Omega Rules--An Evan Ryder Novel, page 22
“You okay?” her host said as she returned to the bedroom.
Evan nodded with a genuine weariness. She didn’t for a moment trust anything this woman told her. On the other hand she could not fathom what game she was playing, hard-ass one minute, warm and fuzzy the next. She suspected that neither was the real Ghislane, but then who was she? Possibly she was intrigued by Evan or wanted something from her. Certainly, she was intrigued by Ghislane. “I guess I’m more tired than I realized.”
“We’ll kick your fatigue to the curb. I’ve got just the ticket. C’mon.” Ghislane led the way into the kitchen, flipped on the lights. It was a big, bright, cheerful space. Butter-yellow walls, butcher block island, stainless-steel sink, refrigerator, and stovetop. “All mod cons,” she said, spreading her arms to encompass the entirety. “All the money spent makes me want to throw up.”
“Why live here then?” Evan asked.
“Because contrary to local lore I’m human.”
Ghislane might have been making a sardonic joke, and yet equally she may have given an honest answer. Humans were complex—they often hated and loved something—or someone for that matter—at the same time.
Ghislane filled a kettle with water, set it on the stovetop. While the water was heating she fetched down two oversize cups and a square bottle with a label Evan could not read. Ghislane then made tea, but as it turned out the tea was only an excuse to drink. The cups were filled mostly with a clear, slightly viscous liquid.
“Slivovitz,” Ghislane said as they took their cups into the living room, sat in cozy upholstered chairs. Unlike most women, she did not fold her legs up under her. But then Evan didn’t either; the position made it impossible to spring up quickly in case of emergency.
Ghislane pushed hair off her forehead. “I’ll tell you about my parents if you like. Rich, indolent, living off the sweat of their workers.”
“All right,” Evan said. It didn’t matter to her what Ghislane wanted to say, she simply needed to take Ghislane’s temperature, to feel solid ground beneath her feet because she was walking so close to the cliff edge. “Anyway, I never expected hot chocolate.”
Ghislane guffawed. “Too right.” Her eyes were half-lidded, her inked animals glowing in the lamplight.
She took a long pull from her cup. Evan tried to do the same, but she was unused to slivovitz and even diluted by the tea the potent plum brandy made her eyes water and set her throat on fire.
“You want to know about me? Okay, here it is. My father was an angry man,” Ghislane began. “He was angry until the day he died. What caused his deep-seated anger? No one knows, not even my mother. Especially my mother.” Another pull from her cup. “He took his anger out on her. Until I was old enough, then he started in on me.”
Ghislane switched from the liquid mixture to hashish. When Evan declined she merely shrugged, continued to hold the aromatic, musky smoke deep in her lungs, releasing it after the longest time with a hiss like a steam engine.
“He craved a boy, you see; his manhood demanded it. Instead, she gave him me, so I suppose it could be said that he was angry at her womb. But, really, his anger preceded my mother’s unspeakable failure. But I know nothing of his early life. He wouldn’t even tell us where he was born. He must have had family: a mother and father, at the very least, but his lips remained sealed about them, about possible siblings. His past is a mystery, a closed book to which only he had the key.”
“If he wanted a boy so badly why didn’t he divorce her and try with another woman?” Evan asked.
Ghislane bared her teeth. “Simple. All the money belongs to my mother. The company, the factories, the investments. Everything.”
She held more smoke, her voice coming thin as if through a bad cell connection. “Her family is very powerful, very influential, vindictive as hell. He couldn’t—or wouldn’t—meddle with that.” She laughed bitterly. “Maybe in the end that’s what killed him.”
Evan noted that Ghislane said “her family” not “my family.”
After taking up the hash pipe Ghislane had lost interest in the plum brandy. Meanwhile, that same liquor was lighting up Evan’s esophagus. When it hit her stomach and its acid she wondered whether it would set off some kind of gastric bomb.
“Of course they don’t like me at all. I’m what d’you call it? Excommunicated.” She shrugged. “Like it makes any difference to me.”
“And your mother?”
