The Storyteller

by Picoult, Jodi

  “The second time,” Aleks told me, as I lay beside him after we made love, “it was a prostitute, who had stopped to pull up her stockings in an alley. It was easier, or so I told myself, because otherwise, I would have had to admit that what I’d done before was wrong. The third time, my first man: a banker who was locking up at the end of the day. There was a teenage girl once, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And a socialite I heard crying on a hotel balcony. And after that I stopped caring who they had been. It only mattered that they were there, at that moment, when I needed them.” Aleksander closed his eyes. “It turns out that the more you repeat the same action, no matter how reprehensible, the more you can make an excuse for it in your own mind.”

  I turned in his arms. “How do I know that one day you won’t kill me?”

  He stared at me, hesitating. “You don’t,” he said.

  We did not speak after that. We did not know that someone was outside listening to everything we had said, and to the symphony of our bodies. So while Damian slipped away from where he was eavesdropping and went to the cave to capture a frantic, frightened Casimir, I rose over Aleks like a phoenix. I felt him move within me, and I thought of not death, but only resurrection.

  LEO

  My cell phone rings when I have just spread the photo array from Genevra across the expanse of the hotel bed. “Leo,” my mother says, “I had a dream about you last night.”

  “Really,” I say, squinting at Reiner Hartmann. Genevra used the photograph from his SS file, which is now propped up against a pillow that was decidedly uncomfortable and that has left me with a crick in my neck. I look at the first page of the file, with his personal information and the snapshot in uniform, trying to compare this picture with the one I am planning to present to Minka.

  HARTMANN, REINER

  Westfalenstrasse 1818

  33142 Büren-Wewelsburg

  DOB 18 / 04 / 20

  Blutgruppe AB

  You can’t see his eyes very well in the photograph; there is a strange shadow in the grain. But the reproduction in the suspect array isn’t shoddy, as I had first thought; it’s just that the original isn’t in the best shape.

  “I was with your son and we were playing at the beach. He kept telling me, ‘Grandma, you have to bury your feet or nothing will grow.’ So I figured, he wants to play a game, fine. And I let him pile the sand up to my ankles and pour water over them from a bucket. And then guess what?”

  “What.”

  “When I shook off the sand there were tiny roots growing out of the bottoms of my feet.”

  I wonder if Minka will not be able to make an ID because of the quality of the photograph.

  “That’s fascinating,” I say absently.

  “Leo, you’re not listening to me.”

  “I am. You had a dream about me that I wasn’t in.”

  “Your son was in it.”

  “I don’t have a son—”

  “You have to remind me?” my mother sighs. “What do you think it means?”

  “That I’m not married?”

  “No, the dream. The roots growing out of the soles of my feet.”

  “I don’t know, Ma. That you’re deciduous?”

  “Everything’s a joke to you,” my mother says, miffed. I can sense that if I don’t take a few minutes to focus on her, I’m going to have to field a call from my sister, too, telling me that my mom is angry. I push the photographs away.

  “Maybe that’s because what I do for a living is so hard to understand, I need a way to let it go at the end of the day,” I tell her, and I realize that this is true.

  “You know I’m proud of you, Leo. Of what you do.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And you know I worry about you.”

  “Believe me, you make that patently clear.”

  “Which is why I think it’s important for you to take a little time to yourself.”

  I don’t like where this is going.

  “I’m working.”

  “You’re in New Hampshire.”

  I scowl at the phone. “I swear to God, I’m hiring you. I think you’re a better tracker than anyone I’ve got in the office—”

  “You called to ask your sister for a hotel recommendation and she told me you were on the road for business.”

  “Nothing’s sacred.”

  “Anyway, maybe you want to get a massage when you’re back at the hotel at the end of the day—”

  “Who is she?” I ask wearily.

  “Rachel Zweig. Lily Zweig’s daughter. She’s getting a degree in massage therapy in Nashua—”

  “You know, the cell phone service really stinks up here,” I say, holding the phone away from me at arm’s length. “I’m losing you.”

