A Serpent's Tooth

A Serpent’s Tooth

Germany and Belgium

October, 1987

They could have been any two elderly gentlemen, swathed in overcoats against the autumn chill and sharing a bottle at a café on the seedier side of Hamburg. Armand Brecht, of course, would have argued that Hamburg had no non-seedy aspects, but that was Armand for you.

They were that rarity: old and wealthy mercenaries.

Armand, who for most of his postwar career had operated under the trade name Janvier, poured himself another glass of schnapps. “The weather is far too damp this year,” he groused. “It will be an evil winter.” Brecht had leveraged a modest inheritance, a family name well-known in financial circles, and a series of shrewd investments based on insider knowledge into a reputable company that specialized in real estate and dabbled in venture capital.

His host that evening had operated under the trade name Friedrich. Without an embarrassingly successful family to trade on, he had slowly built himself an empire of strip clubs and brothels in eleven countries. “I plan to winter with my daughter and her family,” he said. “She has purchased a resort property in Haiti.”

“A fine move. Is she still with—“

“No, he’s flown the coop. Boys these days—“

“I agree. Unable to stay the course.”

Friedrich picked at the remains of his sausage. “I should stay away from this stuff, she says,” he confided, with angry emphasis on the pronoun. “She wants to keep me alive by making my life a living death.”

“My problem is the reverse; my wife would probably suggest I take up bungee-jumping or skateboarding if she thought that I would take her seriously and that it would hurry me along a little faster toward her inheritance.”

“So you’re here in our beautiful city to escape her charms?”

Armand allowed himself a canny grin. “And to see a beautiful, ah, professional, if you get my meaning. One who relieves me of many cares.”

Friedrich chuckled and raised his glass in a mock toast.

Armand acknowledged the compliment shamelessly.

The professional, however young and admittedly beautiful, worked at a local clinic specializing in alternative medicine, including a magnetism-and-hot-oil treatment that Armand found alleviated some of the pain in his arthritic hands and feet.

“And speaking of cares,” Friedrich said, “I was, of course, saddened to see that your protégé, Esau, had met with a bad end.”

Armand gaped at him. “Esau?”

“God in heaven, you were not aware? Janvier, my friend, I am so dreadfully sorry! I had not planned on being the bearer of sorrowful news.”

Esau? Dead? How could that possibly be?

Brecht’s vitals twisted with shock and sorrow, but he tried to keep his tone light. “That’s quite all right, my dear Friedrich. At our age, we often have to say farewell, do we not? Naturally, we assume that we will predecease those who are so much younger than ourselves, but—” He cleared his throat. “I dare not suppose that you happened to hear how—“

“Well, apparently—he was young, after all, and boys will be boys—apparently he was following his dick around, as they say, and got himself involved with a Kuwaiti lass. I gather that she came from one of those families that one does not cross lightly. The way I hear it, the two of them were executed quietly by family retainers.”

“Astounding.”

It was more than astounding. Armand was a great believer in having at hand for emergency use fables which would fake his death. Such fallbacks occasionally proved necessary when it was important not only to drop out of sight, but to discourage anyone from ever looking for you again, and death was the ultimate discouragement. He had helped the very bright, very deadly young man whose working name was Esau to arrange his own fables.

Neither scenario had anything to do with Kuwait.

“It’s a small world we live in nowadays, but some things never change, do they?” Friedrich continued. “You had quite a hand in his training, did you not?”

Armand nodded.

“I always thought so! Talented lad, from all I ever saw or heard of him. Milanese, was he not?”

“Indeed.”

“I thought perhaps he might have been. My first wife was from Milan, and the accent is unmistakable.”

Armand drank deeply of schnapps. Within him, grief and rage warred. His face reflected merely an old man’s pragmatism. “It was I who discovered him, you know.”

“I had no idea.”

“Oh, yes.” He tried to infuse his voice with a casual, but bittersweet tone. “A wild child, a little street rat, but with extraordinary potential, once I got him cleaned up and slapped some manners into him. But enough reminiscence! What is this I hear of you? Is it true that you are a great-grandfather?”

