Number 7, Rue Jacob

by Wendy Hornsby

  “Then you’re willing to give it a try?”

  “I believe we decided that a long time ago, my dear.” Icicle flags were forming around the side-view mirror out my window. “New topic: I want to talk with you about Freddy and the résidence.”

  “Yes?”

  “What Isabelle did was cruel. At the very least, she should have told him a long time ago not to have expectations about rue Jacob.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “There needs to be an adjustment of some sort.”

  “You want to give him a share in the property?”

  “I need to consult my partner before I do anything.”

  “Your partner doesn’t object in concept. We have to be careful, though, that we don’t give Freddy a gift he can’t afford to maintain. If you think taxes are high in America, taxes in France will take your breath away. So, my concern is that if he found himself short of cash, Freddy might encumber his share with a loan that he could have trouble keeping up with. If he defaulted, we’d all be in financial jeopardy. My dear, I have too much invested in rue Jacob to put it at risk because we wanted to make a beau geste. I hope that doesn’t sound cold.”

  “It doesn’t. But there must be something I can do.”

  “We’ll give the idea some hard thought. I have found you a very good, English-speaking notaire with strong financial credentials. Unless you object, I’ll go with you when you speak with him. I hope he can sort out the terms of Isabelle’s will for you. And maybe he can give us some guidance about what we can do for Freddy while we’re there.”

  We were quiet after that. So many things to think about. We managed to get back to Isabelle’s apartment without skidding on ice, losing our police tail, or being chased by the next creep on ProtX4’s list of hired goons. Considering recent events, arriving unscathed felt like progress.

  “Do you think they’re finished with us?” I asked Jean-Paul as I put the key in the front door.

  “No more than you do.”

  “Philippe’s friend, Val, came very close to walking out the door with three-quarters of a million francs in his pocket. That would be a massive temptation to turn away from.” I hung up my coat and helped Jean-Paul off with his; his shoulder was still stiff after being immobilized for a week. “From all accounts, he’s a braggart. How many people have he and the other boy, Cho, told about their near-miss with wealth?”

  “You think those kids set all this up?”

  “Set it in motion, anyway. We have no idea who they might have inspired. I do know I’ll sleep better when the locks have been changed.”

  “Right now, I think I could sleep through just about anything.” He looked drawn. All that family chitchat and drama had worn him out. Though he tried very hard to cover it, he was still on the mend from his ordeal. I reminded him it was time to take his antibiotic, and suggested that he have a nap. He agreed that a brief lie-down would be nice, and within a few minutes, he was snoring softly.

  According to AnoNino, no one was tracking our personal mobile phones or computers at the moment, though that was small comfort. As we had learned, there are other ways to stalk people. After making sure the deadbolt was set on the front door, and that the back door was locked, I retrieved my phone from the suitcase I had stuffed into the armoire in the second bedroom, the one Freddy’s boys used, and went into Isabelle’s office to make some calls. In Los Angeles, it was nine o’clock Sunday morning. I turned the phone back on and called my mom, just to reassure her that all was well. I also called my daughter and asked her to do the same service for me, that is, to reassure me that everything in her world was under control. Roddy Combes had called a couple of times, checking on our well-being. I called him to reassure him that we were still above the sod and to thank him again for taking care of us. He was still in Munich, hoping to sleep off a three-day Fasching drunk before he had to get onto a train to cover the Great Spitalfields Pancake Race in London on Tuesday. We made the usual promises to get together soon and said good-bye.

  Last, I called Uncle Max, told him where I was, made sure all was well in his realm, and asked him not to send out any more press releases until he’d cleared them with me first. When he protested, I explained, in brief, what had been happening since we spoke last. He was horrified, but also excited that there might be material in our ordeal for a film project. Uncle Max, who loves me dearly, was always looking out for my interests. For a few minutes, we discussed strategies for the meeting in the morning. He reminded me that he needed to see any contract or memo of understanding before Guido and I signed anything.

  I booted Isabelle’s computer on the desk in front of me. First, I snooped through the Internet search history and lucked upon several searches from early January, when the boys were in the apartment goofing around, as Philippe said. I found the four books he told us they had posted on auction sites, copied the images and printed them. The books had been posted, taken down, reposted and taken down again. They were currently listed as not for sale, but the bidding history was still up on one site, as was the seller’s contact information. I set up an anonymous email address and used it to send an inquiry to the contact: “At what price could the books be made available to an interested buyer?”

  In Isabelle’s computer files, I found a database for the library holdings. The convent’s collection was formally catalogued, but the Russian books were not. Instead, there was a simple list of titles, in Cyrillic, a shelf location, and nothing more. I found a translation site that converted Cyrillic letters to their Latinate equivalent, printed it, took the basement keys out of the desk, and headed down the back stairs.

  I’ve seen too many horror movies where the stupid innocent heads down into a dark basement, alone, to find the boogeyman. And, of course, the boogeyman finds her first. As a precaution, on my way through the kitchen I grabbed a wicked-looking boning knife, thinking that if I ran into Johann Bord down there, he’d take one look at the knife and run like hell to save himself. Or, if, by some weird circumstance, Qosja or anyone else popped up, I’d rely on instinct again to simply do what needed to be done while screaming like bloody hell. In a deep, dark basement where no one could hear me.

