Bibi considered the moral implications for five seconds and then took the money. It didn’t feel like theft. It felt like wisdom. When she used her credit cards, she risked revealing her location. She had no way of knowing what cash she might need before she completed this task or died trying.
The second item was either a real wasp or a perfectly rendered little sculpture of one frozen in a lozenge of polished Lucite, its stinger curved in the strike position. Attached to the lozenge was a key chain holding a single electronic key. Not for a car. No company name or logo identified it. She had never seen one like it. The electronic key to St. Croix’s Mercedes was by itself on a second ring, and yet another ring held several conventional keys.
The third thing of interest was a paper napkin bearing the red logo of a restaurant chain celebrated for its hamburgers but also for the fact that it served breakfast all day. On the napkin was the name Mrs. Halina Berg, a phone number, and an address in the Old Town district of Tustin. The handwriting was bold, arguably that of a man. In any case, the good professor hadn’t written it; she was famous for the notes with which she decorated the manuscripts of students, all in precise printing of exquisite readability, some being brilliant and/or enigmatic writing advice, some withering criticism. Perhaps she ordered only water for her meal with Chubb Coy at Norm’s because she’d already eaten breakfast elsewhere.
Halina Berg.
Calling ahead seemed like a bad idea. Like asking to be met with guns and handcuffs. Besides, if another housebreaking was required, leaving a name beforehand would be foolish.
Although Bibi had driven through this neighborhood numerous times over the years, she didn’t know it well. So she was surprised when, without consulting the numbers painted on the curb or those on the houses, she knew the Berg residence the moment that she saw it. A two-story rambling Spanish Colonial Revival house of considerable charm, it was set well back from the street, shaded by tall and majestic live oaks crowned to perfection.
An elderly woman was sweeping the stoop. She did not look up as Bibi drove by and parked half a block away.
When Bibi returned on foot, the woman broomed clean the last of the stoop tiles and greeted her visitor with a smile that a loving nana might bestow upon a cherished grandchild. Although the sweeper appeared to be in her eighties, time had performed one of its rare kindnesses with her face, allowing a suggestion of her early beauty to remain, while plumping and gently folding her features into a pleasing fullness, applying the techniques of soft sculpture instead of its usual hammer and chisel.
“Would you be Mrs. Berg?” Bibi asked. “Halina Berg?”
“I would be, and I am,” the woman said, with the faint trace of an unspecifiable European accent echoing down the years of her voice.
The expression on the winsome face, the generous smile, and an intimation of quiet amusement in Mrs. Berg’s brandy-colored eyes all conspired to suggest that she knew who Bibi was and why she had come to pay a visit. Yet she seemed to harbor no hostility whatsoever, no hint of malevolent intent or capacity. If that was a misreading of the woman, well, there was always the Sig Sauer P226.
When Bibi identified herself, Mrs. Berg nodded pleasantly, as if to agree, Yes, that’s right, and when Bibi claimed that Dr. St. Croix had sent her, Mrs. Berg said, “Come in, come in, we’ll have a nice sit-down with tea and cookies.”
Bibi hesitated to follow the old woman across the threshold. But she could think of nowhere else to go. She had no other leads beyond this name and address. Anyway, if Hansel and Gretel had not risked being roasted for dinner by the wicked witch, they would not have found her trove of pearls and jewels.
The ground-floor hallway was lined floor-to-ceiling with books, and unlike the shelves in St. Croix’s office, no empty space remained on any of these. Mrs. Berg led her past archways to a living room and a dining room, the open door to a study; each of those spaces was furnished to its purpose, though they served also as extensions of the through-house library, with more bookshelves than bare walls.
One section of kitchen cabinets, that with glass fronts, was filled with books, too, and none of them appeared to be cookbooks.
As she prepared a plate of homemade cookies and brewed the tea, Mrs. Berg explained that neither she nor her late husband—Max, who had died seven years earlier—had family, nor were they blessed with children of their own. “We had each other. That was miracle enough. And we had our mutual love of books. Through books we lived this life and thousands of others. Never a dull minute!”
