The Hearing (22 page)

“I guess until we can find the remote, or some other way to neutralize the Mercedes. There’re about a million people out here
trying to figure how to do that. We’ve got people on the way from Mercedes, from the armor manufacturer, the architect who
designed Blossom is coming over, also the builder, and a mob of people from FBI, ATF, State Department Security, a lot of
people who investigated Oklahoma and the World Trade Center. Even Israeli intelligence
is sending someone, and no one knows more about car bombs than they do.”

“Don’t worry. Samantha and I’ve been wanting to have some time together, and now we’ve got it. Right, Samantha? Okay, Carl.
Call back when you know something.”

“Someone says it’d help if we had an inventory of the food and drink in the bar in there.”

“We’ll count the drinks and cocktail biscuits.”

“So there really is a bomb? That’s not a mistake?”

Samantha thought maybe
High Society
wasn’t the right name for the new book after all—maybe she should call this part of her life
Blown to Bits
. But she didn’t really think anything bad would happen. This wasn’t the kind of house where bad things happened.

“I’m afraid it’s not a mistake,” Gus said. “But they’ve got a lot of experts out there trying to disconnect it, and when they
do we’ll be able to go out. Anyway, we’ll have some time together. We don’t need to worry about getting interrupted.”

“Yeah, except maybe
Boom!
Sorry, just trying to be funny.” The child again.

For five minutes they were silent. Then Samantha said, “I’m glad we’re alone. There’ve been things I’ve sort of wanted to
tell you. And Michelle.”

“What things?”

“Well … How much did my father tell you about me?”

“Almost nothing.”

“Did you talk to my mom?”

“I’ve never met her.”

“So you don’t know anything?”

“Not really.”

Gus felt a curious sense of anxiety. He wasn’t comfortable cooped up in the back seat of a limousine with a thirteen-year-old
girl. He knew nothing at all about thirteen-year-old girls.

She’d been facing him, but now she turned toward the front of the car, put her back against the seat, and clasped her hands
in her lap. The lights were off in the garage, and the only illumination came through two small windows next to the metal
roll-up garage door. The sun had started to set.

She said, “There’s a lot maybe I should tell you.”

“Then I hope you will.”

“The thing is, once I tell, I don’t know what will happen.”

“I don’t think anything bad will happen, Samantha. You’ll still be my daughter and Michelle’s daughter and we’ll still love
you. Nothing will change that.”

“How do you know? You haven’t heard yet. Sometimes parents say that and then something happens and
Wham!
, there it goes. I had a friend that happened to.”

“It won’t happen, Samantha. You can tell me or not. That’s your decision. But whatever it is, I’m going to keep on loving
you, and so is Michelle. That’s our decision.”

“You don’t know how my mom and dad met, I mean Larry and Doreen, anything about that?”

“Nothing at all.”

“That he’s from Albania?”

“No.”

“He’s from the royal family, I mean before the, you know, the communists came. He changed his name because he said nobody
in Milwaukee could pronounce Albanian names.”

“Really?”

“It’s true. You don’t believe me.”

“I don’t know any reason why that can’t be true, Samantha.”

“He used to be a concert piano player. Even when he was like seventeen or eighteen. He has posters of himself, all dressed
up, when he played at concert halls. And then he was in East Berlin and he escaped through the Wall and he started playing
in nightclubs and hotels. And this group of hotels gave him a job and he was playing in a hotel in Florida, in Palm Beach,
and he met my mom. He said she was the most beautiful person he’d ever seen. She was a teacher in Milwaukee on vacation. So
he went to Milwaukee and they got married.”

She had let it all out at once, and now she leaned back and stared at him through the half-light, assessing his reaction.

He was silent, taking it in. He’d heard a lot of odd stories as a judge, and sometimes it was hard to know what was true.
Odd didn’t always mean it was a lie.

Finally she said, “Do you believe that?”

She seemed not particularly accustomed to being believed.

“Yes, I believe that. Shouldn’t I believe it?”

“Of course you should. You’re a judge, and judges believe the truth.”

What a statement. Judges believe the truth.

Gus said, “What happened next? They got married, and—they stayed in Milwaukee?”

