by Levy, Marc
“Are you serious?” asked the police officer, on cloud nine.
“Dead serious,” said my partner in crime, with enough confidence to leave me stammering and stumbling as we bid the officer goodbye.
Watching George-Harrison from the passenger seat, I noticed he had the same driving habit as my father: one hand on the wheel, the other dangling out of the open window.
“Why are you looking at me?” he asked.
“How did you know I was looking at you? You haven’t even taken your eyes off the road. Anyway, I wasn’t.”
“You just enjoy staring at me, is all?”
“I was wondering how you got the idea.”
“You mean, about the book?”
“No, about my cousin Bertha! Yes, the book.”
“I saw he had a couple of James Ellroy novels on his desk, Perfidia and LAPD ’53, so I took a bit of a gamble. Do you really have a cousin Bertha?”
“You spot a pair of novels on his desk and just cook up that whole scenario? That takes a lot of imagination.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“Not at all.”
“So, just technically speaking . . . that’s something nice you’re saying about me?”
“Yes, I suppose I am.”
“I think that may be the nicest thing you’ve said since we became friends.”
“Friends? We hardly know each other.”
“I’d say I know quite a bit about you. You’re English, a journalist, you have a twin brother and a younger sister. Your dad has a thing for his beat-up old car—I also have a beat-up old car, which you’re sitting in right now—and you may or may not have a cousin named Bertha. Jury’s still out on that one. That’s a start, isn’t it?”
“Sure, it’s a start. I don’t know all that much about you, though. How did you know for sure that the cop would take the bait?”
“Just a hunch . . . Truth is, I had no idea where it would go. I just made something up so we could walk out with our heads held high. It was dumb luck that the guy happened to be bored to death.”
“You certainly know how to spin a yarn. I hate lying. The poor fellow is dead set on appearing in a novel that doesn’t even exist. And I bet he goes straight home and brags to his wife tonight. Because of us, he’ll come across as a total chump.”
“Sure. Or maybe we inspired him to finally write his own page-turner. Besides, when you claimed to be there on assignment for your magazine, wasn’t that a lie?”
“A white lie.”
“Right, of course. White lies, real lies. Not the same thing at all.”
“Exactly.”
“The woman I was with for nearly five years just up and took off one morning, leaving behind nothing but a tiny little note. The day before, everything was normal. She didn’t let on a thing, not a single thing. You really think she made up her mind overnight? So, where does that one fall? White lie or real lie?”
“What did she say? In her note?”
“That I was a bear deep in the woods.”
“And what about that, was that a lie?”
“I hope so. I hope that’s not all I am.”
“Well, if you’re trying to avoid the bear look, you might want to lose the beard. Why did she leave you?”
“It was the same stuff that drew her in at the start. Our bedroom started to seem too small, and my studio too big. She hated if I even set foot in the kitchen, whereas before all I had to do was put on an apron and she’d get turned on. Suddenly, she didn’t want me dozing off while we watched TV. Before, she would let me sleep on her shoulder and run her fingers through my hair.”
“Maybe it was more because of the silence, what with the TV and all, that she started to hate the whole thing. Monotony, too. Maybe she really hated what she had become in that world, and there was nothing you could have really done.”
“She was upset that I spent too much time in my studio.”
“I could see that being quite painful, to be honest.”
“My door was always open. All she had to do was to come in for us to stay together. I’m passionate about my work. I didn’t know how to live with somebody who didn’t care about what I was doing.”
“Didn’t it occur to you that maybe she wanted you to be as passionate about her as you were about the work?”
“Sure it did. But it was too late.”
“Do you regret it?”
“How about you? Are you with somebody?” asked George-Harrison, sidestepping the question.
I sidestepped his. “You know, we’ve gone really off track with the Stanfields. I just can’t picture my mother as some master thief. There’s no way that she could have broken into a safe. No way.”
“Right. Just to be clear: you didn’t exactly answer my question.”
“If you were a woman, you’d know that no answer is an answer.”
“Right. But I’m just a big hairy bear.” George-Harrison sighed.
I caved. “To answer your question, just for posterity’s sake: no, I am not with anybody.”
“Would you have imagined, in your wildest dreams, that your mother and mine could have had a relationship like that?”
“Nope. Not at all.”
“Well, that tells me we might not be as far off track as you think. Maybe they did pull off the heist, and maybe it wasn’t your mother who broke into the safe.”
“What makes you say that?”
“My mom never really had much of a job,” George-Harrison explained. “At least nothing steady enough to raise a kid on. We certainly weren’t rich, but we had everything we needed.”
“She could have set some money aside before having you.”
“This is years without work we’re talking about here. Years. And the cop did say one thing that confirms it for me: there were bonds in the safe, not cash. And, well, my mother had a nice big stack of bonds. At the start of each summer, she’d cash some in, and then again just before Christmas.”
There was nothing to say to that. The facts spoke for themselves: my mother was far from the woman I thought she was. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to accept it. And even more troubling: What other lies would I uncover along the way? George-Harrison searched my face for a reaction, letting the silence hang in the air until I at last opened my mouth to reply.