  “Not only can I track you, I can tell when you’re feeding me a load of BS, Leo.”

  “I love you, Ma,” I laugh.

  “I loved you first,” she says.

  As I gather the photo spread together into its file, I wonder what my mother would make of Sage Singer. She’d love the fact that Sage could keep me well fed, since always I look too skinny to my mother. She would look at her scar and think of her as a survivor. She would appreciate the way Sage still grieves for her own mom, and her close attachment to her grandmother—since to my mother, family is the carbon atom at the base of all life-forms. On the other hand, my mother has always wanted me to marry someone who is Jewish, and Sage—a self-professed atheist—doesn’t qualify. Then again she has a grandmother who survived the Holocaust, which has to earn her a few points—

  I break off in my thoughts, wondering why I’m thinking of marrying a woman I met yesterday—one who is simply a means to a witness for me, and one who clearly, as evidenced by last night, is in love with someone else.

  Adam.

  A guy who stood about six four and had shoulders you could use as a Thanksgiving banquet table. Goyishe, my mother would call him, with his sandy hair and aw-shucks smile. Seeing him last night, and watching Sage react as if she’d been electrocuted, brought back every acne-riddled middle school post-traumatic flashback—from the cheerleader who told me I wasn’t really her type after I published a sonnet to her in the school literary magazine, to my junior prom date, who started dancing with a soccer jock when I was getting her a cup of punch, and wound up going home with him.

  I’ve got nothing against Adam, and what Sage wants to do to screw up her life is her own business. I also know that it takes two to make a mistake of that magnitude. But . . . Adam has a wife. The expression on Sage’s face when she saw the woman made me want to put my arm around her and tell her she could do so much better than this guy.

  Like, maybe, me.

  Fine, okay, I have a little bit of a crush on her. Or maybe her baking. Or her husky, raspy, incredibly sexy voice, which she doesn’t even realize is sexy.

  This feeling takes me by surprise. I spend my life hunting down people who want to stay lost, but I have had considerably less luck finding someone I’d like to keep around for a while.

  Stuffing the file into my briefcase, I shake these thoughts off. Maybe my mother is right and I do need a massage, or whatever form of relaxation it will take to get me back to separating my work life from my private life.

  All of my best-laid plans, however, go out the window as soon as I arrive at her place and find her waiting for me. She’s wearing jean shorts, cutoffs, like Daisy Mae. Her legs are long and tan and muscular, and I can’t stop staring at them. “What?” she says, glancing down at her calves. “Did I cut myself shaving?”

  “No. You’re perfect. I mean, you look perfect. I mean . . .” I shake my head. “Did you talk to your grandmother this morning?”

  “Yeah.” Sage leads me into her home. “She’s a little scared, but she’s expecting us.”

  Last night, before we left, Minka had agreed to look at a photo spread. “I’ll make her as comfortable as I can,” I promise.

  Sage’s house is the visual representation of that
favorite sweatshirt you own, the one that you search through your drawer for, because it’s so comfortable. The couch is overstuffed, the light creamy and soft. There’s always something baking. It is the kind of place you could settle down for a few moments and wake up, years later, because you never left.

  It’s completely orthogonal to my apartment in Washington, which is full of black leather and chrome and right angles.

  “I like your place,” I blurt out.

  She glances at me oddly. “You were here yesterday.”

  “I know. It’s just . . . very cozy.”

  Sage looks around. “My mother was good at that. At drawing people in.” She opens up her mouth and then shuts it again abruptly.

  “You were going to say that you’re not,” I guess.

  She shrugs. “I’m good at pushing people away.”

  “Not all people,” I say, and we both know I’m talking about last night.

  Sage hesitates, as if she is about to tell me something, but then turns and walks into the kitchen. “So what color did you decide on?”

  “Color?”

