The Bookseller (27 page)

“I'm curious about a copy of the book, an early translation, owned by a friend of mine.”

“What friend?”

“A man called Max Koche.”

“I don't know him. Is he German?”

Hugo smiled. “Sort of. You're sure you don't know him?”

“I said I didn't. And what does this have to do with my father?”

“To be honest, Gérard, I don't have all the answers. I'm here to get some of those. But you told me before that you prefer plain speaking, so I hope you will excuse me if I am blunt.”

“I do prefer it, yes.”

“Then I'll tell you what I think. I think that your father was a collaborator. I can't prove it, not right now, but I have several reasons to think this. First, your government's research tools have closed up his file, a file that once existed but has since been erased, moved, or hidden. All I know is that it was closed in 1946. That's just one year after the end of the Second World War, a time when scores were being settled, people were being held accountable. If I remember my history, young women who collaborated with the Germans had their heads shaved in public, am I right?”

“Yes,” said Roussillon, his face impassive.

“I suspect the penalty increased the higher up the social ladder you were. Or maybe not—public damnation is more ruinous to the aristocracy than to the common man. Or woman. Anyway, what I know for sure is that your father's file existed and was shuttered up in 1946. I also know that you received a call from my friend Max two weeks ago, the same day he got his hands on a book called
On War
. I know, too, that Max was a Nazi hunter at one time, but had moved on to looking for collaborators. And he looked for them in the books that came to his stall. I think, Gérard, that he found such a book and that when he looked through it he found your name, your father's name. I think he found it, called you, and then…” Hugo's voice was soft now, and he shrugged his shoulders. “And then what, Gérard? That's the bit that needs filling in.”

Roussillon was staring at him, eyes unblinking. His face had paled noticeably and he reached slowly for his water glass. He began to raise it to his lips, but his hand shook and he put it down, a rattle of glass on glass.

“Can you prove any of this?” Roussillon's voice cracked. “Can you?”

“Just the phone call. But if I get my hands on the book, and if I can access that closed file…” He smiled. “And I know all sort of tricks to get through red tape.”

“I'm sure you do,” Roussillon said, surprising Hugo with a smile of his own. “In any case, I don't intend to lie to you, Monsieur Marston. The truth is that you are right about my father. Everything you said, it's true.”

“OK,” said Hugo. “Tell me.”

“First, let me ask you this. Do you believe in God? No, wait, let me be more specific. Do you believe in the Christian God and his Bible?”

“No, I don't. I don't believe in any God. Or any collection of them, for that matter.”

“I see. Well, many do, as you know, and I have come around to their way of thinking in recent years. Anyway, the Bible speaks of the sins of the father being visited on the son. Are you familiar with the concept?”

“Only as a cliché.”

“You know, even the Bible isn't sure about the answer. Exodus says, ‘I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children.' Deuteronomy I like, it's very cheerful, listen: ‘Fathers shall not be put to death for their sons, nor shall sons be put to death for their fathers; everyone shall be put to death for his own sin.' Much better, but then one is left wondering, which is it?”

“No clue.” Hugo shook his head. “And I'm not sure I care all that much.”

“I do.” Roussillon stood. “And I'll tell you in a moment, but first you wished to see this Rimbaud book, so you will see it.” He pulled a key from his pocket and Hugo twisted in his chair to watch as the Frenchman unlocked the cabinet, reached in, and retrieved the Rimbaud. He stood there for a moment staring at the cover. “It's not an irony, I suppose, that I would go to such lengths to get this book.”

“You mean the content?”

“The content, the author, yes. In some ways, being homosexual
back then was more acceptable than it is now.” He frowned. “Especially for those who worship a Christian God.”

“There are gay ministers,” Hugo said. “And it's not just Christians who judge homosexuality a sin.”

“Oh, I know that, of course.” He looked up and his eyes twinkled for a second. “But it's amusing to hear you, the atheist, defend them.”

