Calling New York from Spain is no simple affair if you don’t speak Spanish, but fortunately the clerk at the long-distance telephone booth in the post office down the block was a helpful, long-suffering type, and eventually I got through, doing my best to keep a sudden, irrational surge of optimism in check. There would be something from her; I could feel it.

  Nada, as they say over here. Mary Gianini, who answered the phone, went through two days’ mail item by item: telephone bill, postcard from an aunt in Florida, cookbook for Lily from Life, two packets from Brooklyn College, a letter from an acquaintance in the Bronx. I had her open and read the one from the Bronx, just in case, but no go.

  That put me right back down in the dumps, and with my tail dragging I stopped at a café right around the corner.

  “Café, por favor,” I mumbled; another of the essential little phrases I could handle in a lot of languages.

  It was a gray, cold day, but the only available table was outside, so that was where I sat, slumped deep into my overcoat, my hands thrust into the pockets, my feet up on the edge of a stone planter, wondering what to do next. Because I’d left a few extra days in my itinerary in case I stumbled on something that needed following up, my flight back to New York wasn’t until Thursday, three days from now. But of course there wasn’t anything to follow up, and as soon as I’d had my coffee and gotten a little energy back I planned to head over to the España ticket office on Las Ramblas to see if I could fly home tomorrow instead.

  What I’d do when I got there I wasn’t sure, but I knew I’d damn well rather do it in my own house than at the Hotel Carlota. At the very least, knowing what I now knew, I could think about how best to approach Lily once I was able to talk to her again. I understood now what was at the root of her fears, and surely I could make her see—it might take time, but I could make her see—that her father’s behavior, no matter how heinous, had nothing to do with her and less than nothing to do with us. I loved her more than ever, there wasn’t any doubt about that, and I was equally certain—well almost—that she felt the same about me; it was impossible that she didn’t. Given all that, how could incidents that had happened twenty years ago, involving other people during a calamitous and aberrant time, damage what she and I had built together? No, I was absolutely confident I could help her see that she was the same terrific person she’d always been, that being a rat wasn’t something you carried in your genes, and that nothing had really changed.

  There was only one thing missing in this hopeful scenario, and that was Lily. Was I ever going to get the chance to tell her these things?

  Only gradually did I become aware that the fingers of my right hand, deep in my pocket, had been worrying the corners of a folded sheet of paper, something I was positive hadn’t been there when I’d started out that morning. When I took it out and unfolded it, I found three typewritten lines in English, centered on the page.

  If you like to learn the truth about Marcel Vercier, you should go to Veaudry and examine at the city hall the record of his trial 11 September 1944 by the People’s Justice Tribunal of the Comité Départemental de Libération. Good luck to find your wife.

  The waiter set the coffee down at my elbow but I sat unmoving, staring at the message. It had to be from Mrs. Aguilar, Lebrun’s assistant; there wasn’t much question about that. Who else even knew I was there? Clearly, she had overheard—or listened in on—my session with Lebrun and slipped the note into my coat while I was in with him. But why would she be interested at all? And what was she telling me? According to Lebrun, Vercier had never been tried; he had fled before they got to him. So what was this about a justice tribunal? Was he tried or wasn’t he? And why would Mrs. Aguilar care whether or not I knew about it? That last sentence, Good luck to find your wife—didn’t that imply that there might be a connection to Lily? Why else would she tack it on?

  I downed my coffee, paid, and headed for the España office full of welcome new energy fueled by a dose of caffeine and an even more welcome sense of purpose. I was still in the dark, but maybe I was closing on on something. Moreover, I now knew where I was heading next, and it wasn’t back to Bensonhurst.

  Chapter 10

  Veaudry, France, my wife’s birthplace and the place of her growing up, lies on the eastern outskirts of Paris, about thirty minutes by rail from the Gare de l’Est, one of the anonymous gray villages that dot northern France. (The pretty ones you see in the travel books are mostly in the south.) Remember the newsreels of Allied tanks grinding their way over those plain, gray, war-scarred village streets as the Germans retreated? Well, then you know what Veaudry looks like.

