Brown-Eyed Girl (20 page)

Sally's rotten French wasn't going to get her through these letters tonight, she realized. But they might give her a few glimpses of Giselle's life. Exhausted, Sally slogged her way through a few, understanding only fragments, looking for impressions. Giselle wrote about her painting, happy when it was going well, despondent when she couldn't get what she saw on paper or canvas. Various Blums
(“cousine F——,” “mon chère frere,” “ma tante Y——”)
came and went; obviously, it was the Blum summer place. There was always some family crisis, the particulars of which were, at the moment, lost on Sally. Sometimes Giselle illustrated her letters with sketches of the people she wrote about, and the drawings of the relatives, for the most part, reminded Sally of Daumier's caricatures.

Giselle invariably referred to people by their initials, followed by dashes. “
P—— ici,”
she'd write, or “
E—— ecrit qu'il veut visiter la semaine prochaine.”
And there was someone she referred to as “M———” who appeared frequently, but evidently not frequently enough for Giselle. “
Jours heureux!”
she wrote, “
M—— arrive samedi.”
Sometimes P——, E——, and M——— were there together, Sally noticed. Paul, surely. Ernst? Who was M——?

A man. In a letter from July, 1936, there was a sketch of the three, captioned “
P——, E——, and M—— à la plage.”
Three young men in bathing gear, playing in the waves, their bodies and faces captured in spare lines. The dark man from the photograph in the café, squinting at the artist, head tilted to one side. Paul. Another man Sally had seen in other photos, slender, tall, light-eyed, smoking a cigarette even as he stood in the waves. M——. And Ernst, unmistakable, grinning, splashing the others. “
Viens ici,”
Giselle had written in that letter. “
Viens.”
You must come here. Come.

Did Meg go to Nice? Sally had no idea. She was incapable of thought. By eight, she had been at it for twelve hours. The fatigue and the French made the letters swim before her eyes. She was midway through Giselle's letters, missing most of what the woman had written, couldn't go any further. She could start again tomorrow.

They were all dead.

Sally ate canned soup, fixed a huge cup of orange spice tea. Thought about calling Hawk, but he was grading term papers, and she didn't want to bug him. Thought about calling Edna or Delice, but didn't feel like conversation. Thought about turning on the TV, listening to music, reading some crappy novel. But she couldn't concentrate. Her guitar stood in the corner of Meg's living room, next to the Christmas tree. She and Hawk and Edna and Tom had skied up into the Snowies, dragging sleds, to cut trees the previous weekend. Sally's tree was small and full and decorated with tiny white lights, a few shiny glass balls from the “Seasonal” aisle at the Safeway, and a dozen ornaments she'd picked up at a semi-okay local craft fair at the Ivinson Community Center.

It felt good to tune a guitar.

The Christmas she'd been in the seventh grade, the Byrds had released “Turn, Turn, Turn.” That had become her only real Christmas anthem. She remembered sitting for hours in the den with no lights on except the colored bulbs on the heavily festooned Christmas tree (great Jews, those Alders!), looking at the tree and listening to the song, over and over. The music had turned something over in her that winter. She was never the same.

Something else was turning over in her, now. She dragged a dining room chair over by her own small, hopeful tree, put on fingerpicks, touched the strings, began to sing. Sang the songs she'd loved so long, Byrds' arrangements of Seeger and Dylan, some early pretty Neil Young stuff, meditative Joni Mitchell and Stephen Stills. Didn't want to sing her own songs, face herself, just now. Wanted the comfort of the company of other singers and songwriters.

When she found herself singing Emmylou Harris's “Boulder to Birmingham,” she knew she was going to cry, but didn't want to stop. It was a great song about surviving what you'd loved and regretted most. Everybody's life broke in half somehow—her own, Hawk's. Maybe Meg's. Maybe Ernst's. Who the hell knew who else's? Whoever lives, survives. It was like being in an earthquake, and having the ground open up under you, and suddenly finding yourself at the bottom of a rip in the planet. And climbing out. And finding the world you'd known only hours or minutes or seconds before utterly different.

Meg and Ernst and Giselle and Paul, the man called M——, to see such lives in the shadow of death, shook her to the bone. Death in the midst of love and life, so horrifyingly everywhere. Death could kill even love. And Meg had survived.

Death leered at Sally, murdered a cat, cut a brake line, scrawled a swastika, scattered papers. Viciously attacked Maude. It could have been her. The chasm had opened up, and the past spilled into the present. Maybe the future. Sally choked her way through the rest of the song, then put her head down and wept.

