“... we thought of our part in that war as an act of humanity, Mark. There was a sense of brotherhood then. I’m sure of that, a continuity of life in what we tried to do...”
Weir’s thoughts were so vivid that he felt for a moment he might have spoken aloud, but there was no sound in the Mercedes except the smooth turn of the engine and the hiss of the tires on the snowy road. After crossing a wooden bridge the general made a turn to the left and followed the twisting graveled road leading to the Tranchet farmhouse.
A carved wooden sign at the gate read “LeRoi.” When she was eighteen, Marta Tranchet had married Emile LeRoi, a prosperous feed merchant from nearby LePont, a man fifteen years her senior. Both the elder Tranchets were dead by then and though Colonel Weir was unable to attend the wedding, Maggie had selected a silver tea service, Regal Eagle pattern, and Marta had written later that it looked so well, “so American,” on a table in the bow window of the old dining room. Scotty would remember the room, she said. She and Emile had decided to make the farm their home, she added. He knew how much the place meant to her.
That fateful rendezvous with the Germans was nearly four decades ago, Marta Tranchet-LeRoi was a wife, mother and Belgian matron, but when Scotty Weir thought of her it was always the frail eight-year-old child with frightened eyes who stood out in his mind.
Chapter Thirty-two
The courtyard, widened and paved, was flanked by towering junipers. There was no trace of the muddy potholes or rutted cart tracks, the icy ridges crusted like iron, through which Scotty Weir and his comrades had trudged that night so long ago. The old farm buildings, sheds and barn stood as before, but in excellent repair, and a new, rambling wing with bright blue shutters had been added to the main lodgings.
As Weir left the Mercedes the house door opened and Marta Tranchet came running down the steps toward him, a trim, middle-aged woman in tweeds and yellow sweater, arms in an open embrace, face tight with emotion. When the general became aware of the tears streaming down her cheeks, he turned quickly to the car, took from the back seat a bouquet of crimson tulips he had bought in Liege and filled her open arms with the flowers. Marta hid her face in the blossoms, then said, “It’s over, Scotty dear. Forgive me. Those were my tears for Mark. I couldn’t help it — the sight of you again.”
In the fireplace in the dining room logs were lit and the table was set for two.
“Emile is so sorry to have missed you,” Marta said, as she arranged the tulips in a crystal vase and put them in the window next to the tea set. “We had your cable from the States, of course, but until you called yesterday we didn’t know when to expect you. He is in Antwerp at a distributors’ meeting, very important to him.”
“There will be another time, Marta.”
“Shall we have sherry first and then our lunch before you tell what it is you need, Scotty? And it would make me less sad for you if you told me about Mark yourself. To think, we both had sons, and now there is just one between us...”
Weir held the sherry glass in one hand, letting the firelight play through the amber liquid as he talked. He had never told Marta of his estrangement from his son and he did not mention it to her now. He kept his voice low and calm, and he tried to speak without thinking too deeply, so he would not get tom on the shards of his emotions. He told her what he thought she wanted to hear: a loyal father, good son, family devotion, a life too short but well-lived. Details, an honor guard on motorcycle, condolence calls from the United States Army, burial in ground reserved for fellow police officers and the funeral on television... That had startled and intrigued her, not the kind of thing one would do in Belgium, she said.
The general felt he was operating on two levels — one the old comrade, benevolent but sorrowing, speaking of his dead son; the other the real Scotty Weir, an angry, agitated and determined man who was willing to play any role to get what he wanted.
He knew the observer at the Greenbrier would have long since decided that he was not out on some distant fairway, chipping balls, and that Laura Devers was, indeed, waiting in the guest cottage alone. At Philo Park, he knew Tarbert Weir had been taped and under surveillance, as well as the morose and stubborn Private Jackson. There had been a blond youth, too, neither quite German nor American, the general had remembered, sitting in the hotel lobby in Heidelberg sipping an aperitif and once again, briefly, at the airport, both places he might or might not have a perfect right to be.
Marta watched his rugged face, aware of the silence. “Poor dear Scotty,” she said, “always so brave and now to be brave alone...”
They lunched on an omelette with cepes, green salad and home-canned blue plums, all foods from the farm, Marta told him. There was a greenhouse off the old kitchen for a salad garden, everyone had them now, she said. Weir had turned down her suggestion that they share a bottle of Beaujolais with lunch.
“I understand,” she said. “We aren’t celebrating.” She poured herself a second sherry and sipped it through lunch.
After coffee Marta Tranchet-LeRoi went to a hall phone and put through a call to her son, Captain Alain Tranchet-LeRoi, on assignment with NATO outside Kassel, West Germany. Weir heard a brief murmur of voices and when she came back into the room, she said, “He asked me to call him when he is off duty, after five o’clock. I have a private number.”
“Good,” Weir said.
She hesitated a moment and then asked, “Can you do what is necessary without Alain’s help, Scotty?”
“The captain can make it easier,” he said. “I will tell him as little as possible, so he won’t be compromised.”
She sighed and her eyes were shining, as if her thoughts were full of tears. “You saved me, Scotty. I thought of that so often when I was growing up, when I married, and I thought of it when Alain was born. Whether it was fate’s accident or divine design, Private Weir was not just a part of my life, he was the reason for it. He let me live.”
“Then here are the things I would like Captain Alain to arrange for me,” Scotty Weir said, and handed her a sheet of Lufthansa stationery on which he had written his requests. “You can tell him I’ll be at his headquarters in Kassel by noontime tomorrow.”
Marta Tranchet read the short list in silence, folded the paper and put it in her sweater pocket. “Perhaps it would be better if we walked now, Scotty. We have always done that. You will hardly know the place.”
Outside General Weir turned up his coat collar and jammed his hands into his pockets, surprised by the sharp chill in the afternoon air. The sky had turned dark, as if it might snow or send down a cold rain, and the wind had the bite of late frost. When they left the graveled walks around the farmhouse and cut out across the plowed fields, Weir could feel his shoes break the crust of ice on the loamy soil and sink almost to the shoelaces.
Marta had put on a quilted down jacket, headscarf and rubber boots, and she strode along beside him in silence, her bowed head barely reaching his shoulder. She had lived most of her life on this farm, but she kept her head down, watching her footsteps as they walked, almost seeming to count and measure the distance.
“When we first married I wanted to put some kind of marker out here,” she said finally. “Something in stone and brass, just a few words, but permanent.” She laughed. “Emile has always been the practical one. He said that if memory is in our hearts, it needs no marker.”
After a half hour’s walk (had he really once crossed these fields in minutes?), they came to the place where Private Weir’s grenades had destroyed the lives of twenty German soldiers and left their armored tank a twist of rubble. The area seemed small now, peacefully rural, neatly fenced. The stand of locust trees, shattered and uprooted that night, had reseeded themselves into a tidy grove. The deep crater left by his grenades still showed in the earth, the sides and floors marked with the curves of contour plowing, the edges of the furrows marked by snow.