A Fire Sparkling

by MacLean, Julianne

  I turned in my seat to face him. “I told him I never wanted to see him again and walked out. Then I came here. And that’s who texted me just now. He’s apologizing again, asking if we can talk. I said hell no.”

  Geoffrey nodded with approval and kept driving.

  Eventually, I gave him a look. “So, what do you think about that?”

  He regarded me with a serious expression. “It makes me think you’ve been going through a rough time lately.”

  I looked out the window again. “I feel so stupid, like my head was buried in the sand the whole time we were together. I was only seeing what I wanted to see.”

  “It happens to the best of us,” Geoffrey replied, watching the road.

  “What about you?” I asked, curious. “You said you’d been there?”

  “Yeah. My ex-girlfriend—well, she was more than just my girlfriend. We were living together and talking about marriage. But then I found out she had never been faithful to me, not since the beginning. There weren’t any full-blown affairs. Just casual sex here and there, which she managed to keep secret.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “One of her friends told me one night when a bunch of us were out. She just thought I should know. I’m grateful now that she told me.”

  “I would have been too. So, did you end it right away, or . . . ?”

  “Oh yeah. I confronted her that same night. It caused a huge scene in the bar, and she was crying and apologizing and begging me to forgive her. She followed me out, telling me how much she loved me and didn’t want to lose me. But that was it. I knew I’d never be able to trust her again, because it wasn’t like it just happened once. It was a pretty common occurrence, according to her friend. So, I moved out that night, went to stay with my parents. And I felt like such an idiot, especially when my mom admitted that she never really liked Susan. She never trusted her. All I could think was: Why couldn’t I see it? Everyone else could.”

  I thought about that for a moment.

  “I guess that’s part of the reason why I wanted to understand how my grandmother could have fallen for a Nazi. It may sound crazy, but it almost makes me feel less alone in this, like I’m not the only person to make a mistake like that.”

  He tapped the steering wheel with his thumb. “But your grandmother married that pilot, right? And he was a good guy? They were happy together?”

  “Yes, very happy. He was a wonderful man.”

  “Well then,” Geoffrey said. “Maybe that’s what we all have to do—make a few mistakes, fall for the wrong person to get some sense knocked into us. Then we’re smarter the next time. Like your grandmother.” He groaned and rolled his eyes toward the roof of the car. “Thank God I didn’t marry Susan. Where would I be right now if I had?”

  I laughed softly. “Sounds like we both dodged a couple of bullets.”

  He pulled into a passing lane. “We certainly did.”

  When we arrived at Heathrow, Geoffrey pulled over at the curb and got out to fetch my suitcase. He set it down on the sidewalk, and I grasped the handle.

  “So, I guess this is it,” he said. “You’ll be heading straight back to New York, out of Berlin?”

  “Yes, after I talk to Hans and visit some archives. I really hope I can find out what happened to Ludwig.”

  “Me too,” Geoffrey said. “Will you call me and let me know how it goes?”

  “Of course. And thanks so much for the drive. I owe you one.”

  I stepped forward to give him a hug, because it seemed like the proper thing to do. It was a quick one. Friendly and casual.

  “Have a good flight,” he said.

  “I will. Talk to you soon.”

  As I turned away, I was keenly aware of the fact that he remained standing on the walk, watching me until I passed through the doors. When I looked back through the glass windows, he was getting into his car, and I felt a twinge of sadness at the notion that I might never see him again.

  But I would certainly call, because I had promised I would.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Hans Buchmann lived in the historic Berlin borough of Bergmannkiez, which oozed with Parisian flavor with its architecture and cafés lining the cobblestone streets.

  It was a bright and sunny morning, so I had decided to walk, as it was less than two miles from my hotel. When I arrived, I knew I was in the right place because Hans’s name was printed on the intercom entry system.

  Butterflies invaded my belly, because I wasn’t sure what I was going to say or how I was going to explain who I was or why I was there.

