Lace (84 page)

“I can’t help this . . . yearning.” She hugged her knees tighter, laid her cheek against her knees.

“Then for heaven’s sake, let’s try to trace your parents instead of vaguely hoping they’ll pop up out of nowhere,” Simon urged. “We’ll hire detectives.
Your lawyer can recommend a firm. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. But you must realise that you might not like what you find.”

Lili moved her knees and the coffee tray lurched dangerously toward the edge of the bed. Simon stood up and stretched. “I think your mother was probably a young, unmarried girl who worked
in town but who came from a country peasant family. You know how practical the Swiss are—a middle-class family would probably have tried to arrange an abortion for the girl, even though it
was illegal and possibly against their religion.”

He wandered over to stare at the little picture of the river. “Another thing—your father may have been married to someone else. I can’t help thinking that if your mother had
stayed unmarried and if she were alive, then she would have claimed you, or at least visited you. So my theory is that there was a mountain village girl who came down to the valley to earn money
for her dowry, had a baby by a married man, then went back to her village and married some peasant and never dared confess about the child.”

“Oh, I don’t care, I just want to
know
,” Lili exclaimed.

The following afternoon a detective called Sartor visited Lili in her apartment. He had thin, gray hair, parted in the middle, and wore rimless spectacles that somehow rendered
the rest of his face invisible. He was neat, dapper, polite and expressionless. Lili’s lawyer had recommended the Sartor Agency because of its international connections. He had explained that
Sartor had contacts with a well-known detective agency in each of the biggest cities in the world so he could simply subcontract any work in that country to the local agency.

Sartor sat in Lili’s sitting room taking notes on a pad that fitted into his left hand. No, she knew nothing about her birth except that she was supposedly born in Gstaad or Château
d’Oex, Switzerland, on October 15, 1949, and that she was not the natural daughter of her foster mother. Her foster mother had at that time been Angelina, widow of Albert Dassin, a guide who
lived in the village of Château d’Oex, Switzerland. No, she had no proof that Madame Dassin was not her natural mother. Yes, that was a possibility, but she would have imagined that
Madame Dassin, a widow, could not have disguised her own pregnancy in that small village. Lili’s real mother was definitely a mystery to the village—she had been teased at school about
that. That Madame Dassin was her foster mother was generally accepted, although Lili was called Elizabeth Dassin. Yes, Madame Dassin had remarried in 1955, a Hungarian waiter, Felix Kovago. Yes, it
had been definitely established by the Swiss consulate that both the Kovagos and the child, Roger Dassin, had been shot and killed by Hungarian border guards in 1956. Certainly she would like
Monsieur Sartor to check that. No, she could think of nothing to add to those details, except that Madame Kovago had arranged for her to take private lessons in English and French elocution, and
Lili felt that it would have been out of character for her to have done this of her own accord. No, the son, Roger Dassin, had not been given such lessons, neither had any other child in the
village school. No, Madame Kovago had not given her any photographs or jewelry that might have had any bearing on her birth.

“We’ll check the birth certificate straightaway,” said Monsieur Sartor, pushing his tiny notebook into his inner breast pocket and standing up. Simon saw him to the front door
and handed him his beige raincoat, still damp with melted snow.

Three days later he telephoned. Lili answered. Simon was away on a promotional tour for two weeks.

“Our Swiss contact has checked with the registry office. The Gstaad area is in the region of Saanen, which has a population of around 6,000. Two baby girls christened Elizabeth were born
there on October 15, 1949. We have already traced and spoken to one of these young women, who is unmarried and still lives in Gerignoz with her widowed father. The other child was born in the
hospital at Château d’Oex to a woman called Post—Emily Post. The Swiss birth certificate always gives the name of the obstetrician. In this case, it was Doctor Alphonse Geneste,
who unfortunately for us died on November 4 last year, but our man in Switzerland has spoken on the telephone to his widow, who lives at Siedenstrasse 9, Gstaad, and they have arranged to visit her
tomorrow.”

“Goodness,” said Lili, “Emily Post. That sounds English, doesn’t it? Not Swiss-French, not German or Italian—which is what you’d expect of a woman having a
baby in Switzerland.”

