Paris, 1954. Eli Cole, American attaché, wants only one thing: to avenge his wife’s murder. But the trail has gone cold. After two years, drinking to his beloved Liana’s memory is all he has left — until the secrets she took to the grave come back to shatter them all. A hidden photo, a Gestapo file, an unsent letter: these are some of the clues Eli must piece together if he is to understand Liana’s secret life, and her mysterious mission. But the clock is ticking. Powerful new enemies are out to give Eli a one-way ticket back to the United States — in a pinewood box.
With the help of Liana’s father and sister, an old war buddy come abroad, and a cunning teenage girl, Eli unravels the events that led to his wife’s death. But getting justice won’t be easy. The more Eli reveals of Liana’s secret past, the more his devotion to her is tested by her deceit. Can Eli allow himself to recognize the entirety of the woman he married? Will Liana’s last art piece, a spectacular glass tree, give Eli the assurance he needs to continue believing in the sanctity of love?
Paris, 1954. Eli Cole, American attaché, wants only one thing: to avenge his wife’s murder. But the trail has gone cold. After two years, drinking to his beloved Liana’s memory is all he has left — until the secrets she took to the grave come back to shatter them all. A hidden photo, a Gestapo file, an unsent letter: these are some of the clues Eli must piece together if he is to understand Liana’s secret life, and her mysterious mission. But the clock is ticking. Powerful new enemies are out to give Eli a one-way ticket back to the United States — in a pinewood box.
With the help of Liana’s father and sister, an old war buddy come abroad, and a cunning teenage girl, Eli unravels the events that led to his wife’s death. But getting justice won’t be easy. The more Eli reveals of Liana’s secret past, the more his devotion to her is tested by her deceit. Can Eli allow himself to recognize the entirety of the woman he married? Will Liana’s last art piece, a spectacular glass tree, give Eli the assurance he needs to continue believing in the sanctity of love?
Jean-Paul tossed his pack of cigarettes on the table and pulled out a chair. I hadn’t seen him in a year. He was the same bull of a man. Maybe a bit grayer, but still a wrecking ball in plumber overalls.
“You look like crap,” he said, flipping up his lighter and striking the flint.
He leaned back, stressing the chair and turned his gaze to the street and then the other deadbeats sitting at Le Carré Rouge. I went back to my newspaper and Pernod. I probably did look like shit. I was developing a gut and hadn’t shaved since being put on unpaid leave. Any day now I’d be dismissed and sent back to the States.
Did anyone at the Embassy even know I was part of Eisenhower’s “Stay Behind Army”? Somebody must, I thought. Lot of good I’d be when the Ruskies marched into Paris.
And now my father-in-law, or whatever you call the father of your dead wife, was sitting across from me smoking and looking like he wasn’t sure whether or not to say what he’d come to say.
I folded the paper.
“What’s happened,” I asked in French.
JP held out his pack of Gauloises and I took one. I liked the French cigarettes even though I got Lucky Strikes at the Embassy. He pushed the lighter across the table.
“I need your help on something,” he coughed. “It’ll be an hour of your precious time.”
This last bit he said with a wave of his hand to encompass the café and maybe my life in general.
JP had all but blamed me for Liana’s death the last time we spoke. Protecting her was my only job as a husband, he’d said. And now he wanted a favor. I pushed away the old hard feelings and the urge to tell him to “fuck off.” A year ago I hadn’t been so restrained.
“What do I have to do?” I asked.
“I need to collect a bill. It might get rough.”
“Don’t you have pals in the Union for that?”
“I just need you at the door. I don’t want him to run.”
I gave him a dubious look.
“It’s sensitive. I need family.”
JP’s eyes held mine a moment and then looked away.
Family?
As far as I was concerned, the funeral had marked the end of whatever kind of family we’d been.
“I’m touched Jean-Paul, but I don’t break legs for a living.”
JP stabbed out his cigarette. “Just meet me here at 3:00. Can you do that?”
“Okay, fine,” I said. I didn’t want him to start throwing tables around.
He took some francs from his pocket and tossed the coins on the table.
“And take the day off,” he said, glancing down at my glass.
I felt my blood boil and gripped the table to keep my temper.
“Courage,” he muttered as he reached the sidewalk.
