Omega rules an evan ryde.., p.26
Omega Rules--An Evan Ryder Novel, page 26
“But I do.” In the same moment, she drew Ghislane to her, hugging her close.
“What … what’re you doing?” Ghislane moaned. Her fists beat a tattoo against Evan’s shoulders. Then feeling Evan’s hand in her hair, her head came down onto Evan’s shoulder. “Oh, God, oh, God. Elke, where are you now?”
“Beyond the pain you and I are both feeling,” Evan said into her ear.
Ghislane hissed, began to struggle again but Evan maintained her firm hold on her and her embrace would not be denied. The dying fire crackled, wind battered the old boards, insinuated itself through cracks in the brickwork. A fistful of shouts, a car’s engine backfiring, drunken laughter indistinguishable to the two women inside the hunter’s cabin from sobbing.
It took some time for Ghislane to understand that Evan’s embrace was not hostile, that she wasn’t being imprisoned. She was being consoled. The tension collapsed within her, all at once, as if she were a marionette whose strings had been cut. Her head lolled against Evan’s shoulder and she took quick gasping breaths.
“Slow down,” Evan whispered. “Slow down, that’s all you need to do.”
After another interval during which a renewed sleet started to crackle and pop against the cabin’s roof and walls like buckshot, Ghislane sighed.
“She’s dead.” Her voice strained, thin as tissue. “Elke’s dead.”
“Yes,” Evan said because she knew Ghislane needed to hear that affirmation.
Ghislane sighed again, deeper this time, air hissing out of her. “She was not like me.” Her voice was small but steady now. “She was born into poverty. Her family had nothing, scraped at the very earth, clawed for money, often stole it. Sometimes beaten for it. Other times thrown in jail. They never lived; they were too busy surviving.”
“That’s something, isn’t it?”
Ghislane took a moment, after which she said, “Yes. I suppose it is. But not something to be proud of.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Surviving instead of dying … I’d say that’s a pretty big victory.”
Ghislane gave a tiny laugh almost immediately submerged into a sob. She cried again until she was dried out.
“She made it perfectly clear to me how much she despised the Nazis, the neo-Nazi movement.”
“Then why was she with you?”
“For one thing, she was my best friend. For another, she was my history guide.” Ghislane sighed. “She studied them, the Nazis, and Goebbels’s propaganda tricks that she saw being used by not only the neo-Nazi movement here in Germany but in the fascistic authoritarianism infecting your own country. She found some of the films Leni Riefenstahl made at his request as Nazi propaganda. God knows where or how much she had to pay for them. There’s a black market for Nazi relics. The more she studied the more convinced she became of the danger of the Fourth Reich being resurrected and spreading out from here. ‘We are the epicenter,’ she would tell me over and over. ‘We have to stop the movement now before it becomes too strong and overwhelms us.’ At this she would grow intensely agitated. I think at some point she began a love affair with drugs, either to dull her anxiety or to forget about the sinkhole opening up under Germany. It’s likely both.”
“So neither of you are what you seem?” The subtle disconnect Evan had noticed between Ghislane and the neo-Nazi’s loathing for Jews was beginning to make sense now.
Ghislane exhaled a long-held breath. “We do our job well, don’t we? That’s partly how we recruited the group. But for us it’s a front.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’ve told you all I can. Maybe too—”
“Finish what you started, Ghislane.”
Ghislane closed her eyes for a moment. “The situation’s not as simple as that.” She shifted a bit but seemed reluctant to have Evan let go of her. It seemed she had found a kind of stasis that kept her from exploding, whirling in all directions. It may be that Evan was preventing her from losing her mind.
“History. That isn’t my thing. I’m only interested in the eternal now—what’s tangible, whatever I can see in front of me. But then I don’t know.” She shook her head. “It was Elke who made me see what a baby I am—doing all this to derail the family’s status. I thought that if I humiliated them thoroughly enough I’d shake them out of their ivory cocoon.” Her hands turned into fists, white knuckles slowly emerging like the Wolverine’s adamantine claws. “I despise them so—their money, their power, their insulated world. Above all their smugness. All they think about is money and what it can buy them. If that’s happiness I’d rather be dead.”
