Deadly Jewels (38 page)

“Who knows?”

She looked surprised. “The English, of course. At only the highest levels. They'd already made the decision to keep it private. The substituted diamonds are part of a piece that isn't usually on display in the tower, and certainly when it is, none of the tourists gaping at it would know the difference, anyway. And it's not like that's never been done before. In fact, apparently it used to be quite usual for the regalia to be set with jewels hired for the coronation only. Afterwards, the stones were returned to the jewelers and the regalia reset with crystals or paste and put in the jewel house for display.” Élodie shrugged. “So, in some ways, it's not as big a deal as we thought it might be.”

“But there's more to the story.”

A quicksilver smile. “There's always more to the story,” she said. “So listen up. You've been thinking about this for a while, you know the stories, that King John lost them in some quicksand someplace—”

“—at the Wash River,” I supplied. “Hence the phrase of something getting lost in the wash.”

That didn't even rate a smile in passing. “Right. And then when they abolished the monarchy, nearly all the jewels were destroyed by Cromwell, who thought that everything to do with kings or queens was detestable—his word, by the way, not mine.”

“Yes,” I said. “Hurry up, Élodie.”

“Well, there was one thing that was saved. Hidden in an abbey somewhere godforsaken like Northumberland. Saved because it was more than just a crown.”

“Here it comes,” I said.

She nodded. “Your diamonds come from a circlet that was probably forged in the thirteenth century in France,” she said. “By the Templars.”

“No,” I said. “No. Not
The Da Vinci Code
. Not Dan Brown. Please, anything but that.”

“Dan Brown didn't actually
invent
the Templars, you know,” Élodie chided me. “They were very real. Warrior monks who got way too rich. The king of France got the Templars suppressed so that he could claim their wealth. And
that
included a number of jewels that they'd—well, not to put too fine a point on it,
stolen
—from the Holy Land when they were out there busily hacking off heads and plucking the riches of the infidels. Jewels that had belonged to a caliph, so the story goes. Centuries of being in courts of richness and power.”

“We're sensing a theme, here,” I said.

“You said it. The king stole them and had them made into a circlet for the queen. But once they were suppressed, the Templars who
hadn't
been killed went underground, and a few of them more than dabbled in black arts. Suddenly the queen found that she couldn't wear the circlet anymore; she claimed that it burned her.”

Right. The famous curse.

“The king's daughter Isabelle was married off to Edward II of England, and the circlet went with her. But it was gone by the time Cromwell seized the jewels, and reappeared once the monarchy was restored. Like magic. But no one seems to have ever been very comfortable with it, and it's never been worn at any state occasion that I can find any record of. Or that my assistant can find any record of; he's been snooping around for me. The next people to really handle it at all? Princesses Margaret and Elizabeth. In 1938 they dismantled all the jewels, put them in hatboxes, probably a big joke to them at the time, they were kids, and shipped them off to Canada, and you know all about
that
story.”

“So you're saying that they've always carried a curse. And that no one in London really even wants them back.”

“That's the unofficial line,” Élodie agreed. She stood up.

I blinked at her. “Where are you going?”

“Back to Ottawa. My work here is done. We've successfully averted an international incident. Champagne all around.”

“An international incident,” I said, “may be the least of our problems.”

“
Your
problems,
chérie
,” said Élodie. “Sorry, and all that, but officially speaking, there isn't a problem here.”

And if Élodie said there was no problem, there was no problem.

Except that there was.

*   *   *

By the time I got home, my nerves were frayed. Too much was happening too quickly. A month ago I'd sat in my office one afternoon contemplating how bored I was. I'd give a lot for that boredom now.

The afternoon had been successful, apparently, and Margery looked relaxed and contented. I wondered if the trip wasn't partly to ascertain that she could in fact leave the children here in good conscience. Apparently their attachment to Montréal was winning her over.

Ivan and Claudia were already in the kitchen cooking dinner when I got in. Lukas was enduring a time-out in his room (“he's tired,” said Ivan when he told me, “and called Claudia some nasty names”), and Margery was leafing through a copy of the
Gazette
in the living room. I brought a bottle of Médoc and two glasses in with me. “Wine?”

She glanced up and smiled. “Lovely, thanks.”

I poured and sat down next to her. “So you enjoyed the tour?”

“It was spectacular. I haven't had that much fun in a very long time.” She sipped her wine reflectively. “The kids seem to like it here.”

“I think so,” I said cautiously. “Listen, Margery—”

She interrupted me. “Don't think I don't know what we're asking of you,” she said. “We do. Well,
I
do. I know it will mean changing your whole life. I've been struggling with—this—for over a year. I didn't know if you'd be willing to take it on.”

“I wish you'd told me,” I said. “It's just, the suddenness of it…”

“I know.” She nodded. “I couldn't come to terms with it myself. Feeling so frustrated, every day, but reminding myself that I'd made my choices and I should see them through. Then last year, when I was in the hospital—well, I had to face up to it all. So it was a slow process. I'd have talked about it sooner if I'd been sure.”

“And you're sure now?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, and her whole face lightened. “I kept thinking it made me a bad mother, allowing someone else to raise my kids. But this is the best place for them right now. I've been seriously unhappy, and it's made them unhappy, too, and that can't be a good thing. Well, they're both insecure, and they didn't used to be like that.”

I thought of Lukas and his obsessive lists and calendars. “They're finding ways of coping,” I said.

“Maybe.” She drank some wine, looking away from me, someplace that wasn't happy. “Claudia may be cutting herself,” she said suddenly.

“What?” I put my glass down on the coffee table. “Why? Did you see it?”

“No. And I made her show me her arms last week.”