“They stayed in Milwaukee. My dad played in hotels and my mom taught. The earliest thing I remember is my mom and me going
to school together and my dad was still in bed because he’d been working late. And then when we
got back home my dad would have something to eat all fixed for us on the kitchen table.”

“That was nice.”

“Yeah, and then my dad started drinking a lot.”

“He told you that?”

“No. My mom told me. She told me plenty. And some of it, later my dad told me. I ask him stuff and he can’t lie, he’s a terrible
liar. Not like my mom. She lies all the time. A friend of hers told me if her lips are moving she’s lying, that’s how you
tell. I knew something was wrong because there weren’t any more little snacks on the table when we got home, he was still
in bed. And he started losing jobs, and my mom said he had to play in little bars and not the big hotels. And then my mom
got into astrology, did you know about that?”

“No.”

“It was something she did with friends and other teachers, and she was really good at it, you know, getting all these people
to believe she could tell their future from the stars. Teachers, and they’re supposed to be smart. Anyway, she started charging
people for this and she branched out into reading tarot cards and Ouija boards and spiritism and talking to dead people, and
all this stuff. And I guess eventually she was making more money at that than she was at teaching, so she quit teaching. And
now my mom and dad weren’t what they used to be anymore. They really changed. He was playing in dirty little bars, that’s
what my mom called them, and she was at home talking to people’s dead relatives.”

“What did you think of all that?”

She shrugged. “To me it was just—well, it’s what she did. I didn’t think anything. What would I think? I was just
a little kid. Like, maybe everybody’s mom and dad did stuff like that. Except that they sort of became different. I remember
they just—mostly my mom, she started getting hard, she wasn’t fun anymore. I remember trying to stay out of her way. And then
Janine came to stay with us. I guess you don’t know about that either?”

“Janine? No.”

“That’s when I
really
started to wonder about things. Because I was six then and I could see from the way things were at my friends’ homes that
things were definitely a little
different
where I lived.”

“Who was Janine?”

Samantha hesitated. This was something she wasn’t sure she should tell. If she did, she’d end up telling everything. Would
he believe her? Would he jump out of the limousine and run for it? Things would change. But—she couldn’t
not
tell him.

“Well, Janine was about eighteen, and she was someone who used to come over for all the horoscope, Ouija board mumbo jumbo,
that’s what my friends and I called it. Then my dad started losing his job more often, from the drinking, and I guess now
he was running out of bars that would give him jobs, and we needed money and Janine didn’t have a place to live because her
parents had kicked her out for some reason, but she had a job as I don’t know what and so she moved in with us—you sure you
want to hear all this?”

“Very sure.”

“She moved in and started paying rent. And then she had a friend named Dorothy, and Dorothy moved in too. And now we’ve got
Janine and Dorothy around the house and all their
boyfriends
. And there were a
lot
of boyfriends.
And one of my friends, my best friend, who used to come over to the house a lot, told her sister about Janine and Dorothy
and all their boyfriends and how they always had lots of money for clothes and things, and her sister, who was seventeen,
said well maybe they’re
prostitutes
. What’s a prostitute? I was seven then. So she explained what prostitutes were. Wow! And then she said that if Janine and
Dorothy lived in our house and they were prostitutes, then our house was a whorehouse. She said I was living in a whorehouse
and my mother was a
madam
. And I got real mad at her because I didn’t know anything about what a whorehouse was or what a madam was, but it certainly
sounded
like a whorehouse and a madam were insults.”

Gus was stunned. How much of this was true?

Samantha said, “You’re shocked, right?”

Gus said, “Well, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that it’s a rather surprising story. I—”

“It’s not a
story
. It’s true.”

“I don’t doubt you, Samantha. I believe it. I’m just—you were seven?”

“Yeah, seven. Your little girl, living in a whorehouse. What if you’d known, right? But it wasn’t that bad. Janine and Dorothy
were nice. I liked them. Only it did get worse, though. You want to hear? Maybe I should stop. Would you like a drink?”

Would he like a drink!

