The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home

by Joseph Fink

  Yemima smiled tentatively and said a few gentle words in Yiddish. I smiled back, hoping my greetings would transcend my lack of her language.

  “She and I were lucky to find each other,” said Rebekah, as she started to remove the elements of her disguise and place them carefully near the bed where they could be quickly reached in case of unexpected callers at night. “I believe she would have faced an unhappy life here, unable to be united with someone she was able to truly love. But I provide the perfect middle between what she wants and what she is allowed to have. And in return, she has shown me love I didn’t know was possible. I never thought such happiness was available to me.”

  She gave Yemima a long kiss, and I felt the terrible weight of my intrusion on this perfect life. I was a dark visitor bearing only revenge and regret.

  “I am glad you have found this place,” I said. “The synagogue is so beautiful.”

  “It is not a perfect community, but it is our community.” Rebekah squinted at me. “I would say you have grown older, but that is not exactly what I am seeing. Instead you seem to have faded. It is hard to remember your face even as I look at you.”

  “You are not the first to say so. I look less like myself.”

  Rebekah nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, that’s it exactly. You look less like yourself. But then I never look like myself.” She shrugged. “You are my oldest and best friend. I am filled with joy on seeing you, but I also suspect you have come to tear me away from this life I’ve lived.” She touched my face that was less and less my face, and she frowned. “I hope I am wrong. Please tell me I’m wrong.”

  I looked at her and at Yemima, smiling up from the hearth, unable to understand what we were saying.

  “You have never been wrong in your life,” I said.

  Rebekah exhaled, long and tired, and it was only then that I felt both of our ages. “That’s not true,” she said. “I befriended you, didn’t I?”

  After two decades, and how the years did slip away so completely and quickly, it was time to make my move. I had heard that Edmond would be holding meetings in a rural area along the Adriatic, a stretch of emerald lakes and misty waterfalls in the Hapsburg Empire that was just starting to be known to the wealthy travelers of the continent but for now was still a quiet area of beauty, a playground for local children. I went several months early, to learn the surroundings and make connections with the farmers in the area. I got along well with farmers, having lived much of my life among the growing of things. They lived a life that I had almost lived, and so I felt a perilous longing among them that I did my best to suppress. Through a careful combination of asking them for advice, genuinely listening closely, and generously showering them with any number of ill-gotten gains, I was able to turn the population into my allies, and they provided me with regular updates about Edmond’s progress toward the lakes, rumors filtered through far-flung family members and trading partners.

  Mine was a blunt plan for a blunt hatred. He was meeting deep in the woods around the lakes, and so would need to travel by a series of boats as there were no paths to that part of the forest. I called upon my ally in Stockholm, and, as promised, he provided a number of dangerous men to back me up. Together we would attack the boat, capsizing it and hacking Edmond to pieces. As I said, a blunt plan, but I became convinced that trickery would never outdo violence. There are times when simply reaching for what is needed is the only way to grasp it, and what I needed was Edmond dead.

  We waited in an inlet along the lake. The water was a luminous green that looked like a painting of water more than it looked like water. In other places, the water was so clear that the fish seemed to be suspended in the ether, moving by mystical means through the nothingness. It truly was an extraordinary place, and I wish I had been able to enjoy the beauty of it, but instead I clutched my Roman knives and waited to murder a man that I had decided needed murdering.

  The plan worked, as far as it went. We saw the boat and came along it, having sprung from our hidden inlet to offer them little time to avoid us. But I had to call a halt to the wholesale slaughter of the passengers because looking into face after face, I realized that Edmond was not among them. Edmond, I would later learn, had cancelled his business in the Adriatic in order to take his young son to King’s College in London. He had a child, a smart and charmed boy, like his father. More happiness for Edmond. More disappointment for me. I sent the Swedes back north, and my revenge was foiled for many years more.

