The Carpenter's Wife Read online

  Solomon’s parents.

  “What about them?” Tom asked blankly.

  “What about them.” Weiss huffed. “Their beginning was a disaster. He committed adultery with her.

  “Not enough, he made sure her husband was sent into battle so he would die. Then he married her. I’m sure they had a great time together in the beginning,” Rainer scoffed. “Every time he touches her, she remembers that he’d violated her; you don’t say no to a king, you know. Every time he gets close she remembers that he killed her beloved Uriah. That’s Harmony City right there.”

  “Brilliant, chief,” Stark conceded. Abe put a different spin on the scriptures. He’d never seen him that animated.

  “But they overcame their past. They made their relationship work.” Weiss gave Tom a probing look. “Imagine they had split up. Solomon, the wisest king ever, the king of Israel’s Golden Age, father of all Ethiopian emperors until Nineteen Seventy—if you want to believe it—would simply not have been. Don’t you think the world would be poorer if Solomon hadn’t lived?

  “I personally love Proverbs.

  “Even the Song of Solomon has its merits. My favorite verse in there is where it talks about the little foxes destroying the vineyard.” Weiss’s eyes had become piercing. “It’s always the little foxes, Tom, the small irritations that make a couple’s life hard.”

  Stark sat quietly, the avalanche of words taking effect.

  Rainer wiped his mouth and threw the napkin onto his empty plate. “But back to the situation in your home. As soon as possible, which will be this coming Monday, you go to a hardware store and get a new faucet.” He shook his head again. “I can’t believe you haven’t checked the ornery thing.”

  “Why’s that?”

  Another disbelieving glance. “Buddy… Do you understand how much of her time your wife spends in the kitchen? I’ll tell you: hours. Hours every day. She spends more time in her kitchen than in all other rooms—with the possible exception of the bedroom where she’s sleeping.

  “I mean, picture her. There she is, barely out of bed in the morning, in her kitchen, trying to fill the coffee pot, because she tries to make coffee—for you. She is making breakfast, then tries to wash up. She can’t do it, because there’s not enough water. She has to go to the bathroom to do her dishes. She does that every day, morning, noon, and night. So, she begins to think, ‘This is ridiculous. I have a faucet in the kitchen. It should work properly. It must work properly. Why isn’t it working properly? My mother had a faucet and it worked properly. There’s something wrong here.’ Then she remembers that it is all your fault, because she talked to you about it, but you didn’t pay any attention to her. She had to repeat herself, feeling stupid doing so. But you ignored her again.”

  “But what if the dumb piece isn’t broke? What if it’s the pipe?”

  Weiss pursed his lips. “Then I’d still buy a faucet and install it for her.”

  “That’s a waste of money.”

  “You’re buying harmony, signaling that you’re listening. You’re doing something exclusively for her.”

  Tom sighed again. Abe Lincoln employed a strange kind of logic.

  Weiss rubbed his hands. “Let’s see what happens if you don’t. Let’s carry the thought to its obvious conclusion...” He chafed his chin with the back of his fingers. “So. You keep ignoring her. Now hostility builds in her. You see her run to and fro between bathroom and kitchen with a basket full of dirty dishes, but you never help. You hide in your office. She deduces from your inattentiveness that you don’t love her. You probably think she’s a dip because she can’t even get a simple faucet to work, a faucet you don’t even trouble yourself to investigate. She begins to resent you. She begins to nag. She begins to punish you—”

  “I’m getting your point,” Tom broke in. He checked his watch. “The first afternoon session starts in half an hour. We’ll have to get going soon.”

  Weiss cocked his head and studied Tom with wily eyes. Then he clucked his tongue and said, “Let’s go then.” He waved for the waiter. “You should still call your wife today and keep in mind what I told you about emotions and opinions in women’s words.”

  “I will,” Stark said tersely, staring into his wallet.

  Weiss grinned.

  Minutes later they stepped out of the shadows into the boulevard’s sweltering heat and quickly disappeared down the stairs into the subway station.