  Finally, I bit the bullet and rang the buzzer. To my surprise, the front door clicked open, and I entered the building without any questions asked.

  “Not the best security system,” I whispered to myself as I started up the staircase.

  I reached the third-floor landing and stood outside the door to Hans’s flat, feeling a brief rush of anticipation before I finally knocked. Almost immediately, the door opened, and I found myself staring at an old woman with angry gray eyes. She wore a pink velour leisure suit and Birkenstocks with socks.

  “You’re not Joseph,” she said, frowning at me with displeasure.

  “No, I’m not,” I replied, smiling. “Actually, I’m not even sure if I’m in the right place. Maybe you can help me. I’m looking for a man by the name of Hans Buchmann.” She continued to frown, so I added, “He’s a friend of my grandmother’s. They knew each other during the war. I was given his name by another friend he worked with.”

  “What’s the friend’s name?” the woman asked.

  “Daphne Graham, but she went by the name of Deidre when they worked together in France.”

  “Ah.” She stepped back and opened the door wide. “Come on in, then.” I entered, and she shut the door behind me. “I was expecting the grocery boy.”

  She led me down a narrow entrance hall to a reception room with tall windows overlooking the street. The space was large with a high ceiling, but it was crowded with too many pieces of furniture and bookshelves with hardcovers stuffed into every nook and cranny. It didn’t smell musty, however. It smelled like cinnamon incense.

  “I’m Joan,” the woman said, pausing on a threadbare carpet.

  “Hello.” I smiled and held out my hand. “I’m Gillian Gibbons.”

  “Nice to meet you,” she said, shaking my hand. “Hans didn’t mention you were coming. Hans! There’s someone here to see you!”

  Knowing that Hans had to be at least ninety years old, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Maybe he would be frail and confused or confined to a wheelchair, like Daphne. But those theories were quickly squashed when he came striding out of another room, dressed in a tweed suit jacket, cotton trousers, and running shoes. He still had a full head of hair and stood tall and upright.

  “Who did you say was here?” he asked, stopping to gape at me.

  “This young woman says you knew someone named Daphne from the war.”

  Hans seemed puzzled.

  “She was an agent with the SOE,” I explained. “She went by the code name Deidre.”

  At the mention of her other name, his expression warmed. “Oh yes, Deidre. I remember her. How is she?”

  “Very well, thank you.” I stepped forward and held out my hand. “I’m Gillian. Gillian Gibbons.”

  “Gibbons . . . you look familiar.” He stared at me intently and studied my face. “My word. Are you . . . ?” He paused. “The resemblance is uncanny. Your code name was Simone.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” I said with a smile. “But it was my grandmother’s code name, not mine.”

  He shook his head as if to clear it. “Of course. Don’t mind me. I’m old, and my brain doesn’t work as well as it used to.” He continued to stare at me as if he were struggling to remember things. Then he said in a husky, breathless voice, “You’re April . . .”

  The fact that he knew more than my grandmother’s code name made me feel a little tongue tied. Evidently, th
is man knew her as April, which was more than the war office knew.

  But she had told me that only Jack knew the truth.

  “Yes,” I replied with unease, while a melancholy frown flitted across his face.

  He gestured for me to sit down. “This calls for a drink. Get us some schnapps, will you, Joan?”

  “It’s not even noon yet,” she replied disapprovingly but nevertheless went without argument to open the double doors of a large walnut cabinet.

  Hans sat down next to me on the sofa and stared with fascination. “You look just like her. The sight of you takes me back.”

  I struggled to smile while my palms began to grow clammy.

  “I thought you were dead.” Then he closed his eyes. “I’m sorry . . . I meant to say that I thought your grandmother was dead. But is she . . . ?” He couldn’t seem to finish.

  “She’s alive and well,” I replied. “Living in Connecticut. But why did you think she was dead?”

