Brown-Eyed Girl

by Virginia Swift

  “‘No, he didn’t,’ I said. ‘You’re lying. Ernst had so much money when we left France, I was sure we’d be robbed. Why would he need your filthy money?’

  “‘What kind of money?’ my father asked me. ‘French francs? Italian lira? How about Reichsmarks—let’s see, right about then, Reichsmarks would have been trading against dollars about five thousand to one.’ He looked at me like I was something he’d spat out and said, ‘Who the hell would want his worthless money?’

  “‘I still don’t believe you,’ I told him.

  “His eyes were glittering with fever and malice. He was clutching something in his hand. ‘Why honey, the first deal we ever did was that day you walked in with that little mongrel bastard. Ernst said he’d heard I had expressed an interest in aiding the defense of the Fatherland—you know how he had that fancy English the foreigners talk? Yeah, he said, he could assist me, but that he’d grown fond of you, and out of concern for you, he would be willing to demonstrate his intent by offering me a gift that had been seized from enemies of the Reich. That time it was a ruby bracelet. When he came again in 1943, it was five of the prettiest diamonds you ever saw. Here’s the bracelet.’

  “He put it in my hand. I almost couldn’t look. I knew the bracelet. Giselle had never taken it off. It was inscribed inside; it was a wedding present from Marc. Why had Ernst given it to my father?

  “And then he crushed out his cigarette, lit another one, and really started in. ‘That man you were so fond of fucking was a Nazi, Margaret,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you proud of yourself—whoring for a Nazi? You’re so high and righteous, saving your little Jewish brat, and all this time, you’ve been nothing but a Nazi’s bitch whore.’

  “Maybe that was really all he had to say in his life. He started gasping for air, clutching his chest. I knew he was having another attack, that I should call a doctor. But I just watched. The cigarette dropped from his hand and landed on the quilt on the bed. It set the quilt on fire, just a little fire. I should have put it out. But I didn’t. I watched it spread. He was unconscious—nearly dead, blue around the lips.” She paused. “He might have been dead. But when I walked out of that house, with the fire moving across the bed and toward the wall, I actually hoped he was still alive. I walked out, holding my dead friend’s wedding bracelet in my hand, and let him burn.”

  Tape number three. Sally was terrified to listen, driven to hear.

  “My father burned up in his house of hate, and left me hopeless and miserable and rich,” Meg began again. “I didn’t tell anyone what had happened. I have always wondered if Maude suspected. But then, she had plenty on her own mind in those days besides my moods.

  “At first, the money was every bit the burden Mac Dunwoodie intended it to be. All I could think of was how dirty it must be, how every penny he’d ever earned must have come as somebody else’s tragedy. I kept hearing him call me a Nazi’s whore. I wanted desperately to give it all away.

  “But then I realized that he was dead. He couldn’t touch me any more. What had been his was mine. My own gift of revenge would be to take all that he’d lied and swindled and threatened his way into, and turn it into something else. I would make it a resource for all the good things he hated. And I would do a damned good job of it. Mac Dunwoodie gave me three things: a bloody fortune, a taste for revenge, and a little talent for making money. I used all three. My mother had given me some things, too: a strong brain and body, the belief in human rights, and the capacity for love. I wanted to use those things, too.

  “I had known for a long time that I would never have a husband, or another lover. Ernst had been the first and last. I forbade myself to think about his betrayal, covered the hurt with so many layers of anger that I almost forgot what it looked like. And yet I couldn’t just turn to stone. It became all the more important to me to be worthy of those I loved, and those who loved justice and beauty. All the things my father despised.

  “I admired and loved Maude Stark from the moment that she picked up those measuring spoons from Clara McIntyre’s kitchen table, and gave them to Ezra to play with. As I tell these stories,” Meg’s voice quavered for the first time, “I have had years to learn just how smart and brave and loyal she is. Maude has inspired me and educated me. She made me see the ways women have suffered injustice. Without Maude, I never would have understood how my mother could have stayed with my father, all those years. I couldn’t have fathomed the ways his hatred bore down on her, how the same things happen to so many women. I hope my legacy can lift some of those burdens.