***

When he returned to Brussels, he kept his own counsel for two days. On Sunday, he invited his wife to the city—he and Simone had not inhabited the same house for the last eight years of their marriage—and took her to the ballet. On Monday, he got his hair cut (strange how, as his hair dwindled, the time and expense required to groom it increased!). He consulted his tailor about a pair of new suits and a coat with a fur-trimmed collar for the winter season.

On Tuesday, he visited his office. He reviewed the week’s numbers, flirted briefly with his receptionist, and returned a few phone calls.

As lunchtime approached, he gripped his cane tightly and stalked down the hall to his great-nephew’s office. “Mathieu,” he said.

Mathieu looked up from the spreadsheets he was reconciling and brushed back the hair from his eyes. He took the pencil from between his teeth, rose respectfully from his chair and smiled. “Welcome back, Uncle Armand. I’ve met with the people from the Hilgess Corporation.”

Armand did not return the smile. “My office. Two minutes.”

He turned and left without further word.

His nephew appeared in the doorway of his office exactly on time, probably to the second. He could be assiduously anal like that when the mood struck him.

“Mathieu,” Armand said heavily. He did not ask the young man to sit down, and Mathieu knew better than to take a seat without an invitation.

Mathieu bowed his head, ever so slightly. “Uncle.” Nevertheless, he lounged in the doorway with his arms folded and one hip against the jamb.

Armand Brecht had, in one way or another, been responsible for much of the rearing of the boy. Little Matti was twenty-two now and built along the lines of his dancer mother and his acrobatic great-uncle: short in stature, but lean, agile and hard-muscled. The mulishness that had been so adorable in the puppy-eyed child was now merely infuriating.

“Close the door,” Armand said, “and stand up straight. What in the name of all that is holy have you done with your breeding?”

Mathieu muttered an apology. He shut the door, and when he stood before the desk, his posture was perfect.

“I had an interesting trip,” Armand began, watching his nephew’s face carefully. “My arthritis is better, not that you have inquired after my health. Oh, do try not to be so obvious about trying not to sigh and roll your eyes! Make an effort to live down your immaturity for a minute or so.”

“I’ll do my best,” Mathieu said, ill-concealing his petulance.

“You can imagine my surprise when I learned this past week that you are dead.”

Mathieu barely batted an eye. “I thought it better not to tell you,” he replied. “I was not sure whether you would need some sort of deniability.”

It was true that Armand had always walked a bit of a fine line, passing off his own family, the grandson of a younger brother whom Armand particularly loathed, as an Italian child of the streets. Nevertheless, their shared vocation was based on lies. The only individuals likely to be angered by the deceit were various members of the, oh, so conventional Brecht family and their annoying American counterparts, the Colthanes.

And the Witherspoons, of course, but they danced to the Colthanes’ tune.

“More likely, you feared that I would stop you.”

“Not at all, Uncle. You could not stop me without killing me—and since that would have the same effect, your prior knowledge was irrelevant.”

“Irrelevant?”

“Except, possibly, in terms of your own contacts in the business.”

“How very kind of you.” Armand sat back in his chair. Eighty years of hiding his emotions enabled him to maintain a calm tone and a blank face. “You know, I have given you all of the tools at my command. I have offered you skills and contacts beyond most people’s imagination.”

“I remain deeply grateful, Uncle Armand.”

“Do you, now?”

“Yes.”

The boy was refusing to be shaken. It was maddening: For almost twenty years Armand had toiled and slaved to turn aside the boy’s fire and train him to be stone. Now that Armand actually needed a little bit of the flame, the boy had suddenly gone all granite on him. Armand cleared his throat several times to give himself the luxury of devising a new way to get to Mathieu. He needed rage, complaints, or excuses—not this damnable calm.

