Fields Where They Lay, page 31
The first eager stars had popped out directly overhead, although the sky above the hills to the west was still washed with magenta. I was parked on a narrow street south of Ventura, about two miles from the house I once shared with Kathy and Rina. The breeze was quite cool—chilly, even—but the hood of my car was warm, and that was where I was reclining with my back against the angle of the windshield. I was looking at the little points of fire burning in the broad cold emptiness of the heavens.
Must have been something to have been a shepherd, seeing that star. The angels, I remembered, were in Luke and the star was in Matthew. Dividing up the miracles, I supposed. I wondered how it felt to believe fully and unquestioningly in all that extravagant divinity. I took my own divinity where I could find it, and most of the time it was measured in small sips, usually delivered through natural beauty and acts of unprovoked kindness. Divinity, I thought, should have its roots in mystery. Mine was distressingly everyday.
There were a hundred things I could have done, but I didn’t have the will to do any of them. The edge of sorrow is especially sharp in what’s supposed to be a season of joy. I was exhausted, which meant that my emotional immune system was tissue thin, my eyes were heavy, and my body seemed to weigh four hundred pounds. I felt adrift, and none of the lighthouses toward which I usually steered—Rina and Kathy, Ronnie, even the occasional joy of solitary freedom—burned brightly enough to draw me. I envied those shepherds that brilliantly unfamiliar star.
If I’d felt any lower, decomposition would have set in and I would have been found in that exact spot on Christmas morning, the biggest and ugliest hood ornament in the history of Tarzana. Just as I reached the deep end of my pool of self-pity, my phone rang.
“Where are you?” a male voice said.
“Depends on who this is.”
“Really? You must live an interesting life. Your location is variable according to who’s asking? Sounds like quantum physics. I’m where I am, no matter who’s calling.”
“Hi, Shlomo.”
“Come on,” he said. “Get over here. You’re missing it.”
“Over where?”
“Edgerton.”
“Shlomo,” I said, “I personally like you quite a bit, but there is nothing happening at Edgerton I wouldn’t much rather miss. My life plan, while it might look wobbly and weak-willed to others, definitely does not include Edgerton.”
“How about this?” he said. “How about I absolutely guarantee you a good time?”
“At Edgerton?”
“We’re only starting at Edgerton, and then we’re off. Come on, get your heinie in gear. It’s after six already. We’ll be leaving in about twenty minutes.”
“For where?”
“Those who come,” he said, “learn. Meet us at the loading dock behind Gabriel’s.”
“Who’s us?”
“Did you hear me? I said, the loading dock behind Gabriel’s.”
I was sitting bolt upright. “Ten minutes,” I said.
I almost missed them.
The parking lot was emptying, leaving only the lonely shoppers who didn’t want to go home to no one, the terminally indecisive, or the procrastinators like me. If it hadn’t been for the shopping skills of Anime and Lilli, I thought, I’d probably be in there myself.
Most of the remaining cars were parked close in, and the vast majority of them were on the western side, where the entrances were, but even so, I drove past the activity at the loading dock without seeing anything except a couple of straggler cars and a small, nondescript van. A light being waved back and forth in my rearview mirror slowed me down and turned me around, and at the other end of the beam I found Shlomo, still in his Santa suit but with his beard pulled to one side, the way some businessmen tuck their neckties over their shoulders when they eat lunch.
“It’s Mister Mystery,” Shlomo said when I pulled up next to him.
“Do you actually own any clothes?”
“Corduroy,” he said, “I got corduroy. Retired teachers wear corduroy. Get out of the car and lend a hand.”
Behind him, the darkness of the mall’s outer wall framed a darker rectangle above the dock—an airplane door—and in that darkness, with the imprint of Shlomo’s flashlight still ping-ponging off my retina, I could just see people moving around. There seemed to be eight or nine of them.
By the time I’d parked the car, I had my night vision back, and the figures inside the open loading dock had resolved themselves into people I recognized: LaShawn from KissyFace, Wink from iShop, and eight or nine others whose shops I could identify but whose names I couldn’t recall offhand. Many of the people, in short, who had been playing roles in Bonnie’s scheme—or, as I hoped Barkov now believed—Vlad’s.
