Lost Cause (3 page)

“You mean six.” DJ spoke the thought that was in all our minds. “There are only six of us.”

“Well,” the lawyer said, a slight smile playing around his eyes, “as I said, there is a most interesting twist. There
is
a seventh grandson.”

After the adults filed back in, stared at us oddly and settled themselves, the lawyer explained to them what had gone on and replayed Grandfather's DVD. My mom and her sisters were sobbing by the end. The lawyer gave them a moment to calm down, and then he'd repeated the bombshell about the seventh grandson.

It didn't come as such a shock for Mom and the others. Grandfather had told them that they had an unknown half sister and another nephew. He had also asked them to keep it from us boys.

Apparently, Grandfather had been quite the lad, and the result had been a fifth daughter named Suzanne, who had then had a son called Rennie Charbonneau. This kid was the same age as DJ and me, but Grandfather had only discovered his existence a few months ago from reading an obituary in the newspaper.

I couldn't help smiling as I wondered how many cousins or half cousins I might have scattered across the world. This meeting had definitely been worth coming to. It had given me a much greater sense of Grandfather as a person, and it had also given me a quest and a real mystery to solve. I looked down at the envelope in my hand.

“Aren't you going to open it?” Mom was standing beside me.

I shook my head. “I'll wait till I get home.”

I looked around the room. The meeting appeared to have broken up. DJ was standing looking at his envelope, and several of my cousins were in huddles with their parents, talking quietly. I hefted
my
envelope. It was light, not much in it. I was eager to know what my task was, but I was also enjoying the anticipation, the not knowing, the mystery. Grandfather had mentioned tickets, money and guides. Perhaps my summer wasn't going to be as disappointing and boring as I had thought.

Steve,

I hope you came to the will reading and are examining the contents of this envelope with an open mind. I know we have not always seen eye to eye. We are, after all, separated by two generations and the world I grew up in was very different from the one that you know. I hope that this will not be a handicap to our friendship, even if that friendship will be a bit one-sided now!

Rosa Luxemburg, a heroine of mine when I was your age, once said something to the effect that freedom only meant something if it was freedom for those who think differently. I think something similar applies to friendship. Being friends with those who are the same as you, have the same interests and beliefs, is easy. The problem is that you miss much of the richness that makes us human. Seek out the odd and unusual, the novel ideas of those who think differently from you.

Sorry, I seem to be preaching. I don't mean to, it's just that I wanted my letter to you to be as long as the ones to your brother and your cousins. This letter will be short for two reasons.

1) I know how much you dislike sentimental stuff, so I won't go into any details about how cute you were when you and your brother first came into this world! I suspect that, deep down, you are as sentimental as the rest of us, but that you keep it hidden. Probably a good characteristic when you become a scientist, which seem to me to be where your interests lie.

2) Your task is very simply explained, although it may not be as easy as you imagine to carry out. I could certainly give you more information and point you in certain directions, but this is your task, not mine. You must find your own way, make your own decisions and come to your own conclusions. I know how much you love mystery novels, so I am going to give you a real-life mystery to solve.

Some time ago, a letter from Spain came for me. It had found me through an organization of which I am a member. It was from someone I had known many years before, and it had been mailed from an address I hadn't thought about in more than seven decades.

The address was from a time in my life that was full of importance, danger, love and a sense of being a part of something that would change the world. Of course, the world didn't change, at least not in the way that I hoped, but that time was so important to me that I sometimes think I have spent my life since then trying to recapture it.

That is your task, to recapture that time. I can't tell you how to do it. All I can do is give you clues to set you on a path that, I hope, will solve the mystery of the letter. I gave you a clue in the dvd, and to that I can add the address where the letter came from. I will not show you the letter itself; it contained a lot of personal stuff that would be of little interest to you, but it did say that there was something of mine at that address. At first, I intended to go to the address myself, but I delayed. I suppose I'm frightened to go back to that time when life was so vibrant that I almost thought I would explode with the passion of it all. In fact, it was such an intense time that I have never talked about it with anyone. If you discover what I think you will, you will be the only person who knows about this part of my life.

I have instructed my lawyer, Johnnie, to mail a letter to the address, informing them of my demise and of your arrival. They cannot get in touch with you except through Johnnie, and without solving the mystery, what would you say to them in a letter? Suffice it to say that the people at that address will be expecting you and, I hope, will be your guides on your quest.

Steve, you are young, and passion is your preserve, so I pass this task on to you. Solve the mystery and, I hope, discover a little of the passion I felt in those longago days.

Good luck and always remember that I love you.

Grandfather

THREE

I read Grandfather's letter through one more time and tipped the contents of the envelope out onto my bed. There was a scrap of paper with two handwritten verses of poetry on it:

They clung like birds to the long expresses that lurch
Through unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel;
They floated over oceans;
They walked the passes. All presented their lives.
The stars are dead. The animals will not look.
We are left alone with our day, and time is short, and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.

A second piece of paper had an address on it:

Maria Dolores Calderon Garcia
Carrer de la Portaferrissa, 71
08002 Barcelona
España

Folded in the second piece of paper was a small tarnished key. It was old-fashioned and too small to be a door key. Nothing written on the paper gave a clue as to its use.

