a tremendous crash came from down the hall, followed by the banging or rolling of tins or pots. We followed the noise down the corridor and eventually found the large kitchen behind the dining room where Leclercq was on his hands and knees among metal bowls of various sizes that had tumbled from the cabinet above. For a moment I thought he was crying, but it turned out that he’d lost his glasses and couldn’t see. We got down on the floor to help him, the three of us crawling around together. I found the glasses under a chair. One of the lenses was cracked, and Leclercq tried pathetically to reshape the wire earpiece. On the counter was a box of vanilla wafers on a tray, and when Leclercq slipped the cracked glasses back onto his face, I had to admit that his likeness to Himmler, so striking before, faltered and grew dim, and that the association I’d made was probably born of my limited knowledge about the nature of Weisz’s business.
Maybe it was because he saw the world differently now, but after Leclercq’s glasses broke a kind of sadness seeped out of him, trailing behind him as we followed him down the long hallways and the winding garden paths, past sheared hedges, through the boxwood maze, and up and down (mostly up) the stairs of that great stony castle, blooming into the atmosphere the way water around a harpooned seal fills with a cloud of blood. He seemed to have forgotten why we’d come—he never mentioned the table, or maybe it was a chest of drawers, or a clock, or chair, that was the reason for our trip, and Yoav was too polite to bring it up. Instead, Leclercq got lost down the long alleys, the turns and switchbacks of his own voice as it unraveled the long history of Cloudenberg that began as far back as the twelfth century. The original castle went up in a fire that began in the kitchen and raged through the great banquet hall and up the stairs, consuming tapestries, paintings, hunting trophies, and the owner’s youngest son, trapped on the third floor with his milk nurse, sparing only the Gothic chapel that sat, some distance off, on a hill. At times Leclercq’s voice became almost a whisper, and I could barely make out what he was saying. I thought then that if we had crept away, retraced our steps, and disappeared back down the long drive in the Citroën, Leclercq might not have noticed, so lost was he in the long, tangled affairs, the secrets, triumphs, and disappointments of Cloudenberg, and at those moments he seemed to me, with his crazily cracked glasses, his dry and swollen feet, his steep and treacherous forehead, like a nun, if that’s possible, a nun who had wed herself, body and soul, not to God but to the austere stones of Cloudenberg.
By the time the tour (if one can call it that) ended it was night. The three of us sat around the scarred wooden table in the kitchen where the cooks had once chopped shoulders and loins for the enormous banquets thrown by the viscount. Leclercq looked pale and exhausted and almost vacant, as if the Leclercq inside Leclercq had gotten up and wandered off into the fiery sunset of the twelfth, thirteenth, or fourteenth century. Forgive me, he said, you must be starving by now, and got up to look in the refrigerator, a piece of gadgetry that looked out of place amid so much history. He seemed to have acquired a limp; either that or I hadn’t noticed it before, doubtful as that was considering I’d been following him around all afternoon. Possibly it was one of those limps that becomes exaggerated with fatigue or certain kinds of weather. Let me help, I said, and he gave me a look of gratitude. Isabel is a wonderful cook, Yoav said. She can make a banquet out of nothing.
Leclercq went off and came back with a bottle of wine. I prepared a quiche, and while it was in the oven I set the table. Afterwards, I realized I’d put the fork and knife on the wrong sides, and when at last it came time to eat Leclercq froze, as if he’d been presented with a conundrum, one he had no hope of being able to solve, but then, summoning all the grace of his nobility, he delicately crossed his wrists over his plate and took