covered the floor had been soaked with Nathan’s blood. The chalk mark that had been drawn around his body was remarkably small. His body had crumpled, not fallen flat. Hardly anything in the room had been spared the splattering of his blood. The walls, the furniture, the precious objects he kept on the tables, all were marked. His hat still lay where it had rolled when he fell dead.
I turned to look at Mitchell, who had been only a few steps behind me. His face was ashen, and he had started to weep.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the policeman said, and I felt myself warm to him.
I touched Mitchell’s arm. “Would you like to sit down in the kitchen?”
“No. I’m fine.” He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his face. “What’s all that white stuff?” he asked.
“That?” Schuyler said, pointing. “Fingerprint powder. You’ll find it all over, light powder for the dark surfaces and dark powder for the light ones. See, it’s the way the fingerprints show up. They dusted the whole apartment.”
“It’s the pictures I want.”
“I guess that’s OK. I’ll make an inventory list. You signin my book and I’ll have Ms.—uh—Bennett witness it and sign, too. Then I’ll get Sergeant Franciotti to sign later.”
Mitchell went to a round table that stood beside an arm-chair. The surface was covered with a mass of framed black-and-white photos dating way back. Some were that sepia tone you see in old pictures sometimes. He picked one up and stared at it, then another, then another. His head was shaking slowly as though something incomprehensible had happened to him.
“This isn’t my mother,” he said. “This isn’t Nina. This isn’t New York. Who the hell are these people?”
I walked over and looked at the photos he was holding. The woman was young and wearing an out-of-date dress and a hat. “I assumed—” I started to say.
He turned the oval frame over, opened the clasps on the back, and pulled out the photo of the woman. In a very European hand, the kind of writing Nathan used, was written: “Renata, Leipzig, 1933.” He put the photo and frame down and opened a frame with a picture of a boy and girl. The same handwriting labeled it, “Heinz, 4 Jahre, Karolla, 2 Jahre, 1939.”
“I don’t believe this,” Mitchell said. He walked to another table, scanned the pictures there, picked one up, and looked at it closely. The man in it was a young Nathan, bespectacled, in a double-breasted suit. Beside him was the young woman of the other pictures. She was wearing a suit, a hat, and a fur piece over her shoulders. The head of one little mink could be clearly seen fastened to another piece of fur. In her hands she held a small bouquet of white flowers. If anything looked like a wedding picture, that did. Mitchell turned it over. It was dated March 10, 1933. “He had another family,” Mitchell said, his voice ringing with misery. “He had a wife and two children that he never told us about.”
“They must have died during the war,” I said.
“But to keep it a secret. To drag out these pictures when I was no longer welcome in his home— How the hell did he get them through the war anyway? And my mother. There isn’t a single picture of her here. It’s as if we were the onesthat died and they were the ones that lived.” He looked dangerously pale.
“Come sit in the kitchen, and I’ll give you a glass of water.”
“I need something stronger than that.” He followed me into the kitchen. “Over the refrigerator. There should be something there.”
There was—several bottles of whiskey. I took one down and poured some into a glass. Mitchell drank it in two gulps. As he sat at the old table where Nathan and I had spent many pleasant hours talking, his color returned. “He had two separate lives,” he said reflectively, “a good one and a bad one. And I was part of the bad one.”
“Don’t look at it that way. There was a war, and there was a time before and a time
Z. L. Arkadie, T. R. Bertrand