Lost Girls

''Hot as you can make them,'' I tell her with forced relish, and she curls her upper lip toward her nose in a troubling expression I take to mean Oh, yeah, pal? We'll see about that.

''So,'' I say after the waitress has left. ''What's so interesting about our friend Mr. Dundurn's life?''

''Not much, I expect. Aside from the fact that he was there on the night Mrs. Arthurs described to you. The night the Lady went through the ice.''

Above our heads a commentator's voice interrupts to announce, ''We've just learned that he's suffered a severe concussion, ladies and gentlemen. Johnson will be scratched for at least the first two games with Chicago.'' The voice is excited, even cheerful, slowing only to emphasize concussion and then instantly picking up again.

''How do you know he was there?'' I ask.

''Well, he doesn't actually come out and say it, of course. But he slips in enough hints to make it clear.''

Pittle clicks open the satchel and pulls a single sheet out from the manuscript pile before him, holds it close to his face, and reads through its trembling creases.

'' 'The men watched her fall through, and not a soul among us said a word. For they knew what they had done. And while there was a darkness settling upon their hearts, there was also the relief that the town was once more safe from physical or moral threat.' Did you notice the slip-up in there? 'Not a soul among us said a word'? Dundurn's manuscript is entirely handwritten, but the us stands on the page uncorrected. I think this shows that the entire work is nothing less than a personal recounting of the event. A confession, really.''

The waitress returns with our beers and slides them before us, watery suds spilling over the sides and rushing into a moat around the base of the glass. Without a word both of us pick them up and glug down the first third in sudden thirst. Then, a moment later, first Pittle and then I fill the air with belches passed through clenched lips, a sound like the release of radiator steam. Neither of us excuses himself before speaking again.

''So he knew her,'' I say.

''Everybody knew her. But he might've been the only one who found out what her story was. Or some of the pieces, anyway.''

''And?''

''She was Polish. Not a great thing to be in Europe during the early forties. Dundurn doesn't say how he found even this out, because she had no passport or documentation of any kind. But I suspect he went out and visited her where she was camping in the woods near the lake. To interview her.''

''Maybe for other reasons too.''

''What do you mean?''

''Mrs. Arthurs told me that some of the men in town would go out there to spend a little time with her. Before the wives found out.''

''I see.''

Everywhere I turn to look at something other than Pittle's face my eyes meet only televisions. Hanging on chains in the corners, pull-down screens taking up entire walls, three smaller units nesting in the boxes above the bar originally designed as wine racks. Each one showing a different athletic spectacle: a body-sculpting show hosted by a man whose skin is so oiled and packed with sinew, he looks like a sausage fried to the point of bursting; a stock-car race where cameras set on the dashboards showed just how tedious driving around an oval track two hundred times must be; a highlights tape of downhill skiing accidents featuring one neck-snapping accident after another.

''Okay, so one way or another, Dundurn was researching the Lady,'' I say, taking another gulp of beer. ''What did he get?''

Pittle lifts his hands and they hover over the papers like two metal detectors searching the sand for buried change. Inside his beard something quivers.

''Not much, in the end,'' he says. ''Her English was almost nonexistent, and I don't think she was much of a talker anyway. What we do know is that she arrived here in the summer of 1945 as a DP, but without official papers, as I've said, which suggests she'd managed to--''

''DP?''

'' 'Displaced person.' The government's term for all people left homeless by the war. A refugee. Somebody that made it out.''

''But how'd she get here?''

''Who knows? She'd probably been on the road in Canada for a while, camping out, staying away from the larger cities and towns where they'd be more likely to ask questions. As for how she got out of Europe? We have to be talking about a very resourceful woman here. Keep in mind that Poland was the first place to undergo Nazi 'Germanizing.' The Nuremberg anti-Jewish laws served as the model for similar regulations aimed against the Polish people generally. Basically this meant complete loss of rights, nationhood, name. Children between six and sixteen were forcibly taken away from their families to be brought up as Germans, a policy that entailed their being sent to institutions to be 'reeducated' in order to erase their language, culture, history along with everything else. And they were the lucky ones. The others, the 'undesirable elements,' were sent to the camps.''

''All this is in Dundurn's papers?''

''Mostly the transcripts to Nuremberg Trial Number 8, actually. I did some research of my own.''

Pittle's face exhibits no pride in this, his voice offering only the evenness of professional clarification. Above me the same commentator states the word concussion for a second time.

''What made her 'undesirable,' then?''

''She was a single mother, which suggests in itself that her husband either fought in the Polish military or was one of the first ones sent to the camps. Maybe he worked in the government, was an academic or a writer--one of the ones they took care of right away. There could have been secondary concerns as well: after the Jews and the Gypsies came Communists, the mentally ill, pregnant women, homosexuals. She may have been one or all of them. But my bet is she wasn't thinking of herself at the time. She had to get out of there in order to save her daughters no matter who she was--they would have been just the right age to be taken away. Not an easy thing, but she pulled it off. It would've made a great story, but she certainly didn't tell it to Dundurn. As far as we know she didn't tell it to anyone.''

''And so she ended up here.''

''One of the camp barracks at Auschwitz was called Kanada. It was where all their food, clothes, gold, jewelry, and other confiscated goods were kept. It was real, but in another sense it was totally imaginary. Somehow the name had meaning for all of them. A safe, protected place. I didn't know that. Did you?''

''No, I didn't.''

Then the waitress arrives with two baskets of slippery-looking wings, each liberally glazed with a fluorescent red ointment. ''Suicides,'' she announces as she sets them down and drops two roll-ups of cutlery into the puddles around our now empty beers. Pittle orders two more.

''They look good,'' I lie, staring into the piled limbs in front of me. Pittle says nothing in return, his small hands already clenched before his mouth, grappling with his food.

''Well, now,'' I push on, pulling a wing of my own out of the carnage. ''She got out, made it over. What I'm wondering is why she wasn't given official refugee status when she got here.''

''Maybe she didn't ask for it. Maybe she was too used to running. And even if she had asked, her acceptance wouldn't have been a foregone conclusion. Canada's immigration and refugee policies in 1945 were not what you'd call liberal, particularly given that a world war had just come to an end. We were way behind the other Allied nations in accepting DPs, and in the end it took a couple of years for the government to really open the doors. So she must have figured she'd be better off going up north and trying to melt into some backwater on her own.''

''And you think that's why they took the girls away from her? Because she didn't have the right papers?''

''Could've been. But more likely because she was different. Noncommunicative, husbandless. And from what you've told me there were also rumors that she had been providing certain--that she was 'morally questionable,' according to the language of the day. Based on this they probably also assumed she was nuts, or called her that in order to do what they wanted with her. Either way they locked her up, shipped off the kids, and forgot all about it. That is, until she broke out from the hospital and started inviting the local kids for a walk in the woods. The rest is