She was silent for some time after that. She seemed to be listening—to the decaying sound of the last of the smoldering wood caving in, the sleet, the soughing of the wind. Then she turned her head, saw Elke again in her lake of blood and gave a sharp intake of breath, as if reliving the moment they came upon her like this.
“I liked her right away.” She was caught up again in her memories. “She was such a street-smart person. She had gone through things I’ve never dreamed of. It made her tougher, you know. But also angrier. I felt her anger; I felt our kinship through it. I picked her out of the gutter, literally, where she’d been lying for a night and a day. She was a reclamation project. To help her, I thought. To get her back on her feet. But I see now that saving her was entirely selfish. The real reason I did it was to make me feel better about myself, believe that I was worth something.”
“You gained a friend,” Evan said.
Ghislane ducked her head. “She owed everything to me and she never stopped repaying me. Even though it sometimes went against her convictions she did everything I told her to do, all the dirty work a girl like me wouldn’t—couldn’t lower myself to do.” Ghislane pulled away enough to look Evan in the eye. “And you know what? I did nothing to stop her. I liked it, reveled in the adulation. I mean, who wouldn’t?” Then her face fell. “No, no, there’d be plenty who wouldn’t.” She gestured with her chin. “You, for instance.”
Evan almost lost it then, thinking of Bobbi who so longed to be her sidekick but never knew how to tell her big sister. Not that it would have mattered, Evan thought now. I was so successful at pushing her away. All at once her inner voice echoed Ghislane’s lament. Where are you now, Bobbi?
Ghislane at last broke away, began to crawl on hands and knees. She stopped once to press her hand against her wound, which was throbbing terribly. Then she continued crawling from where their fight had thrown them back to Elke’s side.
“And now her death”—she whispered—”no, no, her life with me, what I ordered her to do, over and over—I see now that I’m no better than my parents. I was born an elite and, fick mich, I’m still an elite. I hire other people—the indigent who have no other choice—to do what, if I were a real revolutionary instead of pretending to be one, I would do myself.”
Head down, staring fixedly at Elke as if her gaze could pierce through the flesh and blood to find her essence. “She was the real revolutionary. She clashed with many of the group, but she sparked debates among us. Even though she rubbed some of them the wrong way she kept them on their toes, she kept them thinking.”
“Did that include you?”
Ghislane stopped abruptly, as if she had caught herself in a truth she didn’t mean to reveal. “I don’t know you at all.”
“You know me as well as I know you.”
Ghislane rose, shaky but seeming determined. “I need to get out of here, go home.” And as she felt Evan come up beside her, she turned to look at her and said, “I feel like sleeping for a week.” She stared down at Elke’s half-shadowed face one more time. “I don’t want to leave her, but I must. This—her murder—changes everything.”
Evan badly wanted to ask Ghislane what she meant, to go deeper into what she’d been talking about—her parents, her motives, her self-reckoning—but some instinct, honed in the field, warned her to keep silent, to keep her interest at bay. Suspicion, she had learned, was like a genie—once out of the bottle it was impossible to put back in. Nevertheless, she was beginning to suspect that beneath all the bluster and speechifying Ghislane was a decent human being—lost, perhaps, but decent.
She revealed none of this, understanding this was a critical moment for Ghislane, perhaps even a turning point in her outlook. Instead she said softly, “We need to take care of Elke.”
Ghislane nodded. “I’ll stop somewhere, call my people from a public phone. They’ll come fetch her.”
“That’s the best we can do for her? No funeral or—”
Ghislane’s eyes blazed for a moment before dulling out, depthless, half-dead. “We need to bury her as quickly as we can. My people have to be discreet, come here, in and out as quicky as possible. People use this place regularly but we can’t afford to take the time to clean up. This is the world we live in, Evan.”
With visible effort she turned and went through the door. Evan picked up the flashlight and swept it and her gaze around the room for anything they might have missed, but there was nothing. Even the fire had died.