“I confess that I am shocked,” the old man said at last. “I see in you no evidence whatsoever of gratitude; only of an ambitious little boy who will do whatever it takes to get himself where he wants to be. I took your modest gifts and turned you into an agent who could have reached the highest levels of power. Now, I suppose that you have some idiot fantasy of making a killing in the American stock market or managing leveraged buyouts or whatever the bean-counting hordes fancy this year. It is business, is it not? You don’t imagine yourself trading on your mother’s name and dancing, or playing that ridiculous fiddle of yours?”

“It’s a double bass, Uncle Armand. And I know that I have neither the talent nor the drive to make a career for myself in music or dance.” Mathieu replied. “And, yes, sir, business interests me.”

“And life doesn’t? Power doesn’t? God in Heaven, I have made you a young prince and you prefer to be a nebbish—“

Mathieu’s brows knit.

“Yiddish. A useful word. A timid, mousy, ineffectual creature.”

“Aha. Thank you.”

“And the use of the word does not even insult you.”

“It’s a word, Uncle.”

“So is whore.”

His nephew nodded. “So it is, Uncle.”

At the last minute, Armand decided to abandon that line of conversation. It had failed to hit its mark. Worse, any exploration of the various meanings of the word whore could lead to tiresome and awkward accusations and counter-accusations about small favors that Armand had asked the boy to perform for certain powerful persons in the past.

Time for the heavy artillery.

“After all these years, Mathieu, it grieves me that you care so little for what I have given you. I am, after all, the only adult male who has ever shown the slightest interest in treating you like a son.”

The boy’s face remained impassive, but Armand could tell from his eyes that he had found the chink in his armor.

“I have made you my son and my heir, Mathieu. I have no intention of going back on my promises to you. Nevertheless, I wish you had honored your promises to me in the same way.”

“Touché,” Mathieu murmured.

“And yet, given a chance to take my place at the world’s banquet table, to drink deep of life and reach for the stars, you appear to be more interested in grubbing for gold, like your pathetic nebbish grandfather and his brothers.”

There was a long, painful pause.

“Yes, sir.”

“I am deeply disappointed.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is this point where I play the monster and deny you the inheritance that I have promised you all of these years?”

The boy’s eyes darkened, and for the first time Armand saw flashes of anger. “Sir, if I stayed beside you, it was not because of any promise of an inheritance.”

“Yet clearly your staying has very little to do with respect for my livelihood, my friends, with everything that I stand for.”

Another pause. Mathieu had to use silence as a weapon, because, alas, he would never be as verbally astute as his uncle. Sometimes Armand thought he could actually watch the thoughts forming behind his eyes.

“As you said, Uncle,” Mathieu replied, his voice even, “you are the only person who has shown any interest in being a father to me. Is that not enough reason to stay?”

Armand made a dismissive gesture. “Leave me. Clear out your desk and get out, you self-centered little ingrate! Damn you, you have betrayed me. Considering all that you know about me, for my own—and my wife’s—protection, I should arrange to have you genuinely eliminated.”

Oh, dear. Bad move. Exceptionally bad move.

Fire flashed behind the ice, but only a coldly polite smile showed on the boy’s face. “You are welcome to try,” Mathieu said in a dangerously civil tone. His posture changed only infinitesimally, but Armand read the coiled-snake intensity behind the shift.

The boy knew everything that Armand knew about the arts of surveillance and murder; moreover, Mathieu’s strength and agility now far outstripped Armand’s—and the boy had managed to arrange his own fable. God only knew how many contacts Mathieu had developed on his own in the business, or for what reason.

Time for an orderly withdrawal.

“Have I taught you all of this, given you a lifetime’s worth of knowledge and experience, all for nothing?”

The challenging intensity faded, and the boy had the good grace to bow his head. “To the extent that your life tends to rule out some of the things I want—“

“You want? You want? You think yourself old enough to make that kind of decision alone? You think your wisdom equals mine? An abacus, is that what you want? To sit in your little room and count your coins and play it safe?”

“To the extent that I want a wife, and children, and an end to the pretend, and the fear, and the second and third and fourth identities, yes.” The boy looked at him, and his expression was harder than Armand had ever seen it before. “I am not constructed like you, Uncle. You thrive on that life. I don’t.”

“You could, if you wanted to.”

