Solimeos, p.28
Solimeos, page 28
Putting her on the same plane as Raven opened a floodgate. It was a chance I had to take.
Logically, the best thing for her—rather than spending her young life waiting to be murdered—was to get on Dr. Hermann’s plane with her mother. “Rainflower, you can grow up safely and then come back. Return as a lawyer or a doctor and help your people. You can come back a writer and keep them alive by writing their story.”
Rainflower yelled, desperate, “You promised!” She continued shouting as Cecilia and the other nun pulled her up the jetway stairs and onto the plane. “Numi!”
I followed her, walking past the Flower Boys, walking past the fourth musician, who was now feigning sleep.
The two nuns pulled Rainflower into a seat, sandwiching her between them. She sat with a hood draped over her head, softly crying. She sneezed.
Hearing her whimpering, Raven sprang up, then stood over Rainflower.
When the girl looked up, the Queen of the Amazon lifted the chin of this small nun who wasn’t a nun at all. She was a blonde and fair girl. Raven stroked Rainflower’s chin.
“You look just like my mother,” Raven said quietly, as if praying. “The same chin, the same nose, the same eyes.”
Rainflower reached up and touched Raven’s shoulder, licking Raven’s hand.
Cecilia tried to wrestle her away, but the distressed girl threw herself into Raven’s arms. “It’s me, Rainflower!”
“I know who you are.” Raven didn’t crumble or stumble from the shock of recognition. Instead she moved quickly, arms closing tightly around her daughter, half pushing, half carrying Rainflower to the plane’s exit.
“Come on, Axel. Time to go.”
Neither Raven nor Rainflower would be leaving with Benjy, who tossed a suitcase and the laundry bag after us onto the runway. He spread out his hands in a shrug of apology when the suitcase split and spilled out its contents. It had been filled with clothes.
Incandescent in the night, Benjy shouted, “Anytime. I’ll always be there.”
He wouldn’t. But I would.
Wordlessly, Raven got in the bus’s rear seat with Rainflower. From the driver’s seat, I saw the plane’s door close, Benjy waving goodbye from an oval window.
As the plane took off, its exhaust scattered Raven’s clothes across the runway. I ran back to retrieve the laundry bag filled with Raven’s jewels and American dollars, gathering clothes that hadn’t scattered too far.
The Heinkel entered the night over O Linda, over the river.
Raven leaned toward the front seat. “Let’s go home. I found my daughter.” Weeping from fury and love, she held Rainflower close, rocking with her over the rough road.
I remembered Luba, not much older than Rainflower, remembered her rocking on the roof, watching the war. I drove slowly. Raven’s voice was husky with passion.
“This is my baby. I saw her in the plane and knew. My blood knew. Her blood knew. She sniffed me. She licked me. She knew I was blood.”
Raven and Rainflower blissfully clung to each other. I felt that same passage of bubbling energy stretching from my solar plexus to both of them, surrounding them.
“Your father was getting rid of her,” said Raven. “Your father. He was getting rid of my baby once again. He killed my first child in the factory. Children are a nuisance. Jewish children are an unspeakable nuisance. Dorie said he threw my baby into the furnace. Then I had twins. I saw one dead baby,” said Raven. “They told me that the other had been disposed of. I believed them.” Her voice was more growl than speech. “The doctor told me how sorry they were.”
Once home, I pulled the bus off the driveway, away from the house, under a stand of palms. I saw Dietrich pacing before the sunroom windows.
Raven also saw him. “I can just hear what he is going to say. But if I can’t keep her here, I’ll leave, even if I have to kill him. I will kill anyone for this child.”
Dietrich, framed by his half of the Baronial carved doors, stood in the driveway. “What are you two doing? What’s going on?”
Raven opened the bus’s door for Rainflower, helped her out. Approaching Dietrich, she said, in the deepest of voices, “I am no longer your slave. You are no longer entitled to me. Get out of my way.”
He blocked entry, arms stretched across the door. “She’s supposed to be going to Miami. She’s not coming into my house.”
He knew who Rainflower was. She was the yellow diamond on his finger.
“She’ll stay,” said his wife.