“There is, of course, the possibility that it was a Swiss, French, German or Italian woman who assumed a false name—perhaps the name of a foreigner, perhaps the father of the
child.” A dry cough. “On the birth certificate the father is listed as ‘unknown.’”

Another almost apologetic cough. “But if the name is genuine, then certainly the mother might be English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish. Or she could be Canadian, American, South African or
Australian. Or perhaps she came from some other part of the British Commonwealth—Kenya, for instance—or even from some of the smaller English settlements—Hong Kong, perhaps. I
will telephone as soon as there is further news.”

“You’re the policeman, aren’t you?” The man nodded, untruthfully, to the shrivelled old woman who had opened the door of Siedenstrasse 9, Gstaad. Her
thin, bouffant hair was dyed an unnatural shade of blue. She wore blotchy makeup with blue eyelids and uneven patches of heavy rouge on each cheek. Her sagging neck was encircled by a thin, scarlet
velvet ribbon and she wore a bright red jersey trouser suit. She looked terrifyingly decrepit as, with bent back, she shuffled slowly into an overheated, unfurnished living room.

“I don’t know whether I can help you, young man, but from what you said on the telephone, one thing is lucky. As you know, under Swiss law, one must keep one’s account books
for ten years. My husband’s go back to when he first started out here in his own practice in 1927. I kept the old books up in the attic and never bothered to move them.” Blue eyelids
blinked before him. “I was his bookkeeper, you know; that’s how we met. I married the boss!” She gave a dry cackle and the agent smiled encouragingly. “I can get them down
from the attic if you want, officer, although not today, it’s one of my bad days today. Now you say you want to trace a missing person . . . a baby that my husband delivered. You said on
October 15, 1949? A baby girl, you say, and the baby was fostered by a woman in Château d’Oex, a Madame Dassin?”

Again, the wrinkled blue eyelids were lowered, then suddenly lifted to reveal surprisingly bright black eyes. “Well, I don’t need to refer to the books for that. I remember it very
well because the girl was so very young—she was still at school—and because she didn’t pay her bill.”

“She didn’t pay her bill?”

“No, the bill was paid by four other girls. I think they were all at l’Hirondelle, a school that closed about ten years ago when the headmaster died. Anyway, you’ll find all
those details in the documents books. I seem to remember that one of the girls paid cash. Those girls were very good to the young mother, and my husband also helped her a great deal . . . too much.
But he had a kind heart and an eye for a pretty girl.” She smiled. “Anyway, the payments will all have been noted in the accounts book. No, we couldn’t go up there today—and
tomorrow is Sunday—but Monday morning, perhaps? I’m better in the mornings.”

On Monday morning the detective stood again on the snowy doorstep. The old lady let him in and, after a few moments of conversation, led him upstairs to the attic where the old
records were stored in dusty piles.

At a snail’s pace, the old lady moved up the stairs to the landing, where a steel ladder hung down from a ceiling trapdoor to the attic. “I can’t manage that thing, young man,
but you go up with the flashlight. You’ll find the account books in the thirteenth file from the left, right at the back. You’ll want the ledger, it’s a brown cloth book and the
year slip is pasted on the spine. You said 1949, didn’t you? Yes, well, up you go.”

Prepared for a difficult, dirty search, the agent gingerly clambered up into the cold, unheated attic and picked his way over the dust-laden ceiling beams to the back. To his surprise, he found
the book he was looking for almost immediately, exactly where the old woman had said it would be. He blew the dust off the book, hopped back over the beams, carefully descended the wobbly ladder,
then pushed it back to the ceiling.

The old lady turned the pages until she came to the right one. “Here we are, young man. The first entry is in mid-June, you see, under Post. That was the girl’s name. And here are
the payments, you see. To start there were three checks signed Trelawney and Ryan—and big checks they were—then a small cash payment from Mademoiselle Pascale.”

A series of erratic payments were listed as being paid by J. Jordan, P. Trelawney, M. Pascale and K. Ryan but—according to the immaculate account book—never a sou was paid by Miss
Post, the young mother.

Strange.

