The Marble Mask (23 page)

She looked at me, again caught off balance, her face suddenly drawn and tired as if exhausted by all the voices arguing in her head. “Why do you care?” she finally said, addressing us all, I thought. “They are both dead. No one has discussed this in over half a century.”

“I would like to put things right,” I said simply. “I’d like the truth to stand on its own, and for people to stop making the two men you loved into things they were not.”

Her eyes focused on some midpoint between us. In the silence I could hear what sounded like an old grandfather clock ticking loudly in another room.

“And I think,” I added, almost holding my breath, “that you did love them both very much—in every way a woman can.”

She looked up at me, her eyes wet, the surprise revelation giving her some welcome relief. “Not many people know that.”

“Nor will they—not from us.”

She thought a moment and then rose slowly to her feet. “I will be right back.”

Paul Spraiger glanced at me as she left the room. “That was a gamble,” he said quietly.

“What did I have to lose?”

Marie Chenin returned a few minutes later carrying an old accordion file laced shut with a black ribbon. She resumed her seat, the file on her lap, and began working the knot with her gnarled fingers. “When Marcel told me to go, after his father disappeared, I collected a few things to remember Jean and Antoine by. Marcel spoke of them so harshly after they’d gone and changed so much of what they’d done. I’d thought Jean’s passion to find an explanation for Antoine’s death was like one of those tragedies I’d read in school, but Marcel’s anger was even worse—I wanted some remnants of the days before Marcel.”

I watched her fumbling with the knot, letting her focus on it as a way to settle her mind, and visualized her decades ago, in love with two men, both vibrant, creative, and dangerous, taking them both to her bed at different times to fulfill different needs, and then being abandoned almost overnight. It had to have been a life-altering experience, creating far more baggage than the thin file in her hands. Seeing this old, bent woman, I wondered at the reservoir of feelings within her, and at how she might have chosen to channel such abruptly thwarted passions.

I knew I’d surprised her, revealing how her dislike of Marcel had been so manipulated—so I also asked myself what she might do with her newfound knowledge, if anything.

She bent back the file’s cover and peered into its depths.

“What I took were not things of importance. I was so unhappy then, all I wanted were tokens of the life I was leaving, or which had left me.”

She extracted a couple of sheets of paper—thin, flimsy, once creased—and held them in her hand. “Those are two letters Jean received. They’re from men who were in Italy with Antoine. They meant a great deal to Jean—I remember when he got them how happy he was when happiness came so rarely. I took them for that reason, even though they don’t say much. Maybe they’ll mean something to you.”

Marie Chenin seemed spent by the simple act of handing them over, so despite my wanting to press her further, I rose to my feet, sensing I might have gotten all there was to get. As used as she’d been, both by others and by me just now, she was still no fool—and certainly not innocent of the ways of the criminal world. Her slightly doddering appearance notwithstanding, she struck me as a woman of strong will—who now that she was better informed wasn’t going to be taken by surprise again.

I did ask one more question, however. “When Jean left for Stowe, do you remember where Marcel was?”

She seemed genuinely puzzled. “No.”

“What about Guidry and Picard?”

She stared at me as if I’d just walked into the room, bringing her news she wasn’t expecting. “I don’t know,” she finally murmured, sounding deeply lost in thought.

I reached out, took her hand in both of mine, and held it like a small, warm bird. “Madame Chenin, I am sorry to have brought all this back. Most of us try our best to let old ghosts sleep. I apologize for having woken yours up.”

Recovering somewhat, she squeezed my fingers in return. “I don’t think you need to,” she said distractedly. “Sometimes the price is worth paying. Thank you for coming by.”

It was graciously done, and maybe sincere. But the sudden hardness I heard in her voice made me wonder if her thanks was for what I’d said, or for something I’d unwittingly told her.

MARIE CHENIN HAD BEEN RIGHT ABOUT THE CONTENTS
of the two letters she’d given us. They were both bland, straightforward responses to inquiries by Jean Deschamps. But I understood why he’d been happy to receive them. Unlike the disappointments from the Canadian Army and others, these two were from men who’d apparently been with Antoine right up to the end. And they both expressed a willingness to meet with their late friend’s father.

