"Marshall had these three cats named One, Two, and Three. He'd had them in the house only a short time, but they owned the place. They'd walk across his desk when he was working, jump up on the table when we were eating. I never knew whom he liked more, Anna or them. His wife, Elizabeth, had died a couple of years before, so it was just the two of them and those three cats in that monstrous old house together.

"One night after dinner I was sitting out on their porch reading. Anna came out with a cat under each arm."

Louis got off the couch again and sat on an edge of his desk, facing me, about six or seven feet away.

"I have to act this out or you won't get the full effect. Now, I'm sitting where you are, Thomas, and Anna's where I am, okay? She's got the two cats up under her arms, and all three of them are glowering at me. I tried to smile, but they didn't react, so I went back to the book. All of a sudden I heard the cats screech and hiss. I looked up, and Anna was looking at me as if I were the bubonic plague. I'd always thought she was eccentric, but this was insanity." He was standing and had curved his arms out from his body, as if he were holding something. The cigar was clenched in his teeth, and his forehead and eyes were screwed up. "Then she came over to me and said something like, 'We hate you! We hate you!'"

"What did you do?"

An ash fell on his lapel and he brushed it away. His face relaxed.

"Nothing, because that was the strangest part of all. I could just make out Marshall standing behind the screen door. He had obviously seen and heard everything. I kept looking at him, naturally expecting him to do something. But all he did was stand there for another minute, and then he turned and went back into the house."

After that strange little nugget, Louis asked if I wanted coffee. The girl with the Virginia Woolf T-shirt came and went, and in the meantime we chit-chatted about nothing. His Anna story had been so odd and unbelievable that for a time I was stymied for something to say. I was glad for the coffee diversion.

"Who was Van Walt?"

He stirred some honey into his coffee. "Van Walt. Van Walt was another Marshall France mystery. According to him, the man was a recluse who lived in Canada and didn't want to be disturbed by anyone. Marshall made that so clear that we finally said all right, and as a result, whatever dealings we had with him were worked through France."

"Nothing else?"

"Nothing else. When a writer as important as Marshall says to leave him alone, we leave him alone."

"Did he ever talk about his childhood, Mr. Louis?"

"Please call me David. No, he rarely said anything about his past. I know that he was born in Austria. A little town called Rattenstein."

"Rattenberg."

"Yes, right, Rattenberg. Years ago, I was curious about it, so one time when I was in Europe I went there.

"The whole town is on a river that rushes by, and it's nice because just off in the distance are the Alps. It's all very gemьtlich."

"And what about his father? Did he ever say anything about his father or his mother?"

"No, not a thing. He was a very secretive man."

"Well, what about his brother, Isaac – the one that died at Dachau?"

Louis was about to take a drag when I said that, but he stopped the cigar inches from his lips. "Marshall didn't have any brothers. That's one thing I certainly know. No, no brothers or sisters. I distinctly remember his telling me that he was an only child."

I got out my little pocket notebook and flipped through it until I got to the information that Saxony had given me.

"'Isaac Frank died in – '"

"Isaac Frank? Who's Isaac Frank?"

"Well, you see, the person who does research for me" – I knew that if Saxony ever heard me refer to her like that, she would kill me – "found out that the family name was Frank, but that he changed it to France when he came to America."

Louis smiled at me. "Somebody led you down the garden path on that, Thomas. I probably knew the man better than anyone outside of his immediate family, and his name was always Marshall France." He shook his head. "And he didn't have any brothers. Sorry."

"Yes, but –"

He raised his hand to cut me off. "Really. I'm telling you this so that you won't waste your time on it. You can spend the rest of your life in the library, but you won't find what you're looking for, I promise you. Marshall France was always Marshall France, and he was an only child. I'm sorry to say that it's as simple as that."

We talked a little longer, but his obvious disbelief of what I'd said cast a pall over further conversation. A few minutes later we were standing in the door. He asked me if I thought I'd try writing the book anyway. I nodded but didn't say anything. He halfheartedly wished me luck and told me to stay in touch. A few seconds later I was going down in the elevator, staring off into space, and wondering about everything. France/Frank, David Louis, Anna… Saxony. Where the hell had she gotten that stuff on Martin Frank and a dead brother who never lived in the first place?

5

"Do you think I'm lying?"

"Of course not, Saxony. It's just that Louis was so damned adamant about there not being any brother and France's name not being Frank."

I was at a booth on Sixty-fourth Street that had no door and smelled suspiciously like bananas. I'd called Saxony long distance after getting four thousand quarters in a drugstore. She listened quietly to my adventures with Louis. She never got angry when I hinted at the possibility that her information was all bullshit. In fact it seemed that she was almost relaxed. She was talking in a new low, sexy voice.

I was a little wary of her calmness. There was a long silence while I watched a cabdriver throw a newspaper out the window of his cab.

When she spoke again her voice was even quieter. "There's one way that you can check on this Martin Frank part, Thomas."

"How's that?"

"The undertaker he worked for – Lucente. He's still in business downtown. I checked a Manhattan telephone directory a few days ago. Why don't you go and ask him about Martin Frank? See what he has to say about it."

Her voice was so smooth and sure of itself that I obediently asked her for the Lucente address like a good little boy and hung up.

Things like The Godfather and The American Way of Death make the job of undertaker sound profitable, if not pleasant, but one look at "Lucente and Son Funeral Home" and you'd have second thoughts.

It was down in a corner pocket of the city near Little Italy. It was next to a store that sold fluorescent madonnas and stone saints that you put in your garden to give it a taste of Italy. When I first walked by Lucente's I missed it completely because the doorway was small and there was only a tiny sign in the lower corner of the front window announcing the family business.

When I opened the door I heard a dog yapping way off in the back somewhere, and the place was lit by a yellow light from the street that cut in through the half-drawn venetian blinds. A green metal chair and desk – the kind you see in an Army recruiting offlee – a chair facing the desk, a year-old calendar announcing August from the Arthur Siegel Oil Company of New York – that was all. No soft music for the bereaved, no muted Oriental carpets to hush the sound of feet, no professional ghouls gliding around, trying to make you more "comfortable." It all came back to me from the days of my father's funeral.

"Ah! Zito!"

The only other door in the room flashed open and an old man came out in a hurry. He flung both arms up in the air, and looking back over his shoulder into the room he'd just come from, kicked the door shut.

"What can I do for you?"

For a moment I asked myself how I'd feel if my mother had just died and I was coming to this place to make the arrangements for her. A crazy old man comes flying out, cursing… Some funeral home. But later when I thought about it, I had to admit that I sort of liked it. It wasn't fake-y or put-on.