“Don’t bother. I called a guy I know at the NCIC. There’s no Lamont Woolsey in the system. And I mean nowhere. He doesn’t exist. I’ll check back with you later.”
“What are you up to?”
“I’m not even sure myself. How can I tell you? Alexis Dupree has locks of hair in a scrapbook. Maybe we’ve got John Wayne Gacy living in St. Mary Parish. You ever think of that?” he replied.
CLETE WAS RIGHT. How does a man like Alexis Dupree end up in our midst? From what I could find out about him through Google, he had been living in the United States since 1957 and was naturalized ten years later. Had he worked for both British and American intelligence?
Were there any people alive who could authenticate his claim that he was a member of the French underground? The articles posted on the Internet seemed to replicate one another, and none of them contained any source except Dupree.
That afternoon I called a friend in the FBI and another friend at the INS and a friend whose drinking had cost him his career at the CIA. Of the three, the drunk was the most helpful.
“It’s possible your man is telling the truth,” he said.
“Telling the truth about what?” I said.
“Working with MI6 or one of our intelligence agencies.”
“Maybe he was never an inmate at Ravensbrück,” I said. “Maybe he was a guard there. I don’t know what to believe about him.”
“After the war, we gave citizenship to the scientists who built V-1 and V-2 rockets and helped Hitler kill large numbers of civilians in London. During the 1950s any European who was anti-Communist pretty much got a free pass with the INS. The consequence was we gave safe harbor to a bunch of shitbags. No matter how you cut it, you’ll probably never find out this guy’s real identity.”
“Somebody out there knows who he is,” I said.
“You don’t get it, Dave. This guy is whatever somebody else says he is. Any file you find on Dupree was written by someone who created a work of fiction. You’re a fan of George Orwell. Remember what he said about history? It ended in 1936. Unless you want to get drunk again, leave this crap alone.”
His statement was not one I wanted to hear. I tried to dismiss his words as those of a cynic, a CIA agent who had aided in the installation of a Chilean dictator, armed state-sponsored terrorists in northern Nicaragua, and been the associate of men who operated torture chambers and were responsible for the murder of liberation theologians. Unfortunately, those who give witness to the darker side of our history are usually those who helped precipitate it and, as a result, make it easy for us to discount their stories. Sometimes I wondered if their greatest burden was their eventual realization that they collaborated with others in the theft of their souls.
“We’re going to find out who this guy is. I don’t care how long it takes,” I said.
There was a pause, then my friend who had destroyed his liver and two marriages and the lives of his children hung up the phone. At quitting time, I went home in a funk and sat on a folding chair by the bayou and stared at the current flowing south toward the Gulf of Mexico. Clete had said that our own John Wayne Gacy was perhaps living just down the road, ensconced in an antebellum home that could have been a backdrop for a Tennessee Williams play. Except the comparison was inadequate. Gacy had been a serial killer of young men and boys whose bodies he interred in the walls and crawl spaces of his home. Gacy may not have been psychotic, but there was no question he was mentally ill. Supposedly, his last words to one of the guards who escorted him to his execution were “Kiss my ass.” Alexis Dupree was totally rational and by no means mentally ill, and if he had been a member of the SS, his crimes were probably far worse and more numerous than Gacy’s. Every time I reached a conclusion about him, I found myself using the word “if.” Why was that? In the age of Google and the Freedom of Information Act, I had been unable to find one incontestable fact about his life.
I tried to think about Alexis Dupree in terms of what he wasn’t. He claimed to have been a prisoner at Ravensbrück. But if he had been a guard or a junior officer at Ravensbrück and not an inmate, would it make sense for him to draw attention to his association with the camp whose survivors would quickly recognize his photograph? If Alexis Dupree had been a member of the SS, he probably worked at a camp he never made mention of, maybe one that was liberated by the Soviets and whose records were confiscated and not shared with the Americans or the British or the French. When the German army began to collapse on the Eastern Front, the SS fled west and left thousands of bodies in freight cars and in train yards or stacked like cordwood outside crematoriums. They put on the uniforms of the regular German army, hoping to surrender to American or British personnel rather than to the Russians, who summarily shot them.
Alexis Dupree was a smart man. Maybe he had taken the deception one step further and tattooed a prison number on his left forearm and played the role of survivor and veteran of the French Resistance, composed primarily of Communists. Dupree may have been many things, but leftist was not one of them. Maybe he’d been an informer. He certainly met the standard of a self-serving turncoat. Had he been a friend of the famous combat photographer Robert Capa? Out of all the possibilities and claims about Dupree’s past, I was positive that one was a lie. I also believed the photo of the Republican soldiers taken at the siege of Madrid and inscribed by Capa to Dupree was another fraud perpetrated on the world by the Dupree family. All of Capa’s work had already been published, including a lost satchel of photos discovered in Mexico in the 1990s. Plus, Capa was a socialist who probably would have been repelled by an elitist like Dupree.
Where does that leave us? I asked myself. The boughs of the cypress trees were as brittle and delicate as gold leaf in the late sun. An alligator gar was swimming along the edge of the lily pads, its needle-nose head and lacquered spine and dorsal fin parting the surface with a fluidity that was more serpent than fish. The great cogged wheels on the drawbridge were lifting its huge weight into the air, silhouetting its black outline against a molten sun. Then the wind gusted and a long shaft of amber sunlight seemed to race down the center of the bayou, like a paean to the close of day and the coming of night and the cooling of the earth, as though vespers and the acceptance of the season were a seamless and inseparable part of life that only the most vain and intransigent among us would deny.
Meditations upon mortality become cheap stuff and offer little succor when it comes to dealing with evil. The latter is not an abstraction, and ignoring it is to become its victim. The earth abides forever, but so does the canker inside the rose, and the canker never sleeps.
I wondered if Clete was right: that at some point you must become willing to put hurt on an old man. Those words had an effect on me that was like a saw cutting through bone. You do not give your enemy power, and you do not let him remake you in his image. I picked up a pinecone and tossed it in a high arc into the middle of the current, as though I had fought my way through a long mental process and was freeing myself of it. But my heart was as heavy as an anvil in my chest, and I knew I would have no peace until I found the killers of Blue Melton and brought Tee Jolie back to her Cajun home on the banks of Bayou Teche.
AT THE SUPPER table, I couldn’t concentrate on what Molly and Alafair were talking about. “It’s going to be a big event, Dave,” Alafair said.
“You mean the Sugar Cane Festival? Yeah, it always is,” I said.
“The Sugar Cane Festival was a month ago. I was talking about the 1940s musical revue,” she said.
“I thought you were talking about next year,” I said.
Molly let her gaze settle on my face and kept it there until I blinked. “What happened today?” she asked.
“Somebody burglarized Clete’s office. Probably friends of Varina Leboeuf,” I said.
“What were they looking for?” she asked.
“Why put yourself in the mind of perps? It’s like submerging your hand in an unflushed toilet,” I said.
“Way to go, Dave,” Alafair said.