by Joseph Hone
‘Facing a very likely truth isn’t cynical, it’s honest, and that’s our business, isn’t it? Being honest.’
‘Yes, but not this time. My father – innocent until proved guilty.’
‘You think I want to see my father as guilty?’
‘Seems very like it.’
‘A Jew in Auschwitz, who was involved in all this dirty business? I may have to face something worse than anything your father might have been up to.’ He turned away, fretting.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Anyway.’ He turned back. ‘There’s one sure thing. All these people are after us, and it seems they’re not likely to let go.’
‘Bastards.’ The olive oil was heating in the pan. I threw in some diced onions, letting them brown. ‘I didn’t want that man drowned in the baths. Now I hope he was. Just as that little squirt on the boat who cornered me told me. He said his friends were everywhere.’
‘Yes, and one of them is O’Higgins: he must be working with those two guys in the Turkish baths. All of them art crooks, and maybe working with neo-Nazis. In any case the police will be after us when they’ve seen that closed-circuit footage and talked to Harry.’
He put down his glass, rolled a cigarette. It was hot in the galley and he was sweating. The brown make-up had smudged and run down his face. He’d stopped acting. The show was over. He’d saved us, for the moment, and that was great. He’d been great. He was no killer or crook. A bit raffish, mildly lecherous, but a good man. I liked him. But now I wanted out. Of everything – him, them, France, Dublin, the lot, just to go home to New York and try to forget about the whole business. The onions had browned. I threw in half a tin of tomatoes with them.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘So with all these people after us, now’s the time to get out.’ He didn’t reply, no agreement with this obvious point. The sauce started to bubble in the pan. I tipped in the anchovies, olives, diced red peppers, stirred them about. A pinch of oregano, paprika. A dollop of the red wine, turned the heat up, sweating myself. There was a roll of kitchen paper. I mopped my brow.
‘Have a glass of wine,’ he said. ‘I bought some white. It’ll be chilled in the fridge by now.’
He got the bottle out, opened it, poured me a glass.
‘Happiness!’ He held his glass up. ‘Like that first time, the reception in Dublin with that white Châteauneuf.’
I sipped it. ‘This is better. That was a terrible party.’
‘I told you I’m not good at parties, or deaths,’ he added. ‘My mother, well, that wasn’t a surprise. Katie – that was different.’
‘Yes, yes, I can see.’ I hadn’t told him yet about how I had his dead girlfriend’s journal and the drawing of her in my bag; how I knew she looked just like me. I didn’t want to talk about this. At some point I’d just give him back the journal, without telling him I’d seen the drawing.
‘So it all fits.’ He turned to me, intent now, serious.
‘Does it?’ I turned up the gas under another pan of water for the pasta, put in some salt, olive oil. ‘I’d say we’ve come to the end of the story now,’ I said.
He was fiddling with his roll-up. ‘Have we?’
‘It would be crazy to mess with any of these people. We’ve nothing to gain, and everything to lose. Get out of here now, any way we can. You have the Modi. Sell it. No cash problems for you anymore. So we can both forget about it all.’
‘Yes, except I still want to know what my father was up to in the war. And, yes, okay maybe we can forget it all, but these other guys won’t. They’ll be looking for us – or me at least since they think I know where the stuff is hidden.’
‘Go to the police, then, when you get back home. They don’t know where you live in England.’
‘Easy to find out.’
‘Well, what’s your alternative?’
‘I don’t want to sell that nude. I like her.’
‘Okay, just go back home with her then, sleep with her under your pillow and keep your head under it too.’
‘And you?’
‘Me, the same. Go back to New York. Keep my head down. I can put the Killiney house on the market from there. I don’t want the house. I don’t want anything of that house again.’
‘Wait a moment, Elsa!’ He was roused now. ‘You’re saying drop everything. So you don’t care a damn about what our families were up to in the war? Well, we should care. We’re them.’
‘No we’re not!’ I was furious now.
‘Same flesh and blood.’
‘Okay, but that doesn’t make us anything to do with whatever they might have done in the war, and certainly not if it means getting killed for something they did and we were no part of.’
