Copyright © 2005 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.

Comment: publishers@cox.net

Go to Chapter:  
 1    2     3     4     5     6     7     8     9   10   11   12   13   14   15   16   17   18   19   20   21   22   23   24   25  
26   27   28   29   30   31   32   33   34   35   36   37   38   39   40   41   42   43   44  

Intersect: Danger

a novel

by John T. Cullen

6.

New Haven, 1991

The Boeing 757-300 with Marianne, Countess Didier on board, entered North America via the North Atlantic route from London. The plane made a customs stop in Bangor, Maine; then, a short hop to Boston’s Logan International.

Marianne had not slept well the night before. She’d dozed on the plane and felt tired, but was anxious to meet her possible relatives in New Haven.

The November weather was rainy and chill, with a damp, icy wind blowing down from Canada, across the Great Lakes and upstate New York into New England. Under a leaden sky, she took a limousine from Boston to New Haven, a two-hour drive punctuated by toll station slowdowns. But she hardly noticed the annoying traffic, concentrating instead on the picturesque little villages visible through bare trees—beyond them the Sound, with a dark, misty Long Island resembling a distant mystery ship.

Gino and Catherine Francese came to meet her in a blue Cadillac driven by their oldest son, Frankie. Catherine was Tim Nordhall’s sister, a woman of 72 with a host of medical problems but a still-chipper face and attitude. “I haven’t seen my brother and his wife in years,” Catherine said as she and Marianne shook hands on meeting. “I don’t know if I can help you at all.”

“I’m trying to find my father and his...” Marianne said softly. Wife or wives? she wondered, but dared not ask for fear of offending her hosts. Gino was 77, heavy-set, balding, a big silent man with a dutiful expression, heavy hands that staid powerfully knitted together under an overhanging paunch, and small lips that stayed quietly pursed though his quick eyes missed nothing. Francis, Frank, already a graying man in his mid-40s (not surprisingly Marianne’s age), looked sleeker and more businesslike, but he was essentially edging his father out of a lucrative construction business as Gino grew tired. “Travel a bit,” Gino said humbly, “like maybe Canada or one day London. Nothing like all of your travels, I’m sure.” It was practically the longest sentence he spoke during their few hours together.

“You’re welcome to stay at our house if you’d like,” Catherine said airily.

“That is so generous of you,” Marianne said feeling a bit embarrassed. “Do you know, I have to be on a flight to San Francisco tonight for a meeting tomorrow. Maybe next time I can enjoy your company more fully.”

“We’d love that,” Frank said, waving his own large hands as he maneuvered the large car along New Haven’s maze of narrow one-way streets where every parking space was taken. It was a weekday around noon, and the sidewalks were jammed with Yale University students and faculty on their lunch break—going either to some downtown restaurant for a quick bite, or to one of the college dining halls or the university Commons. The New Haven Green looked soggy, with its three old Revolutionary War churches fuzzed over by a growing haze of drizzle. New Haven was a city of umbrellas today.

“Why do you think my brother might be your dad, sweetie?” Catherine said with a speculative glance. The calculation probably was: she’s a countess with money, so it can’t be about that. There was an element of mistrust, and Marianne couldn’t blame the woman.

She related her story again from the kidnapping of her pregnant mother in the last days of World War 2, forced by Soviet agents aboard a Russian ship in San Francisco, and abducted by the NKVD on the Soviet freighter Kalinin to Siberia, to the death of her mother, and her adoption by a wealthy French family.

“My mother died before I could ever speak with her,” Marianne said as if reciting an old drama, simply because it needed to be conveyed. “I had an auntie in Novosibirsk, an old woman of Russian and Inuit stock...”

“What stock?” Gino asked politely but blankly.

“Siberian,” Marianne said. “Auntie Dora. She ran a tavern in a sailors’ part of town, and she took us in. My mother washed dishes and served beer and swept floors, until winter took her away. I was barely three when she died in 1948, so I never really knew her. I lived with Auntie until I was about seven, and she told me my father was a wonderful adventurer in San Francisco during the war. She said he had two wives, and was handsome enough to have all the women on earth.

“Two wives!” Catherine said with a mix of displeasure and incredulity. “That doesn’t sound like my brother.”

Marianne realized immediately she’d gone too far. “Well, these were the stories Auntie Dora used to tell on winter nights. What would Auntie Dora know? She lived her whole life within a few miles of where she was born.”

“Was she a Communist?” Frank asked.

Marianne shook her head. “She was just a very kind elderly woman full of stories. Anyway, this French count and his wife came looking for furs and other rich things, and Auntie gave me to them because they lacked a daughter.” What more to tell them? Marianne fell silent, thinking of her life—a story of dire poverty one day, great wealthy the next—adopted, living in a chateau in Alsace. Her new family also owned a chalet in Davos; bungalow in Cannes, factories in Marseille, other industrial interests in Madrid, Turin, Vienna, and even Canada. But she always wanted to know who her real father was, and that hunger tormented her all these years. Knowing the jealousy it might raise, she glossed over that part of the story.

