My Darling Detective

by Howard Norman

  The auction was held on February 5 at 7:30 p.m. in the street-level drawing room of the Lord Nelson Hotel. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that the auctioneer was the same one, Reginald Avery. He looked even more the worse for wear than the last time I’d seen him, which was on March 19, 1977. The room was crowded, and people stood along the walls as well as sat in the rows of folding chairs. Brice looked like he was attending a funeral (maybe he thought he was, in effect, attending his own funeral, if he didn’t win the day), in his dark pinstripe suit, black shoes, white shirt, and black tie. I tried to loosen him up a little, saying, “You interviewing for the undertaker job I saw listed in the paper, or what?” as I glanced up and down his somber suit and tie.

  “For some reason, the more formal I dress, the more serious I feel about the auction,” he said.

  “Got it,” I said. The Tahiti Portfolio, as Reginald Avery called it, was fourth up on the docket. It was placed upright on a table, not on an easel, and was opened to exhibit two different photographs on two pages. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, if you would refer to item number four in your programs. A very rare opportunity, ladies and gentlemen,” Avery said in that sonorous voice of his, “very rare indeed. From the exotic French Polynesian territories—the island of Tahiti—The Tahiti Portfolio. Presently in the ownership of Mr. Ezekiel and Mrs. Sandra Bitters of Vancouver, British Columbia, a family perhaps best known for its collection of the works of Eugène Cuvelier. But this evening, the pièce de résistance of their fifty years of collecting and curating, The Tahiti Portfolio by Eugenio Courret, French born. The photographs were taken between 1863 and 1864. The only known edition. Near to perfect condition. The portfolio holds sixteen different albumen prints of Tahiti, and each image is 4¾ by 6¼ inches, mounted on a 9½-by-12½-inch sheet. Each print bears a blind stamp on the mat: ‘Courret Hermanos Fotografos Calle Mercaderes 197 Lima.’ Ladies and gentlemen, I am instructed by the family of Mr. Ezekiel and Mrs. Sandra Bitters to begin this evening’s bidding at five thousand dollars. Do I hear five thousand, ladies and gentlemen? Five thousand dollars for the rare Tahiti Portfolio.” Right away an auction paddle was held up, three rows ahead of us on the aisle. “The woman in row five, on the aisle, thank you,” Reginald Avery said. “Do I hear seventy-five hundred? Seventy-five hundred dollars, The Tahiti Portfolio?”

  I must say, the bidding was fast and furious; at eighteen thousand, Brice still had not raised his paddle. I studied his face in profile. He was rapidly blinking his eyes, not a good sign, I thought. But I didn’t say anything. Suddenly I sensed a—what? Something off to my left, coming up the aisle. Later, when I reported this incident to Martha, she called it “your mother’s ghost of an auction past.” Whatever it really was—hallucination, reenactment, déjà vu, or some psychological term I had no earthly idea of—it was over with quickly. I turned my attention back to Avery. “Nineteen thousand, we have a bid of nineteen thousand. Do I hear twenty? Do I hear twenty thousand dollars, The Tahiti Portfolio.” At which point Brice jumped the gun, and not only held up his paddle, but actually called out, “Twenty-two thousand,” a completely unnecessary escalation, of course, because Reginald Avery had asked for only twenty thousand. I reached over and, more roughly than I intended, pulled Brice’s head close to mine and whispered, “Brice, be careful here,” and then Avery pointed at Brice and said, “Gentleman in the sixth row, center, twenty-two thousand dollars. Do I hear twenty-three. Twenty-three thousand? The bid is at twenty-two, do I hear twenty-three?” Avery now pointed to his left as he said, “Lady in the maroon dress, second row, third in from the aisle, bids twenty-three thousand. Thank you, madam. Do I hear twenty-four, twenty-four thousand? The Tahiti Portfolio.”

  This was the moment I determined that Brice should turn his previous mistake into a strategy (was I possibly thinking of Hans Frisch in London?), so I leaned toward him and whispered, “Go for twenty-five—do it. Now.”