I stood up, stunned by the word, and after leaving a few more francs, headed off in the opposite direction. I didn’t stop until I reached the stairs to the Seine.
The first time Liana had asked for “courage” from me was before we were married. I could picture us, standing naked in the cold stream behind her cousin’s farm in Burgundy.
“Will you love me courageously?” she’d asked.
I remembered the smell of the pine trees that grew sideways down to the riverbed and the deep pool under the cliff.
And lacing my fingers to hold her tight.
“Will you always love me?” she asked, leaning her head back to study my eyes.
“Always,” I answered.
“Avec courage?” she asked, her brow furrowing. “I mean, will you love me courageously?”
I said I would even as I wondered what she meant.
We toweled off and then lay in the sand.
“You’ve made it so I owe you my life,” she said. “Sometimes I wish you hadn’t.”
Liana turned on her side and pressed herself against me.
“I love you for saving me, but I would have left, Eli. You know that, don’t you?”
“You don’t owe me,” I said.
She turned my face to hers. “No one’s ever made me feel so wanted, so quenched, so believed in. It’s amazing to feel so much love. But it scares me too, because — that’s not me. I’m not like you...”
That night, back at the quiet farmhouse, I listened to her breathing as she slept and wondered how I’d ever need courage to love her.
At 3:00 p.m. I headed back to the café and found JP waiting on the curb. I followed him down rue Bonaparte.
He moved fast even with a limp that I hadn’t noticed before. It was too warm for the sweater I’d worn but I didn’t take it off. Some part of me was glad to see another spring in Paris. But I knew if I let it be more than a vague thought it would be ruined. Liana had loved this season too.
I almost asked JP about Liana’s older sister, Alix. I’d seen her a few weeks ago standing in a doorway with a man dressed like an American gangster. Her hair was very short, like it was cut in prison, and she looked thin and sickly.
Instead, I asked after the youngest. Emilienne.
JP grunted. “She’s back in Florence to be with her mother.”
His voice was full of disappointment. Shortly after Liana died, her mother had moved out.
All JP’s women left him.
We could have crossed the street and walked through the park but JP led us along the tall black fence until rue Auguste and then turned left.
“We’re close,” he said.
We were only a minute’s walk to where Liana was gunned down two years ago.
“JP,” I started.
“I know where we are, it’s just coincidence.”
He took us down another block back toward St. Germain, which made no sense at all, and then hooked right. The buildings here were narrow and two stories. This was a neighborhood for professionals and bureaucrats.
“Just stay at the door. Don’t let anyone in and don’t let him get out.”
I noticed then that JP was carrying a leather satchel, something a professional pool player might use to keep a stick.
“I don’t want to be part of anything violent. I’m sure you could just have his water turned off.”
“Just stay at the door and don’t get involved.”
When we came to the street where Liana had been killed I stopped in my tracks.
“It’s just a street,” JP said. “People still live here.”
I felt my hands go cold and my heart race. I’d only been here once, to see where it happened. There had still been blood on the sidewalk.
JP pulled me beside him and walked on. I felt like we were trampling sacred ground. At a black door in the middle of the block JP stopped and knocked. It was answered a half minute later by a man in his 30s in a black turtleneck sweater and green corduroys.
“We are here about the kitchen faucet,” JP said.
“There’s no problem,” the man replied, taking off his glasses and wiping them with his undershirt.
“Philippe Garnier? 68 Curie? Your landlord reported it I suppose.”
“Yes, but…”
“I’ll need to see it to sign off,” JP said, like the cog in the system he was.
He turned to me. “Stay here, Ferrand.”
I nodded.
The man opened the door for JP and I stepped into the doorway before he could close it.
“C’est une bell journée,” I said.
He nodded and I thought maybe I recognized him — but from where?
He followed JP out through the back. From the vantage of the doorway I surveyed the clutter of books, records and instruments. A long coffee table with journals and newspapers sat in front of a comfortable-looking leather couch. An ashtray attached to a standing lamp overflowed with cigarette butts. This guy clearly wanted to show how hip he was. I noticed the framed pictures on the bookcase when the man returned in a hurry and out of breath.
“Out of my way,” he said, striding to the door.
I took a step in his direction and he veered behind the table. Now JP entered from the back and the man practically snarled.
“Leave this instant!” he demanded.
