He spread his hands, palms up. “That is something I’ve been asking myself for two years now. I think it’s simply that … well, that these high-handed, brutish confiscations are so hateful, so unjust, that I feel I should do whatever I can to help the victims. How could I not?”

  He looked suddenly back up into our eyes. I had the impression that he’d embarrassed himself, but then, with a shrug, that dry, puckish smile was back in place. “My better judgment has been warped, you might say. Aside from that, there is the considerable artistic satisfaction of duping these Nazi ‘connoisseurs,’ and the pleasurable irony of being paid by them for performing a service for the Jews. And then, of—”

  The film ended with a clatter and the screen went to blank white, then black as the projector was turned off. That was it.

  I had kept my arm around Lily the whole time and now I squeezed the back of her neck. “Wow,” I said. “Some movie.”

  “Can it be true, Pete?”

  “Sure looks like it. As far as those coins go, he did it right in front of us.”

  “So he—I can’t—” She shook her head incredulously. “He didn’t really collaborate with them then.”

  “Apparently not.”

  In the sudden darkness I could hardly see her, but I knew she was crying. “Oh, Pete … I feel so horrible … the way I treated him, and he was only … only …”

  “Now wait a minute, honey. Remember, he wasn’t any prize as a father. He pawned you off to Lebrun when the things got hard, and then he ran to Spain and left you alone in France and never looked back when you were a pregnant sixteen-year-old carrying a German’s baby, and for twenty years he never even bothered to find you, and besides that, he and Lebrun had no problems dealing with old Nazis in Bar—”

  “Yes, but he wasn’t a collaborator, not during the war.” She turned to look at me, her eyes gleaming in the darkness. “My father wasn’t a collaborator.”

  I touched her cheek to brush away a tear track with my fingertips. “No, he wasn’t a collaborator.”

  “Now get the hell out of here, will you?” It was Stanley, leaning urgently out of the projection booth window and pushing the film canister down at me. “The show’s over. I gotta set up Bugs Bunny.”

  “Da show’s ovuh,” Lily whispered to me in a pretty good imitation of Stanley’s Brownsville accent. “He godda seddup Buhgs Buhnny.” And then, exactly why I couldn’t tell you, we burst into laughter that was like honey on our throats.

  * * *

  But on the drive home the unanswered questions started crowding in on us. Every time one of us would ask something, the other would answer with a new question. “Why had Marcel Vercier been silent all this time, why hadn’t he used the film to try to clear his name with the authorities years ago?” I would ask. “Never mind the authorities,” Lily would answer, “why would he let his own daughter think he was a traitor until now?” And on and on. What was there in the film that was so important to Lebrun? Why had Armand Chastenet been killed in Veaudry? Why had Mrs. Aguilar, Lebrun’s secretary, secretly slipped that note into my pocket telling me about the tribunal records at the city hall, what was her interest in any of this?

  It was only on that last point that we arrived at any kind of answer, and that came while we were waiting at the endless stoplight at Bay Parkway and McDonald Avenue.

  “I think I understand what Mrs. Aguilar’s part was,” Lily said suddenly.

  “You do? What?”

  “Nothing. She never put that note in your pocket.”

  “No, that can’t be. I mentioned it to her later, and she acted—”

  And there I stopped. What Mrs. Aguilar had acted like, now that I thought about it, was a polite, busy person who didn’t know what I was talking about and wasn’t eager to strike up a conversation with a crackpot who insisted on thanking her for something she hadn’t done. She’d said “you’re welcome” nervously and non-committally and had returned to her typewriter as fast as she could. Lily was right.

  “But … if it wasn’t her, then who …”

  “Uncle Charles.”

  I shook my head. “That’s crazy. Why would he want me to go to Veaudry and see the tribunal records? And even if he did, he could’ve just told me, not gone through the rigmarole of getting a secret note in my pocket.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “See, he would have wanted to keep alive the impression that they’d been dealing in old Nazi loot because that brought the shop a lot of customers—you told me that yourself—but he wouldn’t have wanted you to think that he himself was knowingly making a profit on what the Germans had stolen during the war.”