‘Christ! How could you live the rest of your life not knowing if your father was a Nazi war criminal or not?’
‘Very easily.’
‘Well, I couldn’t.’ He screwed up his eyes and some more of the sweaty make-up ran down his chin. He rolled another cigarette. ‘What about your olives and olive oil book?’
‘I tell you – I can surely do that some other easier time.’
He poured us both another glass of wine, and sniffed the air. It was full of anchovies, olives, tomatoes, peppers. A whiff of oregano, paprika.
‘Well, why don’t we do the olive groves tour now? Like we said we would in Dublin. Drop the boat at Bar-le-Duc, hire a car and go down south. They’ll maybe look for us back home, but they won’t look for us in the olive groves.’
‘No.’
‘I haven’t painted you yet, either.’
‘You left all your stuff on the Sorrento.’
‘Easy to buy some more paints, a canvas or two.’ He smelled his wine. ‘This isn’t bad, you know. Yes, let’s go south. “Where the vine and olive thrive and the Brussels sprout doesn’t grow at all.”’
‘No. I just want to get back to New York and eat some cheesecake from the deli round the corner.’
He drank the wine, came over to the pan, brushing past me, sniffed the mix. ‘This is good,’ he said.
I don’t know what made me instantly want to do just what he’d said – go to ground, down south, do what we said we’d do in Dublin, as if all this terrible business had never happened. Then I thought I knew. It was his brushing past my body, in the small space, glancing against my backside as he went over to smell the sauce. Oh, it wasn’t Martha brushing past me in our New York kitchen, on her way to sniff the supper I was making on the stove. It was a body. Of course I wasn’t going to go south with his body or anyone else’s, but the thought crossed my mind.
We nearly fell asleep over the tart’s spaghetti before we went to our separate cabins. I had the master cabin with the double bed, tepid shower, the Sanilav, and the gilded cupids. Ben had a cabin somewhere down the corridor. I couldn’t sleep. My life had turned so many strange circles in the last week, I barely knew where I was. All I had was a past I knew about, where I’d been happy. I thought about it, looking for an anchor, lying beneath the gilded cupids, listening to odd sighs and murmurs of the water moving along the flanks of the barge outside the porthole.
I couldn’t concentrate on any one aspect of my old life, and what I most couldn’t focus on properly was my father. Even if what he’d been up to in the back room of his Dublin shop wasn’t war-criminal stuff, it seemed he’d been doing something crooked. This didn’t sit with my memories of my father at all. I’d loved him. He’d been a good man. If I believed Ben’s theories I had to hate him now, but I couldn’t.
If I hated my parents now I’d have to see my whole childhood and youth tainted. It was often idyllic, at home in Killiney, with the sea and the long crescent beach down the road, bathing and lolling about, gazing at the blue haze over Killiney Head in midsummer. All this should have seemed corrupted now, but it didn’t: you couldn’t corrupt the past if it had been happy for you.
My father – gentle, always courteous to everyone, and so Catholic, like my mother. Mass every Sunday and on holy days
, fish on Fridays even when that ceased to be obligatory in Ireland. A quiet man, preoccupied with old books and manuscripts, playing the piano sometimes in the evenings, the easier pieces from Beethoven and Mozart. Dipping into Goethe and Schiller.
How could someone like this be involved in Nazi art looting? My mother, the worn, tired face, but always happy in the kitchen making apfelstrudel or Wiener schnitzel. What possible clue was there, in either of their lives, which might have led one to suspect this sort of evil past in them? I couldn’t deal with these thoughts about my parents anymore. I had to switch to something else, to a much happier time: going to America when I was eighteen and staying near Charlottesville, Virginia, with wealthy German friends of my father’s, the Kochs. They had a stud farm out in fields with white fences, big chestnut hunters, some arabs, palominos, a long row of stables.
They hunted in the Fall with the Albermarle County pack. I spent a whole year there and loved it. Riding out into wild country, up into the Blue Ridge Mountains, forested, with tumbling streams, old ruined homesteads and apple orchards from early settlers in the mountains, with deer and wild turkeys jumping up in front of you and having to stay clear of the bear tracks.
