He glanced around furtively, as if someone would overhear.
"I had no idea Nathalie changed her will," he said. "We never agreed over him. Maybe she'd been drinking. Why should the mistakes we make when young stay with us all our life?"
She wasn't sure what he meant but he appeared fatigued and wiped his brow.
"Cut to the chase, Monsieur." Her head pounded and her patience was exhausted. "Who is he?"
"During the war, Nathalie was an actress, I did lighting and camera work for Coliseum. We worked with Allegret, the director, in the same acting troupe with Simone Signoret." A melancholy smile crossed his face. "Nathalie never tired of telling everyone that. Anyway, Coliseum was accused of being a collaborationist film company and later grew to become Paricor. But then we just made movies and Goebbels made the propaganda. And like everyone in France, we had to get Gestapo permission for anything we did. At that time, cutting your toenails required approval from the Gestapo Kommandantur, so I've never understood the uproar about collaborators. We all were, if you look at it like that."
Maybe that was true, but it reminded her of the joke about the Resistance. Fewer than five in a hundred of the French had ever joined, but if you talked to anyone today over sixty, they'd all been card-carrying members.
He paused, sadness washing over his face. "Anyway, at Liberation we had a stillborn child. My wife couldn't get over it, but then, you see, so many babies came out stillborn during the war. Maybe it was the lack of food. But Nathalie felt so guilty. Everyone went crazy happy at Liberation. Our saviors, the Allies, were rolling in and here she was about to commit suicide."
His breath came in labored spurts now and his face was flushed. "On the street we'd see parades of women with their heads shaved. They'd slept with Nazis."
"Monsieur, some water?" she interrupted. She passed the bottle of yellow pills across the table towards him.
"Merci," he said, gulping the water with more pills.
"What does this have to do with Thierry?" she said.
"There was a knock on our door one night. Little Sarah, a girl really, held a baby in her arms. I knew her father, Ruben."
"Sarah?" she said. Where had she seen that name? Then her brain clicked-she'd seen it on Lili's yarn list next to Hecht's! "What was her last name?"
Claude Rambuteau shook his head. "I don't remember. Her father worked on the camera crew before the war, a Jew, but…" His eyes glazed, then he continued. "Anyway, it was such a shock, I hadn't seen her for several years. Sarah's head had been shaved and an ugly tar swastika branded on her forehead. She cried and moaned at our door. 'My baby is hungry, my milk has dried up, and he's going to die.' The baby cried piteously. I noticed on her torn dress a dark outline of material where a star had been sewn. 'Where is your family?' I asked. She just shook her head. Then she said, 'No one will give me milk for my Nazi bastard.'
"I told her that I couldn't help her. People might suspect me of collaborating. Especially since I'd worked at Coliseum all during the war. She looked at my wife and said that the baby would die if he went with her and she didn't know anyone else to ask. She said she knew we'd had a baby, couldn't my wife nurse hers, too? I told her our baby had died."
Rambuteau closed his eyes. "She begged me, got on her hands and knees in the doorway. She said she knew he'd be safe with us because we had connections. Bands of Resistance vigilantes roamed Paris, out for revenge. I tell you, it was more dangerous to be on the streets after the Germans left than before, if they thought you'd collaborated."
He took a few deep breaths, then kept talking determinedly. "All of a sudden, my wife took the crying baby in her arms. She opened her blouse and instinctively the infant sucked greedily. Nathalie still had milk and her face filled with happiness. I knew then we'd keep the baby. So you see, Nathalie is his real mother. She gave him milk and life, I've always told her that. I never saw Sarah again. She brought us the baby because we were rightists and no one would ever suspect."
Incredulous, Aimee asked, "How could you accept the baby with the way you feel about Jews?"
"I've always regarded him as Aryan, because half of him is."
"Half-Aryan?" Aimee sat up.
"The product of a union between a Jew and a German soldier. Evidently, my wife had made some foolish promise to reveal the past to Thierry. Sometimes her drinking got her into trouble." Wearily, he raised his hand and brushed his thinning gray hair behind his ears. The man had no tears left. Aimee recalled the cobbler Javel mentioning a blue-eyed Jewess with a baby.
"Did this Sarah have bright blue eyes?" she said.
Monsieur Rambuteau looked surprised, then wrinkled his brow. "Yes, like Thierry." He shrugged. "He's as much my son as if he came from my loins. And he's all I have left."
"Tell him the truth. Be honest," she said.
Monsieur Rambuteau looked horror-stricken. "I don't know if I could. You see, he would have such a reaction."
"You mean a violent reaction?" She thought he seemed afraid of his own son.
He shook his head sadly. "His real parentage is against everything I've raised him to believe. And now it's come back to haunt my life. I never meant to be so anti-Semitic when he was growing up. I just felt the races should live separately. And I spoiled him, I could never say no to him. He's very strong-minded, I just don't know what to do."
Aimee was struck by this irony in Monsieur Rambuteau. But his obvious love for his son, even though he was half-Jewish, touched her.
After a minute of quiet, his labored breathing had eased and he smiled faintly. "I'm sorry. I'm a sick old man. And I'm desperate. The truth would destroy him." He sighed. "My son is not the easiest person to deal with. If he asks you lots of questions, tell him that all records of births were destroyed by the Nazis when they abandoned Drancy prison. That's the truth."
"You love him," she said. "But I can't help you."
"The records were destroyed, there's nothing left," he said.
Aimee pulled out a Polaroid of the black swastika painted on her office wall. "This is your son's handiwork."
He shook his head. "Wrong, Detective."
"How do you know, Monsieur Rambuteau?" She searched his face.
"Because that's how Nazis painted them in my day."
Taken aback, she paused and studied it again.
"He could have copied the style," she said.
But even though Aimee pressed him, he just shook his head. "As far as I'm concerned, young lady, we never had this conversation. I'll deny it. Take my advice, no one wants the past dug up."
Wednesday Afternoon
THIERRY RAMBUTEAU, LEADER OF Les Blancs Nationaux, paced impatiently in front of a sagging stone mausoleum. Where was his father? They'd arranged to meet before his mother's funeral.
This was ridiculous. He wasn't waiting any longer. Striding between the narrow lanes of crooked headstones in Père Lachaise cemetery, he realized he was lost. Every turn he took seemed to take him further away from where he wanted to go. A trio of seniors involved in a heated discussion stood on the gravel path, their breath puffy clouds in the crisp air.
"Alors, is this the western section?" Thierry asked of the one with a shovel. "I'm looking for Row E."
The old man looked up and nodded knowingly. "A new burial, eh? You're in the east corridor, young man, made a wrong turn a few turns back."
The old man pulled his heavy work gloves off, reached into his vest pocket, and pulled out a fluorescent orange map. On it were the faces of celebrities buried in Père Lachaise. Like a Hollywood map to stars' homes Thierry had seen sold in Beverly Hills. Only these stars were in homes of the dead. Just then, a group of tourists wandered past them, rattling away in Dutch and consulting their own maps.
"What is this, a tourist stop?" Thierry asked in disgust.