By a Spider's Thread Page 10

  "She's such a—" Conscientious Paul remembered he was standing next to a potential customer. "She's such a sweet lady, but a little forgetful."

  "Well, that's why we have our own storage vault. I can always get a coat for a valued customer, as long as it's not on the Sabbath."

  "You have your own storage facility?" Tess was trying to cover up the awkwardness she felt, as if she had been caught at something.

  Mark nodded curtly. "The other locals use a warehouse in northern Virginia. I'll take over from here, Paul. Miss Monaghan came to see me."

  "Certainly, Mr. Rubin." The salesman disappeared with the practiced discretion of a man who knows how to make himself invisible.

  "He's good at his job," Tess said as soon as Paul was out of earshot.

  "He's excellent. So why were you wasting his time? Not to mention bringing my personal business into my workplace. I hope you don't squander your own time as carelessly as you used my salesman's. After all, I'm paying for it."

  "I was curious about your business," she said, taking off the coat and returning it to the rack. Rubin reached out and gave it a few smoothing strokes, as if Tess had defiled the mink in some way. "Right now I'm curious about everything you do. Somewhere in your life, there's got to be a clue, a hint, as to where your wife might have gone, and why. For example, is there anyone else in your life who disappeared about the same time?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "An employee, for example. Someone from your street. The guy who delivers your newspaper. Natalie had to have some help. She only had a few thousand dollars, right? At least that's what I just learned from the Baltimore County cops. You didn't trust your wife with cash, so she had to figure out a way to sneak it. But she was scared enough to pay most of it back, with a check written by a manicurist who happens to be her oldest friend. But for some reason you didn't think to tell me about your household accounting or to give me Lana Wishnia's name as a lead. I had to pay Natalie's mother a hundred dollars just to find out she existed." Mark Rubin looked around the store. "Let's go back to my office. I'd prefer not to have this conversation out here, on the floor, where customers come and go."

  His office was utilitarian, a windowless room with a messy desk stacked with catalogs. The only personal touch was a bright red shelf filled with photographs of his children and his wife. This long mantel was mounted to the wall behind Rubin's desk, almost like a credenza, so Tess ended up facing all those photos when she sat opposite him. The photos made her feel guilty, as if the children's faces were pleading with her to bring them back to a place where they had smiled and laughed as they did in these photos. Their mother, however, was somber—lips together, eyes downcast. But there was a kind of calculation in the look, too, a sense that Natalie Rubin was striking a pose, her eyes sliding away from the camera's lens lest it glimpse her secrets.

  "I never knew this little shopping center existed," Tess said, making conversation. "Have you always been here?"

  "My father opened the store in this location about thirty-five years ago. Like most merchants, he started off downtown, but he was quick to figure out that the customers were moving farther and farther away and that the stores needed to follow them. He was already making plans to relocate when the riots came. But we always lived out here in Pikesville. We had to."

  "Why? It's not like those old real-estate covenants barring Jews were still in effect in the other neighborhoods."

  "I have to live within walking distance of my shul," he said, his voice patient, yet a little patronizing. It was becoming a familiar tone to Tess. Had he spoken to his wife with these same inflections? That would explain a lot.

  "Right So where's the other son?"

  "What do you mean? Have you learned something about Isaac and Efraim?"

  "No, no—the store is called Robbins & Sons. I figured out that Robbins is simply Rubin, anglicized. But you're the only son here. Did you have a brother?"

  "Oh." He shrugged. "The name goes back to my father. The other furriers in town—Mano Swartz, Miller Brothers—had such impressive-sounding names. And he had a partner in the beginning, when he was downtown, but they went their separate ways. So Robbins & Sons, two lies for the price of one. Only one son, and the name is Rubin. But if my boys… if my boys… well, perhaps we'll make the name true yet."

  Tess completed his thought in her head: If his boys were found, if they were okay. Apparently, Mark Rubin had his own reservations about tempting the evil eye.

  "Did you feel obligated to go into the family business?"

