Egan knew his own choices: Margaret Dunwoodie’s papers eventually, versus no papers. Money for other projects, versus no money. “Righto,” he said. “No bloody choice about it, so might as well be in for a pound as a penny.”
“And as for the pennies,” Sonnenschein offered, “my office would be pleased to assist with the litigation, on behalf of the Foundation. We see no reason why the University should have to incur substantial legal fees,” he added.
“That seems fair enough,” said the lawyer trustee, figuring, what the hell, they were sued or screwed either way. This way seemed cheaper. The other trustee nodded.
Sonnenschein handed Minor his card after writing his home telephone number on the back. “Call me. Sorry to cut this short, but I’ve got a lot to do.” He rose, signaling that the meeting was over. Edna crossed to him to shake his hand. Egan slapped him weakly on the back on his way out.
Sally gave Maude a hug, held out her hand to Sonnenschein, who surprised her once again by putting an arm around her shoulders and squeezing. But surprised or not, she wanted some explanations. “Maude, Mr. Sonnenschein, I think you two ought to come back to the house with me,” she told them. “I want to ask you some questions.”
“I guess we want to give you some answers,” Maude allowed.
“Glad to hear it,” said Sally. “And Mr. Sonnenschein, I hope you brought your keys.”
“Call me Ezra,” said the Denver lawyer, squeezing again.
Chapter 23
Little Eddie
“So, evidently,” Sally told Maude and Ezra as they walked the four snowpacked blocks to Meg’s house, “I’ve passed some kind of initiation test.”
Sonnenschein navigated the icy sidewalk with ease, despite his slippery city shoes. “We wanted to see how much this project meant to you. If you’d run at the first sign of trouble, you wouldn’t have been the person to write Meg Dunwoodie’s story. We know some things that her biographer would have a hard time finding out if we didn’t say anything. We’ve reached the point where we needed to know if we can trust you.”
“How do you know you can?” Sally asked, clomping along in her Sorels, her breath nearly freezing in her lungs.
“Judgment call,” said Maude. “Mine. Ezra goes along with what I want.”
“Why?” Sally asked.
“I’ll tell you when we get home. We’ll talk, then we’ll open the closet,” Maude announced, wrapping her arms around herself and putting her head into the frigid wind.
Maude insisted on making coffee. They were sitting in the kitchen now, and she was taking her time getting started. Finally, Sally was fit to bust. “Come on, Maude, damn it!” she said through clenched teeth. “Spill it.”
“All right,” said Maude, taking a deep breath. “You know Meg came back to Wyoming from Europe in 1940, right?”
“Right. Her mother was sick. She was needed at home. At least that’s the story she told.”
“Yeah. Well, Gert was sick, that’s true. She had cancer. Took her two years to die, and Mac didn’t make it any easier. He was a man who thought the best way to deal with problems was to get good and mad and stay that way. Made those last years of Gert’s life hell, raging around the house, yelling at Meg, and no help at all.”
“Why was he yelling at Meg? I know people get mad at death, but did something in particular piss him off?”
Ezra cleared his throat. “Ahem. That would be me.”
Sally looked at him, skeptical. “You? How old are you, Ezra?”
“He’ll be sixty this year,” Maude answered for him.
Sally did the math: he’d been born in 1938. “What did you have to do with it? You were—what?—two years old.”
“Not quite two, actually,” he answered. “My birthday’s in September.”
“What’s your point, Ezra?” Sally asked, running out of patience.
“Well, you see, when Meg came back, she wasn’t alone,” he explained. “Do you know who Ernst Malthus was?”
“Yes,” Sally said, a million amazed questions dawning at once.
“Well,” Sonnenschein continued, taking a bracing sip of coffee. “He was with her. And so was I. We, ah, traveled from Paris to Laramie via New York, Chicago, and Denver. As a family.”
Sally looked hard at him. Was Ezra Sonnenschein their child? Ernst and Meg had both been blond, rosy, hearty, Nordic. Sonnenschein’s hair was going silver from black, his skin olive, his body slim and elegant. If she was any judge, he had the looks to go with the Jewish name. “What were you doing with them?” she asked.
