wanted to do was make Yoav regret having brought me. Mr. Leclercq, he said, which only added to the absurdity of the situation, since I’d never heard of any Leclercq, nor had any idea who he might be.
I assumed that anyone wealthy enough to live in such a place would be attended around the clock by butlers and maids, by a staff of uniformed people that provided a buffer between himself and any possibility of physical exertion, no matter how slight. But when we rang the bell and the enormous, brass-studded door creaked open, it was Leclercq himself who stood there, in checkered shirt and sweater vest, dwarfed by the double marble staircase behind him. An enormous leaded-glass light fixture hung from a brass chain above him, swaying slightly in a gust of wind. Otherwise, the interior was dark and still. Leclercq extended his hand to each of us, though for a second or fraction of a second I was paralyzed to respond, struggling as I was to recall who, exactly, our host reminded me of, and only once my hand was clenched tightly by his, and a chill began to spread down the back of my neck, did I realize it was Heinrich Himmler. Of course the face had aged, but the tiny pointy chin, the thin lips, the round wire-frame glasses and, beginning just above their rims, that enormous flat expanse of forehead, an unbroken plane that went on far higher than proportion should have allowed, topped with the comically small, almost shrunken mound of hair—all of it was unmistakable. When he welcomed us with an anemic smile, his teeth were small and yellow.
I tried to catch Yoav’s eyes, but as far as I could tell he was oblivious to the resemblance and followed Leclercq blithely into the house. He led us down a long polished corridor, his feet, scaly, swollen, and laced with bulging veins, stuffed into a pair of red velvet slippers. We passed an enormous mirror of mottled glass in a gilded frame, and for a moment our party doubled in size, making the silence more eerie. Perhaps Leclercq felt it too, because he turned to Yoav and began to speak to him in French—about our journey, as far as I could tell, and the large and venerable oaks on the property, planted before the French Revolution. I calculated that even if Himmler’s suicide in the Lüneburg prison had been a hoax, the famous photograph of the corpse laid out on the floor a theatrical trick, by then he would have been ninety-eight, and the spry man we followed couldn’t have been much more than seventy. But who was to say this wasn’t some relative, like those of Hitler’s prospering in the leafy suburbs of Long Island, a nephew or lone surviving cousin of the overseer of the extermination camps, the Einsatzgruppen, and the execution of millions? He stopped in front of a closed door, removed from his pocket a ring of heavy keys, and finding the right one, let us into a large paneled hall with a view of the gardens stretching out in all directions. I looked out, and when I turned back again Leclercq was gazing at me with an interest that unnerved me, though perhaps it was only appreciation for a little company at last. Motioning for us to sit, he disappeared to bring some tea. Apparently, he was alone in that vast place.
When I asked if he’d noticed that our host was a dead ringer for Himmler, Yoav laughed, and when he saw that I couldn’t have been more serious, he said he hadn’t noticed, and when I pressed him on it he admitted that, yes, perhaps there was some minor, a very minor likeness if you squinted at the old man in a certain light. But Leclercq, he assured me, descended from one of the oldest noble families in Belgium, able to trace its ancestry back to Charlemagne; his mother’s father had been a viscount, and for a short time had served Leopold II as director of a rubber plantation in the Congo. The family had lost most of its fortune during the War. What remained went to their enormous property taxes, until in the end they were forced to sell off all of their estates, keeping only Cloudenberg, the beloved family home. Leclercq was the last of his siblings alive, and, as far as Yoav knew, he’d never married.