by Dean Koontz
Toba was clearly pleased to hear this, but then she must have thought of Bibi abed in a hospital, lost in a coma, for she raised her mug and took a long draught of the spiked coffee. “If there was one thing she might have found in the Valiant girls that she didn’t already have or didn’t have in the fullest at fourteen, it was the wonderful concept of free will. She kept coming back to that in our conversations. That we are free to shape our own lives, that we can overcome. That there is a terrible danger in denying the existence of free will. The danger of deciding that we are meat machines, that all is meaningless and that we have no responsibility for what happens because of what we do.”
Pogo said, “Should I tell her about the tattoo?”
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.
The violence equally thrilled and shamed Bibi, made her feel empowered though not exalted. If shame had not been part of it, she would have struck another blow, and another, until she’d seen the skull cave and the blond hair darken with blood. But she retained control of herself, cranked shut the vent that would have released her fear-spawned rage in volcanic gouts.
The voices in the construction trailer continued their muffled conversation. Urgently scheming or merely garrulous, plotting the destruction of a city with a nuke or playing poker—it was impossible to tell which.
If one of them was Vorshack, lucky husband, perhaps the other was Robert Warren Faulkner, alias Terezin. In which case she could surprise him, walk in and shoot him dead, deny him his birthday celebration and save the life of Ashley Bell. But would the lea
der of such a cult—such an enterprise—go anywhere without a couple of bodyguards? Unlikely. She couldn’t know how many others might be in the trailer, stationed in rooms or a hallway into which she couldn’t see from outside.
She thought it better to explore the acreage under development rather than force an ill-conceived confrontation, just as it was better not to dwell on the strangeness of her encounter with Marissa Hoffline-Vorshack and the bizarre way that it had ended.
What is your motivation?
To save Ashley Bell.
Is it really?
Yes. Ashley Bell. Save her or die trying.
The fog enfolded her.
The old woman appeared not to suffer from arthritis, for she moved quickly and without complaint, and there were no thickened and distorted bones in her fingers, no swollen knuckles. She wore no eyeglasses, and Pax doubted that she had resorted to contacts. There was about her a general air of good health, as though she had suffered so much anguish and terror by the age of eleven that, when she’d been borne out of Auschwitz, the exchequer angel that tracked the debts owed by every soul had excused her from paying any serious price for living well into her eighties.
She stepped past the collection of Valiant Girl novels in various languages, to other shelves where she kept the young-adult titles she had written outside that series. From the tightly packed volumes, she extracted the only book she’d written using the nom de plume Halina Berg. It was also her first published work under any name: Out of the Mouth of the Dragon. The jacket art depicted a stylized dragon with human skulls for eyes, but the image was poorly conceived and perhaps quickly executed, unappealing. Although the words A NOVEL, under the title, provided buyer guidance, the work might have been in any of several genres.
“It sold poorly. A disaster. The package didn’t say ‘buy me,’ ” Toba noted, “but in truth I didn’t have the skill to pull off the story I wanted to tell. It was meant to be a little journey through Hell that would nevertheless be inspiring. The story of a young girl who survived Dachau, overcame the trauma, and built a meaningful life in America.”
“Your life,” Pogo said.
“Actually, no, dear. But it is fact-based fiction. It spins off from a true story about someone I met in this country after the war. Her name was Arline Blum, but of course I changed it for the novel.”
Scanning the front jacket flap, Pax said, “So the heroine’s name is Ashley Bell.”
“Easier on the American ear,” Toba explained.
Pogo was as straightforward as the white line on a highway and as easy to read as a roadside sign. His puzzlement was obvious. “The tattoo on Bibi’s arm—ASHLEY BELL WILL LIVE. She did live, but her name was Arline Blum.”
“Is the woman still alive?” Pax asked.
“Sadly, no,” Toba said. “She died four years ago.”
“And Ashley Bell isn’t really a person,” Pogo said, “she’s a character in a novel. So why the tattoo?”
“After that first visit with her mother,” Toba said, “when she found out I’d written one novel as Halina Berg, Bibi insisted she had to read it. I told her the book was out of print, and for very good reason. My talent couldn’t make good use of that kind of material. I found my métier in jolly adventure fiction for girls. But she charmed a copy out of me.”
“Not just adventure fiction for girls,” Pax said, because there was an eleven-book series about a Valiant Academy for boys, which he had read when still living on the ranch with his family, long before the idea of becoming a SEAL had taken root in him. “It helped Bibi and me click on the first date—we’d both read Toba Ringelbaum.”
“Yes, she told me, and I was tickled. But the boy books didn’t sell as well as the series for girls, I’m afraid. Otherwise, I would have written many more.” The graceful folds of her well-aged face conspired in an expression of sheer delight, and her brandy-colored eyes brightened. “I found it so very exhilarating to climb into the young male mind, to imagine boys being boys and kicking butt with rollicking good cheer.”
“Your girls kick butt, too,” Pax said. “That’s a big reason Bibi loves those stories.”
