Round Robin (16 page)

She yanked it open to find Manfred.

“What?” she said testily.

“Bianca is coming,” he said, trying to keep the anxiety out of his voice. “Her airplane will arrive in one hour. Please. You will come with me to the airport.”

In her current mood, Robin thought: Why the hell should I?

But for reasons she was unable to articulate, she said through a humorless rictus, “Sure, why not? We can talk about cherry tarts on the way.”

Manfred wasn’t in the mood for conversation. He was intent on getting to the airport. He found his way to the Kennedy Expressway and got on going in the right direction, but would have missed the feeder road for O’Hare if Robin hadn’t elbowed him out of whatever reverie was showing at the cineplex behind his eyes.

“Danke,”
he said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Robin muttered.

A plane roared overhead, coming in for a landing. Manfred leaned forward, his head over the steering wheel, turning sideways, trying to see into the aircraft’s windows.

“Keep your eyes on the road, will you?” Robin said. “You don’t know that’s her plane, you can’t see anything anyway, and you don’t even know what she looks like these days.”

Manfred turned a face to Robin that made her think: You really don’t want to get King Kong p.o.’ed at you. He might grab you with one hand, climb the control tower and fight off the Air National Guard.

“I will recognize my daughter,” Manfred said stiffly.

But he didn’t try to spot anymore in-bound aircraft. And he followed Robin’s directions to the proper parking structure and to the international terminal. Manfred had a whispered word with a Customs official, who checked a note on his clipboard and let them cross the barrier which held all the non-CIA-affiliated hoi polloi at bay. They stood side by side at the arrival gate not saying a word to each other.

What a pair, Robin thought. Just what a little kid dragged away to a foreign country wants to see. The troll twins in a snit. They were enough to make a brothel look homey.

After several minutes of waiting, Manfred trying not to fidget, Robin wondering, the way people did when their car was about to go off a cliff, what am I doing here, a plane taxied up to the gate. As the jetway goosenecked out to the plane, Manfred turned to Robin. His expression was different this time.

“I am sorry for my rude behavior,” he said. He gave his little nod to make it official. “I am very nervous, and I am not good at being nervous. I have not had much practice. You are doing a favor for me, and I should not be cross with you. You were right: I have no idea what my daughter will look like.”

For a moment, his face sagged. Then, as if he were lifting a barbell, he gathered himself and pushed his features back up into an approximately neutral position. A second effort raised them a millimeter higher, so Robin could see a flicker of hope in his eyes and the hint of an expectant smile on his lips.

“She’ll love you,” Robin said. “If she doesn’t, she’s nuts.”

Manfred looked at her with such pathetic gratitude Robin was almost sorry she’d opened her mouth.

At that moment, the door to the jetway slammed open and a high, keening voice filled the terminal with curses that you didn’t have to be a linguist to translate. The raw venom in every shout and shriek was an idiom familiar to everyone. Robin and Manfred turned to see the source of the commotion. The point of origin was a thrashing dervish of a child being held and only partially restrained by CIA agent Warner Lisle.

Warner’s face, while not cut to ribbons, was bleeding in several places, including a point on his chin where the damage looked as if it had been inflicted by teeth. Spotting Manfred, Warner immediately thrust the child into his arms.

“Your daughter,” he said to Manfred. “She’s all yours.”

Warner took out a handkerchief and began blotting his wounds.

The girl looked at Manfred, to see who her new captor was, and for a moment she was quiet. She had blue eyes, which nicely matched her spiky blue hair. She had a long straight nose and lips full and wide enough to put her on the cover of Vogue. She had a gold safety pin through the lobe of her left ear. She was long and slender in her steel-toed boots, torn jeans, “Eat Me” t-shirt and black leather jacket, but overwhelming the whole punk ensemble was a sense of malice so strong that Robin hadn’t seen anything like it since that kid in
The Exorcist.

If her head did a three-sixty, Robin was out of there.