  Brice raised his paddle and said, “Twenty-five thousand!” And before Avery could even repeat Brice’s bid, a man in the second row, center, shouted, “Thirty thousand!” The bidding for The Tahiti Portfolio was over and done with.

  I told Brice that I would walk to Mrs. Hamelin’s with him and take full responsibility for not winning the bid. Brice said he appreciated that, but that he was the one who had listened to me. We went back and forth about this all the way to 112 Spring Garden Road. Brice unlocked the front door and we went inside, where Mrs. Brevittmore and Mrs. Hamelin were sitting together on the living room sofa. Mrs. Hamelin was just hanging up the telephone. “Open the champagne!” she said, and Mrs. Brevittmore popped the cork of a bottle of champagne. They had set out four glasses, and Mrs. Brevittmore filled all of them. “Come celebrate with us,” Mrs. Hamelin said.

  Confused, Brice and I sat down on the opposite sofa, took up glasses, and held them in midair as Mrs. Hamelin made a toast: “To the most shameless collector on earth—Esther Hamelin!” We all clinked glasses and sipped the champagne.

  We sat in silence for a moment, and then Mrs. Brevittmore said, “Enough suspense, right, Esther? Relax, relax, the deed is done, and The Tahiti Portfolio is now Esther’s.”

  “I’m sorry to tell you this,” Brice said, “but I was outbid, Mrs. Hamelin.”

  “Oh, I know that,” Mrs. Hamelin said. “I received a call right away.”

  “Then I don’t understand at all,” Brice said, taking quite a gulp of champagne.

  “The man who bid thirty thousand, I know him very well,” Mrs. Hamelin said. “Mr. Leonard Calendar, who has a very good eye for photographs, but for him it’s all in the bidding. He doesn’t really collect. Not on the worldly level, like some of us, though he does have some fine items. He just likes to win. I’ve followed his habits for decades now, you see. He’s a type, you might say. A certain type you find in the world of auctions. And when I received the call and heard who had won The Tahiti Portfolio, I simply telephoned Leonard—he always stays at the Lord Nelson. We spoke only moments ago, in fact. I offered him thirty-five thousand. And he was pleased as punch. I knew he would be. And he was. Let’s refill our glasses, shall we?”

  “Am I forgiven, then?” Brice said.

  “I’m sure you bid what I said was my ceiling price—what more could you do?” Mrs. Hamelin said.

  The way I read her expression was that she was not so very pleased with Brice, yet still pleased with the outcome. There it was. A grade of disappointment.

  Letter from Bernard Rigolet

  April 19, 1945

  Darling Nora,

  We are in the city of Leipzig. You should see the looks we get from the locals. One woman ran out of her house and spat at us, threw rotten apples and yelled, “See because of you what we have to eat!” Because of us? What about who started this war, her beloved Führer, her beloved Hitler! Blind cow. I looked in her house and saw the fire burning in her fireplace and I think of men we’ve buried in the frozen ground and God forgive me but there have been times I’ve been very close to firing a round into one of those houses, I swear I have. You won’t like to hear this about your Bernie, but it is true nonetheless, my darling.

  These past eleven hours have been the most crowded hours possible for a man to experience. Crowded in horrible ways. Hours I would give anything to erase out of my mind. But I’ll probably never be able to. Forgive me for telling you but I have to tell someone, I have to write it down, or else I don’t know what. Or else I’ll explode with the sheer crowdedness of it maybe.

  You have to understand that by this time—the 15th of this month—the British army liberated the concentration camp at Belsen. The world’s going to see pictures of suffering like it’s never seen. Robert Capa said he could’ve photographed the camps but decided to leave that to others. But somehow he kept getting information—he actually got information from Martha Gellhorn, who ran in the same crowd with Hemingway, and we even heard a radio broadcast by Edward Murrow—I wondered right away if you heard it at home, Nora. All I know for
certain is those camps were pure evil. There are a lot of them, and all of them are pure evil. We’re not that well informed with it, but we all know that much. Sam Marcus has family in Germany, and he is going insane with each little snippet of news. He hasn’t slept in weeks, he says, he’s out of his mind and can’t do a thing about it, except go nuts.