“Like hell, she will.”
I shoved Dietrich out of the way, and he fell backward. Picking up Rainflower, I carried her upstairs to my bedroom. “Maria, come quickly!”
“Raven, Axel, I demand—”
“This isn’t your house, Dietrich.” Raven said. “It’s my house.”
Raven pulled back the covers of the bed. Maria ran in and out with warm drinks and bread and towels.
I found guns, gave one to Raven, kept one with me, lying on the tiled hallway outside my room through the night. Mother and daughter slept together in my bed. I heard crying and Raven’s soft words, “Rainflower.”
I fell asleep on the hard floor as she repeated the name.
Chapter Thirty-One
The Amazon morning came all too soon.
After a night of weeping lullabies, Raven and Rainflower were quiet inside my room. I heard the parrot Helen’s screech from the kitchen. Her cry echoed through the cavernous house: “Squeeze my tits, Axel! Squeeze my tits!”
I heard footsteps from downstairs, lots of them, doors closing, shouts outside.
“Squeeze my tits, Axel! Squeeze my tits!” Helen, the parrot spy, was a canary, echoing back unleashed desire.
Still unkempt from the night before, I scrambled downstairs to the kitchen. It turns out no one was listening to the parrot. No lost language, this.
Grevaldo said to Maria, “No one knows yet. Keep this quiet as long as possible.”
Something terrible had happened that had nothing to do with my spent passion for my stepmother. Maria dropped to her knees, praying. In the courtyard Mike shouted orders.
Helen the parrot was still broadcasting, “Squeeze my tits, Axel!” but no one cared.
I found her blanket and tossed it over her cage. Annoyed, Helen squawked unintelligibly from under the rag.
Grevaldo turned to me. “Your father is gone. Mike took him in the boat to Manaus early this morning.”
Dietrich had left without us.
I called Mike into the kitchen. “Let’s have it.”
“The Baron told me the Jews were in Manaus, that they were coming for him, that it was time for him to leave. I took him in the boat to the Hotel Tropical just north of town. With just a briefcase and a suitcase, he walked in the water to a beach, then into the hotel’s back door with the workers. He told me to wait an hour and leave if he didn’t come back. He didn’t come back, so I left.”
I looked down at Maria on the floor. “Tell no one. No old language. Nothing.”
Clutching my ankles, loyal Maria wept into my boots, covering her eyes with her hands as her lips moved in desperate prayer.
“Maria, pray later,” I said, helping her into a chair. “Tell me what happened. Who told Dietrich about the Jews?”
She spoke through her hands. “Some lady calls on the telephone before sunrise. I answer. I don’t know her. She says to me, ‘The Israelis are at the Tropical. Tell the Baron.’”
Dietrich had not fled. He had gone to meet the Israelis.
“Was the woman who phoned German, Brazilian, old, young, American? What did she sound like?”
“I don’t know. Maybe like you.”
“Maria, don’t tell Mrs. Baron. I’ll do that when the time comes.”
Maria sniffled. “Miss Margaret is here too, sleeping. She would not leave you, Young Baron, no matter what. She’s skinny but would make a good wife.”
“Margaret? Whatever you do, Maria, don’t let her hear any of this.” Why had Margaret stayed the night? And where was Willi?
Stripped of all but his knowledge, Dietrich was gone. It was what I wanted, what I didn’t want. Had an invincible ego driven him so rashly into the arms of the Israelis? He had nothing to prove his Solomon theory—only his word, his logic, his reason, his goddamned righteousness, and the ego of nobility and genius.
Not enough.
Helen the parrot screamed, “Morning! Morning. Squeeze my tits, Axel.”
Maria pulled her cover off, tossed it on the worktable behind me. A corner fell into a bowl of soaking string beans. I bent to pull it out and saw it wasn’t a rag or dishtowel. I recognized it, but from where? It was a woven strip of fine linen.
A very fine, ancient linen with a prayer in gold filigree embroidered into it, a fabric that could be dated, a fabric joining ancient South America to Hebrews and Egyptians, perhaps others.
“Where did you get this?” The letters on the right side were something like Hebrew but not. Nothing I recognized.
