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AMONG MY GRANDFATHER’S PAPERS, I had found a small black-and-white photograph, taken in 1949, not quite square. It showed a middle-aged man staring intently into the camera. A faint smile across the lips, he wears a pin-striped suit, with a white handkerchief neatly folded into the breast pocket, and a white shirt. His polka-dot bow tie emphasizes a slightly mischievous air.

For two years, a photocopy of the photograph remained on the wall above my desk, competing with Miss Tilney. Her role now resolved, I looked at him daily, taunted and frustrated. “If you’re any good, you’ll find me,” he seemed to say. Occasionally prompted, I tried what I could to rise to the challenge, halfhearted efforts, inevitably fruitless without a name. I scanned the photograph, tried facial recognition on the Web. Nothing.

Time and again I returned to the modest information on the back of the photograph. “Herzlichste Grüsse aus Wien, September 1949,” it said, “Warmest wishes from Vienna.” The signature was firm and indecipherable.

I tried to squeeze what I could from these words, the small red stamp, the name and address of the photographic studio where the photograph had been taken. “Foto F. Kintschel, Mariahilferstrasse 53, Wien VI.” The street still existed, but the studio was long gone. I spent hours trying to decipher the signature, without success, and closely examined the two other photographs of the same man. That dated “London, 8 August 1951” was the same size, with a stamp from the Kintschel photo studio, but in blue. On that summer day, he wore a regular tie with diagonal stripes, a handkerchief again in the breast pocket. Was he slightly cross-eyed?

The third photograph was larger than the others, postcard size. It bore no studio mark or signature. He wore a dark tie with diamond pattern and a handkerchief. The handwritten note on the back says “Wien-London, Oktober 1954.” He’d put on a little weight, the outlines of a double chin now visible. He was cross-eyed. In blue ink, he wrote, “Zur freundlichen Erinnerung an einen Grossvater”—“In kind memory of a grandfather.” Had a grandfather died? Had he become a grandfather?

“Warmest wishes from Vienna, September 1949”

When I first asked my mother about the man, she said she didn’t really know who he was. I persisted. Well, she said, she did once ask Leon who the man was. “He said it wasn’t important, that was all.” So she let the matter lie, with doubts of her own.

So Leon knew who he was, and he kept two more photographs of the same man, one taken in August 1951, the other in October 1954. Why did Leon keep the three photographs if the man wasn’t important?

In fact, my mother later clarified, she found them among Rita’s papers, after she died in 1986. She then moved them over to Leon’s papers, where they remained for a decade. With a little more pushing, my mother shared a fleeting memory from childhood, obscure but real. Perhaps she recalled a visit by this man, to the apartment in Paris, on the rue Brongniart, after the war. An argument ensued between Leon and Rita, voices were raised, there was anger, then reconciliation. “My parents had many arguments like that.” Intense, then forgotten.

The information percolated slowly. Perhaps the man in the bow tie was connected to Leon’s solitary departure from Vienna in January 1939. The general circumstances—the arrival of the Germans, banishment from the Reich—were clear enough, but Leon’s decision to leave alone, without his wife or young child, was less easily explicable. Maybe the man in the bow tie was involved in some way in Rita’s life in Vienna after Leon left. Maybe he was a Nazi. Rita spent three years separated from husband and child, fleeing Vienna only in October 1941, a day before Eichmann locked the doors shut.