Deadly Jewels (16 page)

 

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Plateau is bordered more or less by Sherbrooke Street in the south and Little Italy in the north, and encompasses the beautiful and extensive Parc de Lafontaine as well as picturesque houses with the old curving outside staircases that were outlawed after 1962. I used to live on the Plateau; a lot of people did.

The apartment was on the Avenue Mont-Royal, busy and bustling and filled with light and laughter, especially this late September Sunday afternoon when everyone knew that the winter was just holding its breath, waiting to move in. It was impossible to not be infected by the feeling, and I found myself smiling in spite of everything. “We'll figure it out,” I told Julian with assurance. “I know we will.”

He had just maneuvered his TT into a very small parking space and was looking around for parking signs. “Relax, they're not going to tow you, you're a cop.”

“You think cops never get towed?”

“Yeah, that's pretty much exactly what I think.”

The apartment was up a narrow dusty set of stairs; more crime-scene tape at the top, but no one standing guard. Julian fitted a key into the lock and swung the door open.

Patricia Mason had lived a no-nonsense life. Either that, or she'd just moved in, or was just moving out. No pictures on the pale green walls. Cardboard boxes stacked in corners, filled with books and textiles of some sort. Minimal cooking gear in the kitchen. Only the area around the desk indicated life and personality: books stacked high on the floor around it, pages of manuscript, a large monitor, a decent lamp, pens at the ready. It looked as though she'd just stepped out.

As, in a real sense, she had.

I swung around to Julian. “Computer?”

“Down at the lab.”

“Did you get a look?”

He shrugged. “Cursory. Nothing interesting. Lots of historical sites bookmarked in her browser, e-mail correspondence with other historians, notes for the dissertation. Didn't have time to read it all.”

“Anything from Avner?”

“Not that I saw.”

I continued my walk around her apartment. Bedroom, clothing all neatly on hangers, very much mix-and-match; her colors had been browns and tans, the occasional pale yellow. Julian had followed me in. “Mousy,” he said.

“Understated.” I turned around. “What are we missing? It's like a hotel room here. There's no personality, no sense of who she was, what she was doing. She was passionate, Julian. She was insane about what she had discovered. Why don't I feel anything here?”

“She must have kept that part of her someplace else.”

“Right!” I snapped my fingers. “At school! Graduate students get their own carrels at the library, they can lock them. Anything important, she'd keep there. Round-the-clock monitoring!”

Julian looked bemused. “How do you know?”

“I did graduate studies once, too.” I smiled. “And how do you think I met my husband? Graduate studies at McGill after he left Boston.”

“All right, then: lead on, McDuff,” said Julian, cheerfully misquoting Shakespeare.

I wasn't as sure of myself as I wanted him to think. “Do you think the diamond will be there?”

“No,” he said. “I think it's long gone. But we're going to find it anyway. Doesn't matter who took it.”

I sat down on Patricia's sofa; it felt sacrilegious, somehow. “Who else would know about it and want it, Julian? The audience is small.”

“I keep coming back to what changed,” he said. “That's what you always have to figure out: what it was that changed. For the killer. Something changed that made it necessary for him to kill Patricia. If we can figure out what that is, we're closer to finding him.”

“What changed is a whole list of things,” I said. I was feeling overwhelmed. My telephone rang: Claudia, checking in. “Where are you?”

“We're at Ailes de la Mode, Belle-Maman. We're fine.”

“Has your father called you?”

“No.” A note of puzzlement. “Why?”

“No reason,” I said. “I just wondered.”

And, as it turned out, would go on wondering for some time.

*   *   *

Julian dropped me off in front of the apartment. “Tomorrow,” he promised, “we'll make some progress. You look tired. Have a bath, have a good meal and a good sleep.”

It was probably going to take more than that, but I didn't say anything to him.

Ivan hadn't returned by 4:30—the witching hour at our house, when we have to leave for the airport or the kids will miss their commuter flight to Boston. Boston, where their father apparently still was.

