He let go of her throat but backhanded her across the face, a hard slap meant to confirm his dominance, to knock out of her any last trace of rebellion, to leave her stunned long enough for him to straddle her. One knee to either side of Bibi, still not having fallen upon her, he unbuckled his belt as she looked up at him with a pretense of weakness and resignation. When she crossed her arms over her breasts, he laughed at that expression of maidenly modesty, and his laugh was a low wet sound that reminded her of his tongue in her mouth, nauseating her anew. Busy with the zipper of his pants, eager to expose himself, he didn’t notice that her right hand was under her blazer, didn’t realize that she was probing an interior pocket. The handle of Dr. St. Croix’s switchblade came smooth and cool into Bibi’s hand, the nub of the release under her thumb. She drew the knife from beneath her coat, and the blade sprang out for use, seven inches long and razor-sharp and as pointed as a rapier.
As his jeans slid down his hips, his left hand pulled at his underpants, and his right was already deep inside the pouch of the garment, fondling what he sought to free. His eyes, heavy-lidded with insane desire, widened only when her hand thrust forward. He saw the wicked knife an instant before he felt it. His shirt split as if it were paper, and his flesh proved no more resistant than butter. The blade went in to the hilt. His left hand closed over hers, as if to extract the switchblade in such a way as to minimize further damage, but Bibi twisted it before yanking it out of him, cross-cutting the original wound. And thrust it again, past his grasping, ineffectual hand. And tore it free. She heaved up, rocked him. He fell not upon her, but to her right, and she scrambled away from him.
In the heat of it, under the hammer and seemingly helpless, Bibi had remained cool, had done what needed to be done, as best she could do it. But now fright rode her back and whipped her, and her spinning mind spun out at once a dozen ways that she could still end up dead here in her old bedroom.
He would have a gun. He hadn’t thought he needed it. Pride in his brute strength and the pleasure of physically overwhelming her had ironically made him vulnerable. But the gun would be under his coat—was he wearing a coat?—or in an ankle holster. And right now he was surely fumbling for it.
She recovered the flashlight, swept the floor with it, saw her pistol. It was at the farther end of the room. Near the closet door. She would have to circle the would-be rapist to get to it.
He struggled to sit up, a bear of a man, his neck so thick and corded that it would have foiled a hangman’s noose. No coat on this chilly night. Or he’d left it in another room before creeping up on her. Jeans and a bloody Hawaiian shirt. Arms sculpted by thousands of hours in a gym.
Quick but wary, hobbling, wincing with pain from the beating she had taken, Bibi circled him. She recovered the pistol, inexpressibly grateful that Pax had insisted she have it and learn to use it.
The barbarian was sitting up now, trying to reach behind himself and under his Hawaiian shirt, no doubt seeking a holstered weapon belted in the small of his back. The effort strained his damaged guts, and he strove to bite off a grudging squeal of pain each time he found that he couldn’t twist his torso even slightly to reach what he sought. His face glistened with sweat, his eyes with hate.
Bibi wanted to be gone from there, but she had to see this through to the end. She put the flashlight on the floor, aimed at the bastard, and she stood over him, just out of his reach. In spite of her two-hand grip, the pistol jumped up and down on target, as though it had a will of its own. Even in his agony, the barbarian took note of the twitching gun, and Bibi saw him take note of it. Any sign of weakness invited violence. She steadied herself. “You make a wrong move, and I’ll shoot you dead.”
He seemed to have given up the idea of reaching the gun at his back. His face cleared of hatred and rage and pain. He sat there like a giant infant, legs splayed, hands palms-up in his lap, as though bewildered that his misbehavior had resulted in these consequences.
He didn’t look at her when he spoke, and there was no strong emotion in his voice. “You’ll never get out of this alive.”
If Bibi might have answered him, the blood bubbling on his lips suggested there was no point to either argument or interrogation.
“It’s the Library of Babel,” he said, spitting blood with the strain of forming words. “An infinite number of rooms. No way out.”
