The Zigzag Kid (38 page)

I didn't wait around to hear the rest of the argument. I jumped up and ran to the tree.

From close up, I could see something hidden there. A huge thing someone had camouflaged with branches and shrubs. I lit into it, started clearing off piles of foliage and throwing them on the ground.

Very soon I saw what it was and could hardly believe my eyes. This was beyond my wildest imagination. How did he do it? When did he hide her here? Who helped him? Where on earth did he find her?

First I saw the shiny black door, then the heavy desert tire, and then the rounded fender, the one the English painted a white stripe on during the Blitz so pedestrians would see it coming …

I knelt beside her. My Pearl, our Pearl. The Humber Pullman we were forced to give Mautner, and which he overturned his first time out (Hallelujah), claiming she was cursed, and then promptly sold. And that
was that, we forgot her, never mentioned her again, except now and then—when we flinched at the painful memory. And here she was, resurrected.

Filled with awe, I opened the door. I knew every centimeter of that car. Times without number I had buffed and polished the sleek chassis, the dashboard, the steering wheel. It was almost as though I had imprinted something of my personality in her. I was overwhelmed with nostalgia, the kind I always feel at the end of
Lassie Come Home
. I nestled luxuriously next to the driver's seat, wondering where she could possibly have been all this time and who had driven her, and whether she remembered the touch of my hands?

Felix walked up and looked in through the window.

“
Nu
, what do you say about your grandfather now?”

“Where was she? How did you get her here?”

“I thought if we start our trip in the Bugatti, we must to finish it in Humber Pullman. That is what I call style.”

“But did you know it used to belong to us?”

He chuckled to himself, enjoying my admiration.

“Yes, that is what they always say,” he crooned, putting his arm around Lola, who had come over to see. “Felix the wizard, Felix the magician!”

I told Lola about the Pearl, how Dad had found her by chance in a junkyard, nearly stripped, and brought her home in bits and pieces, and worked on her as though he were caring for a wounded animal, and how he and I had put her back together like a mosaic, and restored her dignity.

“Your Mr. Father would not let her out of yard.” Felix laughed. “You hear that, Lolly? What is this, automobile or porcelain china?” He got in and invited us to join him. Lola stretched out in the back seat, I got in front. I knew there was no point in asking where he'd found her. He loved to shroud himself in mystery, even in cases less amazing than this. What did I care? Knowledge is power, but you don't need an explanation for everything. I didn't even ask. The searchlight whipped over us. The guards were becoming as edgy as the dogs. Maybe they thought we were planning a prison break. I could hear a loudspeaker
blaring inside the walls. I looked at Felix. He looked at me. We felt the ants crawling up our backs. With a barely perceptible nod, Felix started the car. I counted under my breath as the engine gave three feeble hiccups that sounded so far away, no one would ever have guessed what was in those six cylinders. And then suddenly the motor started, and she trembled all over, like Sleeping Beauty when the Prince kisses her awake, and Felix released the hand brake, shifted into first gear, and with a mighty roar, the four desert tires, the kind Montgomery used against Rommel during the war, spurted out a stream of sand, and away we went.

Driving on and on.

Taking dirt roads through empty fields.

“You want to drive now?”

“What did you say?”

“You want to drive? That is what I said.”

Did I want to drive?

“Felix!” my grandmother cautioned him, sticking her sharp finger between his shoulder blades. Sometimes she acted just like Tsitka. “Enough of this foolishness!”

“Let our boy drive. Where is harm? There is no police here. No people to see. And already he has driven locomotive!”

“Please, Lola!” I begged her. “Just for a little while!”

“Well, you hold on to his hands, then, Felix! I'm not happy about this!”

