My Bad Grandad

by A W Hartoin

  “The family. I know. Believe me. I know,” I said, raising my glass. “Here’s to Sturgis. You’ll fit right in, Mom. Remember, it’s for the family.”

  Mom straightened her shoulders. “It will be an interesting experience.”

  “I bet.”

  Mom glared at me and my phone vibrated. Mickey’s assistant had texted with dates for the show in Red Rocks, wherever that was. He wanted to make my plane reservations for me. My heart rate went up as I saw the song list he included. I was not singing “Sexy Curve” again. Oh, my god, no.

  “Ace says I should wear jeans to this thing,” said Mom. “I don’t own jeans. Do you think I can wear sundresses with a little silk shawl for the evenings if it gets cool?”

  “I’ll go,” I said in a rush.

  “Huh?”

  “I’ll do it. I’ll go. You stay here.”

  Mom took my tea and sipped it slowly. “Let me understand this. You are offering to help the family without complaining?”

  “I don’t complain that much,” I said.

  “And you’re doing this out of the goodness of your heart?”

  “I have a good heart.”

  “Yes, you do.” That’s what Mom said, but her expression didn’t back it up. “I thought you had a real job now with regular hours and everything.”

  “Well…”

  Mom’s hand fluttered on her chest again. “Oh, dear lord! Did you get fired? What did you do? Did you hurt someone?”

  “No, I didn’t hurt someone. Why would you even say that?” I asked, affronted.

  “You partied in college. You never studied. We thought you would fail out and end up as a waitress at…Hooter’s,” she whispered.

  Ah, yes. The ultimate horror. A waitress at Hooter’s. I’m sure there was something Mom feared more, but she never expressed it.

  “I was never going to work at Hooter’s, Mom. I just applied to bother you.”

  Mom smacked me with a dishcloth. “That manager kept calling. He said you’d make amazing tips. He wanted to give you a uniform that was two sizes too small.”

  “It was a joke. Why do you think I gave him your number? I didn’t even live here.”

  “Because you’re a horrible child. It was humiliating.”

  “Nobody knew but you.”

  “Still.”

  “Still what?”

  “Your father.”

  “Dad thought it was hilarious.”

  “I could kill that man sometimes,” she said. Maybe it wasn’t such a good thing that Mom was a crack shot. Dad really pissed her off sometimes. “Sturgis. Dumping his own father.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’m going.”

  She smacked me with the towel again.

  “Hey!”

  “Hey nothing. Why? You don’t volunteer.”

  I pressed my palms together in prayer position. “Because I’m a good daughter that wants to spare her mother the indignity of buying jeans.”

  “That’s it?” Mom asked.

  Not exactly.

  “What else am I going to do? The clinic’s flooded.”

  And that’s how it happened. I made an impulsive decision to avoid getting on stage and several lives changed forever, including my mother’s.

  Chapter Four

  “OH MY GOD! What is that smell?” I walked through my apartment with my arm over my nose.

  Skanky didn’t answer. He spun in a circle, biting his butt. It probably smelled better than our home. I threw open all the windows and looked for the source, finding it on my bathroom floor next to a bunch of cat vomit.

  “Chuck! What is on my bathroom floor?” I yelled into my phone while digging around looking for a pair of tongs.

  “Ah crap,” he said. “I meant to put those in the washer.”

  “What happened to your clothes? I’ve never smelled anything like that and I’ve smelled septic wounds.” I ran back to the bathroom and returned to the washer in the little utility closet off the kitchen. I dropped the underwear on the floor. Swell.

  “Baby, I’m sorry. It’s urine.”

  That stopped me. Chuck had some issues, but peeing…that could not be one of them.

  “Um…”

  “Oh, wait. I didn’t pee,” he said, chuckling. “Did you think I peed?”

  “Well, your clothes are soaked in rancid something.”

  Chuck yelled out, “Mercy thought I pissed myself.”

  There was a huge eruption of laughter. The detectives were having a grand old time. Apparently, this was funny. Since my eyes were streaming, I didn’t agree.