Madame Geneste couldn’t remember what Miss Post looked like. She had never seen her.

On Tuesday the agent telephoned Monsieur Sartor in Paris, who immediately delegated to his chief assistant a search to check all Swiss finishing-school archives in the Gstaad area. He also
wanted to locate the birth certificate of Maxine Pascale, probably born between 1928 and 1932, possibly in Switzerland, Belgium or France. Sartor then placed telephone calls to the detective
agencies that he dealt with in London, Washington, Montreal, Canberra, Johannesburg and Auckland. That would do for a start. He wanted routine birth certificate checks on

Emily Post, Pagan Trelawney, Kate or Catherine or Kathleen Ryan, Judith Jordan—probable dates of birth between 1930 and 1935.

On Wednesday morning an overnight cable from Washington lay on Sartor’s varnished desk.

So Mrs. Post was seventy-six years old in 1949 and unlikely to have been pregnant. But perhaps that was the first name that jumped into the mind of a frantic, pregnant girl who wished to conceal
her identity? If you choose a fictitious name, you try to choose one that is in no way connected to yourself and yet is easy to remember.

By Friday, Maxine Pascale’s birth certificate had been traced and by the following Tuesday he had a photocopy of her marriage certificate. Also on Tuesday afternoon, Monsieur Sartor had
received a telephone call from London. Pagan Trelawney (christened Jennifer) was born at St. George’s Hospital, London, in 1932. Married twice, presently Lady Swann, living in London,
photocopies of birth certificate, second marriage certificate and current address upcoming. Her first marriage was thought to have been in the Middle East.

There were dozens of Catherine and Kathleen Ryans born in England and hundreds in Ireland. The agency was ploughing through them, narrowing them down by date. South Africa, Australia, New
Zealand, Canada and America were also compiling great lists of baby Ryans, but Washington cabled NEW YORK JOURNALIST KATE RYAN BORN BRITISH FITS DATE NO BIRTHCERT USA SHOULD PURSUE? ACES.

On Wednesday Sartor put through another call to Washington and asked for a check on whether Jordan or Ryan had been at school in Switzerland in 1949 and if so, where? He carefully didn’t
suggest a possible location—that would be his check on the accuracy of the information he received.

By Friday he had further information on Emily Post. It seemed that the etiquette writer had not only been heard of, but also admired, wherever English was spoken. One had to suspect that some of
the Miss Posts had been deliberately named after her. There were seventeen in the United States, one in Canada, six in Britain and two in Australia, although none had been registered during that
period in New Zealand or South Africa.

On the following Monday, three weeks after he had been assigned to the case, an overnight cable from Washingron awaited him. JUDY JORDAN KATE RYAN NOW WORK TOGETHER STOP BOTH IN GSTAAD
SWITZERLAND 1949 ACES. Sartor telephoned Lili and asked to see her as soon as possible.

At six that evening, the doorbell was answered by Simon and the three of them sat around the log fire as Monsieur Sartor reported to them.

“I am of the opinion that the mother was one of the four girls we have located, and that if we are successful in tracing the Emily Posts, they will be found to have no connection with this
matter.”

Sartor gave his little dry cough. “But there
is
another possibility. If our Emily Post exists, all four of the women we have tracked down will know about her. Do you wish my agents
to attempt to interview them?”

“No!” Lili sprang to her feet. Her face was flushed from sitting by the flaming logs and her dark hair was disheveled.

“No!” she repeated violently. She thought of the screaming row she had had with Judy Jordan; the article that Kate Ryan had written about her; that terrible scene in the orangery
with Maxine. She didn’t know about this Pagan woman, but she never wanted to have anything to do with the other three.

Simon gently took her shaking hands in his. “My darling, you must realise that one of these women might be your mother.”

“No!” Lili’s wistful yearnings for
vraie maman
, for the quiet, kindly and gentle madonna of her dreams had, in an instant, turned to rage. It looked as if Lili had not
been abandoned for pathetic and forgivable reasons by a humble peasant woman. It looked as if Lili had been
dumped
by some rich little bitch who’d been unable to get an abortion. She
choked back her fury.