“They were saving my life,” he answered simply. “My parents understood that the Nazis were going to do horrible things to the Jews who fell into their hands. My father was in the Resistance, and my mother was worried about her parents. They felt they couldn’t leave, but they wanted to get me out. Ernst and Meg agreed to take me to the United States.”
“Do you know the name Marc Sonnenschein?” Maude asked her.
“No,” Sally replied. But she did know an initial. “M— —. The third man on the Riviera. The friend of Ernst Malthus and Paul Blum. And Giselle.”
“Giselle,” said Ezra, “was my mother. She and my father were married in 1937, but her paintings were beginning to be known, so she never changed her name. Meg Dunwoodie was her dearest friend in the world, and she asked her to take me out of France. My father’s family was Alsatian, from Strasbourg. They were financiers who did a lot of business in diamonds. He and Ernst and Paul Blum were very close. Ernst said he could help. And they did it.
“The first thing in my life I remember was being put on the train at the Gare du Nord in Paris. My mother was holding me and crying. She was wearing a suit with a fox collar. I can still remember the way the fur smelled, and the little heads and paws of the fox pelts dangling. My father was walking down the platform, talking to a bearded man. Meg was bossing a porter who was putting the bags on the train. There was smoke and steam everywhere.
“Finally Meg said it was time to go, and my mother put me down. She knelt down and took my hands and told me, ‘Ezra, you have to go away for a while. And for now, I want you to do what I tell you. Until Papa and I can come and get you, you are to call this man’—the bearded one— ‘and Aunt Meg Mama and Papa. They’ll call you Eddie. Can you remember that? It’s very important.’”
“Eddie?” Sally asked, incredulous. Ezra Sonnenschein was not an Eddie, but at two he might have passed for one, in a pinch. This had definitely been a pinch.
“Eddie Martin. Ernst had arranged forged passports and papers for all of us. He was heavily disguised, had dyed his hair, affected a beard. We were an American family named Martin—Ernest, Margaret, and little Eddie. Residents of Cincinnati, Ohio, the town in which I had supposedly been born. Fortunately, I was young enough that when the customs agents asked me my name and age at Le Havre and again in New York, I didn’t have to say anything. All I had to do was look frightened, which wasn’t hard.”
“You must have been terrified,” Sally managed.
“More than you can possibly imagine,” Ezra agreed. “But my mother had told me I’d be safe with them, and that she and my father would come to get me just as soon as they could.” He raised the cup to his lips, took a small sip. “I kept on believing her for a long time, even though I never saw her again.” He lowered the cup, left his hand on the saucer. Maude put her own hand over his.
“So they brought you to Wyoming?”
Maude took up the tale. “Yeah. Can you imagine— Paris to Wyoming in six weeks? Meg had to go home, and Ernst couldn’t stay. She was terrified somebody on board the ship would recognize her or Ernst, but they didn’t know what else to do. It was just luck that nobody knew them, and they got away with it.
“Meg figured she could find somebody to look after Ezra until Giselle and Marc could get away. What she hadn’t counted on was her father’s reaction.”
Sally thought about it a minute. “I can imagine. A conservative Wyoming rancher finds th
at his daughter has come home from gay Paree with a man she’s not married to and a small child of uncertain parentage. I assume he wasn’t pleased.”
“Well, I can’t say what he thought of Ernst,” Ezra replied, “but I do remember him screaming at Meg in English words I didn’t know, but which I understood were angry, and directed toward me. It was clear he wouldn’t have me in his sight. Both Meg and Ernst tried to reason with him, but he made us leave immediately.”
“Where did you go?” Sally asked. It was an amazingly clear memory from such an early age, but then it wasn’t exactly falling off a tricycle. She bet therapy had brought a lot of it back. She ached for the traumatized toddler, the rejected prodigal daughter, and the man who had pulled some very long, doubtless tangled strings to get them to what was supposed to be safe harbor.
