Cries of the Lost (8 page)

“That she wouldn’t talk about it.”

“And that was okay?”

“You never met Florencia. Never has a person’s privacy been so exuberantly preserved. ‘No, Arturo, eez such a beautiful day and I’m sooo tired. Let’s bring fresh fruit and sausage to the park and drink some wine.’ ”

“You just sounded exactly like a Spanish woman.”

“Heard it enough. And technically, she wasn’t Spanish. She was Basque. Florencia Etxarte. Her parents, whom I never met, were born in the Basque region, but then moved to Chile where she was born. They were academics, and wanted her to have an American education, so they shipped her up to Philadelphia where she went to Swarthmore for undergrad, and the Wharton School at Penn after that. My postgrad was in mathematics, but Wharton let us in on their statistics courses. That’s where I met her. That year, she got a letter saying her parents had both died. She cried nearly inconsolably for about a week, but we never went to a funeral, and she never went back to Chile. That’s all I know.”

“That’s it?”

“I tried to learn more after she died, but according to every available database, there was no Florencia Etxarte, or couples named Etxarte who died in 1996, or any other year that would fit their age range. Her birth certificate and Chilean passport in that name notwithstanding.”

“We have birth certificates and passports for people who don’t exist,” she said.

“Exactly.”

“You never ask me about my childhood.”

“You told me you were adopted by an American sailor named Fitzgerald who brought you and your mother to the U.S., who died when you were eighteen. Your mother moved back to Japan and you stayed. If you want to tell me more, that’s up to you.”

“So that’s how that happened. Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

“Basically.”

T
HERE’S
A well-supported theory that the mind works better when thrust into unfamiliar surroundings. I spent the next few days testing that theory on Florencia’s code, while Natsumi explored the exquisitely beautiful surroundings of the French Riviera both on foot and by BMW. It was a satisfying division of labor, made more so by the keen attentions of the Lheuruexs, whose kitchen provided a steady stream of delicious food served everywhere but inside.

They also let me use their printer to make a few dozen hard copies of the code, better to study in bright daylight and to keep track of possible patterns with pen and pencil. On the tech side, I exported the Word document into Excel to cut down on the manual counting. This is how I made the basic determination that the letter ‘a,’ the most commonly used letter in Spanish, appeared twenty percent less frequently than it should have. Likewise, the most common Spanish consonants, ‘d,’ ‘l’ and ‘q,’ were grossly underrepresented. I did the same analysis against frequent English letters with the same disappointing results.

Knowing there were code breakers in the world using software that could crack this thing in minutes didn’t help. It wasn’t just feelings of inadequacy. Florencia had hidden the information for a reason, and until I knew what it was, I dared not share the secret with anyone else.

“So what’s the big problem?” Natsumi asked me, after I showed her my progress.

“Not all letters have the same number all the time. After you get past nine, they have to start doubling up. And even if I knew which numbers corresponded with which letter, the order is jumbled—it could read backwards, forwards, diagonally, or a combination thereof—and there’s no word spacing. And my Spanish could be better, though I think it’s good enough if I could get the numbers right.”

“So the code has a code.”

“Something like that. A key that lives somewhere else.”

“That lives here,” she said. “At the Villa Egretta Garzetta. If, in fact, that’s why the flash drive was taped to the postcard.”

“Agreed. Florencia was a purposeful woman. There has to be a connection.”

As far as I knew, she’d never been to St. Jean, but then again, what did I know? The hotel had been run by the Lheureux family continuously since the thirties. Do I dare ask if their register listed a girl named Florencia? And if so, what would that tell me?

“Go ahead, ask them,” said Natsumi, after I gave voice to the thought. “Why not?”

“Seems like a security breach. Even if it was possible to do.”

She used two fingers to stick me in the shoulder.

“The bank thing has you twitchy. Rationally, this is low risk, high potential reward. Like you say, the probabilities are on our side.”

As is often the case, Natsumi had a really good point. Further proof that two brains were always better than one.

“Okay, you do the asking,” I said. “French is impossible.”

“
Naturellement.
”

And so we asked Monsieur Lheureux at breakfast the next morning if it was remotely possible to see if a girl named Florencia Etxarte had checked into the Egretta Garzetta at any time in the last four decades.

“She’s a friend of the family, and though we love her, we doubt this claim,” said Natsumi in French. “She’s such a fibber.” Monsieur Lheureux looked untroubled.

“Of course,” he said, “we have all the hotel’s records on a computer file beginning at the beginning. It is the work of our son. Traditional and modern. It is the way of the Egretta Garzetta.”

Natsumi was culturally incapable of a good gloat, but the look she gave me as she translated was pretty close.

Before we finished the last plate of prosciutto and sliced cantaloupe he returned to our table. His expression didn’t bode well.

“We have a Florencia in the registry, August 3rd, 1988. Though regrettably, her name is Florencia Zarandona, not Etxarte. She was registered with a Miguel and Sylvia Zarandona. My pardons.”

We thanked him, and when he left, Natsumi bowed in contrition.

“Sorry,” she said. “I raised your hopes.”

“Never apologize for a smart move.”

She looked up at me. “Why do you look so happy?”

She didn’t press me when I led her back upstairs to the Petite Perché and booted up the computer. I brought up my research logs and clicked on a file titled “Zarandona.”