  Edmond no longer lived in Barcelona, and my inquiries there gave me no information on his whereabouts, but I did hear a story that led me west to Madrid, on the trail of one last friend. The brightly painted banner that read SEE THE GIANT was the first indication that I had found the right place. Crowds pushed into the little tent set up in a field east of Madrid’s walls. Flames licked at huge spits of meat, and the tent was a perfect green that popped invitingly against the brown of the hills around it. I paid my money and was ushered into a circle of wooden benches. First a man came out and sang a love song that, as far as I could tell, was about a horse. The horse had died, and the man didn’t think there would ever again be a horse born that could match that horse. Although he did eventually have other horses, still his one true horse would always be that first horse, who had died. Anyway, that was the gist of it. By the end, half the crowd, mostly the men who looked as though they likely didn’t allow themselves to express emotions in any other venue or capacity, were dabbing at their eyes about the horse.

  Then a couple of lithe acrobats twisted and toppled all over the place. The crowd now oohed with delight. Finally the main feature. The giant. I wondered how I would feel, seeing her in this context, exhibited for the delight of strangers. The giant appeared, and the audience was suitably impressed. The master of ceremonies waved her hands extravagantly and bellowed: “We present, Ivan, the Russian wonder.”

  Ivan? For what it’s worth, Ivan did not appear to be anywhere near as big as Lora. After the show I stuck around and asked one of the acrobats about what happened to Lora the giant.

  “Are you a friend of hers?” the acrobat asked, and to my shrug she added, “I loved her. I was so sad when she went. But she said that this wasn’t the business she was meant to work in and I think she was likely right about that.”

  “Do you know where she went?”

  The acrobat looked at me closely for the first time, and her smile faltered. “Your face . . . It . . .”

  “Tell me where she went,” I said again, and this time I let every drop of innocent blood I had ever spilled seep into the words. Her own face went ashen and she told me.

  I didn’t have far to travel, fortunately. Toledo was a day’s journey, and I climbed up the steep path to its walls and into its winding streets, a dusty knot of a fortress in a dusty expanse of land. There I found Lora at her new job, keeping the books at an importer and exporter of religious icons and other sacred items, which, in a place like Spain, is a thriving business. When I stepped into the dim back room and found her hunched over a desk that was far too small for her, she coughed in shock, and it took a minute or two before she found her breath and her voice.

  “You look . . .” she said.

  “Don’t tell me. I’ve heard it enough.”

  And then I was swept up into her hug, and it was my turn to lose my breath.

  “Well, you still have your strength,” I managed.

  “How did you find me?”

  I told her and she snorted. “Those circus folks. I hated being looked at in that way. I would rather sit here, and have no one see me at all. The numbers never stare at me.”

  “As a younger woman, I seemed to remember a joy in what your size could do.”

  “Joy belongs to the young,” she shrugged, without any visible sadness. “I never thought I’d see you again. Now that I see you, I fear it is because my life is about to change in difficult ways.”

  I fell into the chair across from her, which was quite uncomfortable. “I’m so tir
ed of bringing bad news. I feel as though my entire life’s purpose is to cause harm to others.” I twisted, trying to find the position in the chair that didn’t feel like a part of it was jabbing into me.

  Lora nodded at the chair. “When you are a bookkeeper, you don’t want to make things too inviting for your guests. Otherwise they might get the urge to check in on you more often.”

  She rubbed her face, stood and looked out her little window to the dry hills outside the city. “I don’t know what to tell you. We all don’t get happy lives. Maybe a happy life doesn’t exist, at least not as some complete, discrete entity. We get what we get and we sort through how we feel about it moment by moment. So.” She turned back to me. “What do I need to do?”

