Rachel grinds out words. “You have my mother’s painting.”
“Yes. So I do. And—I believe I have the story correct, yes? Your Feter Fritz discovered it with a pawnbroker?” She pronounces the word with amused disdain. “How astonishing. It makes one suspect the hand of fate, doesn’t it? I sometimes sit and gaze at it, wondering if I could really have ever been so young. With so much fire. Your mother was a genius. She captured the essence of youth. Of desire.”
“And is this why we are here?” Rachel wishes to know. Is it for her to gloat? Kvell is the word she uses.
“What? No. I asked your uncle to arrange things not so I could kvell over a thing. But so I could offer you help. I want to help you, Bissel,” she declares.
“Help? From the one they called Red Angel?”
The Angel’s expression flattens. “Don’t use that name.”
“Why not? It was who you were. The Red Angel of Death. And help from her was always poison.”
“So I am to be blamed now for staying alive? For doing what was necessary? I thought you learned what courage survival took. I thought I had taught you that at least. But now you sound like a pitiful victim. The poor little Jewess who can never remove the Judenstern after it was sewn over her heart.”
Rachel shivers. With rage? With fear? With grief? She can speak only to spit a curse. Black sorrow she wishes upon the woman.
But the Angel is unimpressed. She shakes her head, disappointed, even as tears like ice are running down Rachel’s cheeks. “Ah, Bissel,” she laments. “In so einem Gewirr bist du,” the woman declares. Such a tangle you are in. Then she is digging into her alligator handbag for an expensive linen handkerchief. “You were a delicate child, so your mother always said. ‘Rokhl? She is a delicate little bird,’ is what she told me. Wipe your eyes,” she instructs, offering the linen square.
But Rachel refuses the offer, uses her palms to smear at her tears. “You cannot speak to me so. Ir zent nisht meyn muter,” she burns. You are not my mother.
“No,” the Angel admits, frowning lightly as she returns the handkerchief to her purse. “No. But I could be.”
Rachel’s glare goes jagged. She coughs, covering her mouth.
“I could be,” the Angel repeats. “I’m a very wealthy woman, Bissel. My late husband, Irving, was called ‘the Concrete King,’ and believe me, in New York City, the king of concrete was a very good thing to be. I could help you,” she presses. “Ikh ken helfn du.”
“You? Help me?”
“Is that so absurd? I have no children of my own. And your uncle tells me now that you are an artist. That you have inherited your eema’s talent.”
Rachel stares.
“I could help you if you’d allow it. I know many people in the art world,” she says. “I am well known as a collector. I have many connections I could share with you.”
“Such as David Glass,” Rachel notes leadenly.
“David? Yes, why not David? He has a good eye and is always interested in emerging talent.”
“I went to his gallery looking for Eema’s painting. The girl there acted as if I was demented.”
“Pfft!” The Angel dismisses this. There is a certain manic hunger creeping into her voice. Into her eyes. “That makes no difference. I spend plenty with the Glass Gallery. Plenty. So believe me, what I ask for, I will get. Oh yes. But Glass is only one gallery. It’s a big city. There are any number I could call on. Many debts I could collect.”
But Rachel has no reply to the bribe she is being offered. The bait laid by the Angel for her trap. “You made me into a murderer,” she announces and watches the woman’s face freeze, cut off in midbreath from her busy spree of possibilities. “I am the crime that you committed,” Rachel tells her. “And now you think you can buy my forgiveness? That I will sell myself like you did?”
The Angel’s expression levels. “I may have sold myself, Bissel, but never cheaply. Never for mediocre gains. I know more about you than you might guess. Your marriage to a man who makes pennies? No children. No future. A few paintings sold from a nameless gallery years ago. And then? Clapped into an asylum. My, what would your eema think of that? Her poor daughter? ‘What a waste,’ she would say.”
“Do not speak for her!” Rachel shouts, the rage like a blast of steam. “Don’t you dare speak for her! You murdered my mother!”
“I loved your mother,” the Angel shouts back. Painfully, as if her own words have cut her heart from her breast. “I was the one betrayed! She betrayed me! For you! For her child. Didn’t you ever figure that out? It wasn’t the world. It wasn’t her high-and-mighty reputation. It was you. The child! We couldn’t be together because of you! I was nineteen years old, Bissel. I would have given her myself in every way, but instead she gave me up! Passed me on to her brother all because of her little goat!”
The sky cracks open at that moment, and the rain that follows the thunder falls like a lead curtain. A man with a newspaper evacuates his bench, dashing away with his paper over his head. The Angel contains herself. Reassembles herself from her outburst and raises her umbrella.
“Ah. Now comes the flood,” she announces and then offers, “Shall we share my shirem?”
Rachel squints through the soaking downpour. She has felt a poison bubbling through her, but now it is on a full roil. She barely makes it off the bench before she heaves the whole boiling mess onto the grass, splattering the sculpture’s granite base with vomit. The sickness of it all coming up. The murderous eagles must be outraged at the affront, their slaughter interrupted. She spits.
The Red Angel has risen from her seat. She is standing there under the umbrella’s black crown, shoulders back, victorious now, a smug pity forming her expression. She thinks she won. She gazes down at Rachel as she says, “You think you are so special in your guilt, Bissel? It is so precious to you? So precious that it sickens you, but you cannot vomit it out because you do not want to. You want to keep it down in your belly where it can boil. But your guilt does not make you special.
“That girl in that farshtunken café off the Friedrich? With her silly plaits and beret? She was a casualty of war,” the Angel informs her. “Like tens of millions of others across the breadth of this farshtunken world. There was nothing special about her. Just as there was nothing special about your so-called crime. Yet you must make it so. You must make it such a terrible transgression that it stops you from living. You hide behind it, hide from life. But you need not. You can move beyond it.”
Rachel stares at the woman as the rain begins to soak into her. Those hard green eyes. The muscle twitches along the line of the woman’s jaw.
“See yourself in my mirror, Bissel,” the Angel tells her. “I am your reflection, just as you are mine.” She reaches out. Reaches out to touch Rachel on the arm, but Rachel bats the attempt away.
“It’s you who sickens me.” She wipes her mouth on her sleeve and swallows her breath. “It is you. You are the sickness,” she declares. “It’s too bad the rumor wasn’t true. That you didn’t hang yourself ten years ago. Think of how much air you have stolen since then, just by breathing. Think of how much space you’ve purloined by staying alive. Space that should have belonged to someone else. Someone human.”