The final two things in the envelope made my heart race. The first was a note from Grandfather telling me that the lawyer had instructions to buy me a return airline ticket to Barcelona. The second was a bank card with my name on it and paperwork showing a balance of $2,000 on the card. All it needed was my signature. Suddenly my lost cause wasn't so lost after all. Europe
was
possible this summer.

I hadn't planned on going to Barcelona, but I hadn't been anywhere in Europe, so one place was as good as another to begin. There were only two problems: the language and Mom. I couldn't speak Spanish. But I liked languages, so I could probably pick up a few key phrases before I went. Mom would be tougher. Would she allow me to head off to a foreign country on my own?

I'd have to cross that bridge when I came to it. Right now I just wanted to savor the possibilities. I took a deep breath. “Thank you, Grandfather,” I murmured. I let the documents slip out of my grasp onto the bed beside me. That's when a black-and-white photograph slid out from behind the paperwork.

It was the size of a postcard, faded and grainy. To one side, two figures stood in a doorway beneath an intricately carved lintel. The figures were tough to make out but were obviously a boy and a girl, about my age. He wore heavy boots, gray pants with an open-neck shirt tucked into them, and a short leather jacket. He was bareheaded and his dark hair was thick, parted in the middle and swept back above his ears.

The girl was dressed in what looked like mechanics' overalls. She wore a broad dark scarf tied around her neck and a peaked cap. Her hair was dark, shoulder length and tucked behind her ears. I didn't recognize either of them, but they looked happy. Both were grinning broadly at the camera.

My gaze drifted to the lintel, where a crown sat above a shield bearing nine vertical lines. On each side, carved vegetation spread out and down to surround the doorway.

A wall stretched away to the left, bare except for a crudely painted hammer and sickle and words that were out of focus but looked like
Mac
and
Pap
.

The photograph was obviously old. I turned it over, looking for a date and the identity of the people, but there was only something written in Spanish:
El fascismo será destruido
.

I spread the contents of the envelope in an arc across the bed: the letter, the scrap of poetry, the address, the key, the note about the ticket, the bank card and the photograph. I put the note and the bank card to one side. They were practical things to help me solve the mystery, but they weren't clues. There were five clues. No, six. In the letter Grandfather had said there had been a clue in the DVD.

I closed my eyes and replayed Grandfather's message in my mind. It was a straightforward message to the six—no, seven—of us. Where was the clue? I ran through it once more.

My eyes flew open in sudden realization. The only bit of the DVD that hadn't made sense to me—Grandfather had talked about the times he had thought he was going to die as a boy. I couldn't remember the exact wording, but I did remember wondering what he had done before the war. Could that be the time when the mysterious events had happened?

I picked up the letter and scanned it. There:
an address I hadn't thought about in more than seven decades
. That would put the importance of the address in the late 1930s,
before
the Second World War broke out in 1939. My grandfather's mystery had something to do with Barcelona in the years before the Second World War.

I felt ridiculously happy. I was going to Europe this summer, and I had already made progress on my task. What other clues could I decipher?

I moved over to my desk and pulled out a sheet of paper from the printer. Systematically I went through the items from the envelope, jotting down what I thought might be clues. I put a question mark beside the things I was doubtful about. I put a line through the clues I thought I had already understood.

The letter

Rosa Luxemburg?

DVD

More than seven decades ago

The poetry fragments

“They clung like birds”

“The stars are dead”

The address

Maria Dolores Calderon Garcia

Carrer de la Portaferrissa, 71

08002 Barcelona

España

The key

What does it open?

The photograph

Identity of the people?

Location and date of the photograph?

Meaning of the writing on the wall?

I sat back and scanned my list. Even assuming I hadn't missed anything important, it didn't mean much. Still, I had nowhere else to go. I took a second sheet of paper and wrote down what I had worked out so far.

Barcelona

Late 1930s

Dangerous, passionate, dramatic events

It was a short list. I fired up my computer and typed
Rosa Luxemburg
into Google and got nearly two million hits. I quickly discovered that she had been a Communist a hundred years ago and was murdered during a revolution in Berlin in 1919, before my grandfather was even born. I found the quote about freedom that he had mentioned, but what did that mean? Then I remembered something. I checked the photograph. The scrawled hammer and sickle on the wall beside the door was the Communist symbol. Rosa Luxemburg was a Communist. Did
that
mean anything? I wrote
Communist?
on my list and scored through
Rosa Luxemburg
. Now for the poems.

In quotation marks, I typed
“They clung like birds to the long expresses that lurch
.
”
I got thirty-eight hits, all from a poem called
Spain
by someone called W.H. Auden. I typed
“The stars are dead. The animals will not look”
and got one hundred and thirty-three hits, again all from Auden's
Spain
. I found a copy and read the whole long poem. I could make little of it as it jumped from insurance cards and today's struggle to octaves of radiation. Poetry's never been my thing. The only fact that might make sense was that the poem was written in 1937. I added
1937?
to my list and struck out the poetry fragments on the other page, hoping the address would give me more. It did.