It took us a few days to trace the whereabouts of the two writers, one of whom turned out to have died ten years earlier, and more time still to secure the records I’d asked Lacombe to locate. The good news, though, was that by the end of all the digging, we had double confirmation that the surviving letter writer—Richard Kearley—was living outside Montreal.

Apparently, the unit they’d both served in was of some renown, as Paul Spraiger informed me. “Wow,” he said, holding the paperwork in his hand. “The Special Service Force. I hadn’t realized that before. Those guys were amazing—a joint Canadian-U.S. outfit. They were the forerunner of the Green Berets. The Germans in Italy called them the Devil’s Brigade… This is incredible.”

I looked at him without comment, causing him to flush slightly. “Sorry. I read a ton about World War Two when I was a kid. Still do, when I can.”

I wasn’t going to stop him now. “So?” I prompted.

We were back in the Sûreté basement, to which we’d both gravitated as our home away from home. It was quiet, private, and while keeping us in the building also removed us from the bustle overhead.

Paul made himself more comfortable in his chair. “The Special Service Force was a small, elite group designed for guerrilla fighting in Norway. A civilian thought it up—an English guy named Pyke. He figured if a bunch of men with specially engineered snowmobile transports could be dropped into Norway, they could hassle the Germans enough with smash-and-run operations that the Germans would have to divert a disproportionate number of troops from the Russian front to go after them. The snow machines and special training would give the Force the edge over the bad guys—kind of like a mongoose and a snake, I suppose.”

“Sounds suicidal.”

“It was,” he said brightly, “but it never happened anyway. The whole Norway idea was scrubbed, the snow machines dumped, and the unit used as shock troops instead—still suicidal but without the Commando glamour. They never used their parachuting skills, their skiing, or any of the sabotage, behind-the-lines techniques they’d been taught. Basically, Mark Clark in Italy—he was the head U.S. general over there—used them for ops no one thought they could win. And once, in something like twenty-five days in January 1944, they had fourteen hundred casualties out of a total of eighteen hundred men.”

“Christ,” I commented. “They had better odds in trench warfare.”

Paul’s eyes brightened. “Don’t get me wrong. They weren’t just cannon fodder. If it hadn’t been for the fact they were considered a secret weapon, they would have been the most famous unit in the war. They were surreal—climbing sheer cliffs, carrying equipment on their backs up trails mules couldn’t handle, fighting against amazing odds, and winning every engagement they were in. They were a total killing machine.”

I heard that with mixed emotions. I’d been in combat a long time ago, and I remembered units like that. Every war had them. They were made up of people so well trained to do what they did, they almost became unfit for anything else. Very scary guys to be around.

“From what we know about the Deschamps family,” I said, “Antoine might’ve been perfect for this bunch.”

Paul agreed, “If Marie Chenin was right about him and his father being gung-ho about the war effort, they couldn’t have found a better outlet. Rumor had it that, on the American side at least, a lot of the manpower came out of the stockades. The Canadians had entrance intelligence tests, but the killer instinct probably made them all more or less equals. From what I read, once they were in, their handlers were pretty careful not to let them mix too much with conventional units.”

“You know a lot about them, even for a history buff,” I finally said.

He laughed. “They were stationed in Burlington just before they shipped out—Fort Ethan Allen. My grandmother worked there on the janitorial staff during the war. She’s the one who told me about them first. She thought they were great—full of spit and vinegar, as she said. Kind of made me wonder about her later, after I read up on them. Hard to think of your grandmother in that light.”

I thought back to Marie Chenin and to the photograph of a dashing Jean Deschamps. I knew what he meant. “You have a map of Montreal?” I asked. “Let’s go talk to this guy.”

Dick Kearley actually lived in the suburbs of Montreal, in a small community of one-story houses not far from the St. Lawrence River, and closer still to a cluster of warehouses and factory buildings. If it hadn’t been for an oddly European feel about some of the architecture and landscaping, I might have felt transposed into any industrial area in the United States, the only additional difference being, I was embarrassed to admit, the general cleanliness of the place. Whether it was the snow acting as a blanket or simply the truth, it seemed the whole neighborhood had just been given a thorough scrubbing.