Having given Manfred the once over, she rendered her opinion of him by screaming in his face. She tried to claw him, too, but he was made of sterner stuff than her last warder. One arm pinned both of hers to her sides and the other restrained her legs. That left her mouth. She opened it to flash a set of pointy little white teeth, but Manfred quickly raised his right hand. He didn’t strike her, he crooked his thick index finger and let her bite it. Which she did, to the point of drawing blood that flowed from the finger and out the corners of her mouth.

“Now, why didn’t I think of that?” Warner asked.

Manfred didn’t make a sound, didn’t even give a disapproving look. Just waited stoically, and until the end of time if necessary. The little girl saw that she was getting nowhere, her jaws were starting to ache and she realized that any further attempt at a physical assault against this monster would be futile.

When she removed her teeth from his flesh, Manfred said, “I am your father and I love you.” He repeated the sentiment in German.

Bianca stared at him a moment, then turned away, her eyes sullen and downcast. Manfred wiped his blood off her chin with his wounded finger.

Warner took a long envelope out of a coat pocket and handed it to Manfred.

“Here you go, buddy. Bianca Krump. All the necessary paperwork. Legal entry into the United States. Resident alien status, eligible for citizenship. Signed, sealed and delivered.”

Manfred stuffed the envelope in his jacket pocket.

“She has a bag?” Manfred asked.

Warner shook his head.

“She comes as is ... and one more thing,” Warner added. “We’re even now.”

Robin drove home.

Manfred and Bianca sat in the back of the old Mercedes. Robin listened to the kid. She wasn’t screaming anymore, she was talking, a non-stop snarl of German about everything that passed in front of her eyes. The disparaging tone made it plain that nothing she saw was as good as the place she used to know.

Bianca noticed Robin sneaking peeks at her in the rear view mirror.

“Fett und scheusslich,”
Bianca judged Robin.

Robin drove a mile trying to figure that one out. When she thought she had it, she asked Manfred, “Fat and ugly, right? The kid said I’m fat and ugly?”

Manfred shook his head.

“Fat and hideous.”

He saw Robin’s jaw set, and knew she was making an effort to restrain herself.

“Please don’t take offense,” he said. “She says much worse about me.”

By a stroke of divine grace, Robin found a parking space just one house down from her place. She zipped into it, turned off the engine and the lights and flipped the keys back to Manfred. She intended to make a fast getaway and barricade herself in her apartment, putting a safe distance between herself and the wretched refuse that had washed up on her shore.

But that was when the kid decided to pitch her latest fit.

She went into hysterics. Not acting out anger this time, but fear and longing. She was crying for her mother. Robin didn’t know the words this pathetic child was sobbing, but the meaning was crystal clear. She felt she was about to enter a place from which she would never escape ... and she was pleading for her mother.

Robin knew that Manfred wouldn’t have any physical difficulty carrying his daughter down into his apartment, despite the fact that the kid was clinging to the car’s upholstery with all her might, but she thought the least she might do would be to hold the doors for him. She closed the rear door of the Mercedes after he gently tugged the forlorn girl out of the car. She opened the outer door of her house and allowed them to enter. One more door, she thought, and that would be the end of it for her. At least for tonight.

But Manfred asked, “May I show Bianca the park? I think it might help.”

The request took Robin by surprise. And it wasn’t one she was inclined to grant — but she made the mistake of looking into Bianca’s eyes. The child was so lost, so frightened, so doomed.

“Just for a minute,” Robin said grudgingly.

She unlocked the inside hall door and made her way up to the first floor landing. After a moment’s hesitation, she inserted the key into the deadbolt lock and opened the door to the park. There were Gro-Lights on inside, working off their timer, and it gave the place the aspect of some magical jungle. The effect on Bianca was instantaneous: she fell silent and her eyes went round.

She pulled away from Manfred’s arms and he let her go. Bianca stepped cautiously over to the wishing well and the fish pond which were always lit at night. She dipped her hand in the water. The piscine inhabitants fled from her intrusion, but she didn’t pursue them. She didn’t try to filch any of the coins, either, as Robin thought she might. She just rubbed the water she’d collected on her fingers all around her face. Then she turned to look at the rest of this fantastical environment.

