Dog-tired, she checked her messages. There were three of them, all from Mrs. Tillman, each more testy than the last, demanding to know whether the package had arrived. It was too early to call England now, and Lucy was damned if she’d stay up till after midnight. More than anything, she craved sleep.
At five A.M. she was punished by the insistent trilling of the phone. She groggily reached for the receiver in the dark.
“Marjie Tillman — I’ve been trying to reach you since Friday.”
“I’m sorry, we were away for the weekend…. just got back. When I got your messages, it was still too early to call you. But thank you, yes, it did come. Excuse me, I’m not too c-c-c-c-c-coherent right now, you see it’s five in the morning here and I was—”
“Five? It’s surely eight!”
Mrs. Tillman was accusing her of self-serving deception. “No, no — it’s eight on the East Coast, like in New York, but we’re three hours behind out here. It’s only five.”
“Well, in that case, perhaps you—”
“No, honestly, I’m awake now, we can t-t-talk—” Better to deal with this call straightaway than to wake again at seven with it still hanging over her head. To get to her piece, she needed to be done with this peremptory and deluded pest. “But thanks so much for getting the picture to me so fast — it must’ve wrecked your day. I’m hugely grateful to you.”
“So now you see.”
“Sorry?”
“It’s him.”
Speaking gently, trying as best she could not to offend, Lucy explained the differences between the two photos — the change in lighting, the overexposure of Juris Abeltins’ face, exactly how the two sets of barbed wire looked not quite the same. She said, “And then there are the chickens. If you look carefully at the picture of J-J-J-Juris you can see chickens pecking in the background. That’s obviously taken on your farm. But there isn’t a single chicken in the V–V-Vanags one.”
“Well, of course not!” She spoke as if Lucy were a total half-wit. “They use airbrushes and things!”
Lucy remembered the brown envelope of papers that had accompanied Augie all the way from Germany to Useless Bay. He’d asked her to remind him to dig it out for her, and, maddeningly, in the happy conviviality of Saturday’s dinner, when she’d gotten more than a little drunk, she had neglected to do so. The contents of that envelope would prove everything.
“Marjie, August Vanags has papers to prove his identity. He’s not your Juris Abeltins.”
“Papers? What papers?”
“Well…” For inspiration, she rummaged in her memory for the background reading she’d undertaken more than two weeks ago. She had to somehow rid herself of this madwoman at the far end of the line. “There’s a sort of temporary passport issued by…” Who would it be issued by, the embassy? Did they even have an embassy there then? “By the American authorities in Berlin. Then there’s…a l-l-l-letter from his sponsors, a group of Latvians in New York. There’s another letter from Sergeant C–C-Cahan, the soldier who took care of him for a while. Oh, and there’s another one from someone in UNNRA, an Englishwoman, like you. She was in charge of displaced children at the c-c-c-c-camp….” Surely that would do. “And of course there’s the ph-ph-ph-ph-photograph on the book.”
“What’s the date on this so-called passport?”
“I’m not sure. I think…August or S-S-September in 1945?”
“You can’t place it more exactly than that?”
“No.”
“And you’ve seen all these ‘papers’?”
Lucy paused fractionally before saying yes. That she hadn’t seen them was, after all, her own silly fault. And if they weren’t precisely as she’d described them, they must be very similar. There was no doubt in her mind as to the existence of the brown envelope.
Thousands of miles away in Thetford, Norfolk, there was silence. Evidently Mrs. Tillman was taking time to adjust to the fact that she’d been wrong from the start. At last, her voice came back on the line. “Miss Bengstrom?”
“Yes?”
“If these ‘papers’ exist — which I have to say, with all due respect, I rather doubt — they’re forgeries.”
A click at the other end, and then the dial tone.
IT HAD BEEN FIVE in the morning, after all — a time when anyone could be forgiven for being, as Augie liked to say, a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Besides, Marjorie Tillman was both unbelievably rude and downright crazy, possessed by her unshakable but totally bogus idée fixe. If she really had anything on Augie, as opposed to Juris Abeltins, she’d have said so in her letter, which Lucy pulled out and read carefully again. It was simply a long, tedious complaint about the immense inconvenience to which her family had been put by harboring the boy. There were rambling, digressive paragraphs about ration books, the coeliac stuff, the Jenny Lind Hospital, and something they’d had to eat, apparently called snoek, if Lucy was reading the word right; rants about a politician named Herbert Morrison, the bananas that had to be specially flown in, about the indignities of being forced to raise chickens; scattered admiration for “Winnie,” whom Lucy took to mean Churchill; but otherwise only ingratitude — how could the child be so ungrateful to his benefactors? There was nothing whatsoever to connect Juris Abeltins with August Vanags. No wonder the poor kid had never written back to the Vickers family, who appeared to have treated him like Oliver Twist in the workhouse.
Yes, she’d lied, but not only was it five in the morning, she’d lied in the service of the truth, trying to rid this unpleasant woman of a vengeful fiction that had its entire basis in a chance glimpse of a dust jacket in a bookstore. For what else was there? And Mrs. Tillman hadn’t caught her in her lie; she was merely desperate to evade the truth, which was that she was living in Fantasyland. It was written all over her letter, and palpable in her every pronouncement: the bitch was a fucking psycho.
Yet against all reason her adamantine certainty still shook Lucy, They’re forgeries! continuing to ring in her head, a measure of the power of even psychotic certainty to sway one’s feelings in spite of one’s better judgment. Spend enough time with the mad and you’ll catch their madness, because sanity is a fragile, feeble, defenseless thing when battered by the intractable, lunatic conviction exemplified by Mrs. Tillman. It was weak of Lucy to feel so shaken.
She badly wanted to drive back to Useless Bay and get Augie to show her the papers in that envelope. She thought of phoning him now; he could make photocopies in Langley, FedEx them over, and she’d have them in hand tomorrow. That’d stop Tillman’s toxic shit. But then, of course, having described them in such probably inaccurate detail, Lucy could hardly send copies to Thetford, because now they’d really look like forgeries.
Last night, she’d so looked forward to this morning, to reading through her notes and seeing how she could pull this story off elegantly, economically, in a space that GQ could print without cutting. But that phone call had blighted the day. She’d never gotten to sleep again and had squandered the next two hours rearranging the pillows to find a cool surface on which to rest her hot head. She felt jangled and hungover, though she hadn’t had so much as a sip of wine on Sunday.