Jakob had no idea what she meant, but he was unnerved by the comment anyway and they parted that night with an edgy final kiss that, on his walk home, the boy could only think of as suspicious.
And the next night at the Kierling, this suspicion was still present. They had gone to see an experimental feature, a one-night-only event whose title Jakob has never been able to recall. He cannot remember the plot or the actors or the director. He cannot envision the settings or the wardrobes or the musical score. This is the only film in his life that has evaded him in this complete a manner. And weeks later, on the first day of his arrival in Quinsigamond, Jakob opened his notebook and wrote:
All I can remember is the image of a man being pursued through dark, decayed streets by a sea of eyes, human eyeballs, an audience of some sort, preying on this man, hunting him down for the marrow in his bones, the marrow in his soul. And this is simply an impression. A trace memory. Nothing I can verify or concretely describe. But instead of receding, the image is more and more relentless. It does not get any clearer. But it will not leave me alone.
Over the next three years, Jakob would attempt to find out what film this was. He would spend hours in the public library, poring through every cinema reference available. And he would be entirely unsuccessful.
But on that night, while the movie unreeled and the stark, grainy images were gunned onto the screen, Jakob and Felice made love in the back row, and that particular coupling proved to be the most violent and intense session of both their lives.
When the lights came up, they exited the Kierling and walked to Dvetsil Park in silence, both of them trembling, both almost worried about the prolonged intensity they’d just subjected themselves to. They took their bench, fell into each other’s decompressing embrace and, very likely at the same instant, looked out at the Pietá to see that the unconscious body of Yitzhak Levi-Zangwill had been draped into the arms of the weeping stone mother, another doomed child to cry for. Yitzhak had been beaten unconscious, but it wasn’t until Jakob and Felice ran to the statue that they discovered the real nature of the theatre owner’s wounds. Into his forehead had been carved the word Zionist. And below the dripping letters, his eyes had been gouged out.
“Are you out of your mind?”
The voice comes like an unexpected slap, like an open hand thrown full-force across the cheek, exploding the recipient out of a long sleep.
Jakob leaps off the Ping-Pong table and Little Jiri stirs and lets out an awful moan. Felix is at the bottom of the cellar stairs, an arm extended, a finger pointing at the gangboy’s quaking body.
“You brought a casualty to the house?”
“I couldn’t—” Jakob begins and Felix waves the excuse away, furious, his hand coming back to his face and rubbing over his eyes as if he could make the sight of Jiri Fric dying before him vanish.
“Do you have any idea the consequences this could have?” Felix barks. “Have you not heard a word your father has said? You brought a gang casualty back to your father’s home. My God, Jakob.”
Jakob looks from Little Jiri down to his feet, mumbles, “Well, he’s here, now.”
Felix rushes at his cousin, tackles him at the waist and they go to the floor. Jakob throws his head forward, smashing the bridge of Felix’s nose and drawing blood. Felix is shocked with the pain and in the instant his distraction allows, Jakob gets both hands around his cousin’s neck and begins to close off the windpipe, his thumbs pressing in on the throat with a power neither of them anticipated. Felix starts to choke and Jakob bears down harder, enraged, three years of repressed anger flooding from his adrenal gland like a tidal swell.
He leans down to his cousin’s face and spits, “You don’t know me.”
But Felix jerks to the side and throws a knee into Jakob’s groin. Jakob loses his breath, hunches into himself and absorbs a kick in the ribs that rolls him onto his side, fetal and gagging.
Felix grabs the edge of the Ping-Pong table, pulls himself up, then plants a boot on his cousin’s neck, but doesn’t apply any pressure. Through gritted teeth and faulty breath, he says, “You stupid little bastard—”
Then he backs off and Jakob can hear him sucking air. After a second, Felix moves into a shadowy corner of the basement and the noise of Jiri Fric’s labored breathing is displaced by the sound of careless rummaging, trunks being shifted, forgotten crates shoved roughly to the side.
Jakob gets to his knees, pulls himself to standing and looks to see Felix holding a small, threadbare throw pillow over the face of Little Jiri. The smallest Roach gives no sign of suffocation, beyond a sudden and horrible twitch of his deformed leg. Jakob shifts his vision from the slightly jerking foot to Felix’s eyes.
The cousins stare at each other in silence until Jiri Fric’s leg falls motionless.
17
Sylvia takes the Waldstein Ave bus to the westside, transfers and takes the #14 to Hoffman Square. As she’s walking the last two blocks home, she realizes that she left her camera in Leni’s car. But that’s the least of her problems. That feverish feeling from yesterday is starting to come back. Her legs are beginning to feel rubbery and her head is throbbing. She doesn’t want to think about anything beyond climbing up the stairs, writing Perry a note that she’s sick and getting into bed. She wants to sleep for the next two days. She wants to squirrel down under the covers, keep the shades drawn and just go under for the next forty-eight hours or so.
But when she opens the back door of the apartment, she can hear a chorus of unfamiliar voices coming from the front room. She walks as far as the doorway and looks in as all the talking stops.
“Honey,” Perry says as he gets up from the couch, knocking a stack of papers on the floor. “You’re home early.”
“I wasn’t feeling well,” she says.
Perry’s flustered. He hesitates between picking up his papers and coming over to her, then says, “We’re having a meeting here.”
“Sorry to interrupt,” she says.
There’s a moment of horrible quiet until Perry finally comes over next to her and starts introducing people, though she already knows who most of them are.
He gestures around the circle, all of whom, except for Boetell’s silent assistant Fernando, have manila folders at their feet and in their laps. The Brazilian kid is sitting on the floor in the corner, his head buried in a Bible. He doesn’t look up at Sylvia. She wants to ask him if he ever gets tired of wearing that stupid white robe.
“You know Candice, of course,” Perry says, “and this is District Attorney Meade. Reverend Boetell you heard speak the other night. You remember Brother Fernando. And this is Paige Beatty of the Women’s American Resistance,” his head bobs and he says, “This is Sylvia.”
“Pleased to meet you,” she says, wondering why the hell they’re not doing this thing at one of their big walnut conference rooms downtown.
“I’m sorry you’re feeling ill, Mrs. Leroux,” the Reverend says. “Perhaps we should relocate—”