The Discovery, A Novel (21 page)

Ben set the keys of his green four-door coupe on the dresser. The suitcase, gun inside, sat on the bed along with his typewriter. It was dark outside. He was exhausted. The only lamp in this dumpy little motor lodge provided just enough light to see the only thing he cared to see in the room.

The picture of him and Claire. He stood there staring at it. Really, just at Claire.

She was leaning back against him as he leaned against the curved fender of his car, his arms around her. She was looking at the camera. He at her. Then and now, he couldn’t stop looking at her. In the background on the left was the wraparound porch at her parents’ house. Just visible above the wooden railing were the tops of the two rockers they’d sat in so many evenings over the past few months.

Sadness overwhelmed him. The more he looked at the picture, the deeper it grew. But he didn’t care. He didn’t want to look away. “You were worth it,” he said aloud. He’d do it again, all of it, to have experienced her love. It had been the happiest months of his life. When he reached the point he could barely breathe, he gently laid the picture facedown on the dresser.

He looked around the room. A lumpy double bed with a frayed bedspread, no headboard. Two plain dinette chairs and an equally plain round table, in a corner by the bathroom door. The curtains made him sneeze when he closed them. No telephone. No radio. The owners called it E-Z Breeze Motor Lodge. No breeze outside, either.

It sat just off Highway 17, between Brunswick and Savannah. Beggars can’t be choosers, his mother used to say. When he’d decided to turn in for the night, he’d passed four or five similar motels that were closed down. With the gas rationing, not many people toured the country these days.

He looked at his watch. It was just after 9:00. Sliding the suitcase to the far side of the bed, he lay down and stretched out. He should have brought something to read, something to help him get his thoughts off Claire. The Bible Father Flanagan had given him came to mind, though it hardly seemed right putting it in the same suitcase with a gun. But reading it had become part of his morning routine. He actually felt like he was beginning to understand God a little bit. A very little bit.

Hardly seemed the thing to read now.

Would God approve of this, the plans in his heart right now? He looked down at the suitcase, the Bible sitting inside. For a while he’d entertained a silly thought, that somehow God wouldn’t see what he was doing if he ignored him.

What choice do I have, Lord?

He thought about David, the passages he’d read where David said some pretty harsh things about his enemies. Wishing they were dead, that God would strike them down and break their teeth. Not the kind of words he remembered hearing in church as a kid. He’d meant to ask Father Flanagan about verses like that, and how they squared away with things Jesus said, like love your enemies.

He’d heard a preacher on the radio one Sunday morning talk about this. The preacher had said it wasn’t a contradiction in the Bible or a case of the New Testament being nicer than the Old. It was a case of one passage speaking to individuals and another to the role God had given authorities. The preacher had then read a passage in Romans that said God’s appointed authorities “do not bear the sword in vain,” said they are his servants “executing his wrath on evildoers.”

That’s all this is
, he thought.
That’s all I’m doing
. It was why he was on his way to Savannah, to stop Graf and Kittel, the other two German agents. They were exactly the kind of men David spoke about in the Psalms—wicked men, evildoers.

They would keep pursuing their mission, maiming and killing innocent Americans, until somebody stopped them. Father Flanagan was right when he said Ben had to get involved. But he was wrong to imagine Ben could let the American authorities take care of it. They’d throw Ben right in with Graf and Kittel, wouldn’t see a shred of difference between them. Why should he be electrocuted as an evildoer? If he was going to die, he’d rather die trying to stop men like them, not as some infamous traitor, hated by everyone.

He lay there awhile longer, trying to remember his Abwehr training, hoping to get back in touch with the
mörderinstinkt—
the killer instinct—his commander had grilled into them. They’d watched films about killing, read articles about it, fired live rounds into targets day after day until killing became
ebenso natürlich wie atmen
. . . as natural as breathing. Something one does on command, as part of one’s duty.

Ben sat up. It was just no use.