Rather than repair to the parlor, they sat across the kitchen table from each other, as if they were longtime neighbors. The sugar cookies were rich with vanilla. The dark-brown tea, almost as black as coffee, might have been bitter if it hadn’t come with a choice of either honey or peach syrup as sweetener.
“Delicious,” Bibi declared. “Both the cookies and the tea. The tea is…formidable.”
“Thank you, dear.” Leaning forward with apparent curiosity, Halina Berg said, “Now tell me, who is this Dr. Solange St. Croix?”
Puzzled, Bibi said, “But I thought you knew her. When I said she sent me, you brought me right into your home.”
Smiling, waving a hand as if to dismiss the misunderstanding, the old woman said, “Goodness gracious, I brought you in for tea because you’re Bibi Blair.”
A sense of familiarity with the house returned, and Bibi looked around the kitchen, wondering.
“I read your novel,” said Halina Berg, with those four words resolving the mystery. “You’re that rare thing—an author who looks even better in person than in her book-jacket photo.”
Having published only the one novel, Bibi was not accustomed to being recognized as a writer. She explained that Dr. St. Croix was the founder of a renowned university writing program.
“How perfectly boring,” said Mrs. Berg. “It’s you I’m interested in, dear.”
There followed a few minutes of considered and articulate praise for Bibi’s writing that gratified and embarrassed her at the same time.
As if in recognition of the discomfort occasioned by her guest’s modesty, Mrs. Berg said, “But we can talk more about that later, if you’ll indulge me. One of the secondary characters in your book, the Holocaust survivor…I am intrigued by the insights you achieved with her, given your youth. But first, Dr. Solange St. Croix. I don’t want to be mean, dear, but that’s such a pretentious name. I wonder—is it the one she was born with? Ah, but that’s neither here nor there. Why on earth did this woman I don’t know send you to me?”
Bibi almost said, I don’t know, which would have been awkward, but fortunately she said instead, “Research. Maybe she’d heard about your enormous book collection.” That sounded peculiar if not totally lame. A comment Mrs. Berg had made a moment earlier, considered with her slight accent and her age, suddenly gave the old woman a possible historical context that inspired Bibi to say, “Research about the Holocaust.”
Mrs. Berg nodded. “Many people know of my…background. Perhaps this Dr. St. Croix was aware, I survived both Terezin and Auschwitz.”
When she spoke of the ghetto at Theresienstadt, now Terezin, and of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Halina Berg’s appearance changed. Her true years became evident in the plump planes of her face, and amusement neither gathered around her mouth nor dwelt in her eyes as before. The music went out of her voice. She spoke with neither anger nor sorrow, but with a steely resolve, as if she could not speak of it at all if she allowed herself stronger emotions.
In 1942, when Halina was eleven, the Nazis forcibly transported tens of thousands of Europe’s most privileged and accomplished Jews to the fortress town of Theresienstadt—scholars and judges, writers, artists, scientists, engineers, musicians—there to await transferal to one of the death camps. Halina’s parents were musicians with the symphony, he a bass clarinetist, she a violinist. Consequently, due to the courage and will to live of its people, Theresienstadt had a rich cultural life in spite of the oppression, the thre
at of death, and the continuous dying all around. Crowding was terrible, food scarce, sanitary conditions unspeakable, and communicable diseases rampant. Halina’s mother died in a typhoid epidemic. Half starved, her father was transported to Auschwitz, where he was murdered with many thousands of others, but Halina was not sent with him. Mere weeks before Auschwitz was liberated by the Allies, she was taken there with other girls and boys, many of whom perished. Of fifteen thousand children who passed through Theresienstadt, no more than eleven hundred survived, perhaps fewer than two hundred.
“Humanity is capable of any atrocity,” she said. “But when you understand the extent of this cruelty, the unprecedented viciousness, the immense scale of the horror, it seems beyond the power of mere people to conceive and execute. It seems demonic.”
