“It does sound a little unusual,” Simon admitted. “Hadn’t you ever met?”
“Not since we were kids. We were born and lived here, till 1940, when the Germans were advancing on Paris. I was too young to remember much about it, but everyone was very frightened, and my father said we must go away. He wouldn’t go himself, but he sent us with the wife of a neighbor — my mother died when we were very young. Somewhere on the road we were strafed by a plane, and the woman was killed. Charles and I went on alone.”
“Was he older or younger than you?”
“Two years older. But we were both children. Somehow, presently we got separated. I just went on, helplessly I guess, with the stream of refugees who were trudging away to the southwest. Somewhere, after that — it all seems so far away and confused — I was picked up by an American couple who’d also been caught in the blitz. They took me to Bordeaux, and then afterwards to America. They were sweet people — they still are — and they hadn’t any children, and they treated me like their own. Later on, they were able to find out somehow that my father had died in a concentration camp. They adopted me legally, and I took their name.”
“So for all practical purposes, you really are an American.”
“I went to school in Chicago — Mr North is an accountant there — and now I’m a secretary in a mail-order house. And the only French I know is from high school.”
“Who was your father?”
“All I know about him is his name, Eli Rosepierre. And he was some sort of working jeweler.”
The Saint paused with his wine-glass half-way to his lips.
“Was he Jewish?”