JP looked over at me and nodded toward the door.
I looked out into the street and shrugged back at him. “The coast is clear,” I said in English.
The cornered man froze and looked at me with sudden recognition and horror.
JP unzipped his bag, pulled out a police truncheon and put his wrist through the leather strap.
Philippe considered his odds of rushing the door and then thought better of it and unexpectedly sat down on the couch.
“I need a cigarette,” he said.
“Too bad,” JP spat. “Now tell me everything that happened or I will crush your fucking skull.”
I took another step inside. What the hell was going on?
The man took a butt out of the ashtray and lit it with matches from his pocket. It took him another half minute to talk.
“She was here,” he said, looking down at his cigarette. “When she left I heard the shots. I went to the door, a car was just turning at d’Ulm. I went out to her, but… she was already dead.”
He looked up at JP and then stubbed out the butt. “The man, Osval, was choking on blood. I held his head. ‘Why?’ is all he said.”
I felt numb. I might have fallen over if I hadn’t reached for the doorframe.
I heard JP ask him about the car, if he had moved anything, why he hadn’t told the police. But I couldn’t follow anything, the blood pounding in my temples deafened me. I couldn’t breathe and suddenly felt sick. I stumbled outside and felt vomit rush up. I spat and sucked air and took deep breaths until the confusion turned to a surge of rage. I went back to the door and charged in.
“You fucking asshole!”
But JP was ready for me. His vice-grip on my arms pushed me back outside. And then I was weak again.
Jean-Paul brought me home in a cab. The buildings along the way were blurry and red. He came up the stairs, went into the kitchen for a bottle of whiskey and sat me down on my bed like an invalid.
“I’m sorry you had to find out like this,” JP said.
He either took my key or left my door unlocked because an hour later Alix was holding my hand and shushing me like a baby. I was drunk enough to think she was my Liana, somehow come back from the dead to comfort me now that her secret was out.
In the morning Alix was still there. Still in the dress she had come over in and lying next to me on the bed. She must have been out somewhere when JP found her and sent her over. Why? Because he cared that I’d just had my guts kicked out? Didn’t he know this would happen?
By the time I pulled myself out of bed Alix had made coffee, eggs, toast and ham steak. I suppose she thought I still ate like an American or that I could possibly have an appetite.
She sat across from me at the table eating a croissant and jam. There was only a faint resemblance between her and her sister. The same small mouth, dirty blonde hair. I noticed that hers had grown back some and that she was looking healthier. She looked at me with green eyes, Liana had blue.
“Papa told me what happened,” she said in French. “What a bastard.”
“How did he know?”
She turned to look out the window. “I had to go away a bit. Papa went through my stuff. He found Liana’s letter.”
“No offense, Alix, but why would she tell you about an affair?”
Her gaze returned to my eyes. “I was surprised too. It was the first time she’d treated me like a sister since the war. She had wanted to apologize, or what passes for an apology from Liana. I suppose we were now equally despicable in her eyes.”
She poured herself some coffee and blew over the top of her mug.
“I thought you knew, Eli. Liana said something about a letter she wrote you. But she never did?”
I shook my head. “I never saw it.”
“It’s awful I know, but I thought I had my sister back. This little secret of hers. She told me she wanted to stop. She loved you. She loved you more than any of us.”
I couldn’t even laugh, my head was aching from the whiskey. I held my head in my hands instead of eating. My mouth felt as dry as parchment.
She seemed to know what I was feeling. “I gave you a sedative last night. You were tossing and turning, moaning like a kicked dog. You needed sleep.”
“Thanks for coming over,” I managed.
“You’re still my brother,” she said, patting my hand. “In-law.” She smiled.
I nodded and felt myself crying again. I let it come. I let the tears shake me even as Alix wrapped her arms around my chest.
“None of this is your fault. None of it is. Liana was not easy.”
I stopped crying and wiped my face with the napkin Alix had set. “How long did it go on?” It mattered somehow.
“I don’t know. Truly.”
“I want to know. I want to know it wasn’t always.”
“It wasn’t,” she said, sitting down again. “The letter came only a few months before she died. I sensed it had been a recent thing. Something she was ashamed of.”
“Then why? Why did she do it?”