  “For your nail polish.” She picks up a mug of tea and hands it to me. I take a sip and realize she’s put in milk but no sugar, just the way I took it last night at the café. There’s something about that—her remembering—that makes me feel like I’ve taken flight.

  “I was going to go with cherry red, but that’s so FBI,” I reply. “A little too flashy for us DOJ folks.”

  “Wise decision.”

  “And you?” I ask. “Did you glean any wisdom from People magazine?”

  “I did what you told me to do,” she answers, and suddenly the mood has dropped like a stone in a pond. “I saw Josef.”

  “And?”

  “I can’t do it. I can’t talk to him and pretend I don’t know what I know now.” Sage shakes her head. “I think he might be upset with me.”

  Just then my cell phone rings, and I see my boss’s number flashing. “I have to take this,” I apologize, and I drift into the living room to answer the call.

  He has a logistical question about a prosecution memo that I edited on a different case. I walk him through some of the changes I made, and why, and by the time I hang up and walk back into the kitchen, I see Sage drinking her coffee, perusing the front page of Reiner Hartmann’s SS file.

  “What are you doing?” I ask. “That’s classified.”

  She looks up, a deer in headlights. “I wanted to see if I could identify him, too.”

  I grab the folder. I can’t show her Reiner’s file; she is a civilian. But I hold up that front page, the one from his SS file that gives his name, address, birth date, blood type, and photo. “Here,” I say, offering a quick peek of the image—the parted hair, the pale eyes you can’t quite see.

  “He looks nothing like Josef now,” Sage murmurs. “I don’t know if I could pick him up out of a lineup.”

  “Well,” I reply, “let’s hope your grandmother doesn’t agree.”

  • • •

  Once, a historian in my office named Simran brought me a picture of Angelina Jolie. It was on his iPhone, and it was a party scene. There were balloons all over the place and a birthday cake on the table, and in the foreground pouting was Angelina. “Wow,” I said. “Where’d you take that?”

  “She’s my cousin.”

  “Your cousin is Angelina Jolie?” I asked.

  “Nope,” Simran said. “But she looks just like her, don’t you think?”

  As it turns out, witness identification is frequently total crap. It’s often the weakest part of the proof phase of criminal law enforcement. It’s why DNA testing is continually overturning the convictions of rapists who were identified positively by their victims. There really are a very limited number of facial variations, and we tend to make errors of judgment. Which is great for Simran’s cousin, but less great if you work for the Department of Justice and you’re trying to get an eyewitness ID.

  Minka’s cane hangs over the edge of the kitchen table, upon which is a glass mug of tea and an empty plate. I’m sitting beside her; Daisy, her caretaker, stands with her arms crossed in the doorway of the kitchen.

  “Voilà,” Sage announces, and she sets down one perfectly baked roll on the china.

  The roll is knotted on the top. Crystals of sugar dot the surface. I don’t have to wait for Minka to break it open to know that inside is cinnamon and chocolate, that this is the roll her father once baked for her.

  “I thought maybe you’d missed these,” Sage says.

  Minka gasps. She turns the small roll over in her hands. “You made this? But how . . . ?”

  “I guessed,” Sage admits.

  When did she have time to bake this? During the morning, maybe, after she met with Josef? I stare at Sage, watching her face as her grandmother breaks open the pastry and takes the first bite. “It’s just like my father used to make,” Minka sighs. “Just like I remember . . .”

  “Your memory is what I’m counting on,” I say, sensing a perfect segue. “I know this isn’t easy, so I really appreciate you making the sacrifice. Are you ready?”

  I wait for Minka to meet my gaze. She nods.

  In front of her, I place a photo spread of eight Nazi war criminals. Genevra has outdone herself, in both speed and precision. The picture of Reiner Hartmann—the same one Sage had been looking at earlier in his SS file—is on the bottom left. There are four photos in the row above it and three more beside it, which depict other men of generally similar appearance, wearing identical Nazi uniforms. This way, I am asking Minka to compare apples to apples. If Reiner’s photo was the only picture of a man in uniform, it could be seen as prejudicial.

