Bluebird, page 19
She consults her notes, the map in her head, and the map on the train, and when she gets off at her stop, she has to step over a drunken man sleeping longways on the steps.
It’s a very different neighborhood from Powell House. There’s an elevated train, running loud and raining dirt from tracks above her head, darkening the rows of bars and barbershops that will also give you a tattoo. The gutters stink, and police sirens wail from two different directions. She gets a few long stares. But Eva hadn’t survived Berlin for nothing. She wraps her purse straps around her wrist and starts walking.
Some of the street signs are smudged. Or missing, as well as some of the numbers on the buildings. She ignores the women showing too much chest. She’d seen that in Berlin, too, only those women had been skinny, starving. She passes a man pushing a baby carriage, full to the brim with empty beer bottles, and then she turns the wrong way. Has to recross a street.
But she finds it. A corner building of dingy red bricks with a secondhand clothing shop on the first floor, now closed for the night, a sign flashing the word DINER in rhythm directly across the street. There’s a narrow doorway beside the shop entrance, a closed passage between the buildings leading to the upper floors. And on the other side, an alley, stretching back into an abyss her eyes can’t penetrate.
Eva stares at the building. She gets some catcalls from some passing sailors, but she knows how to ignore those, too. Rolf’s address is 2B, but there are no lights showing on the second floor at all. Just the blare of orange neon reflecting in the glass.
And she feels eyes all over her. Even though the sailors are gone. Her father could be up there, watching her from one of those dark windows. Or Rolf. Eva turns and dashes across the street, dodging a car that honks, and pushes open the diner door.
Faces swivel around to look at her. A man in a dirty apron smoking a cigar, something sizzling beside him on an open grill. Men in coveralls and frayed trouser hems. There’s a haze of smoke creeping along the ceiling and not another female in the place.
Eva goes to a booth beside the window and sits. The tabletop is sticky. But the menu of the diner is written on the outside of the glass, giving her a little cover from the building across the street. She thinks through the schedule Jake wrote down.
Rolf starts work at midnight. She’d thought he’d be home now, so she could watch him leave. If her father really is living with Rolf, that’s when he would be alone. If her father isn’t living with Rolf, that’s when she could try to get into the apartment and find out where he is.
“What do you want?”
Eva jumps. A woman in a pink uniform is standing beside her.
“If you’re not ordering, you need to go.” The woman’s fingernails are chipped, coffee stains dotting her hemline.
“Coffee, please. Black.”
“All right, honey.” The woman leans in and whispers. “Say, you know how to get to the subway, right?” Eva nods. “Well, don’t wait on me. Just leave a couple of cents on the table before you go.”
The coffee comes, weak and a little stale, and Eva watches the apartment. She finishes the coffee, and the waitress sighs and refills her cup while one of the men on stools yells for her. Then the bus pulls away from the opposite curb and Eva sits up. And shrinks back down again. Because there is Rolf.
He’s wearing slacks and a white shirt, a paper sack of groceries in his arms. Except for the coveralls, she can’t remember ever seeing him out of uniform. He looks like Rolf. And somebody else. His brown hair is thinning, and when he turns to look for his way across the street, she can see the long, jagged scar running down his cheekbone. For a moment, she remembers what it felt like, to hit him with that chunk of concrete. It makes her sick.
She thinks of the knife in her purse and feels sicker.
She should say the names. All the names. Find her anger.
Rolf goes to the little door beside the secondhand shop and puts a key to the lock. He disappears and Eva waits. Watching. And on the opposite side of the building, a curtained window glows on the second story. That is the apartment. If her father is there, he’s been sitting alone. In the dark.
And then she isn’t sitting alone, because someone is sliding into her booth.
Jake is glaring at her from across the table.
“What are you doing here?” she says.
“What am I doing here? What are you doing here?”
All the faces are turned her way again. Eva lowers her voice. “I do not need you to take me to every place I have to go.”
