“They didn’t get the diamond,” I said. Both men looked at me. “Otherwise they wouldn’t be going to Avner, threatening him,” I said.
“I think,” said Marcus heavily, “that it’s time you spoke to someone.” He wheeled his chair over to his desk and wrote something on a piece of paper. Old-school: I’d have used my smartphone to send it to ours. Or maybe this was something he didn’t want on the Internet. He turned back, wheeled himself over, and handed me the paper. “She may be more likely to talk to you than she is to the police,” he said, indicating Julian.
It was a name, a telephone number. I looked up again. “Who is it?”
“Someone,” said Marcus, “who knows firsthand about these things. Talk to her.”
Julian nodded to me and I stood up reluctantly. “But—”
“Écoute,” said Marcus. “You find out anything, I can probably point you to the right group, to the people who are most likely involved. Believe it or not, even with all this talk of history, my real expertise is with groups currently active in Québec and Canada. You just need the background in order to narrow it down: there are enough neo-Nazis in North America to fill another stadium, and they all have some sort of philosophy, even if it’s badly thought through. So you have to start with the beliefs rather than the corpse. This is something that my brothers in the police department appear to have a problem understanding. They think that you begin with the violence. I say that you begin with the reason for the violence.” His eyes were on Julian.
“We came to you, didn’t we?” Julian asked; but he sounded defensive.
“En tout cas,” Marcus said, looking back at me, “you won’t be able to do that without this background. It’s a lot more complex than you’re willing to take on board right now. And you need to understand some things before you decide to take it any further.” He caught my expression and sighed. “Martine. Most of the far-right groups in this country are innocuous. Sure, they throw stones, they write grammatically impossible diatribes on the Internet, they start fights in bars. They’re young and they’re angry and disenfranchised, and it’s an outlet. But what you’re talking about here—it’s not innocuous. It’s not innocent.”
“So why can’t you explain it?”
“Because you need to hear it from someone who believes it. Or believed it; I don’t know what she thinks now. I haven’t spoken to her in some time, and disillusionment happens to everyone, n’est-ce pas, at some time or another? I’m just an observer. Go and talk to her.”
Julian shrugged. “Thank you for your time,” I said to Marcus.
“Come back,” he said, “when you’re ready.”
* * *
They moved him from the Little Camp into the main facility after a week.
The officer in charge, very correct, very elegant you’d almost say in his polished black boots and black uniform, glanced up. “We’re not taking Jews in Buchenwald,” he said, and turned to the soldier next to him. “Why has this man been sent here? He belongs at Auschwitz.”
The soldier handed him a file.
Elias waited. He knew—how could he not know?—that whatever was decided here was deciding him, too. His future.
Or lack thereof.
The officer looked up from the papers. “Why didn’t you say so before?” he demanded, irritation in his voice. “This is irregular. I should have been notified when he arrived.”
“Yes, Oberleutnant.”
He looked at Elias and shook his head, then gestured to one of the kapos standing by. “Take this man to Commandant Koch.”
Elias was grabbed by the neck of his striped cotton uniform and pushed roughly toward the gatehouse. “This way,” the kapo snarled.
The commandant’s office was open and airy, with light flooding in from a long series of windows. It didn’t escape the smell of smoke; there was nowhere Elias had been yet where one could escape the smell of smoke. But it was as far removed as could possibly be from the Little Camp.
The commandant himself was in his thirties, wearing the inevitable black uniform with the death’s head insignia. “Elias Kaspi,” he said, standing up behind his desk and, unbelievably, smiling. “Welcome to Buchenwald.”
And that was the beginning.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I wasn’t going to call anyone with a background in esoteric Aryan thought without some preparation first. “I have to go back to my office,” I told Julian, who nodded, preoccupied. “I’ll take the Métro, it’ll clear my head. I’ll call you later.”
“Are you going to go see that woman?” He gestured toward my handbag, where I’d tucked Marcus’s paper.
“Not right now. You’ll want to go with me, won’t you?”
“Maybe.”
I stopped. “What is it, Julian? You’ve been completely in your own world since this morning.”
“Just thinking about something.” He caught my expression and smiled. “Nothing to worry about. I’ll let you know if it pans out.”
I’m the one who should be preoccupied, I found myself thinking; but Julian wasn’t going to tell me until he was good and ready. “I’ll see you later, then,” I said. “A plus tard.”
He grunted, which I took to mean back at you, and I headed over to catch the subway at the Maisonneuve station.
Chantal was hovering. “Monsieur Petrinko has called twice, and stopped in about an hour ago,” she said. “He said it was not urgent, but he did not look well.”
“Thank you, Chantal. Is Richard around?”
She shook her head. “At a meeting.”
“Okay.” I grabbed my message slips and headed into my office. Ivan had indeed called. I sighed, kicked off my shoes, and swiveled around to look out the window.
There was sun out there, white clouds in a crystal-clear blue sky. Everything out there seemed simple, beautiful, easy.
Real life? That was something else altogether.