“That may be true. But I want the other things more.”

“More even than pleasing me?”

Ice in his eyes. “Yes, Uncle.”

“So, what do you want of mine? Have I anything that you value?”

“Your good will. Shall I leave you now?”

Armand gave up. “No, Mathieu. You will always have my good will, in this life, or any life. However, since you are determined to chain yourself to the abacus, then let us send you out on your own in search of challenges more to your liking. If you must count beans, which of my beans interests you the most?”

No hesitation. “Margate-Broussard.”

“A poor choice.”

“I disagree. I see a lot of potential there, if it’s managed properly.”

“It’s in the United States. You have always said that you preferred not to live in the same country as your father’s family. Has that changed?”

“I think I’m ready to face them now.”

“Very well, then. Do you have a business plan?”

Mathieu smiled. “I do.”

“Bring it here.”

“No, Uncle.” As Armand stiffened, his nephew continued, “Allow me and Belle to take you and Simone to dinner tomorrow night, and afterward, I will show you what I think we can do with Margate-Broussard.”

“Belle, eh? Has she moved in with you yet?”

The boy looked faintly abashed. “Yes.”

“So this is a serious relationship?”

“Not really.”

Ah, good. Something he could understand. “Just less tedious and expensive than having to buy it, eh?”

A faint grin. “That was the idea, but—“

“In practice it’s a little stickier, eh?”

“Yes—and a lot more expensive.”

“It’s good you’re learning this now. You were entirely too idealistic about your love life.”

“You may be right, Uncle.”

Armand gazed into Mathieu’s almost-black eyes, the Dugas eyes: his mother’s eyes, his brother’s eyes, his niece’s eyes. His own. Certainly the closest he would ever come to parenthood, to immortality. The one human being who knew everything—well, a good deal, at least—about what Armand had needed to do in order to survive and prosper in his life. Recipient of both Armand’s boasts and his confessions.

“So,” he said heavily. “Why are you standing there like a stunned goat? Get us some brandy, and tell me what you learned in your meetings with the Hilgess people.”

The Transparent Boy

The Transparent Boy

Lausanne, Switzerland

March, 1973

This is how bad it was: His parents could not even agree on which language they would use for their arguments.

Matti rolled to his side and gnawed at the cuticle of his left thumb.

One floor below, Claudine screamed in her artsy, la-de-da, annoyingly poetic-reference-laden Parisian French. Her stiletto heels clicked on the carpet, on the parquetry directly under the boys’ bedroom, and on the stone floor. She shut herself up in her sitting room and slammed the door. His father followed her in his thick-soled shoes and flung open the door. He shouted at her in his Midwestern American, with its monosyllabic curses and brutally drawn-out R sounds; its aggressive, snarling vowels. Then Big Cy’s shoes reversed the direction, across stone, parquetry, and carpet. He shut himself up in the music room and slammed the door.

Matti punched at his pillow quietly, hoping not to rouse his elder brother. Matti was not quite eight and still a day student. Juni had just turned eleven — was home this weekend, in fact, to celebrate his birthday — and in his second year of boarding school. Matti hated for his brother to hear the fighting. He suspected that a good brother, a competent brother, would have kept the household calm for Juni’s occasional visits.

After a moment, the sitting room door opened, and once again his mother made her way toward the music room for one last word, one last tap-tap-tap-slam.

Recently, this drama was playing out almost every evening that his father arrived home from the lab before his mother retired for the night.

Juni was already awake, however, and sitting upright with his arms folded across his chest. “They’re arguing about you, Goose-boy,” he whispered. “Can you hear that? They’re arguing about you and Uncle Armand.”

Matti had not known, but he would not be surprised, either. In his parents’ angry, poisonous world, he made as likely a target as anything – likelier than most, in fact. Did they not, after all, when they thought the boys could not hear, refer to Juni as The Perfect One and to Matti as The Impossible One?