“And this is a place you have to go, is it? A diner in the Bowery? After dark? Had a sudden yen for bad coffee and a tattoo, did you?”
Now the waitress is glaring.
“How did you find me?”
“It wasn’t that hard. Since I gave you the address this afternoon. And after you woke the whole neighborhood with that ride down the fire escape.”
“How do you know I did that?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Eva. Maybe the fact that you weren’t in your room and there was a print on the toilet lid from a really little foot.”
Eva bites her lip. “Do they know I am gone?”
“No. What do you take me for?”
“Is Brigit …”
“Sleeping like the dead. You gave her those pills, didn’t you?”
Eva nods. Jake runs his hands through his hair, jaw clenching and unclenching. A shadow moves briefly across the second-story window. “So, spill,” he says. “What are you …”
“Shhh.”
The light in the second story has gone out.
A few seconds, and Rolf comes out the street door. His sack is gone and he has a jacket on now, his hair neatly combed. Jake doesn’t say anything. He’s seen him.
Rolf walks down the street and turns the corner, heading toward the subway. Eva looks up at the lifeless windows.
Her father isn’t there. But Jake is. Why can’t he leave her alone? And then she doesn’t have to search for her anger, because her insides are going up in flames. She’s sick of her rotten deal. If she wants to find out where her father is, her opportunity is now. She turns to Jake.
“Did anyone follow you?”
“Your friend was out front. But I went out the back, like you did. Only I used the door. I didn’t see anybody …”
Eva grabs her purse, digs into the little pocket with her change, and puts a dime on the table. The waitress could probably use something extra. Then she gets up and walks out of the diner.
“Hey,” says Jake, “wait …”
She trots over the pavement to the dark alley beside Rolf’s apartment. It smells of garbage and worse things, but Eva sees what she thought she might. A fire escape. And the ladder is pulled up high, like it had been at Powell House. She starts scooting a metal trash can, positioning it underneath, a dog barking at her noise.
“Should I even bother asking you what the hell you are doing?” Jake hisses from somewhere behind her.
She steps on a crate, one hand against the brick wall, and up onto the trash can lid. Teetering in her heels. She reaches, but she still can’t grab the ladder.
“I need a … a … einen Regenschirm!”
“What?”
“For the rain! To get the ladder.”
“What rain?”
She stretches for the ladder.
“You want an umbrella,” Jake says. “The word is umbrella! What you’re going to need is a lawyer. What am I supposed to tell Martha when you’re arrested?”
A man in soiled clothes stumbles out of the dark part of the alley, waving his hands as he staggers away. But no one on the street has taken notice. Yet.
Jake says some words she doesn’t know and probably shouldn’t. “Oh, stop it before you break your head! Grab my hands and step on my shoulders.”
He squats down, raising his hands. Eva takes them, and gets one foot on a shoulder and then the other, trying not to spear him with her heels. He grunts, her skirt half over his face, her purse sliding down her arm to hit him in the head. She reaches up, the balance much harder than she would have guessed.
“Do not look up,” she whispers.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Eva. Do you know how bad your shoes hurt?”
The ladder is just above her. She stretches out, wobbling. Jake takes one shaky step forward and she’s got it, pulling it down slow. Quiet. It goes almost to the ground. She gets two hands on it, gingerly stepping sideways from Jake’s shoulders to the rungs, climbing fast to the landing at the second floor.
The window is dark, but when she crouches down, she thinks there’s a kitchen on the other side, a smooth surface like a table just beneath the sill. She pushes on the sash gently, and less gently. It’s locked. Then Jake is beside her, pulling up the ladder and hooking it into place. He spins her around by the shoulders. His pretty eyes are narrowed. Hot.
“Spill,” he whispers. “Why are you trying to get arrested?”
“There’s no one inside. But he will know others. There will be information …”
“Information you don’t think Cruickshanks will share with you?”