Ghislane restocked her pipe, lit up, drawing the smoke in more slowly, more thoughtfully. “Well, shit, she’s of no use to anyone—but her family dotes on her; she’s the youngest of the three sisters.” Her eyes looked glassy through the smoke haze wreathing her head. She waved her arm around. “This is her passion, or maybe her obsession. All these things—and what do they add up to, hm?” She drew on her pipe. “Then again every so often I sell one thing or another to fund the group.”
A short silence descended and Evan had the curious sensation if she didn’t break it open it would smother them both.
“You asked me before if I’d gotten enough information,” Evan said.
“Mm hm.”
Ghislane’s eyes were slits behind the smokey haze. Was she awake or drifting off to sleep?
“You don’t sound like you and Elke did before. You sounded like religious zealots.”
“Ah.” Ghislane shifted slightly. “That’s for our rank-and-file, who are believers. That’s how Elke and I roped them in. They’re like sheep, those ones. They’ll believe anything as long as it’s religion-based. Like the Wellses, those creepy American white supremacists. I know quite a bit about them, you know. America is in thrall to the Deep State. And who controls the Deep State? Jews and libs, supposedly, but you and I know it’s Wells and reactionaries like him.”
Ghislane’s breath soughed out like the wind in the willows. “Here in the fatherland the neo-Nazis are convinced that these deeply offensive influxes of Muslims will destroy Germany from the inside out.” She sat up as if suddenly pricked by a bed of thorns. Her eyes were alight, shining in the buttery lamplight. “Who could have thought of such a diabolical scheme, hm? Our neo-Nazis ask themselves: Who is evil enough to use these immigrants as pawns? Who holds a grudge against us? Who keeps rummaging through our past? Who refuses to let our own dead rest in peace? ‘I’ll tell you who,’ they say over and over. ‘The Jews.’” Ghislane shook her head. “And then the lie, told over and over, becomes their truth. ‘The goddamned fucking Jews,’ they say.”
24
NUREMBERG
A clock ticked off the seconds somewhere far away inside the townhouse. Odd that Evan hadn’t heard it before. The metronomic beat fought its way through atmosphere turned as frigid as a meat locker. Evan was dizzied again and for a moment or two the river water had taken her under again, clasping her to its depths. She gave a tiny gasp as if awakening from a nightmare.
Evan stood up, paced slowly around the room. She was desperate to look at anything except Ghislane’s face. The woman had genuinely startled her and for that she was as angry with herself as she was with Ghislane.
“You all right?”
Evan flinched at the sound of Ghislane’s voice.
“My God, you’re not a Jewess, are you?”
“I’m not,” Evan said in a rather strangled voice. And then, stronger, “Not a single drop of Jewish blood in my ancestry.” What else was she going to say? Ghislane seemed to have excluded herself from the bigoted beliefs in that little speech, but Evan was no closer to knowing the truth about her, or about the Omega e-file. In order to stay in place she needed to carefully string Ghislane along the line of neo-Nazi thinking. To do that she knew she was required to espouse a repugnant ideology.
“Huh,” Ghislane was saying now, “well, that’s a relief. I was worried I’d offended you.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Well, you’re American, and I know how Americans—”
“Certain Americans,” Evan corrected her. “And then I’m Omega so … In any event, there have always been fascists in America. Notorious fascists like Virgil Effinger, Seward Collins, Charles Lindbergh, the Ku Klux Klan—the list goes on. The Brits, too. You’ve only to look at the history of the Royals. That family’s half-German, anyway.”
Had nothing changed since the rise of Adolf Hitler? Evan asked herself. Did the false promise he held out of a white Aryan world still glitter like gold? It was still so irresistible to so many because change was always terrifying to people. In the 1930s it was the fall into abject poverty after World War I, now it was the constant influx of immigrants fleeing their own abject poverty, Hispanics and Muslims both. Then as now the outsider was the enemy that needed to be eradicated so the country could be cleansed. This insidious form of fascism was like a brood of cicadas, lying dormant for years only to emerge as a whole new brood, more virulent than the last.
“Nevertheless,” Ghislane said, “I feel as if I’ve made you uncomfortable.”
