Whiskers of the Lion

by P. L. Gaus

  “I suppose.” Branden shrugged. “I just dropped my bag. Left a light on.”

  At a corner table, Robertson switched on a light for Lance and said, “We need to get some dinner across the street. They’re going to close at ten.”

  Armbruster appeared at the door to room 6 and asked, “Am I going to dinner, Sheriff?”

  “Negative, Stan,” Robertson said. “Get some sleep. Be back here at six thirty in the morning.”

  Armbruster acknowledged his orders and left.

  Once Lance had set out some toiletries in her bathroom and laid some clothes in a dresser drawer, she locked up and allowed Robertson and the professor to escort her to the elevator. Then she allowed them to escort her through the first-floor lobby. She was wearing the white organdy prayer Kapp over a bun she had made of her brown wig. Her own short blond hair was hidden under the wig.

  Taking Fannie’s instructions, Lance wore no makeup and no jewelry other than a copper wristband she had borrowed from Irma, which everyone in Holmes County would recognize as the bracelet favored by the Amish for its benefits in alleviating joint pain and arthritis. Otherwise, Lance was dressed as plainly and as demurely as any proper Amish maiden, in a long Amish dress in the approved color of dusty rose. The dress was pleated seven times in front and four times over the rump. It was gathered correctly over the shoulders, and its sleeves reached beyond Lance’s elbows. The hem of her dress reached past her ankles to brush the tops of her soft black walking shoes. Lance’s white day apron was entirely plain. It covered her bodice and front, falling to within precisely two inches of her dress’s hem. The apron draped broadly back over her shoulders and across her shoulder blades, to tie in back at her waist. Properly, the ties were hidden in back, under a roll of the apron’s back hem. Finally, though no one would see it unless she was seated, Lance also wore a suitable pair of modest black hose under her dress.

  Altogether, very little of Lance’s skin was exposed. Only her hands, her wrists, and her face. She was plain and unadorned. Apart from those who already knew her, she would be indistinguishable from any other Amish woman of Fannie’s sect.

  Lance understood that this was just as it should be. That was the whole point, wasn’t it? She reminded herself of the oddity of plainness as she crossed the lobby, and she reminded herself again as she crossed Jackson Street under the professor’s umbrella. She needed to appear plain, simple, and unremarkable. She needed this strange and unremarkable quality of similitude, Fannie had assured her, and she needed demure behavior to match.

  As she crossed the street in her Amish attire, Lance could hear the rain pelting the fabric of the umbrella over her head, but she thought her hearing seemed strangely muffled. She could see the streetlights shimmering in the dark rain water at her feet, but she thought her sight seemed strangely tunneled, as if anyone seeing her would recognize her not as an individual, but only as an indistinguishable representative of her sect. She wondered as she walked in the rain between the professor and the sheriff whether, if people could not see her as a person, would she similarly lose sight and recognition of others? She wondered how her attire would cause others to treat her differently. She wondered if she could treat others as she was now supposed to do. Clearly, Lance thought, the coaching that Fannie and Irma had given her would be wholly inadequate for so strange a charade as this.

  Her behavior beside the professor—her fiancé—needed to be perfect. It needed to be restrained and respectful. Demure and submissive. Let him open the heavy wooden door at the Hotel Millersburg. Now let him take your elbow to guide you down the carpet to the hotel’s restaurant. Stand beside him quietly as he chooses the table. Pull your own chair at the table? No. That was a mistake. He’ll pull it out, but you can sit yourself down.

  In this state of indeterminate confusion, Lance’s meal at the Hotel Millersburg passed like an irretrievable dream, as she focused so intently, and worried so much, about doing everything properly. Fannie and Irma had told her what to do. They had coached her carefully on how to do it. But it seemed so foreign to Lance. So distant. So utterly impersonal.

  “Fannie,” she heard someone say at the edge of her awareness.

  Again, someone said, “Fannie.”

