Courvoisiers, Hugo." - "Good choice," said Latham, looking around the elegant, high-ceilinged library.
"This is a lovely room," he said.
"Being an avid reader, it suits my purpose," agreed Lavolette.
"Guests are frequently astonished when they ask me if I've read every volume, and I answer, "Usually two or three times."
"That's a lot of reading."
"When you reach my age, Monsieur Latham, you'll find that words are far more permanent than the fleeting images on television."
"Some people say one picture is worth a thousand words."
"One photograph out of ten thousand, perhaps, I will not deny that. However, one exhausts the familiar, doesn't one, even a painting."
"I wouldn't know. I haven't thought that much about it."
"No, you probably haven't had time. At -your age I never did."
Their snifters of brandy arrived, the liqueur in each precisely an inch from the bottom.
"Thank you, Hugo," continued the retired cryptanalyst and former priest, "and if you'd close the doors and wait in the foyer, I'd be most pleased."
"Oui" patron," said the chauffeur, leaving the room and pulling shut the heavy double doors.
"All right, Drew Latham, how much do you know about me?"
asked Lavolette sharply.
"That you left the priesthood for marriage, and when
you were quite young you were a cryptanalyst for French intelligence. Other than that, virtually nothing. Except, of course, Manfried Neuman. He told me you're helping him with his problem."
"No one can help him but a trained behavioral psychiatrist, which I've implored him to seek."
"He says you're giving him religious counseling because you had the same problem."
"That is the meide of the bull, as you Americans say. I fell in love with one woman and stayed faithful to her for forty years.
Neuman has the impulse to fornicate with many women, selectivity being merely a result of time and place and maximum opportunity.
I've begged him repeatedly to seek help before he destroys himself. . You came here at this hour to tell me that?"
"You know I didn't. You know why I'm here because I saw your expression when I said who I was. Youtried to hide your reaction, but it was as if you'd been punched in the stomach. Neuman told you about me and you told somebody else. Who?"
"You don't understand, none of you can ever understand," choked Lavolette, breathing deeply.
"Understand what?"
"They have us all with ropes around our necks, not just our necks-that would be easy to dispense with-but others, so many others!"
"Neuman told you who a Colonel Webster was, didn't he? That he was a man named Latham!"
"Not willingly. I extracted it from him, for I knew the situation.
I had to."
"Why?
"Please, I'm an old man and have very little time. Do not make my life any more complicated than it is."
"Let me tell you, Father, your gorilla out there may have my weapon, but my hands are as good as any gun. What the hell did you A?"
"Listen to me, my son." Lavolette drank his brandy in two swallows, the tremble in his head returning.
"My wife was German.
I met her when the Holy See posted me to the Church of the Blessed Sacrament in Mannheim a the war. She was married with two children and an abusive husband, a former Wehrmacht officer who ran an-insurance company. We fell in love, desperately in love, and I left the Church so we could be together for the rest of our lives. She divorced her husband in a Swiss court, but by German law he kept the children. . They grew up and had children of their own, and then their children began to have children. There are sixteen in the two families that are my dear wife's bloodline, and she was devoted to them all, as I was to be."
"She kept in touch with them, then?"
"Oh, yes. We had moved to France, where I started my businesses, aided in no small measure by my former colleagues in the services, and as the years went by, the children frequently.
came to visit us, both here in Paris and during the summers at our house in Nice. I came to love them as my own."
"I'm surprised their father even let them see their mother," said Drew.
"I don't think he cared one way or the other, except for the expenses, which I was happy to provide. He remarried and had three more children with his second wife. The first two children, my wife's, were more an impediment, I believe, reminding him of a meddling priest who had broken his vows and upset a German businessman's life. A Wehrmacht officer's life.. ..