Murder Without Pity (11 page)

The large dining room held merely two other diners, an elderly couple, eating silently, Stanislas noticed as he and Anna followed the maître d’. The icy scraping of knives on the couple’s plates made the atmosphere cold and hollow.

The waiter presented their menus with a slight bow and left them alone. Anna flipped hers open and brushed aside a length of gold tassel. “Something to drink first?” He said he would.

“An excellent lunch.” Stanislas pushed away his plate. “I’m curious. That old man at the Center and that guard, Eli, did your decision to be with me, a collaborator’s grandson, cause problems?”

“You must understand some suffered greatly during the war. From French hands, as well as from the Germans.”

“Are you bitter about those years?” he asked.

She took another sip of Chablis. “No, not like others. I was just a few months old when I lost my family in the Great Raid here. I remember nothing. You wouldn’t believe the hundreds of books I’ve read”—she flicked her eyes momentarily at him—“the few survivors I’ve talked with for hours trying to understand that roundup of Jews. I know everything about the sixteenth and seventeenth of July 1942 and understand nothing.”

She settled her glass down and rested her cheek in her palm, elbow on the table. “Someone, Mamma, I think,” she continued at last, her voice languid and far away, “may have managed to help me escape that day from the Vel d’Hiv Stadium where the police held everyone. Maybe because I was the youngest, the smallest, and she was able to hide me under her coat and push me out an exit. Who knows? Anyway, if she did, it was her last act of love. I never saw her again. Or any of them for that matter. From the Vel d’Hiv to that dreary suburb of Drancy to Auschwitz. My family’s death trail.”

She darted her eyes across to him. “That’s always bothered me, not knowing my parents. Not knowing my sisters either. I say ‘Papa’ and ‘Mamma’ like an incantation. Say them often enough, and they won’t be mere figures in some faded photographs. They’ll spring to life in my head.”

Her eyes drifted back to the tablecloth. “Sometimes when I return to my apartment from work, I want to call out, ‘Papa, Mamma, Rachel, Lea, I’m home.’ Me at my age, playing a child’s game.”

She sipped more wine. “What I know about them, I know from this woman I call Auntie, who knew them. They were Italians, who settled in Poland. There, they became refugees from Hitler. Papa wanted to go to America. Mamma wanted France.” She smiled into her glass at the memory. “Mamma won. They settled near the Bastille. They looked forward to the day when they could get their papers and finally be French. They’d celebrate two freedom days: the day they became citizens and Bastille Day.

“Funny”—she looked up from her glass and over to him—“they longed for that day when they could belong, Auntie said. They taught themselves the language and insisted every family member speak it. Yet in the end, some of their own countrymen thought they weren’t good enough and had them shipped off.” She gave a sad shrug. “‘Man is a wolf to man,’ as they say.”

And my grandfather helped create that murderous atmosphere, he thought. He flinched his eyes away from shame before he caught himself and gazed at her once more.

The wine had washed away her red lipstick. She looked pale and worn. She sighed and looked out to the terrace, empty except for a tree of bare limbs in the middle. “You know what else is funny?” she asked after a time. “I still get a thrill whenever I hear the ‘Marseillaise.’”

She slipped back into her contemplative sadness. He could only wait for her to return. Several moments passed. Still he said nothing, but held his gaze on her and finally his hand on hers.

Anna straightened with an embarrassed laugh, but didn’t remove her hand. “I certainly didn’t expect this. It must be the wine and you. You’re an excellent listener, Monsieur Examining Magistrate. Too good, in fact.” She managed a faint smile. “You will excuse me? I must telephone my Jules to see how he is.” She pushed back her chair and walked away a little too quickly.

STANISLAS’S FEARS

Stanislas noticed off in a corner a middle-aged man, seated next to a youth, who wore glasses. His security detail. They must have entered, he realized, while he listened to Anna. Their being there intruded into the intimacy of Anna’s sadness that held him as though she were still there, and he resented their presence.

He looked over to the elderly couple across from him. A mutter of conversation passed between them. Had one of them said something to fill the emptiness because, like his parents, they had long ago run out of things to say? And also, like his parents, had they put on a pretense of routine, eating out perhaps, to hide some family shame?

