“Hi, Mom,” I say, pushing the speakerphone button without even bothering to look at the caller ID.
“Leo. Would it have killed you to be nice to that poor girl?”
“That poor girl is completely capable of landing on her feet. And she doesn’t need or want someone like me, anyway.”
“You don’t know if you’re compatible after one lousy dinner,” my mother says.
“Mom. She thought the Bay of Pigs was a barbecue joint.”
“Not everyone had the educational opportunities you did, Leo.”
“You study that stuff in eleventh grade!” I say. “Besides, I was nice to her.”
There is a pause on the other end of the line. “Really. So you were being nice when you took a phone call and told her it was the office and you had to go because John Dillinger had been captured.”
“In my defense, dinner had lasted two hours already and our entrée plates hadn’t even been cleared.”
“Just because you’re a lawyer doesn’t mean you can twist the story around. I’m your mother, Leo. I could read your thoughts in utero.”
“Okay, (a) That’s creepy. And (b) Maybe you and Lucy should just let me find my own dates from now on.”
“Your sister and I want you to be happy, is that such a crime?” she says. “Plus, if we waited for you to find your own dates you’d be sending your wedding invitation to me at the Sons of Abraham.”
It’s the cemetery where my father is already buried. “Great,” I say. “Just make sure you leave your forwarding address.” I hold the keypad away from my ear and punch the pound button. “Got another call coming in,” I lie.
“At this hour?”
“It’s an escort service,” I joke. “I don’t like to keep Peaches waiting . . .”
“You’re going to be the death of me, Leo,” my mother says with a sigh.
“Sons of Abraham Cemetery. Got it,” I say. “I love you, Ma.”
“I loved you first,” she replies. “So what am I supposed to tell my podiatrist about Irene?”
“If she keeps wearing heels she’ll wind up with bunions,” I say, and I hang up.
My house is very GQ. The countertops are black granite, the couches covered in some kind of gray flannel. The furniture is spare and modern. There’s blue lighting under the cabinets in the kitchen that makes the place look like Mission Control at NASA. It looks like the kind of place where an NFL bachelor or a corporate attorney would be comfortable. My sister, Lucy, who does interior design, is responsible for the look. She did it to snap me out of my post-divorce funk, so I can’t really tell her that it seems sterile to me. Like I’m an organism in a petri dish, not a guy who feels guilty putting his feet up on the lacquered black coffee table.
I strip off my tie and unbutton my shirt, then carefully hang my suit up in the closet. Realization number one about single life: no one else is going to take your suits to the cleaners on your behalf. Which means if you leave them crumpled in a ball at the foot of the bed, and you work till ten every night, you’re screwed.
Wearing my boxers and an undershirt, I put on the stereo—it’s a Duke Ellington kind of night—and then find my laptop.
Granted, it might have been more exciting if I had stayed in Boston working in corporate law (and who knows, maybe this décor would be just my cup of tea). I would be out schmoozing with clients instead of reading Genevra’s report on one of our suspects right now. God knows I’d be socking away more money for retirement. Maybe I’d even have a girl named Peaches curled up at the end of the sofa. But in spite of what my mother thinks, I am happy. I cannot imagine doing anything except what I do and liking it more.
I’d first gotten an internship with HRSP when it was still called OSI, the Office of Special Investigations. My grandfather, a World War II vet, had regaled me with stories of combat my whole life; as a boy my most prized possession was an M35 Heer steel helmet that he gifted to me, with a dark spot on the inside he swore was brain matter. (My mother, disgusted, removed it from my room one night while I was asleep and to this day hasn’t told me what she did with it.) In college, hoping to pad my résumé before I went to law school, I took the job at OSI. I expected legal experience I could put on my applications. What I got instead was passion. Everyone in that office was there because they wanted to be, because they truly believed that what they did was important, no matter what the Pat Buchanans of the world said about the U.S. government wasting money to hunt down people who were too old to be a threat to the general population.
