The Storyteller (59 page)

“Leo!” she cries. “What are you
doing
?”

“So,” I ask, as if she has not spoken. “When was the last time you ate?”

 • • • 

It’s only a Courtyard by Marriott, but I order a bottle of crappy red wine and a bottle of even worse white; a French onion soup and chicken Caesar salad; buffalo wings and mozzarella sticks and a cheese pizza; fettuccine Alfredo, three scoops of chocolate ice cream, and a colossal slice of lemon meringue pie. There is enough food for me, Sage, Eva, and the rest of the fourth floor, were I inclined to invite them.

Any reservations I have about kidnapping a grieving girl from her own house, where she is supposed to be sitting
shivah
for her grandmother, and smuggling a dog into a pet-free hotel, are allayed by the fact that the color has started to come back to Sage’s face as she works her way through the bounty in front of her.

The room, made for business travelers, has a small sitting area with a couch and a television. We have it tuned to Turner Classic Movies, with the volume low. Jimmy Stewart and Katharine Hepburn are on the screen, arguing with each other. “Why do people in old movies always sound like their jaws are wired together?” Sage asks.

I laugh. “It’s a little known fact that Cary Grant suffered from TMJ.”

“No one from the 1940s ever sounds like trailer trash,” Sage muses. As Jimmy Stewart leans close to Katharine Hepburn, she dubs a line for him. “Say you’ll go out with me, Mabel. I know you’re out of my league . . . but I can always start bowling on Tuesday nights instead.”

I grin, speaking over Katharine Hepburn’s scripted response. “I’m sorry, Ralph. I could never love a man who thinks loading the dishwasher means getting your wife drunk.”

“But, sugar,” Sage continues, “what am I gonna do with these
NASCAR
tickets?”

Katharine Hepburn tosses her hair. “Hell if I care
,”
I say.

Sage smiles. “This is a missed opportunity for Hollywood.”

She’s turned off her phone, because her sisters will be calling her nonstop, once they discover her departure. At one end of the couch, the dog is snoring. The screen abruptly fills with the carnival colors of a commercial. After watching something that’s so black and white, it’s overwhelming. “I suppose it’s done now,” Sage says.

I check my watch. “The movie’s got another half hour.”

“I was talking about Reiner Hartmann.”

I reach for the remote and mute the television. “We don’t have the possibility of a deposition from your grandmother anymore, much less a video testimony.”

“I could tell a court what she said—”

“That’s hearsay,” I explain.

“It doesn’t seem fair.” Sage tucks her leg beneath her on the couch. She is still wearing her black dress from the funeral, but she’s barefoot. “That she would die, and he would still be alive. It feels like such a waste. Like she should have lived to tell her story, you know?”

“She did,” I point out. “She told it to you, for safekeeping. And now that she’s gone, maybe it’s yours to tell.”

I can tell Sage hasn’t thought about her grandmother’s death that way. She frowns, and then gets up from the couch. Her purse is an oversize black hole, from what I can see; I can’t imagine what’s inside it. But she rummages around inside and pulls out a leather notebook. It looks like something Keats might have carried around in
his
purse, if that was in style back then.

“The story, the one she talked about that saved her life? She rewrote it, after the war. Last week, for the first time, she showed it to me.” Sage sits back down. “I think she’d like you to hear it,” she says. “
I
’
d
like you to hear it.”

When was the last time someone read aloud to you? Probably when you were a child, and if you think back, you’ll remember how safe you felt, tucked under the covers, or curled in someone’s arms, as a story was spun around you like a web. Sage begins to tell me about a baker and his daughter; a soldier drunk with power who loves her; a string of murders linked like pearls throughout the village.

I watch her as she reads. Her voice begins to take on the roles of the characters whose dialogue she’s speaking. Minka’s tale reminds me of Grimm, of Isak Dinesen, of Hans Christian Andersen; of the time when fairy tales were not diluted with Disney princesses and dancing animals, but were dark and bloody and dangerous. In those old tomes, love took a toll, and happy endings came at a cost. There’s a lesson in that, and it’s tugging at me; but I am distracted, held spellbound by the pulse in Sage’s throat that beats a little faster the first time Ania and Aleks—the most unlikely of couples—meet.

“Nobody,”
Sage reads,
“who looks at a shard of flint lying beneath a rock ledge, or who finds a splintered log by the side of the road would ever find magic in their solitude
.
But in the right circumstances, if you bring them together, you can start a fire that consumes the world.”

We become the
upiory
in the story, awake all night. The sun is already crawling over the horizon when Sage reaches the part where Aleks falls into the trap the soldiers have set. He’s jailed, and scheduled to be tortured to death. Unless he can convince Ania to kill him first, out of mercy.

Suddenly Sage closes the book. “You can’t just stop there!” I protest.

“I have to. It’s all she wrote.”

Her hair is a mess; the circles under her eyes are so dark it looks like she’s fielded a punch. “Minka knew what happened,” I say decisively. “Even if she chose not to tell the rest of us.”

“I was going to ask her why she never finished it . . . but then I didn’t. And now I can’t.” Sage looks at me, her heart in her eyes. “How do
you
think it ends?”

I tuck Sage’s hair behind her ear. “Like this,” I say, and I kiss the ridged trail of her scar.

She sucks in her breath, but she doesn’t pull away. I kiss the corner of her eye, where the skin pulls down because of a graft. I kiss the smooth silver flecks on her cheek that remind me of falling stars.

And then, I kiss her mouth.

