Baltimore Noir - Laura Lippman [51]
Under the wild gaze of the shot-red eyes, they washed their hands with plenty of soap and left the bathroom for the last time.
“How could she do this?” Yoshi asked. “Zhenya. How could she be with such men?”
They were walking through the early-afternoon sunlight on Security Boulevard, Yoshi carrying Gary’s two bags, Tania her own. Unless they hit bad traffic on the turnpike, Yoshi’s Miata would get them to Queens by nightfall. They’d find Zhenya’s address and see what else Gary’s apartment had to offer.
The sun gleamed off the windows of the Social Security mountain up ahead. Horns honked and brakes squealed along the boulevard, the flood of cars carrying people toward snacks at Dunkin’ Donuts and antacid at Rite Aid. But the noise and bustle seemed remote, distant to Tania, as if she were just a projection of herself placed here and the real girl was somewhere far away.
“They told her she was beautiful,” Tania said. “They offered her money. They swore that her family would renounce her, would never welcome her back, not after what she had done. They put their hands on her until she thought they owned her.”
Yoshi gave her a sharp look. “Is that what Gary did to you?”
Tania shrugged. “Close enough.”
“I wish I’d killed him!” Yoshi knotted his hands. “You should have pulled the gun out as soon as he walked in the door.”
She smiled. “Then we might not have learned anything. And anyway … after what happened with Phil, we agreed I’d wait till you got there.”
“I know,” Yoshi said. “I remember.”
Phil’s raging response had been … unexpected. Even with the pistol, Tania probably couldn’t have handled him alone.
“We were lucky Gary turned out so easy,” she said.
Yoshi stared at the traffic as if he wanted to challenge each car to a fight. “Security Boulevard “ he said with loathing.
“And anyway, it was good.” She caught his expression. “No, it was. Now I know what Zhenya heard. And the other girls too. What they heard when they were poor and scared and hungry, when they’d run away and thought everyone back home hated them.”
“But we don’t—”
“What was it her parents said after she left?” Tania said. “‘We have no daughter!’”
Yoshi shook his head. “My brother Avi. That fool.”
“And how was she to know they’d changed their minds, Avi and Rachel?” Tania asked. “She was out of reach.”
They walked in silence for a while. The wail of distant fire engines wove in and out of the traffic’s tidal surge. Then Yoshi spoke: “When we find her, will she come home with us?”
Tania thought about the unsmiling face, the dark, haunted eyes she’d seen in image after image.
“I think so,” she said.
Yoshi nodded. “And then, finally, we’ll be done.”
But Tania barely heard him. She was listening to another voice, the one that had been with her all day.
Most of us make the mistake of thinking that such experiences occur only very rarely,” the rabbi had said. “But it isn’t true. Every wedding, every birth, every death, takes you out of one life and into another. Even the Sabbath lets you escape for twenty-five hours, every week of the year. And each week, the world you join is different from the one you left, just as you, yourself, are different.”
He’d smiled then at all of them sitting in the pews. “Despite the risks,” he’d said, “some of us find these liminal moments the most fulfilling of our lives. We welcome them, cherish them, even come to crave them. Life would be a cold, barren place if they did not exist.”
They reached the Miata. There was a ticket fluttering on its windshield.
“And then we’ll be done, right?” Yoshi said.
Tania felt the memory of Gary’s hands on her skin. She thought of all the other girls he’d touched, and all the girls these new photographers—the eager replacements he’d brandished at them in his last gesture of defiance—would touch as well. Girls who would