Eva thinks fast. “Cruickshanks will not know what he’s seeing. It could be the only way … to catch them.”
Jake puts his hands in his pockets, his jaw working.
“Go back to the diner,” she says, “and I will break the glass.”
She’s never seen someone laugh while they’re angry. Jake looks down at her, shaking his head.
“Do you really think for one second that I’m going to let you do that?”
He lifts his hand between them, and out jumps a little silver pocketknife. Then his head jerks around like someone tapped him on the shoulder.
Across the alley, five small faces stare from the opposite fire escape, only just silhouetted by a covered bulb in the window behind them. Some sitting, some on their knees, hanging on to the iron rails from a bare mattress that fills the landing like an outdoor bed.
“She forgot her keys,” Jake says. The oldest girl giggles.
Then Jake takes his little knife and jimmies open the window.
JAKE CRAWLS IN the window first. Then his arms reach out, helping Eva over the table, lifting her to the floor without noise. They’re in a dark kitchen, very small, with a refrigerator that hums. But there’s no other sound from the apartment.
“Stay here,” he whispers. “And don’t turn on a light.”
He tiptoes through the kitchen door.
Eva smells disinfectant, and even in the dim light from the window, she can see that the countertops are gleaming. Her father wouldn’t accept anything less. Jake comes back, still quiet, but talking a little louder.
“There’s no one here. Tell me what we’re looking for.”
“Letters,” she whispers. “Papers.” She steps from the kitchen into a living room, where she can just make out a sofa, a chair, maybe a radio on the table.
“Don’t turn on the light in here. You can see it from the street.”
“He’s gone to work,” Eva whispers. But she doesn’t turn on the light.
Through a second door is an interior hallway, pitch-black until Jake finds the switch. It’s white, a little dingy, cracks along the ceiling and linoleum freshly scrubbed. The front door is here, with three extra locks, and three more doors, two on the right, one at the end.
The first door is a bathroom. Spotless. The next a bedroom. Jake finds the light switch, and there’s no desk, only a chest of drawers, a side table with a lamp, and a bed, spread up without a wrinkle.
“The guy must be a great janitor,” Jake mutters, opening a drawer. “Because this place is neat as a pin.” He looks carefully through some socks. “What time did you say he was supposed to be at work?”
“Midnight,” Eva whispers. This is Rolf’s room. She can tell. Because it’s so empty.
“You really think he’s gone already? It’s only a little past nine.”
Eva doesn’t answer, because she’s opened the drawer of the side table. There’s only one thing in it, a single photograph, facedown. And when she turns it over, she sees a picture of herself. She looks a little stern, her hair clipped back, hands folded on her pink party dress, the first one she’d ever worn with the neckline low, a huge Nazi eagle on the backdrop. They’d taken this for Rolf. To send to him during the war.
Eva drops it in her purse, before Jake can see. She can’t stand the thought of Rolf lying in bed, staring at her face. And then she can feel her pulse, beating in her temples, in the tips of her fingers.
Because there’s another bedroom.
She leaves Jake searching the drawers and walks down the hall. The walk is short. And feels long. And there is a smell. A scent she knows, and for a brief second the hallway shrinks, shrinks, down to the size of a box, pressing, and there is no air to breathe. She can’t breathe.
Then there’s too much air, and she’s gasping, standing at the end of the hall in front of the third door. Eva turns the knob.
The smell of the tobacco is strong. Recent. It’s difficult to be ready for a smell. It makes her fear rise, surge, go crackling in her veins. But she is sure now. This is her father’s room. She feels along the wall and switches on the light.
And steps back.
The room is empty. Bed neatly made, a chair and a lamp beside the window, a desk on the opposite wall. But it doesn’t feel empty, because the walls are covered with faces. Photographs taken close-up. Dozens of staring, haunted eyes. Men, women, children in striped shirts. Over the bed. Even one or two on the ceiling.