I could keep my mind on this for a bit, until I realized now that Mr Koch might well have been a war criminal. Since he was an old friend of my father’s – they had been in the army together – he and his stud farm could well have been financed by the looted art. The Blue Ridge memories were at risk of being tainted as well.
I’d liked the Kochs and they helped me get into the University at Charlottesville, where I studied languages, French and German. I knew German anyway and had good matriculation French. I didn’t have any problems until I met Curtis, one of the English professors, at a frat party in Rugby Road. He was young and brilliant, vividly engaging, from an old Southern tobacco family. A gentleman. He’d just had a novel published, which had apparently been well reviewed. He’d described it to me as a ‘literary’ novel that first evening. I didn’t know then that there was any other kind.
Indeed there was, he said, and he talked to me about all the other sorts of novels in the following months. Except the sort of novels he also wrote, which I didn’t find out about until after we were married a year later and were living outside town in an old clapboard house off the Military Road.
He wrote hardcore pornography, under another name, for a publisher in Paris. I found out by chance when I discovered some of the books. They’d been posted over from France, the parcel had partly broken open, and Curtis was away. One fell out. I glanced through it. Brutal sexual athletics, where the woman, who was clearly me, was doing things we’d never done. I saw how he’d lied and used me as a sort of sexual guinea pig in reality and then in his fiction, as the manipulated, degraded ‘heroine’ in the novel.
I hadn’t slept with anyone before Curtis, but when I found out about his other literary efforts and how I figured in them, I exploded. I’d been used as his muse, but a soiled muse. I gave men up and decided never to be used again. That’s when I met Martha. Martha seized my real heart.
I’d been down in New Orleans researching an article on French-Cajun cooking. There’d been a hurricane raging round the Gulf and no flights out of New Orleans that day, so I’d taken the train back, the Amtrak Crescent to New York, as she had too. She’d been giving a lecture at the Maritime Law School at Tulane.
We met in the dining car, first night out, both of us alone, so the steward put us at the same table for two. She had a delicate, rather plain face, with two swathes of straight hair either side of a central parting. Narrow-shouldered, unfashionable, in a beige wool skirt, a dun-coloured silk blouse, a cameo brooch. Though in her mid thirties she had an air of immaturity and innocence, a fragile, otherworldly appearance. I didn’t know then what drew me to Martha, but I knew what this was several months later, after we’d met again in New York and she’d moved into my West Side apartment.
It was her adolescent restlessness, that first night on the train in the storm. The way she fidgeted with her cutlery, her napkin, looking out the window aghast, like Dorothy in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, as if the hurricane was going to hurl itself upon us at any moment and overturn the huge train, and we’d all be sucked up into the raging skies. She was so earnest, naïve and frightened. And I thought I knew, five years later, how it was just these qualities, which at first had attracted me, that took her away from me. Her appealing fidgets, her seriousness, that quizzical gleam in the eye – these were the seemingly innocent seeds which were to grow into exotic hothouse blooms, an overweening ambition to take a leaf out of my creative writing books and write a virgin-attorney-working-death-row-in-Miami novel.
I asked her later what had attracted her to me. ‘Almost the first words you said in the dining car, looking at the menu – “I’m going to have the New York Strip Steak.” The daring way you said it. It was somehow sexy.’ It must have been. We shared my small sleeping compartment that first night out in the train from New Orleans.
That meeting with Martha was more than a dozen years later, though. After I left Curtis I went back to Dublin and moped a while with my parents in Killiney. Then I went back to New York. I did a cookery course, at the Cercle de Cuisine, near the Lincoln Center. Then I worked as a guide on the Circle Line Manhattan boats, and then the same in the UN. I did other odd jobs, in restaurants mostly, waitressing at first, then the cooking, which I suppose was what I’d really wanted all along.
