The Carpenter's Wife Page 9

  Back then, Stark was not a lot of fun to be around. A riotous, violent, unapologetic vandal, he felt he had a prime right to live like one, too. He’d put his life on the line, had faced lethal dangers; now he was entitled to a just recompense, to the best that life had to offer, and that was fun and games. A hunger for life, a mania, took possession of him, and like the submariners of World War Two and the Navy pilots of Vietnam, he gorged himself on excessive doses of sex and drugs and unaccountability.

  He had money, a ton of money; the Pentagon paid its dogs well. Some former generals even became millionaires for coordinating activities like those he’d engaged in. Stark as an operator was top-price material too, cutting 100,000 dollars in just 99 days. Tax free. But his walk came at a cost. He suffered more for his hundred grand than he himself understood. Continually throwing himself into the line of fire, the outrageous demands of those days and nights had crushed and mangled his soul. And now he was settled with his insane mania…

  He’d been working behind—and many times below—enemy lines. As Echo Six he had for days subsisted in a cold and wet burrow in the ground at Al Salman in western Iraq, sleeping by day and blowing up key installations at night, before the 82nd and the French Foreign Legion took that strategic airfield on the first day of the war. Wearing a haik, a loose Arab garment, an AK assault rifle, and a ring of grenades around his waist, he’d skipped town shortly before they arrived, just to be on the safe side.

  Later that tumultuous night, he’d raced east in an old Toyota, toward his next objective, when his car suddenly got struck by small-arms fire, which exploded all of its windows. He narrowly escaped, only to get stuck on a flat, 10-mile-wide gravel field right between the Republican guard and the mighty tanks of 7th Corps when General Franks didn’t reach Objective Collins as quickly as had been anticipated. The guns had roared all night, rocking the ground to a drumbeat of brilliant flashes, while Tom, the freelancer, the expendable hireling, had languished between rocks and hard spots, sweating, the fear unbearable, his guts and bladder barely under control, waiting for the cavalry that never came. But he survived. He survived it all. Now he lived as he pleased.

  He had a right to.

  But for all the abundant wine, women, and song, he was painfully aware of the stale aftertaste with which those nights of carousing left him. They weren’t enough; they didn’t still his hunger. He couldn’t shake the sense of emptiness that overtook him each morning after.

  Then came that bizarre Saturday, September 22nd, when he arrived for a rare visit at his parents old house by the lake in Westville, a village east of Alliance in Ohio.

  After hugging Mom and Dad, waving hello to Aunt Kim across the fence, and unpacking, he’d hit the town in the twilight hours for some rock ‘n roll. Asked later, he didn’t remember too much of what happened that night, just that he’d spent it in a series of bars and decrepit joints, and that his alcohol level had increased steadily, until he was so soused that he became unaware of what he was doing.

  Somewhere, beer bottles had rolled around and women had danced on tables. Then he had crawled onto a table, too, amidst blurry streaks of neon, and had done something incredible embarrassing. Exactly what it had been, he could never recall—and nobody ever told him—but the sense of shame that followed had been overpowering. He’d even wept in his sleep. The next morning he woke up in police custody with his wallet gone.

  He’d felt so unclean, had been so repulsed by something he’d done but couldn’t remember, that he was barely able to look into the cop’s face upon release. The awareness that he had wallowed in the mire like a pig rumbled around in his subconscious, and he utterly despised himself for his scumbag lifestyle.

  Something broke that Sunday morning, September 23rd, 1991.

  Sitting on his own bed and weeping with shame, an irrational craving for purity arose in his spirit and racked him. It chased him and compelled him to drive around in his brown Bronco like a madman, until finally, late in the afternoon, he pulled into the parking lot of a brown brick church, New Life Assembly down in Lewisville, to speak to a counselor—custodian, to somebody, anybody! He was so desperate, he wanted to die. He needed to know how to shake the scum that permeated his being. When he met nobody at the office, he stumbled over to the house next door, hoping it was the parsonage, and groped for the doorbell.

  He was lucky.