Claudia and Lukas were in good spirits: the post-acquisition glow that teenagers get when they've spent all of their allowances—and done so without adult supervision and contrarian opinions. I walked them to the CATSA inspection station where their escort was waiting. “See you in two weeks, Belle-Maman!”

“Remember to call your father,” I said.

“Okay. Bye!”

Lukas, at the last minute, tore away from the line of commuters waiting to have their luggage and selves scanned, and ran back to me for a hug. “I love you, Belle-Maman!”

“I love you, too,
mon chou
,” I said automatically, mysteriously touched by the impetuous declaration of support. “Go on now.”

I found myself scanning the faces of the people coming through the gate from the previous flight, as though magically Ivan would appear among them. I was getting seriously worried. He'd said he'd be back before the kids left, and Ivan was very good about delivering on his promises.

I drove home with my heart pounding. Who could I call? Margery? Probably not; whatever was going on there, I didn't want to sound like the jealous second wife, checking up on her. Ivan's mother had recently been admitted to an assisted-care facility as her Parkinson's was making daily living more and more difficult for her; I wasn't going to alarm her for nothing. Ivan's father? He didn't use telephones; found that the CIA could better monitor him through electronic devices. Yeah: Ivan's father was in a facility, too, though one somewhat different from his wife's. Who did that leave? Ivan's manager at the casino?

The police?

Calm down, Martine. You've left him messages. He will come back when he comes back.

And if he doesn't?

You'll deal with it then.

Julian had left me with a folder filled with photographs, and once I got home I poured myself a glass of wine and sat down on the sofa to look through them. Anything to keep my mind occupied. Anything to keep my mind off Ivan.

A lot of the photographs were of the sealed rooms below the theater: the crates, the hatbox, the bones, the diamonds. I thought about him, the man who had been lying there in the cold and the dark all these years. Who was he? A guard at the vault? Someone who'd
bribed
a guard at the vault? Was he stealing the jewels for himself, or had somebody sent him, paid him well, and then delivered the coup de grâce in the back of his head?

Wait; he had to know something was amiss. You don't swallow potentially dangerous sharp objects unless you feel that there's no other way.

Were the diamonds he'd swallowed the whole of what was stolen? Or were they just the ones he'd decided to keep for himself?

Who was he?

I sighed and flipped through the photos: the bones were stark in the light of the camera's flash attachment, framed by deep shadows. When I'd been down there, all I'd seen were the shadows.

For all that people seemed to be talking about the power inherent in the royal jewels, it seems they hadn't saved this man. But perhaps part of the power came from that, from death. No one said that power was ever only used for good. Maybe it was something dark that fed on all the deaths associated with the jewels through the centuries. Maybe that's why Hitler wanted them so much.

I sighed and thumbed through them again. “You might see something,” Julian had said, offhand, when he gave me the folder. What was there to see?

Other than, of course, the memory ghost of Patricia, sharing her find, the lamp on her helmet making the shadows dance and move around us, her voice insisting that the credit was hers.

I shook it off, but the thought was still there. Had I not listened enough? Had I been too quick to summon the police? No: of course not. I worked in city government; I had an inkling, just an inkling, of the international storm that this was going to stir up. Of course I'd done what was right.

We were, I thought, being very rational about this whole thing. Well, why not: we lived in the twenty-first century in a developed country, of course we thought rationally. But from the start—and it was Patricia who had pointed it out—there was something profoundly irrational about the jewels. They were symbols, and symbols have nothing to do with logic and reasoning.

The answers were clearly somewhere else. Okay: let's say that it's 1938, and the decision's been taken to send the crown jewels along with the gold for Operation Fish to Canada. How many people knew?