I was lucky. I was waitressing in a small West Side restaurant, the Brittany du Soir. Red check tablecloths, bistro style, damn good. Seafood a speciality. The chef burnt his arm badly early one Saturday evening, and the place was booked out, with only the French patron there. He knew I could cook a little, we’d talked about food. And of course I spoke French. ‘Vas-y, Elsa!’ he said. ‘Get in there and help me out. The scallops are one of the specials tonight – see what you can do.’ Coquilles St Jacques. I did them okay, and Lobster Mornay, and oysters quick-fried in batter with a dash of white wine and parsley, a Brittany dish. I did the cooking for several weeks. The chef never came back, and I got his job.
I loved the work and the place and the people. Happy days. Then the restaurant and my cooking were reviewed in The New York Times, so that soon there were smart-ass types over from the East Side, showing off or making ignorant complaints, and I didn’t find it so congenial. I wanted out. The patron didn’t find it so congenial either, but he was coining money. So he said one day, ‘Why don’t we write a Brittany du Soir cookbook?’
We did. It was a success. I became a cookbook writer. Three other books followed, where I travelled in Europe, India, China, Russia. Part diary, part travel book, but the underpinning was always accounts and recipes of simple or unusual food and traditional cooking methods. Talking to the locals in remote places. Venison and sun-dried fig kebabs, and sweet champagne, high in the Georgian mountains. Honey and breadcrumbed Porca Alente-jano and very fresh vinho verde in a riverside café I found halfway up the Tagus. And French-Cajun cooking in New Orleans, which is how I met Martha.
Martha. My mind stopped flashing about. I tried to think of something else quite unsullied. The time in Lisbon, the vast, fabulous seafood platter in what had looked like a McDonalds, right next to the hotel. It was after I’d finished my Portuguese article, the first evening of a holiday with Martha, when she’d flown over and we had a few days together doing nothing but walk the mosaic sidewalks, letting the wind swirl round our ankles, that ever-sweet wind off the Tagus. But the only world then had been us. I’d said to Martha on the plane back, looking at her, ‘If I never wrote another cookbook again, I wouldn’t mind.’ Shaking my head, looking at her, in wonder.
Next morning I woke early, just after dawn, and went up on deck. The sky was pearl-grey, but brightening, the sun about to rise over the hulks of the great barges. There was no sign of Ben. A sudden panic. Then I saw him. He was behind the wheelhouse, sitting right on the stern with a fishing rod, gazing intently
out on the grey water. I moved round the wheelhouse. He was looking at a float, motionless in the water.
‘Ben?’
‘Shh …’ He turned, eyes alight, and spoke softly. ‘Perch, roach, who knows what? I’m trying anchovy as bait. So I might even tempt a great pike. They like smelly bait and murky backwaters like this. I’d like to get a big pike. You know how to cook them?’
‘Bake them slowly for hours in tinfoil, stuffed with as much herbs and white wine as you can get into them, and even then they’re filthy, oily and full of bones. I didn’t know you fished.’
‘Oh, yes. On lakes up in the north of Ireland. Big pike there, monsters. I used to go with my father. He loved it. Early morning, or twilight.’
‘Okay, but it hardly seems the moment.’
‘It’s the ideal moment – told you, dawn.’
‘No, fathead! I meant generally. We’re on the run, Goddamnit! Supposed to be trying to get out of here, not taking a fishing holiday.’
‘Get out of here later. Maybe you could make some coffee?’
‘Okay.’ I turned back. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘there’s something I didn’t tell you last night. On the Sorrento, when that guy went through your bag looking for your father’s art inventory – well, he thought he’d found it, but it turned out to be some sort of scrapbook or journal. He threw it on the floor. I rescued it. Thought it might be important for you. I have it in my bag.’
He was gazing intently at the float, and then he spoke, still with his back to me. ‘Oh, yes, that journal’s important all right. Katie left it behind in her bag, in my barn, that afternoon before she set off to kill herself. I drove after her to give it back, but I was too late.’
‘I see.’ I wondered if he was going to tell me now how I looked just like her.
He didn’t. He continued quickly: ‘I’ve only read bits of it. So I don’t know what she’s really said there. A diary, yes, partly about us. Which is why I didn’t go on with it.’