“I want to hear it all, Samantha. If you don’t mind. Maybe you’d rather—”

“No, I
want
to tell you. I’ve been wanting to do this for years, tell someone.”

“Then go ahead.” He would have given anything to have Michelle here.

“Men started coming over who weren’t Janine and Dorothy’s friends, I mean who they didn’t bring. My mom would meet them and
invite them over.”

“Where was Larry?”

“He never had anything to do with it. He was just living there. Living there and drinking and sometimes playing in a bar someplace.”

“He didn’t know—”

“Of course he knew. How could he not know? But whenever he said something, Mom just yelled at him or ignored him. They needed
the money and he wasn’t making any. Not much, anyway, and what he made he mostly drank.”

“I see.”

“So these men are coming over, and pretty soon Janine and Dorothy and my mom get other girls to come over, because there were
so many men and they wanted other girls. The girls didn’t live there like Janine and Dorothy, but they came over. And some
of the girls were younger. To me they looked old, because I was only seven, but they were younger than Janine and Dorothy,
like maybe thirteen, fourteen. And they would go in the bedrooms with these old guys.”

“You were around for all this?”

“I lived there. I helped.”

“You helped?”

“Opened the door, said hello, hung up coats.”

“What did you think?”

“Sometimes they’d want something to drink and I’d give them drinks. I thought it was kind of fun. Like a party. Everyone was
nice to me. And then when I was eight it seemed like the girls were getting younger, or maybe I was
just getting older, but they were almost like my age. And some of the guys would try to play around with me. Just like playing
around, you know, slapping me on the butt and stuff like that, but then they got a little more—it wasn’t just kidding around
anymore. And I told my mom about it and she said it was just my imagination, that they were all nice people.

“And then one of the guys—a young guy, a nice guy, I liked him—we were sort of playing around, he was chasing me, and I’d
chase him, just playing, and the next thing I knew we were in my mom’s bedroom and the door was closed and he was on the bed
and he wanted me to come on the bed with him, and boy I just turned around got
out
of there. And I told my mom. I thought she’d be really mad and kick him out, but all she said was—like it was nothing, like
the whole thing was just nothing—she said, ‘Well, why’d you run away? He wasn’t going to hurt you. He just wanted to play
a little.’ And I knew what she meant by that because that was what the girls would say to the men, like, ‘You wanna play a
little?’ And I knew what that meant.”

She stopped. Gus waited for her to continue, but she turned toward the window in silence. Finally he said, “Then what happened?”

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

“Okay.”

Her mood had changed. What had happened? She swiveled her head toward him, and he could see she was crying. She said, “I really
hate to tell you this.”

“Then don’t tell me.”

“Even my mother, Doreen, she never talked about it to me, it’s the only thing she never used to hurt me. She mentioned it
once and I threw the TV through the window. It
was just a little TV, a portable. There’s a lot of stuff and after a while there’s just too much. Do you know what I mean?”

“I know very well what you mean, Samantha. You don’t have to tell me.”

“I want you to know.”

“It’s up to you.”

“One day early in the morning there was only this one guy in the house, maybe he’d spent the night, or he’d come over real
early, I don’t know, but he was an older guy I didn’t know very well, a fat guy, with a big belly, not one of the guys who
would always talk to me and kid around with me, and the house was like empty, Dorothy and Janine were still sleeping because
they were always up real late, and I think my mom was out shopping, so it was really just me and this fat guy, who I didn’t
really know that well, he’d only been around a few times.

“And he was sitting in the kitchen, at this kitchen table we had, and I just walked by, I was still in my pajamas, like on
my way to get some milk from the refrigerator for my corn flakes, and out of the blue, he didn’t say anything, just like that,
Bam!
, real suddenly, this arm came out and grabbed me. And the next thing I knew I was on his lap and I didn’t realize till then
but he had his pants open, I hadn’t noticed that, maybe because he was sitting at the table, but his pants were open and his,
you know, his thing was out, and he had me on his lap and he was tearing at my pajamas and he had my pajama bottoms like in
shreds where it was like I didn’t have anything on at all, and I was—I knew what he was going to do, and I was terrified,
and I screamed, and he put his hand over my mouth.