“If you hate your country so much,” Bourne said, “why don’t you leave?”
“Because,” Petra said, “I also love it. It’s the mystery of being German-proud but self-hating.” She shrugged. “What can you do? You play the hand fate deals you.”
Bourne knew how that felt. He looked around. “You’re familiar with this place?”
She sighed heavily, as if her fury had left her spent. “When I was a child my parents took me to Sunday Mass every week. They’re God-fearing people. What a joke! Didn’t God turn his face away from this place years ago?
“Anyway, one Sunday I was so bored I snuck away. In those days, I was obsessed with death. Can you blame me? I grew up with the stench of it in my nostrils.” She looked up at him. “Can you believe that I’m the only one I know who ever visited the memorial? Do you think my parents ever did? My brothers, my aunts and uncles, my classmates? Please! They don’t even want to admit it exists.”
Seemingly weary again. “So I came down here to commune with the dead, but I didn’t see enough of them, so I pushed on and what did I find? Dachau’s bunker.”
She put her hand on the wall, moved it along the rough-cut stone as caressingly as if it were a lover’s flank. “This became my place, my own private world. I was only happy underground, in the company of the one hundred and ninety-three thousand dead. I felt them. I believed that the soul of each and every one of them was trapped here. It was so unfair, I thought. I spent my time trying to figure out how to free them.”
“I think the only way to do that,” Bourne said, “is to free yourself.”
She gestured. “Old Pelz’s crash pad is this way.”
As they picked their way along a tunnel, she said, “It’s not too far. He liked to be near the crypt. He thought a couple of those old folks were his friends. He’d sit and talk to them for hours, drinking away, just as if they were alive and he could see them. Who knows? Maybe he could. Stranger things have happened.”
After a short time, the tunnel opened out into a series of rooms. The odors of whiskey and stale sweat came to them.
“It’s the third room on the left,” Petra said.
But before they reached it, the doorway was filled with a hulking body topped by a head like a bowling ball with hair standing up like the quills of a porcupine. Old Pelz’s mad eyes looked them over.
“Who goes there?” His voice was as thick a fog.
“It’s me, Herr Pelz. Petra Eichen.”
But Old Pelz was looking in horror at the gun on her hip. “The fuck it is!” Hefting a shotgun, he yelled, “Nazi sympathizers!” and fired.
Thirty-Four
SORAYA ENTERED The Glass Slipper behind Kiki and ahead of Deron. Kiki had called ahead, and no sooner were they all inside than the owner, Drew Davis, came waddling over like Scrooge McDuck. He was a grizzled old man with white hair that stood on end as if it were shocked to see he was still alive. He had an animated face with mischievous eyes, a nose like a wad of chewed-up gum, and a broad smile honed to perfection on TV ops and stumping for local politicos, as well as his good works throughout the poorer neighborhoods of the district. But he possessed a warmth that was genuine. He had a way of looking at you when you spoke with him that made you feel he was listening to you alone.
He embraced Kiki while she kissed him on both cheeks and called him “Papa.” Later, after the introductions, when they were seated at a prime table that Drew Davis had reserved for them, after the champagne and goodies had been served, Kiki explained her relationship with him.
“When I was a little girl, our tribe was swept by a drought so severe that many of the elderly and newborn grew sick and died. After a time, a small group of white people arrived to help us. They told us they were from an organization that would send us money each month, after they’d set up their program in our village. They had brought water, but of course there wasn’t enough.
“After they left, thinking of broken promises, we fell into despair, but true to their word water came, then the rains came until we didn’t need their water anymore, but they never left. Their money went for medicines and schooling. Every month I, along with all the other children, got letters from our sponsor-the person sending the money.
“When I was old enough, I started writing back to Drew and we struck up a correspondence. Years later, when I wanted to go on to higher learning, he arranged for me to travel to Cape Town to go to school, then he sponsored me for real, bringing me to the States for college and university. He never asked for anything in return, except that I do well in school. He’s like my second father.”
They drank champagne and watched the pole dancing-which, much to Soraya’s surprise, seemed more artful, less crass than she had imagined. But there were more surgically enhanced body parts in that one room than she’d ever seen. For the life of her she couldn’t figure out why a woman would want breasts that looked and acted like balloons.
She continued to drink her champagne, all too aware that she was taking tiny, overly dainty sips. She’d like nothing better than to take Kiki’s advice, forget about her problems for a couple of hours, kick back, get drunk, let herself go. The only trouble was, she knew it would never happen. She was too controlled, too closed in. What I ought to do, she thought morosely as she watched a redhead with gravity-defying breasts and hips that seemed unattached to the rest of her, is get smashed, pull off my top, and do some pole dancing myself. Then she laughed at the absurdity of the notion. She’d never been that kind of person, even when it might have been age-appropriate. She had always been the good girl-cool, calculating to the point of overanalysis. She glanced over at Kiki, whose magnificent face was lit up not only by the colored strobe lights but also by a fiercely experienced joy. Wasn’t the good girl’s life drained of color, of flavor? Soraya asked herself.
This thought depressed her even more, but it was just the prelude, because a moment later she looked up to see Rob Batt. What the what? she thought. He’d seen her, all right, and was making a beeline right at her.
Soraya excused herself, rose, and walked in the other direction, toward the ladies’ room. Somehow Batt managed to snake his way to a position in front of her. She turned on her heel, threaded her way around the tables. Batt, running up the waiters’ aisle from the kitchen, caught up with her.
“Soraya, I need to talk to you.”
She shook him off, kept going, out the front door. In the parking lot she heard him running after her. A light sleet was falling, but the wind had failed entirely, the precipitation coming straight down, melting on her shoulders and bare head.
She didn’t know why she’d come out here; Kiki had driven them from Deron’s house, so she had no car to get into. Maybe she’d been disgusted by the sight of a man she’d liked and trusted, a man who’d betrayed that trust, who’d defected to the dark side, as she privately called LaValle’s NSA because she could no longer bear to utter the words National Security Agency without feeling sick to her stomach. The NSA had come to stand for everything that had gone wrong in America over the last number of years-the power grabs, the sense felt by some inside the Beltway that they were entitled to do anything and everything, laws of democracy be damned. It all boiled down to contempt, she thought. These people were so sure they were right, they felt nothing but contempt and perhaps even pity for those who tried to oppose them.
“Soraya, wait! Hold on!”
Batt had caught up with her.