  Sage, sitting beside her grandmother, looks down at the spread, too. The eight individuals all have the same parted, slick blond hair as Reiner Hartmann, they are all facing the same direction. They look like young movie stars from the 1940s—smooth-shaven and strong-jawed, matinee idols for a macabre documentary. “It’s not necessarily the case that anyone in this photo array was at the camp, Minka, but I’d like you to look at the faces and see if anything jumps out at you . . .”

  Minka picks up the paper with unsteady hands. “We did not know them by name.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  She passes a finger over each of the eight faces, as if it is a pistol held to the forehead of each man. Is it my imagination, or does it hover over Reiner Hartmann’s portrait?

  “It’s too hard,” Minka says, shaking her head. She pushes away the photo spread. “I do not want to remember anymore.”

  “I understand, but—”

  “You do not understand,” she interrupts. “You are not just asking me to point to a photograph. You are asking me to poke a hole in a dam, because you are thirsty, even though I will end up drowning in the process.”

  “Please,” I beg, but Minka buries her face in her hands.

  The anguish on Sage’s face is even more profound than it is on Minka’s. But that’s what love is, isn’t it? When it hurts you more to see someone else suffer than it does to take the pain yourself? “We’re done,” Sage announces. “I’m sorry, Leo, but I can’t put her through this.”

  “Give her a chance to make up her own mind,” I suggest.

  Minka has turned away, lost in a memory. Daisy swoops in like an avenging angel and wraps an arm around her fragile charge. “You want to rest, Ms. Minka? Because it sure looks to me like you need to lie down a bit.”

  She glares daggers at me as she helps Sage’s grandmother to her feet, hands her the cane, and leads her down the hall.

  Sage seems as if she is breaking in half, watching her grandmother go. “I should never have brought you here,” she whispers.

  “I’ve seen this before, Sage. It’s a shock to the system, seeing the face of someone who hurt you. Other survivors have had the same reaction, but have managed to pull themselves together and make a valid ID. I know she spent over half a century keeping these feelings bu
ried. I get that. And I understand that it’s painful to rip the Band-Aid off the wound—”

  “This isn’t a Band-Aid,” Sage argues. “This is surgery without anesthesia. And I don’t really give a damn about the other survivors you’ve seen going through this. I just care about my grandmother.” Standing abruptly, she heads down the hallway, leaving me with the photo array.

  I look down at the spread, at Reiner Hartmann’s face. There is nothing in it that suggests the evil beneath the surface. Instead, we are forced to approximate what toxic cocktail of cells and schooling might allow a boy raised with scruples to be led to an act of genocide.

  The uneaten roll that Sage baked lies on the plate in two halves, like a broken heart. I sigh, and reach for my briefcase, ready to slip the photos inside. But at the last minute, I stop. I pick up the plate with the roll on it and walk to Minka’s bedroom. Behind the door are soft voices. Taking a deep breath, I knock.

  Minka sits in an overstuffed chair, her feet raised on an ottoman. “Stop fussing, Sage,” she says, exasperated, as Daisy opens the bedroom door for me. “I’m all right!”

  I love that she’s full of piss and vinegar. I love that she’s tough as nails one moment and soft as suede the next. It is what got her through the worst era of history, I’m sure; and what has kept her going since.

  And it’s what she’s passed down to her granddaughter, even if Sage doesn’t know it.

  They both look up as I enter, holding the roll and the photos. “You have got to be kidding me,” Sage mutters.

  “Minka,” I say, handing her the plate, “I thought you might want this. Sage went to the trouble of baking it because she thought it would give you a bit of peace. That’s what I wanted to do today, too. What you lived through? It wasn’t fair. But it’s also not fair for you to live in a country where you have to share your homeland with your former tormentors. Help me, Minka. Please.”

  Sage gets to her feet. “Leo,” she says tightly. “Get out of here now.”