“I’m uncomfortable here in Germany.” A lie; her parents lived in Germany. “In Nuremberg.” True enough. “I’m unnerved by what has happened since I arrived here.” Lies are so much more believable when they’re strewn with the truth.
“I can’t say I blame you. I regret the Roman Forum thing back at the volksbad.”
Evan shrugged. “What’s done is done.” As if being thrown into the drained pool with Rolf to kill or be killed was of no import. “I was just wondering…” She turned to look at Ghislane. “About your father.”
“He died a lifetime ago. Fell down a flight of stairs one night when I was thirteen. Probably drunk.”
“I’m so sorry.” Evan was trying to square the image of Ghislane’s father she’d seen in the photo with what Ghislane had just said. That man did not have the appearance of a drunkard. But then again how much could you really tell from a single photograph?
“Don’t be. I didn’t shed a tear, believe me.” Ghislane jerked her shoulders as if wanting to rid herself of a memory—her memory of him. “He treated my mother badly and me even worse.”
“What exactly—?”
Ghislane’s eyes flashed. “Like I said, a lifetime ago.” Meaning she didn’t want to talk about it. Fair enough. She put the pipe aside. Apparently even she had had enough hash for the time being. She cleared her throat. “I didn’t really mean to provoke you, but I needed to know … because … well, this is a concern of a number of my people, most notably Dieter.”
Dieter again, Evan thought. Something would have to be done about him if she was to get anywhere with Ghislane. Horst Wessel had been convinced the message to American Omega had emanated from inside this group. The longer she spent with Ghislane the more she suspected that Wessel was right. Evan turned her full attention to what Ghislane was saying.
“We found out someone in the group had a Jewish mother.” Ghislane sat with her arms crossed. Despite how much hash she had smoked she appeared less relaxed now. “Can you imagine? How could she possibly be trusted?”
“And now she’s…”
“Gone,” Ghislane said with a ripple of her upper lip. “Gone and forgotten.”
Evan was about to ask her what that meant when Ghislane rose with surprising alacrity. “It’s time I showed you.…” Her voice petered out as she disappeared into the kitchen. She returned moments later with a carving knife. She held it as if she were about to stab Evan to death, but there was no sense of violence behind her eyes. No dullness either. Rather a clear sense of purpose.
She stood in front of Evan, knife held in her right hand. Slowly she opened her left hand, revealing the pale palm. Her gaze never left Evan’s face as she drew the knife blade across her palm. Blood welled, rich and thick. Then she curled her fingers over the cut. Her left hand was a fist. She had not flinched or made a sound. Not even a flicker of her eyelids.
“It’s not that I don’t feel pain,” was all she said.
It sounded like a partial sentence, the following words abruptly cut off. But Evan knew better. Ghislane was demonstrating something about herself, something elemental, primal. It’s not that I don’t feel pain, she was saying. It’s that I’ve felt pain so often I don’t care about it anymore. She means she’s damaged, and it’s the damaged who are cold-blooded, the damaged who are the most dangerous. She thought about the girl whose mother was Jewish. Gone and forgotten, Ghislane had said. In other words, dead. And immediately her mind went to her sister, irredeemably damaged. Cold-blooded? Dangerous? Was Bobbi, then, better off dead? Better dead than to turn out like Ghislane, Evan thought, and was instantly ashamed.
The knife lay on the table behind Ghislane. The thin ribbon of blood running along the edge of the blade turned the knife murderous. It was no longer for chopping vegetables although it might still serve for carving meat.
Ghislane opened a drawer in the same table, removed a strip of white cloth which she wound around her palm. She tied it off with her right hand and her teeth, and Evan wondered whether this was a ritual often performed, or whether it was a ritual altogether. Either way, the act of self-inflicted wounds said something profound, something terrible about Ghislane’s fractured psyche.
“Do you feel better when you hurt yourself?” she asked.
Ghislane gave her a quizzical look. “Doesn’t everyone?”
“No,” Evan said. “Not everyone.”
“You?”
“I don’t draw blood.”
“Of course.” Ghislane gestured toward Evan’s wound, her bruises. “You can’t tell me you don’t feel good when you win a fight.”