When the old woman fell silent, Bibi took it upon herself to bring the teapot to the table and refresh their cups. As she did so, she was overcome by a feeling of having performed this act before, not just the pouring of tea, but pouring from this same pot, in this very kitchen. The moment of déjà vu quickly passed. Because she didn’t know what to make of it, she could only put it aside for consideration later.
By the time Bibi returned to her chair, she thought she knew what Dr. St. Croix would have come here to ask. Perhaps she shared with the professor a need to know what supernatural power it was that the man called Terezin possessed.
“I’ve heard that Hitler was into the occult,” Bibi said. “In all your reading, in your experience, have you found that to be true? Is there any book in your collection you could show me, that might—”
Raising one hand to indicate that there was no need to prowl the extensive shelves, Halina said, “I’ve been blessed or cursed—I’m not sure which—with an eidetic memory. Whatever I dump into my mind stays there, and I have perfect recall. That sounds neat and orderly, but it’s definitely not. Everything is stuffed in there everywhichway. Sometimes I need a minute to sort through it….”
Bibi waited, watching as the old woman sipped her second cup of tea.
At last Halina said, “Hitler was a bit of a pagan, but not entirely that. A vegetarian. He would not allow mice to be killed when they invaded his house in numbers. He believed that the fatherland, German land, had a mystical power that could be drawn upon by the volk, the people of pure German blood. He wasn’t a Christian, could not be one, because of Christianity’s roots in Judaism, so the layered occult system that grew from Christianity—angels, demons, witches, séances, all of that and more—was of no interest to him. But the idea that there was mystical power in German earth and that the pure-blooded volk could draw upon it to become supermen…that is indisputably an occult concept.”
Bibi said, “It didn’t work out well for him.”
“I’m not a big believer in most things occult,” Halina said. “But I do believe the world is a more mysterious place than we often recognize—or care to admit. If there is some strange natural power in the earth under us, some magnetic current yet undiscovered, and if there are individuals who can tap it, then they’re probably those men we say have charisma. Not silly movie stars and singers, not the cheap charisma of entertainers. I’m speaking now of those with great charisma, the power to infect enormous numbers of others with their ego-driven fantasies. Hitler. Stalin. Mao.”
Although Bibi had added sweetener to her second cup, she wasn’t enjoying the tea. She slid it aside.
Halina said, “The Hindu saint Ramakrishna said that when a man becomes a saint, followers swarm to him as wasps to honey. Because he had to become holy to achieve his charisma, a saint won’t misuse that power, that control over others. But if a common man, a volk, with no saintly quality, with in fact an inflated ego, a narcissist, should tap into this magnetic current or whatever, he could draw legions to him…and lead the world to ruin.”
Bibi was disappointed. “And that’s the extent of his occult leanings? The mystical power of German land? You never read anything about him being interested in any kind of divination?”
“No.”
“He was never intrigued by séances, mediums, ceromancy, halomancy, necromancy, that kind of thing?”
“Not to my knowledge. But I am not the world’s primary expert on Adolf Hitler.”
From her purse, Bibi withdrew the electronic key attached to the Lucite fob. Indicating the encased wasp, she said, “Something about this feels occult to me.”
Halina Berg’s eyes widened. She fisted her hands as if to prevent herself from reaching for—and touching—the exotic object. “A wasp in the posture of stinging,” the old woman said, “was the official symbol they chose for themselves, just the unit of the Schutzstaffel garrisoned at Theresienstadt.”
“Schutzstaffel? The SS?”
“Hitler’s praetorian guard, shock troops, his supreme instrument of terror. The primary symbol of the SS was a death’s head. But the unit running Theresienstadt likened itself to Der Führer’s Wespe, his wasp, the sting behind his policies and directives. The camp commandant had the image on his door.”
Returning the key and the wasp to her purse, Bibi said, “I’m sorry if I’ve distressed you.”
Halina opened her fisted hands and then closed them around her cooling cup of tea. “It’s just a thing, a bug in plastic, it should not disturb me. It’s only a coincidence anyway, a novelty key chain. It has nothing to do with Theresienstadt.” She took a sip of her bitter tea. “The fools never seemed to realize they were comparing themselves to an insect.”