  “When Ezra came back to the Rockies, I felt my real family had been reunited. I do think of him as my son, but I have never forgotten his mother. When he first moved to Denver, Maude and I went down to celebrate his return. I gave him Giselle’s ruby bracelet. He was thrilled to have it, but wanted to know how I’d come by it. I told him she’d given it to me for safekeeping, and now it was his to keep safe.”

  Sally stopped the tape. She went upstairs, got a box of Kleenex and a Coca-Cola, resumed.

  “Oh yes. And the horrid Krugerrands. Those I sold for cash, then wrote a check for the entire amount to the Simon Wiesenthal Center. It was a somewhat amusing situation. I had put an ad in the Denver Post offering them to coin collectors, and it turned out that the fellow who came to buy them was from Wyoming, a young Teton County rancher named Elroy Foote. He was quite a character— asked if I had any more! Imagine! I told him I had thousands, and since I didn’t trust the banks, I’d buried them in a secret place. I think the fool actually believed me!”

  Whoops! Stop and rewind and replay that sucker. Jesus.

  “Actually, I kept a single Krugerrand. I’m not sure why. I suppose I don’t believe it’s possible to blot out the past entirely. Or perhaps I was just fated to do it. Because when I saw Ernst again, and showed it to him, I knew my father had really gotten it from him.

  “Yes, I did see Ernst again. I was down at my place in Florida, just last year. Someone knocked on the door. I wasn’t expecting anyone. And there he was.

  “I had always thought Ernst would age well. He had. He stood tall and strong. His hair had turned white, and it was much thinner, but he combed it the same way, straight back. His eyes were as clear as ever. I stood for a long time in the doorway, holding the door open, just staring at him. And then, he walked in.

  “I had no idea what to say. ‘Where have you been the last forty years?’ Or perhaps, ‘I would have waited for you forever, but then I found out that you were a Nazi agent?’ Finally, I settled on ‘Why have you come?’

  “He stood in my living room, staring at me. We could hear the sound of the waves, gulls calling. And then he said, ‘You look beautiful.’

  “I don’t know if he could have said anything worse. ‘Beautiful?’ I said. ‘Ernst, I’m seventy-seven years old. I’m a bitter old lady. I’m not beautiful.’ But to me, he looked beautiful, damn him. ‘You haven’t answered my question,’ I said. ‘Why are you here?’

  “‘I have business in the states,’ he said, as if that explained anything.

  “I couldn’t contain myself any longer. ‘Business!’ I said, ‘I know about your business. Forty years ago you did business with my father. And again in the 1960s. My father showed me the bracelet you traded him for money for your Nazi death machine—Giselle’s wedding bracelet! And this!’ I went to the bedroom, to my jewelry box, and got the coin. Threw it at him. ‘What was this? What have you done? How could you?’ I asked him. ‘You betrayed me and everything I thought you loved.’

  “There is a picture of Ernst, that I took on top of Mount Pilatus, near Lucerne, in 1934. I’m looking at it as I speak these words. In his eyes there was so much love and thought and knowledge—I was never the same after seeing all those things in his eyes. He had that same look, in 1981, as we sat, two old people with everything and nothing to say, listening to the sea.

  “And then he told me. ‘Remember when we left—at the Gare du Nord? Giselle insisted I take the bracelet.
She wanted Ezra to have something to remind him of her if . . . if something happened. I gave it to your father to bargain for the boy’s life.’

  “‘But you knew what he was doing. You knew that he and the others were dealing with the Nazis. You helped him with those deals, sold him diamonds. Whose diamonds were they, Ernst? Did one of your friends take them from some old man in Antwerp as they shoved him onto the train to the camps? How many did you help them kill?’

  “He stood then, and strode over to me, and took me by the shoulders and shook me. ‘How can you think that of me, Greta? Don’t you know me?’