  Anyway, for a couple of days there were three smaller shows and we took a lot of casualties. Our battery faced skirmishes and by the grace of God we got through them, but with casualties. Darling Nora, I write this at noon on April 19, in Leipzig, which we have now occupied. Yesterday there was a big show here.

  We were fighting our way across the Zeppelin Bridge over the Weisse Elster Canal, moving toward the center of the city. We got pinned down by rifle fire, stopped, moved on, it seemed inch by inch—when the first platoon crossed the bridge, when they were right out on the bridge, I think every single one of us thought it might get blown up, but it didn’t happen, but when some men started across, they couldn’t make it because of gunfire, and nobody could make out where it was coming from. So we backed away from the bridge. I didn’t actually see anyone point to an apartment building off to our left, but suddenly that’s where some of the platoon all went toward. It was a four-story apartment building that overlooked the bridge. Some guys were shooting along the upper windows, just in case any snipers might’ve been there, we didn’t know who was up there. I went along on toward the apartment building and we all finally got to it. We needed to get some height, we needed to look out and see where the rest of our sector went and all of that. Troops went every which way in that apartment building. Me, I followed this sergeant named Rodney Ekhert and a young clean-cut pfc named Ray Bowman up the stairs, along with a few others, and Robert Capa close behind holding his camera. I mean, here everyone had been hearing that the war was over but it sure wasn’t over for us!

  We got to this one apartment which had a balcony and Ekhert and Bowman set up a machine gun and started blasting away. The rest of us were crouched back, but every once in a while stood up and shot out the window, not really sighting anything in particular, just support fire more or less. But mainly we were crouched back, and that’s when Ekhert went to get more ammunition and Bowman was left alone at the machine gun, sweeping bullets across his sightline, blasting away—and suddenly his body went slack and he fell back and onto his side. I could see his young face, and he had a single hole in his forehead, and blood was starting to pool. Robert Capa was just behind me to my right and snapping pictures—I think he’d already caught Ekhert and Bowman side by side at the machine gun and then Bowman alone, and after Bowman fell, some other soldier, I think it was Richard Barrical, pushed forward and took over the machine gun and started blasting away, and he was half sitting right on Bowman, but he really had to be, to get to the machine gun. Two of us pulled Bowman back along the floor, sliding him along in his own blood, and everything was very loud. I heard Barrical cursing and shouting at the German troops, and Nora, I’d be loath to repeat what he was saying, but you can imagine.

  Barrical was still firing away when some of us, including Robert Capa, hurried out of that apartment building and went looking for the sniper, and we found a bunch of fascist soldiers cowering inside a streetcar. Soon a pretty big group had surrounded the streetcar, and a few warning shots got fired, and the scumbag coward fascists walked out with their hands up. One was shouting “Kamerad! Kamerad!” You have no earthly idea, Nora, how fuming angry we all were and I half expected somebody to shoot these Nazis on the spot, and the world might not have felt a better place but it certainly wouldn’t have felt a worse place, either, for all of that. I wanted to shoot them myself. I admit that is who I was at that moment. I saw Robert Capa come up then and start snapping pictures while some of my battery were kicking the fascists along, swift kicks to their rears, and slamming rifle butts into their ribs, one fell and got back up, some hard blows across the face, too, hard blows with rifle butts across the face. They were led off into a building and what I heard later was, one fascist gave up the sniper, and the sniper was shot while trying to escape out back of the building, is how I heard it. What’s true there is fact, and what’s not true is hopeful fact. I felt nothing for the Nazi, I feel nothing for him as I write this. I feel everything for pfc Bowman and his family.

  This evening we walked around Leipzig a short while, then set up makeshift tables in one of the apartments in the same building as the one where Bowman was killed, a nice apartment with nice things in it, and we set up there and ate rations. Some of our platoon were in other apartments too, eating rations. Capa came in to announce that Ernie Pyle, the famous war reporter, had been killed on Iejima, Okinawa, shot in the head by a Japanese machine gunner, and Capa was very shaken and pale over this, all his contagious bravado, all his spirit gone all of a sudden, leached out, and he just slumped in the corner.

