Ashley Bell: A Novel (34 page)

When she spoke of the ghetto at Theresienstadt, now Terezin, and of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Halina Berg’s appearance changed. Her true years became evident in the plump planes of her face, and amusement neither gathered around her mouth nor dwelt in her eyes as before. The music went out of her voice. She spoke with neither anger nor sorrow, but with a steely resolve, as if she could not speak of it at all if she allowed herself stronger emotions.

In 1942, when Halina was eleven, the Nazis forcibly transported tens of thousands of Europe’s most privileged and accomplished Jews to the fortress town of Theresienstadt—scholars and judges, writers, artists, scientists, engineers, musicians—there to await transferal to one of the death camps. Halina’s parents were musicians with the symphony, he a bass clarinetist, she a violinist. Consequently, due to the courage and will to live of its people, Theresienstadt had a rich cultural life in spite of the oppression, the threat of death, and the continuous dying all around. Crowding was terrible, food scarce, sanitary conditions unspeakable, and communicable diseases rampant. Halina’s mother died in a typhoid epidemic. Half starved, her father was transported to Auschwitz, where he was murdered with many thousands of others, but Halina was not sent with him. Mere weeks before Auschwitz was liberated by the Allies, she was taken there with other girls and boys, many of whom perished. Of fifteen thousand children who passed through Theresienstadt, no more than eleven hundred survived, perhaps fewer than two hundred.

“Humanity is capable of any atrocity,” she said. “But when you understand the extent of this cruelty, the unprecedented viciousness, the immense scale of the horror, it seems beyond the power of mere people to conceive and execute. It seems demonic.”

When the old woman fell silent, Bibi took it upon herself to bring the teapot to the table and refresh their cups. As she did so, she was overcome by a feeling of having performed this act before, not just the pouring of tea, but pouring from this same pot, in this very kitchen. The moment of déjà vu quickly passed. Because she didn’t know what to make of it, she could only put it aside for consideration later.

By the time Bibi returned to her chair, she thought she knew what Dr. St. Croix would have come here to ask. Perhaps she shared with the professor a need to know what supernatural power it was that the man called Terezin possessed.

“I’ve heard that Hitler was into the occult,” Bibi said. “In all your reading, in your
experience,
have you found that to be true? Is there any book in your collection you could show me, that might—”

Raising one hand to indicate that there was no need to prowl the extensive shelves, Halina said, “I’ve been blessed or cursed—I’m not sure which—with an eidetic memory. Whatever I dump into my mind stays there, and I have perfect recall. That sounds neat and orderly, but it’s definitely not. Everything is stuffed in there everywhichway. Sometimes I need a minute to sort through it….”

Bibi waited, watching as the old woman sipped her second cup of tea.

At last Halina said, “Hitler was a bit of a pagan, but not entirely that. A vegetarian. He would not allow mice to be killed when they invaded his house in numbers. He believed that the fatherland, German land, had a mystical power that could be drawn upon by the volk, the people of pure German blood. He wasn’t a Christian, could not be one, because of Christianity’s roots in Judaism, so the layered occult system that grew from Christianity—angels, demons, witches, séances, all of that and more—was of no interest to him. But the idea that there was mystical power in German earth and that the pure-blooded volk could draw upon it to become supermen…
that
is indisputably an occult concept.”

Bibi said, “It didn’t work out well for him.”

“I’m not a big believer in most things occult,” Halina said. “But I do believe the world is a more mysterious place than we often recognize—or care to admit. If there is some strange natural power in the earth under us, some magnetic current yet undiscovered, and if there are individuals who can tap it, then they’re probably those men we say have charisma. Not silly movie stars and singers, not the cheap charisma of entertainers. I’m speaking now of those with great charisma, the power to infect enormous numbers of others with their ego-driven fantasies. Hitler. Stalin. Mao.”

Although Bibi had added sweetener to her second cup, she wasn’t enjoying the tea. She slid it aside.

Halina said, “The Hindu saint Ramakrishna said that when a man becomes a saint, followers swarm to him as wasps to honey. Because he had to become holy to achieve his charisma, a saint won’t misuse that power, that control over others. But if a common man, a volk, with no saintly quality, with in fact an inflated ego, a narcissist, should tap into this magnetic current or whatever, he could draw legions to him…and lead the world to ruin.”