“Did the wasp have any occult meaning for them, for the SS unit that ran the ghetto?”
“No. Not that I was aware. Although…” She became thoughtful, staring into her tea as if to discern something in its darkness. “For a few months, there was one Gypsy in the ghetto. He’d been sent there by mistake. Jews and Gypsies were imprisoned separately, and always exterminated with groups of their own. The camp commandant should have sent the Gypsy elsewhere, but he delayed for two months, three, maybe longer. There were rumors that a small group of SS officers were intrigued by the Gypsy’s readings…palms, castings of wax, maybe even a crystal ball. But I don’t know if there was any truth to the gossip. The wasp symbol had been there before the Gypsy…and it was there after.”
They remained at the table awhile longer, but they said no more about Hitler or about the occult, or about charisma, as if they both felt that they had drawn too close to some line they must not cross, as if to speak further of these things, just then, would be to invite malice upon them. They spoke of trivial matters. They did not return to the subject of Bibi’s novel. When a decade faded from Halina’s face, when the music came into her voice once more, and when she smiled as she had first smiled while standing on the front stoop, Bibi felt that the time had come to go, although she promised that she would return.
That March afternoon, the westering sun cast off silver rather than golden rays, minting piles of coins from scattered altocumulus clouds that glimmered against a faded-blue sky. At street level, it was a bright but curiously dreary light that made the 55 freeway and then the 73 toll road seem like metaled causeways between nothing and nowhere, and all the racing vehicles like robots engaged in heartless tasks centuries after the abolition of humanity.
On the way to the bookstore in the Fashion Island shopping complex in Newport Beach, Bibi couldn’t stop wondering why she had not asked Halina Berg two important questions. The first: Have you ever heard of Robert Warren Faulkner? The second: Have you ever heard of Ashley Bell? They were the two key figures in this drama, after all; the girl was in urgent need of being rescued, and the mother-murdering Bobby was intent on preventing her from being found. Bibi had assumed that Dr. St. Croix had wanted to speak with Mrs. Berg to explore the connection between Nazis and the occult, but that might not have been her intention. Whatever mysterious faction she aligned with, whatever her purpose in this madness, the professor might have been under the impression that the survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz could tell her
something related to Faulkner or Bell, or both. Even if Mrs. Berg claimed never to have heard of them, there would have been something to be gained by watching her reactions to the names.
Not that there had been any reason to believe that Halina’s history might be different from the one that she had laid out in her cozy kitchen. She’d been credible. Even if she was not the Holocaust survivor that she claimed to be, she was a lover of books, therefore not likely to have anything in common with a man who said that he hated most books and bookish people. Besides, had she been aligned with Faulkner/Terezin, she would have let him know that the woman he wanted to kill was sitting at her kitchen table drinking tea.
If Bibi couldn’t be sure that she had gotten from Halina Berg all the woman had to give, she was convinced that she had missed something during her encounter with Chubb Coy in the third-floor Victorian suite in St. Croix’s house, and that it had to do less with what he’d revealed than with how he’d said it. There had been certain familiar statements and phrases, and now her memory began to serve her better than it had earlier, which was why she needed to visit a bookstore.
As she exited the toll road at Jamboree Boulevard, crawling west in heavy traffic, Bibi heard the start-up music that indicated her laptop had come alive. It was lying on the passenger seat. After searching for the photos of Bobby Faulkner, she had logged off and her computer had shut down. Now she flipped up the screen and found it bright, ready to go.
When the westbound lanes clogged, she used the touch pad to try to log off. The laptop remained on. She reached farther, to the power switch, clicked it, clicked it, but it didn’t work.
Not good. In fact, very bad.
Ten minutes from Fashion Island in that stop-and-go traffic, she came to a halt when a traffic light yellowed to red, with ten or twelve vehicles in front of her. Directly ahead idled a landscaper’s open-bed truck full of mowers, blowers, trimmers, rakes, and white tarps plump with grass clippings.