She stood in what might have been a reception hall, one designed to intimidate or inspire awe. It was about eighty feet wide, sixty deep, forty high, illuminated by adjustable pot lights recessed in the ceiling, most of which were directed straight down. Every surface was finished in panels of white quartz, which lacked the veining of marble and therefore presented a gleaming and uniform surface with depth. The only decoration appeared in the wall opposite the door: an inlaid twenty-foot-diameter disc of some blood-red stone, perhaps carnelian, which itself was inlaid with two parallel, highly stylized lightning bolts in black granite.
Bibi recognized the lightning as being a version of the double-S logo that had appeared on the front-page of Das Schwarze Korps—The Black Guard—the official newspaper of the Schutzstaffel, Hitler’s chief instrument of terror. The colors of the Nazi flag were boldly represented in this enormous room, although reversed. Instead of red for the field, there was white; instead of a white circle, red; instead of a black swastika, the black double-S motif. Whatever use might be intended for this building, Terezin had made only a minimal effort to disguise his inspiration. Perhaps that was because, here in the tumultuous second decade of the new century, frightening numbers of people were either easy to deceive or wished ardently to submit to any belief system, no matter how delusional, that reassured them and justified their hatreds.
Bibi had fallen into a peculiar state of mind. She was afraid but not of this building or anything in it. Not of Terezin, if he were waiting for her in some other room. She was afraid of herself, of some potential in herself that she had long denied but that she might be unable to deny any longer.
She did not fear the bottled and stoppered anger that popped and spilled when she bludgeoned her former teacher with the pistol. Her rage and capacity for violent action were righteous rather than savage. Envy of others and hatred of others because of their race or creed or class were the source of the storms that sometimes destroyed entire civilizations, but they were not the source of her anger. If she raged, it was against barbarism and cruelty, against willful ignorance and arrogance, against the demonizing of one’s opposition and the brutalizing of the innocent. She could control even that potent anger born from seventeen years of repressing fundamental knowledge of herself, which had left her with the fear of some act she had committed—and might still commit—but with no knowledge of what the act had been.
Besides rage, however, there was some other potential that she possessed, forgotten but not lost. It was coming back to her. In some way, the quest that she’d been on for two days was as much a search for that repressed truth as it was for Ashley Bell.
The immense white-red-black chamber was unfurnished except for what might have been a reception desk, a great block of midnight-black granite, so high that anyone manning it during an event would have to remain standing. As this object held the greatest interest, she moved toward it. When Bibi had closed to within a few yards of the desk, Chubb Coy rose to his feet behind it. He held a Taser.
She had researched Tasers for her novel. There was the thrust-and-click stun gun with no more range than the length of your arm, and there was the kind that fired two small probes trailing fifteen-foot wires. Coy was armed with the latter. He said, “Damn it all, woman, I don’t belong here.” Propelled by nitrogen gas, the wire whispered toward Bibi and the probes pierced her T-shirt. The shock mapped her peripheral nervous system and disrupted its messaging along both sensory and motor nerves. Racked by pain, without control of her limbs, she crumpled to the white-quartz floor, stuttering a curse that her tongue could not complete.
Bibi couldn’t sharply focus on Chubb Coy. She twitched in her private world of pain and motor-nerve confusion, like some broken-back beetle in denial of its fractured shell. But she realized what he must be doing, understood him well enough to know that he was coming around from behind the desk, not done with the Taser, tossing aside the used cartridge, clicking another one into place. She had known him only a short while, but she knew his capacity for malice. She knew him well. Her expectation was at once fulfilled as indigo light bloomed behind her eyes and an alien current razored along radiant neural pathways, chattering her teeth, making her hands flop like the hands of a marionette operated by a drunk puppeteer.
Coy circled as Bibi crabbed on the quartz, leaning toward her and raising his voice. “Do you understand that I don’t belong here? Do you get what I’m telling you? Are you going to stubbornly persist with this thread, the Chubb Coy thread? Is the hard way the only way you can fumble yourself to enlightenment?”
Her eyes were full of tears, squeezed out of her by pain. Before her, the white quartz shimmered as if melting, as if it might have been composed of condensed and petrified fog that was about to return to vapor. Aside from Coy’s shoes as he paced around and around her, the only dark object in view, approximately ten feet away, must be her pistol.