  He spoke frankly. “Because I tried to get in touch with her after the war. I tracked her down to a country house in England. Surrey, I think it was. I can’t recall the name of it.”

  “Grantchester Hall?” I offered.

  He snapped his fingers. “That’s it. I spoke to a woman who told me that April didn’t survive the war.”

  I tried to make sense of this. “Was the woman’s name Catherine? Lady Grantchester? And did you ask for April?”

  “I don’t know who I spoke to,” he replied, “but yes, I asked for April.”

  I searched through my cluttered mind for the details of my grandmother’s story. “The people at Grantchester Hall weren’t in possession of all the facts, I’m afraid. They were under the impression that April Hughes had died during the London Blitz, but it was actually her twin sister, Vivian, who died. It was April who came to France as Simone. After that, she survived the war and moved to America.”

  Hans turned his face away. “But all these years, I thought she was dead.”

  It made sense to me that their switched identities had caused this confusion in Hans’s mind. But how did he know the truth? That she was April?

  “Did my grandmother tell you her real name?” I asked, desperate to get to the bottom of it. “I didn’t think she shared that with anyone except for her husband.”

  “No, she never told me that,” Hans said.

  “Then . . . how did you know?”

  Joan arrived with a bottle of schnapps and two glasses, which she set on the coffee table with a clunk. “One glass,” she said sharply to Hans, wagging a warning finger at him.

  As soon as she was gone, he popped the cork from the bottle and shook his head. “She doesn’t know anything. We’ve only been married since the spring.”

  “You’re newlyweds?” I replied as he filled the glasses. “How wonderful. How did you meet?”

  Hans finished pouring and recorked the bottle. “We kept bumping into each other at the Saturday market, and one thing led to another.”

  I smiled as Hans picked up the drinks and handed one to me.

  “So, tell me,” I said, “how did you know that my grandmother’s real name was April?”

  “I knew it through a friend.”

  “A friend?” When he failed to elaborate, I set down my glass.

  “Maybe we should go upstairs,” he said with a frown. “I have something that was meant for your grandmother. Then maybe you’ll understand. I hope I can find it.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Some personal effects.” Hans stood up. “Come this way. We’ll go hunting.”

  I followed him out of the main reception room and down the corridor, past a few bedrooms. It was an unexpectedly large apartment and probably worth a great deal of money in the current market.

  Hans opened the door to a steep, narrow staircase that took us to the top floor of the building, to dusty rooms full of boxes and old furniture, all of it stored under a low timber ceiling, not unlike my grandmother’s attic in Connecticut.

  “I apologize,” Hans said, pushing a small chest of drawers out of the way. “There’s too much junk up here, but you never know when you’re going to need something again.”

  He continued into another room, full of more of what he called junk, while I followed closely. At last, Hans arrived at a large cedar chest on the floor and raised the lid. He dug through the contents—a fur stole, an old radio, some bedding and linens, and framed photographs. Then his big bony trembling hands gripped a smaller antique chest with brass fittings. I recognized it immediately.

  “Where did you get that?” My heart felt like it was going to burst right out of my chest.

  He lifted it out and set it on top of the shelf behind us. “It belonged to a friend.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. “This is the same sea chest that my grandmother had in her attic, where I found pictures of her, which were taken here in Berlin. This is its twin.”

  Running my fingers over the lock and the small brass plate of a Regency gentleman in a top hat, I felt almost dizzy with amazement. “This belonged to Ludwig,” I said.

  “Yes,” Hans replied, seeming astounded by the fact that I knew this piece of information.

  I opened the chest and rifled through the contents—more pictures of Ludwig and my grandmother, different from the ones I carried in my purse. There was a newspaper clipping of Gram singing onstage at a nightclub in Berlin, theater ticket stubs, and a mother-of-pearl hair clip, which I recognized from the photo of my grandmother lying on the bed in the sunlight.

  “Why do you have this?” I asked.

