The Carpenter's Wife Read online

  “Hello?” she repeated. Maria…?

  More sobs. “Romy?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Britta, from church.”

  Romy remembered her, a cute brunette with a waist like a wasp’s and way too much hair—matter of fact, she was a hairdresser, wasn’t she? Or was it waitress? “Hi, Britta.”

  “Sorry to bother you so late, but I’m really devastated.”

  “That’s okay. Do you want to talk to Pastor Tom?”

  “No no. I’d rather speak with you…” She fell silent.

  “Uh-huh.” She heard Britta blow her nose. When the whimpering resumed, she asked, “What’s bothering you so?”

  Britta pulled herself together. “You know that I’ve been out of a job for almost a year.”

  Romy creased her forehead. “You told me about that, didn’t you.”

  “Well, they changed the law and on Monday morning the employment office called me with a job offer—”

  “Hey, that’s great.”

  “Now, wait. Romy, it’s not a normal job. They want me to work at… at the Number Nine.”

  Romy reflected for a moment. “And you don’t want to? Now, Britta, the Bible says if you’re—”

  “Romy,” she interrupted. “You’re not familiar with Number Nine, are you?”

  Romy hesitated. “No.”

  “It’s a house of prostitution,” Britta said.

  “Oh.” The eyes of the pastor’s wife grew circular. “Oooh!”

  “It’s near the Hauptbahnhof. The employment office said, management scanned my file and… and…”

  “And now they want you to waiter in there?”

  “No.” Britta huffed. “It’s not… They don’t want me as a waitress.”

  “But, what could they want you to do…?”

  Britta hesitated before she said, “I’m like… supposed to service patrons.”

  “But how do you—what do they mean…?”

  The silence of disbelief hovered in the line. Then Britta explained. She did it with great verbal economy, using but three words, all of which were monosyllabic and consisted of five letters or less.

  Romy gasped and stopped breathing.

  “Romy, are you there?”

  She held on to the counter. “But, they can’t make you do that. They can’t force you to…” Words eluded her.

  “They say they can.” Britta sighed, sounding downcast when she went on. “Call me stupid, but I thought about it all day yesterday and this morning I actually went there to get interviewed. I made excuses to myself and to the Lord, thought maybe they’d have something else to do for me. It’s all plush and fancy inside.”

  “What?” Romy asked. “The unemployment office?” She caught on as soon as she’d finished speaking. Of course…

  “No, the House—”

  “I know—I know. Sorry.”

  “Romy, I was ready to work in a house of prostitution—as a Christian!”

  How disgusting, Romy thought. “I’m sure you were stressed and didn’t really meant it,” she offered.

  “I didn’t meant to sell myself,” Britta said. “And I didn’t,” she added hastily. “When I went to Number Nine this morning, the first thing I see outside is a silver seven-BMW. I thought Pastor Tom had found out and it was his car and he was waiting for me. But then I saw the license plate and it was a city number. It had four sixes in it. Isn’t six the number of the devil?”

  “Uh, three sixes are,” Romy said. “Six-six-six. In Revelations that’s the number of the Antichrist—”

  “I knew it had something to do with the devil.”

  “Uh-huh. So, what’d you do?”

  “Well, I go in, and a woman says hi and I say who I am and first thing she tells me I can’t smoke if I work here. Told her I quit last month, but she didn’t care. Then she leads me into this fancy room all decked out in red, a French bed in the middle, and she tells me to wait. I’m like, wow, what an interior. Stupid me. Then some guys come in, you know, bodybuilders with long hair and gold chains and shaved chests and stuff. Their boss was kind of old, with an operated face—had wrinkles anyway—well, he tells me to chuck my clothes. I got nervous and asked the boss if he has a job for a waitress, I’m really good at waitering, and they all laugh at me. Then Ali Baba asks me if I want him to unhook my dress—I’ve seen him in the street a couple of times. Now, I’m not prejudiced, but I say, I’m a Bible-believing Christian and no, I don’t want him to unhook me, and he better take his hands off me right this instant. They all laughed, I cried, and then I left.”