Bibi was disappointed. “And that’s the extent of his occult leanings? The mystical power of German land? You never read anything about him being interested in any kind of divination?”

“No.”

“He was never intrigued by séances, mediums, ceromancy, halomancy, necromancy, that kind of thing?”

“Not to my knowledge. But I am not the world’s primary expert on Adolf Hitler.”

From her purse, Bibi withdrew the electronic key attached to the Lucite fob. Indicating the encased wasp, she said, “Something about this feels occult to me.”

Halina Berg’s eyes widened. She fisted her hands as if to prevent herself from reaching for—and touching—the exotic object. “A wasp in the posture of stinging,” the old woman said, “was the official symbol they chose for themselves, just the unit of the Schutzstaffel garrisoned at Theresienstadt.”

“Schutzstaffel? The SS?”

“Hitler’s praetorian guard, shock troops, his supreme instrument of terror. The primary symbol of the SS was a death’s head. But the unit running Theresienstadt likened itself to
Der Führer’s Wespe,
his wasp, the sting behind his policies and directives. The camp commandant had the image on his door.”

Returning the key and the wasp to her purse, Bibi said, “I’m sorry if I’ve distressed you.”

Halina opened her fisted hands and then closed them around her cooling cup of tea. “It’s just a thing, a bug in plastic, it should not disturb me. It’s only a coincidence anyway, a novelty key chain. It has nothing to do with Theresienstadt.” She took a sip of her bitter tea. “The fools never seemed to realize they were comparing themselves to an
insect.
”

“Did the wasp have any occult meaning for them, for the SS unit that ran the ghetto?”

“No. Not that I was aware. Although…” She became thoughtful, staring into her tea as if to discern something in its darkness. “For a few months, there was one Gypsy in the ghetto. He’d been sent there by mistake. Jews and Gypsies were imprisoned separately, and always exterminated with groups of their own. The camp commandant should have sent the Gypsy elsewhere, but he delayed for two months, three, maybe longer. There were rumors that a small group of SS officers were intrigued by the Gypsy’s readings…palms, castings of wax, maybe even a crystal ball. But I don’t know if there was any truth to the gossip. The wasp symbol had been there before the Gypsy…and it was there after.”

They remained at the table awhile longer, but they said no more about Hitler or about the occult, or about charisma, as if they both felt that they had drawn too close to some line they must not cross, as if to speak further of these things, just then, would be to invite malice upon them. They spoke of trivial matters. They did not return to the subject of Bibi’s novel. When a decade faded from Halina’s face, when the music came into her voice once more, and when she smiled as she had first smiled while standing on the front stoop, Bibi felt that the time had come to go, although she promised that she would return.

That March afternoon, the westering sun cast off silver rather than golden rays, minting piles of coins from scattered altocumulus clouds that glimmered against a faded-blue sky. At street level, it was a bright but curiously dreary light that made the 55 freeway and then the 73 toll road seem like metaled causeways between nothing and nowhere, and all the racing vehicles like robots engaged in heartless tasks centuries after the abolition of humanity.

On the way to the bookstore in the Fashion Island shopping complex in Newport Beach, Bibi couldn’t stop wondering why she had not asked Halina Berg two important questions. The first:
Have you ever heard of Robert Warren Faulkner?
The second:
Have you ever heard of Ashley Bell?
They were the two key figures in this drama, after all; the girl was in urgent need of being rescued, and the mother-murdering Bobby was intent on preventing her from being found. Bibi had assumed that Dr. St. Croix had wanted to speak with Mrs. Berg to explore the connection between Nazis and the occult, but that might not have been her intention. Whatever mysterious faction she aligned with, whatever her purpose in this madness, the professor might have been under the impression that the survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz could tell her something related to Faulkner or Bell, or both. Even if Mrs. Berg claimed never to have heard of them, there would have been something to be gained by watching her reactions to the names.

Not that there had been any reason to believe that Halina’s history might be different from the one that she had laid out in her cozy kitchen. She’d been credible. Even if she was not the Holocaust survivor that she claimed to be, she was a lover of books, therefore not likely to have anything in common with a man who said that he hated most books and bookish people. Besides, had she been aligned with Faulkner/Terezin, she would have let him know that the woman he wanted to kill was sitting at her kitchen table drinking tea.