  7

  Sunday, 6 July 2003, Afternoon, 101°F/38°C

  The air seemed to burn when Tom fired up the Harley.

  “And greet your wife!” Abe said.

  “Sure will.” Tom worked the gas, letting the motor roar. “Thanks again!” Then he swung his cowboy boots onto the forward-extended foot rests, and, with a last wave to Rainer and his family, rumbled down Ahorn Straße in Munich-Unterföhring. A moment ago he had changed into black leather pants and a sleeveless T-shirt. He also wore a black jet helmet and goggles with metal rims. His other belongings made the saddlebags on either side of the chopper bulge.

  Soon he was out of sight.

  The conference had ended after the morning service, and on Tom’s last day in Munich, Rainer had invited him for lunch at the apartment, where he got introduced to, or rather inducted into, the Weiss family, since the fresh-faced 10-year-old girl, Annika, had instantly fallen in love with the “cute” American, while the two teenage boys kept circling the chrome-flashing bike.

  Then there was Renate.

  Abe Lincoln’s little wife fit her man to a tee. Rainer Weiss exuded a pleasant trustworthiness. Matching that in her own way, Renate made Tom feel instantly at home. A quiet harmony permeated the family and the time was spent amicably over messy chicken for the adults and pizza for the kids.

  In the end Tom had reached his conference goal. He’d made a new friend. Or Abe Weiss had made one. Whatever.

  It was 3:30 in the afternoon, and the heat lay like a dusty blanket over the suburb when he finally broke for Elmendorf, the sun still high above his head.

  On the upcoming intersection he turned right and roared down Aschheimer Straße. His objective was to reach Autobahn A99 in the northeast, which would take him around the city to northbound A9 and on home to Elmendorf.

  Tom was in high spirits.

  Adhering to Abe’s advice, he’d called Romy at six last night, in between sessions, and had apologized for his abruptness the day before, even though he didn’t feel at fault. Then he’d mostly listened to her, trying to glean where she was coming from emotionally, which was not very hard to do. She was still upset about the impossible situation with the faucet, which prompted him to promise her—again—in soothing tones that he’d fix the mess. This time he’d investigate; he understood now.

  She seemed better when they were saying their good-byes.

  He’d called again this morning, shortly before she drove to church at ten, and their talk had actually been pleasant; a little tense perhaps, since she had to lead the meeting today and that always made her nervous, but otherwise agreeable. The faucet hadn’t even come up.

  Ben and Sarah were excited that Daddy was coming home tonight. They had sung a silly little self-made song for him over the phone, with Coco, an 8-month-old Golden Retriever pup, accompanying them in the background. They were a riot.

  He hoped Romy was okay.

  He was desperate for a better mood in her.

  For crying out loud, it couldn’t be so difficult for her to be in a good mood when he got home.

  Feringa Lake suddenly came up to his left, glistening blue in the sun, its shore teeming with loads of vacationers. He caught the now-familiar sight of multitudes of half-clad women.

  Big city folks…

  But what was that…?

  In the midst of all of them, fairly close to the lake itself, sat a group of young people whose girls were wearing either full-body bathing suits or unspectacular bikinis. A fully grown man—and possibly his wife and small children—sat in their midst. H
e was strumming a guitar. They were singing.

  They were dressed…

  They had to be a youth group! A Christian youth group! A youth group singing songs to the Lord, surrounded by the world—but ignoring it altogether!

  Tom laughed out loud. He was so excited, so irrationally happy, he thought of driving over, parking the Harley, and walking up to them to congratulate their girls for wearing clothes.

  They wore clothes!

  God always had his remnant.

  When a country became decadent and went to the devil, there always remained a steadfast few who refused to rot with the rest. The righteous remainder, the true believers, the Salt of the Earth and the Light of the World. God had his remnant—even in Europe. There was always a remainder who kept the clothes on.

  He needed to tell them how much he appreciated what they did, that he’d noticed their stand.