Which still didn’t make it in any way affluent. Though tidy, the houses were worn and tired, like a poor, hard-working man showing up brushed and polished to a child’s graduation, proud to be there and eager to make a good impression.

The address we had was a clone of its neighbors—white stucco, black shingled, and devoid of much character. Paul and I got out of our car, stretched in the cold afternoon air after the long and boring drive, and walked up the carefully shoveled path to the front door.

The man who answered the bell was of medium height and square build, with a strong, stubby, badly scarred hand that felt like wood when I shook it. His eyes were piercingly pale beneath a thick thatch of white hair, and his face, also scarred across one cheek, looked like that of a man who had truly seen the worst of what humanity had to offer.

“Are you Richard Kearley?” I asked him.

“I am,” he answered in the clear, neutrally accented English common to many Anglo-Canadians.

“The same who fought with the so-called Devil’s Brigade?”

His expression didn’t change, but his tone hardened slightly. “The Germans called us that—and the press. We were the First Special Service Force.”

“Nevertheless.”

“Who’s asking?”

I introduced us both, showing my credentials and explaining that we were part of an American-Canadian task force, hoping the reference might cast his mind back to his old unit’s bi-national character and make our job easier.

It didn’t seem to make much of an impression. “I figured you were the police as soon as you drove up. You after one of the old Forcemen, or is it me?”

That caught me off guard. “Should it be you?” I asked.

He smiled tightly. “This where I break down and confess? Don’t hold your breath.”

I shook my head. “Mr. Kearley, we’re here for a history lesson, not to bust your chops. We’re looking into the death of one of your fellow combatants—Antoine Deschamps—back in ’44.”

He watched me carefully for a moment. “Why?”

I continued playing it straight. “It’s been suggested that maybe he didn’t die in battle.”

“He wouldn’t have been the first. Why do you care now? Especially Americans?”

We’d been standing in the open doorway all this time, we in our coats, he in a thin shirt, and yet I was the one who began to shiver. “Could we come inside and do this?”

I wasn’t sure he’d agree, but he shrugged and stepped back, ushering us into a neat, plain living room whose decorations seemed to have been extracted from a single inexpensive catalogue. Kearley closed the door but didn’t invite us to sit.

“So?” he asked.

“It gets a little complicated,” I admitted. “In a nutshell, we think Deschamps’s father believed he’d been murdered over there, and that the paperwork was cooked to cover it up. We also think that belief got the old man killed as well—in the U.S.—which is how we come into it.”

“Sounds like a movie,” Kearley said. “I could see Antoine mixed up in something like that. Had a flair for the dramatic.”

“So you knew him?” Paul asked, speaking for the first time.

“You wouldn’t be here otherwise.” He finally waved his hand toward the sofa. “Sit.”

We both followed orders, still in our coats. “Do you remember a letter Antoine’s father mailed you right after the war?” I asked. “He might even have mentioned his suspicions in it.”

Kearley took an armchair opposite us. “Maybe I do. I couldn’t’ve helped anyway. I didn’t know about any murder, except that as we saw it, the Germans murdered every man they killed. I don’t guess that’s the same thing.”

“You never met with the father?” I persisted.

“No.”

Paul tried a different approach. “What was Antoine like?”

“Good man. Tough as nails. Could carry half his weight in supplies.”

“When did you two first hook up? In Helena?” Paul continued.

I glanced at him, confused but assuming he was putting his history lessons to good use.

Kearley smiled thinly. “You know about Helena? Yeah. That’s where it was. God, what a dump.”

“Which was exactly the point, right? Colonel Frederick’s grand plan—bury you guys in the boonies.”

The smile spread. “I haven’t talked about any of that in a long time.”

“I guess that means you were one of the few who didn’t marry a local girl.”

This time he actually laughed. “I came close. Those people were amazing. Why or how they took to us, I’ll never understand. We were a bunch of loud, obnoxious bastards, and our training did its best to turn us into professional cutthroats. But they never seemed to mind, even when it cost ’em big.” Dick Kearley shook his head. “I guess it was a time when people just did that. Couldn’t happen nowadays.”