Maude answered. “Meg had bought a car in Denver, and they’d driven up to the Woody D from there. They drove over to Laramie, and stayed with Meg’s old professors, Miss McIntyre and Miss White. They had to find a place for the little boy, and fast. Meg was hoping that she might be able to persuade one or other of her Parker cousins to take him, but a lot of the Parkers had left Wyoming, and the ones left in Albany weren’t one bit interested in taking in somebody’s refugee kid. Very nice people,” she observed.
“So—who?” Sally wanted to know.
Again, Maude provided the answer. “My mother used to take in washing, and she used to do laundry for Miss McIntyre and Miss White. Meg and Ernst and little Eddie had been at their house a couple of days, racking their brains, when she came over to pick up the wash. I went with her. Eddie was sitting on their kitchen floor. I was eight years old and I really wanted a baby brother. I found a set of tin measuring spoons and gave them to him to play with. You really liked those spoons,” she recalled, looking fondly at Ezra. He returned the look. “So my mom asked who he was, and Meg told her, and she said she’d be glad to give the poor kid a home until his parents could come for him, whenever that might be.”
“You had a nice mom,” Sally told her.
“Yeah, I did,” Maude agreed. “A nice dad, too. He was a veterinarian, used to having banged up critters around. Mom brought Eddie home and we all loved him from the start.”
“That was an amazing offer,” Sally exclaimed.
“It was. But Ernst kept telling everybody that he was sure that Eddie’s parents would be coming to get him soon, and that he would do everything in his power to help them. We had no idea what that meant—for all we knew, he was a businessman from Cincinnati, who happened to be a friend of Meg’s from Paris. She didn’t tell us who he really was until much later.”
Sally wondered what kinds of powers Ernst had had. Evidently they extended to doctored passports and disguises. What else? “How long did Ernst stay in Wyoming?”
“He took Meg back to the ranch, and I don’t know how long he was there. Not long, I think. We saw him one more time, in the summer of 1943, wearing the same disguise.”
“He stayed in the U.S.?” Sally wondered.
Maude shrugged. “According to Meg, he traveled around throughout the war. New York, London, Zurich, Capetown, South Africa. And Berlin and Paris. He was a diamond trader, and as far as we know, he stayed in business. From time to time, he sent Meg money for Giselle and Marc’s son. My parents put it in a bank account, in Ezra’s real name.”
“Malthus was a German citizen, right?” Sally asked.
Ezra nodded.
“How did he manage to travel so freely in enemy territory?”
Ezra and Maude looked at each other, and he answered. “We wish we knew. There’s no doubt he was involved in intelligence work. He kept in contact with the French Resistance through my father. It appears he did some work for the Resistance, laundering money, that kind of thing. Perhaps other things. Ernst had friends in high Nazi places. His brother was one, but it turned out that his brother Rainer wasn’t as loyal a follower of the Führer as he should have been.”
“Rainer Malthus, of the Schwartzkappelle,” Sally said.
“The same,” Ezra answered, pleased that she’d gotten that far in her research. “Executed when the assassination plot failed.”
“So Ernst was in the Resistance?” Sally inquired, romantically hopeful.
Another look passed between Maude and Ezra. “It’s not clear. That’s one thing we’re hoping you might help us find out. Certainly he was funneling money and weapons to my father’s cell. But he may also have been working in some capacity for the Fascists, or for their sympathizers in other countries. Or he might have been an agent for the Communists. We just haven’t got him figured out yet.” Ezra shook his head sadly.
“He saved your life,” Sally told him, as if that settled the matter.
“He wasn’t a monster,” Maude replied. “What else he was or wasn’t, we aren’t quite sure.”
Sally expected to do quite a bit of work finding out. The first thing she’d do was file a Freedom of Information Act request for any government files on Ernst Malthus, and for that matter, on Meg Dunwoodie. “Did Meg come to visit you much?” Sally asked Ezra.