  A light touch on her arm brought her some focus. “Fannie,” the professor was saying. “Aren’t you going to eat something?”

  Slowly she turned her head to face the professor to her right. “I’m sorry?”

  “Aren’t you going to eat something, Fannie? You look like you’ve been thinking about something.”

  “I guess I have been,” Lance said. “It’s a strange way to live.”

  To her left, Robertson said, “Fannie, I really think you should eat something.”

  Lance looked down at her plate. She had ordered a chicken Alfredo, with some sautéed vegetables. Someone had brought the meal to her. She took up her fork and began to eat. “Sorry, Reuben,” she said. “I think I was dreaming.”

  As a waiter filled water glasses at their table, Robertson made a point of speaking out. “Fannie, eat something while you can. Then we’ll get you back over to the St. James.”

  Lance looked with curiosity at each of her dinner partners, and she wondered what they were thinking. The sheriff, in his gray suit and red power tie, probably thinking about tomorrow’s schedule. The professor, in his suit of Amish clothes, probably thinking about his wife. Ryan Baker across the table from her, in his deputy’s uniform, probably wondering about Lance’s costume.

  There were waiters circling among the other tables in the dim, carpeted room. All around her, the hotel’s patrons were English. She and the professor were the only Amish people there.

  She gave the room a quick study and realized it was easy to spot the tourists. They were the ones staring at her and at her Amish-dressed fiancé. The locals were paying her scant attention. But the tourists in the corner booth were staring at her. They were staring at the professor, too.

  These were prying, intrusive stares that objectified her more than Lance had realized was possible. It was worse than the stares the boys had given her at college. Worse than the stares of strange men in malls. These stares came with whispers of curiosity. As if she were on display for their entertainment, rather than a person who wanted decent privacy during a meal.

  Lance groaned, shook her head, and began again to eat her pasta.

  Robertson asked, “What, Fannie? Your meal’s not good?”

  “My meal is fine, Sheriff,” Lance whispered as she ate. “Can’t say that I appreciate the tourists.”

  • • •

  Lance entered her room at the St. James and waited for Robertson to enter behind her and close the door. The professor had already retired to the adjacent room. Once Robertson had some lights on, Lance pulled her Kapp off and then her brown wig. Standing in her Amish dress and apron, with her blond English hair exposed like a punctuating anachronism, Lance sputtered, “I don’t think I can do this.”

  Robertson sat in a corner chair. “What, Lance? The outfit or the attitude?”

  “Either one!” Lance answered. She sat heavily on the bed and began to untie the back laces of her apron. Abruptly she stopped and took up her Kapp and brown wig. “It’s too much to remember, Sheriff. Like my hair. I’m allowed to take my hair down only for my husband. And this Kapp? I can never take it off in public. Or even most of the time at home. So really, Bruce, I can’t do any of it. Not convincingly. Nobody’s going to believe that I’m an Amish woman.”

  “You did fine, Lance.”

  “I don’t know how they do it,” Lance complained. “They’re all bottled up, worried every minute that they’ll do something wrong.”

  “That’s not how it is, Lance. They grow up like this. It’s second nature to them.”

  “Well, it’s not second nature to me!”

  “You’ll get the hang of it.”

  “I
don’t think so.”

  “Look, Lance,” Robertson argued. “You don’t have to say much. And you don’t have to talk to everyone. It’s showing you around that’s the important thing here.”

  “Who will I need to talk to?”

  “A banker and a pharmacist. A real estate agent, and maybe a clerk at a convenience store. Maybe someone in a restaurant.”

  “Oh, is that all!”

  “It’ll be OK, Lance. You halfway looked Amish to start with.”

  “Oh, I look Amish, that’s for certain. I had tourists staring at me during dinner.”

  “Tourists always stare at the Amish, Lance. You’ve known that for years.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s the first time they’ve stared like this at me.”

  26

  Thursday, August 18

  9:35 P.M.