  If I don’t exact my revenge eventually, time will rob me of it. Already I am old, and Edmond even older. Sooner or later one of us will drop dead. I just want to be involved when it happens. I realize that perhaps I have been avoiding this moment. That while I must be prepared, there is a limit to preparation that can never be surpassed by pure action. In other words, at a certain point one must simply do the thing, and yet I have avoided and avoided it, as the decades pass me by. My mother was twenty-six when she died on the water. Life is unbearably short. I have lived almost as many years since my discovery of Edmond’s betrayal than I had lived up to that moment. Life is unbearably long.

  Before I make my final move, I have one last bit of preparation that cannot be avoided, much as I would like to. It is torture for me, but I must know, and so I return to a familiar part of the coast, and stand atop a hill overlooking Albert’s farm. My body thrums with nerves and grief, as I watch the sun glitter its way over the sea and the land until it has fully risen, and there he is. He steps out on the porch, the same way he always did, as though it were as easy as that, as though that kind of life were attainable. He is older, of course. Old, one would say. My breath is gone. I gasp against the pain. He surveys his farm, squinting at it with the gentle habit of decades. And then the door opens again, and she comes out. She looks a little like me, although more and more I have forgotten what I look like, and anyway, people tell me I look less like myself. My identity has been subsumed by my mission. The other woman is as old as he, and they stand together with the quiet intimacy of a lifetime spent together. He turns to her and the smile he gives her breaks my heart completely, but it also answers a question I needed answering. Albert is happy. He found someone and lived a life worth living. That is enough for me. I leave the two of them on the farm that they work together. As I travel, I pass a cart moving the other direction. When I look, the man driving it is pale-faced, and stiff. Blood runs down his shirt. “Why?” he mouths at me. I cry out, but now it is only a puzzled farmer looking back at me, alive and well and nudging his horses to put some distance between us.

  Not a week later I meet with André, Rebekah, and Lora. Their faces are grim. I don’t know what my face is.

  “We do it now, or we do it never,” I say.

  Lora breathes out through her nose and nods. André gives me a confident smile that doesn’t quite make it to his eyes. And Rebekah takes my hand. They are each loyal friends, and I know exactly what Rebekah is about to say.

  “So we do it now,” she says.

  7

  It was the long northern summer in Nulogorsk, Russia, and even in the late hour the water still glinted back up at the little bar on the dock at which we would make our final stand. The sun, low on the horizon, stayed close to its twin on the sea, and looking out over that double sun was a squat building with no name, no history, and few customers. Nulogorsk was a nowhere town in a nothing region of a sprawling territory. I chose this little corner of the world as my battlefield because I wasn’t looking to hurt any bystanders. I was only looking to hurt one person very much.

  From the back of a carriage, I watched the bar for a long time. I’m not sure what I was looking for, as we had spent months in this town, planning every moment of this night, but still I stared at it as though I could see my future in its rough wooden walls or the queasy wavering of light reflected up from the water. Finally I stepped down from the carriage. I didn’t tell my driver, a reliable Swede provided by my friend in Stockholm, a schedule for when to come back. Either I wouldn’t come back from this, or I would, and if I did then the last thing I would care about was my transportation to the rooms that André had rented for us on the edge of town. If and when I stepped out of that bar, it would probably still be daylight, and my life’s work would be done, and after that I did not care. I was old now. I could walk with no possessions onto a road to who knows where, and that would be fine. Finally, after seventy odd years, my life could begin.

  But first this evening. And first this bar. I took a breath, and checked in on myself. This was me. I was here. I could hardly find it in myself to step forward, yet I stepped forward.

  As I did, a crowd of people shuffled out from the bar’s front door; André led the way, laughing and patting one of them on the back. He had done his part in this. The years passing had only firmed up his looks, so he seemed less like a flighty, beautiful creature and more like a gorgeous granite rock face, as solid as the earth itself. And age had added to his charm. The selfishness of youth had long since dissipated to be replaced by the grace of giving, which is sometimes actual generosity and often merely a more tactful selfishness. But André truly was a giving person. Perhaps that was easy when he had lived his entire life in plenty, exempting a few adventurous years in my company.

