By a Spider's Thread

by Laura Lippman

  "Are you sure this guy is Jewish?" she asked Rubin.

  "In his own way, yes."

  "How did a car thief ever make a living in Grantsville? It's pretty small."

  "Amos ran a chop shop out here, dismantling cars stolen from Baltimore and Pittsburgh—and who knows what else. I think he took care of the paperwork, too."

  "One-stop shopping. How convenient."

  Amos was standing on his porch by the time they reached the top of the hill, probably alerted by the dogs and the Jaguar's noisy approach. He was the biggest man Tess had ever seen—maybe six foot eight and at least three hundred pounds, massive but not fat. He was perhaps the one person who really could attribute his weight to being big-boned. He also looked like he never quite came clean, although not for lack of trying. Perhaps there was just too much of him to wash, and too many places he couldn't see.

  Tess and Mark got out of the car but lingered behind the Jaguar's open doors, unsure of their welcome.

  "So," Amos said, "the mountain comes to Muhammad."

  Tess looked across the roof of the car at Rubin, who seemed equally mystified by the greeting. They had literally come to the mountains, and the man on the porch was far more mountainlike than either of them.

  "It's been a long time, Amos. You look well."

  This generous description didn't lure Amos forward or even convince him to unfold his huge, muscled arms. "Why are you here?"

  "Miss Monaghan is helping me look for my wife and children, who have been missing since before Labor Day. During her investigation she discovered that Natalie had a friend, Lana Wishnia. Tess tells me you were once married to Lana, and that you may have been a confidante of my father-in-law as well. You remember him, Boris Petrovich? I couldn't help thinking—well, hoping—that you knew something, anything, about Natalie's whereabouts. If either one of them told you anything…"

  Amos just kept staring, assessing them.

  "There's money for you," Tess said, "if you know something."

  Rubin nodded. "Absolutely. I'd pay dearly for any information that led me to my family."

  "Wait here," Amos said, in a tone that made it unthinkable to do anything else. He turned his back on them and disappeared inside the little farmhouse with a slam of the screen door. He hadn't done much to prettify it, but the wood-frame building was well tended.

  Tess and Mark were left where they stood, car still idling, its open doors like wings on a green metallic bug. Tess would not be surprised if the Jaguar proved to have magical powers, a la Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, capable of taking them through the sky or across the water. There was no trace in the air of the strange weather they had passed through. The sky was a cloudless blue again, clear enough to see miles in all directions.

  "You can see three states from here," Rubin said, "if you know where to look."

  Tess didn't even try to make conversation. She was too busy worrying that Amos, not exactly a garrulous sort, wasn't going to let her off the hook. How would she ever tell Rubin what Larry Kirsch had said about Natalie? Perhaps it wasn't even true. She should get at least one more source to verify the information.

  "My property's posted," Amos announced, coming back on the porch. "Which means I'm entitled to do this."

  He had a shotgun in his arms, and he leveled it at Rubin, taking aim. Even then Tess did not quite believe he meant to shoot them. It was a warning, an order to leave, nothing more. A little over the top, but country people were touchy about property rights.

  "A job done is a job done," Amos said, more to himself than them, his finger on the trigger.

  Did Rubin scream for Tess to duck? If so, she never heard the warning, falling instinctively to the ground behind the open door before Amos fired and scrambling for her gun, worn on her belt today. She had spent a lot of time working on her marksmanship over the summer, and those hours of practice paid off. She positioned herself and pulled her gun out as automatically as she might hit the snooze button on her alarm clock, albeit with more alertness.

  Yet as quickly as she had moved, Rubin had moved faster still, diving into the car from his side, banging open the glove compartment and grabbing a gun. Holding the weapon in his left hand, he reached through the passenger door and pushed Tess's head down with his right, using so much force she almost ate a mouthful of gravel. He then shot his onetime acolyte square in the chest, catching him just as he fired, sending the shotgun blast into the porch roof.

