Russia.
Brightman.
Halifax, 1940.
Dr. Charlie…
As I sipped a coffee in Macauley's Inner Circle Restaurant, with the photographs spread out before me, I felt that I was closer to some real answers than I'd been before. The men who'd searched Travin's room had been looking for these photographs; I was almost certain of that. Therefore, I wasn't making a fool of myself — and that alone was reassuring. In addition, the photographs brought Brightman's disappearance and May's adoption irrevocably together, for Travin had been interested in both father and daughter. Yet everything that had happened in Detroit also proved that the connection wasn't "personal" in any obvious way: it wasn't a case of May's "real" mother, or anyone else, trying a quiet spot of blackmail. May's adoption gave a particular focus to her father's past — a focus that had burned its way right into the present — but it was his past itself that was the problem. Who was May Brightman? This question, the question Travin had been asking, now seemed only one aspect of another: who was Harry? I had no clear idea of the answer. But that afternoon, as I drove away from Berlin, I had some real clues to play with, and I began putting them together. May and Harry, together, made up the mystery, and Russia was the key to its solution. Brightman had been there, I had been there, and a number of real, live Russians — and one dead Russian — apparently had an interest in this. And when you think of Russia, you think of Communism, a word that connected up nicely with the year 1940, and even better with Dr. Charlie, the doctor who was "a bit of a socialist," the doctor with all those left-wing books in his den. Finally, there was the photograph itself, with its Cyrillic lettering, and that odd group of men. I'm not sure why, but something in their stance — an aggressiveness, a tension— struck me as familiar. Funny associations played through my mind: old Jimmy Cagney movies about gangsters holed up in the hills… old pictures of railway executives posed around the Last Spike… and, since I was thinking of Russia and Communism, I also thought of those formal, frozen portraits of Engels and Marx, Lenin and Stalin, that are the iconography of Soviet sainthood. This sounds very vague; and it was. But it was more than a hunch. I suspected that I knew more than
I yet understood. I needed one final hint, a last nudge, one more prompt… I'd joined up the dots, but couldn't make out the picture they formed; I'd filled in the blanks, but couldn't pronounce the word the letters spelled out. Or, more precisely, I now had the photograph, but I still needed the caption.
I began looking for it in Washington — and found it three days later in New York.
As searches go, this one was not that hard, and indeed it was a pleasure for me: something like work, even a return to civilization. I faced nothing more threatening than a recalcitrant microfiche reader, and the greatest challenge to my intestinal fortitude was the Washington Post cafeteria. Nonetheless, I didn't forget Travin's fate, or Brightman's. Retrieving my own car, I ditched the Jaguar in a parking garage, and though I stayed at my mother's house in Georgetown, I was very discreet. I kept away from my friends, eschewed certain obvious contacts and haunts, and otherwise kept my head low. With May, I was vague. Though she'd returned to Toronto without mishap, she was still upset — naturally enough — and tried to make me promise that I'd give up what I was doing. But I brushed that off, and once I was satisfied that she was really all right, I told her a story about having trouble with the car and said I'd call her again in a couple of days.
A week, in fact, was the deadline I gave myself. This was less arbitrary than it sounds. I knew the sort of job I had to do, and experience told me that I'd either wrap it up quickly or not at all. Who were the people in the photograph? What had they been doing in Halifax in 1940? Above all, who was the other man whom Travin had circled? Assuming it was possible, then answering these questions should be a task of only middling difficulty.
I had three clues: Brightman, Halifax, and 1940. The first I dispensed with quickly. If I'd run Brightman's name through the files of the Toronto papers, I likely would have come up with one or two references, but there was nothing in Washington. My second clue, Halifax, was more productive — a huge explosion in 1917, innumerable royal visits, naval activity all through the war. And 1940 was a bonanza: all those stories my mother had told me scrolled through the scratchy, glaring field of the microfilm lens:
February 11: The U.S.S.R. launches a new, massive invasion of Finland.
April 9: Germany attacks Denmark and Norway.
May 10: Germany overruns Belgium.
May 13: Germany invades France.
May 26: The Allied evacuation at Dunkirk begins.
June 14: Paris falls.
June 21: France surrenders…
It was all there in black and white, and there were plenty of pictures: Molotov, Chamberlain, Weygand, Churchill, Reynaud, Guderian, Roosevelt, Lindbergh… My man, obviously, was a much smaller fish than any of these; he would be a minor figure, a face in the background, some assistant or aide. But I was sure he was a public man. If the photo had no wider reference, why tear Travin's room apart trying to find it? Pushing on, I checked all the papers, the Library of Congress, then made copies of the photo — blocking out Brightman — and showed them around. Two guesses took half a day to track down, I wasted an evening with an old UPI man in a bar, but finally, widening the search, I got lucky. This was in New York, in the Bettmann Archive, which — being the last place I looked — is undoubtedly where I should have gone to begin with. The Archive houses one of the largest collections of historical photographs in the world, and they are superbly organized. Instead of making you paw through trays of prints, or file folders that end up spilling all over the place, they have a nice, neat system of index cards: a small print of the photo is reproduced on one side of the card, there's a brief paragraph of commentary, and then half a dozen index headings. My first break came under "War, Spanish Civil": a picture of a stocky man hoisted on the shoulders of some grinning members of the International Brigade. I couldn't make up my mind; this man was like Travin's man — he had the same sort of presence — but the photos were too dissimilar to let me be certain. Now, though, I knew what I wanted, and I quickly found three other shots, the best of them in the "Date File" for 1933. It had been taken from above, and showed the head and upper body of a man in his mid-forties. He had dark, thick hair and dark eyes, and his powerful shoulders bunched the cloth of his suit. His expression was determined, but also slightly distracted, as if he'd looked away for a moment after a period of concentration. Even in this casual portrait, the force of the man's personality was evident, especially in contrast to the figures behind him. One of these was a man slumped forward in utter dejection; the second was a guard with a vacant expression who was wearing the uniform of the German police. Under "Description" the index card said:
Georgi Dimitrov (1882–1949), Bulgarian-born Communist leader, was accused by the Nazis of conspiring to set fire to the German Parliament buildings (the Reichstag) on Feb. 27, 1933. His trial at Leipzig was an international sensation and made Dimitrov a hero of anti-Nazi and left-wing groups around the world. Dimitrov brilliantly defended himself, ridiculing both Goring and Goebbels in court, and was finally released. Marinus van der Lubbe (the slumped figure behind Dimitrov) was ultimately convicted and executed for the crime. Dimitrov subsequently became head of the Comintern and was later Premier of Bulgaria.