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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.”
    “Ratten_berg_.”
    “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 gemütlich .”
    “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