“Defend? No. I've just found bigots in every walk of life, no more and no fewer in churches than anywhere else.”

“As you say.” Roussillon walked around his chair and sat down. “There are other sins of the flesh, Monsieur Marston, I alluded to them earlier.”

“The sins of the father.”

“Yes.” He looked up from the book. “You seem to know your history, Monsieur Marston, I mean your Second World War history. For Americans, I suspect that war takes up only a few pages in your schoolbooks, but maybe you know that here in France, and also in Germany and England, the war is very much alive in the memories of the people. To deny the Holocaust is a crime in some places. In Germany, you may not name your son Adolf. And we, the French, endure jokes about surrender from the British and Americans, even sixty years later.”

They shared a smile and Hugo said, “I've told a few of those myself.”

“Ah yes, how quickly you Americans forget that without the French, you would still be a British colony. History isn't just written by the victorious, you see. Sometimes it's rewritten by them. You already know where I am going, and that it's somewhere painful, which is why I am talking around the subject.” He cleared his throat. “You are right that my father was a collaborator. There, now the truth is out. He confessed it to me before he died. And as deathbed confessions go, it was a difficult one for both of us, as you might imagine.” Roussillon smiled sadly and looked at Hugo. “I had of course suspected something like that; it's hard to keep such an enormous secret even in so large a house. But it was easy to look the other way, to ignore my suspicions.”

“I'm sure,” said Hugo.

“He was not a bad man, you understand, but he was far from a
brave man. He couldn't stand the idea of losing this house, our other homes, his fortune.” Another sad smile. “Perhaps he and I are not so different. Anyway, as the war began and then progressed, like so many Frenchmen he was forced to choose sides. He chose the losing one. He sided with the Germans to save our lands and property, and save them he did. He also managed to save our name, but only by keeping his collaboration a secret.”

Hugo said nothing, but nodded for him to continue.

“His collaboration could be excused as bad luck,” Roussillon said, “or so I have often thought. You have to bet on a game when you don't know much about the teams.” He shrugged. “Maybe the one you pick wins, maybe it loses. There's no shame in bad luck. No, the shame doesn't lie in the side you choose, but what you do for that side, how far you go. Do you provide food? Shelter? Money? Or do you do more than that?” Roussillon shook his head, and his shoulders sagged. “The saddest truth is that my dear father was worse than a mere collaborator, much worse than a café waitress who served coffee to, or even slept with, some grubby soldier. My father was a spy. Every month or two the Wehrmacht, or sometimes the SS, would come in and smash a few worthless pieces of furniture so that he could protest his treatment in public, protect his name. But when they left, those soldiers would have a list of names or safe houses or whatever else they could use against the Resistance.” He looked up at Hugo. “It is my lifelong shame that my father sacrificed others so that he might live in comfort. He was a traitor.”

“Maybe he did it to protect you,” Hugo said.

“I'm sure he would say so, yes. But from what? Living in a smaller house? Being called Gérard by my teachers instead of
Monsieur le Comte
? I think I could have survived that better than the shame of knowing what he did.” Roussillon looked down at the book, his fingers caressing the cover.

“Forgive me, but this has something to do with the Rimbaud?”

“No, actually. It is you who asked to see it, and I am showing it to you.” He passed the book to Hugo. “Look through it if you wish, you
will see only a valuable book, prized by a gay man as old as the author.” Roussillon's eyes twinkled for a moment. “Or almost as old.”

“The story of your father's collaboration was written in the Clausewitz.”

“Yes. You see, the Nazis and the collaborators were not the only ones passing notes. The Resistance did, too.”

Hugo thought again about the conversation he'd had with Ceci and silently thanked her for solving this part of the puzzle. “So I understand.”

“
Bien
. After the war my father spent all his time looking for the book, but never found it. He said it would be our undoing. I don't know how he knew, I never questioned him on these matters. All I knew was that as long as the book remained hidden away on someone's shelf, I was safe, my family name was safe. But I also knew that if it ever came onto the market, I would have to buy it, no matter the cost.”

