“Yes,” Stefan said, “I read it. Three times.”
“The same book three times?” Jason said. They were all sitting around the Christmas tree, eating junk food and drinking cocoa, and Jason was in his cheeriest mood of the year. “Laura, beware this man. He sounds like an obsessive-compulsive to me.”
“Well, of course,” Thelma said, “to you Hollywood types, anyone who reads any book, even once, is viewed either as an intellectual giant or a psychopath. Now, Laura, how did you come up with all these convincing-looking, phony papers?”
“They’re not phony,” Chris said. “They’re real.”
“That’s right,” Laura said. “The driver’s license and everything else is supported by government files. In researching Endless River, I had to find out how you go about obtaining a new identity of high quality, and I found this interesting man in San Francisco who runs a veritable document industry from the basement beneath a topless nightclub—”
“It doesn’t have a roof?” Chris asked.
Laura ruffled the boy’s hair and said, “Anyway, Stefan, if you look deeper into that box, you’ll find a couple of bank books as well. I’ve opened accounts for you under your new identity at Security Pacific Bank and Great Western Savings.”
He was startled. “I can’t take money from you. I can’t—”
“You save me from a wheelchair, repeatedly save my life, and I can’t give you money if I feel like it? Thelma, what’s wrong with him?”
“He’s a man,” Thelma said.
“I guess that explains it.”
“Hairy, Neanderthalic,” Thelma said, “perpetually half-crazed from excessive levels of testosterone, plagued by racial memories of the lost glory of mammoth-hunting expeditions—they’re all alike.”
“Men,” Laura said.
“Men,” Thelma said.
To his surprise and almost against his will, Stefan Krieger felt some of the darkness fading from within him, and light began to find a pane through which to shine into his heart.
In late February of the next year, thirteen months after the events in the desert outside Palm Springs, Laura suggested that he come to stay with her and Chris at the house near Big Bear. He went the next day, driving there in the sleek new Russian sports car that he had bought with some of the money she had given him.
For the next seven months he slept in the guest room. Every night. He needed nothing more. Just being with them, day after day, being accepted by them, being included, was all the love he could handle for a while.
In mid-September, twenty months after he had appeared on her doorstep with a bullet hole in his chest, she asked him into her bed. Three nights later he found the courage to go.
The year that Chris was twelve, Jason and Thelma bought a getaway house in Monterey, overlooking the most beautiful coastline in the world, and they insisted that Laura, Stefan, and Chris visit them for the month of August, when they were both between film projects. The mornings on the Monterey peninsula were cool and foggy, the days warm and clear, the nights downright chilly in spite of the season, and that daily pattern of weather was invigorating.
On the second Friday of the month, Stefan and Chris went for a beach walk with Jason. On the rocks not far from shore, sea lions were sunning themselves and barking noisily. Tourists were parked bumper to bumper along the road that served the beach; they ventured onto the sand to take photographs of the sun-worshiping “seals,” as they called them.
“Year by year,” Jason said, “there’s more foreign tourists. It’s a regular invasion. And you notice—they’re mostly either Japanese, Germans, or Russians. Less than half a century ago, we fought the greatest war in history against all three of them, and now they’re all more prosperous than we are. Japanese electronics and cars, Russian cars and computers, German cars and quality machinery of all kinds . . . Honest to God, Stefan, I think Americans frequently treat old enemies better than they do old friends.”
Stefan paused to watch the sea lions that had drawn the interest of the tourists, and he thought of the mistake that he had made in his meeting with Winston Churchill.