  ALMOST AS soon as they slid the door closed on the FBI’s black panel van, Fannie suspected that she had made a grave mistake. By the time they were rolling silently into the center of Middlefield, she was nearly certain of it. As the van turned at the Middlefield city square to roll west out of town on 87, she was contemplating a jump from the sliding door. She was contemplating a run. An escape.

  Feeling so completely alone inside the dark van, with four armed men as escorts, Fannie wondered if perhaps she had not foolishly forfeited her one best chance for freedom. She wondered if she had not lost her chance to walk away from the perverse legalisms of federal law enforcement. To walk free of the legalisms that demanded that she be held in isolation against the improbable eventuality that the leaders of a violent drug cartel might one day be captured and brought to trial.

  But Reuben had been so confident. So she would be confident, too. Tonight was not the night to run. That day would come soon, but it was not tonight. And remember, Reuben had said. Sheriff Robertson has given us the key. When it is time, it requires only courage. It requires only faith to see it through.

  So Fannie rode with her escorts as the van pushed westward into the night, toward the hotel that Robertson himself had chosen. She rode silently as her escorts switched on a small roof light and checked their weapons. The black pistols made ugly clacking sounds as the agents worked the top gun parts back to peer inside. They made clicking sounds as the bullets slid into place. From a single overhead cabin light, Fannie could see the menacing triggers. She could smell the gun oil. She could imagine the muzzles spitting fire and death, and she regretted that she had ever left Reuben’s side. She knew that she should have run when the Brandens first arrived.

  Wordlessly, Fannie watched as the van circled into the wide parking lot of the hotel and rolled toward the rear corner of the four-story brick building. There it seemed to her that an unnatural darkness had descended where the lights of the parking lot should normally have been shining. She realized that the lights had been shut off for her arrival, and she groaned with the misery of her isolation.

  As the van approached the building’s corner, Fannie closed her eyes to pray. She felt the van circle sharply toward a stop, and she heard Parker, riding beside the driver, speak into a radio handset. “On the rear door. Arriving now.”

  The van came to a full stop in the unnatural darkness, with its headlights illuminating the front of a loading platform with steep concrete steps. The driver switched off the headlights, and the men stirred inside the van. Parker got out first, followed by the driver. Fannie heard chatter on the radio as Parker slid the van door open beside her.

  “Come out now, Fannie,” Parker said. He reached in to take her arm and guide her out.

  The two agents who had ridden in the back of the van also climbed out to the blacktop behind her. On either side of her, the men took her elbows and led her forward to the steps. As if she couldn’t manage it on her own, they lifted roughly on her arms to escort her quickly up the steps. Parker and the driver already had the steel door open for her at the back of the hotel. They ushered her inside, and the steel door clanged into place behind her. Squeezed between her escorts, inside a small and dreary basement vestibule, Fannie felt that she now understood the isolation of imprisonment. That she understood the loneliness of a jail cell. And she tried to summon the words to protest.

  But before she had a chance to speak, Parker barked into his handset, “Go,” and the doors to a service elevator spread open in front of her. Two more agents stepped off the elevator toward her, and she found herself surrounded by six armed men.

  Parker next said, “One of you at each of the entrances,” and three of Parker’s agents disappeared into a stairwell door. Then Parker checked his watch, and Fannie found herself being hustled forward into the elevator.

  Once the elevator had started its rise, Parker spoke again on his handset. “On our way up. Secure the hallway on four.”

  Just as the elevator doors were about to open on the fourth floor, Parker used his handset again, “Stepping out.”

  On the fourth floor, Parker and his two agents took Fannie left down the hallway. As she made the turn, Fannie looked to her right and saw yet another agent standing guard near the end of the hall. Beyond him, she saw an Amish woman, with an Amish man holding a position beside her. The Amish woman was delivering pillows to the last room at the end of the hall.

  As the agents hurried her down the hall, Fannie counted three rooms to her right and four rooms to her left. They were all labeled as suites. The agents stopped her at the last room on the right. It was marked Suite 416.