He fell backward from his sitting position, and his skull rapped the floor. But he felt nothing, for he was dead, and bewilderment, too, was gone from his face, with nothing to replace it.
Bibi wanted to be gone from the bungalow, but not with the urgency that she had desired escape only moments earlier.
First, sickened by the need to do so, she went through the dead man’s pockets and found nothing. She rolled him onto his side with the intention of extracting his wallet from a hip pocket, but he carried no wallet.
She sat on the floor, with her back against a wall. She tasted blood each time she licked the throbbing corner of her mouth, and she chose not to count all the places where she ached. Now she waited for calm to settle upon her, and not just calm but also a sense of being fully and rightfully acquitted.
That Bibi had killed in self-defense should not have brought her to despondency and certainly not to despair, and in fact it did not. To kill wasn’t the same as to murder, because killing was done to protect oneself or those who were innocent—or, in war, to deny the aggressor the fruits of his onslaught and to preserve the kind of civilization that valued life and freedom above ideology, above even peace and justice, two words easily and routinely perverted by most authoritarians. The ability to recognize this was why the work of Solzhenitsyn meant so much more to her than the novels of Tolstoy, and always would.
In this case, Bibi had killed to save herself and to have the chance to find and save a girl named Ashley Bell. Horrified by the necessity of killing, she nevertheless sat there without serious doubt about her actions.
She kept the flashlight trained on the dead man and delayed her departure for no reason other than to consider his reference to the Library of Babel. He didn’t seem to be the kind of man who would, by his nature, make such an allusion.
That library was a literary conceit with which several writers had played over the years, though it was most widely known because of a short work of fiction by Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel.”
Imagine an infinite number of rooms, stacked atop one another, in which are stored not only all the books ever written but also all the books that ever will be, each of them in every dialect of every language known to mankind and of every language yet to be learned or formed in days to come. In addition, there is a book of the life of everyone who has ever lived or will live, and an infinite number of other volumes of all genres and purposes that could be imagined. There are books that make no sense and books that seem to make sense but perhaps do not. And the sheer quantity ensures that no one can read a sufficient percentage of it to arrive at an explanation of the library, life, or anything else.
Bibi found it to be a depressing story, if the author would even have wished that it be called a story, a kind of nihilism that would deny its nihilism.
As his dying words, the would-be rapist had said, You’ll never get out of this alive. It’s the Library of Babel. An infinite number of rooms. No way out. He could have had only one intention: to break her spirit, which was the desire of his boss, Terezin.
If such a learned reference was out of character for this thug, he must have been told to memorize those lines. And if he memorized them, he had intended to speak them to her face after he raped her and just before he slit her throat, to be sure that in the end she was robbed of all hope. When it happened that the death of the night would be his, not hers, he still performed according to his program.
If sentinels had been stationed at other places where she might have gone, as the brute claimed, all of them must have memorized the same lines about the Library of Babel. Terezin’s search for her was evid
ently even a bigger operation than she’d imagined. His obsession with her suggested that she posed a serious threat to him.
Bibi tried to think if she had left fingerprints on anything. The knob on the back door. She’d wipe it when she left. She would take the pistol and the switchblade with her. The filthy floor and the scaling plaster walls weren’t surfaces from which a police-lab technician could lift anything useful. Her prints on the dead man’s skin? Possible? Yes, but not likely. She sure wasn’t going to wipe him down, no way.
Besides, she would have left a few hairs. A few drops of blood. If the police technicians were as omniscient and brilliant as those on the CSI television shows, she was doomed. But of course the TV version was more fantasy than reality.
Although there was no one to hear, she refused to groan when she got to her feet. Not just to the dead man but also to Terezin and all the rest of them, she said, “Go to Hell.”
