Styx & Stone (25 page)

“How did you survive?” I asked.

Bruchner pushed his sleeve back down to his wrist and took another deep drag of his cigarette. “I did what I done all my life,” he said. “I drove the train.”

“The train?”

“The Germans took the mines in the Silesia, and we were slave laborers for the Nazis. When we arrived, they asked us our professions. I said railroad engineer. They said I was lucky; they hanged the engineer that morning for stealing coal from the locomotive. So, they put me on the train in the mines.
Beato me.
” He forced an ironic smile.

“Did you ever go back to Italy?” I asked.

“No. After the war I tried, but I had no papers. So they put me in another camp: displaced persons. Displaced? I knew where to go, but the Russians said no. Finally, they sent me to the British Sector in Berlin. I told them I want to go to Italy or Palestine, but the English, they stopped the Jews from going to Israel. So, they give me to the Americans. I still want to go to Italy or Palestine, but they tell me I can go to America. I said, ‘OK, take me to America, far from trains and sulfur.’” Again the ironic smile. “Look at me now. Still working in the mines, driving a train.”

“Do you have any idea who might want to assume your identity?” I asked. “Did you have any enemies back in Merano? Someone, maybe, who thought you were dead?”

He shook his head. “I had no enemies.”

“Would you be willing to meet Gualtieri Bruchner?”

Ruth Chalmers approached 26 Fifth Avenue on foot as I watched from the window of the Rose Café restaurant next door. She was wearing a green wool coat, open despite the chill January air, navy skirt and stockings, and dark glasses. Her shoulder-length hair bobbed in the breeze to the rhythm of her unhurried pace. She was a pretty girl, gentle and lovely, but she inspired none of the beguiling lust of a Hildy Jaspers. She looked sad.

I scooted out the door to meet her before she went into my father’s building.

“Hello, Ellie,” she said, the hint of a smile peeking through the gloom. “I’m glad you could meet me today.”

“Me, too. Would you like to go have a coffee? Someplace on Bleecker, maybe?”

She nodded her indifference. “Sure, why not?”

We walked down Fifth Avenue, through Washington Square, and down MacDougal Street. At the corner of Bleecker we ducked into the Figaro and sat next to a table of Bohemians. They were talking about an experimental film they wanted to make. Something about no lights, no characters, just some kind of moaning off camera for an hour and a half. We moved to another table.

“What’s wrong, Ruth?” I asked, staring at the ruby on her left middle finger.

“It’s all this violence,” she said, sighing, her eyes sparkling beneath unshed tears. She glanced around the room absently.

“You hardly know my father,” I said. “He’s barely an acquaintance, let alone a friend.”

She shrugged. “It’s upsetting. And I’ve always liked him.”

“And Ercolano?”

She twisted the ring on her finger. “The same.”

A bearded young man arrived to take our order. We asked for two coffees.

“That’s a pretty ring.” I said. “Where did you get it?”

“It’s a keepsake of someone I knew. Just a girlish romance that ended. You’d be bored.”

I watched her as she spoke. The clear green of her irises shone in the low light, and the skin of her cheeks was a soft matte. There was more she wasn’t telling me.

“You’re right,” I said, shifting in my chair. “This whole thing is upsetting. I was in Ercolano’s apartment the other night.” She didn’t move. “The police took me there.”

“Why? You didn’t know him, did you?”

I shook my head. “But it appears that Ercolano’s death and the attack on my father are related.”

Now her eyes narrowed. “What?”

The waiter interrupted to drop our coffees on the table, then withdrew.

“The police suspect Ercolano was the burglar who tried to kill my father and stole his manuscript,” I said.

She struggled to understand. “That’s impossible,” she said calmly. “Ercolano was a good scholar, Ellie. He wasn’t stupid enough to steal a noted professor’s latest book and try to call it his own. And he was a nineteenth-century scholar, besides.”

“I said the police suspect him. I don’t.”

“What makes them think he had anything to do with the attack on your father?”

“We checked his mailbox and found a return receipt from the post office for a package sent to Princeton. When we retrieved the package, my father’s manuscript was inside, with Ercolano’s name on the title page.”

“It’s absurd,” she said.

“Maybe. But we did find my father’s gold pens and strongbox in his desk.”

“Then someone planted them,” she blurted out. “Ruggero was an honest man. And he respected your father. He liked him very much.”

Before Ruth and I parted company, I managed to find out that she had gone on a date Wednesday, and had seen
Suddenly Last Summer
by herself on Friday night.

“Alone?” I asked.

She shrugged. “It’s better than spending time with my family. I’d already seen it, but I had nothing else to do.”

I sipped my coffee and decided not to mention that it was my mother’s ruby she was wearing on her left hand.

I walked her to the West Fourth Street station then headed back through the park and up Fifth Avenue. The phone rang a few minutes after I’d walked in the door of my father’s apartment.

“McKeever here. I’m calling about Tiffany’s. We know who bought the tie clip for Ercolano.”

“Surprise me and say it wasn’t Ruth Chalmers.”