“Maria, where did you get this?”
“Every day, I give Helen a fresh blanket. It’s pretty for her. I take nothing good.”
I flattened the cloth on the table. This historic fabric could enhance Dietrich’s case for amnesty with the Israelis.
“I got it from the freezer,” said Maria. “In the banana leaves, around that thing—that thing with the face.”
“The skull with the soda tops?”
“Yes, with the face. No one told me not to take it. It didn’t belong in my freezer. I thought it would be nice for Helen.”
Mike grinned at me as I jumped aboard the motorboat, bound for Manaus.
“What’s funny?” I asked.
“Squeeze my tits, Baraozinho. You better kill that parrot.” He winked at me in a fraternal way.
The shroud that had been around the shrunken head was a linen that could be dated. Taking a seat as Mike piloted us past Cinnamon Island, I lifted the cloth to the light and, through its gossamer, saw a pink dolphin dancing behind it. I wondered how the cloth had been preserved all these millennia. I no longer questioned the reliability of the Amazon pharmacopeia; their methods fascinated me. I would ask Okok what they used.
“Esmeralda! Young Baron! Esmeralda!” Mike shouted, slowing the boat’s engine. “There she is!”
It was said that Maria’s dead sister Esmeralda was now a pink dolphin. As the boat passed, the amazing creature danced backwards on her tail, chattering.
Even as he left Raven behind, left me behind, I couldn’t abandon my father. I clutched his triumph in my hands.
Mike docked the motorboat at Manaus and would wait for me there, keeping an ear out for local gossip or news. I joined a line of Cabloco girls and boys wearing brown uniforms and employee ID tags. A horn sounded, and we boarded the boat for the Hotel Tropical, something of a water bus with stiff wooden benches and loads of bananas. Three laughing young girls spread out on the bananas. We sailed into the wide-open harbor. The Hotel Tropical lay off a beach just upriver.
I rolled up the cuffs of my chinos, took my boots off and, when the boat scraped bottom, jumped into the shallow water with everyone else, wading to the beach. I followed hotel workers through a maze of dumpsters and garbage cans, past a sign that read “Old Wing.” They entered a doorway into a kitchen area. A bit further on, I found a portico of marble, carved with vines and flowers, and entered the hotel.
Under brilliant light, it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to a long, wide, empty marble corridor. Another small sign read “Old Wing Pool.” The newspaper kiosk was closed; an elegant jewelry store was open.
Down the corridor past the store’s entrance, Dietrich sat on a velvet bench. He wore a white linen suit, a yellow tie, a blue dress shirt. His suitcase and briefcase were at his feet. His head was in his hands.
I took a seat next to him and put my boots back on. I put my hand on his shoulder.
He waved behind him. “They’re eating breakfast, planning a trip on the river to our house. I can’t bring myself to walk over to them, to introduce myself, to sit down with them under their beach umbrella and surrender. Axel, surrender isn’t in our blood.”
I handed him the ancient linen, an act of love or betrayal, I couldn’t say. I just knew I had to give it to him.
He held up the fabric, carried it to the entry door, held it to the light. “Hibiru, Axel, the language of light, prior to Hebrew. Here is what it says: ‘Bearded and breasted we came to your shores. Now abandoned and alone we watch the stars and wait.’ My God, Axel.”
Without asking where the shroud came from, as if he were entitled to it, Dietrich stood and headed toward the jewelry store, clutching his briefcase and suitcase in one hand, the linen in the other. “They’ll have a loupe or magnifying glass to look at this closer. You’re coming with me, of course.”
He didn’t mean into the jewelry store. I followed.
Glancing down, he said, “Your laces are loose.”
I stopped to tie my bootlaces. Behind a column and a large potted palm, I had one foot on a marble bench. Dietrich moved ahead to the store’s entrance.
From corridor’s end, a figure stepped forward: Dr. Hermann, brandishing a pistol.
His voice was dreamy, signaling venom. “Where are you going, Herr Baron?” Wearing the same deranged, florid face displayed at the ritual sacrifice in the cave, Dr. Hermann’s grin was a perverse rictus below narrowed pig eyes.
