Field of Blood by Wilson, Eric (pdf e book reader .TXT) 📕

Some ironic humor there. Most daughters acted like they were older than they were, and expected to be treated like adults.

Whereas Gina really was older. Already thirty-one years old.

Safe, hidden by the droplets that sluiced down the windscreen, Nikki mouthed: “What else was I to do, my dear child? I had to cut you. It was my only means of bleeding away your memories and blurring the years. It hurt me every time I did it—you have to believe me—but how else could I pay the price of my own iniquities? What could we do but share in the pain together?”

Nikki got no response. No pardon. Only drumming rain upon the roof.

Anyway, wasn’t introspection for the weak? Tickets for her Atlanta engagements were already selling out, and it would do no good to sit here, paralyzed with regret. By the light of her labors, she would forge ahead.

At least my daughter is alive. Doubly alive.

She tossed back her raven locks and turned the key in the ignition.

CHAPTER

NINETEEN

Late March 1997—Arad

Benyamin Amit had an itch to scratch.

Fixated on a TV advertisement, he gazed across a meal of bread, local cheeses, and meat set out by his devout wife, Dalia. The screen was his world, and there was his cure: a bottle of Orsus Beer in the hand of a Latin beauty.

She was the fantasy, the draw for the recreational drinker. For those more serious about their intake, she was a prop and little else.

“You think she’s pretty, Ben? Is that why you stare?”

“No.” He blinked. “That’s not it.”

Dalia lifted her chin and pushed away from the table. She wore a long flower-print apron over her dress. Her hair was pulled back in an austere bun. “I know ‘pretty’ when I see it, and that . . . that girl . . . she’s pretty. So there’s no reason to deny what I can see with my own eyes, you understand?”

He lifted a chunk of bread to his mouth. Took a bite.

“I know I’m not the woman you married, and I can accept that.”

Another bite.

“Can you, Benyamin? Can you face the fact that I am older, with gray hairs showing and these wrinkles on my neck? I am your wife, and I’ve served you dutifully, as before my Maker. Yet you mock me.”

“I do no such thing.”

“You gawk at this Romanian beauty and then say it is not so.”

“Is that the real trouble?” he asked. “Or are you upset that I moved you here?”

“ ‘From Arad to Arad,’ you said. As though it were an epiphany. As though you’d be a happier man. I followed you for that reason and no other, but now our son’s behind in his schooling. They treat Dov no better than a gypsy. All for what?”

He answered in monotone. “I needed a change.”

“If you were content, Ben, these sacrifices would be justified. Instead, you sit here moody and restless, ogling those younger bosoms.”

“Don’t tell me my own mind, woman.”

“Your eyes tell me more than enough.”

“After all these years, you think you know me? You don’t.”

Dalia snatched half-empty bowls of supa from the table. Her foot-steps shook the floor as she moved from the kitchen, to the bedroom, to the bathroom, and back. She got this way when she was upset, pacing away her sanctimonious anger. It’d become a pattern as far back as Israeli Arad, when she started adhering to the decrees of the datim, the ultrareligious, who fancied themselves ultrarighteous.

Benyamin didn’t doubt their sincerity, but he wondered what it accomplished. Either way, he knew this much: in a minute, Dalia would return to the table, mumble something about the garbage needing to be taken out, and he would do it to appease her for another day.

She was right about one thing. He was restless.

That itchy-itch-itch.

With the Amit family’s move three years ago, Benyamin had hoped to break up the routine. He knew their savings would stretch farther in Eastern Europe, and his volunteer experience with the Israeli Police had gotten him a job guarding a high-profile Romanian official here in Arad. He was paid well, with an occasional bonus in the form of premium Russian vodka, and he liked the prestige, the respect.

That all changed the first time he was ordered to kill a man.

In the ashes of Ceausescu’s regime, bribes were commonplace, dalliances and indiscretions. And he was expected to play along. The last individual who had refused found his wife dead the next morning, jostled from a crowd into the path of a city tram.

Seeing no escape, Benyamin did as he was told—with a Makarov pistol and a double tap to the target’s head.

And the little itch grew.

“There.” Dalia plopped into her chair, wiping her hands together.

“Have you calmed down?” His voice was patronizing.

“See for yourself. I know you better than you think, my dear husband. In fact, I’ve removed the temptation.”

“What are you up to?”

“You might understand if you peek into the kitchen.” She gestured. “It’s around that corner. I know you don’t go in there often.”

A grimace distorted his face. He folded and set down his cloth nap-kin, then strolled from the table. At the kitchen sink he found five bottles that represented his liquor stash from about the house, even the Grey Goose—a gift from a foreign diplomat, that he’d kept behind the panel in his closet.

Five bottles, emptied. Dalia had corralled them all.

Pain spiked through Benyamin’s leg, and he peeled down his sock to get a look at the scar on his heel. Since its infliction years earlier, on the camping trip in the desert wadi, this wound had nagged him. Now it was discolored and puffy, the way it got when his need became great.

Who did Dalia think she was? What gave her the right?

Rage sparked between his ears, but it was nothing compared to the gnawing in his gut that demanded he find a way to douse this thirst. His stomach clenched, curling his body like a huge fist.

That itch. Unrelenting.

Only one thing to assuage his