Page 87 of The Little Liar
“Yes.”
“Perhaps we shouldn’t be speaking on the phone.”
“Why not?”
“The lines. They could be listening now. Use our go-between next time.”
“Yes. All right.”
Udo hung up, furious at himself. One reckless move after all these careful years? He could have ruined everything. His colleague was right. Caution was demanded.
But. America was a huge country. A hard place to locate one person. He took solace in that. And the Hunter was not as potent as he’d once been. Udo had heard that his money was drying up.
Months passed. No one came looking for him. Udo used the time to dig into the Nazi Hunter’s operations. He learned that the Jew Krispis had become a top lieutenant for the old man. Udo’s connections in Austria informed him that Krispis was living alone in a Vienna apartment. This was disappointing. A family in the home gives an attacker some leverage. Someone to threaten, or take hostage.
In early 1980, Udo got a message from Austria that Krispis had left Vienna for the United States. No one knew where or what for. Then one morning, Udo drove to Senator Carter’s office, and was walking past the security guard in the rotunda of the building. As he flashed his card, he glanced over at the line of visitors waiting for clearance. His blood ran cold.
There he was.The Jew. Again!He was wearing a gray suit and approaching the desk. He turned his head in Udo’s direction and for a split second they made eye contact, before Udo spun and hurried down the hall. He pushed into a crowded elevator just as the door was closing. He fumbled for the button, pressing it three times. He looked down, away from the people surrounding him.
What the hell is he doing here? What does he know?
Fannie confronted her feelings.
The day she learned that she was getting a promotion, she stayed late at work and missed her normal bus home. As she waited for the next one, she saw an old car exit the rear of the parking lot, and when it stopped at a traffic signal, she felt a catch in her throat.
Him.The man behind the wheel. It looked likehim.A grown-up version, yes, but Nico. The boy who sat in front of her in school. The boy in the crawl space on Kleisouras Street. The teenager on the Danube, who called her name before she fainted.
Part of her wanted to run up to his car, bang on his window, shout, “It’s me, Fannie! What are you doing? Why are you using a different name?”
But she didn’t. She needed to be sure. She came back the next night, this time borrowing a vehicle from her former boss at the restaurant. When the old car again exited the parking lot, she followed it to an apartment building near the airport, where the driver parked and went inside. It was dark and Fannie couldn’t see much. She returned in the morning. The car was still there. The next day the same. The next day again.
This didn’t make sense. Why would a powerful businessman be staying in this poor neighborhood? She began to think she had made a mistake, that her imagination was driving all ofthis madness, that her unhappiness with Sebastian had somehow made Nico, her first crush, the man who may have saved her life, the answer to everything. It was a foolish distraction. She felt embarrassed, childish.
The next time she drove by the apartment building, she promised herself, would be the last. The car was still there. She rapped her fists on the steering wheel. She thought about Tia. She thought about Sebastian. She should go back home. Stop chasing the wind.
She flicked on her turn signal. Then a figure emerged from the apartment building. She sucked in her breath.There he is.He was carrying an old suitcase, dressed in slacks and a white T-shirt. His face was much easier to see in the daylight, and he surely looked like the boy she remembered, except handsome now instead of cute, and weathered a bit around the eyes. His slim body was fit and tanned, and it was hard to believe he would be in his late forties, just a year younger than she was.
He got into his car, and Fannie followed behind him as he drove through the winding streets, then entered a highway and fought traffic for nearly an hour before exiting in a suburban neighborhood. Once again, Fannie wondered if her imagination had overshot reality.
But any doubts disappeared with what happened next.
The car turned into a Jewish cemetery called Home of Peace Memorial Park. The man got out holding a canteen and a bag of rags. He walked slowly up a hill, to a section of older graves, where he got down on his knees and began to clean the tombstones.
Which is when Fannie knew. Tears filled her eyes. She remembered that afternoon in the cemetery in Salonika, when she and Nico and Sebastian had wiped family tombstones in what Lazarre called “a true and loving kindness.” And how Nico, of the three of them, had stood up, walked to strangers’ graves, and said, “Come on,” urging her and Sebastian to join him. It was the first moment she remembered marveling at the gentle purity of the boy they called Chioni. And she realized now it wasn’t her mind that had led her on this long and winding chase to find Nico Krispis.
It was her heart.
Nico confronted a familiar smile.
When you lie about everything, you belong to nothing. And Nico, or Nate, or Mr. Guidili, or The Financier, led an unconnected life in California. Unmarried. No children. No relatives. No true friends. He told his associates he preferred formality, addressing them as “Sir” or “Miss” and asking that they do the same.
With no one in his life to trust, his days were filled with useless lies. He told the mailman he could scuba dive. He told a cashier he was an accountant. When a bank teller asked him how his day was going, he said he was off to pick up his kids at school. He even offered their names: Anna and Elisabet.
All this was a manifestation of his condition, which seemed to worsen with age. Nico would enter art galleries claiming to be a dealer. He looked at cheap real estate, then, despite his wealth, said he couldn’t afford it. Sometimes he went to German beer halls, claiming to be a recent immigrant.
He never spoke Greek or Ladino, the languages of his youth, but every Saturday morning, Nico took a bus across the city and got off three blocks from an Orthodox synagogue. There he prayed in Hebrew with a tallit over his head, swaying back and forth for an hour, uninterrupted. What he prayed for I shall leave between Nico and God. Some conversations are not our business.
He remained practiced in the art of forgery, although it served little purpose now. He applied for credit cards under false names, then never used them once they arrived. He had three drivers’ licenses from three different states. He held passports under four nationalities. There were a dozen banks in which he kept safe-deposit boxes.