Alix took my hand on the table. “Probably nothing to do with you. She was what, twenty-two when you met? A student. You were her savior. She grew up, and she’s French,” she said with a twist of her lip.
“She could have told me.”
“What’s to tell?” Alix replied. “I have to go. You’ll be alright?”
“Do I have a choice?”
She gathered her purse from the bar, taking out a vial and leaving it on the table.
“Why are you still here, Eli? Why aren’t you home?”
She gave me a look, a slight turn of her head, and then closed the door behind her.
I’d asked myself that question a thousand times since Liana died. Why not just leave this place? The people, every café, every street reminded me of her.
But I wanted to spit on the grave of whoever had done it, whoever it was that ruined my life. I stayed to see them hang. Then after a year I doubted anybody ever would. The suspects they brought in, militant communists, all had alibis, the party leadership insisted they had nothing to do with the killing. But nothing else made sense. Osval, the target of the gunmen, had a rap sheet a mile long for thumping communists. He’d been a collaborator of the worst kind during the war.
The Sûreté called Liana collateral damage. A bystander walking by at just the wrong moment.
Why she had been in that part of the Fifth was not known. But it was close to the Sorbonne where she taught. She was thought to have just been out for a walk. Now I knew why.
My friend in the French SDECE could ask questions in ways the Sûreté could not. But he pointed the finger at gunmen from Russia who came and went and were now likely lost behind the Iron Curtain. The CIA agent I met with told me the same thing.
JP hadn’t liked it. Didn’t believe American or French spooks knew any more than the police. He must have kept at it. Hadn’t given up. Didn’t let himself fall apart.
I knew I’d hear from him again. Maybe it would be a couple days. Time enough to stay drunk. I picked up the vial Alix had left. Little white pills. I unscrewed the top and shook one into my palm. It was my fault. I had lost her somehow. What had I done? I went to my bedroom, opened the closet and took down the ammo box where I kept Liana’s letters from after the war. They fell onto the bed as a group, tied with a pink ribbon. I knew I hadn’t done that. I undid the ribbon and went through them one by one. Liana had put them in order from first to last, but there was nothing else. No confession.
The first time JP came around he let himself in and stood over the bed. I knew he was there. I knew what he’d see too. I was giving myself over to misery. I didn’t want to live. I didn’t want to die but I didn’t want to exist anymore. I just wanted to disappear.
Alix had been back too. She took the Miltowns and replaced them with something stronger, something that let me drift away. I didn’t even think. Not about Liana, not about sleep, not about anything. When they were gone she held my head as I puked into the toilet. She slept over twice. I shook and cried like a baby, not a grown man. She held my hand until I fell asleep at night.
Strange to have a woman in your bed — even an ex-sister-in-law — and feel nothing. I hadn’t had an erection since discovering the affair. My darling beautiful wife had kicked me in the nuts from the grave.
The second time JP let himself in he found me on the porch. I had showered and shaved. The coffee I was drinking was half whiskey but at least I was functional.
He leaned against the iron railing. “Ça va?”
“Better.”
“This has been a lot,” he said and then coughed uncomfortably. No doubt it pained JP to say something sympathetic to anyone, especially me. He took out his cigarettes.
“I want to know what you’ve been up to,” I said in English in case my voice was still shaky.
JP just lit his cigarette and blew smoke out over the gray morning street.
“I wanted to bring you in,” he said shaking his head. “But it will be better if I just do this myself.”
“Do what yourself?”
“This,” he said, getting excited all of a sudden, waving his cigarette. “Justice for Liana!”
“What do you know?” I repeated, in French this time, losing my temper.
“Why do you care? This is over for you.”
“Then why are you here, Jean-Paul? Why did you come find me again in the first place?”
“Because I thought maybe you’d still care. I thought you’d still want to murder the son of a bitch who did this to me. To us. There was a time you would’ve tore him limb from limb. That time is still now for me. But you,” he practically spat. “You’re lost.”
“You don’t think I tried to find out what happened? Why the hell do you think I stayed in this country?”
“I know why you stayed. I know what you are, who you work for.”
“It’s not a secret.”
“Right, the Embassy. America’s spy nest in Paris.”
“Maybe you’d rather it be Soviet France?” I didn’t give him time to respond with his usual tirade against the “great saviors” of France. “I just work there, JP. I’m not a spy.”