It hadn’t become natural to him then, didn’t feel natural now. He wasn’t a killer. All his acquired skills in shooting, bomb making, and espionage were a pretense to get back to America. To be normal again. To talk normal and think normal. To laugh at Abbott and Costello movies, to watch Ted Williams play baseball, to hear Glenn Miller songs on the radio. He had to find some other motivation to go through with this mission.

He stood up and walked back to the dresser. Thinking about Glenn Miller quickly connected to “Moonlight Serenade,” which quickly connected to a memory . . . his first dance with Claire at the Bandshell. The song began to play in his head. He closed his eyes. He could see all the couples swirling around him. Feel the ocean breeze. Claire’s eyes, then her smile. Claire saying yes. He reached out, she held his hand. He could feel it now, not just her hand but how it felt to hold it. He gently spun her around. She drew near and they danced. Time slowed by half. Before the dance was over, he knew she would be his for all time.

He stopped.

It wasn’t for all time. Couldn’t be. It was just an illusion.

How could he have imagined he’d ever escape his past? The Nazi scourge had raised its ugly head, beyond his parents’ grave, across three thousand miles of open sea, beyond all his efforts to bury it. It would never leave him . . . unless he destroyed it.

That was his motivation.

Graf and Kittel were Nazis. True believers. They represented everything he despised. The single remaining part of his past that connected him to a world he wanted to sever ties with forever.

But . . . when it came right to it, could he really do whatever it took to stop them?

Lord
, he prayed,
if you’re even willing to listen to me at a time like this . . . you took Jurgen, so I didn’t have to. Could you
—

No. He forced himself to stop praying. It was weakness. He needed to be strong. He needed to remember . . . the Nazis had taken Claire away.

He lifted the picture from the dresser and stared at her lovely face.

Claire
.

Legare Street, Charleston
4:30 p.m.

Claire.

I read the name a few times, seeing in my mind poor Ben standing by this dresser staring at her picture. I set the remaining manuscript pages beside me on the couch. Looked like less than fifty pages to go. Much of what I’d read since lunchtime felt more like my grandfather’s normal writing, more action and page-turning suspense. But here again, in this chapter, there was this almost haunting torment going on for Ben.

I had no idea where my grandfather was going next. Does he kill off Ben as he goes after the other spies? Does Ben save the day? Does he let Ben live but get arrested? Does he ever let Ben get back with Claire? Gramps often worked a love interest into his novels, even some occasional romance, but rarely spent this much time portraying this side of his characters’ lives.

I knew Rick Samson, my grandfather’s agent, would love this book, even if it were a little different. He’d love anything my grandfather wrote and anything I might write about my grandfather. Just as long as I wrote about
him
, the right Warner. Gerard, not Michael.

I got up and stretched, deciding to fix a cup of coffee, when an image of my grandfather as a young man flashed into my head. I could see him bending over slightly in front of the dresser, staring at the only picture he had of him and Claire together, heartbroken. Wait, not my
grandfather.
I meant I saw
Ben
. I was doing it again, morphing one into the other.

I thought about some of the pictures of Gramps at that age, ones I’d seen upstairs in that old pirate chest full of photo albums in the guest room. My mind zeroed in on one picture in particular. There was something familiar about it. I could almost see it in my head.

Wait.

The picture on the motel dresser, the one Ben had just been staring at. It was the same picture. Had to be. Had I just found another of Gramps’s real-life connections? Like the typewriter case? In my head, the picture upstairs seemed like the same photograph.

I was sure of it.

I picked up a handful of manuscript pages, the last ten or so, looking for the part where Ben described the picture in detail.

He stood there staring at it. Really, just at Claire. She was leaning back against him as he leaned against the curved fender of his car, his arms around her. She was looking at the camera. He at her. Then and now, he couldn’t stop looking at her. In the background on the left was the wraparound porch at her parents’ house. Just visible above the wooden railing were the tops of the two rockers they’d sat in so many evenings over the past few months.

It had to be the same photo.

