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PROLOGUE
Argentina, 1952
Sister Mary kept the orange in the pocket of her habit, where no one would think to look, though the weight of it pulled the cloth strangely against her thigh and made her walk with one hand half-covering the bulge. No one expected a woman of twenty-two who had given her life to God to hide fruit from starving children. No one expected her to be so bad at it either.
It was not selfishness. She told herself this every day, the way she told herself most things that needed repeating to be believed. The orange was for Eva, who was seven and had a cough that would not leave her chest through two winters running, and who needed something — anything — that was not beans, was not the thin broth they stretched across forty mouths twice a day. Eva had learned to cough into her blanket so the younger ones would not wake, which somehow made it worse. A child trying to be considerate while her lungs failed felt like an accusation Mary could not answer.
Mary had traded a rosary for it. Not her own. One of the spares, kept in a drawer for visiting clergy who never came. She did not think God would mind. Then again, she had said the same thing the week before when she watered the milk, and before that when she told Luis his mother was coming back because she could not bear the look on his face. She had stopped being entirely sure, these last four years, what God minded and what He simply allowed.
She was crossing the courtyard with the orange warm against her hip when she heard the gate.
It did not creak the way it usually did. The gate should have screamed. It always did. That afternoon it opened softly, almost politely, and Mary stopped with one hand already near the orange in her pocket.
Someone had oiled the hinge. She noticed that before she noticed the car — a dark, good car, the kind that had no business on this road, which was mud in winter and dust in summer and led to nowhere a man like this would choose to go unless he had a reason.
He got out slowly. Unhurried. A man used to being waited for.
He was perhaps forty, fair-haired going to grey at the temples, dressed for a city that was not this one. There was dust on his shoes, but not enough. That annoyed her before it frightened her. Men from the road arrived with dust up to their knees, in their cuffs, in the lines around their mouths. This man looked as though the road had been permitted to touch him only briefly.
He carried a hat he did not put on. He looked at the orphanage — at its sagging roofline, its whitewash gone the colour of old teeth — like a man deciding whether to buy it.
“Sister,” he said, and his Spanish was careful, learned rather than lived in, with something underneath it she recognised, because she had spent six years of her own girlhood learning to bury an accent of her own. “I am told you are the one who decides things here.”
“I’m told a great many things,” Mary said. “Most of them are wrong.”
He smiled. It stayed at his mouth and went no further.
“My name is Klaus.”
He did not give a surname. She noticed that, too, and filed it away with the oiled hinge and the careful Spanish and the good dark car, in the place where she kept things she was not yet ready to look at directly.
“And what is it you’ve come to decide, Mr Klaus?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I’ve come to help. I understand you have forty children and no roof that will survive another rain.”
“Forty-three,” Mary said. “And the roof has survived eleven rains since you’d have known to count them.”
His face moved at that. Amusement, she decided — at being corrected by a woman in a habit, in a courtyard, with an orange going soft in her pocket.
“I would like to fix that,” he said. “The roof. And other things, in time. I ask nothing for it.”
“Everyone asks something.”
“Then you will find out what I ask,” Klaus said, “when I ask it. Not before.”
Behind her, somewhere in the building, a child was crying — the particular, exhausted crying of a child who has been crying for some time and has stopped expecting anyone to come. Mary did not turn towards the sound. She had trained herself, long ago, to let her judgement answer before her face did.
She looked at the dark car. She looked at the man’s good coat, his soft hands, the watch on his wrist that was worth more than the orphanage’s roof and its forty-three children combined.
She thought of Eva coughing into the grey rag Mary had given her, eyes wet, lips pressed together as if politeness might cure her.
Her palm had gone damp around the orange through the cloth. She imagined squeezing it too hard, imagined the skin splitting, juice running down the inside of her habit like evidence.
She thought, not for the first time and not for the last, that God left a great many decisions to people who had no business making them, and then judged them for the ones they made.
“Come in out of the sun, Mr Klaus,” she said. “We’ll talk.”
She did not give him the orange. That, at least, she kept.
