Greg Iles - Black Cross

Rabbi Leibovitz gave me a meaningful glance.

“What is it?” I asked. “Wait a minute. Do these people know my grandfather is dead?”

He smiled wistfully. “Jonas Stern is dead himself, Mark.”

“What?”

“He died in 1987. One day a telegram came to Mac’s office. It was from Hannah Jansen — under her married name, of course. It said that Stern’s will had instructed her to notify Mac of his death. Nothing else, though. We never found out how he died. I contacted some friends in Israel, but Israel is obsessive about security.”

“What about Rachel? Does she know?”

“She knows. I called her the day of the crash.”

I was pacing the room, growing inexplicably more nervous with each passing minute.

“ Anna doesn’t know, however,” said Leibovitz. “And I think you should be the one to tell her.”

I stopped. “Me? Why me?”

He cocked his head to one side. “I think it would be fitting.”

“Where did you say she was? New York?”

“Yes. Westchester. Her name is Anna Hastings now.”

“She got married?”

“Of course. She wasn’t one to pine away the rest of her life. Her husband died some years ago, though.”

“Well . . . it’s an hour later in New York. I guess I could call her in a couple of hours.”

Leibovitz looked shocked. “You don’t handle something like that over the phone, boy.”

“You mean I should go to New York?”

“Is it so difficult? Would it take so much time out of your life? There and back in a day. Drive to Atlanta, get on a plane, you’re there.”

I tried to remember my hospital schedule, then realized with some embarrassment that I had taken the next three days off. After all, the man and woman who raised me had just died. I knew I’d need some time to clear up any final legal business, make arrangements about the estate and so on. But the simple fact was that all of that could wait a few days, if not months.

“What the hell?” I said. “Okay. I’d like to hear what she’s been doing all these years. Maybe get her side of this story.”

Leibovitz smiled. “I think you’ll be glad you did.”

In the end, I was glad. I flew into Newark on Monday, rented a car, and after a one-handed wrestling match with a cheap service-station map, navigated the rented Ford Tempo up to Westchester.

The house was smaller than I’d expected. Anna was supposedly a physician, after all, and she’d had the good fortune to practice medicine before the advent of so-called healthcare reform. Hell, she’d probably started practicing before they even established Medicaid.

I parked the Ford and walked up a flower-lined sidewalk right out of Fairplay, Georgia, to the modest suburban house. I felt a little overdressed. I’d worn a nice suit in case the former Anna Kaas turned out to own the biggest palace in suburban New York. I pushed the bell twice, assuming — as I had learned to do in medical practice — that anyone over the age of sixty had some degree of hearing loss. I wondered if Anna would have a strong German accent.

When the door opened, I was struck dumb. I stood face to face with a mirror image of the woman from the photograph in my grandfather’s box. There was only one difference. Anna’s eyes had been dark. This woman’s eyes were blue. She looked at me strangely, as if trying to decide whether or not I was dangerous. The Armani suit and gold Montblanc fountain pen finally tipped the scales in my favor.

“Can I help you?” she asked in a perfectly American voice.

I fished a Day-Timer notebook out of my inside coat pocket and took out the weathered photograph from my grandfather’s box. I handed it to the woman. She looked at it for what seemed like a long time. Then she took my hand and pulled me inside.

She led me to a carpeted living room that held a sofa, two Queen Anne chairs, and a set of tall glass-fronted bookcases, which displayed a menagerie of porcelain figurines and heavy ornamental picture frames. The figurines looked like Hummels.

“Wait here,” she instructed. “I’ll only be a moment.”

I walked over to the window and looked out at the well-kept lawn. Had Nurse Anna Kaas ever dreamed she would wind up here? I was still standing like that when I heard someone catch a breath.

“My God,” said a deeper, almost rasping voice.

I turned. Standing in the foyer outside the living room was a woman of at least seventy-five, with silver hair and dark brown eyes. She leaned on the younger woman’s arm for support. She stared at me for some moments, then said, “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Are you Doctor Anna Hastings?” I asked, though I knew she had to be. “Formerly Anna Kaas?”

“Is Mac dead?”

“Yes, ma’am. He died three days ago. It was an accident. A helicopter crash. My grandmother died with him.”

The old woman nodded slowly, then stepped away from her support and walked across the carpet in measured steps. She stopped in front of me. I wanted to be polite, but my gaze kept wandering to the eyes of the younger woman, who was staring at me with a strange intensity.

Anna Hastings reached out and laid her hand against my cheek. “You could be him,” she said softly. “I almost can’t bear to look at you.”

“She could be you,” I said, nodding toward the young woman. Although, now that I had had time to study her, I saw subtle differences. The younger woman was more slender than Anna had ever been, and her cheekbones a bit higher.

“Katarina,” said Anna Hastings. “My granddaughter.”

I smiled at her. “I’m Mark McConnell. The third,” I added quickly. “That never really seemed relevant, but now—”

“You would have finished your training by now, of course,” Anna said. “You are a doctor?”

I nodded. “Emergency medicine.”

She laughed softly at that. “Fighter-pilot mentality.”

Her German accent was hardly noticeable. In fact, she probably spoke better English than I did.

“Sit down, sit down,” the old woman insisted. “Katarina will make some coffee.”

“Well, I really just came to . . . to give you the news.”

“All the way from the back of beyond and already you want to leave? Sit down, Doctor.”

It was on my way to the sofa that I noticed the picture. When I first looked at the shelves, I’d lost it among the others. Now it stood out like a beacon. It was black-and-white, with almost the same tint as the photo I had brought with me. It showed a man in his early thirties standing against a dark wooden beam. His intense countenance and lanky body could have been my own.

It was all so clear now. In the dark of that last night in the cottage, they had taken turns standing against the beam and taking each other’s picture, probably thinking that their images on film would be all that survived. I felt a hard lump in my throat.

“I’d like to ask you some questions, if you don’t mind,” I said.

“Are you married, Doctor?” the old woman asked.

“What? Married? No.”

“People wait too long nowadays. Katarina is the same.”

“Oma,” her granddaughter said with embarrassment.

Anna Hastings laughed. “Too picky, too shy. No one is good enough. Go make us some coffee, girl.”

Anna used one age-spotted hand to shoo me away from the shelves. “You go too, Doctor. Help her find the sugar. NutraSweet for her, of course. Go on, both of you.”

“But I really do have some questions—”

The former Anna Kaas put her hand over her mouth. It was then that I saw the great effort it was taking to maintain her composure. “Your grandfather was a great man,” she said. “A brave and a loyal man. What else does anyone need to know? There’s plenty of time to talk about the past. Go make the coffee. Please.”