The Book of Air and Shadows

would hit my nose in the hallway as I left the urine-stinking elevator, like a presagement of paradise. And we would talk, or she would talk, mainly reminiscences of her girlhood, her marvelous girlhood in the New Germany-the music, the parades, how beautiful the men looked in their uniforms, how wonderful her father, how kind everyone was to her. She actually served as one of those little blondies you see in old newsreels presenting a bouquet to the Führer on an official visit. It was set up through her dad’s contacts in the Party, and she recalled every detail, how proud she was, how the Führer had cupped her little face in his hand and patted her cheek. Yes, the cheek I kissed every day. Lucky Jake!
    About the bad stuff that came later, not so much talking. I don’t like sinking about zose days, she said, only of zhe happy times I like to sink. But I pressed and learned about the rats and the flies, the absence of pets, the smell, what it was like to be bombed from the air, more about the smells, the exploded bodies of her friends and their parents, the peculiar juxtapositions created by blast, the bathtub blown through a schoolhouse wall and resting on the teacher’s desk. How the children laughed!
    When I cleaned out her stuff I found a trove of family memorabilia that she’d never shown us, but which she must have been carrying around in her suitcase when she met Dad: letters home from the various fronts, photographs of the family, school certificates, vacation postcards. It included a good deal of Nazi stuff, of course, awards from the SS, my grandfather’s various medals, and the rosewood presentation case for the pistol. One photograph in particular I rescued and later had framed, and it is still in my bedroom. It is of her family, just before the war started, at some beach resort. She’s about ten or eleven, lovely as a nymph, and the two older brothers are there in their old-fashioned knit bathing suits, grinning blondly into the sun, and my grandmother is looking quite svelte in a one-piece suit, reclining in a deck chair and laughing; and leaning over her, sharing the joke, is the then Hauptsturmführer-SS Stieff. He has obviously just come to the beach from work, for he is in tie and shirtsleeves and carrying his tunic, accoutrements and hat, and unless you look very carefully, you can’t see what kind of uniform it is.
    I like this picture because of how happy they all look, although they lived under the worst regime in human history and the father of the family worked for an organization bent on genocide. In contrast, there are no such pictures of my family, for although we had our laughs, my father was not into photography, and, unlike his late father-in-law, had a positive horror of being captured on film. The only family pictures we have are stilted department store poses taken on our birthdays or else records of events-first communions, graduations, and so on, plus many snapshots taken by neighbors or strangers, for, as I have suggested, with the exception of myself, my family is unusually photogenic.

    No, let’s tear ourselves away from the distant past (if only!) and back to the main story. Miranda and I agreed that she could not be left alone. I made arrangements for Omar to come by and exercise his protective skills, and further arranged that he should stay over and add a little firepower in case they tried anything else once they found that the briefcase lacked what they wanted. This left the question of why Russian-speaking toughs had become interested in Richard Bracegirdle’s personal history. Could Bulstrode have had some original connection with them? I asked Miranda and she looked at me like I was crazy. Uncle Andrew hardly knew anyone in New York aside from scholars, and he had never so much as mentioned any Russians, criminal or otherwise. Freelance thugs then? More likely. Despite the fictions of TV, organized crime has become somewhat more Russian in the past few decades: the Mafiya, so called, but not by the Russians. Someone looking for frighteners, strong-arm guys, torturers, had found a contractor. Who this person was remained obscure, but finding him (as I now explained to Miranda) was not our job. What we had to do was keep her safe, which I thought Omar could handle, and turn the recent developments over to the police.
    Around eight, a fellow called Rashid came by from a hire agency to drive me to work. I left Omar in the loft with Miranda, with instructions not