  Amos dropped his shotgun, but he continued to stand for several long, agonizing seconds, swaying slightly, as if it took a while for his massive body to transfer the news of his injury to his nervous system. Finally, with a confused yet almost respectful look for Mark Rubin, he fell to the floor of his porch.

  Tess and Rubin remained huddled together, listening to each other breathe. After a few seconds, he pulled himself away from her and began brushing dirt and dust from his suit. He approached the porch, his weapon drawn, walking around Amos's huge body, then kneeling down to take his pulse at the neck. Mark's lips moved, and Tess assumed he was reciting a prayer, perhaps a kaddish. Even so, Tess approached the porch with great caution, her own gun in hand.

  A thousand questions occurred to her, but she settled for perhaps the least important. "Why in hell do you have that gun?"

  "I always carry a gun when I go to the storage facility or transport furs. One of my father's ways of saving money."

  "But I mean… it's not just any gun." She recognized the pistol from her own recent gun-shopping days, when she had decided to upgrade to the Beretta. "It's a SIG Sauer. A German gun."

  "Swiss-German, actually."

  "Still, for a man who wouldn't even consider owning a BMW…"

  "Oh." He shrugged. "They do some things very well."

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  The Garrett County authorities were polite, almost painstakingly so, to "that girl and that Jew who killed Amos," as Tess overheard one deputy say to another. The tone was innocuous, the meaning clear: They were outsiders who had killed a local. Just their luck, Amos Greif was well liked in his hometown, if only because he kept to himself and paid his property taxes. And if he had come out of prison less than rehabilitated, as a cursory examination of his house seemed to indicate, at least Grantsville was only a staging area for his auto-theft network. Amos Greif was a good neighbor. He left the local cars alone.

  Luckily, Tyner knew a Cumberland lawyer willing to safeguard their rights on short notice. Tess had learned through sorry experience that there was no percentage in talking to authorities without a lawyer present, especially when she was innocent. The lawyer arrived quickly, and by the time the sun went down over West Virginia, the sheriff had decided to let Tess and Mark Rubin leave, although he reminded them that they would be expected to return for grand jury proceedings. ButTyner's friend said she knew the state's attorney and he was likely to recommend no indictment under the circumstances. Tess and Mark were licensed gun owners on legitimate business, and their stories meshed with the physical evidence at the scene.

  "It would have been better," said the lawyer, Gloria Hess, "if you hadn't gone inside his house after you shot him. But I still think you'll both be okay."

  She was a tall, striking brunette, gorgeous enough so that even Mark seemed to register the fact, shaking her hand with a faintly dazed look. It occurred to Tess that Tyner's legal contacts all tended to be lookers.

  "I had to call 911, and it's hard to get service on my cell out here," Tess told Gloria. "You have to admit, Greif's behavior made more sense after the deputies saw what was in his house. Clearly it wasn't trespassing he was worried about."

  The deputies had opened a closed door off the central hallway and discovered a state-of-the-art forger's shop, with a gleaming photocopier and templates for all sorts of documents—temporary tags, titles, driver's licenses. There also were meticulous files, kept in restored oak filing cabinets, showing price lists for certain parts and in-demand vehicles, broken down by r
egion. Another folder yielded voluminous correspondence about firearms, but this appeared to be legal—up to a point. Greif was the registered owner of hundreds of handguns, but the only weapon the deputies turned up was the shotgun he had died holding.

  The deputies were impressed by their find, so Tess had pretended to be, too, despite having seen it all, and more. She wished she had thought to shut down Greif's computer—with the flick of a finger, the deputies could have traced her frantic path through it in the minutes before they arrived. She had searched documents for references to Natalie and the children, started and quit all the recent applications. The last thing she did was click on Greif's America Online account.

  "What's the use?" Rubin hissed from the door, where he was keeping watch. "You can't get into his e-mail without his password."

  "But I can get into his address book." She opened it up and was grateful to discover that Greif had stored only five addresses.