She stepped gingerly into the park as if strange creatures might lurk beyond the nearest clump of leaves and fronds. She carefully poked her nose around a curve in the plantings. Robin and Manfred watched with interest. With a sudden burst, Bianca ran toward the rear of the park. Robin thought she was trying to escape, find a back way out, but she dove under a thick schefflera. A little hand parted the leaves and the child’s eyes peered out at the grownups.

She said something to Manfred in German.

“Bianca has decided she will live here,” he translated. When he saw the alarm in Robin’s eyes, he shook his head. “You have been most patient. I will take Bianca downstairs now. Will you please turn on the overhead lights?”

Robin did, but the lights were a big mistake. The kid knew the game was over, and her rage flared up once again. She bounced to her feet and started shredding the schefflera leaves. Before the destruction could go too far, Robin was past Manfred and upon the kid in a heartbeat.

“Stop it!” she roared. “Don’t you dare hurt my plants!”

Robin couldn’t have been more ferocious if Bianca had been attacking a child of hers.

Bianca didn’t need any translation, either. She fled to her father’s arms and babbled at him while pointing at Robin, obviously urging Manfred to crush her. Robin wasn’t amused.

She grimly said to Manfred, “You tell her ... tell her that if she ever tries anything like that again — if I ever let her in here again — you’re both out.”

Bianca had been listening to Robin. Now she turned to her newfound father to see whose side he would take. When she heard what he had to say, she tried to attack him again, with the same lack of success. Bianca burst into bitter tears, until Manfred whispered into her ear. She stopped crying immediately. She looked at Manfred with wary, calculating eyes. Hopeful, but not daring to trust.

Robin wondered if he’d given the kid her message.

“She understands?” Robin asked. “You understand?”

Manfred nodded.

“She will behave. I have just promised her that if she is good, and if she so wishes, she may return to her mother in six months.”

Chapter 16

Robin heard the sound of the harmonica coming through the heating vent just as she slipped into bed. The music was slow and simple and so full of heartbreak that she thought she would cry, and then she did and felt better for it. As the tears rolled down her cheeks, she tried to identify the song, but she couldn’t. She wondered if Manfred’s repertoire was simply larger than her knowledge of the blues, or if the song was something he’d written to console himself during his stretch in prison ... and was now putting to use for his daughter.

Not knowing the music, having no sense of where it might be going, made it more elemental as it rode up the current of warm air that also arrived courtesy of the man in her basement. He was a considerable assault on any number of her preconceptions. Here was a man who’d gone to extraordinary lengths to reclaim his child, and yet shortly after getting her back said he would relinquish her.

Robin didn’t think for a minute that it was just a ploy on Manfred’s part just to get the kid to shut up — although the fact that she had closed her yap was a definite plus.

She didn’t think it was a matter of cold feet, either. A guy who’d let a kid bite his finger down to the bone without making a peep wasn’t a quitter.

No, he’d made his promise because the kid’s happiness meant more to him than his own. He’d given his word because he loved that little girl more than anyone. The harmonica moved into a particularly melancholy passage and Robin wondered why men couldn’t love their women as much as they loved their daughters.

She hoped that his playing eased Bianca’s pain and fear as much as it did hers, but with a mild sense of shame, Robin had to admit that it wouldn’t break her heart if the little plant-shredding snot soon fled back to the Fatherland.

To escape the guilt that followed on the heels of such an uncharitable sentiment, Robin fell asleep.

Robin smelled the pastry before she heard the knock at her door. It wasn’t strudel, though. It was ... sniff ... cherry tarts? Then came the knock. A small knock from a small hand.

The picture immediately formed in her mind: father and daughter had come calling on Sunday morning with a plate of fresh-from-the-oven, melt-in-your-mouth pastry. The day was sunny and pleasantly crisp in its autumnal fashion. Robin had just showered, put on clean clothes and brushed her hair. What a perfect setting for inviting her considerate tenants in to share breakfast with her.

Yeah, right.

She wondered if they’d heard her moving around, or if she could pretend she was still asleep. Robin suddenly felt crowded and wasn’t at all sure she wanted company. The little knock came again, and then she thought she heard Manfred whisper something about
schlafen langer
or something like that, recognizing the German word for sleep. So maybe she’d had them fooled after all.

