The Gordian Knot - Bernhard Schlink [85]
Jill was asleep. He lay down next to her and watched the brightening dawn. The phone in the kitchen began ringing and wouldn’t stop. As Jill grew restless, he got up and answered.
“Hello?”
“Is that you, Georg?”
“Fran! How the hell did you …”
“Your friend in Germany told me where you were. You had jotted down his number on a pad and I called him. He told me where you are. Listen, Georg, you’ve got to get out of there. Joe wants to … Joe realized that the negatives were missing. He looked in the safe and they weren’t there, so he knew that I had … What could I do but tell him what I did? I had to tell him everything. He says he’s going to get Jill and bring her back. Are you there, Georg? He’s on his way to the airport. He swore he wouldn’t do anything to you, but he was so mad and looked so crazy. Georg, you’ve got to get out of there! Leave Jill where she is, please don’t take her with you. But you have to get out! All night I’ve been wondering if I should call you, or if you’d use my call against me. You must leave Jill and me alone. I can’t handle this anymore. I don’t want anything to happen to you, but I want Jill back. I’m really scared.”
“Don’t worry, Fran, I won’t take her with me. Don’t be scared. She’s doing fine here, there’s a dog and a cat she likes, and everyone’s being really sweet to her. How does Benton intend to get her?”
“He says there’s no way you can have her with you all the time, so you can’t really use her as a hostage. He’ll get at her when you’re out somewhere without her. He’s taking one of his men along.”
“Do you know when he’s arriving?”
“He’s leaving now, on the Pan Am flight from JFK. He’ll be in San Francisco by noon. Will you promise you’ll be gone by the time he gets there, and that there’ll be no trouble when he comes to take Jill away?”
“Don’t be afraid, Brown Eyes. There’s no need to be afraid. Jill won’t be in any danger, and I won’t cause problems. You’ll have her back, and when she’s grown up you can tell her the story of the crazy guy who ran off with her, and she can tell all her friends that when she was a baby she had been abducted by someone who had run off with her to San Francisco. Hey, Brown Eyes, don’t cry.”
She hung up. Georg turned on the coffeemaker and took a look at Jonathan’s new painting. The day before there had only been the tree trunks of a dark forest with the rough outline of a man, crouching or kneeling, his arm gently hugging the shoulder of a girl. Jonathan must have worked late into the night. The man’s head was finished. His mouth was whispering something into the girl’s ear, his brown eyes exuding warmth and humor, as if they wanted to share with the viewer the anticipation at how happy the little girl would be at his whispered words. Her face was beaming, her shoulders raised shyly. The girl was still an outline, but the man’s head brought her alive.
This one’s a winner, Jonathan! The air in your painting is no longer thin, the people no longer wooden. Perhaps happy paintings don’t sell as well as paintings of horror, because everyone who is happy is the same, or, as Tolstoy puts it: only in suffering is one an individual and interesting, or perhaps one merely feels that way, or, whatever, I can’t remember his exact words. Either way, I’m standing in front of your new painting and know that I’m not sentenced to loneliness and being shut out from communicating with other people.
The coffeemaker had stopped hissing, and Georg went to the kitchen. He poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down at the end of the long table. Seven people could sit on each side, he counted; one could throw a dinner for sixteen. He looked out the window. The sky was blue. On the street the truck engines from next door were rumbling. Why did they all sound so different? Why doesn’t one truck engine