  Inside, Parker immediately directed Fannie to the bedroom on the left. Fannie was given her suitcase, and she carried it into the bedroom, where she turned around and sat on the end of the nearest of two queen beds. Parker switched the lights on for her, and she felt as if she had been marooned in a foreign land. She felt alone, and she realized that she could depend on no one but herself right then. So she calmed herself by studying the layout of her bedroom.

  There was a long dresser to her left, with a flat-panel TV parked on top. Also there was a nightstand between the two beds, with a lamp and the TV remote laid out on it. A soft chair sat in one corner, and a desk with a lamp was in another corner. The bathroom door was situated to her right, on the other side of the bedroom’s entrance.

  The second queen bed was set beside the bedroom’s single window. The window was covered with heavy drapes. Fannie rose instinctively to move to the window, but Agent Parker said, “Please don’t go near the windows, Fannie. And please do not open the drapes.”

  Once Parker had closed the bedroom door behind him, Fannie sat again on the bed, whispering to herself, “Reuben, what have we done?” As she whispered for her fiancé, Reuben’s reassurances returned to her. The words he had spoken to her at the door to the van gave her a measure of peace. She remembered what Reuben had said, and she held fast to the words of Sheriff Robertson’s letter. She held fast to the key that Sheriff Robertson had given them: You would have been safe among your people . . .

  Fannie heard a mix of voices on the other side of the bedroom door. She got off her bed and stepped forward to put her ear to the door. She heard Parker’s voice most distinctly. Authoritative, commanding, insistent. “Is there another way in?”

  “No,” he was answered. “There are emergency exits, but after nine o’clock, they do not open from the outside.”

  Next, Parker asked, “What was that business at the end of the hallway just now?”

  “Room 401 requested pillows,” an agent replied.

  “Were they checked out?” Parker asked.

  “Of course. Both the maid and her supervisor. Also the occupants of 401.”

  “Why does it take two people to deliver pillows?” Parker asked.

  A second agent explained. “It’s hotel policy. A supervisor always escorts the maids when they make deliveries at night.”

  “They were both Amish,” Parker said.

  “They all are.”
/>   “Who is, precisely?” Parker asked.

  “Everyone who works here. Maids, room service, kitchen staff, clerks, even the concierge—all of them, really. It’s Amish owned and Amish operated. The tourists like it that way. And Amish women don’t make deliveries to rooms at night without a male supervisor to chaperone them.”

  Next, Parker said, “OK, we’ll sleep in shifts. Two at a time, three hours apiece. And let’s get some food and coffee up here. We’re going to be here all night.”

  “When will the maintenance team arrive?” an agent asked.

  “Nine A.M.,” Parker said.

  “And they’ll maintain this location until Monday?”

  “Right. Three days only.”

  “Then Cleveland?” another agent asked.

  “Of course,” Parker answered. “This place suits my purposes for now, but if Robertson thinks I’m going to keep a key witness in a tourist hotel indefinitely, then he’s even more stupid than I thought he was.”

  Fannie retreated to a chair in the far corner of her room. Shaken by the swiftness of Parker’s plan, she was also stunned by the callousness of his duplicity. Reuben had warned her, but he hadn’t anticipated how soon she would be betrayed. Really, the sheriff had warned her, too. But like Reuben, the sheriff could not have expected this level of deceitfulness. Clearly, Fannie realized now, it would be foolish to trust the FBI past the weekend. But it was more than that. No doubt, she had been foolish to have talked at all to the Brandens. Or to have waited with the Masts until Detective Lance had arrived with her partner. Or to have waited even longer for the FBI.

  And if it was Parker’s intention—if it had been his intention all along—to spirit her away to Cleveland, where she would see no more of her kind as long as her protective captivity lasted, then it meant only that Reuben would have to be ready that much sooner. It meant that they would all have to be that much bolder.