The Butler

by Danielle Steel

  Liese had a thousand admonitions and instructions for him when she left. She and Joachim sat together on the plane, crying and holding hands. It was hard to feel happy about their move to France, while leaving someone so important to them in Buenos Aires. But Francois had done so many things to prepare for their arrival, and welcome them—a freshly painted, newly furnished room for Joachim, new curtains he’d had made for Liese, a new couch, and new china and utensils in the kitchen. He also bought a new television for the living room, so they could all watch sports together, and a stereo system for Joachim’s room, so he could listen to his music. Francois was so overjoyed to see them when they arrived that he looked like he was going to explode. He had tried to think of everything to please them. And within days, Joachim could see his mother start to relax. It was the first time in seventeen years that his mother had a man to lean on and take care of her, since her husband’s and father’s deaths when he and Javier were only a few months old.

  Francois wanted to do everything he could to make up for the hard years she’d had before she’d met him, the struggles and the poverty. She was happy with him, and the only sadness in her life was her constant worry about Javier. Joachim missed him too and knew that his mother would not fully feel at ease until his “younger” brother joined them, and she could keep an eye on him herself. Javier was a child who needed supervision and guidance, and no one watched him as carefully as she did.

  Joachim adjusted rapidly to his school in Paris, made friends with his classmates, and played sports after school. His French became even more fluent. Francois had arranged for dual citizenship for him and Liese and planned to do the same for Javier when he arrived. Joachim didn’t feel French, but he felt at home there. And Liese loved her husband and her new job. She was deeply grateful for his kindness to her and Joachim.

  Francois had secured a job for her at the Louvre. He was one of the experts who certified the authenticity of all paintings acquired by the Louvre. Liese soon discovered an organization that traced paintings stolen by the Nazis and returned them to their rightful owners whenever possible. She was offered a position by them and accepted immediately. They worked closely with the Louvre and other museums around Europe, and occasionally South America, tracking down works of art that had disappeared during the war, identifying where they had wound up, and then attempting to find their original owners and return the paintings if the owners were still alive. Many weren’t, and had died in German concentration camps, if they were Jewish, but sometimes a family member had survived and was grateful for the return of their family’s lost artwork and possessions. It was slow, meticulous, painstaking work tracking down both the work of art and the original owner, but she loved it. Francois called her an art detective and admired her dedication to her job. She was tireless in her efforts.

  They were a happy couple, and Liese felt surprisingly at home in France. She spoke French, German, English, and Spanish, which made it easier for her to do the research, in many countries, to trace works of art that had been missing for fifty years.

  Many of the world’s masterpieces had disappeared during and after the war. A great number, particularly from France, had fallen into Nazi hands, and the works had then gone underground, hidden by those who had taken them, or sold privately by disreputable, dishonest dealers. Some had been honorably or anonymously returned to museums, but very few. It became Liese’s passion to ferret out the provenance of each work. It was heartbreaking to try to locate the original owners. Most of the heirs were astounded to suddenly find themselves with extremely valuable art. Liese did the work with passion and unrelenting perseverance. She loved telling Francois and Joachim at dinner about the particular painting she was currently pursuing.

  Fresh battles erupted with Javier when he begged for another year in Buenos Aires after he graduated. He wanted to do a year of university there, instead of at the Sorbonne in Paris, like Joachim. Liese didn’t want to agree to it and let Javier stay, but in the end she had no choice. He was eighteen and refused to come to Paris for another year, whether she agreed to it or not. Francois thought it best not to cause a long-term break with him and let him have his way again. They discovered months later, through friends and some of his old teachers, that he had not enrolled in the university, and was working instead. He had taken a job with a man who owned a freight company that shipped goods throughout South America. Javier was driving a truck for him, doing deliveries. Francois didn’t like the sound of it but didn’t want to worry Liese more than she already was. Once again, Javier promised to come to Paris in a year, after he’d saved some money, so he wouldn’t be dependent on his stepfather when he arrived.

  Liese’s job was poorly paid, and a labor of love. Francois paid all her expenses and Joachim’s, so she could afford to do it. He was as generous as his own salary and savings allowed, and they had everything they needed. She wasn’t an extravagant woman, despite the comforts with which she’d grown up, and Joachim made few demands on them. He spent very little money as a student. He was a serious boy and never any trouble, unlike his brother.

  Joachim felt it as a physical blow when Javier refused to come to Paris after their year’s separation. Joachim felt his absence acutely. Javier’s refusal to leave Buenos Aires threw Joachim off balance for his first year at the Sorbonne. He couldn’t concentrate on his studies, worrying about his twin. He wrote to him, and called him from time to time, begging him to come, but Javier sounded different now. He was no longer a boy, but a man living on his own in a small studio apartment near the freight company’s warehouse.

  He had moved out of his friend’s home when he had graduated. He alluded to some kind of falling-out with him, and disagreements with his friend’s parents, without explaining in detail. He was driving a truck now most of the time. To Joachim, it didn’t sound worth staying in Buenos Aires for that, but Javier had no interest in coming to France for the time being. He always promised that he would eventually when he had saved enough money. Paris held no lure for him, even to see his twin or their mother. He said he felt Argentinian to the core and didn’t want to live in France. He liked earning his own money, and his job, which didn’t sound good to Joachim.

