“Did the wasp have any occult meaning for them, for the SS unit that ran the ghetto?”
“No. Not that I was aware. Although…” She became thoughtful, staring into her tea as if to discern something in its darkness. “For a few months, there was one Gypsy in the ghetto. He’d been sent there by mistake. Jews and Gypsies were imprisoned separately, and always exterminated with groups of their own. The camp commandant should have sent the Gypsy elsewhere, but he delayed for two months, three, maybe longer. There were rumors that a small group of SS officers were intrigued by the Gypsy’s readings…palms, castings of wax, maybe even a crystal ball. But I don’t know if there was any truth to the gossip. The wasp symbol had been there before the Gypsy…and it was there after.”
They remained at the table awhile longer, but they said no more about Hitler or about the occult, or about charisma, as if they both felt that they had drawn too close to some line they must not cross, as if to speak further of these things, just then, would be to invite malice upon them. They spoke of trivial matters. They did not return to the subject of Bibi’s novel. When a decade faded from Halina’s face, when the music came into her voice once more, and when she smiled as she had first smiled while standing on the front stoop, Bibi felt that the time had come to go, although she promised that she would return.
That March afternoon, the westering sun cast off silver rather than golden rays, minting piles of coins from scattered altocumulus clouds that glimmered against a faded-blue sky. At street level, it was a bright but curiously dreary light that made the 55 freeway and then the 73 toll road seem like metaled causeways between nothing and nowhere, and all the racing vehicles like robots engaged in heartless tasks centuries after the abolition of humanity.
On the way to the bookstore in the Fashion Island shopping complex in Newport Beach, Bibi couldn’t stop wondering why she had not asked Halina Berg two important questions. The first: Have you ever heard of Robert Warren Faulkner? The second: Have you ever heard of Ashley Bell? They were the two key figures in this drama, after all; the girl was in urgent need of being rescued, and the mother-murdering Bobby was intent on preventing her from being found. Bibi had assumed that Dr. St. Croix had wanted to speak with Mrs. Berg to explore the connection between Nazis and the occult, but that might not have been her intention. Whatever mysterious faction she aligned with, whatever her purpose in this madness, the professor might have been under the impression that the survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz could tell her something related to Faulkner or Bell, or both. Even if Mrs. Berg claimed never to have heard of them, there would have been something to be gained by watching her reactions to the names.
Not that there had been any reason to believe that Halina’s history might be different from the one that she had laid out in her cozy kitchen. She’d been credible. Even if she was not the Holocaust survivor that she claimed to be, she was a lover of books, therefore not likely to have anything in common with a man who said that he hated most books and bookish people. Besides, had she been aligned with Faulkner/Terezin, she would have let him know that the woman he wanted to kill was sitting at her kitchen table drinking tea.
If Bibi couldn’t be sure that she had gotten from Halina Berg all the woman had to give, she was convinced that she had missed something during her encounter with Chubb Coy in the third-floor Victorian suite in St. Croix’s house, and that it had to do less with what he’d revealed than with how he’d said it. There had been certain familiar statements and phrases, and now her memory began to serve her better than it had earlier, which was why she needed to visit a bookstore.
As she exited the toll road at Jamboree Boulevard, crawling west in heavy traffic, Bibi heard the start-up music that indicated her laptop had come alive. It was lying on the passenger seat. After searching for the photos of Bobby Faulkner, she had logged off and her computer had shut down. Now she flipped up the screen and found it bright, ready to go.
When the westbound lanes clogged, she used the touch pad to try to log off. The laptop remained on. She reached farther, to the power switch, clicked it, clicked it, but it didn’t work.
Not good. In fact, very bad.