But what I was seeing wasn’t part of any plan I’d suspected. A jumble of goods was piled at the end of the dock, on a sheet taken from the stock of (I guessed) Interior Harmony. Heaped up there I saw clothes, gadgets, toys, blankets, food baskets, small items of (I supposed) bric-a-brac that had to have come from Bonnie’s. Still in his green polo shirt despite the cold, Wally was taking items from the dock and putting them into the back of the van.
“Give me a hand,” he said. “Got to try to keep the stuff in categories. We can’t go searching through it at every stop.”
“What are your categories? And where are you stopping?”
“We,” he said. “You’re with us, right?” Without waiting for an answer, he pointed at the piles he’d made in the back of the van. “Clothes for women, clothes for men, clothes for kids, extra-warm clothes for, you know, everybody. Shoes, toys—we don’t got enough toys in the mall, so we bought some extra—electrical gizmos from Wink, baskets of all kinds of stuff that LaShawn made up. She makes really pretty baskets, maybe a little heavy on the makeup, but you’d be surprised at how much women want the makeup. Then we got blankets, pillows, and little whatzits, mostly Bonnie’s. People like whatzits, too.” He stopped for a moment, and for the third time since I’d met him I heard him swallow, and then he said, “Let’s get to it.”
We got to it. About fifteen minutes later, when the van was loaded, LaShawn, Jackie—mistress of The Paper Dolls—and Wink clambered into it, with LaShawn at the wheel. It was apparently her van. Five others jammed into a dark sedan with Wally driving, and Shlomo said, “I’ll ride with you.”
“So,” I said as I followed the other vehicles out of the lot, “where are we going?”
“Studio City first, and I don’t know the address, so don’t lose them.” He settled back and switched his beard from the shoulder on my side of the car to the other one, probably so it wouldn’t tickle his face when he looked over at me. “This is my third year of this. This is why I was worried when they decided not to use me this year, just to go with poor Dwayne, before it got crowded. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
“You knew about Bonnie’s plan?”
“No, not the shoplifting part. But these people have been setting aside some of their stuff every Christmas, and I guess one of the effects of Bonnie’s idea of having them all steal from themselves is that it increased the number of gifts that got stored away in Gabriel’s.”
I said, “Oh,” and spent a moment getting used to the notion that I wasn’t actually so smart.
I had to step on it to squeeze through a yellow light—LaShawn, in the lead, had an enviably aristocratic attitude toward things like lane lines and stoplights—and when we’d made it, Shlomo said, “I wonder where all these people will go.”
“I’ve been thinking about that myself.”
“This has to be the end for Edgerton,” he said. “Not that anybody will miss it very much. But I think there’s going to be a hole in these people’s lives. Even if it’s just the community that happened there. There are a lot of friends there.”
“So we’re giving all these things away.”
“Very perceptive. Maybe you are a detective.”
“It’s a shame that they probably won’t be able to do this anymore. People should have known about it.”
“When thou dost give thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee,” Shlomo said. “That’s from your part of the Bible. No, I think they’ve done just fine without publicity. And you know what? It’s probably made their time at Edgerton much better than it would have been. I just wish Bonnie had been here to see this.”
“And Sam,” I said. “Don’t forget Sam.”
°°°
The first stop was a family shelter in Studio City, where we were obviously expected. Everyone was seated at long tables, eating a Christmas dinner, but the moment the door opened in front of us, half a dozen kids jumped to their feet for a ragged but enthusiastic version of “Here Comes Santa Claus.” A cheer went up when Shlomo Ho-Ho’d his way into the room with his sack over his shoulder, and I was surprised to see that the people in the van and those who had been jammed into Wally’s car had somehow divided among them bright green bits and pieces of the Edgerton elves’ costumes. A cap here, a cape there, green gloves, a pair of tights, a bracelet of bells: they were patchwork fragments, but everyone who came in with Shlomo was identifiably of the elven persuasion. When we left, about fifty people crowded through the door to watch us go. Shlomo pointed to me and said to a couple of kids, “He’s taking me to my sleigh. This is a no-reindeer zone,” and we pulled out.