  “That couldn’t have been urine,” I said.

  “I think he’d been storing it up for a while. It was kinda brown.”

  “Why did someone throw urine on you?”

  Chuck laughed. “It’s not that unusual. There was a pop-up protest on Wash U. I got the urine. Nazir got paint and Diana Rehm got pig blood.”

  I dropped the underwear in the washer along with two laundry pods, but I doubted if the clothes could be saved. “How did they know you were a cop? You don’t wear a uniform.”

  Chuck got serious. “After Paris, everybody knows I’m a cop. I won’t be able to go undercover again.”

  “You sound disappointed,” I said, disbelieving.

  “I am.”

  “Are you serious? After what happened?”

  “After we made a bust that saved hundreds, possibly thousands of kids from a living hell? Yeah, I’m serious.” There wasn’t any laughter in the background now.

  The apartment building buzzer rang and Skanky started making a horking noise.

  “I can’t talk about this right now,” I said. “Somebody’s at the door.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about,” said Chuck. “I’m screwed.”

  I told him I had to go spray the entire apartment with Febreze and that got him laughing again. We hung up and I pressed the intercom button. “Hello?”

  Nobody was there, so I sprayed the three sprays of Febreze I had left before cleaning Skanky’s messes and sitting down with my laptop. I googled Stella’s wedding guests and found them easily, mostly because I picked the most French name of the bunch to try first. Florian and Annika Witold weren’t exactly French. Florian’s mother was French and his father Polish. Annika was German. I didn’t know why The Girls were acting weird about them. Florian was the son of Igor Witold. His was a name I’d heard. Igor occupied a huge place in the art world. He owned an art gallery in Paris before the war and had lost a great deal of his collection to the Nazis, some of whom had never been recovered. Everything always led back to Paris. But why pretend not to know Florian and Annika, unless they had something to do with Stella and the Resistance?

  Knocking erupted, rattling my door. Great. Somebody let them in. I hadn’t had a reporter in a few days, so I supposed I was about due. Skanky made another horking noise. I put him on the tile and he promptly ran back onto the carpet and brought up a hairball. The day had been looking so good. I paid off a huge debt. Mom loved me. Aunt Miriam was nice and Grandad thought I was swell for helping him plane some of Mom’s doors. The good times never last.

  More knocking rattled the door and I groaned. When reporters got in the building, they never gave up.

  I stepped over a satisfied Skanky and looked through my peephole. It could be a reporter, but this one would have to be old-school, being bald, rumpled and wearing a tweed jacket. I was almost intrigued, if it weren’t for the smell and the cat.

  “Who is it?” I called through the door.

  “Dr. Calvin Bloom. Are you Miss Mercy Watts?” The speaker had an accent, maybe British or Australian.

  “I’m not doing any interviews about anything, not Paris, not my bra size, or Double Black Diamond. Please leave.”

  “I’m not interested in any of those things, Miss Watts,” said Dr. Bloom. “I’m a history professor at Oxford University.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said. “Go away!”

  “Please, Mi
ss Watts. I’ve come a long way to see you.”

  I looked through the hole again. He could be a history professor. “What’s your name again?”

  “Dr. Calvin Bloom. I’m the Chichele Professor of the History of War. You can google me.”

  I did google him and I’ll be darned. The Chichele Professor of the History of War was actually standing outside my door. “Okay,” I said. “What do you want?”

  “Will you please open the door?”

  “No.”

  “World War Two is my area of specialty with a particular interest in the resistance movements throughout Western Europe.”

  “So?”

  “I had heard that you perhaps shared my interest,” said Dr. Bloom.

  I unlocked the door and saw a slender, studious-looking man, older than I first suspected at around sixty. He wasn’t totally bald, but his thin blondish hair wasn’t great at concealing his scalp. I got an instant good feeling from him, a kind of comfortable coziness that made me want to ask him in. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “I have my sources,” he said with a smile. Then he sniffed. “Miss Watts, I seem to have caught you at a bad time.”

  “It’s always a bad time. That smell is a long story. It’s not me, by the way.”

