The Storyteller (56 page)

She sinks back in the passenger seat. “So he was telling me the truth. Josef. Reiner. Whatever his name is.”

“It looks that way.” I can see a flurry of emotions move like storms across her face, as she tries to reconcile Josef Weber with his previous persona. It’s different, somehow, once that confirmation’s been made. And in Sage’s case, she is wrestling, too, with betraying a man she had considered a friend. “You did the right thing,” I say. “Coming to me. What he asked you to do for him—that isn’t justice.
This
is.”

She doesn’t look up. “Do you arrest him right away?”

“No. I go home.”

At that, Sage’s head snaps up. “Now?”

I nod. “There’s a lot I have to do before we move forward.”

I don’t want to go. I’d like to ask Sage out to dinner, actually. I’d like to watch her bake something from scratch. I’d just like to watch her, period.

“So you’re going to go to the airport?” Sage asks.

Does it seem like she’s a little disappointed, too, to hear that I’m leaving?

But that’s just me, reading into the situation. She has a boyfriend. Granted, he happens to have a wife, but the bottom line is that Sage isn’t looking for anyone right now.

“Yes,” I say. “I’ll call my secretary. There’s probably a flight back to D.C. around dinnertime.”

Ask me to stick around,
I think.

Sage meets my gaze. “Well, if you have to go, you probably should turn on the ignition.”

My face flushes with embarrassment. This pregnant pause between us wasn’t full of unspoken words, just a vehicle that hadn’t been started yet.

Suddenly her phone begins to ring. Frowning, she shifts in her seat to pull it from the pocket of her shorts.

“Yes . . . this is Sage Singer.” Her eyes widen. “Is he all right? What happened? I—yes, I understand. Thank you.” When she hangs up, she stares at the phone in her hand as if it is a grenade. “That was the hospital,” Sage announces. “Josef’s been admitted.”

From where we were hiding, behind the woodshed on Baruch Beiler’s property, we could see it all: Casimir chained on the makeshift stage; the wild rage in Damian’s eyes as he screamed at the teen, his spittle flecking the boy’s face. Drunk with power, Damian addressed the villagers, who huddled beneath the blazing blue sky. Their captain of the guard had found not one perpetrator, but two. Surely this meant they were safe now? That they could go back to the way they had been?

Was I the only one who knew that wasn’t possible?

No. Aleks knew it, too. It was why he had tried to atone for his brother’s sins.

“My friends,” Damian announced, spreading his arms wide. “We have broken the beast!” There was a roar as the crowd swallowed his words. “We will bury the
upiór
the way he should have been buried the first time: facedown at a crossroads, with an oak stake through the heart.”

Beside me, Aleks was chafing. I held him back with a gentle hand on his arm. “Don’t,” I whispered. “Can’t you see, this is all about setting a trap for you?”

“My brother can’t help himself. It doesn’t make what he does right, but I cannot sit here—”

Damian beckoned to a soldier behind him. “First, we will make sure that he remains dead. And there is only one way to do that.”

The cadet stepped forward, holding a wicked, curved scythe. The blade winked like a jewel. He raised it over his head as Casimir squinted into the fierce sunlight, trying to see what was happening above him.

“Three,” Damian counted. “Two.” He turned, fixing his gaze directly at the brush where we were hidden, so that I realized he had known we were there all along. “One.”

The blade sliced through the air, a scream of metal that severed Casimir’s head from his body in a single blow.

Blood flooded the stage. It spilled over the edge of the wood and ran in runnels over the ground, toward the crowd.

“Nooooo!” Aleks cried. He tore away from me and rushed the stage as soldiers ran to apprehend him. But he was no longer a man. He bit and clawed, throwing off seven men with the force of an entire army as the crowd scattered to take cover. When only Damian remained, without his protective escort, Aleks stepped forward and snarled.

Damian lifted his sword. And then he dropped it, turned tail, and ran.

Aleks was on him before Damian was halfway across the village square. He tackled the captain, turning Damian so that he landed on his back; so that the clear, bright sky would be the last thing he ever saw. In one single, wrenching tear, Aleks ripped out his heart.

