A Geography of Secrets by Frederick Reuss

Author:Frederick Reuss
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Psychological Fiction, Secrets, Political, War Victims, fiction, Psychological, United States - Officials and Employees, Cartographers, Secrecy, Thrillers, Espionage
ISBN: 9781609530006
Publisher: Unbridled Books
Published: 2010-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

Yverdon les-Bains

46°46’53.25”N

6°38’26.94”E

Changing trains in Yverdon les-Bains, I went onto the station café to get a cup of coffee. A brochure on the counter caught my attention. L’Expo qui rend fou, an exhibition of unspeakable things at the Mai-son d’Ailleurs, a museum of science fiction, Utopia, and extraordinary journeys. The train to Estavayer le-Lac was not due for half an hour. I ordered a coffee and stood at the counter to read the brochure, which described an exhibit of “things better left unspoken” inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book.

I was a day late getting to La Corbière, having stayed another afternoon in Nyon to drink cognac with Blake at his favorite café. It wasn’t time lost. Such afternoons are never lost. They leave their watermarks in unretractable barings of soul. Blake had certainly shared such occasions with my father, had sat with him late into the night at tables strewn with bottles, overflowing ashtrays, and delusions of significance that lingered for only as long as the next morning’s hangover. Bleary-eyed good times.

We left the house toward noon and followed the same path along the lakeshore. It felt different this time, like strolling with an elderly uncle. Blake seemed happy to play the part. The suspicion and guard-edness of the previous day had dissolved. Locking the front door of the cottage, he dropped the keys into his blazer pocket, turned to me, and said, “Maybe he wanted it to happen this way. Makes a certain sense, doesn’t it?”

“‘Sense’ isn’t the word I’d use.”

The lake was calm, the surface glassy. We walked without talking. I stopped at one point, having forgotten my tape recorder. “Want to run back for it?” Blake reached for his keys. “I’ll wait here.” I took the keys, then changed my mind and handed them back.

I watched a flock of sparrows pecking at crumbs on the station platform and finished my coffee. My questions to Blake were like little crumbs. I’d pecked here, pecked there, but the pile only grew bigger, more daunting, with each crumb I took. My first question—does my mother know?—could have gone unasked. I knew the answer and would gladly have exchanged it for a blank spot. What about Nicole? There was the briefest urge to get on the telephone. Break the sensational news. Sit down, you won’t believe this. But this wasn’t news to telephone and pass along. It wasn’t even news but more like something given clandestinely, slipped in among matters at hand.

The train slid into the station. I didn’t notice until moments before departure and ran from the café with all my gear, made it onto the train just as the doors were closing. I found a rearward-facing window seat. Gauzy afternoon sunlight filtered through the tinted glass. The muted greens and browns of empty fields and pasture rolled by and disappeared in the distance.

“Before he came to the U.S., your grandfather worked for the Reichsbahn in Berlin,” Blake had explained. “The German railroad. The OSS interviewed him in New York. July of 1943.

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