After nineteen term papers, Hawk had had it. He eyed his dirty coffee cup, grimacing. Got up from his desk and stretched. Looked around and thought he'd made his house pretty homey, for him. He'd bought the bed. And a dresser and bedside table. A reading light. In the living room he'd put a chair, a television, a desk with a lamp. His books were on the shelves. He'd moved his box of camp cooking stuff into drawers in his kitchen. Cozy.

But it was ten at night, and he had barely moved from his desk all day. He was restless, felt like a walk. He put on a down jacket, stuffed the legs of his jeans into feltlined rubber boots, headed out the door into the silent town, hands jammed deep in the pockets of his coat. He was determined to maintain his independence, much as he was enjoying spending time with Sally. Still, he ended up, as he'd known he would, standing in front of her house. The house was dark except for the little white lights on her Christmas tree.

He rang the doorbell.

After a moment, her voice came, weak and shaky, on the other side of the door. “Who's there?”

“It's me,” he said.

She opened the door with one hand, was holding her guitar in the other. Her chin was trembling and there were tears running down her face. He stepped inside, shut the door. Took the guitar, leaned it against the wall. Put his arms around her and stood there holding her for a long, long time.

Part Three

Chapter 21
Blue-Eyed Devils

Christmas came and New Year's went. The weather continued snowy and blowy. One morning Sally woke up hot and guilty in the midst of an extremely kinetic erotic dream. Her waking mind could recall only that the dream had moved from place to place (her car, an empty apartment in some faceless city, a park, other places she couldn't remember). The sex had been remarkable. The partner had been a morphing man whose identities included both individuals she had, er, known, and unidentifiable but familiar-seeming strangers. It seemed they/he had blue eyes.

The dream memory came to her in a flash, as such things do, at the same instant that she realized that it was Saturday and she was wrapped tightly around a deeply sleeping Hawk Green. That was where the guilt came in. One of the shape-shifter's morphs had certainly been Sam Branch. She had seen Sam various times in the months since she'd been back in Laramie, and had played music with him and Dwayne and the Millionaires on several occasions. Sam had aged pretty well, but Sally hadn't been the least bit attracted to him, no matter what kind of moves he tried out. She was, after all, a professional historian trained to keep the past, well, past, and the past they shared could be plausibly described as vile. As for the present, he was clearly still scruple-impaired.

But she'd been jamming fairly regularly with the band, and tonight they had a gig, a party Sam and Dwayne had given for five years, which they called the Millionaires' Ball. Everybody including Delice admitted that this was the party of the year. Sam had told Sally to dress sexy. She loved to dress up for parties, but the idea that he might think she was doing it for him kind of spoiled things.

The hell with it. A dream was a dream, and you could giggle about it and forget it. Look at it this way—there had been a number of morphs in her dream man/men, and Sam Branch was hardly the strangest one. It seemed Ernst Malthus (whose eyes may have been blue, or green, or the color of the sea off the Côte d'Azur) had made an appearance and that was truly ill, all things considered. But then so, she admitted with a sigh, was Sally. Her subconscious mind leaned so heavily toward history that she had once actually dreamed she was doing it with Thomas Jefferson.

Well. Management not responsible for the behavior of the subconscious mind. But very much responsible for choices and actions. You didn't have to do everything you thought about doing. That was, she grinned to herself, the difference between Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

On the other hand, some things you thought about were definitely worth acting on immediately. She was still pleasantly warmed up, and lying next to a very real, nicely shaped man who had come to her in her hour of darkness, stayed with her through the holidays, and was giving no sign of looking for the exit. She shifted a little and kissed him on the ear. Hawk said, “Mmmphh.” She stroked his chest, moved her hand down his hip, caressed his thigh. Hawk muttered, “Huh?”

“This is your wake-up call,” she whispered, rolling him on his back. Even though he appeared to be still mostly asleep, he smiled when she crawled on top of him.

Ride, Sally, ride.

By nine they were at the gym, Hawk for a Saturday morning basketball game, Sally to run like a laboratory rat on a treadmill and to pump various machines. Then they went to work. Hawk went home to write a grant proposal. Sally had decided to take a break from the basement. She'd finally worked up to telling Maude she'd really like to see what was in the closet, but Maude had put her off. She didn't have a key, she said, and they might as well wait until Ezra was back from Africa. He was due any day.

