Crusader (34 page)

I hung out at the register with Karl for a while. Uncle Frank stayed in his office, as he's now accustomed to doing. At around five, Ironman walked in wearing a black baseball cap. The cap had the words
BITNER FAMILY REUNION
on it.

Karl looked up from a copy of
PC World
and asked him, "What's with the hat, dude?"

"It was two
ts
."

"Huh?"

"
Bitner.
It was supposed to have two is in it.
Bittner.
They wouldn't take the hats."

"No, doofus. I mean, why are you wearing it?"

"I had to have my head shaved. They said I got head lice."

This bit of information spurred Karl to immediate action. He dropped the magazine and hurried into the back to tell his father.

Uncle Frank burst out through the office door. He honed in on Ironman like a guided missile, barking at him, "No way you got head lice here."

Poor Ironman shriveled under the power of this accusation. Karl came up behind him and pulled off his cap. Ironmans head was completely shaved. He looked like one of those concentration-camp victims in the old newsreels.

Karl stuffed the cap back onto Ironman's head. "Whoa. Keep that thing on, dude. At all times."

Uncle Frank stared at Ironman's head with extreme distaste. He added, "It didn't happen here," then turned and walked slowly back to the office.

I took a break at five o'clock and walked down to Crescent. As I had hoped, the early news was playing on their wall of televisions. Several employees were gathered around the VCR. I joined them and asked, "Is Sam here?"

A guy answered me enthusiastically, "No. Sam was on the local news. On Channel Fifty-seven. We got it all on tape. Watch."

He walked over to a VCR and pushed in a tape. The wall of TVs filled with images of Sam. He looked upset. He was busily dodging the microphones thrust into his face by reporters.

I asked the guy, "Can you turn the sound on?"

"Sure." But by the time he did, the scene had shifted. Ray Lyons was on the screen. He told a girl reporter, "I deplore these hate crimes. As soon as I heard that an African American businessman was being harassed at one of my malls, I got involved. I demanded a full investigation from the state's attorney. And as a senator I will push for tougher legislation against such crimes."

I didn't know Sam was African American. I'm sure he didn't, either. I was hoping for him to come back on the videotape when, miraculously, he appeared "live" at my elbow. He said, "We need to talk." Sam took off into the mallway, so I followed. He turned and said, in a low voice, "I had a chat with Griffin today."

"So did I."

"When?"

"This morning."

"Okay. I just got off the cell phone with him. This is the latest: Your uncle had an alibi ready about last night."

"He did? What?"

"He said he was making a bank deposit."

"But that's a lie."

"It is and it isn't. It seems he slipped over to the ATM right before we saw him. And he has a deposit slip to prove it. "Sam looked at me knowingly. "For one hundred dollars."

I stared at him for a moment, then finally admitted, "I don't get it."

Sam pointed inside Crescent, at the line of people at the cash register. "Is your business really that bad? I don't make deposits under a thousand dollars. And I sure don't make them alone, in the middle of the night. I think your uncle came up to the Crescent window ready to spray the paint. Then he saw the camera, and he switched to Plan B. He went to the ATM and deposited what he had in his wallet."

"Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense to me." Sam started to walk off. I asked him, "So what happened with Hawg?"

Sam looked like he didn't want to talk about it, but he said, "The judge barred him from being within a hundred yards of me or my place of work, and that means within a hundred yards of the mall. They're putting an ankle bracelet on him in case he tries to come here. Basically, he's under house arrest. He can only go to school and back home until the trial."

"That's terrible."

"It could have been worse. Ray Lyons didn't want to let him out at all. He told the reporters he wanted to see Hawg in adult prison. 'So he can get what's coming to him.'"

"Oh, my god."

Sam looked back at the line at his register. "Listen, I have to get some work done. This has been driving me nuts. I can't let my business fall apart."

"Okay."

But Sam felt compelled to say one more thing. He added, "I'm going to try to see that justice gets done here, Roberta. I believe in justice."

I walked back to Arcane. Now I was more determined than ever to avoid Uncle Frank. That wasn't hard, since he stayed in the back for the rest of the night. Griffin was wrong about Hawg, though. He never showed up at the mall.

