LITMIR.BIZ

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again, Stall opened the envelope and removed a photograph.

      She had changed, of course, but he recognized her immediately. Brigitte. Her blue eyes seemed smaller, and there were wrinkles at their edges. Her blond hair was thinner and her cheeks were hollow under the high cheekbones that had been part of her beauty in Paris in 1945. Her lips were as wide and full as ever, and they had been what had first caught Stall’s eye, and, as he would have said then, and as he told her then, they were what had quickened his heart on a narrow street near Sacré-Cœur.

      He put the picture down on his desktop and looked at Tate, gave the man his bleakest stare. “What does this have to do with me? It was a long time ago. I haven’t seen the woman since 1945. I’ve had no contact with her, not a letter, not a postcard. I don’t understand why you bother me with this. A woman I met thirteen years ago during the war.”

      “Well, she wasn’t exactly a woman, for one thing,” Tate said with the look on his face of a man who is a little embarrassed to be splitting hairs. “She was only fifteen years and, let’s see, seven months old. Not even sweet sixteen, as we say here in the States. Did you know that, Mr. Stall, at the time?”

      She looked a lot older, Stall’s stunned mind told him. She looked every inch a woman. And I was what, twenty-three?

      “Well, you asked me what this has to do with you. Ordinarily, I’d say not much, except for this.” Tate took another photograph from the inside pocket of his tasteful suit coat and put it on the desk in front of Stall.

      There was Brigitte, with whom Stall had two of the most glorious nights of his life, standing on a city street holding the hand of a little girl. Again Stall looked up at Cyrus Tate.

      Tate said, “It has to do with you if she had your child.”

      Stall looked back down at the picture. The little girl could have been anybody’s child, the offspring of any man in the world, but Stall knew beyond any doubt that she was his. It was as though a beam of light were fired from the innermost chamber of the heart of a Frenchwoman, now almost thirty years old, across six thousand miles of ocean, to pierce the stricken chest of Thomas Stall. To split him open. And for a few seconds it was as though Brigitte lay next to him again in the warm narrow bed in the pension with the piano and accordion music drifting through the window from the bal musette across the street, the sad, lovely notes whispering, The child is yours, Tom. She is your daughter.

      Stall swallowed and put his heart back together and tried to recover his mind from the narrow bed in a small room that smelled of cabbage soup and cheap wine, and of lovely Brigitte. His voice was a croak when he said, “This is a flimsy excuse for a reason to blackmail a man.”

      “I doubt your wife would say that, professor.” Tate reached down and brushed away some invisible lint from the thigh of his gray suit. “Most women would want to know if their little girl had an older sister. By the way, the girl’s name is Françoise. I think that’s how you pronounce it, but you’d know that better than I would. You speak some French, don’t you, professor?”

      Cyrus Tate had pronounced the child’s name Frank-wahz, and coming from his mouth it sounded like something a man would cough up and spit out. And Stall could not help noticing the usage of Frank. Was this evangelist investigator, this blackmailer, smart enough, vile enough, to sit here suggesting that Brigitte had named the girl after Frank Vane? Tate’s intelligence was open to question: there was no doubt about his vileness.

      “So,” Stall said, his voice still a croak, “what do you want?”

      Cyrus Tate stood up and looked around Stall’s little office, the cramped space he hoped soon to leave for the larger domain of the chairman’s office. Tate reached over to the bookcase and pulled a volume of William Carlos Williams’s poems halfway out of the shelf, shook his head, and pushed it back in. He tapped the spine until the row of books was neat and even. “Poetry” he said, “I never did get it. I always asked myself, Cyrus, why don’t they just say what they mean? Why does everything have to mean six things rather than just one? Seemed like a waste of time to me.” He turned back to Stall. “Maybe I should give it another chance now that I’m older. What do you think?”

      “What do you want?” Stall repeated.

      Cyrus Tate took a long breath and squared his wide shoulders like a man who had done a good day’s work. “I want you to walk across the street to the College Inn and have a cup of coffee with Frank Vane. He’s waiting over there for you.”

      TEN

      Stall had graduated from Williams College in 1943 at the age of twenty and finished a year of graduate school at the University of Virginia before his draft board back home in Greenville had decided that a minor spinal curvature should no longer delay his rendezvous with the German 88. Most of the soldiers he had trained with at Fort Dix were eighteen years old. Stall, at twenty-one, was called Pappy by the boys of his squad. Frank Vane had been younger than Stall when they’d gone to war. Vane, he later learned, had enlisted at seventeen.

      And Stall remembered, as he walked through the blazing August afternoon toward University Avenue and the CI, that during the brief time when he had known Frank Vane, the younger man had seemed to look up to him, seemed to think of him as the more worldly, the more intelligent, of their accidental pair. But Stall hadn’t given this much thought. Even then, he had known that young men were creatures of wild enthusiasms and strong passions. They formed easy friendships and fierce loyalties, all of which could be broken at the hint of an insult or the twitch of a skirt. He had considered Vane a good companion, fine company on an exciting journey, nothing more than that. Stall remembered getting drunk with Vane on their first night in Paris and pledging eternal friendship. The Two Friends, they called themselves in broken French. Les Deux Copains. At that time, everyone in Paris was drunk and all were friends. The German Army had only been gone from the City of Light for four months. The best wines and cognacs that had been hidden in cellars all over the city had been resurrected and were being served in liberal portions to the American liberators, and every man in an American uniform was a hero.

      On that first night in Paris, Stall and Vane had drunk their share, and in the morning, Vane had been too much the worse for his wine to leave his bed. After knocking on Vane’s door and hearing the sound of retching, Stall had gone in search of Paris without his young friend, and the Paris he had found was Brigitte. And after that, he had seen very little of Frank Vane. Neither had said much about Stall’s sudden departure from their happy twosome, Les Deux Copains, but Vane had known, Stall was sure, what was going on. Stall had found a girl. Soldiers did that. In the presence of death, life sought life. For all Stall knew, the army would soon declare him fit to return to the front, to the last bitter fighting that would end the war. The fighting later known as the Battle of the Bulge.

      Stall, with four years of an English major behind him, knew the phrase carpe diem. Had even read some of Epicurus who had said, It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honorably and justly. And it is impossible to live wisely and honorably and justly without living a pleasant life. Vane, four years his junior and only a high school graduate, knew little Latin and less Greek, but must have felt as strongly as Stall did what all of the soldiers who crowded the streets of Montmartre felt. They were young, far from home, temporarily unrestrained by sergeants and lieutenants, and surrounded by the pleasantness of wine and women, many of them willing.

      Stall opened the door of the CI, felt the blessed blast of air-

      conditioning, heard the incessant jukebox playing the hit of the moment, “It’s Only Make Believe.” Conway Twitty. What an unlikely name, Stall thought, too strange to be invented. But a beautiful song, a song full of truth plainly stated. “My only prayer will be / Someday you’ll care for me. / But it’s only make believe.” Stall suddenly saw an image of himself on his knees before Maureen speaking the words of the song. Begging for her forgiveness, pleading with her to take him back.

      He stopped just inside the door, smelled hamburger grilling behind the lunch counter to his left, and surveyed the large dining room.

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