Trophies of War Read online

  TROPHIES OF WAR

  by

  Christopher Remy

  Copyright © 2014 Christopher Remy

  All rights reserved

  ISBN-13: 978-1493570911

  ISBN-10: 1493570919

  This is a work of fiction set in a background of history. Public personages both living and dead may appear in the story under their right names. Scenes and dialogue involving them with fictitious characters are of course invented. Any other usage of real people’s names is coincidental. Any resemblance of the imaginary characters to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas.

  “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity”

  Ecclesiastes 1:2

  1

  Old Saybrook, Connecticut

  David Lyon tried to ignore the half-empty bottle of Jim Beam thudding against the hull, hoping he could fall back asleep. Every movement of the sailboat in the water sent the bottle back against the fiberglass.

  After a few minutes of this, the alarm on his phone went off and he was fully awake. Awake, and unhappy about it. He shut his eyes against the sunlight streaming in the port windows and felt around for the bottle of water he knew was on the galley table. Once again, he had fallen asleep on the cabin’s settee instead of making it up to the bed in the forward berth.

  Lyon chugged the entire bottle of water and grimaced at the sour feeling in his stomach. His neck was stiff and his lower back felt like shards of broken glass were floating around where his spine should be. Not a good start to what was already going to be a difficult day.

  He made a pot of coffee and, while it brewed, he looked in the mirror over the sink in the head.

  Getting too much gray in the beard, he lamented to himself, running his hand over the two days’ growth.

  Still none on my head, at least.

  He ran his fingers through his brown hair and managed to neaten it up somewhat. After staring into the mirror for a long moment, Lyon decided he was presentable enough for traveling.

  He looked at the calendar on his phone, double-checking the departure time for his flight. Plenty of time. Air Canada flight 7303—Hartford to Montreal—didn’t leave until 10:55.

  Lyon poured the coffee into a dirty mug, opened the companionway hatch and stepped up onto the deck. Sitting at the helm, he looked out over the Connecticut River, glassy smooth in the early spring morning. People were knocking about on other boats at the marina, but these were retirees getting ready for the sailing season, not people living on their boats as Lyon had been doing for the past six months. His house, and his wife, were just up the river in Essex, but the 32-foot sailboat Shark Byte was now his home.

  The boat was supposed to be for family outings on weekends and summer vacations—trips to Block Island, day sails on Long Island Sound or just time spent going nowhere together. Now that was all gone. He looked down at the tan line where his wedding ring used to be. His thumb rubbed the callus underneath and Lyon wondered if Sarah was also having her morning coffee, looking at the river from her favorite spot on the back deck.

  He put the thoughts of Sarah out of his head, but then his mind turned to darker things. Lyon had had the dream again last night. Over the past year or so of having this dream, he had developed the habit of waking up in the middle of it, to escape what he knew was coming. This time, just as the red and blue lights were lighting up the neighborhood and before he opened the door to the state trooper, he had jolted himself awake. All the dreams Lyon ever had were strange mash-ups of the real and the unreal, but this one was different. It was as if a camera in his mind had recorded the events of that night last year, and, when he slept, his subconscious hit play. Every detail was there, everything was in order as it had happened. Over the months, he had found himself thinking of that night less and less, but the dream would bring him right back.

  “Dammit,” Lyon muttered under his breath.

  He gulped down the last of his coffee and went belowdecks to pack.

  After twenty years of business travel, Lyon had gotten to know planes well enough to hate the Beechcraft 18-seater he was now on. Every bump of the small plane was a shock to his (already questionable) back, and the loud turboprops on the other side of the window weren’t helping his headache. He tried to focus on the legal papers in front of him, but they bounced around with every jostle of the plane. Holding them up in an attempt to keep them still, he read his lawyer’s markup of the contract to sell his business.

  Ten years after Lyon and Doug Eisen had started DataVision, they were now selling it to a middling Silicon Valley company. At first, it had just been the two of them, selling business software and installing it for small companies around New England. Now, they had 150 consultants and had built an application of their own; it was a simple one for manufacturers to deal with the volatile cost of some commodities, but it made them stand out and gave them national recognition.

  Doug was always convinced that with just a few more years and a little more hustling, they could double their revenues and hit the IPO jackpot. Lyon would point to the stagnant sales of the last couple years and bring Doug back down to reality. Now Lyon wanted out and he had more or less forced Doug into selling, giving him an ultimatum that he either buy out Lyon’s half or they would sell the company. Doug tried to tell him to wait — the past year had been so hard for Lyon — but he had made up his mind.

  Lyon shuffled through the papers, looking again at the sale price. It was a very good offer. He wouldn’t be set for life, nor could he retire right now at 44, but it would be enough that when he did retire in twenty years or so, he wouldn’t have to worry about money.

  The plane lurched to one side and bounced a few more times, so Lyon gave up and put the papers back in their manila folder and looked out the window.

