Safe House

Turner Diaries in grungy furnished rooms to crack a best-seller list. Tapped into some of the fax chains. Read the luno-newsletters. Listened to the Ballad of Ruby Ridge and what really happened at Waco. Heard a half-dozen different accounts of why the Swiss banks kept looted Jewish gold in their vaults all these years, waiting for that cable from Paraguay to release the assets. And how Hitler was ordained, a minister of Jehovah, sent by God to punish the Jews for killing His son. Watched self-proclaimed “constitutionalists” applauding more marches through Skokie, this time on the Internet. Even sat with a Mossad agent the Mole brought me to, an Arabic-looking man with pianist’s hands and slot-machine eyes.

I listened to it all. But when it came to anyone named Lothar operating in New York, I drew a handful of blanks.

“I always wore clothes when I was a child,” Crystal Beth said. She was lying on the mattress on her belly, nude, smoking one of her hand-rolled cigarettes, candle-flicker shadows dancing over the perfect parabolic curve of her bottom before disappearing into the blackness around her thick thighs.

I didn’t say anything, watching her.

“A lot of the kids didn’t,” she said. “On the Farm. That’s what we called it mostly, the Farm. Their parents thought children should be free, not have to wear clothing until they were older. My mother didn’t believe in that.”

“Were there fights about it?” I asked her.

“Fights? Nobody fought. It was a commune, but it wasn’t a government commune. There were no laws from on high, that isn’t the way we did it. A parent could raise a child any way they wanted.”

“Could they hit their kids?”

“You mean like spank them?”

“Whatever you call it.”

“Burke,” she said softly. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing’s the matter. I was just making conversation.”

“Your face . . . Oh, you’re going to think I’m a ditz.”

“You’re losing me,” I told her.

“Come over here, okay? Just lie down next to me for a minute.”

I did that.

She stubbed out her cigarette, rolled over on her side to look at me. “Your aura changed,” she said. “Please don’t laugh. It’s not some New Age thing. People do have auras. Not everyone. At least not powerful ones, ones that you can see. Do you think that’s crazy?”

“No,” I said, not lying. Martial artists call it ki. They don’t talk about seeing it, just feeling it, but it’s really the same: a force field. When I was young, before I learned to make my temper go the same place as my pain, when the rage in me built high enough I could move people out of a room without saying anything. A long time later, when Max explained it to me, he used his hands to indicate waves coming off me. I don’t know where Max got his knowledge, but it wasn’t from books. And it wasn’t new.

The only thing is, ki doesn’t work on everyone. Some people aren’t tuned to the signal. That’s why a street punk will try you when a pro would give you a pass.

“When you asked about . . . hitting children, your aura turned . . . ”

“Dark?”

“No. It’s always dark. This was like . . . Did you ever see heat lightning? It doesn’t make a sound, just kind of . . . flashes?”

“Yeah.”

“Like that. Did . . . people hit you when you were a child?”

“People did everything to me when I was a child,” I told her.

She reached over, took my hand, put it on her proud soft breast. “Feel my heart,” she said.

“Nobody ever hit children there,” she said about an hour later.

“What?”

“On the Farm. Remember, you asked me? Nobody ever did that. Once I came inside from playing and my mother and father were there. They didn’t see me at first. My mother was cleaning the table. My father walked behind her and gave her a slap on the bottom. A hard slap, I could hear it crack. I got angry and I started to run to her, to protect her. Then I heard her . . . not laugh, or even giggle . . . some kind of sweet sound. I was so confused I started to cry. Then they saw me. My father tried to get me to sit on his lap, the way he did when he explained things to me. But I wouldn’t do it.

“My mother took me for a walk. She told me my father was just playing. It didn’t hurt her at all. I asked her if all men played like that, and she told me they didn’t. But she also told me it didn’t matter how men played. All that mattered was how the women wanted them to play. Men should never play any way women didn’t want.

“A couple of days later, I remember asking my father if he wanted to smack me on the bottom, like he did my mother. He got very upset. My father was a very dramatic man. My mother had to calm him down. You know how she always did that?”

“No.”

“Like this,” Crystal Beth said, planting her broad little nose in my chest and pushing so hard with her head that I had to grab her and brace myself to keep from staggering backward. “See how it works?” she whispered, nuzzling me, her hands locked together behind my back.

“Yeah.”

She kept pushing until I felt the easy chair against the back of my legs. I sat down, pulling her with me. She snuggled into my lap, gave me a quick nip on the neck.

“It was so easy when my mother explained it,” she said softly. “There are things a man does with a woman that he doesn’t do with a child. Not his child, not any child. She said someday a man would do things with me. I asked her what things. And she told me. Some of them, anyway. That’s how I learned about sex. My mother knew when it was time. My father, he never would have known.”

“You really loved him, huh?”

“My father? I adored him.”

“So you’re doing his work?”

“His work? My father was a—”

“Protector, right?”

“Oh. Yes. I never thought about that. It’s my . . . purpose. Like my mother told me. I didn’t think it was . . .”

“Ah, what do I know?” I said.

“Burke?”

“What, girl?”

“It must have been so hard. Not to have even . . . known your father.”

“You think they’re all alike, fathers?”

“No. I just—”

“I didn’t miss a fucking thing,” I told her.

The phone rang. Crystal Beth got off my lap and padded over to a far corner in her bare feet. She pulled some papers off the top of a two-drawer file cabinet and picked up the receiver lying underneath.

“Hello.”

She listened, cocking one hip the way Mama had cocked her head—I guess all women listen differently. Then she said: “Yes, I understand. All the way in the back. All right.”

And hung up.