Herbie's Game (43 page)

But I slowly brought the hand around and pushed the box up until most of it was visible over the pocket’s edge. “Do you recognize it?”

She said, “Yes,” but it was mostly an exhalation.

“It has both of your brooches in it,” I said. “The pretty one and the beautiful one.” I took it out, still moving slowly, and popped the top off with my thumb so I could tilt the box down for her to see inside it.

“Oh,” she said, but actually the word escaped her, and she looked surprised when she heard it. She brought up the hand with the phone in it and put it over her mouth. “Why do—why do you have them? What I mean to say is, what are you
doing
here?”

“I’m bringing them back,” I said.

“You took them?”

“I did.”

“Then why are you bringing them back?”

“A long time ago,” I said, “someone taught me some rules about stealing things. One of them was to be on the lookout for something that might be the one thing the person I was robbing couldn’t live without. And when I thought I recognized it, not to take it.”

“The one thing—”

“The one thing that, if it was still there, the person who was robbed would say, ‘At least they didn’t get
that.’
And I think I broke that rule here.”

She said, “Please put the cover back on the box, and put the box on the bed nearer to you.”

I did as I was told, and the gun stayed on me the whole time, steady as a beam of sunlight.

“Now go over to the other bed. When you get there, you may sit.”

It wasn’t until I’d seated myself that I realized how weak my legs had been.

“Tell me,” she said. “Which was the beautiful one?”

“The one that was made by hand.”

She had been leaning against the frame of the open door, and when I said that, she slowly sank to a sitting position, with her knees up, the gun still pointed at me. “Do you know what it is?”

“No,” I said.

“Or what it’s worth?”

“Quite a bit,” I said. “I got beat up pretty badly because I wouldn’t sell it.”

She leaned forward a bit to look at me. “Really. And why wouldn’t you sell it?”

“I didn’t like the guy.”

“Why did that matter?”

“I don’t know. Yes, I do. Because he talked about selling it to someone who collects Nazi memorabilia.”

“Then you
do
know what it is.”

“I know what the Cartier is, liberation jewelry. The other one—”

She gave a smile that was all in the eyes. “The beautiful one.”

“Yeah, that one. I have no idea.”

“There are only ten or twelve of them that anyone knows of. From time to time, a woman who owned one of the Cartier pieces would be arrested. Even those of high rank could be dragged down into those filthy basements. My
mémé
, my
grand-maman
, was one of them. After they lived through what was done to them in the basements, they were either sent to a prison camp or they were shot. One of the first to be imprisoned was a very, very high-ranking lady, the
Duchesse
d’Aubert. They came for her in the morning and found her in her dressing gown. She had been about to paint her nails, and she had decided, as a joke, to paint them the colors of the French flag, red, white, and blue. Nail polish in many colors was new then, and it amused her to paint the flag with them. It was probably good for her she hadn’t done it when the troopers arrived because the Gestapo would not have been charmed. Does this not interest you?”

“Why do you ask?”

“You keep looking toward the window.”

“My fiancée,” I said, using the word for the first time in my life, “is outside in the car, and I wish she could hear it.”

“You can tell it to her. I’m not yet enough of a democrat to invite your fiancée inside my home.” She reached into a pocket and came out with a pack of cigarettes. “Excuse me,” she said, “European vice.” She shook one free and lit it with a slim silver lighter. “So,
la Duchesse
, and in her pocket the nail colors, yes?”

“Yes.”

“She was too great a lady for the Germans to keep. Her family looked down on the former royal family of France as
arrivistes
. When they released her, she gave the colors to another lady, who gave them to another lady, who, well, you can guess.” She took another drag off the cigarette and blew the smoke away, out the door, taking her eyes off me for the first time. “When a woman was sentenced to be shot, the other ladies would make her her own liberation jewelry. They unwound wire from bedsprings or even from wristwatches, they used bits of wood or cork or chips of cement for the bird’s body. Then, on the morning, they would pin it inside their clothes and go face the rifles. To be liberated.”

I said, “But you got this back.”

“You’re quick,” she said. “It was August of 1944. The Allies were practically in the suburbs. The cells were emptied by officers who hoped someone would testify in their defense. My
grand-maman
went home and took with her the brooch her friends had made for her to wear the next day, when she was to be shot. She also took the nail colors, which she returned to the
Duchesse
.”

“Was there much left?”

She shook her head.

I said, “Are you going to call the police?”