  He and Doug had always been friends. Never close, but they had enough of a friendship that they weathered the setbacks and challenges of starting and growing a business. Now it seemed like that friendship was at an end as Lyon was forcing Doug to do something he didn’t want to do.

  Forcing someone to do things against their will seems to be the theme of the day, he thought as he looked down on the clouds.

  Today, he was on his way to Montreal, his hometown, to move his mother into an assisted living facility. Alzheimer’s was claiming her mind, her personality and now her ability to be independent in the same apartment where she’d lived for five decades. After watching the decline over the past few years, Lyon had tried to convince her to move closer to him and Sarah where they could look after her, but she refused. As she sank deeper into her disease, the apartment became ever more important to her as a fixture of the familiar in a widening sea of confusion.

  Lyon’s father had died when he was a small boy and, as an only child, it fell to him to take care of her. He had done everything he could to keep her in the apartment—hiring nurses, asking neighbors to check in on her, enrolling her in adult daycare—but after two calls from the building super about smelling gas, Lyon had had enough. With everything else he had going on in his life, he couldn’t deal with the frustration anymore. He gave his 80-year-old mother an ultimatum: either she moved willingly into an assisted living facility or he would have her declared incompetent and she would be forced to move. She had relented and now today was moving day.

  Lyon looked at his watch. It was just past noon.

  Well, at least no one can say I’m drinking in the morning, he told himself, and flagged down the flight attendant to order a bourbon and Coke.

  2

  Montreal

  The basement of the old brick apartment building was dank and musty with a single bare lightbulb that half-lit the storage units lining the walls. The movers
were upstairs finishing the packing while Lyon tried to organize things down here. His mother’s storage unit had fifty years’ worth of forgotten stuff. Everything had a mildewy, dusty look to it which told him that nothing had changed since he lived here. The basement wasn’t where his mother stored things to be retrieved later—it was a place to put things she didn’t want in the apartment but didn’t want to throw away. Lyon dug into the piles of junk and pulled out broken electronics, boxes of books, an old children’s bike he didn’t remember and countless other detritus from a lifetime lived in one place.

  After an hour of sweaty, dirty work, Lyon had excavated his way to the back wall where he found an old steamer trunk. Among the rotten cardboard boxes and his father’s rusty tools, it seemed out of place.

  This thing must have been buried for decades, he thought.

  He tried to lift it, but the twinge in his back made him drop the trunk.

  Lyon looked it over. The lock in the middle didn’t look like it was pushed all the way in, so he flipped the two hasps on either end and tried the lid.

  What he saw inside was a treasure trove of memorabilia. There were stacks of photos—his mother and father when they were young, his baby pictures, and pictures of people and places he didn’t recognize. Lyon sat down and flipped through the photos. There had to be a couple hundred photographs here, black and white on top of the piles, and color down below. Several were from his parents’ wedding at Temple Beth Shalom, just a block from here. He stopped at a picture of his father holding him as a baby, looking at least ten years younger than Lyon was now. He looked at it for a while, trying to conjure up a memory of his father, but none came.

  There were no photos of extended family; he only saw one of two cousins. Second cousins? Third? Lyon couldn’t remember. He didn’t expect more, since neither his mother nor his father had had any extended family in Canada, or anywhere else. Both were French Jews who had lost their fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles—everybody—at Auschwitz. They were part of a very small group of children that had managed to escape Nazi-occupied France together in 1942 and, thanks to distant relatives and the kindness of strangers, made it to Canada. By coincidence, his mother and father both ended up in Montreal and met up again in high school.

  Lyon pulled the photos out of the trunk and piled them up, making his way toward the bottom. Below the photographs was what looked like every one of Lyon’s art projects and report cards from school—from elementary school through college.

  Why the hell is this stuff buried in the basement?, he wondered. She should have these things in albums and framed on the wall so she can look at it whenever she wants.

  He realized that if this trunk contained photos and mementos from before he was born until his college graduation, that mean she had been coming down here for years, digging through the piles of boxes to get at the trunk, just to bury it again. That didn’t make any sense.

  As Lyon grabbed what looked like the last of the papers, his eye caught a flash of gold paint. He tilted the trunk toward the light and saw a framed picture lying at the bottom. It was the same width as the trunk, so he had to wiggle it to pull it out.

  The wooden frame looked like museum quality, with fleur-de-lis around the outer edges and delicate carvings in the middle. Lyon looked the picture over. It was a painting of flowers in a glass vase. He didn’t know much about art; it just looked like the typical kind of flowers and still life paintings people might hang on their walls. He couldn’t read the signature—it just looked like a few vertical lines with some scribbles in between.

  Lyon touched the surface of the painting and was surprised that it wasn’t a painting at all—it wasn’t canvas and it was perfectly smooth. He took a closer look and saw that a corner was peeling away from a cardboard backing. He pulled the corner up and saw that the other side had printed text beneath some yellowed glue. It was a picture from a magazine.