  “Why wouldn’t he?”

  “Because then you might have been outraged enough to sic the law on him.”

  “That’s true enough. If I’d thought—”

  “So instead he wanted you to see the record of my father’s trial, which Uncle Charles—supposedly—knew nothing about. That would strengthen the story about my father’s Nazi contacts, but leave Uncle Charles innocent and above it all. Are you following this?”

  “Just barely, but you know, Lily, I think you’re right. Byzantine as it sounds.”

  At that point, the light having changed a quarter of a second before, the driver behind us pounded his horn and that was as far as we were able to get. But a few minutes later, as I stepped out to open our garage door, along with the blast of chilly air came another dim glimmer of light. I began to see what I thought might be a way to finally arrive at the rest of the answers.

  “I have to make a phone call,” I said as we got out of our coats in the foyer.

  “Now? This second? said Lily, still deep into trying to puzzle things through. “To whom?”

  “To Tegucigalpa,” I said.

  Chapter 27

  It took a few minutes to get hold of someone at the Honduran Museum of Ancient Art who could speak to me in English.

  “Yes, how may I help you?” said Señor Carías, the curator of jewelry and ornaments.

  “I’m calling about the Rearing Lamb, the seventh-century Merovingian pendant that you acquired a few months ago?”

  “Ah, yes, and what would you like to know?”

  “I believe I heard somewhere that you returned it recently to the Galeria Metropolitana.”

  He replied with a melodic Latin laugh. “No, sir, you heard incorrectly. I assure you we would never part with it. It’s still with us, in our center gallery. I hope that you can come and see it soon.”

  “Thank you, I’ll certainly try.”

  I’ll be damned, I said to myself as a good many things clunked into place. The glimmer of light had opened up into a sunburst. I hung up and walked into the kitchen, where Lily was putting up some coffee for us.

  “Voilà,” I said.

  * * *

  What had the call to Tegucigalpa told me that was so important? It told me that Charles Lebrun had lied about the Rearing Lamb having been returned to the Galeria Metropolitana. It had never been returned; it had been in Honduras all along. Which meant, and this was the critical part, that there were two—at least two—Rearing Lambs: the one I’d seen in Lebrun’s office in Barcelona, and the one that had reposed all along in the Honduran Museum of Ancient Art. Which meant in turn, that one of them—at least one of them—had to be a fake.

  That much was certain. From there on, things necessarily got more conjectural. Lily and I were willing to conjecture, however—what else could we do, with Vercier and Lebrun both dead?—and over a pot of coffee and a package of stale peanut butter cookies that I’d somehow overlooked, we did just that, working from this newly learned fact and piling inference on surmise on speculation. But in the end we sat back with a feeling of closure, satisfied that we’d made as much sense of things as anyone was ever going to make.

  First, the Galeria Metropolitana was a scam. Well, it probably conducted some legitimate business but it was first and foremost a forgery mill. When they got hold of a particularly good coin or piece of jewelry from one of their ex-Nazi pals—the Rearing Lamb of Merovingia, for example—Vercier would knock off a copy or two. Then they’d have two, or maybe three highly profitable sales to make instead of one, a safe enough gamble if they made sure they placed the pieces in widely separated markets. And in the case of the Rearing Lamb, they couldn’t have been much more separate: a little-known museum in Tegucigalpa, Honduras and the family castle of Herr von Feuerbach, a private collector in Leipzig, East Germany, behind the Iron Curtain. Obviously, there was a lot of money to be made from this kind of shenanigan; the Honduras museum had paid them $80,000, if I recalled correctly. What von Feuerbach paid on top of that I didn’t know.

  A lot of money. And that, we reasoned, was why Lebrun was so desperate to get his hands on the two copies of the film. He knew that if the beans were ever spilled about Vercier’s being a skilled forger it would mean not only the end of their lucrative gallery operation, but a probable spell in jail and a life-crushing load of debt from court judgments that would be sure to go against him. So the films and their content had to be destroyed and Vercier along with them, since he was now showing clear signs of wanting to spill the beans. And if I, or Lily, or Armand Chastenet, the man killed in Veaudry, had to be murdered along the way, well, that was too bad.