  “How should I have known him, after forty years? I just looked at him. ‘My father told me what you’d done. It was his parting gift to me, Ernst. He called me a Nazi’s whore.’

  “Then, Ernst just looked at me. And for the first time ever, too late, he began to explain. ‘Your father thought he was giving aid to the Axis, but most of the money he and the others paid me never got to the Nazis. I had been secretly raising funds for the German resistance during the ’30s. In 1940, I made contact with the American OSS. I worked with them throughout the war, funneling money to anti-Nazi groups inside France and Germany. I thought that would make it possible to be with you. I begged them to let me tell you what I was doing. It wasn’t possible. When the war was over, I told myself, this will all be over for me. But it wasn’t. I’d been playing the game so long, I couldn’t get out. I’d done things they could use on me. I couldn’t get back to you.’”

  Was he lying? Sally sat forward, listening hard. Meg’s voice, hard and raspy, came back.

  “I told him I didn’t see how I could believe him. If he’d been a reluctant captive, why had he come to barter gold for guns with my father, in 1962? Surely he could have refused that assignment. ‘It was a CIA operation, of course,’ Ernst told me. ‘I could have turned it down, but I had some foolish thought that somehow I could see you. I couldn’t take the chance of seeing you before, but perhaps after. Then I met with him, and realized that I couldn’t face you. I wasn’t fighting any kind of good fight any longer. Apartheid gold, for guns for CIA-trained Cubans to go take back their Fatherland. I had thought that no matter what it looked like, or to whom, I’d always stayed on the same side. But by then I was just, well, in the game.’”

  “‘And you’re still in it?’ I asked him. Ernst didn’t answer for a moment.

  “‘I retired a few years ago, and moved to Perth, in Australia,’ he told me. ‘I’ve gone back to the diamond mines. The Argyle Mine, out in western Australia, looks as if it will produce remarkable gems in some quantity. Most are of course fairly small, but some,’ he said, putting his hand in his pocket, pulling it out, and taking my hand, ‘some are unforgettable.’ He’d put a paper envelope in my hand. I unfolded it and looked down at a pink teardrop diamond, the equal of any of the ones Ernst Malthus had sold my father on the morning I’d last laid eyes on him, made love with him one final time.

  “I just looked up at him. ‘When we found this,’ he said, ‘I knew at the very moment that I had to find you, had to take it to you. To make you understand, somehow. But you can’t understand, can you? Because it’s not understandable. So don’t,’ he said. ‘But can you forgive?’

  “‘How could you leave me, all these years?’ I asked him. ‘How could you give my father the very weapon he needed to destroy me? How could you ever, ever do his work? Are you here on CIA business again, Ernst? Maybe trade a few pink diamonds to smuggle guns to some pet counterrevolutionaries for the Reagan admininstration? Still in the game?’

  “For the first time, he looked like an old man. He looked at me with such sadness, and such tenderness, and so much regret, I was tempted to take his hand. But I couldn’t. And he knew it. ‘I want you to keep the diamond,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t make up for all I’ve done, but I want it to remind you of the memory of what we once had. I’ve kept it alive inside me for half a century, convinced myself that it was shining and unbreakable and eternal. And I’m so sorry, so very sorry, that it wasn’t nearly enough.’

  “He did take my hand then, and folded my fingers over the diamond, and then walked out. I didn’t go after him. I sat numb, listening to the surf and the birds and the sound of my own hard breathing. I put the diamond away with the others. I have them all, still.

  “I read in the newspaper, two days later, that a man identified as Ernest Martin, aged seventy-seven, of Perth, Australia, had been found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a luxury condominium on Lido Beach. I didn’t pull the trigger but I knew as clearly as I have ever known anything, that I killed him.”

  Chapter 33

  The Yippie I O Cafe

  The world washed clean, on a Saturday morning in June, seven thousand feet above sea level in the town of Laramie, Wyoming. Sally Alder put on her running shoes, stretched a little, and headed out the door. Gram and Emmylou wailed in her ears. Love scars the heart.