  What is a picture from a magazine doing in this kind of frame? And why is it stored with all these photographs and mementos? Lyon wondered.

  For as long as Lyon could remember, people had told his mother that she looked ten years younger than her age. No longer. If anything, Florette Lyon looked older than her eighty years. She was thinner than he’d ever seen her, she walked with a stooped shuffle and, in the last year her hair had gone white.

  Lyon stepped into the dining room, where she was sitting at the table, watching the movers.

  “Maman, I found this in a trunk in the basement,” he said, holding up the gold-framed picture.

  She looked up.

  “What? What are you doing with that?” she asked, frowning.

  Lyon put it on the table in front of her.

  “I said, I found this in the basement.”

  “Oh,” she said, with a blank look. “I thought you were one of the movers.”

  Lyon suppressed a sigh.

  “No, maman. I’m David. What is this and why was it in with family photos and keepsakes?” he asked, tilting the frame up so she could see what was in it. “And why do you keep all that stuff buried in the basement? You should have it out where you can look at it. I think that would be a great project for you after you move into Résidence Mont Royal, putting those photos into albums, having some framed …”

  She still wasn’t looking at the picture, but smiled and said, “Well, why don’t you take it home and Megan can hang it up in her bedroom.” She frowned. “Are Sarah and Megan here?”

  Lyon looked at her, frustrated. He didn’t know what to say.

  After a moment, he replied, “No, they’re at home.”

  Giving up on the framed magazine page, Lyon got up to to go back downstairs.

  “Mes fleurs….” Florette said in a quiet, quavering voice.

  Lyon turned back. She held the picture in her hands and he could see that her eyes had become red-rimmed.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “It’s not a story to tell your children,” she replied, holding the picture up. “Please put it back where you found it.”

  “I’m not a child, maman. What’s the big deal about this picture?”

  In a voice stronger than Lyon had heard in years, she replied, “You may not be a child, but you are my child, you understand?”

  “Please, I want to know.”

  She looked back to the picture for a long while. Then she began to speak. Her voice was forceful, her memory was keen. It was as if the distant past was clearer to her than was the present.

  “When the Germans invaded France in 1940 people panicked—they didn’t know what to do. When they reached Paris, everyone tried to get out, especially us Jews in the 4th arrondissement. My father spent the entire drôle de guerre before the invasion trying to reassure my mother, my brothers and me that it would all blow over. ‘The English and the Germans are just puffing out their chests,’ he would say. He told us they would find some face-saving way of getting out of it and everything would be fine. When he saw how wrong he was, I think he panicked, too. We packed up all the food we could carry and a few valuables. Even my littlest brother Maurice had a full rucksack and a heavy little suitcase.

  “We didn’t have a car, and the trains were already stuffed with people by the time we got to the station. By luck we ran into a man that my father knew who did have a car—a big one—and it was only him and his wife so there was room for us. All five of us packed in and we just drove. We didn’t have a plan other than to get out of Paris before the Germans got there.

  “My father had taken us on a trip out to the country the summer before—a town called Larchant. He said we would be safe there, away from the city. He was sure the Germans wouldn’t bother with it, so that’s where we went. I don’t know how far it was, but we were in the car for hours. The roads were clogged with every kind of vehicle, bicycle or cart trying to get out.

  “Well, we finally got to Larchant and we were there for at least two weeks, maybe more. Once the fear and panic subsided, people were ge
nerally friendly and helpful and we made the best of it. My mother and father tried to pretend that we were back for vacation—taking us on little trips to see the village and the rocks in Fontainebleau . I was seven, so I was old enough to recognize the fear in my mother’s eyes while we were trying to get out of Paris. I knew better, but André was five and Maurice was three—they didn’t know, they didn’t understand. They thought it was all fun. We slept in a farmer’s barn and played with his two little girls. The Germans never came, so we went back home.”

  Lyon was puzzled.

  “I don’t understand. I’ve heard that story before … parts of it anyway. What does this picture have to do with it?”

  “Not this picture,” Florette said, shaking her head. She turned the frame face down and continued.

  “You remember me telling you about the art supply shop my father had? That his father had started? They sold paint, canvas, clay, and everything else to the artists that flocked to Paris from all over the world. It was a good business and it provided for our family for two generations. Most of their customers were amateurs or poseurs but there were some good ones. Like most artists, they had no money, but my grandfather and then my father after him would accept artwork as payment from the ones they liked. They would sell some in the shop and keep others. They built up a nice collection—nothing too spectacular. It was more about supporting certain people than acquiring valuable works.

  “The one exception was the painting given to my grandfather from Édouard Manet.”

  She paused for effect, but Lyon shook his head.

  “The guy who paints those pictures of lilies that every college student hangs on their wall?” he asked.

  Florette snorted. “No! That’s Monet. Manet, Manet!”

  “OK, OK, Manet,” Lyon replied, holding his hands up in surrender. He cracked a smile—it had been so long since he’d seen his mother this animated.