Wally had been right: they were thin on toys. After a quick stop at an almost empty Toy Palace, where I let people shop for a few hundred bucks’ worth of toys that would be my contribution, we went to a shelter on Van Nuys Boulevard for kids who had been rescued from the sex trade, and then a refuge for battered women, always working our way back toward Edgerton. After the fourth stop, a care facility for the aged, Shlomo said, “I owe you the rest of the story,” and he told it to me in between the incandescent pauses to deliver Christmas.
33
Noëlle
In the wake of the scream from down the hallway, the room seemed to Morris to have come alive in some way; the flames on the candles flickered erratically in the wake of Autenburg’s departure, and shadows danced everywhere. When the cry of pain was repeated, Autenburg called for Werner, and the soldier took off at a trot, heading for the back of the house, gun in hand. As he crossed the bit of carpet Werner caught the toe of his boot on something—a nail, Morris remembered—and when he pitched forward his automatic went off, a deafening noise in the small room, and from the direction in which Mme. Loiseau had disappeared, the moan of pain scaled up into a scream of terror, and then a male voice, either Helmut’s or Autenburg’s, was shouting panicked instructions. Werner disappeared into the hall.
The smell of the fired gun was overpowering. Looking self-conscious, Schmidt brought his automatic up and pointed it in the general direction of the Americans, but his eyes kept flicking toward the hallway.
Morris saw Jerome Keystone cross his legs and begin to slide his hand toward the boot with the two-shot in it. As Morris was estimating the length of the jump to the front door, on the other side of which their weapons were stored, Autenburg came back in, his face even redder than before.
He nodded approval at Schmidt’s vigilance and turned to the kitchen, but M. Loiseau rose from his chair quickly, ignoring the spasmodic jerk of Schmidt’s gun as it followed his movement, and shouted a burst of furious French at the sergeant. Morris caught only one word: Enciente.
“Yes,” Autenburg said. He stopped, looking at M. Loiseau. “This is what I am believing,” he said. “She is—” He shaped a belly with his arms.
“It is now, I think,” M. Loiseau said. “She is many days late.”
The cry was repeated, but higher in pitch, and over it they could hear Mme. Loiseau, trying to calm her daughter and then calling, “Claude. The water, the water.”
Autenburg called out in German and got a shaky reply from, it sounded like, Werner. He nodded and waved M. Loiseau ahead, following him down the corridor.
Schmidt, his gun pointed in the general directions of the Americans, blinked several times and licked his lips.
“What a world,” Keystone said, slipping his fingertips into his boot, “to bring a baby into.”
Sabathia said, “She needs a doctor.”
Schmidt said, “My sister . . . has baby, three month before.”
“Everything go okay for her?” Keystone asked. He shifted to put the boot with the gun in it out of sight below the tabletop.
“It went good, good,” Schmidt said. His eyes drifted to the hallway. Keystone bent his head so he could see what he was doing.
Watching Keystone inching down toward his gun, Morris could almost see the sequence his friend was running in his mind: the only German gun in the room being wielded by a distracted teenager, the disorientation the kid would experience seeing the derringer in Keystone’s hand, the rush through the door to grab the weapons and disappear into the fog. The possibility that Schmidt would fire. The possibility that Schmidt would be bleeding to death on this farmhouse floor in a moment or two.
The young woman in the other room.
Morris said, to Keystone, “Jerome.” Keystone’s head came up, his eyes wide at the betrayal, but Morris said to him, “Jerome. I’m a doctor.”
Schmidt’s mouth dropped open, and Autenburg burst into the room and went straight into the kitchen. “Ihr Fruchtblase,” he said, moving things around on the stove. “Ihr Fruchtblase . . . is, is geplatzt—”
“Yes, her water has broken,” Morris said. “Let me see her. I’m a doctor.”
Autenburg said, “Yes? This is true?”
