Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(126)

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?”





The fog that Bibi drew into her lungs seemed for a moment to fill her head, as well. Marissa Hoffline-Vorshack had spoken about events of which she could know nothing. 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. She had never known the captain. He had died years before this awful woman had come into Bibi’s life.

Dressed expensively for a cheap nightclub, dressed for a production number in an old Elvis Presley film, with spike heels and toreador pants and all that cleavage and the black-and-white leather jacket, standing in a bubble of clarity in the white murk, backlit by the Bentley, Miss Hoffline reinvented was demanding to be seen, to be considered and understood.

Bibi thought she heard something behind her, someone closing on her, revealed by the crunch of gravel. She pivoted, sweeping the night with the gun, but she found no one. Lights in the construction-office trailer, behind the window shades. Voices inside, less than half heard, unintelligible, perhaps not speaking English. Like voices from Beyond drawn to a séance and issuing from a scrim of ectoplasm floating in the air.

“They haven’t heard us,” said Mrs. Hoffline-Vorshack.

Bibi swung toward her former teacher, expecting to be assaulted in the turn, but the woman had not moved. Her look of triumph seemed to imply that she didn’t need to attack Bibi physically, that she could destroy her with words.

“They haven’t heard us and won’t,” Hoffline-Vorshack said. “Unless you want them to. You can always want them to.”

Bibi still felt fogbound, mentally as well as physically, and even rage could not burn off the mists. Of all the ways she might have expected their confrontation to develop after Hoffline-Vorshack emerged from the car, this was not one of them. At no other point in the past two days had she felt so confused, with so little control over events.

“What do you want, Gidget?” Hoffline-Vorshack asked with a note of exasperation. “Huh? What do you really want?”

“Ashley Bell, damn it. Where are you keeping her?”

“Her location—that’s just the next turn in the narrative. What you want—now, that’s a bigger issue. Character motivation. If you’re driven to save the girl, if that’s your motivation, you first need to learn the full truth about yourself. If instead you’re afraid of that truth, if you’re the coward I think you are, then your motivation is to remain ignorant of it, and you’ll never save anyone.”

“Why are you going on like this? What is this bullshit? We’re not in a classroom.”

“Aren’t we?” There was such conviction in her voice and such challenge in her eyes that it seemed as if walls might form around the two of them, and rows of schoolroom desks appear. “What do you want me to be, Gidget?”

“Want you to be?”

“As you know, I’ll be whatever you want.”

The fog was everywhere, deep and opaque, everywhere except around Hoffline-Vorshack, but she was speaking fog, a machine of obfuscation.

“All you’ve ever been,” Bibi said, “since my junior year, is an impediment. People don’t change in a minute.”

“So you want me to be an impediment, prevent you from getting to Ashley, prevent you from facing the truth?”

Surrealism had been woven through the past two days, but now its thread count seemed to be increasing rapidly.

“You’ll be what you are.” Bibi didn’t want this conversation. She wanted to end this encounter.

In spite of spike heels and skintight pants and breasts that were the opposite of aerodynamic, Hoffline-Vorshack moved fast, grabbing for the Sig Sauer with one hand, tearing at Bibi’s blood-crusted ear with the other, missing with the first, scoring with the second. Bibi’s cry of pain was silent, bitten off, choked down. As the teacher issued a zombie hiss through bared teeth, Bibi used the P226, but not as a firearm, as a bludgeon, brought the barrel down hard into her assailant’s forehead, which produced a cruel but discreet sound. Hoffline-Vorshack dropped, sprawled facedown, head turned to her left, lighted and shadowed by the Bentley’s headlamps, in a strangely graceful pose, as if this were a macabre fashion ad in which the model was pretending to be the victim of a crime. She might have been unconscious or on her way out, but she regarded her former student with one gimlet eye that would have killed if the extreme voltage of hatred in it could have been emitted in the form of an electric current. Maybe Bibi should have waited to see if the eye closed and the woman remained still, but the anger she had always been able to control now controlled her instead. She reversed her grip on the pistol, held it by the barrel, and brought the butt down on the side of Hoffline-Vorshack’s head, not with full force, though still a terrible blow, hard enough that the fierce eye disappeared behind a fluttering but then stilled eyelid.