When nine o'clock finally drew near, I asked Kristin, "Can you cover for me tonight on the checklist?"

"Do you think that's a good idea? After the head lice business? My dad will be mad."

"I don't care."

Kristin looked at me, genuinely shocked. "Roberta, what has come over you?"

"Nothing. I just want to get out early tonight."

Kristin held up a can of lice spray. "Yeah, sure. Go for it."

I wound up back at Mrs. Weiss's condo, watching the Travel Channel with her. It was a program called
Europe's Capital Cities.
About ten minutes into it, Mrs. Weiss commented, "Those cities are still there, Roberta. Berlin, Vienna, Warsaw. Maybe you'll get to visit them."

"I hope so."

"You won't see many Jews, though. In that sense, Hitler succeeded. He set out to rid his society of us, and he pretty much did it."

After the program, Mrs. Weiss continued on this theme. "My mother and father found themselves in a society that didn't want them. I was eight years old, but it didn't want me,
either. I had an aunt in New York, so they sent me with a one-way ticket to visit her. They had no intention of bringing me back.

"Letters started coming to my aunt—
Can you keep Isabel for a while? The Nazis are causing trouble.
And then,
Can you keep Isabel for a while longer? We might be losing our business.
And finally,
Isabel has to stay there. We have no house now.
The bottom line was that I never saw them again."

"What happened to them?"

She muttered, "What happened? My father took the path that a lot of Jewish men in Germany took. He shot himself through the head."

I gasped. "Oh, my god."

She explained, "There was a government riot against Jewish shops called Krystallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. It was November 9, 1938. They smashed the glass of Jewish-owned businesses all over Germany. That made my father sick to his soul. He never recovered. He shot himself a week later."

"What about your mother?"

"My mother was the stronger one. She would not give up. She wouldn't do the Nazis' dirty work for them." Mrs. Weiss looked up proudly for a moment, but then she started to cry. "The truth is, they never did kill her. They probably would have. Near the end they were killing every Jew they could get their hands on. A frenzy of murdering. But they didn't get to kill her."

I asked a stupid question. "Were you lonely without her?"

"
Pshht!
Lonely? I cried myself to sleep for five years. I dreamed of her nearly every night. All I had of my mother was her letters. Her letters and her recipes! She wrote out a favorite recipe, by hand, in each letter. When the recipes stopped coming, I knew."

"You knew she'd died?"

"Yes. I knew when it happened. I just knew it, inside me. It would be years before I found out how it happened."

Mrs. Weiss paused. I didn't know if she wanted to go on or not. I asked, "Do you want to tell me about it?"

She did. Mrs. Weiss leaned forward and whispered dramatically, with her eyes open wide, "A person is not really gone until everyone who knew them is gone. I got a letter one day, when I was still living in New York. Harry and I had just gotten married. A lady named Mrs. Freund said that she knew my mother."

Mrs. Weiss sat back and continued quietly, "This woman knew her at Bergen-Belsen, the camp where my mother died. She asked if she could meet with me and talk. Of course I said yes. We met in the city, at a restaurant. I was very surprised when I saw her. Mrs. Freund was about my age. She had been just a little girl in the camp, like I would have been. And she survived.

"She was very gracious, very European. After a few pleasantries, she told me this: She said, 'Your mother did a brave thing. She had a friend in her cabin who got sick with the typhus. Your mother, instead of keeping away from her, nursed her day and night. The two of them died together, of typhus, while the guards watched and did nothing.'"

Suddenly Mrs. Weiss got to her feet. "Come with me, Roberta." She clicked off the TV. "Enough television."

I followed her to our seats out on the balcony. She resumed her story. "It had been more than twelve years since I had seen my mother, and eight years since I had gotten her last letter. But when this Mrs. Freund told me that story, I felt like I had a mother again! Not only that, but I had a mother who was a hero. A woman who died in a death camp. Defying the Nazis. Helping others. She never gave up on life. And she never gave up being a good person.