The woman helped herself into her coat. Her husband reached for his hat on a chair. They departed as they might have arrived, Stanislas reflected, alone in their own worlds like his parents. The dining clientele shriveled to four.

Angry voices filled the bar. Someone cursed Dray, Streible, and Fuchs as rabble rouser thugs. That must be the barman, he thought. Someone praised them as saviors. One of the guards ordered the offender out. The drinker yelled profanities and left. The two security men ignored the near-brawl and continued chatting.

Stanislas nibbled at a slice of Anna’s Belgian waffle. He longed to get away from the mounting turmoil and the two gentlemen across from him and to return to his cases. Anna had been wrong about him, he thought. His telephoning her office had implied fear she’d reject him, not tenacity. He had to commit to their rendezvous, judge how she responded. He hadn’t detected any reproach in her so far over his grandfather. Did she accept him as clean? Did he accept himself that way? He glimpsed movement and turned to see her walking toward him, her face bright with a smile, the traces of sadness put away.

“That Jules. I wonder about him.” She snapped her napkin open as she sat down. “He gets me so angry at times with his stubbornness. He insists on flying off on trips to some spa that promises cures—he leaves next Monday for another flight who knows where. He refuses to quit smoking and now claims he has only a bad cold, and I shouldn’t worry.”

She drifted away in thought as she reached for her Chablis, then withdrew her hand and laughed. “No more confession wine. Are you ready?”

Outside, they set off toward Rue St-Antoine with mist swirling at their feet. And the two security men not that far behind, Stanislas knew.

“If I’m not prying, how did your parents talk about your grandfather?” she asked.

“They said he fought for France, whatever that meant.”

“They were protecting you?”

“Me, my brothers and sisters. Themselves, too. My father became a traveling champagne salesman, I think, to avoid explaining his father. My mother took on that chore with shrugs and silences mostly.”

“She raised you alone?”

“With my grandfather’s help after his prison release. Marcel Cassel, Man of the House. Another one of his titles.” He caught his bitterness too late.

At the curb he felt through the mist for his footing. Glancing over his shoulder, he spotted his bodyguards further back, on their side of the street. As he felt solidity and planted weight on his left leg, he caught her concern. “Don’t worry. I can manage. I have for nearly two decades.”

She watched till he had secured his balance. “When did you began to suspect him of being a collabo?” she asked when they continued.

There wasn’t a single incident, he said. Just fragments that added up. A woman clawing her fingernails into his grandfather’s face. His grandfather turning edgy whenever a knock sounded on their door. His discovering a revolver buried in an attic trunk. Midnight whispers from the dining room, the front door inching shut, a car rattling off. In the morning, his grandfather absent from breakfast, and the silence with just the sound of knives scraping across the plates.

Anna paused to tap mud from a heel. Stanislas glanced back. Several police had stopped his two bodyguards for questioning. The police didn’t seem to believe their story or their IDs’ and were calling for backup. His escorts would catch up with them shortly, he decided.

Anna straightened, and they continued. “Why Pétain?” she asked.

“My grandfather was an idealist.” He dared glance at her, expecting ridicule at last. Her shoulders remained hunched against the chill, hands thrust inside her pockets, her head downcast in concentration. When she offered no response, he continued. “He believed two wars with Germany were enough. Time for a Franco-German entente.”

“Better Hitler than Stalin?”

“Hitler would save European civilization from the barbaric Communists. Incredible, how blind he was. Look what he got: Prison. Death threats—”

He caught suddenly from somewhere on the other side of the street the drone of men arguing. The timbre of their voices alarmed him as he and Anna drew closer. The bartender, he thought. He had warned about roving gangs. He shushed Anna and listened for the threat’s direction that sounded alarmingly close. He glanced around for his bodyguards and didn’t see them.

A youth in a baseball cap staggered from the mist into the street toward them, obviously drunk.

Stanislas pushed Anna into a hollow of thick fog, into an alley.

The youth yelled what sounded like “You!” at them before he collapsed cross-legged near their side of the walkway.

Two buddies, one chunky, the other scrawny, stumbled into view, also drunk. They wore baseball caps too, and crowding around, taunted him, calling him a silly old Jew and a silly old nigger.