  The second year of their separation was harder for Joachim than the first, because his brother’s promises to come to Paris no longer sounded convincing, and Joachim was beginning to fear Javier would never come. Joachim wanted to visit Javier during the summer, to convince him in person, but Francois got Joachim a summer job, working for one of his friends at an auction house, carrying artwork on and off the stage during the auctions. It was hard work, and only manual labor, but it paid well, and Joachim didn’t want to let his stepfather down and back out of the job. Javier said he was gone all the time anyway, driving the truck, so he would have seen little of him. He did all he could to discourage Joachim from coming, and the chasm between them seemed wider than ever. Joachim felt it like a loss, and feared they would be separated forever. He mourned their boyhood closeness, which had been the happiest days of his life, having his identical twin always near him, and now it was all over.

  Joachim started his second year at the Sorbonne, studying literature and art history, at his mother’s suggestion. They hadn’t heard from Javier for two months by then. The home number they had for him had been disconnected, and the main office of the freight company said simply that he was “probably on the road” and they would give him a message. Two months later, his family still hadn’t heard from him. To put Liese’s mind at rest, Francois hired a detective firm with an office in Argentina to track him down. They heard back from the agency a few weeks later. He confirmed that Javier was still working for the same freight company, driving between Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay, and Brazil, as he had said, but he was based now in Colombia and living in Bogotá. Discreet inquiries with the friend he had lived with revealed that they had had a falling-out and lost touch. The friend said that Javier had been too
hard to live with and had caused problems with his parents. The parents had told their contact in Buenos Aires that Javier was disrespectful, followed no rules, and had fallen in with what seemed to them like bad company. He accepted no supervision or control whatsoever. Further inquiries supported the theory that he was hanging out with a bad group, and it was possible that drugs were involved, but there was no proof of it. At no time had the detective in Buenos Aires been able to lay eyes on Javier or connect with him. He had successfully slipped through his family’s fingers. Liese wanted to go to Bogotá to try and find him herself, and Joachim volunteered to go with her, but the detective thought they would not be any more successful. Javier was on the road or in Colombia most of the time now. None of his old school friends had heard from him. He was leading a very different adult life from his peers or past connections. The detective’s suspicion was that he might be transporting drugs, had fallen in with disreputable people, and would hardly welcome a visit from his mother and brother if that was the case.

  The mood in the house was heavy after that. By Christmas, they hadn’t heard from him for six months. He called Joachim late one night. He sounded high or drunk, and tried to pick an argument with him. There was no longer any question of him promising to come to Paris. He accused Joachim of still being a child, tied to their mother’s apron strings, and bragged that he was a man now. He said he was earning a decent wage, better than what he could earn in Paris, but he was vague when Joachim asked him what he was transporting. All he was willing to say was that he was well paid for it and sounded like he was bragging.

  Joachim was haunted by their conversation and reported it to his mother. Francois engaged the detective service again. They were able to find out very little, except that Javier was alive, spending more time in Colombia, and only occasionally in Buenos Aires. The detective still suspected that he might be working for a drug dealer. Their contact with Javier was sporadic from then on. He would disappear for months, surface, and then vanish again. He called home very rarely.

  Once on Christmas, he called his mother and started a heated argument with her when she complained about how elusive he was. It ruined the holiday for all of them. He called her on her birthday, and she cried for weeks afterward. Everything in her life was going well, except for the son she could no longer see or touch. He was lost to them, which was how Javier wanted it. He had ranted about politics to Joachim during one of their phone calls. He sounded revolutionary in his ideas and hostile about the middle and upper classes and the Establishment and referred to Francois and his mother as “bourgeois.” He was a changed person, and no longer the boy Joachim had come into the world with and grown up with and had loved so fiercely. And eventually, Javier stopped calling entirely and they had no way to reach him. It was agony for Joachim and his mother, a wound that never healed, always hoping to hear from him.

  * * *

  —

  When Joachim’s flight landed in Buenos Aires during the Argentine summer, it had been twenty-five years since he had seen his twin brother, and more than twenty years since he had spoken to him. Their mother no longer had any contact with him either. Francois had hired the detective a few more times, but they finally all agreed that it was a waste of money. Javier had disappeared into another world, another life, and until he wanted contact with them, it was unlikely that they would find him. He had slipped into a dark underworld where it was easy to hide and disappear. Liese wasn’t even sure that she would know if he died, since no one he knew would know how to find her. They checked prison records, but he hadn’t been in prison so far, and with the kind of people he worked for, if they wanted to get rid of him, or he betrayed them, or let them down, they would have him killed, and his family in Paris wouldn’t know that either. Joachim had lived with Javier’s silence for almost twenty-three years, and his mother for just as long. It was a bond between Joachim and his mother, the agonizing loss they both lived with, of brother and son.