For the moment, he said nothing. He adjusted the covers over his shoulder and returned to what he had been doing to block out his parents’ argument. He had been imagining that he was holding his violin, pretending to play one of the songs his father played on his big black stereo in the music room -- a cheerful tune that featured someone whistling the melody line. Even now Matti smiled as his fingers danced over imaginary strings.

Juni seemed to be listening as hard as he could. “Hey, Goose-boy, what are they saying? Are you still going away for trips with Uncle Armand?”

“Yes.”

“An old circus clown?” Juni’s voice barely concealed his scorn. “God, you are such a goose! What does he do? Does he perform tricks for you? Does he juggle rings and ride about on a unicycle? Does he let you honk his big red nose?”

That was a tough one to answer, and Matti considered it carefully. Uncle Armand said that often the best answers weren’t really answers at all. “Uncle Armand did a lot of different things with the circus,” he said finally. “He wasn’t just a clown.”

“Maybe when you grow up, you’ll—“

They both heard it then, the sound of footsteps on the stairs. The tread was that of Mlle Dorothee, who covered a lot of ground for the family as both a governess and nanny when needed, and a sort of auxiliary housekeeper when the boys were away.

She padded down the hall and tapped on the boys’ door. “Mathieu,” she called in a soft voice. “Mathieu, your father wishes to speak with you.”

Matti swallowed hard. “I’m coming, Mlle Dorothee,” he called back.

He climbed out of bed and reached for his robe and slippers.

“Remember that it’s a bathrobe,” Juni hissed at him. “I called it a dressing gown last time I was here and he—well, you can imagine.”

“I know.” Speaking English to their father could be a tricky business, because at school they were taught British English. Big Cy, however, called British pronunciations and vocabulary posh talk and faggot-speak. He expected Midwestern Standard from his boys when they were at home.

The differences were not as dramatic as, for instance, the difference between the High German spoken in Germany and the dialectic variants that one heard in German-speaking cantons of Switzerland. Navigating the differences in English was a subtle task, certainly harder than pleasing their mother, whose French was only a handful of words and a tiny tweak of a vowel or two from what was taught in their schools.

As Matti knotted the sash on his gown—sorry, robe—and reached for the door, his brother whispered, “Good luck, man,” in English.

“Thanks,” he replied in the same language. “I’ll need it.”

* * *

Cyrus Witherspoon sat with his wife on the sofa in the sitting room. “Good evening, Matti,” his father said in English.

This was not a good sign.

Usually when they were together everyone spoke French. Big Cy was fluent in French—had been excellent in it even before he first came to Switzerland in 1961, according to what people said. Claudine considered herself fluent in English. She was not, but she tended to grow enraged when anyone tried to point that out—or when she lost track of a conversation, which happened rather often.

How American are we going to get here? Are you “papa,” or “Dad”?

Matti decided to avoid the question altogether. “Good evening,” he said, nodding to both of his parents in turn.

“Your mother tells me that you’re still taking treks with your great-uncle.”

Matti kept his face as blank as he could manage. “Yes, sir.”

“Would you mind telling me what Armand does when you’re out there, just the two of you?”

“Mostly, he checks on his properties and his investments, sir. Sometimes he looks at buildings and things he might buy.”

“I told you,” Claudine interrupted, “This is all business.”

Mr. Witherspoon ignored her. “Your mother says that whether you make it to class or not, you always know your dancing routines.”

“I practice every day.”

“And Madame Charvat says that your violin lessons have not suffered. You take your instrument with you?”

Matti nodded.

“I didn’t hear you.”

“I take it with me, sir. I practice every day.”

Big Cy scowled. “Your assessment letter from the school arrived yesterday. It’s in the mail basket in the foyer. Go and get it for me.”

Mathieu’s heart sank. He did his best, but he knew that there were some things he simply could not grasp. He nodded and turned to obey.

When he arrived in the hall, he noticed that the envelope had not yet been opened. He was not completely surprised that his mother had been afraid to look at his grades; on the whole, Claudine preferred to leave things academic to Big Cy. However, he had presumed that his father was upset at his going off on adventures with Uncle Armand because it was making his school work suffer. A sealed envelope meant that this whole inquisition was not contingent on his grades. There was something else going on.