“I have my degree,” Morris said. “Ich habe—” His German, sketchy at best, had flown out of his head. “I have my, my—meinem Medizinstudium.”
“You have had baby—” Autenburg shook his head impatiently. “No, no, you have helped woman to—to bring baby before?”
“No,” Morris said. “But I know what needs to be done.” He felt compelled to add, “Unless things go really wrong. I mean, I’d hate to attempt a cesarean section, but—”
The girl at the end of the hall cried out again.
Autenburg’s gaze was so intense Morris could almost feel it blow straight through him. The German sergeant nodded once, brusquely, and said, “You tell us what to do.” Then he looked over at Sabathia and Keystone. “You. You stay sitting here, yes? Schmidt—”
Schmidt swiveled to point his gun back at the table where Sabathia and Keystone sat. Keystone lifted both hands above the table, fingers spread, and made the little back-and-forth movement that meant I’m not up to anything all over the world.
“I need soap, hot water, towels,” Morris said. “Now. I need to go in there.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Autenburg said in a tone that suggested he’d given the order several times already. “You go.” Then he called down the hall, something to Helmut and Werner, and stepped aside to make room for Morris. Over his shoulder he called out, “Schmidt, you stay here. You are too young.”
He repeatedly called for more light, and by the time Morris brought the baby, tiny and shining and perfect, into the lantern’s hard yellow gleam, the bedroom was almost as bright as day. The young woman on the wet mattress was undernourished and terrified, but the moment her mother used the word docteur, she put herself and her child unquestioningly into his hands. When she cried out during the delivery, it was because of pain rather than fear, and Morris encouraged her in his unstudied French to make noise, make all the noise she wanted. Once he added, idiotically, that she wouldn’t wake anyone up, and she smiled at him and the rigid doctor-face he had adopted to mask his terror dissolved into a smile of his own, and from then on they worked together.
The windows were defining themselves as pale grey rectangles by the time he had the child firmly in his grip and smacked its bottom, and when the child cried, the girl on the bed said, “Ohhhhhhh,” and tried to sit up so she could see it better, but her mother snapped a caution and she settled back. As Morris wiped the baby clean with damp cloths that had been boiled in the kitchen, Mme. Loiseau got extra pillows and lifted her daughter’s shoulders to slip the pillows behind her. From the time she caught sight of the baby, the girl never took her eyes off it.
“A daughter,” Morris said, wrapping the baby in a blanket. “Une fille.” He put the infant on her mother’s breast, and the mother curved her arms around the bundle, which chose that moment to begin to cry again.
“Une chanteuse,” the girl said, “a singer. Maman, elle s’appelle Noëlle.”
“Noëlle,” her mother said nodding. Then she came up to Morris and took both his hands in hers. “Merci, merci, merci. Thank you.”
Behind her the doorway darkened, and Autenburg stood there. He surveyed the room, his eyes pausing on the mother and child, and he said, “We heard the crying.” He cleared his throat. “Everybody wants to see the baby.”
“Her name is Noëlle,” Morris said. He felt light enough to drift away.
“Madame?” Autenburg said. “Can the men see Noëlle?”
Mme. Loiseau turned to her daughter, and her daughter said, “Yes. They have been so quiet.”
Autenburg made a brusque military bow and said, “Thank you,” and half a minute later the men were at the foot of the bed. There were no guns in the room. In the grey dawn of Christmas day, they all gazed down at the child, and Morris had to look away from Schmidt, whose face was as clear and transparent as water.
The three German privates and Keystone used two of M. Loiseau’s overcoats to make a kind of gurney and they cheered the mother into sliding across the bed and onto it as her mother held Noëlle, and then, with much cautioning in two languages, they carried mother and child to the dry bed in the other room, where M. and Mme Loiseau usually slept.
Morris was spared gurney duty, and when he went back into the front room he found Autenburg bent over a piece of paper. Autenburg said nothing while Morris, suddenly exhausted, collapsed into a chair and buried his face in his hands. He sat that way for a few minutes, hearing men making cooing sounds from down the hall as well as the scratch of pencil on paper.
