Humor a gunman, she thought. Don't resist. Resisters get shot.
"Move!" he said between clenched teeth, and he shoved her again.
When he pushed her into a recessed doorway three-quarters of the way
along the passage, not far from the single faint bulb at the end, he
started talking filthy, telling her what he was going to do with her
after he took her money, and even in the poor light she could see he
held no weapon. Suddenly she had hope. His vocabulary of obscenities
was blood-curdling, but his sexual threats were so stupidly repetitive
that they were almost funny. She realized he was just a big dumb loser
who relied on his size to get what he wanted. Men of his type seldom
carried guns. His muscles gave him a false sense of invulnerability, so
he probably had no fighting skill, either.
While he was emptying the purse that she willingly relinquished, Ginger
summoned all her courage and kicked him squarely in the crotch. He
doubled over from the blow. She moved fast, seized one of his hands,
and bent the index finger
backward, savagely, until the pain must have been as excruciating as the
throbbing in his bruised privates.
Radical, violent, backward extension of the index finger could quickly
incapacitate any man, regardless of his size and strength. By this
action she was straining the digital nerve on the front of his hand
while simultaneously pinching the highly sensitive median and radial
nerves on the back. The intense pain also traveled into the acromial
nerves in his shoulder, into his neck.
He grabbed her hair with his free hand and pulled. That counterattack
hurt, made her cry out, blurred her vision, but she gritted her teeth,
endured the agony, and bent his captive finger even farther. Her
relentless pressure quickly banished all thought of resistance from his
mind. Involuntary tears burst from his eyes, and he dropped to his
knees, squealing and cursing and helpless.
"Let go of me! Let go of me, you bitch!"
Blinking sweat out of her eyes, tasting the same salty effluence at the
corners of her mouth, Ginger gripped his index finger with both hands.
She shuffled cautiously backward and led him out of the passage in an
awkward three-point crawl, as if dragging a dangerous dog on a tightened
choke-chain.
Scuttling, scraping, hitching, and humping himself along on one hand and
two knees, he glared up at her with eyes muddied by a murderous urge.
His mean, lumpish face became less visible as they moved away from the
light, but she could see that it was so contorted by pain and fury and
humiliation that it did not seem human: a goblin face. And in a shrill
goblin voice he squealed a chilling array of dire imprecations.
By the time they had clumsily negotiated fifteen yards of the
serviceway, he was overwhelmed by the agony in his hand and by the
sickening waves of pain rushing outward through his body from his
injured testicles. He gagged, choked, and vomited on himself.
She still did not dare let go of him. Now, given the opportunity, he
would not merely beat her senseless: he would kill her. Disgusted and
terrified, she urged him along even faster than before.
Reaching the sidewalk with the befouled and chastened mugger in tow, she
saw no pedestrians who could call the police for her, so she forced her
humbled assailant into the middle of the street, where passing traffic
came to a standstill at this unexpected spectacle.
When the cops finally arrived, Ginger's relief was exceeded by that of
the thug who had attacked her.
In part, people underestimated Ginger because she was small: five-two, a
hundred and two pounds, not physically imposing, certainly not
intimidating. Likewise, she was shapely but not a blond bombshell. She
was blond, however, and the particular silvery shade of her hair was
what caught a man's eye, whether he was seeing her for the first time or
the hundredth. Even in bright sunshine her hair recalled moonlight. That
were the very definition of gentleness, an Audrey Hepburn neck, slender
shoulders, thin wrists, long-fingered hands, and her tiny waist-all
contributed to a misleading impression of fragility. Furthermore, she
was quiet and watchful by nature, two qualities that might be mistaken
for timidity. Her voice was so soft and musical that anyone could
easily fail to apprehend the self-assurance and underlying authority in
those dulcet tones.
Ginger had inherited her silver-blond mane, cerealian eyes, beauty, and
ambition from her mother, Anna, a five-foot-ten Swede.
"You're my golden girl," Anna said when Ginger graduated from sixth
grade at the age of nine, two years ahead of schedule, after being
promoted twice in advance of her peers.
Ginger had been the best student in her class and had received a
gilt-edged scroll in honor of her academic excellence. Also, as one of
three student performers who had provided entertainment before the
graduation ceremony, she had played two pieces on the piano-Mozart,
followed by a ragtime tune-and had brought the surprised audience to its
feet.
"Golden girl," Anna said, hugging her all the way home in the car.