I thought of the oversized sweaters, of the sleeves that Claudia kept pulling down over her knuckles. I'd thought it was a grunge fashion statement. “Should she see a therapist?”

“She is, already.” I hadn't known that. “She should probably keep seeing someone, too. What happened is, one of her friends texted another of her friends, who—thankfully—told her mother, who called me. The girls say they don't know for sure, but they thought she might be. I didn't see any evidence—nothing recent, no scars—but it brought it home to me, what I've been putting them through.”

It had been so far off my radar to worry about something like that, that I was shocked into silence. Loud, assertive, combative Claudia? I associated cutting with Ophelia-type girls, not someone as
present
as my stepdaughter. I clearly had a lot to learn about this parenting thing.

Better learn it fast, LeDuc.

Dinner was boisterous, to say the least, but it suddenly felt fine. Lukas came out of his sulks and told some hilarious story he'd cribbed from the tour guide. Claudia was permitted a half glass of wine and took selfies all night with various adults in the pictures with her. Over their heads, Ivan and I smiled at each other. And Margery talked about us all planning a vacation together next summer.

I loved where I was. Being part of this circle of people. Seeing them all relaxed and enjoying each other. It balanced out the darkness, somehow.

Julian called me while the kids were still arguing over who had to clear the plates and who had to fill the dishwasher. The police in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu were on the lookout for Avner, but he hadn't yet turned up. “I think we just need to be there,” he said. “I don't know what it is exactly that we're trying to stop, but we can't do it from here, whatever it is.”

“The jewel is exactly what we thought it was,” I said, taking my phone upstairs and into the bedroom for privacy. “It's got stored vibes from centuries of magical goings-on, and is cursed on top of it, by the Templars of all people. It's perfect for Aleister.”

“Okay.” I could tell that Julian was skeptical about the magical goings-on, but he at least understood that we had to stop whatever it was. And, of course, find Avner. “They're keeping an eye on the warehouse, checking it on the overnight tours. I'm gonna owe them for this.”

“If it comes off, they'll be owing you,” I said. “Tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” he said resignedly. “Pick you up at ten. Maybe by then we'll have some news. Magicians work at night, right?”

“How do I know?”

“Well, who knows. If I hear anything overnight I'll give you a call. Pray they don't start it at midnight tonight when all we'll have out there is a couple of constables on a graveyard tour.”

“There's that,” I agreed. But somehow I thought we were looking at tomorrow. The sentencing at Nuremberg was during the day; they'd want to replicate that.

Probably. We hoped. Unless it was Nuremberg time, which made it … I couldn't do the math. What time zone was Nuremberg in?

There were just too many variables, and every time I tried to catch at one of them it disappeared, a will-o'-the-wisp, tantalizingly out of my grasp. Too much to think about. But the one thing was that they had to be stopped. All of us—Gabrielle, Marcus, Avner, Julian, even Élodie in her own way—seemed to be in agreement at least about that.

Julian sounded cheerful. “Anyway, I got us some new recruits,” he said. “Been talking with the RMCP.”

“Really.” None of the police forces were particularly known for their easy entente.

“They're joining us tomorrow,” Julian said. “Seems they're hot to get this last diamond back. They're the ones who got them stolen in the first place.”

“The Royal Canadian Mounted Police were guarding the vault?”

“Yes indeedy. And probably one of their own—long gone now, of course—was responsible for the hatboxes moving down to the other vault, where Patricia found them.”

“Wow,” I said. “Talk about needing to make up for something.” I hesitated. “But I thought all you guys didn't play that well together.”

“LeDuc, I'm still not even close to being sure that any laws are going to be broken tomorrow. Not sure who's getting arrested for what. If we can get any kind of clarity from anybody, I'm open to it.”

“Okay,” I said. But I was envisioning a full-blown raid, American-style, and I had a feeling that Aleister Brand was too smart to allow something like that to happen.

And just as I was falling asleep, something was tickling the edge of my consciousness and pulled me back from the brink. Something that knotted my stomach and jarred me wide-awake. But I still had no idea what it was.

*   *   *

It was unthinkable. It was impossible.

Numb, Hans walked down the street, through the park, by the bench they'd called theirs, laughing and silly together. There was too much loss to assimilate. Too much … too many … he couldn't even tell how he felt. The world had shifted impossibly in an instant, and people passed him by, acting as though nothing had changed, oblivious to the darkness pressing in on all sides. Without her, without Livia, there would be no point. In anything.

And now not just Livia. Livia and their—child. The concept so new he couldn't articulate it.

But surely she couldn't mean it. She was a young woman alone, alone and pregnant. She could not survive as an unwed mother. She needed help; she must know that she needed help. She had to change her mind. She had to realize how much he loved her, her—and their unborn child.

She would realize. She would come.

He would do what he had to do at the vault, and then he would take the jewels and wait for her in her room. He would pack the candlesticks. She would change her mind; he knew she would change her mind.

And he was right.

He stepped out his front entrance the next morning and a shadow detached itself from the bagel shop next door. “Hans.”

“Livia!” He looked around, desperate that Kurt wasn't coming down after him, shaken at the thought that he might. Livia in danger was unthinkable. “What are you doing here?”

Her smile was a little shaky and, he thought, very brave. “I am ready,” she said. “I am ready to go wherever you want to go. You are right; you are the one I know, you are the one I love. The past does not matter. What matters is our future.”

“Come with me.” Quickly, now, quickly, around the corner; Kurt could come downstairs at any moment. “Listen to me, darling. Go to the bus station,” he said. “Here are the tickets. Wait for me there. I will be there, my love, I promise.”

She was crying again, but smiling through the tears. “And where are we going?”

He put his arms around her. “Ottawa, to start. And then west, as far west as we can go. Someplace where they will never find us.”