  No more war-scarring to speak of, but even so no one could call the place high on charm; a cluster of unprettified streets surrounding a central square, the predictably named Place de la République, with the railroad station and the town’s one hotel on one side and most of the usual mom-and-pop business enterprises around the other three, and small cafés and restaurants on the streets leading away from the square. The buildings, three stories high at most, are typically mud-gray stucco, with a few of the fancier ones decorated with corner edgings of once-red (now dried-blood-brown) brick.

  When I got off the train from Paris at 2:30 Tuesday afternoon, the dismal gray rain that had been falling all morning was just turning to sleet, stinging my face and soaking my hair (Lily had always been the one to remind me to pack a hat when I traveled). I humped my suitcase over to the modest Hotel Mercure next to the station. Not stopping to unpack or to eat lunch, I asked the hotel clerk where the city hall was, and made straight for it across the cobblestoned square (the place of Marcel Vercier’s non-execution, no doubt).

  * * *

  Gulp.

  That was the response of the teen-aged clerk when I stepped up to the counter and politely asked to see the record of the trial of Marcel Vercier before the regional justice tribunal on September 11, 1944. Followed by:

  “I’m not supposed to … I’ll have to get the supervisor.”

  And off she ran through a door at the rear of the room, to return a few seconds later trailing a tall, pale, stooped man with hangdog features and a patently distrustful air. “I am Mr. Roche,” he said, drawing out the words. “I am the head clerk. You wish to see the file of Marcel Vercier?”

  For a moment I thought I was back in some new variation of The Dream because this guy reminded me of nothing so much as one of those characters in pince-nez, rusty black suits, and wing collars; the petty bureaucrats or whatever they were who regularly came trooping out from behind some building or other, wringing their hands, or muttering to one another, or banging their pots. There weren’t any pots or pans in sight, and he wasn’t wearing a wing collar, but his close-fitting three-button suit was black, all right, and the round wire-rimmed spectacles sitting on his nose were most assuredly pince-nez, something you didn’t see every day.

  “Ah … yes,” I said, hardly able to stop staring at him, “the file of Marcel Vercier.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, because … isn’t it public information?”

  He scowled, not much liking the question. “That’s not the point. Are you a relation?”

  “No.” Well, sure, I guess I was Vercier’s son-in-law, all right, but I didn’t feel as if I was, and I wasn’t anxious to claim him as a relative. Besides, this character out of my dream had hardly won my good will thus far, and I didn’t see how it was any of his business.

  He sniffed. “Do you have a valid reason for seeing it?”

  Did I ever. “Yes, I do.”

  He waited for more, but I didn’t say anything. “It can’t be taken from the room, you understand.”

  “All right.” It occurred to me that Roche now held the position that Charles Lebrun had been in during the Occupation: head clerk at the city offices.

  “It must be read here, in the presence of the clerks, you understand that?”

  “Okay.”

  “And you’ll be required to sign for it.”

  “Fine.” I was certain Roche was pulling things out of his hat. Why, I didn’t know.

  From under the counter he brought up a ledger, the open page of which had signatures going back six months, then slid over a tray with a built-in inkwell and a stained, cork-handled pen.

  “Pierre Simon,” I wrote, and slid the ledger over to him.

  He slid it right back, tapping the column next to my signature. “The date, the date.”

  I complied. Mr. Roche turned the ledger around and leaned close to the page to peer at my entry. A few yards away, at the other end of the counter, a rangy, weather-beaten man in a grease-stained blue workman’s smock, who had been engaged in a whispered, heated argument with another clerk, had stopped in order to gape at us instead.

  “Very well,” Roche said grudgingly, apparently unable to come up with any more excuses to put me off. “You may use the table over there. The young lady will bring the material to you.”

