about any international trip. I was hoping he might have said something
to you.”
“Not a word. Did he get any phone calls … ?”
“No, I don’t… Let me look at the message book.” She came back to the
phone a minute later. “Just a Mr. Godwin.”
“Godwin?”
“Well, actually, it says Professor Godwin.”
The name took him by surprise. That had to be Ben’s college mentor, the
Princeton historian John Barnes Godwin. Then again, he realized, it
wasn’t particularly bizarre for Godwin to be calling Max: a few years
ago, impressed by what Ben had told him about the famous historian, Max
had given money to Princeton to set up a Center for the Study of Human
Values, of which Godwin became the director. Yet his father hadn’t
mentioned Godwin. Why were the two of them talking on the morning
before Max disappeared?
“Let me have the number,” he said.
He thanked her and clicked off.
Strange, he thought. For a brief moment he imagined that his father was
fleeing somewhere, because he knew his past had been uncovered or was
about to be uncovered. But that made no sense fleeing what? Fleeing
where?
Ben was exhausted and emotionally depleted, and he knew he was not
thinking clearly. He badly needed sleep. He was making connections now
that weren’t quite logical.
He thought: Peter knew things, things about their father’s past, about a
company Max had helped set up, and then Peter was killed.
And then … And then I found a photograph of the founders of this
corporation, my father among them. And I followed to Liesl and Peter’s
cabin, and I found a page from the incorporation document setting this
company up. And then they’d tried to kill both me and Liesl and cover
up the evidence by blowing up the cabin.
So is it possible that they… again, the faceless, anonymous They …
had gotten to my father, informed him that the secret was out, the
secret of his past, or maybe the secret of this strange corporation? Or
both?
Yes, of course it was possible. Since They seem to be trying to
eliminate anyone who knows about this company… Why else had Max
disappeared so suddenly, so mysteriously?
Might he have been compelled to go somewhere, to meet with certain
people… There was only one thing Ben felt sure of: that his father’s
sudden disappearance was in some way connected with the murders of Peter
and Liesl, and with the uncovering of this document.
He returned to the Range Rover, noticed in the light of the rising sun
the deep scratches that defaced its sides, and drove back to
Zahringerplatz. Then he settled back in the Rover and placed a call to
Princeton, New Jersey.
“Professor Godwin?”
The old professor sounded as if he’d been asleep.
“It’s Ben Hartman.”
John Barnes Godwin, historian of Europe in the twentieth century and
once Princeton’s most popular lecturer, had been retired for years. He
was eighty-two but still came into his office every day to work.
An image of Godwin came into Ben’s mind–tall and gaunt, white haired,
the deeply wrinkled face.
Godwin had been not just Ben’s faculty adviser but a sort of father
figure as well. Ben remembered once sitting in Godwin’s book-choked
office in Dickinson Hall. The amber light, the vanilla-mildew smell of
old books.
They’d been talking about how FOR managed to maneuver the isolationist
United States into the Second World War. Ben was writing his senior
thesis about FDR and had told Godwin that he was offended by Roosevelt’s
trickery.
“Ah, Mr. Hartman,” Godwin replied. That was what he called Ben in
those days. “How is your Latin? Honesta turpitudo est pro causa bona.n
Ben looked at the professor blankly.
” “For a good cause,”” Godwin translated with a slow, sly smile, ”
‘wrongdoing is virtuous.” Publilius Syrus, who lived in Rome a century
before Christ, and said a lot of smart things.”
“I don’t think I agree,” Ben said, the morally indignant undergraduate.
“To me that sounds like a rationalization for screwing people over. I
hope I never catch myself saying that.”
Godwin regarded him with what seemed to be puzzlement. “I suppose
that’s why you refuse to join your father’s business,” he said
pointedly. “You’d rather be pure.”
“I’d rather teach.”
“But why are you so sure you want to teach?” Godwin had asked, sipping
tawny port.
“Because I love it.”
“You’re certain?”
“No,” Ben admitted. “How can a twenty-year-old be certain of anything?”
“Oh, I find that twenty-year-olds are certain of most things.”
“But why should I go into something I have no interest in, working in a
company my father built, to make even more money that I don’t need? I
mean, what good does our money do for society? Why should I have great
wealth while others have no food on the table?”
Godwin closed his eyes. “It’s a luxury to thumb your nose at money.
I’ve had some extremely rich students, even a Rockefeller, in my class.
And they all struggle with this same dilemma not to let the money rule
your life or define you, but, instead, to do something meaningful with
your life. Now, your father is one of our nation’s great
philanthropists ”
“Yeah, wasn’t it Reinhold Niebuhr who said that philanthropy is a form
of paternalism? The privileged class tries to preserve its status by
doling out funds to the needy?”
Godwin glanced up, impressed. Ben tried not to smile. He’d just read
this in his theology class, and the line had stuck in his mind.
“A question, Ben. Is becoming a grade school teacher actually your way
of rebelling against your father?”
“Maybe so,” Ben said, unwilling to lie. He wanted to add that it was
Godwin who had inspired him to teach, but that might sound too …
something.
He was surprised when Godwin replied, “Bully for you. That takes guts.
And you’ll be a great teacher, I have no doubt of it.”
Now, Ben said, “I’m sorry to be calling you so late ”
“Not at all, Ben. Where are you? The connection ”
“Switzerland. Listen, my father’s disappeared ”
“What do you mean, ‘disappeared’?”
“He left home this morning, went somewhere, we don’t know where, and I
was wondering because you called him this morning, just before that…”
“I was returning his call, really. He wanted to talk about another gift
to the center he was planning to make.”
“That’s it?”
“I’m afraid so. Nothing out of the ordinary, as far as I can recall.
But if he happens to call me again, is there a way I can get in touch
with you?”
Ben gave Godwin his digital number. “Another question. Do you know
anyone on the faculty of the University of Zurich? Someone who does
what you do modern European history.”
Godwin paused for a moment. “At the University of Zurich? You can’t do
any better than Carl Mercandetti. A first-class researcher. Economic
history’s his specialty, but he’s very wide-ranging in the best European
tradition. The fellow also has an astounding collection of grappa,
though I suppose that’s neither here nor there. Regardless,
Mercandetti’s your man.”
“I appreciate it,” Ben said, and he hung up.
Then he put the car seat back and tried to doze for a few hours.
He slept fitfully, his sleep disturbed by unceasing nightmares in which
he was forced to see the cabin explode time and again.
When he awoke at a few minutes after nine, he saw in the rearview mirror
how unshaven and dirty he looked, saw the deep circles under his eyes,
but he didn’t have what it took to find a place to shave and wash.
There wasn’t any time in any case.
It was time to begin excavating a past that was no longer the past.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.
Paris
Only a small brass plaque marked the office of Groupe TransEuroTech SA,
on the third floor of a limestone building on the avenue Marceau in the
eighth arrondissement. The plaque, mounted on the stone to the left of
the front door, was but one of seven brass plaques bearing the names of
law firms and other small companies, and as such it attracted little
attention.
The office of TransEuroTech never received unscheduled visitors, but
anyone who happened to pass by the third floor would see nothing out of
the ordinary: a young male receptionist sitting behind a glass teller’s
window made of a bullet-resistant polycarbonate material that looked
like plain glass. Behind him, a small, bare room furnished with a few
molded-plastic chairs, and a single door to the interior offices.
No one would, of course, realize that the receptionist was actually an
armed and experienced ex-commando, or see the concealed surveillance
cameras, the passive infrared motion detectors, the balanced magnetic
switches embedded in every door.
The conference room deep inside the offices was actually a room within a
room: a module separated from the surrounding concrete walls by