I went to Harvard Law and had my choice of offers from Boston firms when I graduated. The one I picked paid me enough to buy fancy suits and a sweet Mustang convertible, which I never had time to joyride in, because I was working furiously on a track toward becoming a junior partner. I had cash, I had a fiancée, and 95 percent of my litigation had resulted in a verdict for the defendant I was representing. But I missed caring.
I wrote to the director of OSI and moved to Washington one month later.
Yeah, I know that my head is more often mired in the 1940s than the 2010s. And true, if you spend too much time living in the past, you never move forward. But then again, you can’t tell me what I do isn’t necessary. If history has a habit of repeating itself, doesn’t someone have to stay behind to shout out a warning? If not me, then who?
The Duke Ellington track ends. To fill the silence, I turn on the television. I watch Stephen Colbert for about ten minutes, but he’s too entertaining to be background noise for me. I keep finding myself pulled away from Genevra’s report to listen to his patter.
When my laptop chimes with an incoming email, I look down at the screen. Genevra.
Hope I’m not interrupting a lovely sexcapade with the next Mrs. Stein. But just in case you’re sitting home alone watching old episodes of Rin Tin Tin like me (don’t judge) thought you’d want to know that Josef Weber’s name returned no hits. Onward and upward, boss.
I stare at the email for a long moment.
I had told Sage Singer that the odds were against her. For whatever reason, Josef Weber is lying to her about his past. But that’s Sage Singer’s problem now, not mine.
I’ve questioned dozens of suspects over the years I’ve worked at HRSP. Even when I am presenting some of them with the incontrovertible evidence that they were guards at an extermination camp, they always say they had no idea that people were being killed. They insist that they only saw the prisoners on work detail, and they remember them being in good condition. They recall seeing smoke and hearing rumors of bodies being burned, but they never witnessed it themselves and didn’t believe it at the time. Selective memory, that’s what I call it. And—go figure—it’s completely different from the stories of survivors I’ve interviewed, who can describe the stench from the chimneys of the crematoria: nauseating and acrid and sulfurous, fatty and thick, almost more of a taste than a smell. They say you couldn’t help but breathe it in, everywhere you went. That even now, they sometimes wake up with the scent of burning flesh in their nostrils.
Zebras don’t change their stripes, and war criminals don’t repent.
It doesn’t surprise me that Josef Weber, who confessed to being a Nazi, isn’t one. After all, it’s what I expected. What surprises me is how much I really wanted Sage Singer to prove me wrong.
When you can prolong the inevitable, it’s always better.
That’s why, for a predator, the wilding begins with a chase. It’s not toying with food, as some people think. It’s getting the adrenaline level to match your own.
There comes a point, though, where waiting is no longer possible. You hear the prey’s heart beating inside your own head, and it is the last conscious thought you will be able to hold. Once you give in to the primeval, you are an observer, watching another part of you feast, shredding the flesh to find the ambrosia. You drink in the victim’s fear, but it tastes like excitement. You have no past, no future, no sympathy, no soul.
But you knew that before you even sta
rted, didn’t you?
SAGE
When I show up for work the next night, someone else is baking in my kitchen. He is a behemoth of a man, six-foot-something, with Maori-style tattoos on his upper arms. When I walk in, he’s cutting slabs of dough and tossing them with incredible precision onto a scale. “Hey,” he says, in a squirrelly voice that doesn’t match his body. “Howyadoin.”
My mind is a colander, and all the words I need to have this conversation are funneling fast through the sieve. I am so surprised I forget to hide my scar. “Who are you?”
“Clark.”
“What are you doing?”
He looks at the table, the wall, anywhere but at me. “The dinner rolls.”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “I work alone.”
Before Clark can respond, Mary enters the kitchen. She was no doubt alerted to my arrival by Rocco, who had greeted me in the front of the bakery with this cryptic observation: “Dreamed of traveling? / Maybe taking up knitting? / Now may be the time.”
