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“I’ll catch y’all later,” I said.
Varina was breathing hard through her nose, her face pinched, not unlike a child’s. “You don’t know how mad you can make people,” she said. “I had tender feelings for you once, whether you knew it or not. But you’re a shit, Dave Robicheaux.”
I got in the cruiser and drove down the two-lane toward Croix du Sud Plantation. In the rearview mirror, I saw Varina drop the flat tire in the trunk and throw the jack on top of it and slam the hatch, then stare down the road in my direction. If she and her father were acting, their performance had reached Oscar-level standards.
A BLACK MAID wearing a gray uniform and a frilled white apron let me in and went to fetch Alexis Dupree while I stood in the foyer. When he emerged from the back of the house, he was squinting, as though he didn’t quite recognize me.
“I’m Dave Robicheaux from the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department,” I said.
“Oh, yes,” he replied. “How could I forget? Are you here about my grandson?”
“Yes, sir, I understand he was assaulted in a restaurant in New Orleans. He left the scene without giving any information to the New Orleans police.”
“If I recall, your last visit here wasn’t a very pleasant one, Mr. Robicheaux. I don’t always remember things with great clarity. What was the issue?”
“I called my daughter a pet name. You thought I used the word ‘Waffen.’”
“Pierre left the restaurant in New Orleans to get medical care. In regard to his not reporting the matter, any involvement with the New Orleans Police Department is a complete waste of time.”
“May I speak with him?”
“He’s sleeping. He was beaten badly.”
I waited for Alexis Dupree to ask me to leave, but he didn’t. This was my third encounter with him. On each occasion I had felt as though I were speaking to a different individual. He was the patrician and the veteran of the French Resistance whose mind hovered on the edges of senility; the irascible victim of the Holocaust; the avuncular patriarch whose bones were weightless as a bird’s. Or perhaps the problem lay in my perception. Perhaps Alexis Dupree was just old, and I should not have been surprised by his mercurial behavior.
“I’m having a glass of lemon and tea in the library. Sit with me,” he said.
Without waiting, he walked into an oak-paneled study furnished with a big wood desk and tan leather chairs and a liquor cabinet. Against the far wall, by the French doors, was a stand with a large Oxford dictionary on it. On the walls was a collection of photographs that had been taken all over the world: an indoor-cycling racetrack in Paris, the canals of Venice at night, the Great Wall of China, a decayed Crusader castle on the edges of a desert, Italian soldiers marching through a destroyed village, ostrich plumes stuck in the bands of their campaign hats. One photograph in particular caught my eye. In it, a dozen men and women who looked like partisans were facing the camera. They wore trousers and berets and bandoliers stuffed with large brass cartridges. Their weapons seemed to be a mix of Mausers and Lee-Enfields and Lewis guns. Behind them was a chalklike bluff, grooved by erosion, and on top of it, buildings pocked from shellfire. The photograph was inscribed “To Alexis” and signed by Robert Capa.
“You knew Capa?” I asked.
“We were friends,” Dupree said. “That photo was taken in the front lines outside Madrid, just before the city fell. But I met Robert much later, after World War Two. I worked for both British and American intelligence. Robert stepped on a mine in Indochina in 1954.” He gestured for me to sit down. “It was a grand time to be around, actually. Our ideological choices were clearly defined. We never had any doubt about who was right in the struggle.”
“You were in the Resistance?”
“We called it le maquis. The underbrush.”
“You were also in Ravensbrück?”
“Why do you ask of these things?”
“Because I was in Vietnam. I saw the tiger cages and some other things on a prison island both the French and the Imperial Japanese once used. I had no experiences like yours, but I saw a bit of what Orwell called ‘the bloody hand’ of an empire at work.”
“I believe you have the wrong idea about my experience. I don’t look upon myself as a victim. I survived in the camp because I worked. I did as I was told. I didn’t show disrespect. Each day I imposed a soldier’s discipline upon myself and never complained about my situation or my physical state. Nor did I beg. I would die before I begged. I learned that begging always breeds contempt and ensures one’s victimization.”
“I see,” I said. But his account did not square with a detail Pierre Dupree had mentioned. I tried not to let the discrepancy register in my face. “Was Capa a Communist?”
“Because I admired and respected Robert, I never asked him.”
“The Italian troops with plumes in their hats? That photo was taken in Ethiopia, wasn’t it?”
“It could have been. I wanted to be a photojournalist, but the war intervened,” he said. “I hope my own unfulfilled aspirations have a second and more successful outcome in my grandson’s life.”
“Jean-Paul Sartre was in the Resistance. Did you know him?”
“No, Mr. Sartre was not in the Resistance. He was a writer who resisted. He was not a resister who wrote. Do you know who said that? His friend Albert Camus.”
“I didn’t know that,” I replied.
