The Weight (34 page)

Then there was some Jewish writing. Maybe it was more words, but I could only read the English part. I did that, over and over again.

I shook my head, like maybe that would change the writing. I’d probably still be staring at that paper if Rena hadn’t stabbed me in the side of my neck with a long fingernail.

“What the—?”

“There’s nothing else to say, is there? You got what you came for.”

“Except for—”

“Just stop, okay? I don’t care anymore. I’m going to obey my husband. You want to run back to Solly, do it. You want to talk to Jessop so bad, I can tell you where to find him too.”

“How could you do that?”

“Easy,” she said, like there was a foul taste in her mouth. “On paper,
he’s
my husband.”

Rena pulled the Caddy into a marked-off slot right in front of one of those little up-and-down houses. She had the key for the front door.

The place was like brand-new clean, but it had a musty smell.
Like Solly’s unit
, I thought.
Only his smelled good, because Grace came in every week
.

I got all our stuff inside. Rena went around turning things on. “Don’t open the blinds,” she said. “I want to get the car into the garage. It’s out back. We have two slots. One’s large enough for an RV. That’s a big thing in time-shares.”

Then she was gone. At least, this time, there weren’t any of those damn bugs to keep me company.

“What’s a time-share?” I asked, as soon as she sat down. She looked like she didn’t have much left in her, and I wanted to be sure I knew what the deal was. “Time-share” didn’t sound good to me.

“The owner is a corporation,” she said, between puffs of her smoke. “You buy shares that entitle you to use the place one month out of every year. Summertime, the shares are pretty cheap. In the winter, they go for a lot.”

“So you own one of those shares?”

“I own them all. One corporation, twelve shareholders. But they’re all me, just different names. The corporation has a bank account. The mortgage company gets a check every month from that account. Automatically, I mean—they just go in there and take it out. Same for the condo association. You have to pay them fees, on top of the mortgage. Also the cable TV.

“There’s no phone. The account for the corporation always has enough in it to carry the place for a few years, even if no new deposits show up.

“I handle all the deposits into the corporate account. I just made one last April. Nobody’s going to be asking any questions for a long time. And I’ll be gone a much longer time by then. That’s the way Albie set it up.

“The same for the car. I own it. In the same name I use for my driver’s license and insurance. Down here, a white Caddy’s like a palm tree—anyplace you look, you see them.”

“Are you going to—?”

I stopped when I saw she was already asleep. Just passed out on the couch. I snubbed out her smoke in the ashtray, then I kicked back in the recliner.

But I didn’t go to sleep.

It was way past midnight when she came around. At first, she looked scared, like she woke up in the middle of a bad dream. Then she shook her head hard, put her nose under her armpit, made a face.

That’s when she saw me there.

“I need a shower, Sugar. Then you can sleep, okay?”

I didn’t say anything. Just kept sitting there, with her pistol in my lap.

She made it quick. I guess she knew I was running on fumes. I don’t even remember going out.

When I opened my eyes, I was in a bed. Rena was next to me. She must have taken off my shirt and shoes and socks. She smelled fresh and sweet. I didn’t.

I found the shower easy enough. Draped over the hamper, all the fresh clothes I’d need, except for my shoes.

I just kept going, like I knew what I was doing. But I didn’t even know what day it was. Didn’t know the time until I went back into the living room. It had those tiny little blinds, the kind you open and close by twisting a rod. I pushed one up with my finger. Daylight.

The kitchen was nothing like the one in Rena’s house, but it was still all high-end. Looked new. I opened the refrigerator. Bottles of water were all I saw. But there was a whole mess of my power bars on the little round table.

I was still eating when I felt her behind me. I started to turn, but she put her hand on my face and pushed it back to where it was.

“Finish first, then we’ll talk,” she said.

In the reflection from the hood over the stove, I could see she wasn’t wearing anything.

When I went into the front room, she was waiting. Dressed in a set of baggy gray sweats, barefoot. Her hair was down, looked wet, like she’d just walked out of the shower.

With the blinds drawn and only a little lamp going in the corner, the room was all dark and smoky. Like an after-hours joint, except for the quiet.

