“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.”