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(Manny saw the citation.) Finally, he came across a later clipping from the Detroit Jewish News , of all places, from his professor, Jean Paul Slusser, describing Raoul as one of his brightest students in his thirty years of teaching there. (Had Raoul known that his favorite professor was Jewish?)
    Manny had taken along the Letters and Dispatches volume and the letters to the grandfather, and he put a few relevant letters together with bits and pieces from the archive to get a fuller picture of the young man: how popular a student he was among his peers; how much he preferred the students here to the snobbish Swedish kids; how he loved wearing his sneakers and eating hot dogs and wouldn’t join a fraternity because it would isolate him from other student strata; and how he loved hitchhiking all around the country on school holidays. As he explained to his grandfather, “When you travel like a hobo, everything’s different. You have to be on the alert the whole time. You’re in close contact with new people every day. Hitchiking gives you training in diplomacy and tact.” What a perfect training for his later role as diplomat.
    So Raoul got a full robust education in America, just as his grandfather had hoped when he sent him here and not to Swedish or European architecture schools. (And he sent him to a public and not an Ivy school.) Here he learned up close about the land, about democracy, about different ethnicities, and maybe about who he was , at heart. For Manny perceived quickly that all his best pals were male; when he traveled about, to Chicago or Mexico, it was always with his male friends. Nary a woman was mentioned in his three-year sojourn here, let alone one dated on a regular basis—circumstantial evidence, to be sure.
    In his honor, now there was a plaque and a distinguished lecture series, by architects, some of whom, it turned out, hardly knew who he was. Well, that was about par for the course. In fact, it seemed that no one at the school, or the university, knew much about RW (including a humanities dean, who had never heard of him). Several faculty were skeptical that he had ever attended Michigan. (“Are you sure it was the same Wallenberg ?”) Well, why not? After all, he had made his mark in the world beyond Michigan, beyond architecture. And beyond the classrooms in the streets of humanity.
    One memorable incident stood out, when Raoul was hitchhiking and was kidnapped and in real danger, taken into in the back of the car of three young gangsters, who brandished a loaded revolver. He gave them his wallet, made a casual joke, and convinced them to leave him in a deserted ground—not bad for the young lad. Raoul tossed off the whole thing, to his grandfather, as nothing to fret over. He had escaped any real injury, and exhibited supreme cool and calm—perhaps preparing him for his future adventures with larger gangsters: the Arrow Cross Nazis of Budapest. Manny came to realize how playful and witty was this Raoul, how adaptable, brave and dedicated, back in his late twenties. And how highly talented. He was a figure in the making, to himself, to Grandfather perhaps, and later, to the world. A singular soul. Was it Manny’s job to complete the making of that unfinished identity, with his own vision and the facts as they were given? Well, he surmised, let that be part of my task, my mission. Help him out, in history at least. Though that was a long way off, just yet.
    Manny returned home, strangely fortified, feeling he had been in touch with the real man behind the legend, the thin, darkly-complected figure hidden within the clouds of history. Even Raoul’s small but clear handwriting, in the one notebook there, gave Manny a surge of intimacy. Oh, he knew, driving back from the Manchester airport, that he had only scratched the surface of who Raoul was, but that was enough. A modest breakthrough. Maybe he’d try to stop in Sweden sometime during the spring trip? He had a friend in Lindingö, a