  Pastor Eugene, an elderly gentleman with auburn hair and mild eyes, saw him, heard him, and took him in. While Mary, his wife, set out cups for some tea, Tom wept and sobbed and made no sense, until an exasperated Pastor Gene simply led him in the Sinner’s Prayer.

  It worked.

  Stark got born again without comprehending it at the time. But that day, God chased away the demons clawing at his soul. The Almighty stretched out his finger and touched the hired gun they used to call Echo Six, and filled him with his Spirit. Darkness drained out of him, light shot forth, and with it came peace. Tranquility.

  Purity became so important to Stark that he sobered up virtually over night, foregoing girls and drink altogether, much to the astonishment of the few friends he had. For the next four years he read his Bible and attended New Life, sitting at Pastor Kelly’s feet, until God spoke to him and he moved west, to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to attend a small Bible school at Hope Fellowship, a 3,000-member congregation on South Barnett Road between Tulsa and Broken Arrow. He intended to prepare for the ministry there, since Stark now felt called to be a missionary to Europe. To Germany, to be precise. Since his days in the 10th SFG long ago, he knew and loved the people. And as all Special Forces operators, he was bilingual, speaking German fluently.

  He’d barely arrived at Logos School of the Bible in July of 1995, when something new and unexpected burst onto the scene in Stark’s world.

  Walking down the office hallway one morning, he suddenly stood, bolted to the floor, as she floated by, smiling coyly at him. At first he was convinced that she wasn’t really there, that she was a dream, a vision, a fairy-tale maiden that had stepped out of a corner of his overwrought imagination.

  But she existed.

  The missions secretary at Hope had sparkly brown eyes, long chestnut-colored hair in tight curls, and a smile as wide as Kansas; a willowy figure… She was all he’d unconsciously been looking for. More than anything else, he was smitten with the purity that surrounded her at all times. She was clean. She was not the least bit streetwise.

  What a woman!

  The attraction was mutual, and within two months—three weeks into the school year—they were married. Her consent to go to Europe with him was easily obtained. She loved missions and had been on several short-term trips, including one into the wilds of southern India. They cast vision together and began to prepare for the day of departure. She, by attending German classes at Tulsa Junior College, he, by studying and working odd jobs until he got a steady position at Hope.

  As a janitor.

  13

  Monday, 7 July 2003, Afternoon, 101°F/38°C

  After dropping Sarah off for her ballet lessons on Rückert Straße, Romy cut across the large Rossmarkt square, fighting her way through a noisy throng of Turkish women. Those who didn’t carry bulging plastic bags in both hands were pushing baby strollers. Scanning the wider crowd, she noticed that virtually all in the sea of bobbing heads wore black or brown headscarves matching their ankle-length trench coats.

  Romy couldn’t get used to it. Trench coats!

  In 100 degree heat.

  An everyday occurrence in Schweinfurt, such a sight was unthinkable in her native Kansas, and she wondered again how she ever got to Turkey. She was supposed to be a missionary to Germany, wasn’t she? That was what she’d consented to. But nobody within earshot spoke German. Rossmarkt was the Orient.

  Looking at the uniformed crowd, Romy thought again that many of those women had probably lived through a youth similar to her own. Pious Turks usually came from Anatolia in central Turkey—the former Galatia—a backward area with few mode
rn amenities. But growing up on her parents’ farm, she herself had learned about the radio only when she was twelve, TV entering her life at fourteen, when she witnessed Dick van Dyke’s antics at Aunt Lisa’s house, his show airing on Channel 21 out of Dodge City.

  Of course, Kansas wasn’t Anatolia, and her father’s faith wasn’t Islam. But it hit her that there were a lot of similarities in the outcome of Dad’s beliefs, which consisted mostly of dos and don’ts, plus a certain uniformity, like Islam produced uniformity.

  Like the women around her, she’d lived through a sheltered adolescence. Like the headscarf-wearers in whose midst she walked, she’d never gone on a date, venturing out on her first one only after moving to Tulsa at 26. There, at Hope, she’d heard about the liberty of the redeemed, about the power of the New Birth. At Hope she shed a lot of her legalistic opinions, trading them for revelations of God’s grace. But some fears remained.

