“I must have seemed a comical sight, scampering through the woods in clothes twice my size. But I found an old rag dealer on the outskirts of Vilna who was glad to trade me some children’s clothes for his Sunday suit. I tried to join the partisans but they wouldn’t have me, I was too small, so I started living by my wits on the streets of Vilna. I hoped I might come on Zudymas by stealth and kill him, but the opportunity never arrived. I made some money, the war ended, I bribed my way onto a freighter to Sweden. From there to Chicago.”
He gave a laugh that wasn’t completely bitter. “My whole life, eighty-three years, collapsed into a few sentences. Now you know. You know why I let Lawlor’s chatter roll off me—it’s not that I’m indifferent, but the worst has already happened to me. Until the harm to Arielle made me see that fate always has another card up her sleeve, another way to make you dance to someone else’s melody. I would kill someone, yes, to protect Arielle. But not to preserve my own reputation.”
He was quiet again but finally said, “I would take some of your whisky now, Ms. Warshawski.”
I went to the dining room and brought my mother’s red Venetian glasses out. Five remain whole of the eight she wrapped in her clothes to carry with her from Umbria to Cuba to Chicago. A sixth has been glued back together by expert hands. I drank from that, poured into the undamaged glasses for everyone else, including Lotty, who almost never drinks spirits.
Salanter drank, and some of the waxiness left his face. “So, Ms. Warshawski, we came to accuse you of betraying my family and instead you get the story of my life. You told me last week that anyone who wanted to dig it up could find it, and you were right, of course. Zudymas, his family have their own version that they doubtless tell everyone—the Jew betrayed our uncle, took a vast fortune from him; now he lives like a king in America. And you will create your own version to tell for your own ends—my history is in the open air now, I have no control over it.”
“I’m not like King Midas’s reeds,” I said. “No one will hear your story from me, nor should they. Everyone in this room has some greater or lesser version of it, after all—my own mother—you’re drinking from the wineglass she brought with her when she fled Italy in 1939. And, yes, she loved Mozart. But this is Handel.”
I went to my stereo and put in the CD Jake Thibaut had made for me from my mother’s old reel-to-reel tapes. “Vieni, o figlio,” we heard Gabriella’s rich pure voice. The child’s eyes are closed. He is lost to me, lost forever.
43.
ALAS, POOR SISTER
WE ALL SAT IN A NUMBED SILENCE UNTIL SALANTER, HIS NUT-BROWN face still pale, pushed himself to his feet. “Gabe, I would return home. Loewenthal? Sophy? Dr. Herschel?”
He tried to speak with his usual authority, but his voice, for once, betrayed his age. He didn’t fight off the protective arm Gabe offered as he walked slowly to the door.
Salanter paused briefly in the doorway to say to me, “My mother was a pianist. She, too, loved Mozart.”
Sophy Durango left with Gabe and Salanter, but Lotty and Max stayed behind. They sat on the couch, not quite touching.
Lotty looked at her watch. “Thank God we do no surgery on Friday. I would not guarantee anyone’s health if I had to cut into her tomorrow morning.”
Her own voice was heavy with fatigue. We were all exhausted from the emotions of the past hour.
“How come you were with Salanter tonight?” I stirred myself to ask. “I didn’t think you knew him well.”
“We don’t,” Max agreed. “But I was at Lotty’s when Salanter’s minion Gabe arrived. He came up to explain that Salanter and Dr. Durango were on their way here to demand a reckoning from you about their girls. Salanter thought Lotty would have a better chance of talking you round than he would himself, or Dr. Durango—she was too distressed about her daughter to feel she could speak calmly. I came along because you and Lotty are both volatile compounds.”
He grinned. “Salanter has pledged ten million to the hospital. I didn’t want one of you blowing him up before he wrote the check.”
I shadow-punched him, but we all laughed, and some of the strain went out of the room.
“I do apologize, Victoria,” Lotty said. “It wasn’t well done of us—of me—to assume the worst of you. I know you wouldn’t deliberately put a child in harm’s way, but sometimes you are so single-minded in your search for answers that you don’t always think of the consequences.
“But when Chaim started to reveal his history—we were safe in London, while he was—enduring—Lithuania. It was hard not to think of my own mother, to wonder what she might—” Her face crumpled.
Max took her in his arms. After a moment he looked over her head at me. “Do you believe him? I mean, do you believe he didn’t murder that detective, that Wuchnik?”