had neither the capacity to be comforted nor the time to allow the house and the singular old woman to work their magic.

Their hostess offered tea or coffee, both of which she brewed after Pax had called to ask if they might pay a visit, but he and Pogo declined. When Toba heard about Bibi’s brain cancer and her collapse into coma four days earlier, she poured her full mug of tea into the kitchen sink, replaced it with coffee, and spiked the coffee with both Baileys Irish Cream and bourbon. She did all that before she could speak a word in response to the news, and when she was able to talk, there was a tremor in her voice that wasn’t characteristic. “I rarely drink, but there are times when even drinking too much is not enough.”

The rest of what they had to tell her regarding the strangeness of Bibi’s condition—the unprecedented brain waves, the injuries to her face that appeared without apparent cause (though for the moment they said nothing of the tattoo)—didn’t lift Toba’s spirits, but did engage her imagination and energize her. They told her about Jasper and Olaf and the long-hidden dog collar, about the reason that Dr. St. Croix had driven Bibi out of the university writing program.

Although Pax had brought the notebook decorated with Pogo’s drawing, they didn’t at once mention the lines that had appeared on its pages as though written by a ghost. This wasn’t an interrogation, Toba being on their side, on Bibi’s side, but certain techniques of an interrogator were of use in an informal interview and even in casual conversation. Whether you were talking to an enemy combatant or to a friend, information drawn out in stages—in layers—tended to be more detailed, included more useful revelations. Not because the subject was purposefully withholding information. Simply, the human brain did not always know everything it knew, needed time for one thought to tease out another, to untie the many little knots in memory and recover an experience to its fullest.

When they implied that Bibi had spoken the words
I am a Valiant girl
in her coma, Toba sprang up from her kitchen chair as if sixty years had fallen from her flesh and bones. “She loved those books. She was so industrious about finding my unlisted phone number, amazingly determined for a girl of just fourteen. She called and apologized for calling, for snooping out the number. Come, now, you two, come along, let me show you. Well, Pogo has seen it, but you haven’t, Paxton. My study, where I wrote, where I write.”

As they followed her along the ground-floor hall and its shelves of precisely ordered books lovingly maintained dust-free, up the open stairs to the second floor, and to her office, Toba said, “You see, the Valiant series earned a comfortable living, but they were never best-sellers. I received some mail from readers, of course, but I was not besieged by little girls knocking on my door. I was flattered by the trouble Bibi had gone to. And charmed by our few minutes on the phone. So I said she could visit with her mother if she wished. A half hour. And bring five or six books to be signed. I’d never done a formal book signing. It seemed overreaching to me, too proud by half. Who was I, after all, but Toba Ringelbaum, who should have been dead a dozen times? I wasn’t Mr. Saul Bellow, though I might have wished to write so well! I found the girl enchanting, far too solemn for her age and yet delighting in every smallest thing, a knowledge sponge in search of something that I think always eluded her, still eludes her, whatever it might be.”

That her office was book-lined came as no surprise. The large ultramodern U-shaped desk wasn’t the heavy-footed European antique that Pax expected. The latest model computer with a screen that seemed the size of a billboard as well as printers and a scanner and a tech geek’s array of the latest electronic gadgets proved that she remained in the game to an extent that Pax had not realized, and he was embarrassed now to have thought her largely retired in spite of her claim to be still producing.

Pogo said, “This is like a starship control station, Toba-Wan Kenobi. I’ve always known the Force was with you. Are you a dedicated social networker?”

“Not much, dear. I have better ways to waste my time. Besides, I find social networking too antisocial for the most part. But I think it’s wise to keep an eye on it.”

At a section of shelves devoted to the display of her novels, she had arranged the American editions of the Valiant books in the order of publication. There were forty-six of them.

“She calls me her inspiration and her mentor,” Toba said, “and I might be vain enough to admit to the first, but not the second. How could I mentor a girl who, by the time she was seventeen and out of high school, was already a better writer than I am or ever could be?”

“Maybe you mentored her in other ways,” Pax said. “The values the girls learned at Valiant Academy. A lot of people these days might find those corny or certainly out of date. But Bibi says the code of the Valiant girls is a brilliant expansion and application of natural law.”

Toba was clearly pleased to hear this, but then she must have thought of Bibi abed in a hospital, lost in a coma, for she raised her mug and took a long draught of the spiked coffee. “If there was one thing she might have found in the Valiant girls that she didn’t already have or didn’t have in the fullest at fourteen, it was the wonderful concept of free will. She kept coming back to that in our conversations. That we are free to shape our own lives, that we can overcome. That there is a terrible danger in denying the existence of free will. The danger of deciding that we are meat machines, that all is meaningless and that we have no responsibility for what happens because of what we do.”

Pogo said, “Should I tell her about the tattoo?”

Pax nodded.

The concept of four injected words appearing without the aid of ink or tattooist did not startle Toba Ringelbaum or require her to stretch her belief system to any degree whatsoever. She had made no secret of the fact that during her time in Theresienstadt and then when she had been freed from Auschwitz within hours of her scheduled execution, she’d had several experiences beyond explanation, when for a moment logic and the laws of nature were suspended in such a way that she was spared when she should not have been. Some would label these events coincidence, which is a tool of fate, but others would call them miracles, which have no need of fate. She had never spoken of the specifics of those experiences, not even to her husband, Max, because they were sacred to her and because she understood that the infelicities of language would diminish them. The ineffable would not be ineffable if it could be described.

When Pogo finished, Pax opened the panther-and-gazelle notebook to the page on which lines of Bibi’s cursive script had appeared, and Toba listened without further need of spiked coffee as he explained how they had materialized and read them with her. Whether this was less or more astonishing than her indescribable experiences as a girl in the ghetto and in the death camp, he could not tell; however, he could see that they were of the same wondrous fabric, for she smiled and set her mug aside on the desk and said, “It’s not hopeless, then.”

“Why,” Pax wondered, “would she refer to you by your pen name—Halina Berg?”

“I don’t know,” Toba said. “It’s peculiar, isn’t it?”

“Who is Robert Warren Faulkner?”

“Never heard of him.”

“More important,” Pogo said, “who is Ashley Bell?”