He looked devastated. Even though she felt sorry for him, she still had to know the truth.
"Did you kill Lili? Make an example of her death?" She watched him closely.
He shook his head. "From an airplane? I told you, I flew in from. . ."
"Who did it?" she interrupted.
"Someone's trying to frame me," he said. He began rummaging through papers near the window.
"What are you looking for, Thierry?"
"Something that tells me who I really am." Thierry picked up papers, never taking his eyes off her. "All this reveals is. . ." But he couldn't say it.
"That your mother was Jewish and your father a Nazi?" she finished for him.
"What does this mean?" Thierry said with a strange look. He pulled Nathalie Rambuteau's photo out of the silver frame and lifted up a scrap of paper. "Is this my Jew name?" He thrust it at Aimee.
She took it. Sarah Tovah Strauss, nee April 12, 1928, was printed on a yellowed, otherwise blank scrap of paper.
"Can you believe that?" he said. "Even with all my work in Les Blancs Nationaux I've never really felt like a Nazi," he laughed.
He hurled the frame on the floor. Nathalie Rambuteau stared up, filtered by glittering shards of glass.
"Maybe that's because I'm half-Jew," he said.
SHE HATED going to the Archives of France but if any record of Sarah Tovah Strauss existed, besides in the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine where it was not, that was the only place it would be. The old palace, glacially cold and littered with rodent droppings in its corners, was open late on Wednesdays. Napoleon's records and Nazi documentation along with most of French history filled much of the adjoining mansions, hôtel de Soubise and hôtel de Rohan. Her level-two access card allowed her entry twenty-four hours a day.
She followed a clerk with a thinly curled moustache who reeked of garlic-laced rabbit stew. They entered a glassed-in lobby, filled with large wooden reading tables.
"The material is quite heavy. Use a cart." He pointed to a high-tech metal wire construction resembling an Italian sports car.
Off this parquet-floored area, open and light due to myriad skylights, stood racks and racks of leather-and cloth-bound volumes.
She approached the small checkout desk. "Bonjour, I'm looking for records from 1939 to 1945 in Archives of the Commissariat general on the Jewish question."
"Something specific?" the librarian asked. "We have thousands of files."
"Strauss, Sarah Tovah," Aimee said.
The librarian clicked on the computer. "Living or deceased?"
"Well," Aimee stumbled. "That's why I'm here."
"I only ask because some patrons already know." The librarian smiled understandingly. "Find the AN—AJ 38 division. The Deceased section is to the left, oddly numbered. Aisle 33, Row W has volumes with the names starting with S. Unknown or nonreported deceased are to the right." She indicated a much smaller area. "Please call if you need assistance. Good luck."
At the entrance to the racks, a sign proclaimed that the blue labels were German Occupation Documents, orange labels were Allied Forces documentation, and green labels were French National Records. Most of the racks were filled with blue-labeled material. Aimee knew the German reputation for recording details but this was staggering. She picked up a sagging blue volume tied with string and read a five-page itemized list of the contents of a clock factory at 34 rue Coche-Perce owned by a Yad Stolnitz. A red line had been drawn through his name. She often walked on narrow, medieval rue Coche-Perce, which angled into busy rue St. Antoine, full of boutiques and sushi bars. Once it had thrived with small Jewish bakeries and falafel stands.
She climbed up the small library stairs and found the Service for Jewish Affairs, the 11—112, of the Sicherheitsdienst-SD, the intelligence agency of the SS. Among the S volumes, "St-" alone took up sixteen volumes. She loaded up her high-tech cart carefully with yellowed documents and wheeled it to a reading table.
Sadly, Aimee sat and turned page after page, filled with Parisian Jews who were no more. Straus, Strausz, Strauz, she read, going down columns of names. Every single derivation of Strauss had been drawn through with a red line. There was a Sara Straus-man listed but no Sarah Tovah Strauss. After two hours her eyes ached and she felt guilty. Guilty for being part of a race that had reduced generations to ashes or ooze in mass-grave lime pits.
Convoy lists composed most of the Unknown section. Jews who had arrived at death camps were checked off but no further records existed. No Sarah Tovah Strauss listed here either.
Back in the Deceased section, Aimee discovered that the Germans also cross-referenced deportees with their arrondissements in Paris. They had sectioned the city into areas with Judenfrei status. Probably the idea of that Gestapo brown-noser in the memo to Eichmann who'd worried he couldn't get them to the ovens fast enough. She wondered how human beings could do this to each other.
Well then, she would start with the 4th arrondissement, the Marais, where most of the Jews had lived. Streets, alleys, and boulevards listed names and addresses. Forty minutes later she found a household at 86 rue Payenne cross-referenced from an Strauss, Ruben with this under it:
A red line ran through the name, like all the others on the page. The Strauss family were routed via the Vel d'Hiver transit camp. Sarah T. Strauss had entered Drancy prison and then was listed on Convoy number 10 to A, meaning Auschwitz. How could this Sarah Strauss be Thierry's mother?
Aimee noticed how bright the red line through Sarah's name was compared to the others. Odd, she thought, every other red line had faded to a rose hue. It almost looked to her as though the A had been squeezed next to the non-Aryan classification column, with its bold black J for Jew. As if the A for Auschwitz had been added later. But that didn't fit with what she'd discovered.
Claude Rambuteau had seen Sarah alive when she handed them the infant Thierry. Aimee remembered Javel's comment. He'd mentioned the bright-blue-eyed Jew who'd given birth to a boche bastard.
As she returned past the desk, wiping her hands of dust, the librarian said that it was their policy for the librarian to reshelve.
"Find what you were looking for?" she inquired.
"Yes, but it raises even more questions," Aimee replied.
"A lot of people who come here say that. Try the National Library in Washington or the Wiener Library in London. Those are the major sources besides Yad Vashem in Jerusalem."
Aimee thanked her and slowly walked down the sweeping marble stairway. She felt dirty after touching those pages and her fingers reeked with a special musty smell that clung to the catalog of the dead. At home she collapsed and thought over all the events of the day. She took a long shower and stayed under the hot water until it ran out. But she couldn't get rid of the smell or erase the red lines from her mind.
THURSDAY
Thursday Morning
"I'VE GOTTEN EVERYTHING CHANGED since the break-in," Rene said. "Here's your new access code and keys to the safe."
"HOPALONG?" She laughed, eagerly punching in her new access code. "Where do you get these, Rene?"
"My perverted childhood spent with pulp Westerns." He winked. "I'm CASSIDY."