“I see you’ve met Clark.” She smiles at the giant who is now shaping loaves at a blistering speed. I wonder if he’s poked through my pre-ferments and pored over my spreadsheets. It makes me feel as if someone has been rifling through my underwear drawer. “Clark used to work at King Arthur Flour in Norwich, Vermont.”
“Good. Then he can go back to them.”
“Sage! Clark’s just here to help you out. To relieve some of the stress.”
I take Mary by the arm and turn her away, so that Clark can’t hear what I say. “Mary,” I whisper, “I don’t want any help.”
“Maybe so,” she says. “But you need it. Why don’t you and I take a little walk?”
I’m fighting tears, and the uncontrollable urge to throw a tantrum; I’m equal parts angry and hurt. Yes, I took the night off without telling my boss, but I found my own replacement. And maybe I changed the menu without running it by her, either, but that challah I baked was moist and sweet and perfect. But mostly I’m upset because I thought Mary was my friend, not just my boss, which makes her zero-tolerance policy even more devastating.
She leads me past the last few customers in the shop, who are being rung out by Rocco. As we pass the register, I turn away from him. Did Mary tell Rocco she was getting rid of me? Is he her new confidant about this business, the way I used to be?
I follow her through the parking lot and the shrine gates, up the Holy Stairs, until we are standing in the same grotto where Josef told me he was a Nazi.
“Are you firing me?” I burst out.
“Why would you think that?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because Mr. Clean’s in my kitchen baking my dinner rolls. I can’t believe you’d replace me with some drone from a factory . . .”
“King Arthur Flour’s hardly a factory, and Clark’s not a replacement. He’s just here to give you a little flexibility.” Mary sits down on a granite bench. Her eyes are a piercing blue, with all that monkshood behind her. “I’m only trying to help, Sage. I don’t know if it’s stress or guilt or something else, but you’re not yourself lately. You’ve become erratic.”
“I’m still doing my job. I’ve been doing my job,” I protest.
“You baked two hundred and twenty loaves of challah last night.”
“Did you try any? Trust me, no customer could find a better one anywhere else.”
“But they would have to go somewhere else if they wanted rye bread. Or sourdough. Or an ordinary wheat loaf. Or any of the other staples you chose not to make.” Her voice grows soft as moss. “I know you were the one who got rid of the Jesus Loaf, Sage.”
“Oh, for God’s sake—”
“I prayed about it. That loaf was a call to save someone, and now, I realize that person is you.”
“Is this because I played hooky?” I ask. “I had to see my grandmother. She wasn’t feeling well.” It is amazing, I realize, how quickly lies compound. They cover like a coat of paint, one on top of the other, until you cannot remember what color you started with.
Maybe Josef had actually begun to believe he was the person everyone thought him to be. And maybe that was what finally made him tell the truth.
“Look at you, Sage, a million miles away. Are you even listening to me? You’re a hot mess. Your hair looks like there are birds nesting in it; you probably haven’t showered today; you have circles under your eyes that are so dark it makes me think of kidney failure. You’re burning a candle at both ends, working here all night and then committing adultery during the day with that trollop.” Mary frowns. “What’s a male version of trollop?”
“Shimbo,” I say. “Look, I know you and I don’t see eye to eye about Adam, but you didn’t get all up in Rocco’s grille when he asked you the best fertilizer for a cannabis crop—”
“If he’d been stoned on the job, I would have,” Mary insists. “You may not believe this, but I don’t think you’re immoral for sleeping with Adam. In fact, I think it bothers you deep down, just as much as it bothers me. And maybe that’s why it’s taking over your life in a way that’s affecting your work.”
I start to laugh. Yeah, I’m obsessed with a man. He just happens to be a nonagenarian.
Suddenly an idea lights in my mind, delicate as a beating butterfly. What if I told her? What if this burden I’ve been carrying around—this confession from Josef—wasn’t only mine to bear? “Okay, maybe I have been a little upset. But it’s not Adam. It’s Josef Weber.” I look her in the eye. “I learned something about him. Something terrible. He’s a Nazi, Mary.”