  For a long time, it felt like a death to Joachim, to have lost his identical twin, like losing a part of himself. He could no longer contact his brother, hear his voice, or see him. He had no idea where he was, or if he was alive on any particular day. And given the rough people he was involved with, it was never a certainty that he was still alive, or for how long that would last. It disrupted Joachim’s life in countless ways. He couldn’t concentrate on his studies at the Sorbonne, which seemed meaningless to him. He didn’t care about art history or literature and had only taken those classes to please his mother. He didn’t know what he wanted to do for a career. He often wondered if his brother was right, and he was being a “baby,” still close to their mother. And finally, with failing grades, he dropped out of the Sorbonne, feeling lost and aimless, and unsure which way to turn.

  Francois got him minor temporary jobs, as an art handler at the Louvre, then working in one of the restaurants there. Joachim went back to the auction house for a while but was nothing more than a furniture mover. He took a job running the Ferris wheel at a carnival one summer. Liese told Francois that was the bottom of the barrel. Joachim was intelligent, and capable of much more than that, but he seemed lost without Javier. But they all had to live with it. It was Javier who had distanced himself from them, severed all connection, and wanted it that way.

  Joachim was nineteen the last time he heard from his twin, and spent five years after that doing odd jobs, going nowhere. He rented a tiny studio apartment in a dilapidated area of Paris. The building smelled bad, and the apartment was barely bigger than his bed, with a small battered fridge and a hot plate and sink, a toilet, and tiny shower. Liese hated to see him live that way, but he didn’t want to take advantage of his stepfather. He felt that he should be independent by then, and living on his own, although Francois would have been happy to house him. He enjoyed having him around, and it made his mother happy.

  Liese worried about both her sons constantly, for different reasons. Javier was destroying any chance he had for a good life, and he was affecting Joachim’s life from a distance, with the grief of having lost his twin. Joachim doubted he would ever see Javier again and, at the same time, always hoped he would, and Javier would magically reappear, which never happened.

  Liese had to make her own peace with having a son she might never see again. She prayed every day that he was still alive. Some sixth sense gave her the feeling that he was, and Joachim had the same intuition that somewhere out in the world, his brother was still living, but they had no way to verify it. The detective had found no trace of him during his last mission for them. Javier had vanished.

  Liese had had her share of grief in her lifetime, the loss of her father and then her husband only months later, and then Javier’s determined disappearance. Then eight years after she came to Paris, Francois died quietly in his sleep, lying beside her. A massive stroke was the cause of death. He was only seventy-four years old, but mercifully, he had died peacefully, hadn’t fallen ill, and hadn’t suffered. And Liese was a widow again at sixty-four. She was still passionately engaged in her work for the organization that located lost and stolen artwork in order to return it and had no desire to retire. She was healthy and strong, and loved going to work every day. Francois had still been working as an expert at the Louvre, but he had been tired lately, and thinking of retiring, and now he was gone.

  He left almost everything he had to Liese, since he had no children or relatives. He had a very decent insurance policy he had taken out when he’d married her. And he had left a nice amount of money to Joachim, not enough to go crazy with, but he wouldn’t have anyway. Francois knew that about him. It was enough for Joachim to buy himself a small apartment, nicer than the ugly one he rented, or study somewhere abroad, if he wished to. Francois gave him a little start in life. He had hoped that Joachim would go back to school, to learn a trade or pursue a career of some kind, but he hadn’t. The loss of his twin had been a huge blow and took him years to adjust t
o. There were girls in his life, but they never lasted long. And he never got deeply attached to any of them. Having lost Javier, he seemed to have a hard time getting close to anyone, for fear of losing them too. At twenty-five, he had no particular direction and hadn’t found a career that inspired him, only the temporary jobs he took as filler. He was just passing time. Liese and Francois had talked about it a great deal, and Francois had been as concerned as any father would have been. Joachim had been lucky that his mother had married a man with a big heart who had wanted to take him under his wing, although Javier had thrown them all off balance. Liese always wondered if Joachim was just waiting for Javier to return.

  Liese continued working after Francois died, with no intention of retiring. More than ever, she needed her job now. It gave her some purpose in life, a place to go every day, and contact with people. She was doing some good, or trying to, tracking down art and returning it to people who had been so severely wronged. She felt as though she was part of some form of justice, compensating in some small degree for all that had been lost or taken from them, most of it so enormous that no one could ever really make it up to them. But what she was able to return to them gave them something, and in some cases, with important works of art, it gave them an object of great monetary value. She was only a child when most of the art had been taken from them, or their relatives, during the war, but at least as an adult, she could be part of the restitution. It was very meaningful work for her, and she was proud of what she was doing. And Francois had been proud of her.

  Joachim was shocked that Francois had left him anything at all and was deeply touched by it. Two months after he died, with his new inheritance, Joachim was having Sunday lunch with his mother at her apartment and saw an ad in the newspaper that intrigued him. He folded the paper and handed it to his mother, who looked at the page blankly. She couldn’t see why he had shown it to her. She didn’t see anything of interest.