  A little while ago, too, we heard that Ernest Lisso, deputy mayor of Leipzig, committed suicide along with his wife and daughter. Sweeping through and clearing out buildings and houses, we found a lot of suicides. More than you can possibly imagine.

  The things that have happened here, darling Nora, the things I’ve seen, the things I’ve written to you about, I’ve become them. But I know I’ve become them just for now. I know that when I get home to you I won’t be them anymore. Maybe for a while but not for long. This is knowledge and conviction well thought out and I want so very much for you to understand this and believe it. I believe it and you will see for yourself once I get home to you. When might that be—on the calendar, I mean. (Because I never really left you, not in my heart.) Well, on the calendar—this is what I’ve been told—it might not be for three more months at the least, possibly as much as four or five more months, depending to what extent the war is actually over, in reality, not just the rumors. But believe me the war isn’t over quite yet, my darling. I’m here in it. It isn’t quite over.

  Here’s something I need to write to you. If somehow we could be at breakfast together a world away from this war, Nora, if only. I would quietly and calmly try to tell you what happened this afternoon here in Leipzig, a city much in ruins now. Here is what I would tell you in the calmest way possible. I was patrolling through the streets with two of my infantry mates—pfc Paul Langdon and medic Ken Kelly—and down a small street I saw a library. The roof had been blown away by artillery fire no doubt, and one wall was crumpled to pieces, and I could see right into the library. I told pfc Langdon and medic Kelly that I wanted to go take a look, and they said sure, let’s go, and so we walked over to the library. They both stood outside having smokes and surveying the wreckage. “I don’t read German—nothing in there for me,” medic Kelly said, and pfc Langdon laughed, and I laughed too. But I made my way over the piles of brick and such and on into the library. As far as I could tell, it had three rooms—two small rooms and one large one. Shelves of books were exposed to the weather now, and many books were charred and almost unrecognizable as books, but there were also quite a few that seemed to have survived the onslaught of artillery and such. A long solid beautiful desk was right out in the open, and it somehow looked almost completely unscathed—there was even a book lying there on it. I picked my way into one of the smaller rooms. The outside wall of this room had a gaping jagged hole in it and the card catalogue was on its side, the drawers open and cards scattered every which way on the floor, and I had the strange impulse to get down on my hands and knees and return them to their drawers. Don’t you think that’s odd? Maybe just to put the world a little back in order. I don’t know what.

  The long strain is telling. I wish I hadn’t written you about such ghastly things. But here is the rest of what happened. There lying against the wall behind the card catalogue was a woman. She was dead and had one arm completely blown off and other parts of her mangled, but she was wearing . . . I guess you might say a formal dress. It wasn’t a housecoat or anything like that. No, it was a get-dressed-up-for-an-evening kind of dress, whic
h was ripped to shreds. Dried blood was splotched on her face and forehead, her eyes were staring open (I reached down and closed them), and she had a blood-splattered book in the hand that was still intact. I sat there next to her. Pfc Langdon called and I called back, saying I was going to stay on there awhile, and he called back saying they were walking on, which was just fine with me. Pretty much I just sat there and might’ve even dozed off a minute or two, believe it or not, because that’s how sleep comes in our circumstances. Then I reached down and looked at the book she was holding. I couldn’t read the title but saw the name Rilke. That must be, I thought, the same writer you so love, Nora, my darling. I opened the book and saw it was a collection of poems. That has to be the same Rilke, right? And that is when our worlds were connected all of a sudden—libraries, that book, our hearts traveled such great distances. And because this war is definitely not over, my darling, there are going to be bad things to come yet, I can just feel it. I can just feel bad things yet to come. I don’t know if you will even get this letter, but awkwardly put, if death befalls me, I am holding your hands in mine. You may eventually read this in your library, surrounded by such articulate writers of books, and here I’m just trying to use words. But I was today connected to you in a way most men God willing will never be connected to their beloveds, and I am, for all the pain and sorrow and mystery of it, so very grateful.