Murder Without Pity by Steve Haberman Page B

read”—she flicked her eyes momentarily at him—“the few survivors I’ve talked with for hours trying to understand that roundup of Jews. I know everything about the sixteenth and seventeenth of July 1942 and understand nothing.”
    She settled her glass down and rested her cheek in her palm, elbow on the table. “Someone, Mamma, I think,” she continued at last, her voice languid and far away, “may have managed to help me escape that day from the Vel d’Hiv Stadium where the police held everyone. Maybe because I was the youngest, the smallest, and she was able to hide me under her coat and push me out an exit. Who knows? Anyway, if she did, it was her last act of love. I never saw her again. Or any of them for that matter. From the Vel d’Hiv to that dreary suburb of Drancy to Auschwitz. My family’s death trail.”
    She darted her eyes across to him. “That’s always bothered me, not knowing my parents. Not knowing my sisters either. I say ‘Papa’ and ‘Mamma’ like an incantation. Say them often enough, and they won’t be mere figures in some faded photographs. They’ll spring to life in my head.”
    Her eyes drifted back to the tablecloth. “Sometimes when I return to my apartment from work, I want to call out, ‘Papa, Mamma, Rachel, Lea, I’m home.’ Me at my age, playing a child’s game.”
    She sipped more wine. “What I know about them, I know from this woman I call Auntie, who knew them. They were Italians, who settled in Poland. There, they became refugees from Hitler. Papa wanted to go to America. Mamma wanted France.” She smiled into her glass at the memory. “Mamma won. They settled near the Bastille. They looked forward to the day when they could get their papers and finally be French. They’d celebrate two freedom days: the day they became citizens and Bastille Day.
    “Funny”—she looked up from her glass and over to him—“they longed for that day when they could belong, Auntie said. They taught themselves the language and insisted every family member speak it. Yet in the end, some of their own countrymen thought they weren’t good enough and had them shipped off.” She gave a sad shrug. “‘Man is a wolf to man,’ as they say.”
    And my grandfather helped create that murderous atmosphere, he thought. He flinched his eyes away from shame before he caught himself and gazed at her once more.
    The wine had washed away her red lipstick. She looked pale and worn. She sighed and looked out to the terrace, empty except for a tree of bare limbs in the middle. “You know what else is funny?” she asked after a time. “I still get a thrill whenever I hear the ‘Marseillaise.’”
    She slipped back into her contemplative sadness. He could only wait for her to return. Several moments passed. Still he said nothing, but held his gaze on her and finally his hand on hers.
    Anna straightened with an embarrassed laugh, but didn’t remove her hand. “I certainly didn’t expect this. It must be the wine and you. You’re an excellent listener, Monsieur Examining Magistrate. Too good, in fact.” She managed a faint smile. “You will excuse me? I must telephone my Jules to see how he is.” She pushed back her chair and walked away a little too quickly.

CHAPTER 14
    STANISLAS’S FEARS
    Stanislas noticed off in a corner a middle-aged man, seated next to a youth, who wore glasses. His security detail. They must have entered, he realized, while he listened to Anna. Their being there intruded into the intimacy of Anna’s sadness that held him as though she were still there, and he resented their presence.
    He looked over to the elderly couple across from him. A mutter of conversation passed between them. Had one of them said something to fill the emptiness because, like his parents, they had long ago run out of things to say? And also, like his parents, had they put on a pretense of routine, eating out perhaps, to hide some family shame?
    The woman helped herself into her coat.