He raised his brow. “It doesn’t matter to me,” he said.
“Tell me what you know. I can help.”
I knew it was the wrong thing to say but I was still feeling banged up. My head hurt even with the whiskey.
“I don’t want your fucking help!” he yelled, crushing the cigarette on the railing. He left the rest unsaid and headed for the door.
I didn’t go after him.
Just sat at the little table where I used to have coffee with Liana, before walking her to the corner. There I’d held her thin body in my arms and kissed her goodbye. How could she have felt so solid, so warm? Now her ashes floated eternally on the brook behind Henri and Cosette’s, the same place she asked me for courage.
I grabbed a pack of Lucky Strikes from my stash in the dresser and went back to Le Carre Rouge. Parisians always stick to the same café. I had one with Liana, where I never go. This place was more fitting. It was strictly bottom shelf. The regulars rolled their own cigarettes and there was always a table with a view of the traffic circle.
I knew what JP wanted. I remembered how I felt that first year. Living on hate, living for vengeance. When I wasn’t drunk, I was bothering the police, calling in favors with the French services. I had been with the Sûreté when they questioned suspects. I skulked around Communist meetings, trying to pass myself off as an American comrade. But I was always suspect, and nobody opened up to me more than the usual propaganda line. I followed the men the Sûreté took in for questioning. Some for weeks at a time. Nothing out of the ordinary. No hatchet men. They were family men, working men, functionaries of the party. Rallies, meetings, strikes, canvassing, campaigning. Nothing violent. No one told any stories over drinks. They were dedicated to their cause but did nothing to make me think they had killed one of the opposition and my wife.
There had been no doubt about what I would do when I figured out who had killed Liana. Unintended bystander or not, they would pay with their own life. I had my Colt 1911 wrapped in an oiled cloth in the closet.
The fire that burned inside me never went out, but after that first year of disappointment and false leads, after fellow attachés reported to me that they figured it for the work of Russian agents on orders from the Kremlin, my blood lust began to seep away, like rain on a bridge drying in the sun.
Liana became one of the many senseless deaths. She might have been in a car accident, she might have choked or fallen down the stairs. Undignified. Unlucky. Like so many GIs, she had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And now — had JP found a string to pull?
Even if he had it probably didn’t matter. I’d be shipped back to the States and debriefed any day now.
But maybe there was a way I could stay on, at least long enough to settle this.
I found JP at the same bar where he used to hang out when I was married to his daughter. He was sitting at a table playing la belote with friends or maybe enemies. I didn’t know. They looked like mechanics. The bar was in the Eleventh, not far from Pere Lachaise, a working-class neighborhood. No professors here. Or immigrants. Natives only. Some Algerians had been beaten on the street only a week ago. Where were all those loyal colonized subjects of France supposed to go?
When he saw me he got up and went to the bar. He ordered Suze. The barman poured two cloudy glasses of the yellow liquor. Besides being one of the cheapest drinks, it was disgusting. I sometimes ordered it despite the taste of bitter orange peels.
“What do you want?”
“To kill someone,” I said.
He looked into my eyes. His were red and puffy. “I don’t believe you,” he said, taking a drink. “But I’m going to need you. This time we finish it.”
I took a drink and waited for him to tell me what he had found out.
“Philippe — that is his name — is a professor at the Sorbonne and also a communist. And, it seems, so was Liana.”
I scoffed. “Don’t you think I’d know that?”
“No,” he replied bluntly. “I don’t. As an American there are things you couldn’t understand. The motives of a French woman are not the same as in your country. She couldn’t sacrifice who she was for promises.”
“She wasn’t like that.”
“But she was, wasn’t she? You’ll need to accept that. Accept she was not the perfect wife you thought she was. She was independent, she had a life she didn’t share with you. Maybe she would have…” He stopped.
This was more than he’d said to me all at once the whole time I’d been his son-in-law.
He went back to his table and recovered his cigarette from the ashtray.
“Osval had a 15-year-old daughter. The police report has nothing about her.”
“Police report?”
“I have a friend on the force. She’ll be seventeen now, an adult. Maybe she knows something.”
“And if she doesn’t?” I asked. “Do we break her arm?”
JP smiled. “We’ll see.”
“Let me do it. Just stay in the car with your tool kit.”