Ghislane called her name from just outside the door. “You coming?”
The sleet had stopped, at least for the time being, but the sky was still low, choked with clouds corrugated as a tin roof. Evan caught up with Ghislane, a sudden thought overtaking her as they crunched along. The sleet had turned to an icy skin over the snow.
Ghislane reached the VW, opened the door, then turned back. “It’s too late to do anything for Elke, you know. Too late to make amends.”
“I can find who murdered her,” Evan said.
“The only way is to … he wants to find you. You’re the target. Elke was just a stop along the way.”
“Just a stop,” Evan echoed. “She deserved so much more than that, didn’t she?”
“Yes, she did.”
“I agree. So then. I think I’ll stay here a bit longer.”
Ghislane gave her a stern look. “I think you’re wasting your time.”
“I want another look inside the volksbad. Maybe someone saw him.”
Ghislane inclined her head. “Okay. Will I see you again or are you done with us, done with me?”
There was nothing to say to that, so Evan turned and threaded her way toward the endless throng polluting the air outside the volksbad. But her eye was on the VW, and the moment she saw it going down the driveway, she climbed into the back of the first taxi in the wait line.
“Follow that VW,” she instructed the driver. She’d always wanted to say that.
30
FAIRFAX COUNTY, VIRGINIA
Ensconced in his den, one of the rooms in the mansion Lucinda was forbidden to enter, Samuel Wainwright Wells, notepad on his lap, sipped his Pappy Van Winkle bourbon from a cut-glass lowball glass.
He was currently engaged in conversation with Alice Stanwick, his nurse and personal secretary. She had begun schooling him when he was ten years old and she was fourteen going on twenty-five, a rare and precocious genius. She had been handpicked for him by his father, Louis, a towering man, brilliant, volatile, ruthless, with a massive ego that would hit you like a stone wall if you crossed him in even a minor way. Such was his power in those halcyon golden days that he had been known to reduce his rivals to near bankruptcy or suicide. Starting when she was seventeen, when Alice wasn’t schooling young Samuel she was in bed with Louis.
She had left the fold soon after Louis died. She was thirty-four, and she spent the next decade earning her RN, then traveling throughout the Far East—Japan, Indonesia, China, Tibet, Sumatra, finally Nepal—studying with the great healers and shamans, learning their trade, and then returning home, to Samuel, with their secrets. No matter how far she went, she never lost touch with Samuel. They exchanged long letters, phone calls as often as possible. She made sure the connection between them would never be broken. Wherever she was in the world, she remained his first teacher, his most trusted adviser.
Now, she was still as rare and precious a light in Samuel’s life as she had been when he was a young boy. She had pale clear eyes, a patrician’s nose, and rouged cheeks. She had not shed a tear at Louis’s funeral or interment. But within a week she had donated all the expensive clothing Louis had bought for her to Goodwill and bought a new wardrobe of plain practical outfits in black, white, and camel. Ever since, her dress remained always nondescript. It occurred to Samuel that consciously or unconsciously she had chosen the colors of death. Mourners in the West wore black. Mourners in the East wore white. Camel was the color of the desert, a forbidding place, trackless, bereft of life.
She was the only person he trusted absolutely, the one he knew would never lie to him. Everyone else around him did; he took that as a matter of course. It came with the territory when you were so very wealthy. His father had taught him that, along with the admonition, “Never allow anyone to call you rich, son. That word is for people of a lower class. What we possess is wealth.” Samuel Wainwright Wells never forgot a single word his father said.
They were seated in a pair of persimmon wingback chairs with a marble and wrought-iron café table between them. To their right was an oriel window guarded by green watered-silk curtains pulled back with swags. Across the room a large wall-mounted flat-screen TV played soundlessly. For a couple of minutes they watched the images. The TV was programmed to auto-change to a different newscast every two minutes.
