WEARING WHITE SNEAKERS, breezy-cut white chinos, and a bright pink-and-blue Hawaiian shirt with a flamingo pattern, eighty-one-year-old Bernie Riggowitz stood five feet seven, weighed at most 140 pounds, and didn’t look like anyone’s image of ideal backup in a crisis. A little over a week earlier, urgently in need of new wheels, Jane had forced Bernie at gunpoint to give her a ride in his Mercedes E350 from Middle of Nowhere, Texas, all the way to Nogales, Arizona. He had proved not only to have the right stuff, but also to be the right stuff—unflappable, quick-witted, and game. Somehow, the kidnapping had turned into an agreeable road trip at the end of which they were mishpokhe.
Now, in the Tiffin Allegro, Bernie sat in a dinette booth with Jane, across the table from Luther Tillman, listening to their story of Techno Arcadians and injectable brain-tropic self-assembling nanoparticle control mechanisms. He exhibited none of the amazement or fear that might be expected. He asked no questions. His face revealed nothing of his thoughts, and although he listened intently, there was a faraway look in his eyes.
Concerned that she couldn’t read his reaction, Jane said, “Bernie, what’s wrong? It sounds too cockamamie or something?”
“Dear, you should excuse the expression, but it sounds so not cockamamie that my kishkes turned to jelly.”
“Listen, if you feel this is more than you bargained for, if you want to back out—”
Putting a hand on her arm, Bernie said, “Darling, stop already. You should live so long that I’d ever back out on you.” To Luther, he said, “I am so sorry about your wife and daughter. The pain …” He grimaced in sympathy and could say no more.
Luther loomed across the table like a version of Thor, and there was a rumble as of distant thunder in his voice. “We’re not going to let the bastards take Travis from Jane.”
“Your lips to God’s ear.” Bernie squeezed Jane’s arm. “I don’t put much stock in the cabala, but I’m told in Sepher Yetzirah it says something about making a golem from clay and using it for vengeance. What these Arcadian momzers are doing is a reverse golem. They take precious human beings and mold them into obedient clay. It’s not possible to back away from this and still have any self-respect. So when do I get a gun?”
“You won’t need one,” Jane said.
“Maybe I will. I know from guns. Back in the day, the wig business was not all bagels and cream cheese.”
To Luther, Jane said, “Bernie and his wife owned a wig company. Elegant Weave. They sold wigs up and down the eastern seaboard.”
“Fourteen states and D.C.,” Bernie said. “It was mostly a city business, so there were the usual wiseguys wanted their cut. Better you should declare bankruptcy the day you open your doors. We didn’t give them bupkis. I had a gun; Miriam, too. We could make hard-boiled like Bogart and Bacall when we had to convince the khazers we were tough.” He turned his hands palms-up. “I’m embarrassed to admit, Sheriff, our guns weren’t legal. But we never did shoot anybody.”
Jane stared at Bernie in silence for a moment. “You think you know someone, then you find out he’s a tough guy.”
“That was a long time ago. I’m eighty-one now. I’m about as tough as a cheese kreplakh.”
Luther said, “God knows what we’re going into. You should have a gun, Mr. Riggowitz. You cool with that, Jane?”
“How long has it been since you fired one?” she asked Bernie.
“About three weeks. Wherever I am, I find a shooting range once a month and do some target practice.”
“You mean you have a gun?”
“An old man who likes to drive mostly at night and through some lonely wide-open spaces, he shouldn’t have a gun? It’s there in my suitcase. I just wanted to feel you out, did you think me having a gun was kosher.”
She said, “The night in Texas I jacked your car, you had a gun then?”
He smiled and nodded. “In a special holder under the driver’s seat, muzzle backward, grip forward, so I could just reach under and snap open the sleeve and have it in hand.”
“Why didn’t you pull it on me?”
He looked aghast. “Pull a pistol on a girl as pretty as you? Enough already!”
“They call me a monster. What if I had been?”
“Bubeleh, I needed about a minute to know your heart is maybe half your body weight. Am I right, Sheriff?”
“Never more so, Mr. Riggowitz. And call me Luther.”
“Mr. Riggowitz was my father. Call me Bernie.”
Luther’s smile was the first that Jane had seen since he’d boarded the motor home. He said, “We have a dream team here.”
She put an arm around Bernie and kissed his cheek and said, “Okay, Eliot Ness. You drive the motor home, sneak Luther and me into Borrego Valley, then be ready to sneak us out. If you need the gun, use it. But if you have to start shooting, it’ll mean we’re over the cliff.”
5
SHE RAGED WITH HER MATE through the house—overturning, tearing, smashing—driven by the rapid rant inside her head, a fierce voice in a language half remembered both by the unknown raver and she who received his tirade, not just words but also hatreds that were not her own but became hers, too, upon receipt. Vivid images were transmitted into her mind’s eye from elsewhere: enormous overhead blades whisking the wind; a savagely bitten, eyeless face; a cleaver raised in a clenched fist; again the huge blades whirling faster, faster, flashing with reflections of silvery sunshine; a human head rolling as if toward an array of tenpins; dolphins leaping on a lampshade; storm-tossed ships hung on a wall; a burst of fragile bones and feathers as a winging bird encounters the bright, spinning blades and disintegrates like a clay target shotgunned from the sky.… Those continuing visions thrilled her as she wrenched open the door of a display cabinet with enough force to tear it from its hinges. She flung the cabinet door, and the misshapen discus clattered against a wall with a shattering of glass. Within the cabinet were cups and saucers, plates and bowls. From a shelf, she scooped up gold-rimmed china chargers and threw the stack onto the dining table. She grabbed a gravy boat in her left hand, a small cream pitcher in her right, and smashed them together as if they were a pair of cymbals; as the porcelain disintegrated, she cut the ball of her thumb. Blood welled, and with something like vampiric need, she put her mouth to the cut, sucked, and drank of herself. Having seen this, her mate relented in his rampage and took her hand and brought it to his mouth and sampled the essence of her. The taste inflamed in them a fierce desire, a rutting frenzy, which the ranting voice in her head encouraged, so that she found herself upon a table from which most of the broken china had been swept away, half their clothes somehow gone, and he upon her. They rocked the table with carnal rhythm, copulation without tenderness or love, so ferocious that it was both thrilling and terrifying. They were incapable of language, their animal voices resounding from the walls of the ravaged room. At the peak of her excitement, an image came into her mind’s eye that was not from the ranting Other, that arose from her own experience, a remnant of her faded memory: a dead woman slouched in a wheelchair, her once-pretty face grossly distorted. With that memory, a dark wave of grief washed through her, and in the throes of coitus she suddenly spoke: “I am … I am … Minette.” But she could not sustain the grief, nor the memory. In the wake of the grief rose a tide of rage that swept away the name forever, and with the name went the last of her memories, all human purpose, all hope, all promise of transcendence. The male finished and rolled off her, off the dining table, stood sweating and swaying and satiated. Among the few shards of broken china still on the table, she gripped a pointed sharp-edged chunk of porcelain ware and, with pleasure greater than that of copulation, used it to attack and kill the male.
6