JP shrugged. “The downstairs neighbor in her building knows me anyways. I’ll pick you up at noon. I’ve watched her. She never leaves the apartment before two. She’s a dancer at Le Coq Gaulois, or maybe a putain.”
I nodded and finished my drink without coughing.
“She should be alone, the mother leaves with the husband, or whatever he is, around ten. They part ways at the corner. I think she works for the post.”
“And him?”
“I don’t know. Wears a cheap suit and hangs around Les Halles market.”
“Maybe it would be better to talk to the daughter at work.”
“Who knows who’ll be watching there. Better alone.”
I left the bar and walked toward the metro. It was the kind of day I might have strolled through the flea market at Porte de Clignancourt, or the bookstalls along the Seine on the Left Bank. Maybe afterwards a drink with Liana on St. Germain or over the bridge to the Ile Saint Louis for a café. Someone at the Embassy said they’d seen Picasso and Hemingway there. What it must have been like in Paris before the war.
When I got to the metro stairs I changed my mind and headed toward the Sorbonne. I hadn’t been there in a long time. It was a lively part of Paris. Busy with students, those born just before the war.
I walked into the building where Liana had her classroom. I hadn’t spent much time here. Occasionally I came in to meet her after class. It was always so bustling, so alive. Maybe it had too much, too much temptation. It occurred to me that I might find him here. The professor Liana found more exciting than me, who fit her academic mind better. Maybe she even loved him more. I pushed the thought away.
I found her old classroom and cracked the door. It was full of kids listening to a lecture. I went in and took a seat at the back.
It took me a few minutes to figure out the subject. Someone’s textbook read Abstract Expressionism. Liana was part of this. Part of the new wave of art. The museums were full of Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler now. Liana painted and sculpted in experimental ways; the work resembled nothing of the subject. This was the future. I had encouraged her to turn tradition on its head, even if I preferred the old stuff. Giant paintings of battles, dogs with pheasants in their teeth and stags hung for dressing. I didn’t understand the canvases of colorful blotches. It was lost on me. But Liana was passionate about it. The old stuff was overdone, belonged to the past, she’d say. Maybe that’s what I was.
If she hadn’t been killed, would we still be together? Or would she have left me? How long would I have played the sap? Maybe she would have come back to me on her own. Maybe I would never have needed to know about Philippe.
I left the class. Her office was in another building, a half block away. I took the stairs to the fourth floor. They had given me the little name plaque with her things. There had also been a memorial for her at the school’s graduation that year. All the students had stood, there was a chorus who sang La Mer. The professors all shook my hand afterwards. Including, I supposed, Philippe. I didn’t remember. Maybe he’d had the decency not to. I doubted it, the fucking douche.
I knocked on the door. Her office was occupied by “Prof. Alois Courtemanche” now.
An older gentlemen answered in a tweed jacket. How stereotypical.
“I’m sorry to disrupt you.”
“Come in, come in,” he said. “You are Liana’s husband.”
“Yes.”
“I remember seeing you now and then. I was so sorry,” he said shaking my hand. “Someone with so much vitality, so much energy. And the way she understood art. What it could do, could mean.”
I just looked down, nodding.
“She is missed here,” he went on. “By everyone. It is an honor to have her office.”
“Thank you. I feel like I didn’t know this part of her very well.”
“Please, sit down.”
I sat and he pulled out a bottle of schnapps from his desk drawer and took down two teacups from the shelf behind him. After pouring in a dash, he handed me one.
“This place, to me, was just where I lost her every day,” I started. “I should have been… I wish I had been a bigger part of her art.”
Alois watched me over his teacup, a strange look on his face. His eyes were blue and a little watery.
“But I think you were. I think you were a big part of her art. The school has a permanent collection you know. Can I show you something? Do you have time?”
“Yes, of course.”
He finished his drink and smacked his lips. I set my cup on the desk and noticed a small bronze sculpture of a man sitting with a book. The sculpture had been there when this was Liana’s desk.
“That sculpture...”
“Done by a professor who died during the war. It kind of lives here. This was also his office.”
“What happened?”
“A dark chapter for France. The Gestapo came and took him one day. He was never seen again. I understand you were in the army?”
“The Third. The occupying force her father used to say.”