  "Not at all. I considered it a privilege. My father made it clear, early on, that our partnership was to be a two-way street—I could say no, but he could, too. If I wanted to do something else, there would be no hard feelings. And if he decided I didn't have the brains to run it, then no hard feelings on my part either. Some people found my father rather… rigid. Strict, at least in business."

  "What do you mean, 'at least in business'?"

  "He wasn't strict about religion at all. My father considered himself Orthodox, but he did things I would never do. Dance with a woman who was not his wife, for example. Eat in nonkosher restaurants. Such looseness was more common before the Conservative movement gathered strength. I decided I wanted to follow a more traditional Orthodox lifestyle. It's all relative. There are Hasidim who consider me unspeakably liberal."

  "Was there a reason you embraced a stricter version of the religion than the one practiced in your family?" The question was asked out of nothing more than sheer curiosity. One of the perks of being a private detective was that one was allowed to pursue topics considered outrageously rude in everyday life. Tess could ask people about their income, their sex lives, and even about religion, the most forbidden topic of all in some ways.

  "Reasons, I'd say. But they all fall under the general heading of growing up, moving on. My father died ten years ago. Heart attack. Died, in fact, carrying an armload of furs into the vault. The last thing he said to me was, 'Mark—grab the coats.' He didn't want them to fall. He was dead when he hit the ground."

  "This was just before you married, right?"

  The shrug again. Rubin was an eloquent shrugger. "My father was fifty-five when I was born, yet he outlived my mother, who was twenty years younger and died before my fifth birthday. He also outlived my stepmother, who died when I was a teenager. I was in no hurry to marry, and my father seemed to enjoy my companionship. Besides, I was waiting for a love match, a true one."

  "I guess a good-looking Orthodox furrier doesn't want for prospective wives."

  He stroked his beard, amused. "How nice to know you think I'm good-looking."

  Tess pretended to be flustered, but the compliment had been calculated. She had wanted to soften him up before she began asking the ruder questions. "So… about Lana Wishnia."

  "I didn't know her." Said quickly, as if that would make the subject go away. "And the police told me she was Natalie's manicurist. You say they were friends, but this is the first I've heard of that."

  "I'm more curious about the check Lana wrote to Natalie—and your little bookkeeping system, which made it necessary. Why didn't Natalie have money of her own?"

  "She had credit cards, an ATM card, accounts at all the stores where she shopped. She never wanted for anything."

  "C'mon, it was pretty medieval, and not even in keeping with your own beliefs. Jewish women have always been given a lot of control over their homes, allowed to have their own money. Was it a bone of contention in the marriage? Did Natalie want things set up differently? Maybe this whole disappearing act is a walkout intended to get you to change some things."

  "No," he said, an edge to his voice. "No, you have the wrong idea."

  "Really? Then would you point me in the direction of the right idea? Again, I have to ask you if Natalie had an addiction of some sort. Because that's the usual reason not to entrust a family member with cash."

  "I don't want… You shouldn't ask such questions. This is the mother of m
y children, my wife. You're being disrespectful."

  The phone rang just then, and Rubin flicked on the speakerphone. A man's voice, high and reedy through the distortion of the voice box, started out tentatively: "This is Jack Reid, up in Montreal, and there's a small problem with the knitwear you ordered for this fall."

  "There are no small problems, Jack." Mark Rubin's voice took on a cold, ruthless quality that Tess had not heard before. I wouldn't want to go up against him in a business deal, she thought Then she realized she already had, and he had acquiesced readily at the price she named. She must have underbid the job.

  The voice on the speaker continued, clearly nervous. "The per-unit cost quoted you… my assistant… well, he's new, and he didn't figure in some ancillary costs. There are some complicated tariffs and shipping fees, at least in order to make the October date we agreed to. You see, we get the pieces from New York, but still have to assemble them here, so you're talking a really fast turnaround."

  "That's your problem."

  "But I'm going to lose money if you hold me to that price."