I was so angry about my apparent place in Ivan’s priorities that I hadn’t really paused to think about the actual content of what we were arguing about: Claudia and Lukas not being every-other-weekend houseguests, but rather full-time responsibilities. Enrolling them in school here. Having dinner with them every night. Encouraging Lukas to be more assertive and Claudia to be less dramatic. Was I ready for that? Was it what I wanted?
My mother and I’d had a relationship that could best be termed problematic. We were pretty much alone: I had no siblings, and my father was a researcher with an obsession far greater than his love for his family.
His death was the stuff of my own nightmares: while my mother had died slowly of a cancer that ate her up from inside, my father’s demise—like everything about him, really—was rather more dramatic, bigger than life. In fact, in a not-so-literal way, he was a victim of a mythical dark nightmare monster, the Kraken: Papa was a marine biologist whose obsession with the deep-ocean-dwelling giant squid was far more important to him than his family back in Montréal, an attitude that added to my mother’s increasing bitterness at life in general and impatience with me in particular.
He hadn’t lived long enough to see the extraordinary films of the real giant squid that emerged out of the American scientist Edith Widder’s research; and the fact that I even know about that research shows perhaps that I’m still a little obsessed myself. Or maybe I just want to know what this creature was, why it had lured him so completely away from us, and left me alone for all those years with an increasingly resentful, restless woman. What it had that I didn’t have.
The squid wasn’t what killed him; he died when his research ship out of the University of Québec at Rimouski miscalculated the path and ferocity of an August hurricane. There was barely enough funding for the trip; there was nothing left over for recovery.
I was sixteen years old.
I secretly thought it was appropriate, him staying forever in the deep cold waters that had so fascinated him in life, but I did campaign to have a stone placed up at the cemetery of Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, wh
ere my mother would eventually be buried, even if it didn’t cover his remains, even if it was nothing but symbolic. Maman would have none of it. Her anger and bitterness kept her from really grieving, really mourning, really feeling. And then the moment when she could have done it was gone and life moved on.
I’m not complaining, not really; I had the great good fortune to have attended a convent school all the way up to university, sometimes as a day student, a few years as a boarder when my mother and I were really not doing well together; and the nuns, the bonnes soeurs as we called them, more than made up in love and caring and examples for any lack of parenting elsewhere in my life. Last year I’d had occasion to question that love, when the evidence that another group of nuns in Montréal had behaved quite differently—and quite horribly—to the children in their charge.
But me? I had nothing of which to complain.
Still, it’s not the sort of background that teaches one about how to be a good parent in turn. My mother was never physically abusive, but she was an unhappy woman and I was a target for the amorphous bitterness and disappointment that her own life had brought her. And my father made clear by his absence from it his level of involvement in my life as I grew up.
Did I know how mothers were supposed to behave? Not especially.
I’d always felt that the saving grace in my current family life was the very fact of its irregular nature. Nothing that I could do to these kids was irreparable or even, in the final analysis, important. At the end of the weekend, at the end of the vacation, they always went back to Margery.
Until now. Could I deal with having full-time kids in my home? If so, it wouldn’t really be my home, would it? It would be theirs as well.
And if I couldn’t, what did that do to my marriage? Would Ivan resent me forever for saying no? Would he leave me, deciding—quite rightly—that his children’s welfare had to come first?
My head was starting to hurt. And I wasn’t the smallest bit closer to understanding my own feelings.
Okay, Martine. Think about something else. You don’t have to make that decision now. Often I found that stepping away from a problem offered a solution. Or perhaps that was just something I told myself to justify my procrastination over dealing with difficult issues.
I swung back to the desk and pulled Marcus’s paper out of my purse. Ignoring all the other messages waiting for me, I smoothed it out and read the name for the first time: Gabrielle Brand. A number over on the west part of town, the anglophone side. I took a deep breath. In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought, and pressed the digits on my desk phone. I knew that “City Hall” would come up on the caller identification, and hoped that wouldn’t be a deterrent.
For many people, surprisingly, it seems to be.
The telephone was answered on the third ring. “Hello?” Definitely anglophone.
“Hello, this is Martine LeDuc calling. May I please speak with Gabrielle Brand?”
A long pause. “Who did you say you were?” A faint accent that I couldn’t place.
“My name’s Martine LeDuc. I work for City Hall. I was given your name by Marcus Levigne.” Leaving out his occupation and rank.
“I see.” A pause. “I am Gabrielle Brand.”
Okay. I took a deep breath. “Ms. Brand, I’d very much appreciate being able to meet with you. Today, if possible.”
Another silence, this one so long that I wondered if she’d put the phone down and walked away. And then she said, “Yes. I really think it will have to be today.”
She hadn’t asked what it was about, which seemed the obvious response. Okay. As Claudia would say, whatever. “That’s great,” I said heartily, as though countering her reluctance to speak with too much enthusiasm might even things out. “When can—”
“I am taking my grandchildren up to the park,” she interrupted. “You can meet me there.”