  “I would assume not.” He looked like he had wanted to come in, but was thinking better of it.

  “How can I help you?” I asked.

  Dr. Bloom glanced down the empty hall. “We may be able to help each other.”

  “Every time someone says that, their help consists of publicity,” I said.

  “No publicity, Miss Watts. History. If I might come in?”

  I stepped back and Dr. Bloom braved the smell, coming in and smiling. “It’s just how I imagined it.”

  “You imagined my apartment?”

  “I’ve been following your exploits for some time.”

  I offered him coffee or tea. He chose orange pekoe and I put on the kettle. “Why would you be following me?”

  “You’re a member of the Bled family,” he said, perching on a stool at my breakfast bar.

  “I’m not a Bled. There are plenty of real Bleds for you to follow or whatever.”

  “I think you are a real Bled and no one else is quite so interesting as you.”

  “Now I know you’re off your rocker,” I said. “The Bled family is chock full of characters.”

  “You’re referring to Stella and Josiah, I presume.”

  I stiffened and said nothing.

  “Let me assure you that I have no interest in harming the Bleds or making false assertions about the art that may or may not be in their possession.”

  “So what are you interested in?” I measured the tea into the strainer and kept an eye on him.

  “Let me tell you a story,” said Dr. Bloom.

  “Knock yourself out.”

  Dr. Bloom’s story started thirty years ago. A man named Jens Waldemar Hoff came to see him on the campus of his college at Oxford during his office hours. Hoff wanted the research Dr. Bloom was doing on resistance groups for his second PhD. He asked for anything Bloom had on Stella and Nicky, Josiah, and some resistance cells. First, he offered money for Bloom’s work, but Bloom was interested in history, not money. He’d worked for years, tracking down survivors for interviews. He wasn’t about to let that go to the highest bidder. Hoff was amiable enough until he was summarily refused.

  “Did he threaten you?” I asked.

  “He said that thin, little bicyclists like me often got run off the road,” said Bloom.

  “What did you do?”

  “I stopped biking.”

  “So you didn’t give in?”

  He shook his head and accepted a cup of tea. “No, but a few weeks later, my office and flat were broken into.”

  “Hoff got your research.” I sank onto a stool.

  He chuckled and stirred a little cream into his tea. “He did, but I was wise enough to have copied everything and put it in my bank box. He must’ve been quite disappointed.”

  “How come?”

  “I had almost nothing on Josiah Bled and less still on Stella. I knew of her existence, of course, but Stella’s record was and remains classified.”

  I sipped my tea and began to wonder what the point of all this was. Dr. Bloom came a long way to tell me that he didn’t have a clue. “Why would that Hoff think you had anything in the first place?”

  A tinge of pink appeared on his plump cheeks. “It may be hard for you to believe, but I was young and charming. I was able to get people to talk who otherwise wouldn’t have spoken to a historian. Survivors of the death camps were particularly reticent. I have the largest collection of personal one-on-one interviews for the period in existence. I believe Hoff thought I had information on Stella Bled, but I didn’t. Although, I’ve interviewed dozens of survivors, resistance fighters, and operatives who knew her, I learned nearly nothing about her operations, connections, or tactics. My file on her was quite slim.”

  “What did you know?” I asked.

  “Probably less than you, I’m embarrassed to say. Stella spoke seven languages and was adept at disguise. Even so many years later, those who knew her during that time refused to speak of any particulars or to speculate on her motives or methods. She was uniformly liked, no matter the persona that they knew her by.”

  “How many personas did she have?”

  “I have reason to believe at least twenty-three, but at the time of Hoff’s visit, I didn’t know that much. After my research was stolen, I waited for something to happen. I was full of my own importance and thought they wanted to publish my work as their own.”

  “But nothing happened?”

  “Absolutely nothing. Eventually, I forgot about the incident until I learned about you,” said Dr. Bloom after taking a long sip.

  “Me? What do I have to do with it?” I asked.

  “Quite a bit, I believe. I followed the news about The Klinefeld Group’s insinuations about the Bleds and your father.”