Maude was jerking her around, Sally thought, but there was nothing she could do about it. All the boiling impatience of her forty-five erratic years wouldn't get her in that closet without the key, a locksmith, or a crowbar. The key was promised, any day. So she decided that she'd go to the library to see what she could find out about Europe in the 1930s, about people with names like Dunwoodie, Blum, and Malthus.

What she learned didn't particularly surprise her. For those who had money (and as far as she could tell, that included virtually all the people she was most interested in), the continent was, well, a moveable feast. Meg's scrapbooks had testified to the fact that a woman with the right job and the right attitude could go almost anywhere. How much easier still it would have been for a man like Ernst Malthus to move around, welcome wherever he went.

Clearly, throughout the '30s, the Nazis were already making their plans, already watching and plotting. But they were not, by any means, all making the same plans. Some drew up designs for crematoria; others were plotting to kill their Führer. And it was clear that lots of Germans, still dazed at what they were permitting to happen, were hoping hard that they wouldn't be forced into having to take a stand.

She found a few references to Giselle Blum, and one reproduction of a painting in a catalogue for a 1985 exhibit at a museum in Amsterdam, featuring painters of the Holocaust. The picture, titled “
En repose”
and dated 1938, was recognizably a portrait of that lean man, M— —, sitting in a chair, reading a book. Blue eyes. She stared hard at the picture, knowing that the man reminded her of someone but unable to place him. He looked a little like Daniel Ellsberg, but that wasn't it.

According to the painter's biography, Giselle Blum had been murdered at Auschwitz, on the day she arrived at the death camp. It was common practice, the catalogue explained, for the Nazis to take male Jewish deportees off to work them to death, and to kill Jewish women quickly. Sally's eyes narrowed with fury and grief. But she knew how it had been. In the eyes of serious Nazis, there was absolutely no reason to let Jewish women live; they were no more or less than incubators for more nasty Jews.

On this first foray into the library, she pulled a bunch of books about Nazi Germany off the shelf, but found no reference to an Ernst Malthus. The only Malthus mentioned at all was someone named Rainer Malthus, a young army officer attached to the staff of General Ludwig Beck. When Beck resigned from the army in 1938 in protest against the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Rainer Malthus also quit the army, becoming Beck's secretary. Beck was soon among the leaders of a group of German officers, aristocrats, and diplomats looking for a way to overthrow Hitler. The group began to refer to itself as the Kreisau Circle because they met often at Kreisau, the Silesian estate of Helmut von Moltke, another central figure. But they had another name, given to them by the agents of Himmler's secret police, who infiltrated their innermost ranks. To the Nazis who watched them, the resistance was known as the
Schwarzekappelle.
Black Orchestra.

Beck became a ringleader in the botched plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944, and Malthus, as his aide, had faced the same firing squad as his commander when the scheme failed. Was Rainer Malthus related to Ernst? Why did he end up in the assassination plot? Obviously she'd need to do more research, but maybe not on this guy. Ernst was her quarry. Still, she wanted to know more. The UW library didn't have any books specifically on the Kreisau Circle, but she had found some citations on the German Resistance. She filled out slips for interlibrary loan, left them at the loan desk. She probably could have found the information she wanted by surfing the Web, posting queries on the Internet, but she had never quite trusted the safety of cyberspace, especially for stuff about Nazi history. Who knew what evil lurked behind the bytes and bits of machines?

On the other extreme from sending a message in a bottle out on the Web waves, there was the personal approach. Whenever Sally had found herself digging into stuff that was outside her field, she'd known that she could always ask a colleague for some pointers. On many occasions, she started out by consulting friends, and had saved who the hell knew how much time by listening to people who knew the subject. There were one or two people at UCLA she could call.

And there was, of course, a simpler option. She could start by finding out what Maude knew about the Blums and Ernst Malthus and anybody else Meg had known during her years in Paris. Yes, it was definitely getting to be time to start asking Maude questions.

Sally hit the library catalogue one more time, then went back to the stacks to get books on international banking in interwar Europe. She hoped, but did not expect, to find some mention of the banker, Paul Blum. His name didn't appear, but she got a pretty good picture of a very screwed-up situation, a shell game so huge and complicated that nobody had yet sorted it all out. By the end of the day, she had a picture of bankers as pivot players in a very dangerous and tangled network involving national loyalties and cosmopolitan sensibilities, profit motives and patriotism, love of big stakes, and fear of heavy consequences. She'd always thought bankers were sober, conservative types, but in Europe during and between the wars, the job of making and taking loans, tracking money and storing capital was so political and volatile, so riddled with big scores and big mistakes, that the term “risky business” acquired scary new dimensions. Top it off with the fact that lots of these guys were Jewish, doomed if they opted to keep playing instead of running, and you had a gut-churning situation.