  "No you're not. You may not make as much as you counted on making this fall, but you won't lose money, not in the long run. The way you'll lose money is by trying to renegotiate the price or delay delivery. Then you'll lose a lot of money, because I'll never buy from you again, and I'll persuade other merchants in my area to blackball you, too, tell them how unreliable you are. You'll never make another sale in the Mid-Atlantic region."

  "But, Mark—"

  "No, Jack. Do it for the agreed-on price, delivery on the contracted date, or we're through. You're through."

  "If you could just split the difference in the shipping?"

  "I can, but I won't. Fob it off on one of your stupider clients, who doesn't read every line on his bill. But don't try to play me for a fool."

  "Mark, if you could just see your way clear…"

  "Jack, hang up now, or I'm going to insist you deliver a week earlier. At your expense."

  "Pleasure doing business with you," the disembodied Jack said, allowing himself a small measure of sarcasm in his defeat.

  "The pleasure," Rubin said, "is all mine." He punched a button, disconnecting the line.

  Tess sat in stunned silence, half admiring, half appalled.

  "In business," Rubin said, "you have to remember who works for whom. He needs me more than I need him. So I win."

  "Well, by that logic I work for you, but you need me and you need to heed my advice. You can't keep everything decorous, Mr. Rubin." Funny, she was closer to him in age than his own wife was, but she just couldn't call him by his first name, and he never invited her to. "You can't mark areas of your life 'keep out,' especially if they might hold the key to where your wife and children went."

  "I want to find my wife, but I don't want to violate her, or expose her."

  "Expose her to what?"

  "Nothing," he said, backpedaling. "It's just that I've come to you with a problem of what I would call location. I want to know where my wife is. Why she left isn't so important to me. We'll deal with that when she comes home, between us."

  "But I may not be able to find her unless I know the why. So if there's anything you're not telling me…"

  The phone rang again, and Rubin punched the speaker-phone with great enthusiasm, as if happy for the interruption.

  "That better not be you, Jack," he warned the phone. But the voice that came back was mechanical and unhearing.

  "This is a collect call from 1-800-CALL-ATT. If you wish to accept this call, please press '1' on your TouchTone phone. The message is from—"

  A pause, then another voice, a human one, small but determined: "Isaac."

  Rubin almost broke the phone's plastic surface in his effort to punch the 1, but his voice was controlled when he spoke. "Isaac? Isaac? Are you there?"

  A rush of words, boyish and high, filled the room, for Rubin had left the phone in speaker mode. "Daddy, this is Isaac. I'm in a McDonald's, but I'm not sure where. I tried to call you earlier, when we first got here, but I got your voice mail and I used up the money that I told Mama I wanted for a salad. Now everyone is playing in the ball room, and they think I'm going to the bathroom. Don't worry, I didn't eat anything, although I guess a salad would be okay. I'm not supposed to call you, but I don't care, because I want to come home and be with you, in our house, and go to school and—Daddy! DADDEE!"

  And the call ended on that long-drawn-out syllable, a shriek that faded away, followed by a vague scuffling noise.

  "Isaac? Isaac? Isaac, are you there?" But there was no reply, just a click. The line had definitely gone dead.

  Rubin grabbed at his hair, as if he might tear it out, then pushed the phone off the desk as if it were responsible for whatever was happening on the other end of the line. He then began throwing every sheet of paper from his desk, showering Tess, who was on her hands and knees, trying to retrieve the phone even as paper rained down on her.

  "I'm calling AT&T back," she said, trying to stay calm in the face of Rubin's amazing rage and grief. "They should be able to tell us the number he called from."

  "He said he tried to call earlier and I wasn't here. Why wasn't I here? Because of that behayma, Mrs. Gordon, and her stupid lynx. She should fall off the Norwegian Princess and drown for what she's cost me."

  The phone had caller ID, and the number was on the LED display. Tess found a phone book beneath a pile of glossy catalogs showing young women in furs of not-in-nature colors—lilac, moss green, peacock blue. "Area code 812 is southwestern Indiana."