Bianca said something that Robin didn’t understand, but her tone was clear.
We tried, she’s not interested, let’s beat it, okay?
Out of sheer perversity, Robin went to the door. Of course, that wasn’t what she told herself. No, she’d just decided that she had to check out this new pastry she might soon be serving to her customers.

She opened the door just as Manfred was bending over to leave the plate of pastry on her doorstep. He looked up, saw her, straightened and gave her his nod.

“Good morning,” he said.

He handed the plate to Bianca and gave her a gentle nudge.

“Gut morgen,”
the girl said, handing the plate to Robin, and giving her father a look over her shoulder.

“Cherry tarts,” Manfred said.

Robin had known that before she’d opened the door; drawing close the smell had become unmistakable. Now, though, she was more interested in what Manfred had done with the kid. The black leather jacket was gone, as was the gold safety pin from her ear. The holes in the knees of her jeans were neatly stitched and the “Eat Me” t-shirt had been laundered and turned inside out. The kid’s hair was still blue but it had been thoroughly shampooed and combed flat and back with a part on the left side. Just like a boy’s, Robin thought. Manfred must have missed hairdressing school. She noticed that Bianca’s roots, chestnut brown, were starting to grow out.

Manfred’s index finger was neatly bandaged.

“Good morning,” Robin said. “Thank you for the tarts.”

An awkward silence ensued as they all stood there for the next several moments trying to decide who should say what to whom. Then Manfred took Bianca’s hand, gave Robin another nod and started to leave.

Again, out of perversity, or for some other reason she couldn’t fathom, Robin took the initiative. “Have you had breakfast?”

“No,” Manfred said, “we are just now —”

“Come on in,” Robin suggested. “I’ll cook. You’ve done enough for one morning.”

Bianca didn’t exactly skip inside. But she didn’t complain aloud, either. She was a model prisoner quietly serving her time, giving the warden no excuse to extend her sentence. She sat at the kitchen table between her father’s place and Robin’s and awaited the French toast she’d chosen from the list of possibilities Robin had offered. Manfred preferred scrambled eggs, as many as Robin cared to fix, crisp bacon and a toasted English muffin with raspberry preserves. When he saw that Robin intended only one soft-boiled egg for herself, he told her to eat more if she wanted, he would help her turn her food into healthy muscle.

It struck her as oddly threatening that a man would tell her to eat as much as she liked. She’d used her size, her obesity, as a barrier against unwanted male attention. Yet, here was a man who brushed aside one of her main lines of defense as if it were a cobweb.

Still, Robin loved to eat a hearty breakfast and so she seized the opportunity, adding more eggs to the bowl to be scrambled.

She wasn’t a fancy cook, but with almost two decades in food service, Robin knew how to make what she liked, and prepare it well and efficiently. She had everything on the table in appropriately short order. It looked good, it smelled better, it was all hot and everyone was ready to eat at the same time.

Except Manfred had something to say.

“Do you offer thanks?” he asked.

“For the food?”

Bianca watched the exchange, interested.

“Ja.”

“No.”

“Would you mind if we did?”

“You’re religious?”

He shrugged.

“I started praying at school meals to annoy the Communists. In prison, I became sincere. Prayer helped me there. I would like my daughter to learn. Even if it means nothing to her now, someday, perhaps, she will become sincere, too.”

“If that’s what you want,” Robin said, “this is a free country.”

Manfred took Bianca’s hand and bowed his head. Robin was about to reach for her fork, and dig into her rapidly cooling eggs, when Bianca startled her by taking her hand and joining them all together.

But the kid wasn’t being pious. There was a smirk on her face.

The look said:
If I’m stuck with this mumbo-jumbo, so are you.

Manfred was pleased with the food, complimenting Robin, and disappointed that she wouldn’t let him do the dishes as a gesture of gratitude. For a moment, she wondered if this was some kind of elaborate con. She’d never heard of a man offering to do someone else’s dishes. Even her dad didn’t do that.

