“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 leader 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.”