Felix winked at me. He stopped the car. We changed seats. I could barely reach the pedals. I stepped on the gas. The Pearl lurched forward. I slowed her down. I shifted gear. She obeyed me. She knew me. I knew how to rouse her and how to control her. All the moves were in my blood. The rounded top of the gearshift fit the palm of my hand now, so I could see how much I'd grown. Mautner could take driving lessons from me. I tried to think what Dad would say if he saw me. He would go nuts if I told him I'd driven her out of the yard. When would I tell him? Maybe never. Why go into all the details? I could hear my grandmother pleading from behind: “Nonny! Nonny!” Sometimes she shouted, “Felix, Felix!” I was bumping over a field of thistles, between
the rocks, when suddenly I realized why you always see people steering a little to the right and then a little to the left, but the car goes straight ahead just the same, and then I felt the heat between my eyes. It ebbed and flowed. My foot pushed down on the gas, to fly away, to soar—

I stopped myself. I regained control. A moment before the eruption. I realized that I'd already lost the Pearl once because of my stupidity and I didn't want to lose her again.

“Your turn.” I offered Felix my seat.

He looked at me, a little surprised. “This is it? I thought you will drive us all the way to Mountain of the Moon!”

“No thanks. I've had enough.”

Lola squeezed my shoulder from behind. “Come, sit next to me,” she said. I climbed over into the back and nestled beside her. I felt wonderful. As if I had fixed whatever it was that had gone wrong in my life. As if I had mastered something inside me. Felix was still watching me in the rearview mirror with a look of mild disappointment and surprise. Lola waved imperiously, and in the same voice she had used to tell the taxi driver, “Charge it to the theater!” she now commanded Felix, “To the Mountain of the Moon!” Felix obeyed.

The car glided softly into the night. The radio was playing American songs. Felix was driving. Lola spread out her purple scarf, now mine, and we snuggled under it together. We spoke in whispers so as not to disturb Felix, who had to concentrate on his driving, and also because we wanted privacy.

“Start asking,” she said as we snuggled up. “We've lost so much time already. Ask me anything you want. I want very much to answer.”

All right.

“When Zohara was a little girl, did she know that Felix was a—uhm—”

“Excellent!” she exclaimed. “Straight to the point, just like me. Maybe you did inherit something from me, after all, besides your acting ability.”

“What, you mean I inherited it from you and not from—” I almost said “Gabi,” which goes to show how hard it is to get rid of old beliefs.

“I certainly hope it's from me. Your mother was not a bad actress either! She had flair, she had feeling. As a little girl she practically lived at the theater with me. Oh my …” Lola laughed. “That child was utterly hypnotized, velvet curtains and masks, and kings and queens, and heroes and villains … My fellow actors called her the mascot of the Habimah Theater. Ah yes.” She sighed. “I guess her talent stood her well enough, who knows how many people she swindled with it … But you asked me an important question …”

“Whether she knew he was a criminal.” The word came out of my mouth more easily now.

“No, not only did she not know that he was a criminal,” said Lola, “but until she was sixteen, she had no idea he was her father!”

“What?” I couldn't understand that at all.

“You're a big boy, Nonny, I can speak frankly to you, can't I?”

“Of course.” But about what?

“There are all sorts of grandmothers in this world … You have one sort of grandmother on your father's side, I believe, and I'm sure she's very dear to you. But I myself am a different sort of grandmother.”

“What do you mean, different?”

“I have different ideas, different standards of behavior— Everybody's different, right?”

“Yes,” I answered, not sure what she meant, though she seemed cautious suddenly, worried about what I would think of her.

“There were always men around me, admirers and lovers …. You had a pretty wild grandmother, I'm afraid …” She took a long look at herself in the rearview mirror. Felix glanced up for a moment, and there was a twinkle in his eyes. “For Zohara, Felix was just another uncle, a nice, rich uncle who sent her postcards and dolls from around the world. Whenever he landed in our tiny country he would spend time with us and everyone else—and then disappear, just another one of Mother's friends, but a very good friend, you see?”

“Yes,” I answered. At least I thought I did. She really was a different sort of grandmother.

“And then, when Zohara turned eighteen, he sent a telegram inviting her on a grand tour as a kind of graduation present. The trip was supposed to last a month, but as soon as I read her first letter from Paris, I knew that she belonged to him.” Lola glanced wistfully at Felix in the mirror. “You yourself have seen how charming he can be—especially when it comes to someone as volatile and impressionable as Zohara.”