The man chuckled. “Yes, we French are very patriotic. And for some, even when it was Vichy.”
We took the stairs to a courtyard and crossed it to another gray stone building. In the basement he unlocked a room and flipped on the lights. It was a gallery of sorts. Objects under glass or freestanding and an array of paintings. I followed him to the far wall.
“Did Liana ever show this to you?”
“No,” I said, mesmerized.
On a white table stood a glass tree, maybe three or four feet tall, on a wooden base with a drawer. I was sure it was meant to be a Black Walnut. They were Liana’s favorite. Something to do with a place her parents had taken her as a child and the tree had become her solace.
There were two trunks at the base that twisted into one. The branches were hollow, with the tips of each branch open, like the end of a straw. The glass reflected different colors, muted but noticeable, hints of green, rust, light blue and beige. They felt familiar somehow.
Alois pulled out the drawer. Inside was a flat reel-to-reel recorder. He pressed a button and the tapes turned. Liana’s voice came out of the speakers. At first I thought she may have been reading a book. But the sentences didn’t make sense. It was a jumble of words.
“What is she reading?” I asked.
Alois just shook his head slightly.
I recognized the words somehow. The intonation of her voice. She wasn’t reading random words. They came from somewhere else, someplace meaningful to her.
He pushed the drawer in and the words became a hum, echoes, musical almost, escaping through the branches.
Alois said nothing but looked at the piece with me another minute. I was awestruck.
“I wanted you to see it,” he said, opening the drawer and turning off the tape.
I followed him out and he locked the door.
“Thank you,” I said. “I’m really at a loss for words.”
“Come back anytime,” he said, shaking my hand.
I had the feeling he didn’t want to talk anymore. Something had changed and he was uncomfortable now.
At the front steps he gave me another tight-lipped smile and walked away.
What didn’t he want to say? What, I wondered, was he doing during the war? Probably teaching here. Life went on in Paris despite shortages and hardships.
At the corner of the building, I turned and walked deeper into campus. I used to feel out of place here. It was such a different world. Everyone was young and hopelessly pessimistic.
Now I felt like everyone’s father. Not jealous anymore. They didn’t have Liana. None of us did. Instead, I could look at them for what they were. Hadn’t I brought the light back into the world for them? That’s what they told us anyways. Our sacrifice was for their generation. And here they were.
I sat down on a bench and watched the students. I smoked a cigarette and pictured Liana’s glass sculpture and the sound it made. What did it mean? Why had she never shown me?
I finished the cigarette but didn’t get up. To move from this spot was to rejoin the world outside. To get back to the black tunnel leading… where?
A mystery novel set in Paris in the 1950s, The Glass Tree is about Eli, a dejected widower who is losing all hope of finding his wife's murderer. But instead of being able to cherish Liana's memory, Eli is forced to come to terms with her secret life involving adultery and a dangerous political affiliation. So with the help of Liana's family, Eli's war buddy, and a poorly supervised teenage girl, Eli eventually discovers more about Liana's past and how her secrets may have been the reason she got killed. As he digs deeper, it gets harder to find the real culprit behind her murder.
It's genius how the author chooses not to describe Liana at the beginning of the story but allows her character to be formed piece-by-piece with every new information that Eli unearths from her secret life. It makes the writing smooth and effortless. Furthermore, the description of the actual glass tree in the book is the most beautiful and vivid depiction of an inanimate object I have ever read. Hence, Michael Manz deserves praise for giving life to non-living characters in his story. That said, the book could use another round of editing as there are some grammatical errors in the text. The dialogue among the characters can also be refined in some places, especially where personal loss and regrets are being shared among one another. Furthermore, I expected more out of Liana’s glass tree that she left as her legacy. Similarly, the climax wasn’t that impactful, despite the suspense being quite nail-biting throughout the book.
I give this book 3 out of 5 stars, mainly for the flowy and witty writing style. But there is definitely scope for improvement in the dialogues and grammar. However, this is a great one-time-read, especially for murder-mystery lovers. Readers should be prepared to come across some sexually suggestive content in the story along with the usage of swear words. Also, the book contains several references to the political climate in France in the 1950s. So the reader may require some knowledge from that time to better understand the story. Nonetheless, this novel is a true testament to unconditional love and the willingness of a person to love someone in spite of getting hurt by them in return.