“You must have followed me from the hospital! How dare you!”
“You’ve got to help me find something, Liesl, please.” He had to make
her listen.
She whipped her head from side to side, frantic. “You have compromised
my security! Goddamn you to hell!”
“Liesl, I wasn’t followed.”
“How can you possibly know? Did you rent this car?”
“In Zurich.”
“Of course. Idiot! If they were watching you in Zurich, they’ll know
you rented the car!”
“But no one followed me here.”
“What do you know?” she snapped. “You’re an amateur!”
“So are you.”
“Yes, but I am an amateur who has lived with the threat of death for
four years. Now please, get out. Go.””
“No, Liesl,” he said with quiet finality. “We need to talk.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN.
The cabin was simple yet cozy, low-ceilinged, book-lined. Peter had
built the bookshelves himself, Liesl said proudly. The floor was wide
board pine. There was a stone fireplace, a neat stack of split logs
piled next to it, a wood stove, a small kitchen. The whole place
smelled of smoke.
It was cold; she lit the wood stove for some heat. Ben took off his
coat.
“You’re hurt,” Liesl said. “You’ve been hit.”
Ben looked at himself, saw that the left shoulder of his shirt was stiff
with dried blood. Oddly, it hadn’t been painful–stress and exhaustion
had somehow rendered him insensate to the injury, and he’d put it out of
his mind during the long drive through the mountains.
“I’m sure it looks a lot worse than it is,” Ben said.
“That depends,” she said, “on what it looks like. Remove the shirt.”
She spoke like the doctor she was. ,” Ben undid the buttons of his
white pinpoint Oxford cloth shirt. The fabric adhered to the top of his
left shoulder, and when he tugged, there was a warning twinge of pain.
Liesl took a clean sponge, soaked it with warm water, and wet the area.
Then she carefully peeled the shirt from his wounded shoulder. “You’ve
been incredibly lucky: a bullet creased you, no more. Tell me what
happened.”
As Liesl tended to his wound, Ben recounted the events that happened
only hours before.
“There’s debris here. It must be cleansed carefully, or there will be
the risk of infection.” She sat him next to the sink, poured some
boiling water from a kettle, and left it to cool in a porcelain bowl.
She went away for a few minutes and reappeared with a quantity of gauze
and a yellow plastic bottle of antiseptic.
Ben found himself wincing as she carefully washed the area, then wine
ing again as she daubed it with cotton saturated with the brown-colored
antiseptic. “Cleaning it hurts worse than getting it did,” Ben said.
Liesl applied four strips of medical adhesive tape to secure the sterile
wound dressing in place. “You won’t be so lucky next time,” she said
dryly.
“What I most need right now isn’t luck,” Ben said. “It’s knowledge. I
need to understand what the hell is going on. I need to get a fix on
Sigma. They sure seem to have a fix on me.”
“Luck, knowledge trust me, you’ll need both.” Now she handed him a
shirt. A heavy shirt of knitted cotton. One of Peter’s.
Suddenly the reality of the past few days, the reality he’d tried to
hold at bay, reared up and he felt a surge of vertigo, panic, sorrow,
despair.
“I’ll help you put it on,” she said, alert to the anguish that played
across his face.
He had to regain his composure, he knew, if only for her sake. He could
merely guess at her own wrenching pain. When the shirt was on him,
Liesl stared at him for a few moments. “You’re so alike. Peter never
told me. I think he never realized how alike you are.”
“Twins never recognize themselves in each other.”
“It was more than that. And I don’t mean physically. Some people would
have said that Peter was aimless. I knew better. He was like a sail,
something that’s slack only until it captures the wind. And then it
possesses the force of the wind.” She shook her head, as if frustrated
by her fumbling attempts to communicate. “I mean that Peter had a
larger sense of purpose.”
“I knew what you meant. It’s what I admired most about him, the life he
came to create for himself.”
“It was a passion,” Liesl said, her eyes sad, gleaming, “a passion for
justice, and it infused every aspect of his being.”
” “A passion for justice.” Those aren’t words that mean much in the
world of asset management,” Ben said bitterly.
“A world you found stifling,” Liesl said. “It was suffocating you by
degrees, wasn’t it, just as Peter said it would.”
“There are quicker ways to die,” Ben said. “As I’ve had reason to learn
of late.”
“Tell me about the school where you taught. In New York, Peter said.
I’ve been to New York a couple of times, as an adolescent, and once,
later, to a medical conference.”
“It was in New York, yes. But not a New York any tourist ever sees. I
taught in a place called East New York. About five square miles of some
of the worst-off people in the whole city. You’ve got some auto shops,
and bode gas places that’ll sell you cigarettes and booze, and places
that’ll cash your checks. The Seventy-fifth Precinct what the cops call
the Seven-Five, those unfortunate enough to be assigned to it. When I
was teaching, there were more than a hundred homicides in the
Seven-Five. Some nights, it sounded like Beirut. You’d go to sleep to
the sound of Saturday Night Specials. A desperate place. Pretty much
written off by the rest of society.”
“And that’s where you taught.”
“I thought it was obscene that in America, the wealthiest nation in the
world, this sort of desolation was still tolerable. Here was a place
that made Soweto look like Scarsdale. Sure, there were the usual
ineffectual poverty programs, but there was also the unspoken conviction
of futility. “The poor will always be with us’ nobody used those words
anymore, but that’s what they meant. They used other code words, talked
about ‘structural’ this and ‘behavioral’ that, and, hey, the middle
class was doing just fine, wasn’t it? So I stuck it out. I wasn’t
going to save the world, I wasn’t naive. But I told myself that if I
could save one kid, maybe two, maybe three, my efforts wouldn’t have
been wasted.”
“And did you?”
“Possibly,” Ben said, suddenly tired. “Possibly. I wasn’t around any
longer to find out, was I?” He spat out the words with distaste: “I was
ordering truffled timbales at Aureole, quaffing Cristal with clients.”
“Sounds like a terrible shock to the system, that kind of change,” Liesl
said gently. She attended to his words carefully, perhaps in need of
distraction from her own pain.
“It was deadening, I think. The hell of it was, I was actually good at
it. I had a knack for the game, the rituals of client courtship. If
you wanted someone who could order at the city’s most expensive
restaurants without glancing at the menu, I was your man. And then, as
often as I could, I’d go risk my neck recreation ally of course. I was
an extreme sport junkie. I’d go climb the Vermillion Cliffs, in
Arizona. Sail solo to Bermuda. Go para-skiing in Cameron Pass.
Courtney an old girlfriend of mine used to insist I had a death wish,
but that wasn’t it at all. I did those things to feel alive.” He shook
his head. “It sounds silly now, doesn’t it? The idle diversions of a
pampered rich kid, someone who hadn’t figured out a reason for getting
dressed in the morning.”
“Maybe it was because you’d been taken from your natural element,” Liesl
said.
“And what was that? I’m not sure that saving souls in East New York was
going to be a lifelong calling, either. Anyway, I never got the chance
to find out.”
“I think you were a sail, like Peter. You just needed to find your
wind.” She smiled sadly.
“The wind found me, it would seem. And it’s a goddamn monsoon. Some
conspiracy that was launched half a century ago and is still claiming
lives. Specializing in the people I love. Maybe you’ve never been in a
small boat during a storm, Liesl, but I have. And the first thing you
do is drop the sail.”
“Is that really an option now?” She poured him a small quantity of
brandy in a water glass.
“I don’t even know what the options are. You and Peter have spent a lot
more time thinking about it than I have. What conclusions did you come
to?”
“Just the ones I told you. A great deal of conjecture for the most
part. Peter did a lot of research into the period. He was disheartened