Julia followed me back up the hall. “And you will keep our conversation to yourself.”
“Oh, yes. I don’t want to add to Dr. Durango’s woes with the public, but someone does. Even though I don’t think you could trace the leak, someone got the news to Kendrick fast—she had Nia’s name before the police knew it, because the cops only got it after one of the parents took his daughter into Area Six this morning. And then, the way the murder was committed—it was horrible, rebar through the heart. I think grounding those girls until the murderer is caught might be a smart move.”
Salanter stared at me. “You think someone would try to hurt Arielle?”
“I don’t know.” I sat on her father’s scrap metal relic to put my sandals back on. “I hope not, but if you have a security detail, I’d keep an eye on her. On Nia, too. There’s an ugly mind behind this murder.”
Salanter’s face, tight and white with worry, stayed with me as I rode the L back north.
9.
CABLE NEWS
OVER DINNER AT LOTTY’S, CONVERSATION WAS MOSTLY ABOUT music, or, more accurately, musical personalities. Jake was leaving for Vermont in a few days: he’d been invited to serve as an artist-in-residence at the Marlboro Festival. I’d put aside the last week of the festival to spend with Jake, a real vacation—from Marlboro, we would drive up to Canada, where we would hike the Laurentian Mountains.
Lotty and Max were planning to go in August, when some of their old musician friends from London would be in residence, and they joined Jake in dissecting conductors and performers with a happy disregard for slander laws.
It wasn’t until we were sitting on the balcony with our coffee that Lotty brought up the body in the graveyard, and that was because she worried about how it might affect the Malina Foundation.
I told them about my meeting with Durango and Salanter, at least the parts that wouldn’t violate their privacy: the girls’ participation in the full-moon ritual was pretty much public knowledge.
Max’s lips were tight with anger. “Malina has been under attack for years; this is going to add fuel to a fire that’s almost out of control.”
“Why?” Jake asked.
“The anti-immigration hysteria that’s gripping parts of the country,” Max explained. “You know that the foundation’s mission is with immigrants and refugees? It’s why Lotty and I sit on the board, and maybe why we follow more closely than you the way Global Entertainment keeps attacking the foundation along with Chaim. They claim that Chaim is anti-American, or trying to destroy America, and they point to Malina as proof. Malina is an old Yiddish word for a hiding place inside a ghetto, and people like Lawlor pounce on that—they say Salanter chose the name because he’s smuggling illegals into the country. They say he’s laughing at America by running the foundation as a training camp for terrorists.”
“Yes.” Lotty shuddered. “I can hardly bear to imagine what Wade Lawlor will say if he learns that the girls in Petra’s group were acting out vampire fantasies.”
“Julia said Lawlor will accuse her father of being a Nazi sucking Christian blood,” I said, “but I thought the Salanters were Jews.”
“They are.” Lotty’s mouth set in a hard line. “It’s despicable, what they say about Chaim. He somehow survived the 1941 Yom Kippur massacre in the Vilna ghetto. His family was annihilated that day, but he slipped out and managed to survive on the streets for the next four years. Lawlor twists that to mean that a thirteen-year-old boy bartered his mother and father for his own life.”
“This is completely outrageous,” Jake exclaimed. “Why doesn’t Salanter sue?”
“He says it will just bring more attention to the lies that Lawlor and Global are telling,” Max said. “I think it’s a mistake to let them get away with it—it’s letting them ape Goebbels: keep repeating outrageous lies and people believe them.”
“I haven’t watched much of GEN’s campaign coverage,” I said. “I know they support Kendrick, but she’s such a wing-nut—she wants to teach Creationism in the public schools, she’s proposed jail terms for women who have abortions, she wants to outlaw Social Security and Medicaid—I just assumed no one could take her seriously. But if Global is positioning Salanter as the fulcrum of the axis of evil—”
“Yes. It’s dangerous, shocking, vile. I never thought I would hear such language in America—” Lotty broke off mid-sentence.