Jacob drove, blinking back tears of pride. Jacob was an emotional man,
easily moved. Somewhat embarrassed by the frequency with which his eyes
moistened, he usually tried to conceal the depth of his feelings by
blaming his tears or reddened eyes on a never-specified allergy. "Must
be unusual
pollens in the air today," he said twice on the way home from
graduation. "Irritating pollens."
Anna said, "It's all come together in you, bubbeleh. My best features
and your father's best, and you're going places, by God, you just wait
and see if you aren't. High school, then college, then maybe law school
or medical school, anything you want to do. Anything."
The only people who never underestimated Ginger were her parents.
They reached home, turned into the driveway. Jacob stopped short of the
garage and said, in surprise, "What are we doing?
Our only child graduates from sixth grade, our child who thinks she can
do absolutely anything-will probably marry the King of Siam and ride a
giraffe to the moon, our child wears her first cap and gown and we
aren't celebrating? Should we drive into Manhattan, have maybe
champagne at the Plaza?
Dinner at the Waldorf? No. Something better. Only the best for our
giraffe-riding astronaut. We'll go to the soda fountain at Walgreen's!"
"Yeah!" Ginger said.
At Walgreen's, they, must have been as odd a family as the soda jerk had
ever seen: the Jewish father, not much bigger than a jockey, with a
Germanic name but a Sephardic complexion; the Swedish mother, blond and
gloriously feminine, five inches taller than her husband; and the child,
a wraith, an elf, petite though her mother was not, fair though her
father was dark, with a beauty altogether different from her mother's-a
more subtle beauty with a fey qualit
y. Even as a child, Ginger knew
that strangers, seeing her with her parents, must think she was adopted.
From her father, Ginger had inherited her slight stature, soft voice,
intellect, and gentleness.
She loved them both so completely and intensely that, as a child, her
vocabulary had been insufficient to convey her feelings. Even as an
adult, she could not find the words to express what they had meant to
her. They were both gone now, to early graves.
When Anna died in a traffic accident, shortly after Ginger's twelfth
birthday, the common wisdom among Jacob's relatives was that both Ginger
and her father would be adrift without the Swede, whom the Weiss clan
had long ago ceased to regard as an interloping gentile and for whom
they had developed both respect and love. Everyone knew how close the
three had been, but, more important, everyone knew that Anna had been
the engine powering the family's success. It was Anna who had taken the
least ambitious of the Weiss brothers-Jacob the dreamer, Jacob the meek,
Jacob with his nose always in a detective novel or a science fiction
storyand made something of him. He had been an employee in a jewelry
store when she married him, but by the time she died he owned two shops
of his own.
After the funeral, the family gathered at Aunt Rachel's big house in
Brooklyn Heights. As soon as she could slip away, Ginger sought solace
in the dark solitude of the pantry. Sitting on a stool, with the aroma
of many spices heavy in the air of that narrow place, praying to God to
bring her mother back, she heard Aunt Francine talking to Rachel in the
kitchen. Fran was bemoaning the grim future awaiting Jacob and his
little girl in a world without Anna:
"He won't be able to keep the business going, you know he won't, not
even once the grief has passed and he goes back to work. The poor
lufunensch. Anna was his common sense and his motivation and his best
adviser, and without her in five years he'll be lost."
They were underestimating Ginger.
To be fair, Ginger was only twelve, and even though she was already in
tenth grade, she was still a child in most people's eyes. No one could
have foreseen that she would fill Anna's shoes so quickly. She shared
her mother's love of cooking, so in the weeks following the funeral she
pored through cookbooks, and, with the amazing diligence and
perseverance that were her trademarks, she acquired what culinary skills
she had not already learned. The first time relatives came for dinner
after Anna's death, they exclaimed over the food. Homemade potato rolls
and cheese kolacky. Vegetable soup with plump cheese and beef kreplach
floating in it. Schrafe fish as an appetizer. Braised veal paprika,
tzimmes with prunes and potatoes, creamy macaroni patties fried in hot
fat and served in tomato sauce. A choice of baked peach pudding or
apple schalet for dessert. Francine and Rachel thought Jacob was hiding
a marvelous new housekeeper in the kitchen. They were disbelieving when
he pointed to his daughter. Ginger did not think she had done anything
remarkable. A cook was needed, so she became a cook.
She had to take care of her father now, and she applied herself to that
responsibility with vigor and enthusiasm. She cleaned house swiftly,
efficiently, and with a thoroughness that defied her Aunt Francine's sub
rosa inspections for dust and grime. Although she was only twelve, she
learned to plan a budget, and before she was thirteen she was in charge
of all the household accounts.