Or someone like me, I thought.

“Because the truth is, Nonny”—she sighed in my ear—“it wasn't just
his stories and the things he could teach her that were so fascinating. It was what he passed on to her, in her blood, what she inherited from him. When the two of them were together on their grand tour, he let her see how truly similar to him she was, always had been, though she never knew it, or was afraid to be. And he showed her what she was, what she could be.”

I sat up: this sounded familiar.

Felix stepped blithely on the gas. The Humber took off like a streak of lightning. I could just see the corner of his mouth in the mirror. He was smiling, pleased with himself. Lola saw him, too, and grimaced slightly. And then I realized that Felix's whole purpose in kidnapping his only heir was to reveal the hidden Nonny inside me, to rouse him from his slumbers so I would know he existed. So that some remembrance of him and of his character would survive.

And so I would know I didn't only come from my father's side of the family.

Boom.

My world kept changing. The events of the past few days were lit from a different angle every minute, as though reality was not at all solid and substantial but rather pliant, elusive, variable.

My head nearly burst with so many thoughts: What did Lola mean about Felix's blood running through Zohara and me? That I would grow up to be a criminal? That I was fated to become one? What if I didn't want to be one? What if I still wanted to be the best detective in the world? And what about Dad's blood running through me? Didn't that have any say in the matter? Hadn't he and Gabi raised me together? Did Zohara's blood outweigh all that? Is crime always stronger than the law? How many drops of criminal blood does it take to dissolve lawfulness? I shuddered. I could feel that blood circulating, hot, boiling hot, through my stomach, my chest, stinging my legs. I never thought you could feel it, that it had a character of its own, but maybe I had other drops of Zohara's blood in me as well, drops of the good things that were in her, like her imagination and the stories she told. Why not? The questions surged through my veins; my blood was raging, fermenting,
as though someone were conducting experiments on it. But what would happen to me now? And more important, would someone remind me who I am?

“One thing is certain, you're not Zohara,” said Lola sharply. “Don't ever forget that: you don't have to follow in her footsteps. It's up to you to decide.”

“I'm not Zohara,” I murmured to myself. “I'm not Zohara.”

“Naturally you have in you something of her and something of Felix. But you also have in you something of many others, all the people on your father's side of the family, for instance, like the grandmother we spoke of, and your uncle, the famous educator Dr. Samuel Shilhav, right?”

For the first time in my life I could see that having a bit of Shilhav inside might not be such a bad thing; but I also felt the stirring of a new self-esteem, yes, a new confidence, because it wasn't just me on my own anymore against the tribe of Shilhavs. And I suddenly realized that I had always felt ashamed around them, like an insecure nobody, because they were this big family with strong ties and similarities, and I had to face them all alone, with no one on my side, like a foundling foisted on their family. And then I understood that they had been hostile toward me right from the start, even before I was born, on account of Zohara, but now with Lola, Felix, and Zohara on my side, the two clans could confront each other, the doctors, educators, and Tsitkas versus the actors, crooks, and storytellers … I shut my eyes tight and envisioned the scene, the two opposing sides—and me, adjusting my position till I was standing right between them. I listened inwardly: my position was still incorrect, so I backed up a little, half a step in the direction of the Felixes, and immediately felt calmer in spirit and more serene.

“You have a different sort of character,” continued Lola, unaware of the little drill on the parade grounds inside me. “Only Zohara was Zohara. Don't ever forget that! Know her, feel her, but remember that you are a whole new person, an independent agent.” I repeated her words under my breath and tried to engrave them on my memory. I
knew that I'd be needing them a lot in the course of my life. “And now, Nonny, as an independent agent, I hereby order you to get a little sleep. We have a long night ahead of us.”

I lay down with my head on her knees and closed my eyes. I tried to fall asleep, but couldn't. Thoughts were running through my mind at the speed of the car. Things were becoming clearer to me and more coherent. Okay, I was unusual. I had an unusual upbringing, an unusual father. He wasn't exactly my twin, and neither was she. I was an independent agent. I could be what I wanted to be. I would always have Gabi there to keep me on my path.