  Maude Stark had once told her that writing Meg Dunwoodie’s biography would be the most important work she had ever done. Now, she knew why. Maude had not known what was in the tapes, but some of it she had suspected. And when she heard the tapes, Maude just said, “Meg was wrong. She didn’t kill either of those men. But maybe she should have. Somebody should have.”

  That was loyalty. Misguided, probably, but loyalty.

  Sally thought there were sins and betrayals in her life. Comparing the dull saga of Mustang Sally to what had happened to Meg Dunwoodie, and what Meg had done herself, was like comparing pennywhistle music to Wagnerian opera. Amid the regret and the wonder, Sally felt . . . relief. The larger dramas of the world had touched her life very little. She had never been in immediate physical danger, never saved anybody’s life, never come close to killing anyone (except maybe Sam Branch—but he was clearly still alive). She hadn’t written brilliant poetry, hadn’t had a grand tragic passion that spread over her whole life. At least, not yet. It didn’t look as if she was going back to LA, but she knew that if she did, it was goodbye, Hawk.

  But being involved with Meg Dunwoodie apparently rubbed off on you. Now she’d been threatened by fanatics, scorched by fire, held a fortune in mysterious diamonds in her hand, and walked back into the arms of the man she’d been mad for, once upon a time in her wayward youth. Not bad for ten months in Laramie.

  Maybe it was time to celebrate. Tonight was a private party to kick off the grand opening of Burt Langham and Frank “John-Boy” Walton’s Yippie I O Cafe, Laramie’s first ever real live California fusion restaurant. The space in the historic building on old Ivinson Street had been completely remodeled since its last incarnation as a fern bar (ten years after fern bars were happening). A neon cowboy rode a neon bronc above the entrance. The tin ceiling was restored to perfection. Burt had keyed the decor to a poster of an old rodeo, lots of faded cream, dark crimson, and saddle brown. There were hints of leather, high blue sky, and the occasional lariat.

  The bar was an art piece Burt had commissioned from a California friend, a crescent of gleaming crimson resin resting on a Plexiglas base in which were embedded row upon row of vintage cowboy boots. A moose head with huge antlers hung on the brick chimney over the muchcontested pizza oven.

  Sally varied her jogging route so that she could stop in for a morning cup of coffee. Burt didn’t really want to do breakfasts (although he was planning a Sunday brunch menu), but she knew they’d be there, getting ready and freaking out. She wanted to wish them luck (and see if they passed her private coffee test; most restaurants, no matter how good, didn’t).

  The place was already insane. A fish delivery truck (Colorado plates) was parked at the back entrance in the alley, blocking access for a produce truck (plates ditto), and the drivers were about to get into a fight. The Albany County 4-H beef project team, meanwhile, was delivering half a prime steer, a good luck present from the 4-H president, a distant cousin of the Langhams. Since they couldn’t get it in the back, they were coming through the front door. Burt was screaming at
them to wait, but they were all saying howdy to Delice, who had arrived just in time to see them drop the bloody semi-steer on the spanking new tile floor.

  Everyone rushed over to get the steer off the floor and out of the way, and then Delice shooed as many people as possible out out out. Sally washed the beef blood off her arms, wondered if her New Orleans Jazz Festival T-shirt was wrecked, and told Delice she looked like she could use a cup of coffee, hint hint. The coffee passed the test, easily.

  Dickie showed up fifteen minutes later, and they had the weird sensation of holding an informal Wranglers’ Club meeting in a place that resembled the actual Wrangler only insofar as there was already blood on the floor. But John-Boy was taking it all surprisingly well, claiming that anybody who wanted to be in the restaurant business had to look sharp when things got crazy. He even offered to fix them up a couple of eggs.

  “Charge ’em $6.50 for two-over-easy,” Delice hollered at John-Boy. “You can’t make any money in this business giving away food.”

  And then she turned to her brother and Sally. “I’ve been so busy with all this, I haven’t had time to find out— what’s the latest with the Unknown Soldiers? Is that one guy still on the loose?”