“What does it say?”

Roussillon smiled sadly and shook his head. “Not much, but more than enough. The words, at least as my father relayed them to me, are not easy to forget. For a Roussillon, anyway.”

“Tell me.”

“The message is contained in a microdot in the lower right corner of the endpaper, and it is short and to the point. Here.” He reached into the coffee table drawer and pulled out a pen and notepad. He scratched a line on the paper and handed it to Hugo.

C. de Auvergne—collab. avec Nazis. Traître
.
Tuez-le
.”

“Kill him,” Hugo translated the last phrase aloud. “Short and to the point.”

“Actually, there was more.” Roussillon wrote on a fresh sheet. “The most sinister part was this.” He handed it to Hugo:
A l'air de suicide
. A list of six names followed.

“Make it look like suicide,” Hugo read. “You'd think they would want to make an example of him.”

“Not someone so powerful, so connected. The Nazis would have wiped out dozens, maybe hundreds, of innocent people in revenge.”

“Yes, I'd
forgotten that tactic. And this list of names, they are the people ordered to kill your father?”

“No,” Roussillon said, his voice almost a whisper. “No, those are the names of men who died because of my father. And as much as those names tortured me, imagine how they tormented him.”

Hugo nodded, then glanced up and found Roussillon looking at him. “I'm curious, would you have destroyed the book?” Hugo asked.

“No, I don't think so. It holds too much history, it is too valuable to disappear in flames. Do you know, neither my father nor I ever even saw the book, never laid eyes on the pages that contain secrets powerful enough to destroy us.”

“You are sure it even contains those secrets, those names?”

“My father was, and the information he passed on to me was very specific. I am sure it is true, as sure as he was. And so you see that quite apart from the monetary value of such an old book, the secret it holds is itself historically significant, of course.”

“True, but that secret only makes the book more valuable, historically speaking, if someone discovers it.”

“Of course,” said Roussillon. “And perhaps you misunderstand. I said before that the victorious get to rewrite history. That's never been my intention, and it's precisely what I would be doing if I buried this secret forever. No.” He shook his head and took another sip of his water. “In all honesty, I am not entirely sure what I would do with it. On the one hand I feel obliged to let Claudia know her family history, to tell her myself in case she first hears it from someone else and wastes time and effort in a futile defense of the Roussillon name.” He shrugged. “But on the other hand, I still want to protect her. Not only from the secret itself, but from having to carry it around for the rest of her life.”

“Your daughter is a strong, intelligent woman. She can cope with the truth,” Hugo said. “Look at her career—she hasn't relied on the Roussillon name to get where she is. Of course you should tell her.”

“Maybe. You know, I had thought that I might like to sit down with a writer and explain it all. It would make a fascinating story, don't you think? And sooner rather than later.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Several reasons. Like an alcoholic repenting his ways to those he sinned against, I must in my pursuit of spiritual and religious sobriety repent the sins of my father.”

“So you think that's what the Bible is saying?”

“I have no idea. But it doesn't matter because it's my sin, too. I have been hiding the truth from the world, from my own family even. And the Bible is clear about one thing: I may not continue to sin and also find salvation.”

“That's the why,” Hugo said. “Even if it's not a great one from the atheist's perspective. But why now?”

“It's not only cowardice I inherited from my father,” Roussillon said. “He also blessed me with the genes for early onset dementia. My daughter tells me I have blank moments, that you witnessed one at dinner. I don't notice those so much, but I do know,” he spread his hands, “that I have been forgetting things lately. Small and unimportant things, but my doctor tells me this is how it starts. I need to tell Claudia, and maybe the world, this story before I forget it.” He offered a weak smile. “And after that, well, you know we Europeans are embracing the idea of euthanasia. It does seem like a dignified option, don't you think?”

“I can't say I've thought about it much.”

“Well, I suppose you've had no reason to.”