  "We should go, we should call the police, we should—"

  "You call the police," Tess said, "while I dial this number back."

  But it rang busy. It rang busy every time they tried it for the next hour.

  * * *

  Chapter Twelve

  "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?"

  Zeke seized Isaac by his collar and arm, yanking him so hard that the pay phone, loosed from Isaac's grasp, bounced on its metallic tail like an enraged cobra, hitting the white-tiled wall and caroming off, catching Isaac hard enough across the face to raise a welt. Good. It was almost as good a release as hitting the goddamn kid himself. Which he would never do, and not just because Natalie wouldn't stand for it. Zeke had known the end of a belt as a boy and had sworn to himself never to inflict such pain on a child. It hadn't been the beatings so much. It was the ritual of the beatings—the weary trudge to the closet for the correct belt, the chair in the kitchen, the way the belt was looped just so over the right hand. And, more than anything else, it was the mournful resignation, the insistence that he had brought the punishment on himself.

  "I said, 'What are you doing?' " Zeke depressed the hangup switch but let the receiver swing free. He then turned the boy around, pressed him against the wall—okay, pushed him against it—and dug his fingers into his neck and shoulders just hard enough to let Isaac know that he meant business. But his voice was low. He had learned this, too, in childhood. As long as you kept your voice low, you could get away with a lot. It was tones, the shrill and the sharp, that made people look up. You could practically kill a person and not draw a crowd, as long as you never raised your voice.

  Isaac kept his eyes on the floor. "I was making a phone call."

  "To who? To who?" Zeke might have started shaking him then, but a woman came out of the restroom and gave them a curious look. He threw an arm around Isaac's neck, trying to make their interaction look like good-natured roughhousing.

  "To whom," the boy corrected, and Zeke really wanted to slap him then. What nine-year-old knew the difference between "who" and "whom," much less cared? The stupid kid should be grateful for his rescue from that tight-ass upbringing, not spending every moment scheming about how to return.

  "You didn't call 911, did you, Isaac?" Even Zeke lost the new names when his emotions ran high. "We're all going to be in some deep shit, you try that. You know what they're going to do? They're going to take you away
from your mom. But they won't give you back to your dad—oh, no. They'll split you and Efraim and Penina up, put you in foster homes. Is that what you want?"

  Isaac's lip quivered, but he didn't break easy, this kid. Spoiled as he was, he was a tough number.

  "You called your dad, didn't you? I heard you say 'Daddy,' don't deny it. Look, I can pick up the phone right now, call the operator, and ask her where the last call went from this phone, so you might as well tell me."

  "'1-800-CALL-ATT,'" Isaac said in a mockingbird's singsong voice. " 'Free for you and cheap for them.' "

  "Ike, you want to spend more time in the trunk? Because that can be arranged. You can ride back there all the time, take your meals there, spend the nights there if that's what you want."

  Isaac stared back, yielding no ground. God, he was tough. Those had to be his grandfather's genes, not his father's. But the boy couldn't hold it together very long, and he finally whispered, "I called my dad, at the store. I miss him."

  "Did you get him?"

  "I'm not sure. He never… The machine didn't pick up, but I'm not sure he was there."

  Softened by his victory, Zeke bent down next to Isaac, examining the red mark the phone had left. Not good, a kid with a bruised eye. People noticed things like that. They had to avoid attracting any attention, at least for the next few weeks. That's why they had been on the move since Natalie had refused to take the kids home. Her stupid impulse had forced Zeke to risk much more than he wanted, but what could he do? He couldn't convince her to leave without telling her everything, and Natalie couldn't be trusted with what Zeke thought of as the global overview. Her ignorance of certain details was key to the success of his plan.

  "We'll want to put something on that. I'd ask for a raw steak, but I'm pretty sure they don't have real steak here. Hey, maybe I could ask for a McRib, but the barbecue sauce would stick to your face."

  The boy didn't smile. "All the food here is crummy. I wouldn't want to eat it even if it were kosher."