SAGE

Hospitals smell like death. A little too clean, and a little too cold. The minute I walk inside I have dialed my life back three years, and I am here watching my mother die by degrees.

Leo and I stand in the hallway, near Josef’s room. The doctors have told me that Josef was brought here to have his stomach pumped. Apparently he had an adverse medical reaction, and a Meals on Wheels volunteer found him unconscious on the floor. It makes me wonder who’s got Eva now. If someone will be taking care of her tonight.

Although Leo is not allowed into the room, I am. Josef listed me as his next of kin, which is a pretty interesting relationship for someone you’ve asked to kill you.

“I don’t like hospitals,” I say.

“No one does.”

“I don’t know what to do,” I whisper.

“You have to talk to him,” Leo answers.

“You want me to convince him to get better, so that you can ship him out of the country and have him die in a jail cell somewhere?”

Leo considers this. “Yes. After he’s convicted.”

Maybe it’s because he’s being so blunt—it shocks me back to the present. I nod, take a deep breath, and walk into Josef’s room.

In spite of what my grandmother has said, in spite of that photo in the spread that Leo created, he is just an elderly man, a husk of the
brute he used to be. With his thin limbs jutting from a pale blue hospital gown, his silver hair disheveled, it is hard to imagine that the very sight of this man once crippled others with fear.

Josef is asleep, his left arm thrown up over his head. The scar he showed me once before, on the inside of his upper arm, is clearly visible—a shiny, dark button the size of a quarter, with ragged edges. Glancing over my shoulder, I see Leo in the hallway, still watching me. He lifts his hand, letting me know he’s still watching.

With my cell phone, I snap a picture of Josef’s scar, so Leo can see it later.

I hurriedly stuff my phone back into my shorts as a nurse enters the room. “You’re the girl he’s been talking about?” she says. “Cinnamon, right?”

“Sage,” I say cheerfully, wondering if she’s seen me taking the picture. “Same spice rack, different jar.”

The nurse looks at me oddly. “Well, your friend Mr. Weber is a very lucky man, to have been found when he was.”

I should have been the one to find him.

The thought slips into my mind like the blade of a knife. As his one good friend, I should have been there if he needed me. But instead, I was the one who had argued with him and stormed out of his house.

The problem is that I’m Josef Weber’s friend. But Reiner Hartmann is my enemy. So what do I do, now that they are the same man?

“What happened to him?” I ask.

“Ate a salt substitute while he was taking Aldactone. It made his potassium levels skyrocket. Could have put him into cardiac arrest.”

I sit down on the edge of the bed and hold Josef’s hand. A hospital band is looped around his wrist.
JOSEF WEBER, DOB 4/20/18, B+

If only they knew that wasn’t who he really was.

Josef’s fingers twitch against mine, and I drop his hand as if he is on fire. “You came,” he rasps.

“Of course I did.”

“Eva?”

“I’m going to take her home with me. She’ll be fine.”

“Mr. Weber?” the nurse interrupts. “How are you feeling? Do you have any pain?”

He shakes his head.

“Could we just have a minute?” I ask.

She nods. “I’ll come back to take your temperature and blood pressure in five,” the nurse says.

We both wait until she has left to speak again. “You didn’t do this by accident, did you?” I whisper.

“I am not stupid. The pharmacist told me about drug interactions. I chose to ignore him.”

“Why?”

“If you would not help me die, then I had to do it myself. But I should have known it was no use.” He waves an arm around the hospital room. “I told you before. This is my punishment. No matter what I do, I survive.”

“I never said I wouldn’t help you,” I reply.

“You were angry at me for telling you the truth.”

“Yes,” I admit. “I was. It’s really hard to hear.”

“You stormed out of my house.”

“You’ve had almost seventy years to live with this, Josef. You have to give me more than five minutes.” I lower my voice. “What you did—what you said you did—makes me sick. But if I . . . you know, do what you asked me to do . . . now, I’m doing it out of anger, out of hate. And that brings me down to your level.”

“I knew you would be upset,” Josef confesses. “But you were not my first choice.”