“Well,” Catherine said, reflecting on that tale of Cinderella wealth without any particular feeling for history or for the visitor’s sufferings, the loss of her mother, any of it. Marianne did not hold it against her. She had known many persons of narrower experience in her time, and sometimes they even managed to quarry more richness out of a small life than some worldlier persons managed to extract over many time zones and exotically named seas or far locales. “We weren’t exactly well off. Tim managed to scrimp and save and put himself through two years at Connecticut Teachers’ College. He loved engineering. There were no jobs before the war, but he managed to get something in a clock factory down along the Quinnipiac River. The factory burned down years ago now, I forget, when, Gino?”

Gino’s hands twitched dutifully. “Oh, I’d say 1975 at the latest.”

“Gino says 1975,” Catherine told Marianne as though people did not hear Gino when he spoke, although he’d built an impressive business with those big hands and preoccupied eyes.

Marianne nodded from her seat beside Frank in the front. “With so many years gone by, so much evidence is washed away.”

“Washed away by time,” Frank said.

“We all get washed away,” Catherine said, and Gino nodded, giving a twitch of the hands, steepling his fingertips together, as if playing a chord on some invisible tiny accordion.

“I would like to know what kind of man he was. Or is. And where he is.”

Catherine looked at her oddly. “I don’t know where he is. I haven’t seen him since right after the war. He came out to visit with a woman he said he had married. Nice looking young gal, I can’t remember her name or even what she looked like. Something fishy about the whole thing, but I could never put my finger on it.”

“Did you and your brother have a disagreement?”

Catherine shrugged. “We always fought. Siblings do. No, it was something else. I never figured it out. He had something to hide. Didn’t he, Gino?”

Gino nodded, gave that odd steepled-fingertips twitch.

“Gino agrees. There was so much going on during the war.” Catherine shook her head. “I don’t think we ever knew the half of it.”

“I’d appreciate anything you can tell me.”

Catherine said: “We were all sworn to secrecy. We knew he was in Africa for a while, then in London, and finally in San Francisco. My mom and I, rest her soul, we were the only ones who knew, and we were told he could be killed if anyone found out he was doing important work for the Government, so we kept our mouths shut. That’s all I know.”

Nothing but secrets, Marianne thought, and you are still keeping your mouth shut. How well they must have hidden it all these years. So many dark secrets had been born in that vast modern Iliad called World War II.

Catherine made a wry mouth, thinking dreamily of her memories. “He was always a strong, handsome boy. The girls really liked him.”

“Good looking,” Gino said—nod, twitch, and all.

“A handsome man,” Catherine said. "Wasn't he, Gino?"

Gino nodded. They drove slowly downhill through narrow streets. “This is where the factory was where Uncle Tim worked as a boy, the clock place,” Frank said, pulling up on a licorice-colored pad of wet asphalt edged with trash and weeds. “A bunch of family members were lucky enough to get jobs there during the Depression and then after World War II.”

A dishwater river about 80 feet wide flowed past—the Quinnipiac River. Raindrops pelted glassy spaces amid lacy foam circles on the river surface. In the hills huddled tight little New England houses waiting for the winter cold. The houses looked as if they were shivering behind their black windows and lace curtains. Along the river street were spots of color, where a dry cleaner and a liquor store and a check cashing place and a few other businesses advertised their offerings.

Catherine said: “I sometimes took the trolley down here with Tim and Sally. She was his big high school fling, Sally Levesque, nice looking redhead with pale skin and healthy lungs, if you know what I mean. Sweet girl, really, but all the other girls were jealous of her.”

“Does she still live around here?”

“Sally?” Catherine shook her head and made a condolent mmm sound. “Poor Sally. She and Tim stopped writing to each when he was in London during the war. She ended up marrying a cop from West Haven and having a couple of kids, and last I heard she died of breast cancer in a rest home over in Branford. Isn’t that right, Gino?”

“Breasts,” Gino said, nodding. His eyes were sad at the irony. Instead of twitching, he sketched loops in the air from his chest with his hands.

“Timmy always had something against his home town,” Catherine said. “He took off when the war took him away, and I don’t think he ever looked back. Me and the other kids kind of resented it, to be honest, but then he was the smart one, the educated one, and it was hard to think he wasn’t looking down on us a little bit.” She softened. “I hope you find him, hon. Drop me a line if you do.” A tear rolled down her cheek. “I might just want to visit him if he’s still alive someplace. Tell him I won’t ask any questions.”