  Romy’s eyes darted around her kitchen. Still at a loss, she finally said, “You did the right thing, Britta.”

  “Well, sure. But I’m such an idiot.”

  “You’re not. You were just desperate.”

  Britta began to cry again. “Went back to the unemployment office and the lady working my case got furious. Yelled at me for stalling. Called me a child.”

  Romy became indignant. “Now, nobody can force you into an occupation like that. That’s disgusting. The law—”

  “The law! Romy, they changed the law!” Britta broke in. “She said that prostitution is now just another occupation. When I said no it wasn’t, she said a court in Berlin just ruled that sex for hire is no longer uncustomary; society accepts sex workers now. Said, they’re contributing to the welfare by paying taxes; they help unfulfilled men and they get benefits like everybody else; I’ll get them too. I’m like, no way. So she loses her patience and yells, university students do it on the side, and housewifes go part-time, and it’s nothing special and everybody does it anyway and in Japan even schoolgirls do it for money.”

  Romy stood, her stomach burning, her fist clenched in silent fury.

  “I said we’re not in Japan. So what? she said, you’re no schoolgirl. I said that I’m a Christian—haven’t been for very long, but anyway—the Lord is good.” She blew her nose again. “Told her God hates it; it’s sinful. She just sneered at me. Then she shoved the file across and said that I was twenty-three and since I’d been married once, I was experienced. Statistically, every single below forty loves somebody once every two weeks anyway—she meant me too, but that’s not true—I’ll just be speeding my romantic life up a bit and, who knows, perhaps I’ll even find a mate among my customers; Number Nine’s where the rich guys and the politicians go. She was unreal, like, a witch in a nightmare. I couldn’t believe that she was serious. But Romy, she was!” She took a breath. “Romy?”

  “Uh…”

  “Romy, she was serious. I’m like, I’ll pass. She says, what else are you going to do? With your education—or lack of it—and those female attributes, you know? There was good money to be made, she said, and taxes to be paid, which the city needed. They have to take care of people who are less fortunate than I am. Laid-off Sachs-workers would love to take the position, but they won’t get it. Nobody’d pay to see them. She asked if I appreciated social justice, and I’m like, no, not if the state makes me chuck my clothes.”

  Romy regained her voice. “Britta, that’s awful.”

  Britta sniffled. “She said, if I refuse to work at Number Nine I’ll lose my unemployment benefits come August. Then I have to take any job they offer.”

  Romy was groping for words.

  “What am I going to do?” Britta said, her voice breaking. “I need to pay the bills. How am I supposed to feed Florian,” her two-year-old son. “The two of us barely make ends meet with the funds I draw now. And I’m not—”

  A muffled gunshot rang out and startled Romy, and the phone slipped from her hand. It hit the tiles of the kitchen floor. The plastic shattered, and the battery spilled out.

  Coco came in, barking.

  Tom’s teeth were grinding. He stared at the tiny hole in the couch on which he sat. The pistol was large and futuristic-looking, but the bore was small. It was a .22.

  The man was unfazed. “Who else is in this house?”

  “They’re all sleepi
ng,” Tom said.

  The assassin’s brow went up. “Wife too?”

  Stark nodded once, with difficulty.

  “Already?”

  “Early up, early down.”

  The gun swung toward the closed door. “If they come down, I’ll kill you all—even the dog, barking pest; I hate dogs.”

  Tom didn’t reply.

  “You’re not looking at me...”

  Stark’s head strained forward and he concentrated on the pitiful sight in front of him.

  The stranger’s hair was plastered to his forehead and his clothes looked as if he’d been sleeping in them for a week. The corners of his mouth were white and his left hand pulled and tore on his Eighties shag, inflicting pain, but the man neither noticed nor cared. He was high on something. Tom saw that his eyes were still wide, but he seemed to be sobering up; the bang had jerked him out of his madness.

  Tom hoped to God that the man was just showing off. But fearful of a misunderstanding, he hadn’t said anything at all—until the gun fired.

  The man suddenly began to sniffle. The gun wobbled. “I’m sorry.”