Seaside, from high white cliffs, the fog came down in slow avalanches, burying the peninsula and the harbor beyond it and the shore beyond the harbor. Each traffic light stood like a cyclops, peering through the mist in red rage or green jealousy or cowardice. For all that was revealed of them, the passing vehicles might have been lantern-eyed beasts that had journeyed out of one mythology or another into Newport.
Accustomed to parking a couple of blocks from her destination, the better to keep Pogo’s Honda a secret from those who would track her if they could, Bibi left the car on Via Lido. She walked west to the corner and a few blocks south on the boulevard. She’d never before visited the place toward which she was headed, had just noticed it in passing. Terezin’s people could not be expecting her to show up there. She was cautious, anyway.
On the mainland, a far-away siren grew nearer as perhaps an ambulance made its way toward Hoag Hospital. The periodic bleat of the foghorn at the distant mouth of the harbor. The muffled music of a live band performing in a club.
She encountered a dozen or more pedestrians. They emerged from the murk as if born in that moment, sometimes with a dog on a leash. The canines were always grinning, elated by the cool wet night, the people not so much. Although it was a King Charles spaniel, the first dog reminded her of the morning pursuit through the park in Laguna. After that she half expected to be confronted by someone in a hoodie with a golden retriever, but she saw neither.
The electric-blue neon was at first a meaningless scrawl in the mist, floating like a balloon animal representing a species unknown on Earth. As she approached, the blue resolved into glowing glass script that spelled the words body art.
The tattoo parlor aimed to be a bit more upscale than most, although not to an extent that bled away its air of counterculture and rebellion. Striking images hung in the window—a winged horse, a leering death’s head, Rocket Raccoon, a busty Vampira, a serpent with jeweled scales, a heart twisted around with brambles and pierced by thorns—implying that the artist-in-residence could make of your skin a first-rate gallery of pop art.
The spacious front room had a glossy Santos mahogany floor and walls papered with dozens of imaginative designs. Of the four chairs provided for customers, two were occupied by bearded men in their thirties who seemed to style themselves after the band ZZ Top. Their arms were sleeved with interwoven images. A younger man perched in a kind of barber’s chair with tilt-back capability, where hand and arm decorations could be outlined and colored while interested parties observed. In the back, past a bead curtain, there would be rooms with padded tables for those who needed to lie down to present their backs and chests and more intimate areas of anatomy to the needle master.
Bibi was accustomed to men’s interest, but the three in the tattoo parlor paid more complete and solemn attention to her than usual. They were talking animatedly when she opened the door, but fell into silence as she closed it behind her, as if a celebrity or a goddess had arrived. She knew it wasn’t beauty that hushed them as much as it was what the beast had done to beauty: her scraped left ear caked with blood, the bruise along her jaw, the half clotted and half weeping cut at the swollen corner of her mouth.
To the twenty-something guy in the barber’s chair, she said, “How long a wait till I can get a tattoo?”
Climbing off his perch, he said, “No wait at all. Kevin here, and Charlie, they just stopped by to bullshit.”
Charlie, whose hair and beard were prematurely white, nodded at Bibi and said, “Ma’am.”
Kevin wore a black cowboy hat, which he lifted off his head and put back again. “Pleasure.”
“I’m Josh,” the tattooist said. When Bibi didn’t offer a name, he continued, “I can do anything you want, anything on the walls here or in one of these albums of customer photos.”
“No dragons, no skulls, no hearts,” Bibi said. “Nothing but four words on my wrist, all where a sleeve will hide them.”
Josh produced a notepad and pencil. Bibi printed the four words, one per line, just as she wanted them.
After holding up the pad so Kevin and Charlie could read what she’d printed, Josh said, “I got a book of scripts here—”
“Block letters,” she interrupted. “Simple and black.”
“I can garnish the words with bats or birds or—”
“Just the words.”
Disappointed, he said, “Don’t seem worth doing—just letters.”
“It’s worth it to me,” Bibi assured him. “What’s the price?”
He named one, and she accepted.
When Bibi got into the chair, Josh said, “You’ll have to take off the jacket.”