The past, whatever it was wearing, whatever name it had decided to use, had found the road. It always did, eventually. It was only ever a question of how long the gate could be made to look as though no one had been expecting it.
CHAPTER ONE
Buenos Aires, present day
Thomas Vale did not believe in saints. He believed in money — money had weight, had temperature, could be folded into a pocket or buried under a name that no longer belonged to anyone living. Saints were useful only because people believed in them, and belief, in his experience, was the most reliably exploitable currency there was.
He sat at a metal table outside a café that had one short leg and rocked whenever he shifted his weight. Across the street, a dog slept under the awning of a closed pharmacy, its ribs moving under dirty yellow fur. The coffee in front of him had gone cold an hour ago. He’d ordered it only because the waiter kept glancing his way, the particular look of a man deciding whether to ask a customer to leave.
He checked his watch. Twenty minutes late.
He hated lateness. It was theft, as far as he was concerned — time taken without asking. He lit a cigarette he didn’t want, off the bitter taste of the last one, and his fingers shook faintly around the lighter. A fleck of tobacco stuck to his lower lip. He felt it there and did not remove it, because removing it would mean admitting his hands were less steady than they should have been.
He blamed the heat. He blamed the flight. He blamed the city, the damp collar of his shirt, the taxi driver who had pretended not to understand him, the small blister forming where his new shoes rubbed his heel. He blamed, as a rule, anything that was not himself.
It had been six weeks since his father’s solicitor had called — a clipped, apologetic voice explaining that Edward Vale had died in his sleep, alone, in a house in Surrey that Thomas had not visited in four years and had no particular wish to visit now. There had been a funeral. He had not cried, which bothered him a good deal less than the fact that he’d glanced around the room afterward, cataloguing who had noticed he hadn’t. He had also taken two sandwiches from the wake and eaten them in the car before driving home, which had seemed practical at the time and disgusting later.
There had been a will, unremarkable, dividing an unremarkable estate between Thomas and a sister who hadn’t spoken to either of them in a decade. And there had been, three weeks later, a box.
The solicitor had found it in the loft, behind insulation that hadn’t been disturbed since the house was built. A biscuit tin, rusted at the seam, holding the sort of things men keep without ever quite deciding to keep them: a wedding ring that wasn’t Thomas’s mother’s, a ticket stub for a ship that had sailed in 1971, and a single sheet of paper so brittle that Thomas had been afraid, lifting it, that it might come apart in his hands like wet ash.
He had it with him now, folded twice, in the inside pocket of his jacket, and he had read it so many times in six weeks that he no longer needed to look at it to know the words. He looked at it anyway. A bruise gets touched. That was the whole of the logic.
There had also been a photograph, loose in the bottom of the tin beneath a layer of dust. A boy, perhaps six or seven, unsmiling, standing in front of a whitewashed building he didn’t recognise. On the back, in a hand that wasn’t his father’s — older, more careful, the ink browned with age — someone had written a name.
Aurel Weiss.
The name had annoyed him. Not frightened him. Annoyed him. It had the smug, sealed quality of a clue in a crossword someone else expected him to solve.
He’d turned it over twice, looking for a date, a place, anything. There was nothing. Some cousin who hadn’t made it, he’d decided, somewhere around his second glass of wine that evening. Half of Europe’s family trees had a branch like that, snapped off during the war and never spoken of again. It happened to everyone’s family. Almost certainly nothing. He’d put the photograph back in the tin, face down, and not looked at it since.
The letter was the part that mattered. The letter was the part with a use.
A woman in a red coat turned the corner.
He watched her come without moving — sixty, maybe, narrow-faced, her dark hair pulled back hard enough to look less like a style than a decision. One button was missing from the coat. He noticed that with relief, almost pleasure. It made her less theatrical. She walked quickly, then too slowly, then quickly again, as though arguing with herself about whether to come at all.
She stopped at his table. She did not sit.
“Mr Vale?”
“You’re late.”
“Yes.”
No apology offered. None expected, evidently. He disliked her before she’d said another word.
“Sit down.”
“I’ll stand.”