“During the first couple of years, Meg came whenever she could, but she had to be at the Woody D and take care of her mother, and for that matter, her father. Gert took a long, hard time dying, and it was clearly tough on Meg,” Maude remembered. “Every time she’d come to see us, she looked skinnier and tireder, and by the time the end finally came, she was worn down to bones and nothing. They buried Gert on the ranch, and it wasn’t a week later that Meg showed up in Laramie with a couple of suitcases, looking for a place to live and a job.”
Sally considered.
“So then you saw a lot of her.”
“She thought of herself as my aunt,” Ezra said. “She loved me. So did Ma and Pa Stark and Maude. Meg wasn’t exactly close with her own family, and the Starks kind of adopted her as a cousin.”
“So you grew up in Laramie?” Sally asked, incredulous. Laramie did not add up to Ezra Sonnenschein’s kind of suave.
“I lived there until 1948. That was when my father came for me.”
Postwar Europe took some time sorting itself out. Marc Sonnenschein had managed to evade the Nazis through five horrid years. He’d lost countless friends and loved ones, including his parents, all his siblings, the wife he adored. It took a long time for him to reclaim what was left of his life before the deluge, to reassemble his profession, scrape together what he could of his property, and make his place in a new society. With all he’d sacrificed and all that had been taken from him, he lived for years on the promise that his son was safe and well cared for, somewhere in the wilderness of America.
Ten-year-old Ezra, known to his Laramie pals as Fast Eddie, loved Stan Musial of the St. Louis Cardinals, the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the Rocky Mountains. He was known around town as “that war orphan the Starks took in,” and considered a success story. If he was a little quiet and intense, a little too studious, he was also a wiry ball of energy, a base-stealing, power-hitting Little League phenom. Doc Stark said he wouldn’t be surprised if the kid made it to the bigs.
Then Marc Sonnenschein showed up.
Ezra was overwhelmed. The life he’d come to think of as natural was the one he was expected to leave without a thought. Paris to Laramie, eight years before, had been terrifying. But the prospect of Laramie to Paris, now, seemed nothing short of devastating. A thin, hollow-cheeked foreigner had come to claim him. Marc looked at Ezra as if he were seeing a ghost. Later Ezra realized that he must have thought he was, seeing his own eyes looking back at him in the childish rendition of his dead wife’s face. And the child knew himself as Eddie. It startled him when Marc called him Ezra, with the accent on the second syllable.
Father and son: strangers. And his father’s arrival made the fact of his mother’s tragic death inescapable.
Marc had a house in Paris, a partnership in an international financial house. He was resuming his position as a man of wealth and
influence. Paul Blum, seeing disaster coming in the late thirties, had put all the family’s holdings in Swiss banks. Ezra, at the age of ten, was a very wealthy little boy.
“A hell of a lot for a kid to handle, I thought,” Maude told Sally. Maude had been determined to do something to make things easier on her little brother, so she went to Meg to ask her to find some way.
Auntie Meg made the whole thing possible. She convinced Marc not to take Ezra away immediately, but instead to spend a month in Wyoming getting to know the boy’s world, know what he was taking him away from, think about what he was taking him to. That month made all the difference. They made Marc welcome in Wyoming, and he ended up loving the people and the scenery (it was, after all, summer). By the time Ezra packed his baseball glove and his Tarzan books, they had all forged ties that would span the Atlantic and last half a century and more. Ezra promised he’d come back and live in the Rockies when he grew up, and to Maude’s great amazement, he did.
Ezra had stayed with his father in Paris, attended the Sorbonne. Bilingual, bicultural, he always planned to return to the United States, and he wrote often to the Starks and to Meg. He convinced Marc that it would be a good thing for him to attend law school at Columbia. Upon graduation, he joined a top New York law firm and specialized in international corporate law. He shuttled back and forth between Manhattan and Paris, lived the life of a high-powered cosmopolitan. But he always took his summer vacations in the Rockies, and made a point of visiting Laramie every year.
“My father died in 1970,” he said. “And I realized that there wasn’t anything holding me in New York. I’d gotten married a couple of times, but I turned out not to be very good at marriage.”
“That made two of us,” Maude commented, assuring Sally, “we can talk about that later.”
Brown-Eyed Girl Page 22