At first, I hold her in my arms like something fragile. I have to exercise every fiber of my body not to crush her tighter against me. I’ve never felt like this about a woman: like I need to consume her.
Think of baseball,
I tell myself, but I know nothing of value about baseball. So I start silently listing the justices of the Supreme Court, just so that I don’t scare her off by moving too fast.

But Sage, thank God, winds her arms around my neck and presses herself flush against me. Her fingers comb through my hair; her breath fills me. She tastes of lemon and cinnamon, she smells of coconut lotion and lazy sunsets. She is a live wire, and everywhere she touches me, I burn.

When she grinds her hips against mine, I surrender. With her legs wrapped around me and her dress tangled around her waist, I carry her into the bedroom and lay her down on the crisp sheets. She pulls me over her body like an eclipse of the sun, and my last conscious thought is that there could not possibly be a better finale to this story.

 • • • 

In the cocoon of the room, created by blackout shades, we are caught in a bubble of time. Sometimes I wake up holding Sage; sometimes she wakes up holding me. Sometimes all I can hear is her heartbeat; sometimes her voice wraps me as tightly as the tangled sheets.

It was my fault,
she says, at one point.

It was after graduation, and my mother and I, we
’
d packed up the car to go home. It was so full she couldn’t see out the back window, so I told her I
’
d drive.

It was a beautiful day. That made it even worse. There was no rain, no snow, nothing else to blame it on. We were on the highway. I was trying to pass a truck, but I didn’t see the car in the other lane, so I swerved. And then.

A shudder runs down her spine.

She didn’t die, not right away. She had surgery, and then she got an infection, and her body started to shut down. Pepper and Saffron, they said it was an accident. But I know deep down they still blame me. And my mother did, too.

I hold her tightly.
I’m sure that’s not true.

When she was in the hospital,
Sage says,
when she was dying, she told me,
I forgive you.
There’s no reason to forgive someone, unless you know they’ve done something wrong.

Sometimes bad things just happen,
I say. I brush my thumb over her cheek, tracing the topographical rise and valley of her scars.

She catches my hand, brings it to her mouth, kisses it.
And sometimes, good things do.

 • • • 

I have a thousand excuses.

It was the red wine.

The white.

The stress of the day.

The stress of the job.

The way her black dress hugged her curves.

The fact that we were lonely/horny/sublimating grief.

Freud would have plenty to say about my indiscretion. So would my boss. What I’ve done—taking advantage of a woman who was instrumental in an open HRSP case, one who had attended a
funeral
hours before—is unconscionable.

Worse, I’d do it all over again.

Eva the dog is giving me the evil eye. And why shouldn’t she? She witnessed the whole sordid, intense, amazing affair.

Sage is still asleep in the bedroom. Because I do not trust myself to be near her, I’m out here on the couch in my boxers and T-shirt, poring over Reiner Hartmann’s file with every ounce of Jewish guilt I can muster. I can’t undo what I did last night to take advantage of Sage, but I can damn well figure out a way to make sure this case doesn’t get ruined in the process.

“Hi.”

When I turn around, there she is wearing my white button-down shirt. It almost covers her. Almost.

I stand up, torn between grabbing her and dragging her back to bed, and doing the right thing. “I’m sorry,” I blurt out. “That was a mistake.”

Her eyes widen. “It didn’t feel like a mistake.”

“You’re hardly in any condition to be thinking clearly right now. I knew better, even if you didn’t.”

“Marge says that it’s normal to crave life when you’re in the throes of death. And that was pretty lively.”

“Marge?”

“She runs the grief group.”

“Oh,” I sigh. “Fabulous.”

“Look. I want you to know that in spite of what you’ve seen in the few days you’ve known me, I’m not usually . . . like this. I don’t . . .
you know.”

“Right. Because you’re in love with the married funeral director,” I say, rubbing my hand through my hair and making it stand on end. I’d forgotten about him last night, too.

“That’s over,” she says. “Completely.”

My head snaps up. “You’re sure?”

“Dead certain. So to speak.” She takes a step toward me. “Does that make this less of a mistake?”

“No,” I say, starting to pace. “Because you’re still involved in one of my cases.”

“I thought that was over, too, since there’s no way to identify Josef anymore as Reiner Hartmann.”

That’s not true.

The caveat flies like a red standard in the battlefield of my mind.

Without Minka’s testimony, the murder of Darija cannot be linked to Reiner Hartmann. But the prisoner wasn’t the only one to witness that infraction.

Reiner was there, too.

If someone were to get him to confess to the incident that was written up in his SS file, it would be a slam dunk.

“There might be another way,” I say. “But it would mean involving you, Sage.”

She sits down on the couch, absently stroking the dog’s ears. “What do you mean?”

“We could wire you up, and tape the conversation. Get him to admit that he was reprimanded for killing a Jewish prisoner in a way that wasn’t sanctioned.”

She looks into her lap. “I wish you’d asked me first, so that my grandmother never got involved.”

I am not going to explain to her that this is a default attempt; it would never have been my first choice. Not just because of the power of a survivor’s testimony but because there is a good reason we don’t put civilians into the field as makeshift agents.

Particularly ones we might be falling for.

“I’ll do whatever you need me to do, Leo,” Sage says. She gets up and starts unbuttoning her shirt.
My
shirt.

“What are you doing?”

“Honestly. A Harvard degree and you can’t figure that out?”

“No.” I take a step backward. “Absolutely not. Now you’re a material witness.”