As the tires of passing vehicles swished and fizzled on the wet pavement, as fog laid a shine of dew on her face, as trees dripped, as great moths of vapor throbbed wings against the panes of the streetlamps, Bibi felt like a stranger to herself.
With her latest round of purchases, she returned to the Honda, which was parked near the east end of Forest Avenue. Minutes later, on Coast Highway, she began looking for a motel on the north side of town, someplace where no one would find her but where she might begin to find herself.
The motel deserved neither a five-nor a four-nor perhaps even a three-star rating, but it looked clean and proudly kept and, most important from Bibi’s perspective, anonymous. She parked on a side street two blocks away and walked, pulling the wheeled suitcase.
A lone woman manned the front desk in an office painted pale Caribbean blue and yellow. The counter was a free-form slab of koa, either genuine driftwood or sculpted to suggest a heroic history of shipwreck and travail, red and lustrous and with a watery depth.
These small motels were often owned by a couple, and the clerk was as gracious as if welcoming a guest into her home. The badge on her blouse identified her as Doris. She was pleased to accept cash, but their policy required a credit card and a driver’s license for ID, which was probably in case the guest trashed the room.
“He didn’t let me have credit cards,” Bibi said. “He cut up my driver’s license.” She surprised herself when her mouth trembled and her voice conveyed fear, bitterness, and anguish. She was no actress. Her true condition, anxiety and loneliness, provided the emotion with which she sold her story of spousal abuse. “I came in a cab partway and walked till I saw this place.” Her vision blurred with tears. “He won’t come here to make a scene. He doesn’t know where I’ve gone.”
Doris hesitated only a moment before making an exception to the rules. “Do you have family, dear? Someone to turn to?”
“My folks are in Arizona. My dad’s coming for me tomorrow.”
Wanting to avoid seeming either nosy or unconcerned, Doris said, “If he hit you, girl, then you should report him.”
“He more than hit me.” Bibi put one hand to her stomach, as if with the memory of a punch. “A lot more than hit.”
She signed the register as Hazel Weatherfield, with no idea where she got that from. She said it was her maiden name.
Three rooms were available, all in a row, and she took Room 6, farthest from the street. It was simply furnished but cozy.
Sitting in one of the two chairs at a small round table, she ate a dinner of cashews, dried apricots, and aerosol cheese squirted on crackers, washed down with a Coke from a motel vending machine.
While she ate, she studied the photo of Ashley Bell, and heard in memory Terezin’s voice, when she had spoken to him on St. Croix’s phone: Too bad you can’t come to the party. Ashley will be there. My guest of honor. It’ll be the last chance you’ll have to find her alive. It all begins again. The little Jewess’s role is historic.
He fancied himself the heir of Hitler. Evidently, he had made it his mission, even if with one symbolic victim, to launch again the Final Solution to “the Jewish problem.” The swarm of cultists—both airborne and ground troops—that had sought Bibi at the shopping mall suggested Terezin’s intentions were ambitious. But whether he meant to kill one Jewish girl in celebration of his birthday or had also planned a terrorist atrocity that would result in many more deaths, either way Ashley Bell would die if Bibi couldn’t soon find her.
If this had been a time of widespread sanity, a mere decade or two ago, Bibi might have found it hard to take Terezin seriously. But the world had gone mad in recent years. Anti-Semitism, that vampiric hatred that could never quite be staked through the heart and turned to dust, had infected not only the expected foreign capitals but also politics here in the States, and not just politics but academia and the entertainment industry as well. It was nearly epidemic among all elites, though fortunately not among average Americans, who so far and for the most part seemed immune to the fever. What could once have been dismissed as the unlikely plot of a bad movie must now be regarded as a real threat. Terezin had followers and a significant source of funding, all that was needed these days for him to join the myriad groups blasting away at the foundations of civilization.
And in addition, he had some kind of occult power. Bibi knew from personal experience that it was more than charisma drawn from a mystical magnetic current in the earth, as Halina Berg had proposed, though that might be part of it. She wished she had a better idea of what paranormal resources he possessed, a wish that turned her mind to the mysterious book of the panther and gazelle.