I grabbed this page, ran upstairs to the guest bedroom, and opened the chest. I didn’t remember which album I’d seen the picture in but quickly separated the three that had any old black and white photos. After spreading them out across the bed, I reached back and flicked on the lamp. In a few minutes, I was able to figure out which contained the oldest pictures.

I scanned the pages carefully, making sure not to tear anything. As I did, I remembered a conversation with my sister, Marilyn. One of her big “sticking points.” Before my grandfather died, she had pressed him about why they had no wedding pictures. How was that possible? It had become pretty normal to take wedding pictures by that time. All her friends’ grandparents had them.

Gramps’s answer did not satisfy her. He simply said they hadn’t taken any. It was a long story and parts of it were quite painful. He didn’t want to get into it. Out of respect, she didn’t bring it up again. We had, of course, assumed that meant all the pictures in these albums were taken after they were married.

I turned several more thin black pages until I finally saw it. The top right corner of the third page. There they were, Gramps and Nan in their twenties. All the pictures in the surrounding pages were of them, one or both, in a variety of poses.

But this one . . . it was exactly as Gramps described it in his book.
Claire. She was leaning back against him as he leaned against the curved fender of his car, his arms around her.
She was looking at the camera. He at her.
And sure enough, just to the left, in the background I saw . . .
The wraparound porch. The wooden railing. The tops of the two rockers they’d sat in so many evenings
.

Gramps had chosen this picture to be the picture Ben had carried with him as he’d fled, the one that tormented him as he stared at it by the dresser.

I wondered why.

Was this Gramps’s favorite picture of him and Nan when they were young? I knew Gramps had been crazy about her his whole life. You could see it in this picture. I looked at all the ones with them together. I had never noticed it before; he was looking at her, not at the camera.

I remembered a conversation I had with him, the weekend before I proposed to Jenn. I’d driven up here to get his advice. “Did you ever have any doubts, Gramps, about Nan?”

“No, never,” he’d said. “From the moment I met her.”

“I’m serious, Gramps. I know you loved her. And she was my grandmother and all. But I’m talking man-to-man. Not as your grandson. You’ve never had any doubts, never had any regrets?”

We were sitting right out there in the courtyard in the Adirondack chairs. It was dark. He turned toward me. I could see his face clearly in the light beaming down from his home office. “Michael, look at me. Look in my eyes, tell me if you see the slightest hint that I’m not being straight with you or holding anything back.”

“Okay.” I obeyed.

“From the first moment I met your grandmother, through all the difficulties we had before we got married, through all the ups and downs in the fifty-seven years after that, I knew she was the only woman I would ever love. I never once doubted that. Never had a single regret. If God gives you that kind of woman, you know it deep inside. Almost at once. Like you know your own soul. A love like that is a gift, Michael. A gift you can never earn or ever repay.” He’d sat up just then, tears welling up in his eyes. Then he looked back at me. “I knew I’d found in her a woman that would make everything in my life better, and she did. The hard parts more bearable, the happy parts more fun. My,” he said, looking away, “she was
so
much fun.” He wiped some tears away with his finger. “I had it good with her. Really good.”

It was like he was in the room with me right now, saying these words aloud. I wiped the tears that had formed in my eyes, just like he had. I realized . . . I felt the exact same way about Jenn.

During that conversation, and now.

I missed her so much. I looked at my watch. Couldn’t call her; she wasn’t off work yet. But I could text her. She might get that. I took a few moments to send her a love note then set my phone down on the bedspread.

Looking back at the photograph in the album, with the yellowed manuscript page beside it, I felt so close to Gramps just then. There he was in the photo as a young man in love, and here he was as an old man, thinking back to this moment and writing about it in his novel.

Obviously, I’d found a third real-life connection. The typewriter case, giving Ben his first name, and now this. I wondered what it was about this photograph that caused Gramps to single it out. A couple of pictures had become loose over the years and were gathered together in the middle of the album. I remembered looking at these before; I especially enjoyed the little notes my grandmother had written on the back.