The chunky youth clapped his fallen friend on the head. The blow knocked off his cap and revealed his shaved skull.

“Hey, why you’d do that?” He swayed to his feet, pointing at Stanislas and Anna and babbling, “Over….” before he plopped down again.

“Over for us is right if some cop who hates us comes by.” The scrawny youth began singing as he hefted his collapsed friend by an arm and staggered with him down the street with their buddy behind.

Stanislas glanced at Anna and saw she had sagged against a wall. She looked at him with a fearful expression, sighed deeply, and pressed her trembling hands to her cheeks. He wanted to caress away her fright, though he knew he shouldn’t say anything. His voice might carry and draw them back and panic her.

“It’s passed,” he whispered after awhile. “I think they’ve gone. Things like this happen.”

Her mouth fell open as she stared at him.

“They’re just showing off.”

“How can you be that calm, that blind?” she said at last.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. They’re only kids, trying to act tough, that’s all.”

“Kids? They’re racist punks and don’t underestimate how vicious they are. Or the problem of violence. Didn’t you hear the latest? About that bomb destroying that warehouse in the tenth district? Over one hundred killed, including many police? The newspapers reported an anonymous tip caused them to rush to investigate an arms cache. Some think the far right planted the guns there and made the phone call to lure them into a trap.”

“There’s no proof of that.”

“Proof? Is that what you want? Look at the public’s reaction. They’re blaming Arabs for the deaths. Can’t you see things clearly? This extremism is dangerous.”

“I’m sure the authorities are doing their best to catch whoever’s behind the bombing.” The expression in her eyes had changed, he noticed. Did she now feel exasperation? Or was it disgust? He shifted his cane to his other hand, uneasy by their sudden disagreement.

“This complacency,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re in a dream.”

Exasperation, he decided. That’s what she must feel. “I’m not complacent,” he said, trying to stay calm. “I simply refuse to become an alarmist.”

“And I am? I’m imagining the hate I see on the Internet? The daily reports I read from sources throughout Europe warning about pitches to the unwary? And the émigrés fleeing Germany and Austria and Russia, who come to the Center, they’re inventing tales because they have nothing better to do?”

“Okay, I chose a poor word. I shouldn’t have said ‘alarmist.’”

She held him with her intensity. She seemed to struggle to control some emotion. But she couldn’t withhold. “I’ve spent a good part of my life trying to alert people like you, decent, hard-working, honest, bright people, the mainstay of any civilized society, about the larger evil in this world. I give talks, though I hate public speaking. After work, I stay up late at night writing articles. I plead with spineless politicians. I debate the most loathsome creatures in coats and ties imaginable, hoping just one person in the audience will understand. And you know what? Sometimes I wonder if I, if any of us at the Center, have made the slightest difference. Jules says people never change. I find myself agreeing with him at times like this. Come on. Let’s go. I don’t like staying out in the cold. And I didn’t mean to spoil a lovely afternoon with my outburst. I’m just tired. Very, very tired.”

She was near tears as she walked away. He thumped his cane hard on the pavement at his insensitivity. For the first time in years he had confided in someone about his past. She had listened with compassion. And for that he had offended. He should have understood how much her work meant to her. He’d better give her another few moments alone to compose herself and then apologize. After a block though, she stopped and jerked her head his way, waiting for him.

He withdrew a packet of Kleenex from his overcoat pocket when he reached her. “I’m sorry if I hurt you. It wasn’t intentional.”

She nodded without saying anything as she accepted the tissue and dried her eyes. They walked on in silence until they reached the Center. The three policemen who had stood guard had left, and two others had taken their place, leaning against their van, chatting. Stanislas could see two more unraveling bared wire around the Center’s perimeter, as though preparing for a mob assault.

At the walkway that led to the entrance, they paused. A smile brightened her worn face as she extended her hand, and she held his for a long moment. “I feel like such a fool,” she said. “I’m truly sorry for my temper. I guess Jules is right. I have worked too many days lately. One of these years I’ll learn to relax and let someone else save the world. Can we try another lunch? I’ll give you a call. We’ll talk about only what you want to.”