Spinning to face him, momentarily looking like a guilty child, Baron von Pappendorf took a split second to regain his hauteur. Standing straighter, he said, “I gave you your alphabet. I left the Jew for you. I’m leaving. What more do you want?”
Dr. Hermann looked over at the outdoor pool. Spotting four fit men in suit jackets and a curly-haired woman in a long ninja sweater, he knew.
From my vantage point, I saw Dr. Hermann calculating the odds. If he used his weapon on Dietrich, how likely was he to escape the clutches of five expertly trained Israeli Mossad agents? Germans are good at math. He pocketed his gun. Turning, he lumbered up the hallway and out the back door.
Dietrich, head held high, walked into the jewelry store. I left the Jew for you. My God.
Who had informed Dr. Hermann? Perhaps Margaret overheard what was happening in the house—the tumult would be hard to miss. Perhaps she’d finally reached Willi and told him.
In the jewelry store, a woman old enough and well-dressed enough to be the proprietress was bent behind the counter. With her back to us, she slid tray after tray of diamond rings from a safe. At her feet was a hound that reminded me of one of Dietrich’s from our home in the Black Forest.
Dietrich addressed her matronly rear end. “I wonder if I might trouble you and borrow a loupe to examine a valuable object,” he said, his voice croaking.
She continued her work but said, “Perhaps you need a glass of water.”
Dietrich cleared his throat. “That would be most kind.”
“One moment, please,” she said. “I also have fresh coffee, acid-free.”
“Yes, wonderful. You are generous.”
She left, returning with a fancy cup and saucer. Hair gray, her cheeks were bright red as she held a Meissen cup before him. “Be careful, Dietrich. It’s very hot.”
There was a stillness in the air, a silence, a freeze around me. The only sound was the rattling of cup and saucer as he put them down on the counter.
Dietrich looked up, stunned. He faltered, steadying himself. “Berthe?”
I could hardly hear him. He turned to look at me, his face a mixture of shock and wonder.
“Axel, it’s your mother.” He struggled to speak. “Where have you been, Berthe?”
“Right here,” she said, a loupe in hand. “Captain Kroening hid me, Dietrich. He hid me, and I married him. This is my shop, Dietrich. The captain gave me the money you paid him.”
Heart pumping, legs threatening to fail me, I stuttered, “You were here, Mama? All this time?”
“Better to mourn me than hate me.”
For a millisecond flash, I did hate her. And then I didn’t. It had taken my mother courage to make her choices. And she had escaped Dietrich, a longed-for feat unaccomplished by the rest of us.
Tears ran down her face, and she ran around the counter to embrace me. She felt as soft and solid as my memories, smelling even more fragrantly beautiful.
Berthe turned and slipped her arm into his. She thought a moment. “Dietrich, I phoned your house to warn you, to tell you these Israelis were looking for you. What are you doing here? They’re eating breakfast by the pool. Five of them. You could have hidden in the forest. Why did you come here?”
“I do not run, Berthe.”
After finishing his coffee and wiping his mouth with a napkin, Dietrich bent to examine the ancient linen through the loupe. It seemed to offer him comfort and courage. When he handed it back to me, he looked more resolute.
I walked behind my mother and father as they approached the pool area. Anyone else would have thought they were an ordinary tourist couple.
Berthe pulled me aside, said quietly. “I’ll walk with your father. You stay inside just now. They need not meet you, and you shouldn’t see this. Later there will be time for you and me.”
Poolside, at the Hotel Tropical, Baron Dietrich von Pappendorf sat down with the Israelis at their breakfast table under the umbrella.
From the hotel entryway, I watched him introduce himself. All four men stood to greet him. There was no sign of weaponry or handcuffs. The woman fumbled in her pocket, then bent to inject something into his arm. As Dietrich’s hand flew up, the female Israeli held him up just below the shoulders.
I left my mother behind. She did fine all by herself, or she had all these years. She had been in Manaus, so close, yet she had never contacted me, for reasons I could not at this moment fathom emotionally. Perhaps down the road, there would be a more meaningful reunion for us.