  The first four, all Hotmail accounts, meant nothing to her. Tess jotted them down, knowing that a computer-savvy type could discern a lot from mere addresses.

  The last address was for Wishnia, Lana, with an AOL user name of SlavicBeautee. And the comment box included the P.O. Box at the Reisterstown mail store where Tess had followed her that first day.

  Tess quit the program, scooting out of the room and into the front hallway just moments before the deputies climbed the porch steps and began walking around the considerable corpse left there. Contemplating the lifeless form, Tess had felt nothing, or close to it. Her only regret about Greif's death was that he had taken whatever he knew with him.

  "I'm sorry." They were passing the ballpark outside Frederick, home to the Keys, dark this time of year.

  "Sorry for what?" Mark said, glancing longingly at the park. "I took Isaac there once. It's a great little stadium."

  "I'm sorry you had to kill a man today. You should have let me do it, given that I already have one on my scorecard."

  "There really wasn't time to sort it out. I've gotten so used to the fact that you carry a gun that I forgot about it. I suppose we could have done the Alphonse and Gaston thing: 'After you. No, after you. No, I insist, after you.' But we'd both be dead by now."

  Tess smiled, feeling through her jeans for the bumpy scar on her knee. She had bruised it when Mark threw her down, and she couldn't help feeling it might burst open once again, exposing the bone. Of all the things she had seen in her life, few had made her queasier than a glimpse of bone inside in her own knee.

  "Any idea what he meant, about the mountain coming to Muhammad, or a job done being a job done?"

  "I'm not sure he knew what he meant Maybe he had just taken an order for some hard-to-get Jaguar parts. It does seem that the only thing Amos learned in prison was how to run his criminal enterprises with more technological finesse."

  "Are you disappointed that he didn't change? You spent all that time visiting Jessup, trying to help these guys, and he goes right back to his old ways."

  "I did it as much for myself as for them. That's the nasty little secret about charity. We do it for ourselves."

  "Well, sure, if it's just some onetime thing. I read in the newspaper once that the local soup kitchens dread Thanksgiving because all these dilettantes come out of the woodwork, determined to hand out platters of sweet potatoes so they can then go home and watch football while enveloped in a saintly glow. The writer called it 'the one-day philanthropy fix.' But you're not one of those people."

  "Still, my motives were largely selfish."

  "How so?"

  Rubin hesitated. "You've heard me speak of a shanda?"

  "With Natalie's father, right. It means 'shame.' "

  "It's bigger than shame in some ways. I grew up surrounded by relatives who really did evaluate everything on the basis of whether it was good for the Jews or bad for the Jews. Hank Greenberg? Good for the Jews. Michael Milken? Bad for the Jews. We were responsible not just for ourselves but for every Jew, and the bad always outweighed the good. When I… became aware of the Jewish men in Maryland's prison system, I felt I should do something. My own father…" His voice trailed off.

  "Was your father in prison?"

  "Oh, God, no. No. But there was gossip, ugly gossip, about his business and his money. My stepmother was very well fixed. And, truth be told, my father had a little gonif in him. That means—"

  "Thief," Tess said. "I've read everything Philip Roth has ever written."

  "Roth. That self-loathing monster, projecting his own problems onto an entire people."

  "Read The Ghost Writer and American Pastoral, then get back to me. What about your father?"

  "I told you it was my dad's idea for us to offer lifetime storage to his customers at a discounted rate. What I didn't tell you is that the original building was just an old, crummy warehouse in downtown Baltimore. No climate control, nothing. He figured that most people wouldn't know if their coats had been properly stored, and if one got damaged, he would just replace it and still be ahead financially. It was a gamble, and it paid off. But it was dishonest, taking money from people to put their furs in that nasty old building. When I came on as his partner, I insisted on the new warehouse. It was a big capital expense, but I wanted to make up for all the years my father ripped people off."

  "You're not responsible for your dad."

  "You're wrong about that. I'm responsible for my dad, and my family. As you pointed out this morning, everywhere I go, people see a Jew, first and foremost. So I have to live an exemplary life."

