22
Magdalena and I left the Aquarium in the shark-feeder guy’s green Subaru hatchback. I had to lean on the steering wheel with my chest to drive. I couldn’t extend my arms.
Magdalena was in one of the yellow raincoats from the metal cabinet. She had her legs under her on the passenger’s seat. She was keening so hard, her entire face red and wet with tears, that when she first spoke I didn’t realize she had, or understand what she was saying.
Which was, over and over, “Stop.”
“We can’t,” I said. My gums were hot and fat where I’d lost a tooth and ground down the socket.
“We have to tell my parents.”
I thought about this. Her parents needed to leave. Once Skinflick found out we were still alive, he would go after them. They had to be warned.
But they also had to stay calm. If they called the cops before the Feds had protection in place, Skinflick would just find out sooner.
“You can’t tell them about Rovo,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Magdalena said. Both our voices were hoarse. Parody voices.
“You have to tell them to leave. To get out of New York. Get off the East Coast. Go to Europe. But if you tell them Rovo’s dead they’ll freak out, or they’ll stay, or both.”
“They deserve to know,” Magdalena said.
“Baby, you can’t,” I said.
“Don’t call me baby,” she said. “Never call me baby. There’s a payphone. Pull over.”
I pulled over. If she hated me, which she was right to, there was certainly nothing else worth worrying about.
I think she did lie to her parents about Rovo, though. Because she was crying while she talked to them, but silently, with her chest jolting in and out.
Whatever she said, she said it in Romanian.
For which I am eternally grateful.
It was night by the time we crossed into Illinois. There was a restaurant pretty high above the highway in a long strip of widely spaced motels. It was Somebody’s Pies or something. It was a chain.
Magdalena came in with me to order, shivering the whole time. It was stupid to be seen together, but I couldn’t let her out of my sight. I felt rootless to the point of nonexistence.
What Skinflick had said about my grandparents, I knew, had been right. It explained too much: all those years of avoiding other Jews, their silence about their families before the war, the wrong tattoos on their forearms. I didn’t know what to make of it, or of their attempt to live their lives as other people, but I knew I had only one connection to humanity now, and that was Magdalena.
The restaurant we stopped at I don’t remember much about. I’m sure it was orange and brown, like all highway restaurants. We ate in the car. Then Magdalena fell asleep in the hatchback with the seats folded down, and I snuck out and called Sam Freed, and told him we were ready to come in.
“This may take a little while,” he said. “I don’t know who I can trust with this.” He thought for a few moments. “I don’t want to call anybody I don’t have to, but we may not have a choice. I’ll get a few people and fly out there myself. It shouldn’t take more than six hours.”
I woke up in the back of the Subaru, with Magdalena curled away from me.
It was still night, but the shadow of someone’s head had jumped onto the fogged-over back window, because whoever it was was backlit by the streetlight behind the restaurant parking lot.
The head was not wearing a police hat. I heard no radios, and saw no flashlight. The owner of the head was doing his best to move as quietly as possible as he worked his way around the car. When the shadow was outside the right rear door, I kicked the door open and into the guy’s stomach, then launched myself out after him.
The guy stayed on his feet for about five sideways steps, then went down, and I was on him. His nylon coat hissed on the asphalt as I dragged him behind the dumpster, out of the light.
I didn’t recognize him. He was early twenties. Thin, glasses, white guy. I slammed him face-first into the side of the dumpster.
“You with the Feds?” I said. He was too nerdy to be a hitman.
“No, man! I thought that was my car!”
“Bullshit.” I slammed him again.
He started crying. “I just thought you guys were effing,” he says.
“What?”
“I wanted to watch!”
He was sobbing. I searched his pockets, but there was nothing there but a velcro wallet. His driver’s license was from Indiana.
And his fly was open.
“Jesus,” I said.
I leaned out to tell Magdalena it was all right. She was sitting up in the back of the Subaru.
Then, suddenly, she was lit up by headlights, and I heard the squealing of tires.
The SUV’s windows must have already been down. The broadside of submachinegun and shotgun fire they vomited out, lighting up the Subaru all over again, came too quickly for them not to have been.
Then the SUV leaped forward and out of my way, as if I had brushed it aside with my hands. I heard it sideswiping cars behind me as it rocketed from the lot.
I reached the Subaru. It looked stepped on, the whole side of it crushed in by gunfire. The air was filled with glass dust and the smells of cordite and blood.
The door came off in my hands. Magdalena’s head lolled as I pulled her out and spun with her to the ground.
Her right cheekbone was caved in, smashed like the side of the car and filled with blood. Both eyes were completely red, the left one with a seam across it that oozed perfectly clear jelly all the way down the side of her head.
When I grabbed her face up to mine, I felt bones I couldn’t see shift beneath her skin.
When God is truly angry, He will not send vengeful angels.
He will send Magdalena.
Then take her away.