The Book of Lost Names(107)

Kühn and I follow her outside, where a white-haired man in a light trench coat stands several steps away, his back to us as he looks out over the city.

“Herr?” Mila asks, her tone firm and steely, and the man turns slowly, the hint of a polite smile on his face.

But then his smile falls and his jaw goes slack as his eyes meet mine, and I’m as frozen as he is. I’m aware of Kühn saying something beside me, but his words sound very distant, because suddenly, the years are falling away, and I’m walking toward the man, my head spinning. I’m seeing a ghost, and though my brain tells me it’s impossible, my heart knows it isn’t.

“You got the library wrong, Eva,” the man says in French, his voice cracking with emotion.

There are tears in my eyes now, for it’s a voice I was sure I would never hear again. “Rémy? How can it be?”

He smiles, and then he’s walking toward me, too, and there are tears streaming down his face. “We were supposed to meet on the steps of the Mazarine, Eva,” he says, taking my hands in his. They’re rough with age now, but somehow they fit around mine in just the same way they did a lifetime ago.

“I waited for you there,” I murmur. “I waited a long time.”

“I thought you were dead,” he says. “I went back to Aurignon at the end of 1947. Père Clément had passed away, but a few people in the Resistance who knew who you were told me you’d been killed during the war.”

I close my eyes. In the aftermath of the war, chaos, confusion, and misunderstanding had reigned. “I was told you were dead, too.”

“I confronted a traitor—a gendarme named Besnard, if you remember him—and I was gravely wounded in ’forty-four. I was evacuated to England. I was in the hospital for a very long time, and then, because of a diplomatic snafu, it was 1947 before I was cleared to return to the Continent. I went to the Mazarine, Eva, for months, just in case you were alive. But you never came.”

“I waited there for two years,” I whisper. “I convinced myself that you were trying to leave me a message in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It’s what kept me holding on.”

His eyebrows go up. “You found the book? It was a message, Eva—I intended to fake my death if things went wrong with Besnard. I just didn’t count on being laid up in the hospital, and then tangled in visa paperwork, for so long.”

I wipe my cheeks, but my tears are still falling. “I thought I was crazy. I finally convinced myself I was wrong, that I was holding on to a ghost. I left for America at the end of 1946.”

“America? Where?”

“Florida.”

“Well, imagine that. I’ve lived in New Mexico since 1951.” He smiles. “It turned out that Los Alamos had a place for a chemist like me after I completed my degree in England.”

I shake my head in disbelief. “But what are you doing here, Rémy?”

“I saw the book in the New York Times article. I came right away.” He takes a deep breath, never breaking eye contact. “I came back for the book sixty years ago, Eva, before I confronted Besnard, the day I left you the Twain book. You were gone already—I assumed you were on your way safely to Switzerland—and I was praying that you’d left me one last message. But the Nazis had already looted the library. I realized I would never know.”

I stare at him. This feels like a dream, but it’s not. Otto Kühn is on the steps behind me, silently watching this fairy tale unfold, and Mila has retreated to the shadows. We’re in Berlin, the very heartland of our old enemy, and we’ve found each other again, despite the impossible odds. “I did, Rémy. I left you a message.”

“You did?” He holds my gaze, his eyes warm, familiar. “What was it, my Eva?”

My Eva. After all these years, I am still his, and he is still mine. “épouse-moi. Je t’aime. That’s what I wrote. I—I love you, Rémy. I always have.”

“I love you, too, Eva. And if the offer is still open, my answer is yes.” And then he closes the final inches between us, and his lips are on mine, and I’m twenty-five again, my whole life ahead of me rather than behind, all the chapters still unwritten.





Author’s Note

While researching my previous novel, The Winemaker’s Wife, which is set in the Champagne region of France during World War II, I came across a few mentions of the important role that forgers played in the Resistance. It was something I hadn’t considered before, but as I read about champagne caves and the smuggling of arms, in the back of my mind lingered images of the brave people who used their artistic ability and scientific ingenuity to produce convincing documents that allowed innocent people to survive.

By the time I finished writing The Winemaker’s Wife, my curiosity was fully piqued, but I still wondered whether writing about forgers could be the basis for a book. Then I read Adolfo Kaminsky: A Forger’s Life by Sarah Kaminsky and A Good Place to Hide: How One French Community Saved Thousands of Lives During World War II by Peter Grose—two excellent nonfiction books that explore forgery during the war—and I knew I was onto something. There was so much more to the life of a World War II forger than I had imagined.

But it still felt like something was missing—that is, until my agent, Holly Root, emailed me a New York Times article about the Nazi looting of books—and the fact that most major German libraries are still full of books stolen in the waning days of World War II. As I read the article, penned by art writer Milton Esterow, the final piece of the puzzle clicked into place: I could write a novel about forgery, framed by a story about a looted book that meant everything to someone. It would allow me to dive deep into the research about both forgery techniques and the fascinating history of Nazi looting and share that with you, all wrapped up in a story about love, loss, courage, and the highest stakes.