  But when he slowed down to pull over and to follow through with his idea, he figured that the black-haired adult—and possibly his wife—might misconstrue his motives; they might not understand. If he walked up to congratulate their girls and to thank them for staying dressed, they might find him strange. “Why,” the adult—the youth pastor—might ask, “Why do you park your Harley and wander through a throng of worldly women to come to us?”

  “To congratulate you for being the remnant.”

  “You want to tell us, you walked through a mass of worldly women to congratulate us for not being worldly?

  “Your motives are all messed up, sir.”

  He would come across as weird.

  Not as a fellow-element of the remnant, but weird.

  Besides, he didn’t exactly look like a man of the cloth.

  “Who are you?” they might ask.

  “A pastor,” he would answer.

  “A pastor? A free-evangelical pastor? What business has an evangelical pastor dressed like a biker high on hormones searching for a clothed youth group among the half-clad?”

  “I’m Tom Stark,” he would have to say, “who loves dressed people and who has seen many things this week he didn’t care for.”

  Tom realized he might frighten them.

  Then another thought popped into his mind. What if they weren’t a youth group at all? How many Christian youth groups would go sit among the topless? How would the boys cope? Surely, that had to be a concern for their leader; it would be for him.

  Maybe they didn’t care; maybe they simply wanted to swim too. They, too, had a right to cool off, didn’t they? After all, the earth and its lakes belonged to the Lord and not to the world.

  Maybe they had a covenant with their eyes.

  Maybe…

  Oh, junk.

  He reduced the gas, shifted into fifth gear, and roared on, the scorching breeze on his arms and face.

  Madness.

  This heat bred madness.

  8

  Sunday, 6 July 2003, Late Afternoon, 99°F/36°C

  He drove north on A9, riding in the middle of the right lane, occupying the full space of an automobile with his chopper, while limousines and flat sports cars flew by on his left. But Tom didn’t care about speed this afternoon. He now enjoyed the warm wind on his body and the cruising speed of 140 klicks per hour, which translated into no less than 85 mph.

  For the longest time he’d been recalculating everything to American measurements. But when Romy realized that the metric system made sense, more sense than her old imperial system of Kansas, she quit the habit, and he’d scrapped mental converting too. They lived in Germany now, perhaps for the rest of their lives. They needed to adapt. And they had.

  In time he passed through the Holledau hops-growing area, the biggest such region in the world. The tangle grew, not unlike vine, on high stakes, which turned the landscape into a giant nail board. Most of the hops grown here went to the big breweries in America, which were, after all, the largest on the globe.

  After a little more than half an hour a road sign for Ingolstadt came up.

  Ingolstadt.

  Mary Shelley’s infamous Doctor Frankenstein once occupied a laboratory in Ingolstadt’s university, during a dark, romantic age. In truth, the institution had been given up long before Doctor Victor might have assumed his role as the modern Prometheus.

  But a monster once appeared. A little further north. In Nuremberg.

  Nürnberg.

  Here the Autobahn turned into a normal street for a stretch within the city. Here the Nazis had held their yearly party conventions with parades and splendid displays of pillars and domes built with the beams of searchlights.

  Here they sat, spellbound, and listened to the orator from hell, a mustachioed former drifter from Austria, who by marvelous circumstances had become their ruler; who preached hatred against Christ and the Jews, and who proclaimed a thousand-year Reich of tall, blond, and blue-eyed Northmen—being small, black-haired, and gray-eyed himself—only to drench that Reich, indeed the whole continent, in blood, becoming one of history’s worst mass murderers…

  Somewhere to the west lay Fürth, Henry Kissinger’s hometown. Stark saw the signs.

  After another forty-five minutes of easy riding Tom passed the village in which Levi Strauss had lived before emigrating to San Francisco and making it big. His pants now ruled the world.

  But he had to go to America to make it so.

  Then Würzburg came up, where Doctor Roentgen had stumbled upon the X-ray phenomenon in 1895, a discovery which earned him the first Nobel Prize in physics ever awarded.

  1,300 years before, Saint Boniface had come to town, a bold Irishman sent by Rome to evangelize the hostile inside of the yet unexplored continent. The diocese he founded was still there, having survived every onslaught of thirteen centuries.