“You never asked her where the bonds came from?”
“I didn’t really think about it as a kid. I just remember her telling me she had inherited them.”
“Well, our family was barely able to scrape by,” I replied. “If we’d learned that Mum was sitting on a stack of bonds, we would have been shocked, to say the least.”
“So, that makes her innocent and my mother guilty. Does that come as a relief?”
“Nope. Not at all, actually. My mother—the chemistry teacher, a total do-gooder with these uncompromising values about raising her kids—was really a crazy rebel who pulled off a heist? Honestly, the idea was starting to grow on me.”
“God, you are a walking contradiction.”
“I’ll take walking contradiction over boring any day! Does your mother still have any of those bonds?”
“I cashed the last of them when she went into the home. I guess I should apologize; I should’ve held on to them, at least shared what was left with you.”
“And why should you have done that, if my mother had nothing to do with the heist? Yours took all the risks.”
“Not so fast. The fact that your parents had trouble making ends meet only tells us your mother didn’t get a cut of the loot. It doesn’t mean she didn’t take part in the crime itself. Don’t forget what the poison-pen said.”
“He said that she had walked away from a huge fortune. Maybe it was because yours made off with all of it. Sometimes partners stab each other in the back.”
“What a lovely thing to say. But I’m going to have to stop you right there. My mother has always been an incredibly honest woman.”
“You’re kidding, right? That’s your definit
ion of honest? The woman stole over a million dollars out of a safe!”
“He said a hundred and fifty thousand!”
“Which was worth a whole lot more back then! You do realize what you’re saying is completely nuts. Your mother pulls off a major heist, keeps my mum’s half of the loot, and somehow she’s still a saint?”
“Slow down, there’s no need to get nasty again. You really think they’d call each other ‘my love’ if something like that went down?”
“Your mother said that, not mine. I haven’t been able to get my hands on my mum’s letters.”
“So, maybe ‘honest’ wasn’t the best choice. But I can assure you, my mother has always been a loyal and faithful woman.”
“Says the kid who never even knew his father!”
George-Harrison shot me an icy glare, then abruptly flicked on the radio and kept his eyes fixed ahead on the road. I waited for the song to finish, then turned the volume back down.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t mean it the way it came out.”
“If they gave my mom the wrong change at the cash register, even a dollar extra, she’d return it every time,” he said. “When the cleaning lady broke her leg, my mom kept paying her until she could get back on her feet. When I got in trouble at school, the first thing she did after finding out why the fight started was to have the principal tell the other kid’s parents they had twenty-four hours to get their brat to apologize, or my mom would come to their house and kick all their asses. I could go on and on, honestly, but just take my word for it: my mother would never be capable of stabbing somebody in the back like that, okay? Believe me.”
“Why did you get in a fight?”
“Because when you’re ten years old and someone says you’ve got no dad because your mom sleeps around town, it’s a lot easier to talk with your fists than think of a snappy comeback.”
“Right . . . I understand.”
“No, you don’t! You don’t understand any of it.”
“You’re right. I’m an idiot. But you listen to me, George-Harrison: I couldn’t care less about the money they stole. Truth is, my first thought about the money was to treat my father to a much-deserved holiday. So I promise you, right here and now: I won’t return to London until you find out who your father is.”
George-Harrison slowed the car and looked in my direction. His expression changed, and I suddenly felt as though I was staring at the little boy throwing punches in the school playground.
“Why would you do that for me? I thought we barely knew each other?”
I thought of my father. How gentle he could be, the way he was always ready to comfort me when I was feeling down, or how sweet and wise he was whenever I needed cheering up. He was always so involved in my childhood, never lacking patience or time, and wanting nothing but the best for all his children. I couldn’t imagine how George-Harrison must have felt to be deprived of that type of figure, and how much pain he must have endured. But I had no idea how to tell him all that.
“We may not know each other that well, but it’s a promise just the same. And you never answered my question. Do you miss her?”
“Miss who?”
“Nobody. Forget it. Just concentrate on the road.”
I had a thousand thoughts spinning in my head. I guessed it was the same for him. Then, out of nowhere, George-Harrison suddenly blurted out, “Of course! It’s so obvious!” He slammed the brakes and steered the pickup to the side of the road.
“They split the loot. My mom kept the bonds and yours . . . kept something else.”
“What makes you so sure there was something else they stole aside from those bonds?”
“My mother’s letter said not to let the ‘precious treasure dwell in darkness and fade from memory.’ That’s enough for me.”
“I was thinking about that earlier, around the time when you were telling me not to get nasty again. On that note, you’ll have to tell me exactly when I was nasty at all. But I digress. Let’s say they did split things up. Knowing Mum, she probably gave up her cut because it was dirty money.”
“There you go again. I get it: your mother was a saint. But if that’s so true, then the poison-pen would have to be pretty naïve to think that the bonds were some lost treasure that would just pop up untouched after thirty-six years. Unless . . . the poison-pen knows, just like the cop was hinting at, that part of the lost treasure can’t be cashed in.”