“Great,” I said again. Up to the park probably meant the big one, the one covering part of the mountain that the city was named for, but I had to be sure. “Which—”
“We’re going to Beaver Lake,” she said. “I do not want to see you there. I do not want to involve my grandchildren.” A German accent? I wondered. “On our way back, we always stop at the lookout, the one on Remembrance. You can meet us there. My daughter will pick up the children, and you and I will have this conversation that we must have.”
For someone who had initially sounded so tentative, she was certainly on top of planning. “All right,” I said faintly. “What time?”
“Three o’clock. And, Mrs. LeDuc—”
“Yes?”
“It is best, I think, if you come alone.”
That was all that was missing, I thought, to make this a thoroughly clichéd experience. “Why is that, Mrs. Brand?”
“I’ll see you at three, at the overlook.”
Okay. Nothing mysterious there. And an hour and a half to kill before I could leave for the meeting. I glanced through my e-mails, returned a couple of quick calls that seemed urgent, drank three coffees in quick succession, and finally called Ivan’s mobile, still with no idea what I was going to say.
There was casino noise behind him. “Martine.”
“Is this a bad time? It’s only that I just got in.”
“No, no. Not at all. Let me just get someplace more private. Can I call you right back?”
“Sure.” Click.
I picked at a hangnail and considered whether I should get a manicure. I decided that the painting of Marguerite Bourgeoys, our local saint, should probably be moved to another wall of the office as it was fading in the sunlight. I went back to my laptop and keyed in Gabrielle Brand’s name and got a lot of returns that featured one or the other of her names, but not the two in conjunction; this was going to take more than just Google. I thought about whether or not my car might need an oil change. Anything to not think about the conversation we were about to—
The phone rang. “llo?”
“Okay,” said Ivan. “Quieter now. Sorry about that. How are you doing?”
“I’m okay. We need to talk about this, Ivan. All the things we need to consider. Schools, and friends, and…”
“I know,” he said, as my voice trailed off. I really didn’t even know what all the things were that we needed to consider.
“I mean, you and me,” I said. “You’re right, at the end of the day, they’re your children, not mine. But this is our life we’re talking about changing. My life, too. I need to be part of this decision. If I can’t be part of this decision, then there’s no sense in my being part of any decision. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
A short pause. “I was wrong not to have you be a part of it from the start,” he said. “God, as soon as those words were out of my mouth I realized what I was saying, and that I really didn’t want to be saying it. I—it’s not an excuse, mind you, but I just felt that as long as the conversation stayed in Boston, it stayed academic. Like it wasn’t really affecting us at all.”
I swallowed. “If there’s an us, Ivan…”
“Of course there’s an us,” he said. “Good Christ, Martine, this is big, but it’s not bigger than us. And I think we can—”
“No specifics,” I interrupted him. “I can’t put my head around specifics right now. I just need to know that this is as much about you and me as it is about Margery, or Doctors Without Borders, or even Claudia and Lukas.”
“I’m not making the same mistake twice,” Ivan said.
“All right, then.” I didn’t know what else to say. “Will you be home for dinner?”
“I’ll make it a point to be. Want me to cook?”
“I don’t want to spend the whole night washing dishes,” I said.
“That’s why we have a dishwasher.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, unconvinced. “Let’s take a page from the kids’ book and I’ll pick up a chicken dinner at Saint Hubert. Rotisserie chicken, cole slaw, French fries…”
“Sold,” he said promptly. “Wit
h a Nuits Saint Georges.”
“But of course,” I said, and we were both laughing when we hung up. It wasn’t real laughter, not yet; but it was a step in the right direction.
And then suddenly, it seemed, it was time to leave for the lookout and whatever was awaiting me there. After all that had happened, I couldn’t say I was looking forward to it.
* * *
The next week, Bernie set the smoked-meat sandwich in front of Hans and said, without preamble, “Livia’s coming in for lunch tomorrow. I’ll introduce you to her, if that’s still what’s on your mind.”
“I have not been able to think of anything else,” Hans said frankly.
“Nu, I will do it. But you be careful with this girl, or you’ll have me to answer to, you hear? I don’t want her getting hurt. She’s the real deal. She’s special.”
That was the one thing that Hans already knew about her.
Livia was wearing a blue sweater the next day. She laughed when Bernie told her that Hans talked funny, “on account of him bein’ from Holland.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “Everyone I know talks funny in one way or another. Sit down, please?”
“Thank you.” Hans sat on the swivel seat beside her. It all seemed so inelegant for such a goddess. “Bernie speaks quite highly of you,” he said.
She laughed again. “Bernie is like an uncle to me. He thinks I’m the most amazing human being God ever put on earth. It’s all very complimentary, but a little silly, don’t you think?”
“No,” said Hans. “I think so, too.”
“Then you’re silly, too.”
But she let him buy her lunch, and hold the door for her, and talk with her about his work. “Are you very homesick for Holland?” she asked as they emerged into the sunlight together. “You must be terribly worried about your family.”
“I have no family,” said Hans. It sounded abrupt and she looked away from him. He hadn’t meant to do that, to be rude or insensitive. He didn’t know how to talk to her. “There was an accident when I was young,” he said quickly. “They all died.”
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