  “Because Ludwig and I were friends,” Hans replied. “And neighbors. He lived across the street.” Hans pointed toward the dust-covered window, and I pushed past some boxes and chairs to look out at the building directly across the way. It was a mirror image of this one.

  “On the third floor,” Hans said. “We used to play ball in the park, and we rode our bicycles all around Berlin and chased girls, even when we were no more than ten years old.” He seemed to be remembering all of that with fondness and a quiet melancholy.

  “But you were Jewish,” I said, unable to understand the substance of this friendship, which made no sense to me, “and Ludwig was a Nazi. Why would you keep something that belonged to him, as if you still counted him as a friend?”

  “He wasn’t a Nazi then,” Hans replied with a hint of indignation. “And even afterward, he wasn’t a real Nazi.”

  I frowned and shook my head. “I don’t understand. What are you saying?”

  “He was with the German Resistance. He was the Gray Ghost.”

  I nearly lost my breath. “What? I thought you were the Gray Ghost.”

  “No, people only thought that because I was the one who provided the information to the British government, and the Polish government as well, but it always came from Ludwig. He was the source.”

  I felt light headed as I fought to comprehend what this man was telling me. “But . . . Gram said that Ludwig was there at Gestapo headquarters, asking questions about the Gray Ghost, and he did nothing to stop them from torturing her when she wouldn’t answer.”

  Hans shook his head at me. “She’d be dead if he hadn’t walked into that room when he did. She and Deidre both would have been executed, and he knew that. He couldn’t let that bastard Klein see that he cared about what happened to April, or he wouldn’t have been able to help her.”

  “Help her?”

  “That’s right. He contacted me, and I contacted Armand, and Armand got the SOE to send a plane to get them out.”

  I stared at Hans in wonderment. “You stole a car and a Nazi uniform . . .”

  “I didn’t have to steal it,” he explained. “Ludwig provided it.”

  I gaped at him in disbelief. “Why didn’t he tell my grandmother this in Paris? Why didn’t he give her some hope? Just a look? A whisper? Anything?”

  “He couldn’t risk it. If Ludwig blew his own cover, she would have been executed
. He would have been as well.”

  I shut my eyes and let out a breath, then sank onto a faded upholstered armchair. “Poor Gram. She went through her whole life believing that he didn’t care, that he was a monster, and that she’d been a fool to love him. But she wasn’t.” I looked up at Hans. “Whatever happened to him?”

  Hans slowly shook his head.

  “He died?”

  Hans nodded.

  “When? How?”

  Hans stared at me, as if he couldn’t bear to speak of it.

  For some reason, rather than wait for him to explain, I leaped out of the chair and returned to the sea chest, where I rifled through the contents and pushed everything aside.

  I found what I was looking for—the little satin-covered button. I slid it sideways with the pad of my thumb.

  Click. A drawer popped open.

  “What’s that?” Hans asked, moving closer.

  “It’s a place for secrets,” I told him.

  The drawer appeared to be empty, but I knew where to look. I found the little ribbon, just like in the chest in my grandmother’s attic, and lifted a false bottom in the drawer. There, beneath it, was a letter.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Dear April,

  I’ve asked Hans to deliver this chest to you, should anything happen to me, because you know as well as I do that these two pieces were never meant to be separated.

  As I’m writing this letter, you are somewhere over France, making your way home to England. Perhaps you’ve already landed by now. I hope so. I want to imagine that you are safe, far away from here.

  I hope that one day soon, I’ll be able to tell you everything and explain myself, and I pray that you’ll forgive me for those wretched things that happened at Avenue Foch, when I couldn’t help you or tell you that I loved you. It was the worst moment of my life when I saw the hurt in your eyes, and then the hatred. I wanted to kill Klein right then and there with my bare hands for what he did to you, and for what he forced me to be, in front of you, but if I had done that, they would have killed us both, and I wanted you to survive.

  I wish I had known about our son. Perhaps if there had been a way for you to reach me . . .