30
ROBERT
June 1944, outside Montauban
It was late in the day and Robert had been pedaling nonstop for hours. The pain was nearly unbearable. Ten kilometers earlier, he had been forced to make another stop to vomit on the side of the road. Sitting on the slope, he unbuttoned his shirt and looked over the splotchy fresh bruises across his chest and arms. His eyes were nearly swollen shut, his lips puffed up to twice their normal size. Blood flowed sporadically from his nose, and his whole mouth tasted metallic from the blood from his split lip. Robert’s hands were the only part of him left unscathed. They had been bound behind his back, and thus spared the onslaught that the rest of his body had endured for hours on end.
Most of his memories of the torture were hazy, with only small interludes of consciousness. None of that mattered. Robert had neither time for self-pity over what had happened nor the heart to dwell on it. He had only one thought: reach the hunting lodge before the enemy.
Robert at last made it to the foot of the path and threw the tandem into a ditch. He ran the length of the path through the woods, using his last ounce of strength to make the upward climb to the lodge. The loose dirt kept slipping beneath his feet, but he managed to grab hold of branches to keep pushing onward, until the hunting lodge finally came into view at the top of the hill in a haze of smoke.
Everything was calm, far too calm. Robert heard something crackle and crouched down, then made his way cautiously closer to the lodge. When he caught sight of Antoine’s corpse sprawled out on the ground in front of the porch, he knew he was too late. The windows had all been shattered by heavy gunfire, the facade riddled with bullet holes. The front door had been obliterated, leaving only a shredded plank of wood swinging from a hinge.
Carnage awaited him inside. The furniture had been torn to shreds in the hail of bullets, and three partisans lay dead on the ground in a horrific state. It was a grisly scene—one had been disemboweled, the other had lost both his legs to a grenade blast. The third could only be identified by his thick build—his face was completely covered by a mask of dirt and blood.
Robert doubled over and dry-heaved, having vomited all the contents of his stomach on the side of the road. Heart pounding, he scanned the space desperately.
“Sam! Hanna!” he shouted. Nothing but dead quiet in response, no signs of life. Robert rushed into their bedroom and froze in the doorway. Sam was slumped backwards over the foot of the bed, his eyes staring blankly into space, his arm dangling with a pistol resting in his hand. A stream of blood trickled from his temple.
Robert knelt before the body and wept as he closed Sam’s eyes. Composing himself, he pried the pistol from his friend’s lifeless hand and shoved it into his belt. Next, he returned to the porch to scan the woods around the lodge, praying that Hanna made it out alive and was hiding somewhere out there, unlikely as it seemed.
“Hanna!” he shouted. Apart from a crow cawing in the distance, the woods were silent. Robert was terrified at the thought of Hanna being taken by the militiamen, not daring to imagine what might happen to her. He stood motionless for a moment, brought to tears once more as he caught sight of the tree stump where he had sat so often smoking side by side with Sam. The art dealer had told him all about his past, how he had met his wife, how dearly he loved his daughter, his deep passion for art, and his pride at acquiring the precious Hopper masterpiece.
Night fell. Finding himself truly alone now, Robert wondered how many more nights he would last. In just a few hours, the sun would set in Baltimore. H
e thought of his parents and the comfort of his bedroom on their sprawling estate, all the lavish dinners he had enjoyed there, and the reading room, where his father squandered his fortune in poker games he always lost. Robert remembered finding him one morning in his office, sitting there, drunk, sobbing with rage. He would never forget the shame on his father’s face, the look that plunged Robert deep into despair. And he was reminded once more that he was about to die thousands of miles from home because of those poker games.
The thought filled Robert with rage, and the burst of anger gave him a second wind. Sam had taken his own life rather than die at the hands of his enemies, and that act of bravery reminded Robert of the promise he had made. If there was a chance, however slim, that Hanna was still alive, he would find her. With the help of his comrades, he would hunt down Hanna’s captors and rescue her, even if it meant taking her place as their prisoner.
“Comrades. What comrades?” Robert mumbled to himself. “The only comrades you had are all lying here, dead, and anyone left alive would be after your hide.”
Yet Robert was spurred on by youthful determination. He swore to himself that he’d stay alive long enough to honor the pact he had made with the old art dealer. He would return home a hero, living up to his name, and continue his rise to prominence just as all the men of his family had, save his father. Robert thought of the paintings hidden down in that hole at the back of the cellar. Even if Robert didn’t make it home, even if he couldn’t save Sam’s daughter, the priceless works of art mustn’t stay down there, lost for eternity.
The moon had risen in the sky, casting its light over the treetops. Robert, knowing that Sam still lay there in the bedroom, with the corpses of his other friends close by, had not yet found the strength to set foot inside the hunting lodge again. He took a deep breath to steel himself, and decided it was time to head in.
He spotted a banged-up oil lamp on the floor and lit the wick, averting his eyes from the gory scene. He headed straight for the trapdoor to the cellar, swung it open, and lowered himself inside.
Robert hung the lamp from one of the ladder’s rungs and began shifting aside stacks of crates concealing the tunnel’s entrance. As soon as he had made a large enough space to get through, Robert grabbed his lantern and slipped inside.