He handed the envelope to his father without a word. Big Cy slit it open with a ballpoint pen from his pocket. He shook the folded paper out and narrowed his eyes.

“I see that reading is still something of a problem. And nothing is happening with your spelling or your penmanship.” He glared at Matti. “Apparently you still don’t find it worth your time and trouble to improve.”

Matti bowed his head and said nothing. He knew that there had been very little improvement. He had put forth an effort, of course, but some things were appallingly difficult, and there were so very many other things that were both more interesting and less frustrating—there just wasn’t enough time to do everything.

“It's the letters,” Matti said. He pressed his thumb and first two fingers together and moved them as though picking up and putting down a chess piece repeatedly. “They keep boinging around on the paper and changing direction.”

“You need to try harder,” his father said. “You're a smart boy. I know you can do better.”

“Yes, sir.”

Yeah, right, he added to himself.

“You know,” Big Cy said in a conversational tone, “back home when I was your age, everything was expressed as a letter grade. Just little rectangles of cardboard with some letters on it — that was all. And you had best believe that my father would have tanned my hide if I had brought home anything less than an A.”

Matti tried to picture Dr. Witherspoon, a slightly-built retired anthropologist in Kansas, a man with the thickest glasses Matti had ever seen on a real person, trying to tan the hide of Big Cy, a man well over six feet tall, with a thick torso and an American-style football player’s shoulders. “Yes, sir,” he said as neutrally as he could.

“Top marks in physical development—that’s just your genes coming through there—ahead of the class in geography, significantly advanced in history. History?”

“Um, Uncle Armand tells me about the places we visit—about the famous people who lived there and the famous things that happened there. And I read the maps for him.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes, sir.”

“See, I told you, Cyrus,” Matti’s mother said. “Armand has only the child’s very best interests at heart.”

“Hmm, this is interesting.” Matti’s father stared at the report for a long minute, and then studied his son with renewed interest. “It says here that you are significantly ahead of your class in mathematics. It says you multiply to three places, you’re working with percentages, and you’ve mastered long division.”

Matti hesitated: This was an area where British versus American English could trip him up disastrously. “When we travel,” he began, watching his father’s face for any sign that he was using the wrong word. “Uncle Armand has me cal—“ He saw no warning twitch on his father’s face.

“Cal—“

Still nothing.

“—Calculate how many kil—miles. How many miles from city to city, and how much—gasoline we expend in our travels. And when he—calculates—things about his investments or his taxes, he asks me to do some of the work. He says my eyes are better.”

To his relief, Cyrus Witherspoon nodded his head. “This is good,” he said. “This is very good. You’re not completely wasting our time and money out there.”

He leaned forward, his arms on his knees. “But I must know: Does Armand touch you?”

Matti whipsawed instantly from relief to confusion. “I beg your pardon, sir?”

“I said, does he touch you?”

“Um, he—he cuts my hair sometimes. And when he was teaching me to walk the wire, he held my hand—“

“That’s not what I mean, Mathieu. Does he touch you inappropriately?”

“Cyrus, such a question to ask the chi—“

“Claudine, this is between men, you understand?”

Matti opened his arms. “I’m sorry, Papa, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Big Cy seemed to have lost interest. “Yes, well, go back to bed,” he growled. “I have to talk to your mother.”

A minute later, Matti stood between the beds removing his robe. “It was very strange,” he told Juni, both of them still speaking English although they considered French their native language. “He wanted to know whether Uncle Armand touches me.”

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Does Armand touch you?”

Matti threw his slippers at the chair. “I don’t know what Papa means. Does he touch me? He cut my hair. He held my hand when he taught me to walk the wire—“

His reward was a cascade of giggles. “Matti, you are the stupidest little goose-boy in the world! Papa wants to know whether Armand touches you inappropriately.”

“Yes, that’s the very word he used: inappropriately. What does he mean?”

“I don’t believe that you don’t get it.”

Matti was losing patience. “Believe it.”

The giggles continued unabated.