I pulled out my notebook and pen and began a list. The people around Churchill. The people around the king. His daughters, for heaven's sake, and who knows how they might have chattered? The bankers, the people who amassed the securities and the gold, who escorted it on the
Emerald
. The Office for Strategic Services was in charge, and they passed it on to the folks at the Royal Navy. Whomever in the federal, provincial, and city government had been the contact here and made the agreement. Probably also the federal, provincial, and city police as well. The insurance officers at Sun-Life. Whoever escorted the jewels from Halifax to Montréal.

I sat back and looked at the list in dismay. Hundreds of people had known. Which brought us back to the beginning.

Think of it another way. Accept the magical properties of the jewels, the centuries of stored power, the opportunity to use them to accumulate more. They'd been stored away in Westminster, in London, trotted out for coronations and other affairs of state, then returned to safekeeping. If you are in the market for esoteric relics—and Hitler clearly was—then you're out of luck.

Unless you hear that they're on the move, and it was more than possible that spies in London had passed along the word.

You may not know the specifics of how they're getting out of the country, and that's okay. And you may not be able to get at them in transit—sure, there were U-boats in the north Atlantic, but that would be risky business, you could sink the
Emerald
instead of capturing her.

Halifax? Better to wait and see where they end up: everyone's on edge when they're being transported. Montréal. A vault. An insurance company. That's when you'd make your move. Early on, mind: what if these jewels could influence the outcome of the war? So early on, you figure out a way to steal them.

What a headache, I thought. Someone in London was going to be tasked with seeing just how many of the jewels currently residing at the Tower of London had been made, instead, in the camp at Buchenwald. Someone in London was going to be very unhappy.

So either one of the Quebecker guards had been paid off, or blackmailed, or somehow co-opted … or those bones belonged to a Nazi. I didn't see a lot of other alternatives.

And it didn't get me any closer to figuring out who'd killed Patricia.

*   *   *

The town they were nearest, Elias was told, was Weimar.

Weimar. He'd heard of it, of course; who hadn't? Anyone interested in any kind of cultural life had heard of Weimar,
nicht wahr
? He could name the famous Germans who'd lived in Weimar: Goethe, Schiller, Franz Liszt, Bach.

And now, Elias Kaspi.

They had been separated almost immediately, him and Ruth, with her questions still ringing in his ears. “Why are they doing this to us? What did we do wrong?” There were no answers to her questions and he offered her no comfort, something that he thought about, long and hard, as time went by. Should God ever allow him to go back, he would hold his wife, he would kiss her, he would give her what strength he had.

But then? Then, he was too dazed to do anything. They'd pulled her away from him and herded her with other women onto a train. “Where are they going?” Elias asked the man standing next to him, who shrugged indifferently. Everyone was looking out for themselves, dazed and anxious to please, as odd as that seemed—they still had some hope, then, that good behavior could keep them safe. That what they did as individuals mattered. No voices raised in anger, no accusations, no challenges. Go this way, stop here, move quickly! And they did it all.

The train ride through the night was cold; Elias huddled inside his coat and thought about Ruth, thought about Antwerp, thought about his diamonds. There had been other options; at the very beginning, Jews were allowed to buy visas, to go away to America. The Germans were eager for them to leave, so their property could be seized. He could have bought visas, but he'd thought it wouldn't come to that.

Perhaps, after all, this would not last long. Perhaps he would go back, someday, and Ruth would be there and safe, and they could take up their lives again. Coffee with Smuel and Paulie down the street. Arguing over the cost of precious stones.

They walked the last few kilometers along a paved road just as the sky was turning gray. There were guards marching beside them, guards with big terrible snarling dogs, and Elias pressed himself into the center of the ragged line of men. They each carried a small suitcase, and he was wondering what Ruth had packed in his. It seemed heavier with every step.

Once, he permitted himself a question. “What is that smell?” But no one answered.

They arrived at what was called the Little Camp right at dawn. It was extraordinarily beautiful: roses and trees, a small zoo with a bear behind the fence who watched them with melancholy as they walked past.