In no way, Ben, were you responsible for the death of your first wife, as this couple will confirm. How I wish I could have shared this with you when I was alive. But for various reasons, I could not.
You will soon understand. Someone-I think it was La Rochefoucauld or one of those seventeenth-century French aphorists-put it best: We can rarely bring ourselves to forgive those who have helped us.
And one last literary reference, a line from Eliot’s “Gerontion”: After such knowledge, what forgiveness?
All my love,
Dad
FIFTY-SEVEN
Tears coursed down Molly’s cheeks, and she bit her lower lip. She blinked rapidly and stared at the note, then finally looked up at me. I didn’t know where to begin, what to ask about. So I wrapped my arms around her, gave her a big, long hug, and said nothing for a long while. I felt her rib cage hiccup with quiet sobs. After a minute or two her breathing became more regular, and she pulled away from me. Her eyes shone, and for an instant they were the eyes of the four-year-old in the photograph.
“Why?” she said at last.
“Why… what?”
Her eyes searched my face, back and forth, back and forth, and yet she was silent, as if trying to decide for herself what she really meant. “The photograph,” she said.
“A message. What else could it be?”
“You don’t think it could be… a simple, straightforward gift from… the heart?”
“You tell me, Molly. Is that like him?”
She sniffled, shook her head. “Dad was wonderful, but you’d never call him straightforward. I think he learned how to be cryptic from his friend James Jesus Angleton.”
“Okay. So where was your grandmother’s house in Canada?”
Again she shook her head. “God, Ben, I was four. We spent exactly one summer there. I have virtually no recollection of it.”
“Think,” I said.
“I can’t! I mean, what is there to think about? I don’t know where it was! Somewhere in French Canada, probably in Quebec. Jesus!”
I put my hands on either side of her face, held her head steady, stared directly into her eyes.
“What are you-cut it out, Ben!”
“Try it at least.”
“Try-hey, hold on there. We have an agreement. You assured me-you promised me-you wouldn’t try to read my thoughts.”
trem… tremble… trembling?…
It was just a fragment, a word or a sound I suddenly heard.
“You’re trembling,” I said.
She looked at me quizzically. “No, I’m not. What are you-”
“Tremble. Trembling.”
“What are you-?”
“Concentrate! Trembling. Tremble. Trem-”
“What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “No, I do know. I do know. I heard you-you thought it-”
She looked back into my eyes, by turns defiant and bewildered. Then, a moment later, she said, “I really have no idea-”
“Try. Think. Trembling. Trembley? Canada. Your grandmother. Trembley or something? Was that your grandmother’s name?”
She shook her head. “She was Grandmother Hale. Ellen. Grandpa was Frederick. No one in the family was Trembley.”
I sighed in frustration. “Okay. Trem. Canada. Trembling. Canada…”
… tromblon…
“There’s something more,” I said. “You’re thinking-or maybe you’re subvocalizing-something, some thought, some name, something your conscious mind isn’t entirely aware of.”
“What do you-?”
Impatient, I interrupted: “What’s ‘Tromblon’?”
“What?-oh, my God-Tremblant. Lac Tremblant!”
“Where-?”
“The house was on a lake in Quebec. I remember now. Lac Tremblant. Beneath a big, beautiful mountain called Mont-Tremblant. Her house was on Lac Tremblant. How did I know that?”
“You remembered it. Not enough to speak it, but it was there anyway, in your brain. Probably you heard the name mentioned dozens of times when you were little, and you stored it.”
“And you think that’s important?”
“I think that’s crucial. I think that’s why your father left that photograph of a place no one would be able to recognize but you. A place that’s probably to be found in no records anywhere. So that if anyone got into this box somehow, they’d come to a dead end. The most anyone else except you could do would be to identify you and your parents, but then they’d be stymied.”
“I was almost stymied myself.”
“I suppose he counted on you to summon it up, track it down, something. This was for you. I’m quite sure of it. Your father left that for you to find.”
“And-”
“And to go there.”
“You think that’s where the… the documents are?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me greatly.” I stood up, straightened my pants and jacket.
“What are you doing?”
“I don’t want to waste another minute.”
“Where? Where are we going?”
“You’re staying here,” I said. I looked around the conference room.
“You think I’m safe here?”
“I’ll tell the bank manager we’ll require the use of this room for the rest of the day. No one is to be admitted. If we have to pay a rental charge for the use of it, we’ll pay. A locked conference room inside a bank vault-we’re not going to get more secure than that, at least not on more than a moment’s notice.” I turned to leave.
“Where are you going?” Molly called out.
By way of reply, I held up the scrap of envelope.
“Wait. I need a phone in here. A phone-and a fax machine.”
“For what?”
“Just get it, Ben.”
I glanced at her with surprise, nodded, and left the room.
Rue du Cygne-the street of the swan-was a small, quiet street just a few blocks from what was once the Marché des Innocents, the great central market of Paris, the place Emile Zola called le ventre de Paris, “the belly of Paris.” After the old neighborhood was cleared in the late 1960s, a number of gargantuan and impressively ugly modernistic structures were put up, including Le Forum des Halles, galleries and restaurants, and the biggest subway station in the world.
Number 7 was a shabby late-nineteenth-century apartment building, squat and dark and musty inside. The door to apartment 23 was of thick, splintery paneled wood that had, long ago, been painted white and was now quite gray.
Long before I had reached the second floor, I could hear the low, menacing bark of a large dog from within the apartment. I approached and knocked.
After a long time, during which the dog’s bark grew more shrill and insistent, I heard slow footsteps, the tread of an old man or woman, and then the rattle of a metal chain, which I assumed was the door being unbolted from the other side.
The door swung open.
For an instant, the barest fraction of a second, it was like being in a horror film-the footsteps, the rattle of a chain-and the face of the creature that now stood in the shadows of the opened door.
It was a woman; the clothes were those of an old woman of bent posture, and the hair atop the head was long, silver-gray, and pulled back in a loose chignon. But the old woman’s face was almost unspeakably ugly, a mass of welts and growths and lumps surrounding a kindly pair of eyes and a small, deformed, twisted mouth.
I stood in shocked silence. Even if I had the wherewithal to speak, I had no name, nothing more than an address. I stepped forward and wordlessly showed her the yellowed scrap of envelope. In the background, from the depths of the dark apartment, the dog whined and strained.