'They're going to blow up the Opera,' she whispered, 'at one of the peak performances,' she whispered. 'They're going to blow up The Marriage of Figaro -- something popular like that. Or something heavier,' she said. 'I'm not sure which performance -- they're not sure. But one that's full-house,' Fehlgeburt said. 'The whole Opera.'
'They're crazy,' I said; I didn't recognize my voice. It sounded creaky; it was like Old Billig's voice -- Old Billig the whore or Old Billig the radical.
Fehlgeburt shook her head back and forth under me; her stringy hair whipped my face. 'Please get your family out,' she whispered. 'Especially Lilly,' she said. 'Little Lilly,' she blubbered.
'But they're not going to blow up the hotel, too, are they?' I asked Fehlgeburt.
'Everyone will be involved,' she said ominously. 'It has to involve everyone, or it's no good,' she said, and I heard Arbeiter's voice behind hers, or Ernst's all-embracing logic. A phase, a necessary phase. Everything. Schlagobers, the erotic, the State Opera, the Hotel New Hampshire -- everything had to go. It was all decadent, I could hear them intoning. It was full of disgust. They would litter the Ringstrasse with art-lovers, with old-fashioned idealists silly and irrelevant enough to like opera. They would make some point or other by this kind of everything-bombing.
'Promise me,' Fehlgeburt whispered in my ear. 'You'll get them out. Your family. Everybody in it.'
'I promise,' I said. 'Of course.'
'Don't tell anyone I told you,' she said to me.
'Of course not,' I said.
'Please come back inside me, now,' Fehlgeburt said. 'Please come inside me. I want to feel it -- just once,' she added.
'Why just once?' I asked.
'Just do it,' she said. 'Do everything to me.'
I did everything to her. I regret it; I am forever guilty for it; it was as desperate and joyless as any sex in the second Hotel New Hampshire ever was.
'If you think you're going to die before you'll even have time to have a baby,' I told Fehlgeburt, later, 'why don't you leave when we leave? Why don't you get away before they do it, or before they try?'
'I can't,' she said, simply.
'Why?' I asked. Of these radicals in our Hotel New Hampshire I would always be asking why.
'Because I drive the car,' Fehlgeburt said. 'I'm the driver,' she said. 'And the car's the main bomb, it's the one that starts all the rest. And someone has to drive it, and it's me -- I drive the bomb,' Fehlgeburt said.
'Why you?' I asked her, trying to hold her, trying to get her to stop shaking.
'Because I'm the most expendable,' she said, and there was Ernst's dead voice again, there was Arbeiter's lawnmower-like process of thought. I realized that in order for Fehlgeburt to believe this, even our gentle Schwanger would have had to convince her.
'Why not Schwanger?' I asked Miss Miscarriage.
'She's too important,' Fehlgeburt said. 'She's wonderful,' she said, admiringly -- and full of loathing for herself.
'Why not Wrench?' I asked. 'He's obviously good with cars.'
'That's why,' Fehlgeburt said. 'He's too necessary. There will be other cars, other bombs to build. It's the hostage part I don't like,' she blurted out suddenly. 'It's not necessary, this time,' she added. 'There will be better hostages.'
'Who are the hostages?' I asked.
'Your family,' she said. 'Because you're Americans. More than Austria will notice us, then,' she said. 'That's the idea.'
'Whose idea?' I asked.
'Ernst's,' she said.
'Why not let Ernst be the driver?' I asked.
'He's the idea man,' Fehlgeburt said. 'He thinks it all up. Everything,' she added. Everything, indeed, I thought.
'And Arbeiter?' I asked. 'He doesn't know how to drive?'