  Now what the hell had that been about, I wondered as I sat at one of two library tables in the room, joining a bespectacled, elderly man who was meticulously making notes in the margin of a complex permit of some kind, stopping after every jotting to touch the point of his pencil stub to his tongue. Was Roche giving me in particular a hard time, or was this just one more example of the famous attitude of the French civil servant toward one and all?

  When the file came I was surprised at how little there was to it; just four or five pages neatly bound to a brown cardboard folder with a metal fastener. The cover sheet was of cheap, thick paper, no letterhead, and it got to the point in a hurry.

  Having been duly tried this day in absentia on charges of 1) collusion with a foreign power for the purpose of assisting the acts of that power against France and for his own profit, 2) trafficking in stolen objects, and 3) engaging of his own will in other criminal activities damaging to the welfare of the community and the nation in its time of need, Marcel Vercier, 37, of rue Weller 149, is hereby adjudged guilty of treason and sentenced to death in a manner to be determined at such time as his apprehension may be achieved.

  Judgment determined this eleventh day of September 1944, at the Veaudry Palace of Justice, by the People’s Tribunal of Veaudry, under authority conferred by the Seine-et-Marne Committee of Liberation.

  Antoine Donnadieu, Colonel, FTP, Presiding Member

  Claude Goujon, Major, FTP, Member

  Henri Lefebvre, Captain, FTP, Member

  Jean-François Ribeau, Lieutenant, FTP, Member

  Robert Lienne, Corporal, FTP, Member

  Whew. This was just a little different from the story Lebrun had fed me. Clearly, Vercier had done more than sell a picture or two to a German bigwig. And he’d not only been accused of collaborating, he’d been tried for it; tried and sentenced to death. My first reaction was anger at Lebrun for misleading me, but then I realized that I hadn’t necessarily been lied to by him. If he had left France before the trial he wouldn’t have been aware of it. For all I knew, Vercier himself hadn’t known of it. After all, it had been conducted in his absence.

  But obviously Mrs. Aguilar had known. I wondered why that was, and how much else she knew about Vercier. It was beginning to look as if I’d spent my time with the wrong person in Barcelona.

  There was something else at the bottom of the cover sheet. Opposite the signatures and just below the round, embossed seal of the commune of Veaudry, slantwise across the page, was a box in which two fragmentary sentences were stamped in upper-case blue letters:

  Sentence annulled, General Amnesty Law of 1953. CASE CLOSED 28 JULY 1953 BY ORDER OF the COMMISSIONER OF THE REPUBLIC FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF SEINE-ET-MARNE

  Thoughtfully, I ran my fingers over the pale blue ink. Case closed. Yes, that would be right. The French had passed their amnesty act in 1953 in an effort to heal the festering lesions that had been produced by the Occupation. As of July 24, 1953, the purge was declared over. Except for those who had committed the most atrocious offenses—the torturers and murderers, the denouncers of partisans, the vermin who had put on the Nazi-supplied uniforms of the despised Milice, the volunteer French militia that eagerly helped the Gestapo in their bloody work—except for these most vile of traitors, those still in prison were released; those convicted in absentia were pardoned; those not yet tried had their cases taken off the books. Marcel Vercier was technically no longer under sentence of death.

  But “technically” and “actually” weren’t necessarily the same. I looked again at the names of the judges that had tried him. Antoine Donnadieu, Colonel, FTP; Robert Goujon, Major, FTP … all of them were officers of the FTP. This was an organization I knew a little about: the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans. Literally, the name meant Irregulars and Guerillas, and it was one of the many resistance outfits that fought the Nazis during the Occupation. More a loosely-knit, frequently squabbling association of local fighting units than a single entity, it was nevertheless dedicated, resourceful, and daring, and a source of great concern to the Nazis, who did their best to hunt them down. I had two barely remembered cousins in Lyon who had joined up in 1943. Alfred made it safely through and became a bookbinder after the war. Armand never became anything. As we learned later, he had thrown himself headfirst out of a second-story window after being arrested by the Gestapo, to avoid giving away the names of compatriots under torture. He’d been my age at the time: seventeen.