“Back to my question,” Pogo said. “Why the tattoo? Where is Bibi? What is she dreaming? Or not dreaming—but doing? How is Ashley Bell a part of it?”
“Toba?” Pax said as he returned Out of the Mouth of the Dragon to her. “Any ideas?”
“There is one thing. One more strange thing.” After the old woman shelved that book, she took down another nearby volume. “I didn’t have many extras of the American edition, so I gave this one to Bibi, the British version.”
Instead of a dragon, the cover featured the face of a beautiful young girl of perhaps twelve or thirteen. Pale-blond hair. Complexion as smooth as bisque porcelain. Remarkable violet eyes. The wide-set eyes, which shone with intelligence, the direct and limpid stare, the planes and curves of the face, and the faint suggestion of defiance in the set of the mouth seemed to reveal an appealing personality, as if in this case appearance and reality were the same.
“When Arline Blum read the manuscript of the novel inspired by her life,” Toba explained, “the dear woman liked it more than she should have, considering I didn’t do the greatest justice to it. She was always a lovely, generous person. Anyway, the British publisher wanted to have the face of Ashley Bell on the cover, instead of that horrid dragon. They meant to have an illustrator paint it. I’d seen this photo of Arline when she was a girl, and I thought it perfect. She was agreeable to letting it be used. It was in black-and-white, of course, but the artist used it for reference, and painted the cover in the photorealistic style. I’m sure this is the only reason the British edition sold so much better than the American.”
“She’s kind of…mesmerizing,” Pogo said. “Did she grow up to be this beautiful?”
“Yes, indeed. And her heart was more beautiful than her face. Like I said, four years she’s been gone. I will always miss her.”
As striking as it was, the portrait on the book jacket could not be considered strange.
Pax said, “Toba, we were wondering how—but also why—Bibi might have gotten that tattoo, why Ashley Bell is a part of this. And you said there was ‘one more strange thing.’ ”
“In the novel,” Toba said, “Ashley Bell survives Dachau, just as did Arline Blum, and comes to America, as did Arline, and by the early 1970s becomes a successful and highly regarded surgeon, as did Arline. My fiction was too beholden to fact. Modeled on Arline, Ashley Bell in the novel is a surgical oncologist specializing in brain cancer.”
In the west, the sun settled toward the sea, and there were just enough clouds of varied textures to ensure, a quarter of an hour from now, the day would come to its end with a burning sky. As if melting, shadows elongated in the golden light, which would soon be red.
At the window in Room 456, Nancy looked down at the hospital parking lot and didn’t like what she saw, didn’t like it at all, and turned away. The rows of parked cars reminded her of caskets lined up the way that she had seen them on the news when men killed in war were sent home by the planeload.
Murph had gone downstairs to the cafeteria to get sandwiches and pasta salads for dinner, which they would eat together in this room. Neither of them wanted to leave until visiting hours were over, and perhaps not even then.
While Murph was getting their dinner, Nancy had decided to bail out of the real-estate business, depending on what happened next. She loved selling houses, helping people who needed new homes, and she was good at it, better at being a Realtor than Murph was at selling surfboards, and he was pretty darned good. But if something happened to Bibi—not just the undefined something, face it, if she died—every property in the world would be, to Nancy, haunted. Every house she showed to every prospective buyer would have been a house where Bibi might have lived one day and raised a family with Pax. Every bare lot, waiting for an architect to finish the house design, would be a gravesite waiting for a headstone. Wrung like a ra
g in the hands of anxiety, that is what she told herself as she paced the room.
Although it sounded as if she might be making a bargain with fate, she wasn’t promising to give up her career if only Bibi were allowed to live. There was no point in such dickering. That kind of sentimental gesture made you feel a little better if you were feeling like crap, gave you a sense of control when in fact you had none, but it was meaningless. What would happen would happen. Fate was a bitch; she made no bargains. What Nancy was really saying to herself, by planning to give up real-estate sales, was that losing her daughter so young would surely drain the meaning from her work, her life. But you had to face reality even when reality sucked.
She was standing at the foot of the bed, watching the comatose girl, when dried blood and fresh blood flew from Bibi’s damaged ear, spattered across the pillowcase, the sheets. As though an invisible presence had clawed open the crusted abrasions, blood dribbled from them again.
For a hundred feet or so, Bibi made her way through a white-out worthy of an arctic blizzard, a white-out without wind or polar cold, but nonetheless disorienting and fearsome. When the lights of the construction-trailer windows were hardly brighter than the phantom phosphorescence on a just-switched-off TV screen, she took her flashlight from an inside jacket pocket and dared to switch it on.
If they had roaming security guards, she might be seen, but she could not worry about that. Intuition told her, the threats she faced from this point would not be as mundane as rent-a-cops. Since Pogo had brought the Honda to Pet the Cat, since she had set out on this quest, she had gone much farther than the miles on the odometer would attest. She felt as if she had traveled to an unknown country on an undiscovered continent, to the brink of a nameless abyss. There was the known world and the supernatural world that shadowed it, and the veil that had been deteriorating between them now began to dissolve entirely.