“Look at them,” Alice said conversationally. She wore her still-thick hair unfashionably long. It was the color of silver and shone like metal. She was knitting him a sweater. In her later years she had taken up knitting as a way to keep her fingers nimble, protecting their arthritic joints from stiffening up too badly. “They’re like the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz,” she said, referring to the coast-to-coast rioters, whose disturbances were, according to plan, ratcheting up. Mass shootings, looting, drummed-up protests devolved into full-scale riots, burning big-box stores, retail storefronts, overturned vehicles. “Soon the entire country will be on fire,” she said.
“Can’t be soon enough,” the Old Man grunted. His face twisted, the seams down his cheeks seemed to crater, but perhaps that was only a trick of the light. “Now,” he said without looking at her.
Alice was at once on her feet. “The periods between—”
“I don’t want to hear that,” he thundered, and bit his lower lip. “None of my business.”
She unlocked a cabinet, drew out a tray with four Styrofoam beds meant for syringes. Only one remained. She drew it out, went through the familiar ritual: alcohol on cotton ball, clean his upper right arm, uncap the one-time-use syringe, inject him. He made a face, like a child forced to drink cod liver oil. “It burns. Oh, how it burns.”
“You know that means it’s fresh and working.” Alice turned away, disposed of the used syringe so no one would find it. “You’ve used…” She halted, thought better of the rebuke. “That was the last dose.”
He glared at her as if his eyes were a weapon. “Order an immediate delivery. Do I have to tell you everything?” The serum gave him an unpleasant, almost feral edge while it was being absorbed by his body. But she knew this, she had been trained well, and his sharp words flowed over her like water over a rock.
Alice, back in her chair, called in the order on her cell. “I don’t care if it costs more. And increase the standing order from one tray to two.” She listened. “Do I care what it costs?” She disconnected, uninterested in a reply.
She glanced up at the riots flitting across the TV screen. She knew she needed to change the subject; he became low if he dwelled on his medication. “The people. These sheep. With their blood up they’re an unthinking mass.”
“When I was in college,” Samuel Wainwright Wells drawled, “I observed an experiment. Rats responding to electrical stimuli. Get them to do this, get them to do that, as you wished.” He gestured at the screen. “Same thing.”
“Well, not quite.” Alice contemplated the ceiling, her mind turning over, turning, always grinding facts to dust, like grist in a mill. “Today there are so many forces at work in our favor, destabilization chief among them. When people feel threatened as whites do now they turn to like-minded people. Religion, faith empower them in a world that threatens to marginalize them. You promise them strength, Sammy. You promise to protect them from the encroaching tide of people of color, radical libs who want to take away whatever’s left of their lives.”
Needles clicking, stitches lining up like good soldiers at attention. “You provide hope and, just as important, an outlet for their rage. You provide targets they can blame for the country’s upheaval. You give them everything they need to express themselves, to reassure themselves they still matter. The result: a sense of belonging is more important than facts. Because facts contradict this sense of belonging, which is all they have.
“In short,” she concluded, “you have given them a magnifying glass which turns sunlight into heat, a way to burn their enemies alive.”
“What a victory, Alice! No one in this country has ever accomplished what I have! No one had the vision. No one had the nerve.”
“Or the wherewithal,” Alice interjected drily.
Samuel grunted, either in admission or in contempt. “By recruiting the radical right to my cause while demonizing the radical left I have effectively split this country right down the middle. That message is playing out overseas in Germany, France, Italy, Turkey, but it will be all the more potent once Titan-Firstar begins televising internationally tomorrow. Just in time for our nationwide American insurrection where we begin to take back our country from the left-wing socialists.” Samuel’s expression was smug. “The contracts are all signed, sealed, and delivered. Dylan sent me e-copies.” Dylan Soames was the corporation’s chief lawyer stationed in London. “He’s done a stellar negotiating job. Got better terms than we had initially discussed.”
“Soames will go far,” Alice acknowledged. “He takes orders well.”
The rioting kept Alice’s interest for only the length of two channel cycles, then her attention moved on. She watched Samuel’s gaze riveted to the screen of his notepad. No time like the present, she decided.