“It’s a café table. Not an interrogation room.”
“A man sat at that exact table eleven years ago,” she said, “across from someone he should not have agreed to meet. He didn’t get up from it on his own. I’ll stand.”
Thomas glanced at the table as though it might confirm or deny this. It said nothing, being a table.
“You believe that,” he said, “or you’re testing whether I do.”
“Both can be true.”
Her left hand worried at the missing button without seeming to know it was doing so.
“I was told you had documents.”
“I was told you had answers.”
Her face gave him nothing, though her eyes kept dropping, he noticed, to his hands — to the lighter still turning between his fingers, to the cigarette he hadn’t put out — the way you watch a dog you don’t yet trust not to bite. The waiter drifted past, close enough to listen, and Thomas waited until he’d cleared the next table before reaching into his jacket for the folded sheet of paper.
He didn’t hand it over. Not yet. That was the one piece of leverage he had, and he intended to spend it slowly.
She looked at the fold of it in his hand.
“Where did you get that?”
“Family box. My father died and left me a house full of rubbish and one interesting letter.”
“Your father’s name.”
“You know his name.”
“I want to hear you say it.”
He smiled. He could afford to, now.
“Edward Vale.”
Her hands, he saw, had gone still at her sides. Not flinched — stilled, the way a person goes still when they’re concentrating very hard on not reacting. Recognition, he decided. Better for him.
“And you are?” he said. “Since we’re being formal.”
“Someone who has handled certain matters for certain people for a very long time. My name won’t help you. Names rarely do, in this business.”
“Everyone keeps telling me that. It’s starting to feel like something people say when they’d rather I stopped asking.”
She didn’t answer that. He let the silence sit there until it became hers to break, a trick he’d learned from men who did this for a living and had taught it to him without ever meaning to.
“You said documents,” she said eventually.
“I said one document. I’d like to know if there are others.”
“That depends entirely on what you intend to do with what you already have.”
“I intend to find out what it’s worth.”
“That’s not the same question,” she said, “as what it’s worth to you.”
He unfolded the paper. Brittle, yellowed at the creases, the ink gone the colour of weak tea but still legible. A date at the top: 14 September 1948. Beneath it, three lines in a careful, schooled hand that had cost someone time to get right, even in a hurry:
The woman is not what she claims.
The German paid for the orphanage.
The rest is still there.
He tapped the last line with one finger.
“That’s the part I’m interested in. The rest. What rest. What’s still there, and where.”
She looked at the letter a long moment, longer than reading it required. He had the sense she wasn’t reading it at all — that she already knew every word, had perhaps known them for decades, and was instead deciding something about him: how much he understood, how much he didn’t, how dangerous either condition might turn out to be.
“There is a place,” she said finally. “Still standing, as far as I know. An orphanage. The woman who runs it is old. Very old. And has been very careful, for a very long time.”
“Careful about what?”
“About people exactly like you, Mr Vale, who arrive holding exactly that kind of letter and believing it points to money.” She said the word money the way some people say the name of a disease. “I’d advise you to consider, before you go any further, that you may not like what you actually find instead.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
“Everyone does,” she said. “Until they don’t.”
She stepped back from the table — not turning yet, just putting distance between herself and it, as though the table itself were the thing she didn’t trust.
“I won’t be giving you an address,” she said. “But you’re a resourceful man, or you wouldn’t have found me. I expect you’ll manage.”
“That’s it? You came all this way to tell me nothing?”
“I came all this way to see your face when you said your father’s name. That’s what I needed.”
She turned then, and walked back the way she’d come, faster now than she’d arrived, not looking back at the table once.
Thomas sat with the letter still open in front of him, the ink swimming slightly where a drop of rain had caught the corner of the page. He thought about the photograph in the tin at home, face down where he’d left it — a boy he’d decided meant nothing, standing in front of a building he hadn’t troubled himself to look at twice.
An orphanage. Still standing.
He thought, with the comfortable certainty of a man who had never once distrusted his first instinct: there’s money in this.
The truth, when it came, would take its time correcting him.
He folded the letter, and put it away.