“It doesn’t work like that for me,” Evan told her. “I hurt myself in other ways.”
Ghislane’s eyes opened wide, questioning, avid, like a pelagic bird. “Tell me.”
Having put one foot into the darkness, Evan hesitated. Ever since Ghislane revealed her group’s rabid anti-Semitism, and likely her own, the way forward had become more perilous than she had bargained for. On the other hand, there was no backing out now; the only way forward was to enter the darkness fully. That meant opening herself up to Ghislane because her sense of the other woman was that as a consummate liar herself she was a bloodhound for lies. She could sniff them out. Even when she wasn’t sure she smelled a lie she knew something was off. Evan knew that if she lied now the game was up and she might as well walk away without discovering who created the Omega file that got Armistad killed. Having come all this way, having almost died more than once she could not allow that to happen.
“My sister.” She looked Ghislane straight in the eye and did not blink. “I was not good to her. I looked down on her, played tricks on her, sometimes hurtful tricks. Once, when we were children, I left her alone overnight in a cave near where we lived.” It all came out in a rush, as if she were vomiting up a poison that had lain festering deep inside her. “And as adults, I didn’t approve of her lifestyle; I didn’t understand her, didn’t take the time. I didn’t love her enough.”
“That’s all?” Ghislane sneered.
“Do you have siblings?” Evan asked her.
“I don’t.”
Did she or didn’t she? Ghislane thought and acted like an only child. “Then you can’t know. I didn’t understand until it was too late that Bobbi was a piece of my own heart. There’s a hole there now that can’t be repaired. No one can take her place.”
“Where is she?”
“Dead. So is her husband.” Evan’s mind flashed back to finding Paul Fisher hastily buried in the Fisher backyard. Suddenly the room felt claustrophobic, as if the walls were closing in on her. She went past Ghislane to stare out the window. The snow had ceased, and this changed the aspect of the night completely. As she looked the full moon emerged from behind swiftly racing clouds, carpeting the sidewalks in a luminescent blue. Shadows reared up suddenly, taking on ominous shapes, then receded after a car’s sluggish passing. The snow looked thick, boggy, as if it might suck you down like quicksand. She didn’t like the look of it and it made her feel even more cut off, as if she were in the desolate Berber desert.
“I never knew who I was,” Ghislane said from behind her, voice soft as velvet, slow, as if she were measuring each syllable, tasting it on the tip of her tongue. “I never felt comfortable in my own skin. Does that make sense?”
“Of course it does.” Again Evan found herself thinking of Bobbi. Is that how her sister had felt, right from the beginning? Is that why she took the FSB’s offer, thinking she’d leave everything behind, start afresh?
Evan was about to ask her to elaborate when there came a knock on the door. Ghislane crossed the room to the entryway, pulled open the door. Two sets of footsteps, one heavier than the other. She turned from the window to see Dieter standing in the living room, a venomous look on his face.
“I knew you’d be here.” He bit off each word as if they were forkfuls of schnitzel.
“Why is he here?” Evan asked.
“Get out, Dieter,” Ghislane snapped.
“Fuck you.”
“You see how it is.” Ghislane sighed. “‘In this world there is no justice, only mourning for what was lost, piece by bloody piece as we move through it.’”
Evan looked hard at Ghislane and with an internal shiver wondered whether she was already a corpse. Nihilism had been fathered by Nietzsche. But you couldn’t trust Nietzsche, let alone admire a man who wrote, “Woman was God’s second mistake.” So screw him and nihilism to the outhouse wall.
Dieter, untroubled by such existential concerns, had drawn a pistol from behind his back.
“You killed Rolf. I don’t know who you are. For all I know you’re another Jewess.”
“She isn’t, Dieter,” Ghislane said calmly.
“What, because she told you?” He scoffed. “Please. They all lie, these Jews. Lying’s in their filthy blood. It’s one of the sicknesses they carry.” He gestured wildly. “And you—you called for that Roman circus. It was you who started the boulder rolling down the hill that killed Rolf.”
“Rolf had his chance,” Ghislane said with utter calmness. “Rolf wasn’t up to the task I set him. He failed. No one’s fault but his own, Dieter.”