  And why Chastenet? That was something no one would ever know for sure, but given what we already knew, we could make a pretty good guess. Chastenet had been a film-maker. He had also been a friend of Vercier’s. Apparently, he’d known what was on the film—very likely he’d been the person behind the camera—and if that was what he’d been going to tell me about that morning, then obviously he had to be taken out of the picture too. Which he was, and me almost along with him.

  That left the most mystifying aspect of all. If Chastenet knew what was on the film, then why hadn’t he brought it to light years before in an effort to clear his friend? Why wait until the very day he learned (from me) that Vercier was dead? And, more to the point, why had Vercier himself never tried to clear his name? Why make the film at all if he wasn’t going to use it? Why, for twenty years, had he permitted his daughter to despise him for something he’d never done?

  It was Lily who came up with the explanation, and it was the same one we’d come up with for Lebrun, the simplest of all motives. “Money,” she said after we’d thought about it for a while, silently sipping coffee and dunking rock-hard cookies.

  I looked at her. “I don’t follow.”

  “Well, look. Father was making a lot of money, the same as Uncle Charles was. If he cleared his name with the film, the word would be out that he was a forger, and that’d be the end of their business. I hate to say it, but somebody like my father would be much more interested in the business than in his reputation back home. In fact, as long as he was safe in Barcelona, I doubt if he ever bothered to give it a thought. So he set the copies aside—just in case they ever came after him—and went on happily raking in the cash, hoping the situation would never arise.

  “But not to tell you? To just let you go on thinking—”

  She gave me a wistful smile. “As you said, he wasn’t much of a father. I’m afraid that just wasn’t his thing.”

  “Yes, that makes sense,” I said nodding. “Unfortunately. And you think he had a change of heart when he found out he only had a little while to live? He didn’t want to go to his death with you believing that he’d been a traitor?”

  “Yes, that’s just what I think.” Her eyes suddenly welled up with tears again. “And I was so awful to him, I wouldn’t even let him—”

  “Lily?” I said softly. “We actually have some vacation money left in the bank, enough for a couple of days anyway. What do you say go up to the mountains, the way we planned? And forget about all this for a while? How does that sound?”

  She wiped at her eyes with a tissue and summoned up another smile, more whole-hearted this time. “Fabulous,” she said.

  * * *

  We went to the Concord Hotel for two days and nights. We listened to Connie Francis. We danced to Xavier Cugat and Abbe Lane. We rented skis and took advantage of such skiing as the Catskills allow. We slipped, and slid, and laughed on “the world’s largest artificial ice-skating rink” and played in the heated Tropical Indoor Pool. It was wonderful. Nothing whatever of importance happened.

  Except …

  On the second night, as we were preparing to go downstairs for dinner and Lily was blotting her lipstick at the mirror over the bureau, she paused to study her reflection.

  “Pete,” she said slowly, “how would you feel about me letting my hair grow? You’ve never seen me with long hair, and I think maybe it’s time for a change.”

  It took a minute for my throat to unthicken enough for me to speak, and even then I had to turn away so she wouldn’t see the contortions I suspected my face was going through.

  “Oh, I like it fine the way it is,” I said as casually as I could. “But maybe it is time for a change.”

  * * *

  “Hi, Sharon. Yes, fine, how’s your holiday been?”

  It was the morning after we got back from the mountains and Lily had just picked up the telephone. I went out to shovel the small dusting of fresh snow off our steps and when I came back she was just hanging up. “Let me call you back,” she said and turned to me with a quizzical expression on her face.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “That was Sharon at the school. Would you have any idea what she was talking about? Minot, North Dakota? The new baby?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, “Minot. Um, well, it’s like this. …”

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2002 by Aaron Elkins

  Cover design by Open Road Integrated Media

  ISBN: 978-1-4976-1018-7

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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  New York, NY 10038

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  AARON ELKINS

  FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA

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