“The name must have come up at least twice, for some reason, in my original research. You want to have at least three corroborating data points,” I said, “but two is worth saving, in case number three pops up later on. Happens all the time.”

“What now?” she asked.

“Down the rabbit hole.”

T
HE NEXT
time we spoke, it was nearly dinner time. She’d gone off on a journey into the foothills of the Alps and I’d traveled through trackless census and immigration data, news sources in English and Spanish, plumbing every legally available source of information on the Internet covering the prior half century.

She poured from a bottle of red wine purchased in Provence, I ordered up some tea. I tried to coax her into the day’s travelogue, but she was insistent.

“I’m much more interested in what you learned.”

“Everything or nothing.”

“Which means?”

“If I have the right Florencia, I have a lot,” I said.

“What are the odds?”

“Good. Miguel and Sylvia Zarandona were Basque professors at the University of Bilbao. And committed socialists. This was not a good thing in Franco’s Spain. So in 1968, during a lot of upheaval there, the Zarandonas fled the country with their young son.”

“And Florencia?”

“Florencia was born in ’72.”

“Both Florencias?”

“Yup. Same year, different days, so there’s your shadow of a doubt. Though I used to do a lot of ancestry research for the rich and lazy, and conflicting birth dates are common.”

“Wow.”

“She also had a grandmother with an interesting name.”

“Etxarte?”

“Lorena Etxarte DeAnzorena. Etxarte is the surname per Spanish custom.”

“That nails it,” she said.

“I think it does.”

“Why’d they go to Chile?”

“They were invited by an extremely convenient distant relative of Sylvia’s. Convenient in 1968. Not so much later on.”

“Sorry. This I can’t guess,” she said.

“Salvador Allende. President of the Chilean Senate at the time, two years later, president of the country. A fellow Marxist, with Basque ancestry, from an upper crust family—like the Zarandonas, by the way—and clearly a hater of everything Franco represented, it was a natural fit. He got them both jobs at his alma mater, the University of Chile, and life was good.”

Natsumi asked me to put it on pause so we could get ready for dinner. It wasn’t until we were back down under the pergola, fresh and clean and in the kind embrace of the Lheureux family, that I was able to share the rest of the information.

“You said life was good,” she said, picking up the story, “I’m guessing it didn’t stay that way.”

“I’m sure the Zarandonas had many fine qualities, but luck wasn’t one of them. A year after Florencia is born, Allende is overthrown by the military and his socialist regime wiped out. Augusto Pinochet, sort of a tin-horn version of Franco, is now in charge, and the only thing that amounts to good fortune for the Zarandonas is that Pinochet is too busy purging government workers to spend much time on the academics classes. But that would come later, and the first school on the list was the biggest, the University of Chile.”

“Qué lástima.
What a shame. What happened to them?”

“I don’t know. They made it for at least five years; the last botany course taught by Professor Zarandona—that would be Sylvia—was held in 1978, also the year their son died at eighteen of a brain tumor. After that, the public record goes silent.”

“Public?”

“Anything available online. I’d need a few weeks going through the print stacks in libraries here and in Latin America to call it a dead search, but experience tells me I’m almost there.”

“Though you have a theory.”

“No. Just a common sense assumption that they went underground, or fled the country under different identities, or both. If it wasn’t for the hotel registry, I’d figure they’d been disappeared. People like the Zarandonas didn’t just lose their jobs under Pinochet, they were killed. By the thousands. Often secretly. The proverbial knock on the door in the middle of the night.”

“God.”

“So we know that didn’t happen, at least not as of 1988. By then, Pinochet was on his way out. The political killings were supposed to be a thing of the past. The Zarandonas were now free to travel. Did they sign in at the hotel under their real names because they only had their real passports? Otherwise, did they live under assumed names? Those are gross assumptions. Too little data.”

The next day Natsumi coaxed me out of my lair atop the Egretta Garzetta and showed me as much of the Côte d’Azur as she could in a day and part of the night. We ended the trip with a scrotum-shrinking drive up a one-and-a-half-lane switchback road, in the dark, to a little city called Eze, that as far as I could tell hung off a cliff straight up from the Mediterranean.

“It’s called a
village perché,”
said Natsumi. “I assumed you were only comfortable in perched places.”

Even an obsessive like me, with a head crammed full of data and boiling hypotheses, was easily distracted by the view from Eze—at night with the lights of Cap Ferrat to the right, and Monaco to the left; and in the day, the cliffs, peninsulas, grey-green flora of the Alpes-Maritimes, and the deep blue Mediterranean spread out to the horizon.

It was a sight I hadn’t seen in many years. Florencia rarely traveled, and I got my fill tracking down missing people, one of the more engaging sidelines of my research business. Except for an occasional detour to Canada or Mexico, the journeys were restricted to the Continental U.S. Fortunately, I’d spent a year between undergrad and graduate school living in London and making frequent forays to the Continent, usually to Italy, France and Spain. It was a student pauper’s existence, running on cheap rail passes and youth hostels, but I recalled the joyful exploration, both physical and intellectual.

As I stood on that balcony in Eze, it sank in that given my status as a dead man—a legal necessity—more updated experience with the world would not only be enriching, it might prove essential to survival. More places to hide, to disappear into.