“Hey! Hey, you! Hey, Cyrus Montgomery Witherspoon, Junior. Believe. It.”

Ah. Blessed quiet.

Matti rarely hauled out the big gun of Juni’s given name, but he felt that he had already had more than enough stress for the evening.

Juni rolled to his side and looked his brother straight in the eye. “He wants to know—Elmer Mathieu, Elmer Fudd—whether Uncle Armand ever touches your, you know, your pee-pee.”

Matti thought that he had fairly good control of his facial muscles, but he was unable to suppress a look of disgust. “Oh, yuck!”

Juni fell back against the headboard, chortling again. “Oh, God, look at the goose-boy’s face!”

“But you didn’t have to say pee-pee. I’m not a little boy any more. I know penis. And phallus. And dick. And that’s just in English. I know a lot of languages.”

I know more languages than you could ever imagine, Little Cyrus.

Feeling that he had perhaps regained a bit of his dignity, Matti blew his nose and drank some water, then climbed into bed, waiting for his brother’s glee to wind down. When it did, Matti asked, in as careful and as grown-up a tone as he could manage, “Why would he want to do that anyway? He already has a penis; I see it whenever he has to make water out in the country—“

Whatever he had said (and he thought that he had sounded very reasonable and mature), his brother was lost again in paroxysms of laughter.

* * *

The following afternoon, Uncle Armand and his restored Bentley arrived just as Madame Witherspoon and Mlle Dorothee got Juni, his books, and his laundry out into the drive to wait for his ride back to school.

Armand Brecht knew how to make an entrance. He was actually their mother’s uncle, the flamboyant black-sheep elder brother to her father. Armand had played at dozens of professions, from the family-scandal circus gig (and that was as an acrobat, in spite of what the family claimed—Matti had seen the old posters) to only slightly less scandalous turns as an actor, a nightclub singer, and an artist working in pastels, before settling down in his twilight years to the kind of stodgy capitalism that the Brecht family understood. He might have won a measure of respectability, had he been able to find one woman and stick to her. Unfortunately, Yvette was the sixth Mrs. Armand Brecht, and that relationship was starting to look shaky.

To Matti’s dismay, before Uncle Armand came to him, he bent over and studied Juni. “You have grown,” Armand said in a serious voice. “I don’t see you enough. I hope that you will come to my house for a few days this summer.”

Juni tried to look cool, but there was no doubt that he was totally blown away by the invitation. He absolutely strutted out to the van. Once he and his bags were inside, Mathieu could see him happily pointing out both his great-uncle and the Bentley to his classmates.

Matti said good-bye to his parents and picked up his violin case and his own small suitcase. Armand beamed at him, but this time he did not return the pleasantry. His face as still as stone, he climbed into the Bentley, fastened his seat belt, and braced his shoes on the metal box in the well before his seat, the box that he knew was full of candy and games and toys.

“Ah, we are a little sphinx today,” Armand murmured as he pulled out of the drive, waving gaily. As always, the gravity of his voice and the joy on his face seemed unrelated. “But know this, young man: That house is poisonous enough without the two of you boys playing jealousy games. I’m an old man. In a few years, I will be gone, and that boy will be your best source of sanity.

“Now Little Cy—“

Armand broke off while Matti snickered at the name his brother hated above all other names. “Yes, go ahead, laugh, but don’t do that to his face. He can’t help what your parents decided to name him any more than you can help your own name. Little Cy deserves a little break, too. So he will come to the chateau this summer. He’ll play in the pool, we’ll go sailing on the lake, and perhaps I will even see if it’s too late to teach him the wire.

“And that is all, my little friend. He will never be a part of our secrets. Not ever. Our journeys and our games belong to us, and to nobody else, Mathieu—my promise will be good until the day I die. He will visit the chateau, and that will be the end of it.”

A massive weight lifted from Matti’s shoulders and heart as his uncle spoke.

“Better now?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” Armand spun the wheel and slid into the heavy traffic headed toward Geneva. “Now, young man: Blow it away. Blow away everything that you are, everything that you think, everything that defines you.” Matti began taking deep, deep breaths and releasing them lustily at the dash as his uncle spoke. “Visualize the little gnome. Do you see him?”