At fourteen, three years younger than her classmates, Ginger was the
valedictorian of her high-school class. When it became known that she
had been accepted by several universities but had chosen Barnard,
everyone began to wonder whether, at the tender age of fourteen, she had
finally taken too big a bite and would choke trying to swallow it.
Barnard was more difficult than high school. She no longer learned
faster than the other kids, but she learned as well as the best of them,
and her grade average was frequently 4.0, never less than 3.8-and that
was the semester in her junior year when Jacob was sick with his first
bout of pancreatitis, when she spent every evening at the hospital.
Jacob lived to see her get her first degree, was sallow and weak when
she received her medical degree, even hung on tenaciously until she had
served six months of her internship. But after three bouts of recurring
pancreatitis, he developed pancreatic cancer, and he died before Ginger
had finally made up her mind to go for a surgical residency at Boston
Memorial instead of pursuing a career in research.
Because she had been given more years with Jacob than she had been given
with her mother, her feelings for him were understandably more profound,
and the loss of him was even more devastating than the loss of Anna had
been. Yet she dealt with that time of trouble as she dealt with every
challenge that came her way, and she finished her internship with
excellent reports and superb recommendations.
She delayed her residency by going to California, to Stanford for a
unique and arduous two-year program of additional study in
cardiovascular pathology. Thereafter, following a one-month vacation
(by far the longest rest she had ever taken), she moved East again, to
Boston, acquired a mentor in Dr. George Hannaby (chief of surgery at
Memorial and renowned for his pioneering achievements in various
cardiovascular surgical procedures), and served the first three-quarters
of her two-year residency without a hitch.
Then, on a Tuesday morning in November, she went into Bernstein's Deli
to buy a few items, and terrible things began happening. The incident
of the black gloves. That was the start of it.
Tuesday was her day off, and unless one of her patients had a
life-threatening crisis, she was neither needed nor expected at the
hospital. During her first two months at Memorial, with her usual
enthusiasm and tireless drive, she had gone to work on most of her days
off, for there was nothing else that she would rather do. But George
Hannaby put an end to that habit as soon as he learned of it. George
said that the practice of medicine was high-pressure work, and that
every physician needed time off, even Ginger Weiss.
"If you drive yourself too hard, too fast, too relentlessly," he said,
"it's not only you that suffers, but the patient as well."
So every Tuesday she slept an extra hour, showered, and had two cups of
coffee while she read the morning paper at the kitchen table by the
window that looked out on Mount Vernon Street. At ten o'clock she
dressed, walked several blocks to Bernstein's on Charles Street, and
bought pastrami, corned beef, homemade rolls or sweet pumpernickel,
potato salad, blintzes, maybe some lox, maybe some smoked sturgeon,
sometimes cottage cheese vareniki to be reheated at home. Then she
walked home with her bag of goodies and ate shamelessly all day while
she read Agatha Christie, Dick Francis, John D. MacDonald, Elmore
Leonard, sometimes
a Heinlein. While she had not yet begun to like
relaxation half as much as she liked work, she gradually began to enjoy
her time off, and Tuesday ceased to be the dreaded day it had been when
she first began her reluctant observance of the six-day week.
That bad Tuesday in November started out fine-cold with a gray winter
sky, brisk and invigorating rather than frigidand her routine brought
her to Bernstein's (crowded, as usual) at ten-twenty-one. Ginger
drifted from one end of the long counter to the other, peering into
cabinets full of baked goods, looking through the cold glass of the
refrigerated display cases, choosing from the array of delicacies with
gluttonous pleasure. The room was a stewpot of wonderful smells and
happy sounds: hot dough, cinnamon; laughter; garlic, cloves; rapid
conversations in which the English was spiced with everything from
Yiddish to Boston accents to current rock-and-roll slang; roasted
hazelnuts, sauerkraut; pickles, coffee; the clink-clank of silverware.
When Ginger had everything she wanted, she paid for it, pulled on her
blue knit gloves, and hefted the bag, going past the small tables at
which a dozen people were having a late breakfast, then headed for the
door.
She held the grocery bag in her left arm, and with her free hand she
tried to put her wallet back in the purse that was slung over her right
shoulder. She was looking down at the purse as she reached the door,
and a man in a gray tweed topcoat and a black Russian hat entered the
deli at that moment, his attention as distracted as hers; they collided.
As cold air swept in from outside, she stumbled backward a step. He
grabbed at her bag of groceries to keep it from falling, then steadied