“Why?” she said. “Because you returned to me something I had lost?”

I said, “Thank you,” and got up.

“The person who taught you this rule about what not to steal?” She hadn’t gotten to her feet. “He is a friend?”

“Yes,” I said. “He was.”

“Very well. Please go out the front door. I don’t want the neighbors thinking I have young men creeping in and out of the place.”

“May I tell you something?”

“But of course.”

I said, “You need better locks.”

This book began
life as
Liberation Jewelry
, a novella of (theoretically) 30,000 words, which I undertook in response to a request from the folks at Soho that I “knock one out” during an otherwise idle week or two. Problem is, it’s harder for me to write short than it is to write long, and the more-than 100,000-word book you’re holding is evidence of that fact. Also, Wattles barged in, and that complicated things.

The first thing I wrote was the burglary that opens the book, the scene in which Junior nicks the two brooches, the Cartier and the amateurish one. When I wrote it, I had no idea where the second brooch came from or why it was there. I’m embarrassed to say that I do this kind of thing all the time. It’s a part of my process that I indulge on faith, without understanding it. I think of planting these open questions as a kind of mystery for myself, something I have to solve before I get to the end of the book. Almost invariably, these things not only get worked out, but they also become important to the story.

In this case, there was virtually no suspense about whether the mystery brooch would work out because about eight days into the writing of the book, I mentioned the two brooches to my agent, Bob Mecoy, and he instantly came up with the explanation that you probably just read. When I hung up the phone,
I felt like I’d tripped over a ten-pound emerald. That piece of information shaped about half of the book, so thanks, Bob.

It may be disappointing to some of you to know those handcrafted liberation brooches didn’t actually exist. The Cartier version did, though, and it was both sold and worn under the noses of the Nazis, which was pretty gutsy in itself.

In this book I killed off some peripheral characters (as a favor to those of you who skip to notes like these without reading the story first, I won’t name them). One of the things that happens when you write a series is that you gradually accumulate a small army of peripheral characters, and
they all want to get into every book
. It’s hard enough to make up a story without a platoon of underemployed characters standing just offstage, shifting impatiently from foot to foot as they wait to be called into the light, so I’ve thinned them out a bit. Two of them are gone for good (and I already regret one of them) and the other is in that peculiar fictional dusk where I don’t know whether he’s alive or dead and probably won’t until he lurches through some doorway when I least want him.

Lots of good music went into the writing of
Herbie’s Game
. I made a playlist of about nine hundred songs by reasonably new-to-me artists such as MS/MR, Jack’s Mannequin (and its frontman, Andrew McMahon), The Boxer Rebellion, passEnger, Amanda Shires (“Detroit or Buffalo” became Ronnie’s theme song), John Fulbright, Langhorne Slim, and Alabama Shakes. Also on call were more familiar names: The Hold Steady (and
its
frontman, Craig Finn), John Hiatt, Neko Case, Tegan and Sara, The National, Steve Earle (burning the Walmart down!), Jon Fratelli, Vampire Weekend, The Dodos, Over the Rhine, Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand (a new album after only
four years
!), and a bunch of reasonably obscure Rolling Stones songs from their first three albums.

And this is a good place to say thank you to all the people who have written to suggest new music to me. I listen to all of it, even if it doesn’t make it into a writing playlist. Send more! And finally, thanks to all of you who have said such nice things about Junior.

Please continue to let me know what’s up via my website,
www.timothyhallinan.com
. As far as I know, I’ve responded to every piece of reader mail in the past couple of years. And who knows? You might write something that would lift my spirits on one of the three days a week, on average, that writing is less fun, and less productive, than doing my own dental work. More than one book has been saved by a letter—and this is true not only of me, but also of most of the writers I know.

While I’m thanking
people, I want to start a round of applause for the people at Soho Crime for breaking every rule in the publisher’s playbook to put out the first three Junior Bender novels in seven months, while going to the wall in their support. So let’s hear it for publisher Bronwen Hruska; my indefatigable if occasionally fractious editor, Juliet Grames; marketing marvel (and all-around well-read guy) Paul Oliver; and gifted enablers Meredith Barnes and Amara Hoshijo. And, of course, cover artist Katherine Grames, whose jacket design for this book was the first one I ever saw that I didn’t want changed in any way, however minuscule. Gratitude also goes to three tireless beta readers, Everett Kaser, Alan Katz, and Ellie Korn, who caught dozens of errors.

As always, thanks to Munyin.