Perfidia | Page 3

cover, tilted away to almost meet the line of the back. Two reels mounted toward the top each measured about four inches in diameter and an inch thick, wound with steel wire the thickness of a human hair. More than anything else it reminded me of the Bell & Howell 8mm movie projector that my father had tortured us with as children, showing captive audiences of dinner guests his home movies featuring Ann and me as children and my mother in the radiant beauty of her 30s.
The wire recorder hadn't been working when it arrived, but I'd been lucky. Blowing a half century's worth of dust off the electronics with an air gun, I'd found the broken bit of wire that had fallen into the works and caused a short. That and replacing a burnt-out power tube from my extensive stock of spare parts was all it had taken--apart from cleaning the wire itself.
The trick was to remove the corrosion without affecting the magnetic properties of the metal. I'd spent eight hours running the wire through a folded nylon scrub pad soaked in WD40, letting the machine's bailers wind the wire evenly back on the reel, stopping now and then to confirm there was still something there. Then I'd jury-rigged a bypass from the built-in speaker, through a preamp and into an eighth-inch jack that I could plug into my laptop. With excruciating care, I'd played it into a .wav file and worked on the results with CoolEdit Pro for another hour, trying to control the trembling in my hands as I began to realize what I had.
*
When I got to the hospital in the morning, my father was reading the newspaper. Ann was still in the same clothes I'd last seen her in; she'd already had circles under her eyes, so it was hard to say if they were deeper. "You're here early," she said, with a smile that failed to cover the implied criticism.
"I'm on a plane to Paris tonight."
"Oh really?"
"You going to find out about that tape?" my father asked.
"That's the idea. My travel agent found me a cheap cancellation."
"How lucky for you," Ann said.
"This is business, Ann." I stifled my reflex irritation. "That recording could be worth a fortune."
"Of course it could," she said.
"Don't give those French any more of your money than you have to," my father said.
"Oh, Pop," I said. "Don't start."
"We had to bail their sorry country out in World War II, and now--"
"No politics," Ann said. "I absolutely forbid it."
I sat on the edge of the bed next to him. "You're not going to die on me, are you, Pop? At least not until I get back?"
"What makes you so special that I should wait for you?"
"Because you want to see how this turns out."
"I already know it's a fake. But there is the pleasure of saying I told you so. You'd think I'd get tired of it after all these years, but it's like fine wine."
I leaned over to hug him and his left arm went around my back with surprising power. He had two days' growth of beard and the starchy smell of hospital soap. "I'm serious," I said. "I want you to take care of yourself."
"Yeah, yeah. If you bag one of those French girls, ask if her mom remembers me."
"I thought you were only in Germany." His unit had liberated Dachau, but he never talked about it, or any other part of the war.
"I got around," he shrugged. His left arm relaxed and I pulled away. "Don't take any wooden Euros."
Ann followed me out, just as I knew she would. "He'll be dead by the time you get back. Just like--"
"I know, I know. Just like Mom. It's less than a week. He'll be all right."
"No, he won't." She was crying.
"Sleep, Ann. You really need to get some sleep."
*
I myself slept fitfully on the way over, too cramped to relax, too tired to read, but my spirits lifted as soon as I was on the RER from DeGaulle to the city. There was no mistaking the drizzly gray October world outside the train for the US, despite billboards featuring Speedy Gonzales, Marilyn, Disneyland, Dawson's Creek. The tiny hybrid cars, the flowerboxes in the windows, even the boxy, Bauhaus-gone-wrong blocks of flats insisted that excess was not the only way to live. It was a lesson that my country was not interested in learning.
I'd been able to get a room at my usual hotel, a small family place in the XVIIth Arrondisement, a short walk from the Metro hub at Place de Clichy and a slightly longer one from Montmartre and Pigalle. I stopped at the market across the street to pick up some fresh fruit and exchanged pleasantries with the clerk, who remembered me from my previous trip.