  Tom clicked his tongue and sighed. That again.

  The man was overcome with emotion. “I don’t want you to think that I’m a bad person. I’m so sorry that I have to do this. It’s just that you leave me no choice.” Tears began to streak his grimy cheeks.

  Tom hesitated. “But you have a choice,” he said softly. “Just walk out of here, Go home, lie down, maybe check yourself into an institution…”

  But the stranger ignored him, struggling with some thought of his own.

  “I won’t press charges…”

  The viciousness returned to the stranger’s face. “Not. I can’t leave you alone, can’t you see that? You’re a seducer. You fog up the air with delusions; you destroy everything that’s beautiful—that gives life and meaning to a man...” The gun described small circles in front of Tom’s face. “You’re a devil, and devils have to be eliminated. And now it’s good-bye,” the man whispered. “You die. Good-bye.”

  Stark swallowed. His chin pointed at the pistol. “You’ll go to jail if you fire that thing.”

  “Out in a year,” the man quipped, pulling back his gun hand. “And you’ll still burn. You believe in hell, yes?”

  Tom blinked with heavy lids. “What do you want from me?”

  The intruder tugged on his hair. “What you can’t give.”

  “Then you’re unfair.” Tom stared at the intruder. “I don’t even know you.”

  “You make people I care for miserable.”

  Stark’s eyes turned into slits. “You’re…”

  The man sneered. “Correct.”

  “Coco, be quiet.”

  The dog whimpered, turned in a circle, and laid down under the table.

  Romy wondered what Tom had dropped. The noise couldn’t have been a gunshot. It sounded remarkably like one, but he kept no weapons in Elmendorf. Here, the right to keep and bear arms didn’t exist, which she didn’t mind one bit, to tell the truth. Her husband saw that differently, of course, griping that here only criminals carried guns and that law-abiding citizens got discriminated, and what about self-defense? But that was just the opinion of an ex-trooper missing his toys.

  The bang had made her uneasy for the moment, but what really irritated her was the telephone. She’d reattached its bulky 3.6 volt battery, but the thing still wouldn’t work, and she couldn’t leave Britta hanging like this.

  She decided to tell Tom.

  Phone-pieces in hand, she descended the basement stairs—when she heard two voices. One was Tom’s, the other she didn’t recognize. She stopped to listen.

  Tom said, “You’ll never get away with it.”

  The strange voice gave a wicked laugh and said, “You rot while I weep. Before the jury. My lawyer will plead momentary insanity; I have no criminal record, you know—not even a mark in the Flensburg register—”

  “This is not traffic you’re violating. You’re into murder here.”

  The voice cackled again. “The judge will make a sour face. His decision’s so grave. He can’t let on that he’s already made up his mind to sentence me to five years. In France they’re lenient when it comes to matters of the heart—”

  “You’re not in France.”

  High-strung laughter. “Not tonight; but they will arrest me in Toulouse, where they don’t have room in their public dormitories and let the nice guys go quickly—and you can bet I’ll be a model inmate. After six months they’ll reduce my sentence to four years, and after a year they’ll commute it, just to get me out. It’s been done before. And then I’ll be marrying—” He coughed and laughed again. “Marrying Gina.”

  “You’ll never get away with it,” Tom repeated.

  “You lose, guru. She may not have told you to your Kennedy visage, but she sees nothing in you. You’re just a toy. Now, she’s God-fearing all right, but she wants nothing to do with your kind. You just confuse her.” The man coughed nervously and went through a laborious clearing of his throat. “You’ll never get her to do feasts. She’s a good, solid, God-fearing woman.” The voice turned into a whisper. “But you’ll die today, and nobody will mourn you. Neither she, nor I, nor anybody else here cares for a snake-handling Amerikaner.”

  A second went by. Then Tom said, “You lost her. Forever.”

  “You…!”

  Romy heard a quick clambering, then smacking noises. Standing silently, breathlessly, she stared at the broken phone in her hand. She didn’t dare move.

  Tom growled, “Take the gun out of my face…”

  There were more hits.

