"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 amp;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.