Silence down the line. “Why do you bother asking me to look into things if you already know the answers?” he asked. “It took two men three hours to get that information out of a Tiffany’s clerk without a warrant.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I just spent a couple of hours with Ruth. It was clear she was in love with Ercolano, and that she was defending him with a lover’s passion.”

“Just a hunch?” he asked.

“I got lucky; the ring she was wearing just happened to be one of my mother’s favorites.”

“What?”

“Mom wore that ring until the day she died. I had assumed it was buried with her.”

“I thought no jewelry was missing from your father’s apartment.”

“You tell me,” I said. “I asked if any had been taken, and the police said it appeared not.”

“So, what do you figure?” he asked.

“I think Ruth was Ercolano’s young girlfriend, the one his neighbor mentioned. Do you remember what the police report said about Ercolano’s death?”

“I can recite it chapter and verse. What about it?”

“Who did it say found the body?”

There was a pause on the line. “Ruth Chalmers’s father.”

“Exactly. Victor Chalmers paid me a visit the other night to explain how he had happened to be in Ercolano’s neighborhood after midnight on a Saturday. Chalmers lives across the park on the Upper East Side. He tried to have me believe Hildy Jaspers had called him from Ercolano’s apartment.”

“Are you sure she didn’t?”

“I haven’t found any of my mother’s possessions on Hildy’s person.”

“So, you’re saying that Victor Chalmers went to Ercolano’s apartment to bail his daughter out of a bad situation?”

“I believe so,” I said. “Ruth was there that night. And if the neighbors and super are to be believed, Ercolano died at ten thirty. Chalmers called the police at what time?”

“The call was logged in a little after one o’clock.”

“Then I’d say Ruth found her boyfriend dead in the bathroom and panicked. She called her father, who came over and decided what to do and what story to tell.”

“Then how did Ruth get the ring?”

“She probably found it in Ercolano’s apartment before her father arrived. She wanted a keepsake of her lover and took it. She seemed to treasure it.”

“Then we’re back where we were with Ercolano as the most logical suspect,” said McKeever.

“The ring was in his apartment,” I said. “But that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with logic.”

“You think she’s innocent?” he asked, already convinced of his answer. “Innocent enough to sleep with a debauched professor ten years her senior? Do nice girls do that, Ellie?”

“Nice girls do a lot of things you wouldn’t suspect,” I said. “Ruth Chalmers was in love with Ercolano; so much in love she couldn’t see how he was playing her for a fool against that other woman. All the other women.”

“I’m bringing her in,” announced the cop.

“Give me a couple of days,” I said. “With a little luck, I’ll clear this thing up.”

He mulled it over. “If you’re not pressing charges for theft of the ring, I suppose I can wait.”

“I appreciate your hanging in there on this,” I said. “I mean for not taking the easy way out and pinning this on a poor dead man.”

He was quiet for a long while, and I felt he wanted to say something important to me. I thought his silence betrayed a pain, though not one I could identify. In the end, he said simply that it was his job. And then he told me the pens found in Ercolano’s office, the ones I knew belonged to my father, had all been wiped clean. No prints at all.

“That doesn’t exactly implicate Ercolano,” I said.

“It doesn’t clear him, either.”

I took a few minutes to go through my father’s mail, which had been accumulating on the secretary near the door in the foyer. There were some bills, a letter from Carnegie Hall, a couple of journals and glossy magazines, and various pieces of bulk mail, but little in the way of personal or professional correspondence. The only letter worth noting was an airmail envelope plastered with colorful foreign stamps and a postmark from Padua, Italy. A Professor Nardone had written the letter, and it was in Italian. I could make out the gist in only the grossest terms, relying on cognates and my sketchy memory of a summer in Italy years before. Why hadn’t I, the daughter of a renowned Italianist, studied Italian? My father has often begged me to answer that one. One of the few words not needing translation was Bruchner. The letter was obviously a response to an earlier inquiry from my father about the visiting professor.

Chiarissimo Professor Stone,

La prego di scusare il ritardo di questa mia risposta alla Sua cortese lettera del 15 novembre scorso; purtroppo mi trovavo all’ospedale per un intervento non tanto grave quanto scomodo.

Le posso assicurare innanzi tutto che il Professor Bruchner, da quanto ho potuto osservare negli anni in cui era mio collega qui a Padova, si è sempre comportato da persona colta e perbene . . .

Formal Italian. The object, my father always said, is to achieve a one-sentence, multi-paragraph letter. That, of course, is impossible, but Italians take a stab at it anyway each time they pick up a pen to write. Wading through the successive clauses, I managed to cull something of the mess: Nardone, a colleague of Bruchner’s in Padua, was writing to dispute some kind of accusations my father had leveled against Bruchner. But, my Italian being what it was, I couldn’t figure what the accusations entailed. I fetched an Italian–English dictionary from a shelf and looked for the word that had me stumped:
ebreo
. Nardone had insisted that Bruchner was indeed “
ebreo
.” Aware of Bruchner’s background in the concentration camp, I was surprised to find that the word meant Jewish or Jew. My father suspected Bruchner was not a Jew.