The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [97]
“You hate it!” Wolf said, and laughed. “You’ll make a hell of a terrorist, Faith.”
An angry vein pulsed at her temple. She lifted the gun, watching her hands as if they were someone else’s.
“Safety off,” he said.
Faith released the safety. Eyes fixed to the gun, she pointed it at Wolf’s chest.
“Touching,” he said very gently, his eyes, too, on the gun until the cold round nub of it met his skin, Faith’s cold anger behind it. Her face was twisted in pained concentration, as if keeping the gun aloft required every ounce of her strength. Wolf searched her eyes but they looked strange, opaque, and he found himself thinking, amazed, She could actually do it.
“Is he watching you now?” he whispered.
Faith’s head jerked up. In Wolf’s eyes she must have caught her own reflection, for an awful recognition parted her face and she dropped the gun, which hit the floor and fired, jumping backward several feet, spinning. In the sparkling silence they stared at it. Faith began to cry. Wolf lifted the backpack from her shoulders and they clung to each other, shivering, the gun halfway across the room and deeply still, as if mortified by its outburst.
“Don’t go,” Wolf said.
Faith shook her head, crying—she didn’t want to go. Timidly she crossed the room, leaned down to the gun and put the safety back on. She stood up quickly but stayed there, gun at her feet. Wolf trembled in the night air, wishing he had clothes on. There were splinters on the floor near a moulding where the bullet had entered. After a while Faith squatted over the gun, and Wolf felt the battle in her, two things pulling opposite ways. Which ran deeper? That was the question. By then, somehow, he knew what it would be.
There was a long silence in Wolf’s living room. “Why didn’t you call my mom?” Phoebe said.
Wolf shook his head. “You didn’t do that—go running to somebody’s parents,” he said. “Plus, what could she do, your poor mom? Just get terrified.” He paused, lighting a cigarette. “I don’t know, though. Maybe I should’ve.” He turned to Phoebe. “You think I should’ve called her?”
But Phoebe was empty, a vacuum. “I have no idea.”
“Anyway, I left Berlin the next day,” Wolf resumed after a long pause. “I had a friend in Munich, Timothy, who’d lived with my family freshman year of high school. I nailed Tim’s address to the wall of the carpenter’s pad, went to Munich and waited.
“On the last day of September, I saw this giant headline: the RAF pulled off three bank robberies the morning before. Twelve people involved, three cars, they got something like 230,000 marks. I looked at that and I thought, Oh Christ.”
To Phoebe’s confusion, laughter rose in her chest.
“I know,” Wolf said, glancing at her, smiling uneasily.
Loose, tooth-chattering laughter overwhelmed Phoebe. “Why am I laughing?” she said.
“What else can you do?” Wolf said. “Bank robberies. Shit.”
“How many?”
“Three. Four, originally—one didn’t work out. Damn,” he said, finally yielding to his own mirthless laughter. “The thing is, it really wasn’t funny.”
The laughter drained from Phoebe suddenly, leaving her tired.
Wolf was working illegally by then, loading boxes at a shoe factory on the outskirts of Munich. He’d sublet a room in someone’s apartment, leaving word with his friend’s family on the off-chance that Faith would track him that far. Days passed, then weeks, Wolf scouring the paper on the streetcar to work, following news of a police raid on the Red Army, a few big arrests, but no mention of a young American female. It was early October by then, soon to be 1971; Janis OD’d on the fourth, Hendrix had died mid-September, in London. A lot of people were starting to head back home, but Wolf felt paralyzed. “My head was messed up,” he explained. “Reading about the Red Army every day, knowing Faith was part of that, I’d just panic sometimes, thinking I should be there, too, like I’d made the mistake of my life. She was in the world,