  Tom got loud. “Sit down and let’s talk!”

  She admired his cool. He didn’t sound intimidated at all. But he’d been trained to handle dangerous situations. He’d been a soldier once, of the silent kind, which the hapless fool in there opposing him didn’t understand.

  That last thought set off a whole rash of ideas in her mind.

  Tom was trained to “disable without killing” he’d explained once. The special operations military didn’t churn out mindless killing machines. Rather, it produced disciplined soldiers, trained to respond with force appropriate for the situation. Incapacitate. Surely, that was on his mind right now. He was waiting to make his move…

  He’d talked about kill boxes… Kill box.

  Her thoughts raced.

  A kill box was not a room, but a designated area in which all enemy life was to cease. But kill boxes were serviced by more efficient dealers in wholesale slaughter, such as the Air Force, artillery, or tanks. The work of operators was more nuanced, he’d said. It also required the better nerves. Tom had nerves; he didn’t suffer from nightmares; and he’d killed, not as a member of the 10th Special Forces Group who’d trained with the KSK in Grafenwöhr, but as an independent in Iraq—

  But the man in there had a gun. If Tom killed him, it was an act of defensible self-preservation.

  Romy felt sick in her stomach.

  Distraction…

  All Tom needed was a second or two.

  She racked her brain for a solution.

  Müller began to sob again.

  “Guru,” he said between sniffles, “you don’t know what you’re doing, you don’t know. You’re destroying me. Gina is all I have, and you’re taking her away from me…” He jerked on his hair. “Look at me—look at this face! Do you think a Jack-o-lantern like me can refuse a woman like Gina? Look at me. I’m the original Mr. Potato Head.” His arm began to shake, the pistol still trained on Tom. “You don’t know my wife, you’ve never seen her. She’s a gray mouse—her kids are gray mice. I have five children, gray mice, because my wife is too stupid to use contraceptives—or too Catholic, I could never determine exactly which.”

  “I’m a gray mouse too,” he went on. “But for some reason Gina heard my call and rescued me from the hell that was my family. She’s Queen of Hearts; she can do that. She picks her men. It’s never the other
way ‘round.” He cocked his head. “Be honest—if you can. When have you ever met a woman like Gina…? Don’t tell me you never wanted her. You’re obsessed with her…”

  Müller swung away from the desk and kicked the barbell on the floor. “You’re dreaming about her, but I’ve loved her,” he leaned closer, “I never knew the satisfaction, the sense of conquest, of—”

  “Manhood?” Tom said.

  Müller drilled his eyes into Stark. Then he said quietly, “Empathize. You’d be me, if I hadn’t met her first.”

  The veins in Tom’s neck were bulging. “Hardly.” He leads me in paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.

  Müller scoffed. “Don’t give me no spiel about being concerned for her soul. This is so phony…” He gave him a queer look. “You and she, you’d fit, Hercules.”

  Tom’s face seemed chiseled ice.

  Müller was leaning on the desk again, breathing easier now. “You know why I came with this?” he said, waving the gun, widening his eyes in mock-amazement.

  “No.”

  “It’s about power.”

  What else? Tom thought.

  “Gina told me that you were a soldier once, and soldiers wield power over life and death—absolute power. She told me that you’ve used that power before, that you’ve done people in.”

  “In another life.”

  “I came to show you how it feels,” Müller said, “how power feels when somebody else has it, Americano. You’re destroying my life, and now I’m destroying you. Are you feeling it?”

  “Friend,” Tom said, his lids half-raised, “if you’d ever been in battle…”

  He got a series of nervous blinks.

  “See…” He leaned forward. “I’ve been shot and left to die before, only because I tried to evacuate women and children.” Tom made a helpless face. “Neurologists say that a murderer never gets rid of the images in his mind—“

  “Quit!” Müller said.

  Stark raised his hands to calm him. “Sure, man.” His tongue ran over his lips. “Take it easy.”

  Müller hyperventilated again, eyes darting.

  After a few tense seconds Tom had an idea. “May I say something?”

  The answer were harried throat-clearing noises.