Matti nodded, picturing the heavy glass gnome-shaped candy container his uncle kept on the hall table adjacent to the room where Matti slept when he visited.

Armand’s voice became lower, slower, and more seductive. “You must blow away everything, little Matti—your family and your history, your likes, your dislikes, your dreams, your beliefs, and your name. Be empty, Matti. Be empty and utterly transparent.”

There was nothing but the vibration of the Bentley, and the wind whistling in through a partially opened window, and his uncle’s low, magical voice.

“Now,” he said, but he spoke in a coarse country dialect of Flemish, a language that nobody else in Mathieu’s family would recognize. He spoke slowly, with lengthy pauses between sentences. “My name is Andre Liebling. I am an old man now, a farmer, and in poor health. I had a wonderful wife and six children. I raised root vegetables in a rural district much like the one that you and I visited near Marseilles around the New Year, but now I must find my youngest son. I hear that he is in terrible trouble and I am afraid. I must look everywhere for him. I promised his wife that I would do so.

“My daughter-in-law Nikki has sent with me their son. His name is Bruno. He was born on the fifteenth of April in the year nineteen-sixty-seven. He is almost six, and although he is not very clever, he has a good heart. I will try to find a good school for him while I am in the city.”

Uncle Armand waited three minutes and then repeated everything he had said.

Then another pause. Then one last repetition.

Matti kept his eyes squeezed shut tight and let his imagination run wild.

Thinking. Planning. Becoming.

Armand’s tone changed, although the language did not. “What is your name?”

“Bruno Andre Liebling,” Matti answered in the same dialect. His eyes were still tightly closed. “I’ll be six soon!”

“Oho, Bruno Andre, eh!” Armand said with a chuckle.

“Yes, sir,” Matti said with dreamy confidence. “I was named after my grandfather, and his father before him.”

“Very good. And when is your birthday?”

“I will be six — this many — in April. I have a kitty,” he added, his tone gaining an edge of excitement. “Her name is Bijou and she is going to have baby kitties!”

“And what color is she?”

“Gray, sir, with one white paw and a little white flag on the tip of her tail.”

“Oh, very good, Bruno. I love kitties, too. Now, tell me about your mother.”

“My mama? Her name is Niccolina. My father is away; my sister says that he is in jail, but mama says only that he is looking for work.”

“I do believe that you are the best and cleverest boy in the world. Tell me what your mama does.”

He saw the small farm, all browns and grays, too much rain, too much mud, not enough money. Saw his mama biting her lip in the kitchen, looking at bills. A lonely woman, counting on her little boy. Proud of him. Blue walls and a white enameled metal table.

Matti opened his eyes and drank in the warmth and the light. “My mama grows hops and cares for the neighbors’ geese.”

“Geese? Is that the truth?”

“I am sure, sir. They are old (the neighbors, not the geese) and mama helps them, and I help her.” Matti gifted his uncle with a smile of utter delight. “She calls me her little goose-boy — Grandpapa, look at the sports car!”

“Don’t get distracted, my little Bruno. It’s a pity, you know, that you’re clumsy and not very well coordinated.”

The boy in the passenger seat felt his muscles go just a little looser, felt his reflexes slow ever so slightly. “Yes, sir.”

“It is a pity that you are not gifted with agility, for you will be required to climb the back of a three-story building for me. Do you think that you will succeed in being my little monkey?”

“Of course, grandpapa, if it will make you happy.”

“It will indeed, because I will need someone to get my tools to me.”

“Your tools.” Matti drank in the sunlit landscape. “Then this is an assassination.”

“Yes, but we must not speak of it that way.”

“Of course, grandpapa.”

Utility poles swished as they passed them. The waters of Lac Leman glittered in the mid-afternoon sun. From the radio in the dash of the Bentley came the voice of Edith Piaf, raw and powerful and weirdly exciting.

Bruno Liebling was a happy little boy.