It dawned on me. Back then, people wrote things on the back to help them remember details about the picture later on. Like the captions we write now beneath our digital photos. And often people didn’t paste the pictures into albums right away. Sometimes it might be years later. That meant all the pictures still pasted on these pages probably had little notes on the back. My sister Marilyn would kill me for doing this, especially if I ripped the photo, but I couldn’t help it. I had to see what Nan had written on the back. I peeled it from the black paper, ever so carefully, and turned it over.

No.

No way.

I couldn’t believe what I saw.

Ben and Claire—1943
.

Not “Gerard and Mary” but “Ben and Claire.” How was that possible? I quickly looked at the other loose photos, checked the handwriting on the back. I knew the other notes had been written by Nan. She’d told me so once.

It wasn’t the same handwriting.

My grandfather had written the note on this picture. I just knew it. I read it again, aloud. “Ben and Claire—1943.” That was all it said. But when had Gramps written this? It was difficult to say. The writing looked almost as old as the photograph itself. But that was impossible.

I had to find out what was written on the back of the other pictures. One by one, I peeled them off and read the backs. Every single one was written in my grandmother’s hand, and none referred to them as “Ben and Claire.” Always “Gerard and Mary.”

I noticed something else. In comparing the Ben and Claire photograph to all the others, I noticed that Nan wore a slightly different hairdo. And in the Ben and Claire photo, they actually looked younger, maybe by several years. I don’t know why I hadn’t seen it before, but it was crystal clear to me right then. In fact, I suddenly felt stupid for not seeing it sooner. As the realization sunk in, my hands started trembling.

The typewriter case. The real first name. This picture.

I had not spent the last two days reading my grandfather’s last, unpublished novel. I had been reading his memoir.

This was his story.

The story of how they met. The story the family had never heard. The answers to all the questions Marilyn had been asking.

Then I remembered my grandfather’s journal. Something he’d written on the last page. It didn’t make any sense then. Maybe it would now. I left everything spread out on the bed, took the photo and manuscript page, and ran down the steps, through the kitchen, and into his office.

I flipped open to the last journal page, skipped till I found the paragraph.

I’m writing these last few pages for my family. More precisely, for my grandson Michael to find. I trust he’ll know what to do with it, and with the package I’ve left in my wooden box (which has its own story, and he’ll find out about that too).

Tears slid down my cheeks.

I had found it, what Gramps had wanted me to find. Even the wonderful story about the wooden typewriter case. Where it came from. I looked down at it. Oh man. I just realized. This wooden box had actually been made in Havana in 1898, during the Spanish-American War. My grandfather—Ben—had gotten it from his future father-in-law—Mr
.
Richards, my great-grandfather—who’d gotten it from his father—my great-great-grandfather—who’d fought with Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders. He’d actually fought in the battle of San Juan Hill.

My great-great-grandfather was an American war hero.

Everything I had been reading over the past two days . . . it was all true.

I had to call Jenn. She had to know. What time was it? Shoot, she didn’t get off till 6:00. This couldn’t wait. What were they going to do, fire her? I dialed her number and let the phone ring.
Pick up, Jenn. Please pick up
.

Her voice mail. I listened to her message, waited for the beep. “Jenn, call me as soon as you get this. You’re not going to believe it. This manuscript, it’s not a novel, it’s my grandfather’s story. It’s all true. I can’t wait to talk with you, love you.”

And I hung up.

Then another thought, this one more disturbing. Not only was my great-great-grandfather a war hero—if this story was all true—my grandfather had once been a German spy. And our family name—my name—wasn’t Warner, because Gramps’s real name wasn’t Gerard Warner. And it wasn’t Ben Coleman, either. It was Gerhard Kuhlmann.

Was that my real last name? Our family’s real name? Kuhlmann?

What would Jenn think about all this . . . or Marilyn?
Marilyn will go crazy when she hears this
. What about my family? What about Rick Samson, my grandfather’s agent? What about my grandfather’s fans?

What about the FBI?

I couldn’t think any more about this. I had to get back to the couch and see how my grandfather’s story ended.