“Easier on the American ear,” Toba explained.
Pogo was as straightforward as the white line on a highway and as easy to read as a roadside sign. His puzzlement was obvious. “The tattoo on Bibi’s arm—ASHLEY BELL WILL LIVE. She did live, but her name was Arline Blum.”
“Is the woman still alive?” Pax asked.
“Sadly, no,” Toba said. “She died four years ago.”
“And Ashley Bell isn’t really a person,” Pogo said, “she’s a character in a novel. So why the tattoo?”
“After that first visit with her mother,” Toba said, “when she found out I’d written one novel as Halina Berg, Bibi insisted she had to read it. I told her the book was out of print, and for very good reason. My talent couldn’t make good use of that kind of material. I found my métier in jolly adventure fiction for girls. But she charmed a copy out of me.”
“Not just adventure fiction for girls,” Pax said, because there was an eleven-book series about a Valiant Academy for boys, which he had read when still living on the ranch with his family, long before the idea of becoming a SEAL had taken root in him. “It helped Bibi and me click on the first date—we’d both read Toba Ringelbaum.”
“Yes, she told me, and I was tickled. But the boy books didn’t sell as well as the series for girls, I’m afraid. Otherwise, I would have written many more.” The graceful folds of her well-aged face conspired in an expression of sheer delight, and her brandy-colored eyes brightened. “I found it so very exhilarating to climb into the young male mind, to imagine boys being boys and kicking butt with rollicking good cheer.”
“Your girls kick butt, too,” Pax said. “That’s a big reason Bibi loves those stories.”
“Back to my question,” Pogo said. “Why the tattoo? Where is Bibi? What is she dreaming? Or not dreaming—but doing? How is Ashley Bell a part of it?”
“Toba?” Pax said as he returned Out of the Mouth of the Dragon to her. “Any ideas?”
“There is one thing. One more strange thing.” After the old woman shelved that book, she took down another nearby volume. “I didn’t have many extras of the American edition, so I gave this one to Bibi, the British version.”
Instead of a dragon, the cover featured the face of a beautiful young girl of perhaps twelve or thirteen. Pale-blond hair. Complexion as smooth as bisque porcelain. Remarkable violet eyes. The wide-set eyes, which shone with intelligence, the direct and limpid stare, the planes and curves of the face, and the faint suggestion of defiance in the set of the mouth seemed to reveal an appealing personality, as if in this case appearance and reality were the same.
“When Arline Blum read the manuscript of the novel inspired by her life,” Toba explained, “the dear woman liked it more than she should have, considering I didn’t do the greatest justice to it. She was always a lovely, generous person. Anyway, the British publisher wanted to have the face of Ashley Bell on the cover, instead of that horrid dragon. They meant to have an illustrator paint it. I’d seen this photo of Arline when she was a girl, and I thought it perfect. She was agreeable to letting it be used. It was in black-and-white, of course, but the artist used it for reference, and painted the cover in the photorealistic style. I’m sure this is the only reason the British edition sold so much better than the American.”
“She’s kind of…mesmerizing,” Pogo said. “Did she grow up to be this beautiful?”
“Yes, indeed. And her heart was more beautiful than her face. Like I said, four years she’s been gone. I will always miss her.”
As striking as it was, the portrait on the book jacket could not be considered strange.
Pax said, “Toba, we were wondering how—but also why—Bibi might have gotten that tattoo, why Ashley Bell is a part of this. And you said there was ‘one more strange thing.’?”
“In the novel,” Toba said, “Ashley Bell survives Dachau, just as did Arline Blum, and comes to America, as did Arline, and by the early 1970s becomes a successful and highly regarded surgeon, as did Arline. My fiction was too beholden to fact. Modeled on Arline, Ashley Bell in the novel is a surgical oncologist specializing in brain cancer.”
In the west, the sun settled toward the sea, and there were just enough clouds of varied textures to ensure, a quarter of an hour from now, the day would come to its end with a burning sky. As if melting, shadows elongated in the golden light, which would soon be red.
At the window in Room 456, Nancy looked down at the hospital parking lot and didn’t like what she saw, didn’t like it at all, and turned away. The rows of parked cars reminded her of caskets lined up the way that she had seen them on the news when men killed in war were sent home by the planeload.