"Yes, Uncle Carl."
"When we took those walks when you were a child, and I told you things about your ancestors, was your mind paying attention to me, Jean Louis? Tell me truthfully now."
"Well, you know how children are, Uncle Carl."
"The truth."
"No, Uncle Carl. I went with you because as a German you could get the best patisserie at the time. I thought about chocolate."
"And the manuscripts I gave you?"
"I must confess, I drew pictures on them. Paper was scarce, Uncle Carl."
"And the name of our possession? That all of us share?"
"That stone. Uctut?"
"Yes. Its real name," said Uncle Carl.
"I forgot, Uncle Carl."
"I see," said Carl Johann Liebengut, president of Bavarian Electronics Works. "So you think I am a German uncle of a French nephew, and this is such a fine autumn day, what is this crazy uncle doing talking about death in New York City, yes?"
"You put it rather harshly, Uncle."
"True, no?"
"All right, true," said Jean Louis. His gray vest tailored precisely to his lean form hardly wrinkled as he brought one leg over the other and formed an arch with his long delicate fingers in front of his face. He rested his chin on this arch.
"You are no more French than I am German, Jean Louis," said Carl Johann Liebengut, and such was the coolness of his voice that deJuin forgot about the sunshine and the bookstores and the autumn green of the leaves outside on Rue St. Germain.
"I said you are not French," said Carl.
"I heard you," said deJuin.
"You are Actatl."
"You mean, I share a bit of this blood."
"Actatl is what you are. Everything else is a disguise because the world would not let you be Actatl."
"My father is a deJuin. So am I."
"Your father was a deJuin and he gave you that disguise. Your mother gave you the blood. I gave you the knowledge, and you apparently rejected it. I am too old to wage the war of survival that is now required, and you, Jean Louis, apparently do not want to. So a thousand years of our heritage, maybe more, dies this day. Monsieur deJuin, may you have a long and happy life. I go."
"Uncle Carl, wait."
"For what, Monsieur deJuin?"
"For me to listen. Come, I will go with you. If I was unattentive as a child, let me listen now. I am not saying I will take up the standards of the war of our tribe, but I am saying I will not let a millenia of history succumb without even access to my ear."
As a child, the tale of the last king of the Actatl has amused Jean Louis because of the discrepancies of his childhood memory-the attenuation of unimportant things.
They walked along Rue St. Germain, up the Left Bank, past restaurants and cinemas and coffee shops and tobacco shops, strung along the way like so many minor potholes to collect loose change. At Rue du Bac, they turned right and crossed the Seine over the Pont Royal Bridge. Now as deJuin heard the story of the last king he could appreciate the man's brilliant assessment of a sociological avalanche, one that would crush the existing Indian culture to pumice. The Maya had not known this. The Inca had not known this, nor had the all-powerful Aztec. And they were no more.
But here was Uncle Carl, talking to him about symbols on a sacred stone. Every nuance, every meaning was as clear as on the day the priests of the Actatl had made their last sacrifice in the verdant Mexican hills.
"Why have we not made sacrifices until recently?" asked deJuin. "Back in our ancestors' time, it was a monthly thing. And now we use it only for revenge?"
"It was not thought wise on one hand. And on the other, the sacrifice of the last of the Actatl city was interpreted as the final eternal sacrifice. But if you should look upon the stone and see the living lines as I have done, if you had gone last year as you were supposed to, you would have seen everything in the stone. The meaning of the earth and rivers and sky. To see everything we have heard about. There it is, our history. Shared by no one else, Jean Louis. Ours. You don't know how insufferable those Nazi rallies were, but I had to do it for the tribe, just in case Hitler should win. What had started out as a protection society for the tribe eventually became a network of each of us helping the other. Then came the desecration of Uctut."
"And just the death of this one boy would not do?"
"Of course not. First, Uctut demands that the United States bear the responsibility for the desecration. And what is the life of a Negro worth?"
"You forget, our real skin is brown, Uncle," said deJuin.
"Have you decided to take up the case of our family?"
"I want to show you something," Jean Louis said. "That is all. Do you know why I went into computers?"
"No," said the older man, who was having difficulty keeping up with the long strides of the tall, thin man who moved so effortlessly and so quickly while seeming just to stroll.
"Because, it was untainted by what has made me feel uncomfortable all my life. Computers were pure. I will now show you what is not pure for me."
And this bridge led to the Louvre, a giant square of a castle with an immense courtyard that had been transformed into a museum more than two hundred years before. A gaggle of Japanese tourists coming on in phalanx marched into a side exhibit following a leader with a flag.
Four Americans laughing noisily brushed aside a vendor who offered to take their pictures.
"It takes a full week just to properly peruse, not even to examine, the contents of this museum," said deJuin.
"We don't have a week," said Uncle Carl.
The younger man smiled. "We don't need a week." He spread his right arm slowly in a wide arc, as if offering the entire museum. "I spent, if you would total the time, literally months here in my student days. China, ancient Greece, Europe, even some modern South American painters are all represented here."
"Yes, yes." Carl was becoming impatient.
"I never felt at home with any of them. None. Since childhood, even though Father told me our family went back to Charlemagne, I never felt at home in France. I felt a little bit at home in computers because it was a life without a past."
"So what are you saying?"
"I am saying, dear Uncle, that I am no European."
"So you will help?"
"Help, yes. Run at someone with a stone knife, no."
Uncle Carl became flustered. He angrily announced he had not come to Paris to organize a committee but to seek help in fighting a holy war of the tribe.
"And how is that war going, Uncle?"
"Disastrous," said Carl.
"So let us get it going right, eh? Come. We think."
"The knife is holy," said Carl, lest his nephew think he was surrendering a point.
"Success is holier," said Jean Louis deJuin. He looked around the spacious and awesomely elegant stone courtyard of the Louvre for the last time as a Frenchman and silently said his goodbye to Europe in his heart.
Listening to Uncle Carl, it did not take deJuin long to see what had gone wrong with the family. The Actatl had been content to hide, not only for generations, but for centuries, and when a time came that action was demanded, action was beyond the capacity of the family.
He hailed a cab and ordered it to the small apartment he kept for his mistress on Avenue de-Bretuil, a spacious two floors of rooms with large rococco molding on the ceiling. The houseboy, a North African dressed in a silver embroidered waistcoat, served them coffee with heavy dollops of sweet cream. Uncle Carl ate three patisserie, gleaming in syrupy sugar over candied fruit set in an exquisitely light flaky crust, while Jean Louis took a pad from his pocket and wrote down several formulas. DeJuin, oblivious to his uncle, did not answer questions about what he was doing. At one point, he phoned into his office and asked for computer time. He read several formulas to an assistant over the phone and fifteen minutes later got his answer.