  Dr. Bloom had an inquisitive mind. He wanted to know who Tommy Watts was and what The Klinefeld Group wanted from him. He found out the things Chuck and I had. That there was more than one Jens Waldemar Hoff, that Josiah had disappeared, and somewhere along the line, he found out that I was investigating The Klinefeld Group and he wondered why.

  “Maybe I’m just curious like you,” I said, smiling and swirling the tea in my cup.

  “I considered that until I found out that you were born in the Bled Mansion and your mother was given Josiah Bled’s house. These things implied a great connection. The bonds of love and blood.”

  “I’m not a Bled.”

  “I believe you are.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  He held out his cup and I poured him more orange pekoe. “I’m rarely wrong, Miss Watts. I’ve spent a lifetime studying history, which is really the study of human behavior. Everything I know about people says you are a Bled and the Bleds know it.”

  We sipped our tea in silence for a moment until I said, “But you have no proof.”

  He smiled. “You know it, too, don’t you?”

  “I really don’t.”

  He pointed out that none of the Bleds had a problem with The Girls giving my mom Josiah’s house, paying for my education, or my traveling the world with them.

  “They treat you like family, every single Bled.”

  “Not Brooks. He sued them and said we were influencing The Girls.”

  “Did you read the suit?”

  “Er…no,” I said.

  Dr. Bloom pulled a manila folder out of his briefcase. “‘Tommy Watts, his wife, Carolina Watts, and their daughter, Carolina (Mercy) Watts are asserting undue influence over Myrtle and Millicent Bled, effectively separating them from the rest of the Bled family and controlling their attitudes and actions.’ That’s a direct quote, Miss Watts.”

  “The rest of the Bled family,” I said quietly. “That could mean anything.”

&nb
sp; “Brooks’ suit strongly implied that you are, in fact, known to be part of the family. Brooks could’ve said that you were outsiders trying to steal Bled family money. He didn’t. He basically said that one part of the family was influencing them more than other parts. He never said you weren’t part of the family. It seems an obvious thing to say when trying to get control of your aunts’ money and the Bled Collection.”

  “Is that what you came to tell me?”

  “No, it isn’t.” Dr. Bloom set down his cup and gently took my hand. “I came to confess. I’m the reason your great grandparents were murdered.”

  After ten minutes of apologies, during which Dr. Bloom got tearful, I finally got him to tell me the reason he was responsible for the murders. It was a short story that left me tearful and astonished.

  Dr. Bloom went to Paris in the spring of 1980 to investigate a French resistance cell known as Le Petite Fromage. They were also known as Le Fromage Jolie and some other cheese names. He’d figured out that there were about twenty members of the cell and they’d been responsible for smuggling several downed allied fighter pilots out of France, murdering several Nazi officers, and were particularly good at bombing Nazi headquarters and bringing down lines of communication. Four members of the group were executed in 1941 after being caught setting bombs under a railway bridge. The rest of the members disappeared and he wanted to know what happened to them.

  A man who was the son of a woman who had concealed several pilots in her attic told Dr. Bloom that his mother had once told him that she reached her contact through an antique shop on Rue de Lille. The shop remained in business and he went there to find the ninety-five-year-old owner still running the shop. Monsieur Bergère was happy to be interviewed about his part in the Resistance. Dr. Bloom found out that Le Fromage Jolie was one of several cells that used the shop for meetings and to leave messages.

  In an effort to find out who was in these cells, Dr. Bloom started showing Monsieur Bergère every picture he had of the resistance fighters, since they used aliases and he wouldn’t have known their real names. Dr. Bloom had no reason to think Stella had anything to do with Le Fromage Jolie, but he had a picture of her and Nicky so he showed it. To his shock, Monsieur Bergère recognized them. They weren’t part of any cell that he knew of, but they were such a striking couple he remembered them. They came into his shop in November of 1938. He remembered because it was shortly after the Kristallnacht and they were both injured. They didn’t look Jewish to him, but he thought maybe they had been attacked during the violence because they mentioned Germany while they were in his shop.