Page 71 of Beehive
“But you were not,” she pointed out, her expression maddeningly smug. “You should learn to savor the moment. Life will be richer for it.”
My mouth opened to respond, but words failed. The woman was maddening. She might not have been human. I wasn’t sure.
Thomas stepped across the room, sat on the bed beside the satchel, and opened it. He hesitated a moment before removing the statue, turning it over in his hands a few times, then setting it on the writing desk opposite the bed.
“What now?” His voice was quiet.
Visla shrugged. “Now? Now we figure out what our rabbi is hiding . . . and quickly. The Soviets will not stop looking, and I doubt it will take them long to learn that it was you two who ‘liberated’ him from the museum.”
I stared into the eyes of the Keeper.
25
Thomas
“What the hell do we do now? If she’s right . . .” The rest of my thought hung unspoken in the air,“The whole damn Soviet intelligence apparatus will be hunting us within hours.”
I stretched onto the bed, staring up at the ceiling with my hands clasped behind my head. Before Visla could reply, I met her gaze and pointed around the room, then to my ear. She nodded at my signal of, “Uncle Joe is listening.”
I wasn’t sure the Soviets were actually listening. We hadn’t swept the room for bugs; but our host had said it was a possibility. We had to assume there were operators somewhere nearby, possibly in one of the houses next door, hanging on our every word.
Visla padded across the room in her socked feet and snatched the statue off the desk.
“Whoa, hang on,” I said, forcing myself up into a sitting position. “We don’t even know if that’s the right . . .box of tissues; and, if we tinker too much, we might never get all thetissues back in the box. You know how hard it is to fold those things.”
Visla sniffed and wiped her nose with her sleeve, then ignored us, staring at the statue as though trying to interpret Sanskrit. She turned it over, ran her thumb across the Hebrew symbols carved on the book the man held, even raised it to her nose and sniffed it. She was a woman on a mission, though none of us—including Visla—knew where that mission might lead.
After several minutes, she gave up searching for clues on the outside of the piece, held it up to her ear, and shook it. Frustration etched in her features, she set the statue down and wrote on a piece of paper.
“There’s something inside. I can hear it rattle when I shake it.”
“Be careful, please. I would hate to damage that statue. Plus, whatever it holds might be delicate,”Will wrote back as she picked the statue up and returned to her examination.
I scooted to the edge of the bed. The last thing I wanted was to get into a wrestling match with Visla over the statue, but I couldn’t let her impatience drive us to ruin the one clue we had to this interminable mystery.
She switched tactics, pulling at the Keeper’s hat, arms, feet, and anything else she could push, pull, or twist. She wasn’t rough, testing each area with a minimum amount of force; still, all her prodding had me holding my breath. I wasn’t sure Will had breathed since she’d entered our room.
We needed the rabbi—and his secrets—intact.
After what felt like ten lifetimes rather than a dozen minutes, she set the statue back on the desk, crossed her arms, and stared like she was trying to intimidate the little man into forking over his mysteries.
I couldn’t suppress a laugh.
The sharp look Visla sent my way made my chuckle grow.
“There are . . . tissues everywhere,” she said. Now, I was snorting. “You try pulling just one out of that damn box.”
The bed vibrated when Will flopped down and added his laughter to my own.
Visla was always so serious and supremely confident. Seeing her frustrated and struggling with a puzzle might’ve been the funniest thing I’d seen in a very long time.
She lifted her hand, balled her fist, and flashed afigat us, sticking her thumb between her index and middle finger in Europe’s crudest gesture. It was the equivalent of an American middle finger or telling someone to “go fuck themselves.”
Will heaved as tears bloomed in his eyes. Every ounce of tension we’d felt throughout the day morphed into uncontrolled mirth. We let it all out.
The poor Soviets listening to our conversation—assuming someone was listening—must’ve wondered if we’d turned our room into a comedy club . . . or a bar . . . or an insane asylum.
Once we calmed, and the room was quiet again, I took the statue and felt along its edges. Visla might’ve been inelegant with her stretching of the tissue box analogy, but she hadn’t been wrong. The intricate way the piece was carved made it nearly impossible to find how the wood was joined. After a few minutes of fumbling, I held it out for Will.
