We can take you down and break you down so completely, no one could ever put you together again. And we will.
—put her in Terezin’s neo-Nazi cult and eliminated any chance that the selection of her husband as the builder of Terezin, Inc.’s new headquarters had been a coincidence.
“Where’s the girl?” Bibi asked. “Where are they holding her?”
“As if I’d tell you.”
“Tell me.”
“As if you need me to tell you.”
“Does that mean something?”
“You know.”
“Don’t riddle me.”
“Don’t make me a riddle.”
Bibi raised the pistol in her right hand.
“Gidget breaks bad,” said Hoffline-Vorshack.
“By God, I will,” Bibi said. “I’ll shoot you.”
She didn’t know whether or not she meant the threat. Earlier she had stabbed the brute who beat her and tried to rape her, stabbed him to death, but that had been in desperation. And he’d been a stranger. It would be harder to kill someone she knew, even someone like this awful woman. Familiarity bred contempt, but it also bred civility, even if a reluctant civility.
Hoffline-Vorshack’s face was a nest of snaky emotions—venomous contempt, hatred, arrogance. She ventured no closer, although her posture was belligerent. “You want to know something, you silly little goob, you ignorant spleet?” Never before had the former teacher used surfer lingo. “You’ve got this all wrong. You aren’t putting it together right. If I was still teaching school and you were still in my class, I’d give you a D on this, and that would be a generous grade.”
Bibi took the pistol in a two-hand grip. “Where is Ashley Bell?”
“You think you understand Bobby Faulkner, the mother killer? You think you’ve got his psychology down pat, you have a handle on his Terezin ID and the cult he’s building? Gidget, you don’t know shit. You’re pathetic. It’s not a cult. It never was a cult, not anything as clichéd as a cult.” Bibi’s hair frizzed in the fog, but in the bubble of clear air that Hoffline-Vorshack occupied, her tumbling blond tresses looked worthy of a shampoo commercial. “Look around you, BeeeBeee”—she made the name sound positively cartoonish—“look around and maybe you’ll notice your cult has morphed into some kind of giant conglomerate that’s building an über-expensive headquarters in the campus style. Maybe you’ll realize there must be thousands of people involved in this operation, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. Does that make any sense for a crackpot Nazi cult? We’re not crackpots, Gidget.”
“But you are fascists.”
“Everyone’s a fascist these days, sweetie. The word has no power to sting anymore. The country has embraced all the fascist dictators we once shunned. Kissed and made up. It’s respectable now. It’s the true and preferred way.”
Bibi raised the pistol, aiming it not at the woman’s chest any longer, but at her face, from a distance of six or seven feet. From Hoffline-Vorshack’s perspective, the muzzle must look like a black hole with planet-rending gravity. “Where are they holding the girl? I’m not going to ask again.”
“Good. You’re not going to ask again. I’m tired of listening to you ask.”
All of her life, Bibi had kept a governor on her anger, had consciously negotiated between the gracious, complaisant aspect of her nature and the darker part of herself that sometimes wanted to strike out, strike back. Her tendency to arbitrate herself into a courteous reaction, or at least one of quiet anger, was motivated not by a noble inclination, but by fear that she would lose control of herself. She suspected that, should she lose control, she had the capacity to do great damage out of proportion to the offense she had suffered, though no evidence, either internal or external, existed to support that suspicion.
“Where is Ashley?” she demanded.
A bark of laughter escaped Hoffline-Vorshack. “You just asked again. You said you wouldn’t ask again, and you just did. Listen, Gidget, you don’t need that little Jewess. You never have needed her. Don’t you know a red herring when you see one, when you have actually dragged it across the trail yourself?”