“Josef Weber. The same Josef Weber I know? The one who always leaves a twenty-five-percent tip and who gives half his roll to his dog? The Josef Weber who was given the Good Samaritan award last year by the chamber of commerce?” Mary shakes her head. “This is exactly what I’m talking about, Sage. You’re overtired. Your brain is firing on the wrong cylinders. Josef Weber’s a sweet old man I’ve known for a decade. If he’s a Nazi, honey, then I’m Lady Gaga.”
“But, Mary—”
“Have you told anyone else about this?”
Immediately, I think of Leo Stein.
“No,” I lie.
“Well, good, because I don’t think there’s a novena for slander.”
I feel as if the whole world is looking through the wrong end of the telescope, and I am the only one who can see clearly. “I’m not accusing Josef,” I say desperately. “He told me.”
Mary purses her lips. “A few years ago some scholars translated an ancient text they believed was the Gospel of Judas. They said the information, told from Judas’s point of view, would turn Christianity on its ear. Instead of Judas being the world’s biggest traitor, he was apparently the only one Jesus trusted to get the job done—which is why Jesus, knowing he would have to die, picked Judas to confide in.”
“So you believe me!”
“No,” Mary says flatly. “I don’t. And I didn’t believe those scholars, either. Because I’ve got two thousand years of history telling me Jesus—who incidentally was one of the good guys, Sage, just like Josef Weber—was betrayed by Judas.”
“History’s not always right.”
“But you’ve got to start there anyway. If you don’t know where you’ve come from, how in Heaven’s name will you ever figure out where you’re going?” Mary folds me into an embrace. “I am doing this because I love you. Go home. Sleep for a week. Get a massage. Hike up a mountain. Clear your head. And then come back. Your kitchen will be waiting for you.”
I feel dangerously close to sobbing. “Please,” I beg. “Don’t take this away from me. It’s the only thing in my life I haven’t screwed up.”
“I’m not taking anything away from you. It’s still your bread. I made Clark promise that he’ll use your recipes.”
What I’m thinking about, though, is the scoring.
Back in the days of communal ovens, people would bring their own dough from home to bake en masse with the rest of the village. So how could you
tell the loaves apart, when they came out of the oven? The way they were cut, by the individual bakers. When you score the outside of the dough, it does two things: it tells the loaf where to open, and helps the interior structure by giving it a place to expand. But it also allows the baker to leave his or her brand. I always score a baguette five times, for example, with the longest cut at one end.
Clark won’t.
It’s a silly thing, one that our customers probably don’t even notice, but it’s my signature. It’s my stamp, on each loaf.
As Mary walks down the Holy Stairs, I wonder if this is yet another reason Josef Weber picked me as his confessor. If you hide long enough, a ghost among men, you might disappear forever without anyone noticing. It’s human nature to ensure that someone has seen the mark you left behind.
• • •
“I don’t know what got into you today,” Adam says as I roll off him and stare up at the bedroom ceiling. “But I’m sure as hell grateful.”
I wouldn’t call what we just did lovemaking; it was more like trying to crawl beneath Adam’s skin, dissolve by osmosis. I wanted to lose myself in him, until there was nothing left.
I trail my fingers along his rib cage. “Do I seem different to you lately?”
He grins. “Yes, especially in the last half hour. But I’m fully in favor of the new you.” He glances at his watch. “I need to get going.”
Today Adam is presiding over a Japanese Buddhist funeral, and he’s been doing research to make sure that he gets all the customs just right. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the Japanese are cremated, including the deceased he will be taking care of today. Yesterday was the wake.
“Can’t you stay a little longer?” I ask him.
“No—I’ve got a ton to do,” Adam says. “I’m terrified I’m going to mess it up.”
“You’ve cremated hundreds of people,” I point out.
The Storyteller Page 10