  Although it had originally been organized by French Communists before the war and considered by many (my father, for instance) to be an outlaw mob of anarchists, by the end of the Occupation the FTP banner had flown over Jewish refugees, anti-Fascist Italian migrant-workers, young Frenchmen who preferred to fight rather than accept deportation to forced labor in Germany, and French men and women of every stripe who chose to fight the Nazis on their own after their government, under Petain, had chosen to collaborate.

  With the coming of the Liberation, the FTP, like other resistance groups, took it on themselves to organize ad hoc tribunals that tried accused collaborators in a sort of twilight zone between frontier justice and blood revenge. Sometimes there were defense attornies, sometimes not. Few trials took more than a day, there were no appeals, and when the sentence was death the defendant was usually shot the following morning. Once de Gaulle’s new provisional government moved from Algiers to Paris and took firm control of the country, these seat-of-the-pants tribunals were replaced by more orderly courts of law, but that time hadn’t yet arrived in September 1944 and the early justice that was meted out was a rough justice indeed. Neither the people’s tribunals nor the FTP itself were inclined to forgive and forget. There had been a lot of suffering under the Occupation.

  So wasn’t it at least possible that Vercier’s murder in New York had been the carrying out of that nineteen-year-old sentence of execution by parties who chose not to be bound by the amnesty law? “Death in a manner to be determined at such time as his apprehension may be achieved,” the formal sentence had read. Who was to say that didn’t include death by pipe and baseball bat?

  But if so, it raised other questions. Where, for example, did the film figure into it? And why would they choose to kill him in New when they’d had him practically on their own doorstep in Barcelona all this time, where they would surely have found it easier to arrange his murder? No, the idea didn’t seem to hold water; still, it was something to tuck away, and certainly something to tell Kovalski about.

  I turned to the next page, a photostated sheet in German. I couldn’t even make it all the way through the letterhead and turned more pages in hopes of a translation, but there were two more sheets in German, one of them an itemization of some kind, and then, I was relieved to see, a page-by-page translation.

  THE MILITARY COMMANDER IN BELGIUM AND NORTHERN FRANCE

  Bureau: Work Group Northern France

  19 November 1943

  To: The Military Commander in Belgium and Northern France

  Head of Military Administration

  Bureau: Enemy Property Accounts

  Section: Expenditures

  To the Hands of Deputy Registrar Dr. v. Zeitz

  Dear Deputy Registrar!

  This office requests your authorization of the allotment of 50,200 francs to be paid to Marcel Vercier of Veaudry, antiques dealer, who has rendered us many services, particularly in regard to the identification, evaluation, and seizure of objects in the hands of Jews and other undesirables. The man Vercier has already been paid 85,000 francs of the 135,200 francs owed him, as previously approved by you. He is now owed the remainder, 50,200 francs, as is shown in the following records. I remind you with respect that prompt payment is always advisable in matters of this kind, although it is my belief that Vercier is rendering his services out of genuine allegiance to the cause of National Socialism, and not merely from a desire for selfish gain.

  Heil Hitler!

  (Nazi stamp) (Signature)

  Well, so much for any lingering thought that Vercier had somehow been railroaded by the tribunal, à la Lebrun’s sanitized rendition, and as if it wasn’t already bad enough, things got worse on the next page, an itemized account of just what services Vercier had provided during the previous three months and what he was paid for them.

  6,500 fr.

  Commission for assessing the value of two first- and second-century Roman cameo brooches depicting mythical scenes (Meleager offering the Caledonian boar to Atalanta, and Endymion sleeping on Mt. Latmos). Previous ownership unknown.