  A7 on which he rode now turned into A70, and at 7:00 PM the industrial buildings of Schweinfurt finally came into view, when his motor began to stutter. He reached down and turned the valve onto reserve, and decided to get gas at the Shell station on Mainberger Straße. The motor coughed and rumbled back to life.

  A billboard greeted him as he rolled up to the light on Max bridge, which spanned the Main river and connected Schweinfurt’s harbor with the city, declaring, “It’s string time.” Below that sentence, five models stood side by side, their backsides toward the inclined observer.

  What was the responsible marketing genius trying to sell?

  Tom couldn’t tell. He growled and averted his eyes, now looking at a board on which two packs of Lucky Strike lay stacked. The caption read, “Do you like to lie on top?”

  Forevermore…

  The light changed and he drove on, snaking toward the northeast.

  In town, on Marienbach Straße, another board came up, also hawking cigarettes. A topless brunette lay on a lakeshore, partially covered by water, while some pseudo macho with a West in his mouth lay beside her—

  Glimpsing the sea of red dots ahead, Tom braked abruptly and his tires squealed. The car in front of him stood, waiting in line for yet another light to change. He’d almost crashed into it.

  This was getting ridiculous.

  Watching the 95-octane Super splash into the tank, he noticed that gas prices had gone up again by two cents, now costing 1.18 euros per liter, which shook out to about 5.50 dollars per gallon, a staggering 80 percent of which were nothing but taxes. Germans paid gas tax, on top of that an eco-tax plus some minor taxes that weren’t even called taxes, and to the sum total were added 16 percent value-added tax. Tax upon tax.

  “Father State,” as the Germans called their welfare system, was hungry, even more than “Uncle” Sam, who was still only an uncle, extended family, not an all-out patriarch.

  Stark swallowed at the view of the final sum and replaced the nozzle. He locked his tank and went in to pay.

  The inside of the station mart felt pleasantly cool. Its little A/C was working overtime. He passed the racks with automotive items like cans of overpriced oil and wiper blades. Then he had to turn left and walked down
the magazine rack. Right on its end, where you had to look at them if you didn’t want to run into the wall, sat the “men’s’” magazines, not carefully hidden in the last row, but nicely exposed.

  A copper-toned Asian lady smiled at him from one of the covers.

  What all money did to a woman’s soul. They probably paid her an arm and a leg to sit like that.

  Next to her, an equally bare Paris Hilton cast a clouded look from a golden cover.

  Did she need the money?

  On another cover, Madonna held her thumb out, hitchhiking, totally nude.

  Stark closed his eyes, frowned, and strolled on, passing the rack with national newspapers. He grabbed an FAZ, stood in line, and skimmed headlines to refocus his thoughts. FAZ, Frankfurt’s highbrow national daily, never had pictures—much less girlie pictures—on its front page, only writing.

  A stout, black-haired fellow in woodland fighting greens and combat boots walked up behind him. The soldier, a corporal by the markings, wore a big olive 1 on his left shoulder. The numeral would have been red on his dress uniform.

  Tom glanced up from his paper, faced him, and smiled.

  The Ranger didn’t smile; his jaw was set. But he nodded faintly.

  Tom noticed the small Ranger tab above the big olive 1. “You went through the course in Georgia?”

  Again the steel-eyed Ranger nodded slightly. The man studied him, probably wondering what business this German had gabbing like that. Stark spoke good English; his hair was short but too long for the service, and he held a German newspaper in his hand. Had to be German.

  “Man, that course is crazy,” Tom went on. “The humidity. The mosquitoes. Once you’re wet you never dry. No sleep for days on end… Do they still make you eat snakes for dinner on Saturday night?” Ha-ha.

  The Ranger pointed ahead, politely.

  Tom turned around and realized that it was his turn to pay. “All right.” He tucked the Frankfurter Allgemeine under his arm and reached into his pocket to retrieve his wallet with the Eurocard—when his eyes fell on the counter: Paris Hilton.