Their mother had been left destitute when her husband left her, and moved to a poor slum area of Buenos Aires. And she supported her two boys by working at the National Museum of Fine Arts, as a curator in the department of French Impressionists. According to his school records, Joachim had been a good student, his brother less so, and reports of locals who still remembered her informed them that Liese had been a devoted mother.
It went on to say that when Joachim was fifteen, his mother, then fifty-four, met Francois Legrand, an art expert at the Louvre in Paris. They married two years later, and Liese and Joachim immigrated to Paris to be with Mr. Legrand. His twin, Javier, remained in Buenos Aires, supposedly to finish his studies there, living with family friends. According to all reports, he fell in with bad company, and within two years became involved in the drug trade, and eventually moved to Colombia, where he remained to this day, deeply embedded in the drug cartels. He was considered to be highly dangerous, and had been in prison several times in Mexico, Venezuela, and Colombia, and escaped each time with the help of his powerful connections.
When Joachim got to France at seventeen, he attended the lycée with high marks, obtained his baccalauréat degree, and spent two years studying art and literature at the Sorbonne. He then began to lose his focus, according to professors’ comments, dropped out, and had assorted minor jobs for five years in Paris, until he attended a respected butler school in London, obtained a job with the Earl of Ashbury, where he remained for a year, and was then hired by the Marquess and Marchioness of Cheshire, eventually became head butler, ran both of their homes, and remained in their employ for sixteen years until the recent death of the marchioness. He left the family on good terms at that time, and was highly thought of by the heir and current marquess. For the past four months he had been living with his mother in Paris, the widow of Francois Legrand. She remained employed and was eighty-one years of age. Upon arrival in France, she obtained a job also at the Louvre and within a year, went to work for an international organization that tracked down important works of art stolen by the Nazis and returned them to the heirs of the family they were taken from. She continued to be employed by them, and was active with the organization, to the present. She lived in the same apartment in Paris she had lived in for twenty-five years. Mr. Legrand died eight years after she came to France. The whereabouts of Javier von Hartmann were currently unknown, but he was believed to reside principally in Bogotá, Colombia.
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The report itself was surprisingly bloodless and cut and dried. Given its content, it was very unemotional and listed tragedy after tragedy that had occurred in Joachim’s life and his mother’s. It was chronological, appeared to be well researched and documented, from a wide variety of sources. It also stated that Joachim had no criminal record, had never had a problem with the law, had a clean driving record in England, and paid his taxes and was in good standing and had legal residency and a current work permit in the United Kingdom. All his documents were in order. The report concluded that everyone they had contacted spoke highly of Joachim as an honest, trustworthy person of high morals, with an excellent work ethic and reputation.
Olivia already knew some of it. She knew all about Javier now, more than she’d ever wanted to know, and Joachim had told her that he’d never seen his father. He hadn’t said that he’d been abandoned and renounced by him almost at birth, that his grandfather had been a Nazi war criminal, and had died in prison, or that his mother had lost both her father’s fortune and her husband’s support and within weeks had descended from a lifetime of comfort and luxury to abject poverty in the slums of Buenos Aires, where Joachim had grown up. Somehow, they had survived it, and she had supported them. The story it told was a sad one, but also a triumph of the human spirit, with a mother who had done everything possible to protect and nurture them, successfully with Joachim, and who had been unable to save Javier, who had defected to the drug lords in Colombia as soon as he could and had been unsalvageable despite all attempts to contact and rescue him.
Olivia had profound respect for Joachim and his mother. The person to fear in all of that was Javier, which had become clear to her in New York. It seemed unfair to punish Joachim now for the sins of his brother, and she didn’t want to fire him. He was an upstanding, honest man, and a terrific employee. But clearly, if his twin ever surfaced, which seemed unlikely, he posed a danger to them all, and particularly Joachim and his mother.