"I carry that image of my mother with me to this day. That image has inspired my life. Roberta, I do not even have a real picture of my mother, and yet I carry such a vivid image of her in my heart. Still, to this day, when I have an important decision to make, I look inward, at that image, and ask,
What would my mother do?
"

Mrs. Weiss touched both hands to her heart. "Anyway, I heard Mrs. Freund's words, and I broke down crying, right there in that crowded restaurant. I was inconsolable for many minutes. I finally managed to say to her, 'I'm too late. I'm too late. I can never tell my mother what she means to me now.'" Mrs. Weiss opened her eyes wide again. "And do you know what she did? She put her hand on mine and said, 'Yes, you can. Why don't you write her a letter, today, and tell her how you feel?'

"Of course, I wrote the letter. That day. But I did more than that. I made Harry take me to Europe. We went all the way to the gate of that camp, that Bergen-Belsen. And do you know what I did then? I left a memorial outside the gate of that horrible place."

"A memorial?"

"Yes. A letter, a bouquet of flowers, and a pack of her recipes, all neatly tied up. I left it there at the gate. I just laid them down and walked away. Wasn't that silly? I made Harry take me halfway around the world, and that's all I did."

"Did Harry think it was silly?"

"No."

"Neither do I."

Mrs. Weiss looked out over the dark swamp for a long time. Then she concluded, "I always thought that some passerby, some poor woman, picked up those recipes, took them home, and used them. Then she passed them on to her daughter, and that daughter is still using them now. That probably didn't happen. Some fat guard probably came along and tossed the
whole thing in the trash. But I'd like to think that's what happened."

I told her, "I'd like to think that, too."

Mrs. Weiss leaned back to peer at the kitchen clock. "Eleven o'clock. What kind of mother lets her child stay up until eleven o'clock on a school night?"

"I stay up that late a lot."

"I'm sure you do." Mrs. Weiss got up, so I followed. We stopped at her bedroom door. She said, "So now you know my sad life story. I had no parents. Neither do you."

I started to speak, but she stopped me. "Roberta, life is hard when you have no one to stick up for you. People push you around, purely because there's no one to stop them from pushing you around. That's just the way it is, and you're going to have to take it." Mrs. Weiss looked at me curiously, like she was about to share a secret. But she didn't. She just said, "For a while, anyway. For a while. Good night."

I stayed in my old bedroom at Sawgrass Estates last night, over Mrs. Weiss's objections. Dad and I had Burger King after work, then he went out with Suzie. I read a news magazine and went to bed early. I wasn't afraid until then. I turned the kitchen, living room, and hall lights on before I got into bed. They were still on in the morning when I got up because Dad and Suzie hadn't come back.

There wasn't any milk, so I ate handfuls of dry cereal while I watched CNN. I left the house at ten-thirty, walking as fast as I could through the thick air. It looked and felt like a bad storm was building.

Ironman turned onto 111th Street almost in step with me.
He actually said something. He said, "My mom must have left without me."

"Uh-huh" was the best I could manage. We walked quickly, in silence, sweating along through the morning heat and humidity. We made the turn onto Everglades Boulevard a few minutes later.

There was a lot of traffic whizzing by, more than usual, and it seemed to be going faster than usual. I looked up at the Route 27 intersection. I saw a black pickup truck parked next to a white car. Off to the side, to the north of them, I saw a distinctive red T-shirt. It was Hawg.

As we got closer, I could make out the words
ATLANTIC COUNTY JUVENILE JUSTICE
written on the side of the car. A guy in a white shirt was talking to another man by the truck.

I asked Ironman, "Is that Hawg's stepfather?"

Ironman jerked his head up and down, up and down, in a sweaty nod. He smiled nervously.

"What are they doing there?"

"I don't know."

Hawg had positioned himself off to the right of the two men, about ten yards away from them. He clearly was not listening to their conversation. He seemed deep in his own thoughts. Ironman and I reached the intersection. The two men took no notice of us, but Hawg snapped his head back, smiled, and said loudly, "Hi, I. M. Hi, Roberta. Y'all on your way to Arcane?"

I answered, "Yes." But then I couldn't think of anything else to say. The scene was too confusing. Ironman and I just stood there, stuck in our spots.

I tried to tune in to the man in the white shirt. He was now pointing down toward Hawg's foot. I looked down, too, and saw a small, round device, like an oversize wristwatch. It was strapped around the sweat sock on Hawg's right ankle.