This surprises me. There is someone else in this town who knows what Josef did . . . and who hasn’t turned him in?

“Your mother,” Josef says. “She’s the first one I asked.”

My jaw drops. “You
knew
my mother?”

“I met her years ago, when I was working at the high school. The World Religions teacher invited her to talk about her faith. I met her in the teachers’ room during lunch, very briefly. She said she was hardly a model Jew, but that she was better than none.”

That sounds like my mother. I can even vaguely remember her going to speak in front of my sister’s class, and how embarrassed Pepper was to have her there. I bet my sister would give anything to have my mother in such close proximity now. The thought makes my throat close tight.

“We got to talking, and she of course noticed my accent, and said that her mother-in-law had been a survivor from Poland.”

I notice that he uses the past tense when talking about my grandmother. I do not correct him. I do not want him to know anything about her at all.

“What did you tell her?”

“That I was sent abroad to study during the war. For years I tried to cross paths with her again. I felt it was fate, that we had met. Not only was she a Jew but she was related by marriage to a survivor. She was as close as I could come to forgiveness.”

I think of what Leo’s reaction to this would be:
one Jew can’t substitute for another.
“You were going to ask her to kill you?”

“Help me die,” Josef corrects. “But then I learned she had passed. And then, I met
you
. I did not know at first you were her daughter, but when it became clear, I knew there was a reason we had connected. I knew I had to ask of you what I did not get a chance to ask of your mother.” His eyes, blue and rheumy, fill with tears. “I won’t die. I can’t die. I know you must think it is ridiculous of me to believe this, but it is true.”

I find myself thinking of my grandmother’s story; of the
upiór
who begged for release, instead of an eternity of misery. “You’re hardly a vampire, Josef—”

“That does not mean I haven’t been cursed. Look at me. I should be dead now, several times over. I have been locked for nearly seventy years; and for nearly seventy years, I’ve been searching for a key. Maybe you are the one who has it.”

Leo would say Josef has stalked me, and my family.

Leo would say that even now, Josef sees Jews as only a means to an end, not as individuals, but as pawns.

But if you seek forgiveness, doesn’t that automatically mean you cannot be a monster? By definition, doesn’t that desperation make you human again?

I wonder what my mother had thought of Josef Weber.

I reach for Josef’s hand. This hand, which held the gun that killed my grandmother’s best friend, and God knows how many others.

“I’ll do it,” I say, although at this point, I am not sure if I am lying for Leo’s sake, or telling the truth for my own.

 • • • 

Leo and I drive to Josef’s house, but he will not come inside with me. “Without a search warrant? Not on your life.”

I guess it’s different, since I’m just there to pick up the dog, not to hunt for incriminating material. Josef’s spare key is kept in a sliding compartment in the bottom of a stone frog that sits on his porch. When I open the door, Eva comes running out to meet me and barks frantically.

“It’s okay,” I tell the little dachshund. “He’s going to be all right.”

Today, anyway.

Who will take the dog if he’s extradited?

Inside, the kitchen is a mess. A plate has been overturned and broken, the food is gone (a perk for Eva, I’m guessing); a chair is lying on its side. On the table is the salt substitute Josef must have eaten.

I right the chair and clean up the broken china and sweep the floor. Then I throw the salt substitute in the trash and wash the dishes in the sink and wipe down the counters. I rummage through Josef’s pantry to find Eva’s dog food. There are boxes of Quaker instant oatmeal and Rice-A-Roni, mustard, rotini pasta. There are at least three bags of Doritos. It looks incredibly . . . ordinary, although I don’t know what I was expecting a former Nazi to subsist on.

When I go looking for a crate or a doggie bed, I find myself standing at the threshold of Josef’s bedroom. The bed is neatly made with a white blanket; the sheets are flowered with tiny violets. There are still
two dressers in the room, one with a jewelry box on top and a woman’s hairbrush. On one nightstand sit an alarm clock, a telephone, and a dog’s chew toy. On the other nightstand is an Alice Hoffman novel, with a bookmark still in place; and a jar of rose-scented hand cream.