  "Is there an element of shame in the fact that Natalie left you?"

  He nodded, his eyes on the road. "Absolutely. If I were a good husband, she never would have gone. Clearly, I failed her in some way."

  "Not necessarily."

  "Necessarily. I've told you we had no problems, and that was true. But if she left me to keep me from learning something about her… well, that's my failure, too. Somehow she came to believe that she couldn't be completely honest with me, that she couldn't trust my love for her."

  "Maybe Natalie isn't the person you thought she was. Maybe she's concealing something far worse than you could ever imagine."

  "She's the mother of my children. What else matters? We're the adults, we can work out whatever we need to work out. But children are better off when their parents stay together."

  They drove for a few more miles in silence. Tess saw an ad for a real-estate agent, one in which two giant hands shook and sealed a deal for a little piece of the American dream.

  "You touched me today," she said.

  "What?"

  "You pushed my head down. Before you—"

  "Any Jewish law can be suspended if a person's life is in danger."

  "Yeah, but you shook Gloria Hess's hand, too. Didn't hesitate."

  He had the good grace to blush. "In business a man has to shake hands sometimes."

  "So why did you make such a show of not shaking mine the first time I offered it?"

  "You offered it and withdrew it before I could do anything. In that moment… well, I didn't think it would be such a bad thing if you were a little off balance."

  "You mean you thought it would be good if I felt tentative enough that I didn't ask too many hard questions. What else are you keeping from me, Mark?" Tess realized with a start it was the first time she had used his first name. He had been "Mr. Rubin" to her in conversation, "Rubin" in her head. Nothing like a little justifiable homicide to bring two people closer.

  "Nothing. Absolutely nothing. What are you keeping from me?"

  "Nothing. Absolutely nothing."

  Tess wondered if Mark were lying, too.

  The countryside was fading away and the suburbs, with their diffuse, fuzzy lights, came rushing toward them. Mark Rubin was not as delusional as Tess had once thought. He had sought the assistance of a private detective, insisting there were no overt problems in his marriage, convinced that some secret had cost him the life he knew. Almost everything Tess had learned so
far supported this original theory. Natalie did have a secret. And her father, used to getting a cut of whatever Natalie made, had tried to blackmail her. Mark Rubin had been stalwart enough not to peek under the lid of that Pandora's box. For a decade, that had granted Natalie a reprieve from her scheming father. But now Boris had a new buyer for his information. If Natalie cared for Mark, would she rationalize that leaving him was the only way to save him?

  Then where did the mystery man fit in? And was a desire to protect his criminal enterprises the only reason that Amos Greif had produced that shotgun, clearly ready to kill them both? The mountain had come to Muhammad. Mark was the mountain. Greif had been expecting to see him, only not today, not on his property.

  "Lana's the key," Tess said, thinking out loud. "I'm going to follow her tomorrow, see where she leads us."

  "Can I come along?"

  "You have a business to run. Besides, that's not very professional. You hired me to do this stuff. I don't need anyone riding shotgun." Mark grimaced. "Sorry, poor choice of words. You know, you should… see someone."

  "I should start dating while I'm still looking for my wife?"

  "No, I mean… what you did today. It will stay with you in ways you might not expect. Even when there's no choice, when it's you or him, it leaves a mark."

  "So you think I should go to counseling?"

  "Yes."

  "Is that what you did?"

  "More or less." Tess had already been in counseling, for unrelated reasons, but she'd been smart enough to realize she needed the therapist's help.

  "Well, if you had a God, maybe you could have talked to him and prayed to him. And saved yourself a little money in the process."

  "God is great, and God is good," Tess intoned. "But he can't get you prescription drugs."

  It was after ten when Tess arrived home, and the dogs were almost hysterical, although she had arranged for a neighbor boy to walk and feed them when she realized she wouldn't be back until late. They were probably scared she had simply left, never to be seen again.