If Bibi couldn’t be sure that she had gotten from Halina Berg all the woman had to give, she was
convinced
that she had missed something during her encounter with Chubb Coy in the third-floor Victorian suite in St. Croix’s house, and that it had to do less with what he’d revealed than with how he’d said it. There had been certain familiar statements and phrases, and now her memory began to serve her better than it had earlier, which was why she needed to visit a bookstore.

As she exited the toll road at Jamboree Boulevard, crawling west in heavy traffic, Bibi heard the start-up music that indicated her laptop had come alive. It was lying on the passenger seat. After searching for the photos of Bobby Faulkner, she had logged off and her computer had shut down. Now she flipped up the screen and found it bright, ready to go.

When the westbound lanes clogged, she used the touch pad to try to log off. The laptop remained on. She reached farther, to the power switch, clicked it, clicked it, but it didn’t work.

Not good. In fact, very bad.

Ten minutes from Fashion Island in that stop-and-go traffic, she came to a halt when a traffic light yellowed to red, with ten or twelve vehicles in front of her. Directly ahead idled a landscaper’s open-bed truck full of mowers, blowers, trimmers, rakes, and white tarps plump with grass clippings.

She didn’t want to do what she knew she was going to do, what she believed she had to do. After she tried the power button twice again, without success, she closed the laptop, opened the car door, got out, and hurried forward to the open-bed truck. She flung the computer over the tailgate, darted back to the Honda, got behind the wheel, and pulled shut the door without looking at any of the people in the cars around her, who might have been interested in knowing what she’d just done and why. Let them wonder. It was California; you never knew what anyone might do next.

She had hoped the laptop would tumble in among the gardener’s equipment, but it landed smack in the middle of one of the large marshmallow-looking tarps bulging with clippings. As if it were on display.

The traffic signal didn’t change fast enough to suit her. She couldn’t guess what might happen next, but she knew for sure that when the big boot came down, aimed at your neck, it was better to be on the move than sitting still.

Did the latest models of computers emit an identifying signal even when they were switched off? Could someone in authority reach out to that signal and activate your laptop? The newest model TVs included cameras that watched the viewer and microphones that could listen, to allow interactive entertainment. It was a negative-option component; you got it whether you wanted it or not, and you had to take active steps to cancel those features. Not that it necessarily disconnected when you were told it did. Who knew? If someone in authority could reach out and switch on your laptop, and if the laptop contained a transponder with an identifying number, then it was like a flashing neon sign announcing
HERE SHE IS, COME AND GET HER!

The signal turned from red to green, and traffic began to move, but Bibi thought it would probably never again, for as long as she lived, move as fast as she wanted. The throng of vehicles, spaced like beads on a necklace, progressed as far as the next intersection, at the crown of a hill, before halting again. She was now six or eight places from the commanding light, and the landscaper’s truck remained in front of her.

She heard the bass throbbing only a moment before the helicopter soared over the brow of the hill, immense in visual impact if not in fact, flying about sixty or seventy feet above the roadway, far below legal minimum altitude for the circumstances. It wasn’t a standard two- or four-seat police chopper, and it wasn’t a humongous military job, but rather a sleek blue-and-white corporate craft, what Pax would call a “medium twin,” powered by two engines, with an eight- or nine-passenger capacity. High-set main and tail rotors. Advanced glass cockpit. Maybe eight or nine thousand pounds of machine and fuel, coming at her like a missile, framed in her windshield, seeming lower than it actually was. The engine noise and the air-slam of the rotary wing escalated instantly to a violent roar as the chopper passed overhead, then diminished as it swept downhill, above the lanes of waiting vehicles.

Red winked to green, and the steel-Fiberglas-rubber sludge began to move once more, across the brow of the hill. Bibi said
“Yes!”
and slapped the steering wheel when the landscaper’s truck turned right, off the boulevard and away from her.

Crossing the intersection, she checked the rearview and side mirrors, didn’t see the helicopter, but then heard it approaching from behind. The volume didn’t grow as loud as it had before, because the craft turned north and gained a little altitude to clear some old trees. She glanced right and saw it disappear as if in pursuit of the landscaper.

As slow and inept as she had felt now and then during the past eighteen hours, she now felt quick and clever. Nevertheless, she warned herself, nothing in this game was ever easy. And she was right about that.