“You’ll have to cut this later,” she said, pulling at her hair. “I
can dye it myself. I’ll pick up what we need when I buy some real suitcases.”

“You’re going to, what, disappear?”

“I already have. Rena Rosenberg is gone. I’m Lynda Leigh. On this unit, on the car, on my license. Even on my birth certificate. Which you need to get a passport. And Lynda Leigh has a credit history, too.”

“You’ve been ready for this to happen, huh?”

“For a long time. Albie knew it would come someday, and he never let me forget it. You know something else? I made all this ID myself. Me. Albie taught me. Perfect ID isn’t just copying a photo on a license, like I did when you took the Lincoln. It takes research, equipment, and technique. That last one, I don’t know if I can explain it. But Albie said I was a natural.

“I learned from the best. Albie told me that the fatal flaw in buying ID is, you’re giving the person you bought it from more than just the money; you’re giving him something he can sell. But when you learn to make your own, you never have to trust anyone, ever.”

“And this Jessop …?”

She lit another cigarette. “I lied,” she said.

“You lied about what?”

“Everything. I’m not thirty-nine; I’m thirty-five. I married Jessop in 1989. That was to keep him from going to prison. He paid my mother to sign some paper so we could get married.”

That’s what the lawyer told me about Jessop
, I thought.
He got married to some girl who was fourteen
. She wasn’t lying about that, anyway.

“I’d already been with him for almost two years then,” Rena said. “I’d probably still be with him except he once brought me along to a meeting with Albie.”

“At that big house?”

“No,” she said, like only an idiot would even think that. “In a restaurant. I already had the first implants by then, and Jessop, I think he wanted to show off. Show
me
off, I mean. I was all slutted up: four-inch heels, raccoon eyes, a little skirt I had to fight to fit into.

“Albie had two men with him. The same men who are coming for his book now. Not them, necessarily, men just like them, I mean.

“They started talking about some job. Right in front of me, like I was a piece of furniture. All of sudden, Albie says to Jessop, ‘This is the way you work? You bring a little girl along, let her listen to everything?’

“ ‘She’s dumb as a fucking rock,’ Jessop says. ‘By the time we get back home, she won’t even remember she’s been here. How old do you think she is—twenty-two, maybe? Well, she’s fifteen, and she’s been stripping for a couple of years already. You got nothing to worry about.’

“Albie just looks at Jessop. ‘I drove a long way for this,’ he says. ‘Did I say you could bring anyone?’

“ ‘No,’ Jessop tells him. ‘But what’s the—?’

“That’s when Albie cut him off. ‘You take any risk you want. But you don’t make me take them with you. So this girl, she stays with me until it’s over.’

“The way Albie said it, you could see he wasn’t asking. I’d never seen Jessop like that before. Scared, I mean.”

“He left you there?”

“Sure. Far as he was concerned, this was just a long trick. Like a rental. I think he even expected Albie to throw a bunch of cash at him when the job was finished.”

“But …?”

“But Albie brought me to the house, the one you stayed at. He told me I was going to stay there until I was old enough to make intelligent decisions.”

“Weren’t you scared?”

“Not for a minute. Albie told me to take a shower, scrub all that
shmutz
—that was the word he used; I still remember—off my face. Put all my clothes in a plastic bag. He didn’t have any women’s clothes, so I had to wear men’s stuff for a couple of weeks, until he brought all kinds of things back. I didn’t know
exactly
what the stuff was, but I could tell it was good.”

“He never—?”

“Don’t you even
think
it! I had to read all the time. Books, magazines, newspapers. And watch TV; that was okay, too. Anything I didn’t understand, I’d ask Albie. Some things he’d tell me. Sometimes, he’d say I was just being lazy, go look it up. An education, Albie called it. The first time he said, ‘Rena, you are a truly intelligent young woman,’ I thought I would die, I was so happy.

“All I know is that Albie met with Jessop again. After the job, I mean. I don’t know what they said, and I know they kept doing business, but Jessop never came around the house. None of the people that Albie set up jobs for
ever
did. Just those other men; the ones I told you about.