Because she was carrying the pistol in the shoulder rig, she said, “That’s not how we’re going to do it.” She pulled the jacket sleeve up to her elbow and with it the long sleeve of her T-shirt. She pointed to a spot about two inches above the most prominent wrist bone. “Start there, centered on the arm, and please keep the lines tight.”
As he set out his instruments, Josh said, “You want a couple of aspirin or Tylenol?”
“Will it hurt much?”
“Oh, well, what I meant is—aspirin because of what happened to your face there. But this’ll sting a mite.”
“Thanks, but I’ll do without.”
Charlie glanced at Kevin, and Kevin nodded solemnly, and Charlie shook his head, and they both looked sad.
“You don’t seem spittin’ angry,” Josh said, “which maybe you should be. Sorry for sayin’.”
“I’m not angry,” she said. “Anger doesn’t solve anything. I’m just damn-all determined.”
“Determined what?” Charlie wondered.
“Determined nothing like it’s going to happen to me again.”
Silence ruled until Josh had completed three letters, and then Kevin said, “Hope you don’t mind my sayin’, miss, but a woman like you doesn’t need to put up with that kind of crap.”
“With any kind of crap,” Charlie elaborated.
“That’s nice of you,” she said. “But I didn’t put up with it.”
“Glad to hear it,” Charlie said.
After a while, Kevin gave her another opening to share her story. “I got a feelin’ I’d hate to see the other guy.”
“You would,” she agreed.
“Hope to hell he’s nursin’ a broken nose or somethin’.”
“He’s dead,” Bibi said.
They were all quiet then, until Josh finished.
The flesh was slightly inflamed and swollen around the four words, one per line, but they were neat and readable. Josh wrapped a few layers of gauze around his work, taped it in place, and gave her a small tube of antibiotic ointment to guard against infection.
“Treat it like a wound for two or three weeks. Don’t wash it. When it itches—slap, don’t scratch.”
When Bibi paid for the tattoo, he said, “It didn’t fulfill the artist in me, but it was nice doin’ business with you, Ashley.”
“That’s not my name,” she corrected. Under the bandage was a promise scored into her right arm: ASHLEY BELL W
ILL LIVE.
Tattooed and renewed, Bibi returned to the Honda, where she had parked it on Via Lido. She sat watching the street and its businesses melt away in the thick tides of mist, partially re-form, and melt away again, over and over, as if some celestial power had ordered the end of the world but kept having second thoughts.
When she worked out what she would say, she used the disposable cell phone to call her mother.
“Bibi? We thought you’d call long before this. Did you get a motel? Where are you staying?”
“I drove all the way to San Diego, Mom. Then I played tourist for a while, it’s a cool town, and then I found a nice little place for dinner.” She didn’t lie, not about anything important, and she particularly didn’t lie to her parents; however, to her own ear, she sounded as though she was becoming at least a good apprentice liar. Although keeping Murphy and Nancy ignorant about her situation was necessary in order to keep them off Terezin’s execution list, Bibi didn’t feel justified and wanted to get through the deception as fast as possible. “Anyway, I have a room at the Best Western. It’s clean and quiet, and I’m going to sleep like a stone.”
“Which Best Western?” Nancy asked.
“The Best Western Best Western. You know, the chain.”
“But there must be several of them in San Diego.”
“Well, I don’t know, it just says Best Western on the building.”
“There must be another part to the name. Best Western Downtown, Best Western Old Town, Best Western Harbor, something like that.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Look for an ad card on your nightstand or a brochure in the drawer. It’ll have the full name. Go look.”
“Okay. Wait a sec.” Bibi clamped the palm of her hand over the phone and counted to twenty while she watched the less than thrilling spectacle of the fog. “Okay. There’s both an ad card and a brochure, but they just say Best Western. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, I’m happy and well fed and sleepy, and I’m only staying one night. Tomorrow I might drive back up to La Jolla, stay there a day or two.”