  That advantageous childhood had also left him in command of a number of languages, most usefully amongst them Russian, which he had been using at this bar for some weeks now, introducing himself as a Parisian merchant with an interest in investment in the fishing trade. There were, after all, preservative techniques that might allow him to take the bounty of the Arctic ocean to the more discerning diners of France. The best lies are mostly truth. He changed nothing about his biography, and while the excuse was just that, in developing it he found it was a sound business plan and made ready to act on it.

  Of course, he didn’t need weeks to completely win over the fishermen of this village, and, most importantly, Venedict, the owner and sole operator of the bar. The bar had no name over its door and was referred to by locals only as “Venedict’s.” André found Venedict a truly welcoming host, charming in a way that felt as sincere as his own charm. In this way, they enticed each other, and while André had never developed any interest in romance or attraction, he had as much interest in human bonds as any. “My good friend Venya,” was the invariable formula by which he referred to the man. I did my best never to be seen by anyone in town that did not need to see me, but I found myself drawn to Venedict as well. There was something warmly familiar about him, like an old friend that I had once known but had since drifted away from.

  In any case, when, a few days before, André had suggested that his employer needed a place for a quiet meeting without bystanders, Venedict had practically begged him to take the bar. André hadn’t even needed to offer the gold, but of course he did, because he didn’t want to take advantage. The bar owner had been so delighted, he had even allowed us some time late the night before to decorate for the festivities. And so we had, although the results were not visible to the casual eye. Or I hoped they weren’t.

  Lora was holed up in a village a few miles down the coast. We thought it best that there be as little connection between her part in this and our machinations in Nulogorsk, on the chance that Edmond’s spies might start to piece together even a vague outline of our plan, or realize that I was still alive and coming for him. He had a powerful organization of crime and wealth. We had the element of surprise and a sincere desire for his complete destruction. This was the evening where we would find out if it was enough.

  Lora’s job was simple. Get a boat, whether through hire or sale. Then row the boat the few miles to the bar at the right time and wait, floating in the darkness beneath. Her massive arms would eat throu
gh that distance in little time, and so she had been the most obvious choice for the job. Also her size would have made her conspicuous in such a small town, so it seemed best to give her a role that did not require her to stay with André and I.

  The bar had a square gap in its floor looking down on the harbor water. It was a convenient place to toss trash, and a miniature underwater mountain had formed underneath. The mound of debris was a point of pride for Venedict and his regulars, a monument to the time spent diligently drinking the nights away into squinting, bleary mornings. The hole was also just big enough for me to step through and fall into Lora’s waiting arms when the time came. Yes, I was hoping to survive this revenge. I didn’t see much point in a vengeance I didn’t get to see carried through.

  I approached the bar slowly, keeping an eye down the shoreline. Edmond wouldn’t be arriving for some hours yet, but timing was never exact, and I couldn’t afford to be surprised. I also glanced under the pier but there was no sign yet of Lora. That too was good, she was to wait outside the harbor, only slipping in after Edmond had come. I didn’t want any evidence of our plan to come to Edmond’s cunning notice. As I crossed the street, I prayed to no one in particular for Rebekah’s success.

  Rebekah’s role had been to lay the groundwork for our confrontation with Edmond. She had insinuated herself months before into Edmond’s social circles within The Duke’s Own, playing not one but several different men, and so in this way was able to bolster her own reputation. Rebekah committed treason against the organization as one man, only to catch herself and then have herself brutally disposed of as another man. At one point she offered herself a promotion, and while no one was quite clear who this man announcing a promotion for the (unfortunately not in attendance) junior level member was, all of his connections checked out and the news was accepted with bored equanimity. All of this work, tireless and thankless, to achieve one impossible task for a man as invisible and stealthy as Edmond: to put him in a specific room, in a specific place, at a known time. At a bar with no official name, in the harbor of a town that no one over fifty miles away had ever heard of.