  Her dad once witnessed how quickly a little partying can deteriorate into gross carnality; you can slither quickly into the pits of depravity if you don’t watch yourself. He’d known a man once, who’d been with two women at the same time, a mother and her daughter. He’d been shocked afterwards, and the affair became a defining experience for him. Knowing how fast the innocent can be swayed and betrayed—especially when alcohol was part of the picture—he tried to shelter his angelic daughter from the smut of the world by limiting her exposure and by warning her with stern words of the fearsome animal lurking in the universal male. Little Romy had listened with wide eyes and in time grew distrustful of boy’s friendliness.

  Tom had been so different.

  At first.

  Only after she married him did she realize that he was preoccupied too—worse than she’d ever imagined possible. Once married, he thought nothing of seeing her every day. Even while working as a janitor at Hope—a church!—he came home every night with only two things in his head: supper and… that other stuff. And not always in that order. Distraught, she’d tried to re-educate him by becoming increasingly passive. But he just wouldn’t relent. Only by forcing him into darkness and utter simplicity had she been able to steer him away from his annoying preoccupation.

  And Tom went along. He really was a sweet fellow. He’d never be mean to her for being too tired. He never even let on a mood. Perhaps his pride had something to do with that. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to be with him. It was just that…

  She really didn’t know what she wanted.

  Weaving through the pedestrian area, Romy made her way toward the Beamer sitting in the shadows of the restricted-parking zone opposite the towering Panorama Hotel. A blue-clad politesse, a municipal ticket-writing-lady, stood in front of it, getting ready, pen and pad already in hand.

  “I’m here!” Romy waved her car keys, running the last few steps.

  The haggard woman frowned and put her hands to her sides.

  “I’m sorry. I hurried.” Romy’s shoulders went up, as did the palms of her hands. “It’s a madhouse in there; just look.”

  Not a muscle moved in the woman’s face. “See this?” She pointed at the red-and-blue restricted-parking sign.

  “Well, yes, of course, Madam.”

  “It means you can stop here for three minutes”—three fingers on the woman’s right hand went up—“three minutes total, to load or unload cargo. I haven’t seen you do that.”

  Romy gestured feebly. “But I…”

  “But what?”

  She thought of intelligent things to say, but they eluded her.

  The woman hadn’t blinked once so far. “You overstayed by more than five minutes.”

  “But I’m here now,” Romy said. “I’ll leave on the spot.”

  “I’m afraid it’s too late.” The politesse wrote without looking up.

  “But—”

  “Look,” the ticket lady said, her voice frosty now. “You keep arguing, you’ll increase the price.” She drilled her eyes into the perpetrator. “Are you going to keep arguing?”

  Romy exhaled with an open mouth, speechless for the moment.

  “I thought so.” The politesse went back to writing. She studied the license plate. Then she ripped the ticket from her pad and handed it over.

  Romy peeked at the amount due. She gasped and stared at the blue uniform in front of her. “Twenty-five euros?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “If you sue, it’ll easily come to twice that amount,” the woman said matter-of-factly. “Don’t stall the traffic now. Get moving.”

  “But this is way too much—”

  “How much?” asked a tinny male voice behind her.

  “Twenty-five.” Romy turned to see who’d asked.

  A burly Turk, his age indefinable, peeked over her shoulder. He wore black loafers, blue suit pants, a gray short-sleeved shirt unbuttoned almost all the way, and gold chains around a hairy neck. A skull cap adorned the back of his head, and a rosary dangled from his meaty right paw. His fingers massaged the prayer beads.

  “Twenty-five.”

  “That’s the regular going-price for unmetered parking around here,” said the woman. “The lady should have—”

  “Here,” said the Turk, his billfold in hand, waving two ten euro bills and a five.

  The politesse snatched the money.

  “But you can’t…” objected Romy, her eyes wide.

  “I don’t care who pays,” said the woman.

  The Turk grinned.

  “But…” Romy’s eyes went from one to the other.