While she mulled the issue, Bianca spoke to her father.

Manfred listened, gave her a strange look and then turned to Robin.

“May Bianca watch your television? She says while she was being torn from her mother’s embrace, she consoled herself with the thought that at least she’d get to watch American TV.”

“Sure,” Robin said. “The set is in the living room.”

“What is a good channel? Nothing with the violence.”

“Try PBS. Channel 11.”

Manfred went with Bianca to introduce her to the joys of television. Robin started rinsing off the breakfast dishes. The three of them hadn’t exchanged more than a dozen words during the meal. Manfred’s focus on eating was, if anything, more absolute than his concentration on weightlifting. The kid had really dug in, too, eaten all the French toast and started to lick the syrup off the plate before her father had given her a frown. Then she’d checked Robin out to see if she’d been laughing at her. When she’d found Robin’s face suitably neutral she’d asked if she could have orange juice, like she was asking for gold, and had been astounded that Robin actually had a carton, and had swallowed the whole eight-ounce glass in three gulps. Then she’d used the back of her hand as a napkin, which had drawn another frown but not a word of reproach.

Robin was halfway through rinsing the dishes when Manfred returned.

“You are sure I cannot help?”

“Okay, okay,” Robin relented. “I’ll rinse, you stack things in the dishwasher.”

She pulled open the front of the machine. Manfred took a second to study the arrangement of the racks and quickly transferred the contents of the dish-drain into the washer. He caught up with Robin so she could hand the remaining plates, pans, glasses and flatware directly to him.

Robin was impressed at how adept he was. She had the feeling he’d never seen a dishwasher before. But he loaded the racks as quickly and neatly as she could have done. The natural hand-eye coordination of a world-class athlete, she guessed.

He knew he was doing it right, too. He gave her a smile and waggled his eyebrows when he neatly tucked the fry pan into a tight spot. Robin laughed at his clowning.

Then a chill passed through her. This scene was the height of domesticity. Disposing of the Sunday morning dishes while the kiddy watched cartoons in the other room. Who was this man who’d penetrated her armor so completely in such a short time? She started to look ahead, worrying and wondering where this madness might lead, when she slammed on the brakes. Told herself to get a grip. Washing dishes was about as mundane an activity as any in which a human being could engage, even if there was someone helping out — even if that someone was still smiling at her and would probably make her laugh again any second now.

It was no big deal.

Manfred said, “May I ask you a favor?”

And just like that her paranoia roared back to life.

What?

What did he want?

What would he ask?

“Bianca needs new clothes. Proper clothes for a young girl. I know more about the dark side of the moon than such things. Please. Will you help me?”

Not please, you will help me. The way he’d probably have said it before.

He was making the effort to learn better manners. Or better grammar, anyway. Prompted by what? She didn’t want to think about it.

But she said okay.

She’d go shopping with him and the kid.

They stood at the door, ready to go, and Robin asked Manfred what kind of clothes he wanted for the kid.

“First class,” he said.

“Okay,” she said, “you want to be Daddy Warbucks, it’s your bank account.”

“Daddy who?” Manfred asked, puzzled.

“Never mind,” Robin said. “I just meant that first class in this town costs a lot of money.”

Manfred pulled a wad of bills out of his jacket pocket appropriate to his size and line of work; you’d have to be a weight lifter to pick it up. Bianca spotted the roll immediately, gawking with great interest at the money. Robin noticed the avarice in the kid’s eyes. Maybe life with Daddy won’t be so bad after all, huh kid, she thought.

So, they piled into Manfred’s old Mercedes and Robin led them to North Michigan Avenue, the Magnificent Mile.

Robin decided that this was what brought people to America as she saw her two immigrants hit one of the country’s most glittering retail streets: They came to shop. The ambitious ones stayed so they could keep on shopping.

Robin had intended simply to take them to Water Tower Place, a gilded vertical mall, where any normal person could satisfy any consumer need that wouldn’t draw the attention of the police. But that plan soon went out the window. Just as soon, in fact, as father and daughter saw the endless shops lining both sides of the street.