Free The Case of the One-Penny Orange: A Masao Masuto Mystery (Book Two) by Howard Fast Page A

lunch together?”
    â€œNo, just my son and I. I dropped my husband off at his studio on Wilshire. He had some pressing things to attend to.”
    â€œAt what time?”
    â€œI don’t remember, really. What difference does it make?”
    â€œTry to remember.”
    â€œI think about noontime.”
    â€œThen how did your husband get back here to the house?”
    â€œAfter I dropped Bernie off, I picked up Jack at his office. It was about one-thirty, maybe a little later.”
    â€œYour son’s name is Bernard?”
    â€œNo, it’s Bernie. He was named after my father.”
    â€œI see. Tell me something about your father, Mrs. Briggs.”
    â€œWhy? How can it have anything to do with this?”
    â€œIt might.”
    â€œWhat shall I tell you? I hardly remember my father.”
    â€œWas he wealthy?”
    â€œI suppose so. At one time. He was a publisher. Not a very large publisher, but a very good one.”
    â€œAnd what happened to his wealth?”
    â€œWhat happened to the wealth of any German in Hitler’s time who was Jewish or half Jewish? They took everything he had, everything. When we escaped and got to England, we had nothing but the clothes on our backs. Nothing. My mother found work as a cook in a little restaurant. Then when we got to America, she became a servant, a live-in cook. She was only sixty-one when she died — so young but worn out.” Her eyes filled with tears now.
    â€œI’m so sorry.”
    â€œNo, it’s all right. My husband gets furious when I talk about the old times. He doesn’t care for Jews, and once he heard me tell Bernie that I was Jewish, because after what my mother and father had been through, what else could I say, but he was in a rage with me. Why am I telling you all this?”
    â€œPlease, I want to hear about it. That’s why you’re talking to me.”
    She smiled through her tears. “I like you, Sergeant Masuto. I’ll tell you a story, and maybe you’ll understand better how I feel. I was once up for a very decent part, which I did not get. Well, I wasn’t right for it. But I was interviewed by the producer — his name was Deutschmaster. He was a Jew who had been a refugee and then had returned to Germany and become a very important producer. He’s dead now. Well, I noticed in the pocket of his vest, inside his jacket, he had two small silver spoons, and I asked him why. Do you know what he told me — he told me that when he was a refugee in Europe, he discovered that money could be worthless, of perhaps he had none, but he had a sterling silver spoon and it bought him life for a week. So you see, the two silver spoons he carried were, as he explained to me, a sort of symbolic reminder. Do you know what I am trying to say?”
    â€œI think so.” Then Masuto was silent, staring at her until he realized that she was becoming uncomfortable under his gaze. “Forgive me. Does the name Gaylord Schwartzman mean anything to you?”
    â€œNo. Should it?”
    â€œI don’t know. What concentration camp did your father die in, do you know?”
    â€œBuchenwald.”
    â€œAnd you say he was well-to-do once, but when your mother escaped she had nothing. But how could that be? I am not impugning anything you say, please believe me, but many others escaped and many of them brought small things with them — jewels, things of that sort.”
    â€œWhatever she had went to pay for our way out.”
    â€œYou said that you arrived in England penniless and empty-handed. Empty-handed — do you mean that literally?”
    â€œBut you are asking me to remember something that happened when I was three years old.”
    â€œTry. Luggage. A large handbag. Some treasured things — things that would be important to her but worthless even to the Nazis.”
    â€œWhat kind of things?”
    â€œPerhaps letters from your father —