  “Say ‘thank-you’, lady,” said the woman. “And close your mouth.” She strolled off, shaking her head.

  The Turk’s grin persisted.

  “T-Thank you.” Romy didn’t know what to say. “Of course, I’ll reimburse you.” She opened her purse and rummaged for her wallet.

  “Never mind…” The Turk caressed the silver hood of the Beamer. “I do not want money back.” His grin became uncanny.

  Romy swallowed, her eyes unsteady. “But I can’t just let you—”

  “Of course you can,” he interrupted.

  “No, no,” she said. “I can’t just let you—”

  “Of course, you can.” He became slightly impatient.

  She stared at him.

  He relaxed and his eyes began to gleam as they slid up and down her figure. He looked her over without embarrassment. Then he said, “Nice car.”

  “I-I don’t understand…”

  “I understand,” he said, his face straight now. “Now is not working hours for you.”

  “I don’t work,” she said.

  “It’s all fun?” He giggled. “That’s nice. The car…” He pointed at the BMW. “Of course, nice. Expensive.”

  “Well,” she said awkwardly, brushing a strand of hair off her forehead, “not really.”

  He wiggled his head. “Not to you.” He whistled a high note. “You are expensive. Elegant lady. Expensive.”

  “I-I really need to get going.”

  He had been leaning on the Beamer and stepped away now. “I understand, not working hours.”

  “No,” she said.

  He grinned sheepishly. “But my twenty-five.”

  “I’ll give them back; I told you…”

  He shook his head and waved his hands dismissively. “No, no. Not want.”

  She opened the car and sat down. “Thank you.” She smiled up at him, and he gently pushed the door shut, smudging the glass with his fingers. Her eyebrows bounced once, then she started the engine.

  “Wait!” he said. Turning around, he hurried off toward his own car across the street, an old white Mercedes 200 without hubcaps.

  Romy pulled away from the curb and rolled down the hill toward Marienbach Straße, where she waited for the light to turn. On the billboard across the street, a young man with a cigarette in his mouth stared at the girl in the water next to him. West, she thought, you stink. And Kansas was far away.

 
Too far.

  Glancing into the rearview mirror, she noticed that the Turk’s Mercedes sat right behind her. She turned around and waved her fingers at him, smiling, and mouthed, “Thank you” again. When the light changed, she drove left, entering the wide Marienbach.

  The Mercedes followed her.

  By the next light, the man drove up in the neighboring lane. She looked over. He waved. She waved back.

  And then he puckered and threw her kisses.

  Shocked, she looked away. She suddenly felt sober; anxiety sprang up in her stomach. If he thought of that… Her eyes widened. She needed to shake him. When the light turned green, she set her blinker and dashed right, into the maze of narrow one-way streets around Gottesberg.

  Tires squealed behind her, and in the mirror she saw the white Mercedes rumble along after her. Driving on, Romy became positively afraid. She was getting stalked!

  What should she do?

  She couldn’t go home now. Then he’d know where she lived. Tom was there. Now. But Tom wouldn’t always be there. He’d be gone. She’d be alone. The kids…

  She began to pray, but found she was too confused.

  She drove faster, crossed a patch of cobble stone, got back on smooth blacktop. The cars parked left and right blurred as she flew along, her frantic eyes oscillating between the rearview mirror and the street in front of her. Down another one-way street, then left. She slammed on the brake; a blue Volvo was pulling in from the left. She waited a few seconds, set her blinker, and passed the crawling car.

  Oncoming traffic flashed headlights. She tore the steering right, cutting the Volvo off. Its driver honked. Another pair of lights flashed, this time in the mirror. Approaching cars rushed by. Then the Mercedes passed the Volvo. He drove up behind her again. Accelerating, she raced around a wide curve—and was back on the Marienbach. Traffic was slower here.

  The Panorama intersection came up again. On the billboard, the West boy still studied the West girl. Stupid advertising. She gritted her teeth.

  The man behind her pointed at the board and laughed. When she didn’t react, he clutched the wheel. All friendliness drained from his face. Wicked determination twisted it into a grimace, a frightening mask.