On her way to check books out, she glanced through a window and saw the sun sinking lower in the sky. She dumped the books on a desk, went in search of a couple of volumes on the history and business of diamonds. Maybe she'd find Ernst there. Added them to her pile, and headed for the circulation desk.

She needed time for a long bubble bath before getting dressed to go out. She had managed to talk Hawk into going to the Millionaire's Ball only by reminding him that she would be wearing the kind of dress that would give people ideas, and she preferred to hear those ideas from him. He'd protested that the only party featuring Sam Branch that he had any desire to attend was a funeral, but then she'd offered to try the dress on for him. “Trying on clothes isn't exactly a guy thing, Sally,” he'd grumbled, pouring himself a cup of coffee. Then she'd come into the kitchen with the dress on. Blue velvet, form-fitting and slit to the knee, buttoning all the way up the front. Or down, depending on the situation. His expression didn't change. “What time do I pick you up?” he asked.

Sally was not the only one who cleaned up pretty good. Hawk arrived at eight, carrying his down coat and wearing a black Armani suit, black shirt, black tie. “Close your mouth, Mustang, you look like an idiot,” he said sweetly, sidling in.

Sally reclaimed the lower half of her jaw. “God!” she finally exploded. “Since when do you dress like that?”

“Well, ah, honey,” he began, blushing slightly, “you remember I told you that I had a little run of good luck working in Peru for this exploration outfit out of Houston?” She nodded. He cleared his throat. “See, I had this Brazilian girlfriend who'd grown up with quite a little bit of money, and she used to say that nothing got her hotter than drinking a couple of martinis at Cafe Annie at lunch, then spending the afternoon shopping at Saks and Neiman Marcus. Usually I let her do her own shopping and just met her back at the Ritz in time for an afternoon nap, but she got me to go along once on the grounds that I needed some clothes that would make a really good impression and that she wasn't wearing any underwear that day.”

“Trying on clothes isn't exactly a guy thing,” she mocked.

Hawk shrugged.

“Too much information,” Sally said.

“Right,” Hawk agreed, and grinned. “You don't look so bad yourself.”

The party was in the alleged ballroom at the Holiday Inn. You couldn't say all that much for the decor, which consisted of a linoleum floor and some beige drapes on the big windows. But the bar was well stocked and fully open, and much to Sally's amazement, there was food. She had never been at a party given by any member of Branchwater at which actual solid food had been available. And what food! Clearly Dwayne, always a devotee of the Little Debbie school of catering, had let Nattie take charge, and she had had the bright idea to hire cousin Burt and John-Boy and tell them money was only slightly an object. To Sally, the buffet table looked like the mirage a dazed and starving Californian would hallucinate when marooned in the culinary desert of Wyoming.

Guests were only beginning to arrive, and Sally went straight to the stage to get ready for the sound check.

Hawk went to the bar, requested a Budweiser, and sauntered over to talk to Dickie, who was pounding sushi and washing it down with Coca-Cola. The sheriff looked the part in a dark brown western-cut suit and brand-new Stetson hat.

“Glad to see you got the night off, Dick,” Hawk greeted him. “Are you sure the criminals will be able to get along without you?”

“If there's one thing I know,” Dickie replied, “it's criminals. And if you consider the fact that this party is being given by a banker and a Realtor, you're led to the obvious conclusion that the most corrupt assholes in Laramie will be here tonight. Perfect place for a peace officer, wouldn't you say?” he asked, cramming another piece of rainbow roll into his mouth. Casually, he glanced at Sam Branch, who was tuning his guitar and surreptitiously eying Sally's butt as she bent over to adjust the volume on the vocal monitors. “Good thing most of them are mostly reformed.”

“Present company included,” Hawk observed.

“That's so,” Dickie agreed genially.

By nine, the band, decked out in tuxedos with the exception, of course, of Sally, was ready to start. The ballroom was filling up with people who were, Dickie noted, “dressed to impress.” Quite a few of them had been around when the original Branchwater had plied its raunchy blend of country, rock, and soul. For years on end, they'd paid money to buy watered drinks and listen to Sam and Dwayne play, and they had been glad to hear that Mustang Sally was back in the saddle. When the Millionaires opened up with “Wild Night,” the dance floor filled immediately.