“Looks like a salvage yard.” I hold out my hands by way of apology. “And the wait time to get in is at least an hour.”

“Really?”

“No less than forty-five minutes.”

Mimi decides we should at least walk the perimeter. The graveyard is surrounded by a thick stone wall, but every so often, there’s a small portal that you can look through.

“You can’t see much,” Mimi tells me. “The gravestones are stuck in the ground at all sorts of angles. It looks as though someone dropped them out of the sky and just left them where they landed.”

I don’t bother looking. Graveyards are graveyards.

“I’d like to be able to read the inscriptions on the stones.”

“They’re probably in Yiddish.”

“Probably.”

“Or Czech.”

“Rabbi Loew is supposed to be buried here,” says Mimi. “According to legend, Loew is the guy who created the Prague Golem.”

I know the story of the Golem. A brute made out of mud. Brought to life to defend the community. The desperate fantasy of a desperate people. Gods and angels, Wonder Woman and Superman. Every culture has heroes and talismans that it looks to for protection.

Mimi comes away from the wall and brushes herself off. “The problem with creating monsters is that, in the end, it’s impossible to control them.”

At the Battle of Hattin, the Christian army under the command of Guy of Lusignan carried the True Cross into battle and was slaughtered by the Muslim army under the command of Saladin. At Wounded Knee, the people put on Ghost Dance shirts in the hope that they would stop bullets.

“Let’s get that coffee,” says Mimi. “And while we’re at it, maybe we can figure out what we want to bring home from Prague to put in the new bundle.”

ONE OF THE FIRST PLACES we went when we started following Uncle Leroy’s trail was Paris. When we got home, we went out to Alberta to visit Mimi’s mother and to give her the initial report.

“Where are the children?” was the first thing Bernie wanted to know.

“They’re grown, Mum. Tally is working in Ottawa, and Nathan is finishing up at UBC.”

“No reason you can’t bring them along.”

“I’ll tell them to call you.”

“I don’t want a phone call. I get all sorts of phone calls. People call to tell me about my tax problems and my dirty ducks.”

“Ducts, Mum. And you don’t have a tax problem. Those are scams.”

“I know they’re scams,” said Bernie. “I tell them I don’t have any dirty ducks but that I got a bunch of geese that could use a good scrubbing. You know what they say?”

“They hang up.”

“So, did you find out what happened to Leroy?”

Mimi shook her head. “You have to remember, Uncle Leroy was in Paris more than a hundred years ago.”