They’re identification photographs. Prisoners, only in much larger prints. Her father used to say how the night was his musing time. His time to think creatively about his work. He must have had these photographs enlarged. And brought them here. All the way to America. To look at every day.
His experiments.
And there are so many more than the names she recites.
She hears Jake suck in a breath behind her. “What is this?” he whispers.
She feels sick. And embarrassed, somehow, for him to be seeing this. She hurries to the little table beside her father’s chair, opens the drawer, leafing through the stack of books. Jake stands still, gazing at the walls.
“Are these from a concentration camp?” he asks.
“Yes,” Eva whispers.
“Do you know which one?”
“Sachsenhausen.” She can feel him looking at her.
“Do you know any of these people?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I can’t look at them.”
“Okay,” he says. And then just “Okay.”
Eva knows he’s watching her. Like the four walls are watching. But the photographs have helped her focus. She knows where the Doctor lives now.
Inge’s anger is a fire wind. The silent inferno.
She will be coming back.
Eva turns to the bedside table. Finds a pair of glasses. A bottle of white pills. Slippers beneath the bed. She runs her hands underneath the pillow and feels something cool. Smooth. Leather over metal.
“Schneider,” says Jake, turning around. He’s holding up a letter. “This guy seems to know a Dr. Schneider at the hospital. I bet that’s how your guard got his job. Cruickshanks will want to know about that.”
Eva nods, and Jake tucks the letter in his jacket pocket before going back to the desk. She pulls out what was hidden beneath the pillow.
A gun. With the gold eagle embossed on the holster. The last time she’d seen this gun, it had been in her mother’s dead hand. So the lodge didn’t burn down after all. Her father must have gone there. After. And looked at them.
She slips the gun into her purse beside the photo. She hopes it’s loaded.
She could turn out the lights and wait, in that chair beside the window, maybe. He has to come home sometime. And she will be here, and justice will be done. For everyone.
Then Jake says, “Look at this.” He’s pulling out a case from beneath the desk. Like a briefcase with a handle, made of black metal. Fireproof. Eva comes around the bed. She presses a little button with a fingertip, and the latch snaps open.
A file full of neat, thin papers. The way the ones inside her mattress at Powell House had looked, before they got stepped on by soldiers, stuffed in her shirt, sewn into her skirt, and carried across the world.
The name on the file is Anna Ptaszynska.
Eva opens it, flipping through the information. Charts. Punishments. An experiment with a bird. All in her father’s handwriting. Jake tilts his head to read, brows down, but the files are in German. She stops on the last page.
When brought the prisoner, a Jewish agitator set for execution, the patient Anna Ptaszynska was given an order and the proper word. She left her dinner, picked up a gun, and shot the prisoner. She showed no symptoms of agitation or distress. She continued her dinner while the body was removed, and later, when returned to her natural personality, claimed never to have seen the dead man. I consider Anna’s training to be complete, and ready for whatever use the Führer deems …
Eva closes her eyes. What is this “proper word” that makes Anna Ptaszynska a killer? It can’t be anything too common. And then she thinks maybe it’s good that Brigit is the way she is. Maybe it’s better if her memories never, ever come back. All those times Annemarie was away. At the market in Halbersadt, they’d said. With her father. But that’s not where she’d been at all. Eva sets the file back in the case, snaps the lid shut.
Cruickshanks can’t have this. He can’t see it.
Jake frowns. “Who is Anna …”
A door slams somewhere in the building below them. They look at each other, breath held, and then the steps on the other side of the wall are creaking with the weight of feet.
“The light,” Jake whispers, and he is out the door. Silent.
Eva can hear two voices. One of them a woman. Very loud. They could be going to another apartment. Until she hears a key scraping in one of Rolf’s three locks. She snatches up her purse and the black case, smooths the blanket on the bed, and then Jake is back, shutting the door without a sound. She grabs his hand, pulling him toward the closet. He pulls back, reaches out, and turns off the light switch.