  The stairs were clear and no one lurked in the library. But just in case someone came to my party late, after I closed the pocket door I pushed a heavy table in front of it to slow an intruder. Feeling a bit foolish, and vowing never again to watch a movie where basements figured in the mayhem, I tucked the knife next to the pile of books Val Barkoff left on a table, and pulled out my list. With a pencil, I began checking books against the list. Some of the volumes had plain, homely leather bindings, while other leather covers were ornately embossed and brightly colored. The true treasures were encased in copper, or maybe silver, and decorated with intricate cloisonné designs or gemstone inlay. They ranged in size from massive tomes with large lettering that I thought were probably lectionaries to be read aloud during church services, to quite small, personal books like the little volume of Psalms upstairs, a book that would easily slip into a pocket or under a thief’s waistband. What all of them had in common was age.

  There were two hundred and fourteen Russian books on the list, but only two hundred and three were in the room, plus the book upstairs. I underlined the titles of the ten missing volumes, and using one of the computers in the room, searched for any mention of them online.

  A book of Gospels that had been in the private collection of Sofia Alekseyevna, who, according to an auction catalogue, had served as regent for her younger brothers, tsars Peter I and Ivan V, was sold through the London branch of a Moscow auction house for an enormous amount of money a little over a year ago. A diary of private prayer was sold by the same auction firm last spring. I couldn’t find the other eight. But what I did learn was that the two volumes that had been sold had not been saved, or looted, from the Vladimirsky Cathedral of St. Petersburg during the Russian Revolution, but had once been in the private collection of a Russian aristocrat who fled St. P
etersberg in 1917.

  I looked at my watch. Guido’s plane should be on the ground already. I turned off the computer, tucked the list into my pocket, moved the table back where it belonged, turned out the lights, locked the door, and went back upstairs.

  “There you are,” Jean-Paul said when I walked into the kitchen. He had the cork out of a bottle of wine and had pulled three glasses out of a cupboard. “Wondered where you’d wandered off to.”

  “I was snooping in the library.” I tipped the glass he gave me against his and took a sip. Rarely had I tasted a wine as large, and pure, and as delicious. “What am I drinking?”

  He turned the bottle so I could see the label. The date was the only part that meant anything to me; it was ten years old. Putting the bottle back on the counter, he said, “Isabelle knew wine.”

  “I only know what I like,” I said. “This, I like.”

  “I thought you would. It’s a Bordeaux, good vintage year, from a very small family winery,” he said.

  “Expensive?”

  “Bien sûr.” Of course it was.

  “I’ve been wondering about something.” I pulled the Russian list out of my pocket and smoothed it open on the kitchen counter. “The convent property cost an enormous amount of money to acquire and restore, right?”

  “Yes, of course. Both cash and bank financing.”

  “May I ask how you came up with your share of cash?”

  He shrugged, scratched at his itchy scars as he thought. “Marian’s father left her quite a nice inheritance, as did mine. We had been looking for a good place to invest it, something that was significant and would have long-range earnings potential. For those reasons, this property was interesting to us.”

  “How much did it cost to buy the property and complete the restoration?”

  The figure he gave me was both staggering and somewhere in the neighborhood of what I expected.

  “How much of that had to be cash?”

  Another soul-jarring number.

  “I’ve seen how my Uncle Gérard works,” I said. “He probably came in with cash that he borrowed from a couple of silent investors. As you said, he also brought building expertise, and let’s just call it ‘involuntarily shared materials and crews from a different project,’ right?”

  He laughed softly. “Don’t forget charm. He always brings charm.”

  “Isabelle was a civil servant. A high-level civil servant, I grant you, but that still wouldn’t make her wealthy. She had income from the tontine, as did my father. For my parents, the royalty payments that fed the tontine were a boon, but they were rarely more than supplemental income to Dad’s public university salary. If my ballpark guess is correct, if Isabelle squirreled away all her royalty payments for a couple of decades, I can see how she could accumulate sufficient cash to buy in as a one-third partner for the purchase of the property. But, it would have stripped her resources before she contributed to the restoration.”

  “It was a stretch for all of us. I had to borrow from both Karine and my mother. When we were finally able to lease the apartments and generate a regular income stream, it took a while to pay them back. For maybe five years we ate a lot of soup.”

  “You make wonderful soup.”

  “Thank you for that. Now, tell me what is stirring inside that lovely head.”

  “Did Isabelle move into this apartment right away?”

  “No. Originally, she rented the apartment downstairs, where Griffith is now. A smaller unit.”

  “At some point, though, she bought this one,” I said. “How did that come about?”

  “It was during the second part of making dust,” he said. “After the initial work of finishing the apartments was complete, we ran out of money, so we left some of the basement areas for later. All that time, we were negotiating with the Louvre and being sued by the Vatican. In the meantime, the library sat very much as it was discovered. The museum came up with money to at least protect the resource until everything was settled. Walls had to be opened for the new ducting. Isabelle and I agreed that it would be a good time to go ahead with the work to finish the basement, but it would be costly, and I would be out of the country most of that time because I sat on a panel, as I told you, that investigated Kosovar War crimes.”

  “That’s where you ran into Sabri Qosja.”

  “Unfortunately, yes,” he said. “I wanted to put off the basement work until I could be on hand, but Isabelle made the ultimate bargain with me: she assured me that she would be fine supervising the contractors alone, and to pay for the work, she offered to buy her apartment. For cash.”

  “She paid cash?”

  “She did.” He leaned back against the counter and crossed his arms. “We negotiated a fair price, and she deposited a check for the full amount into the rue Jacob account. Remember, she was also buying the apartment from herself.”

  “It would make sense that Isabelle had the back stairs and the wine cellar put in, and her secret library door installed at the same time the rest of the work was being done.”

  “It would.”

  “You were still eating a lot of soup?”

  He chuckled. “Yes. And taking on extra work, like the war panel.”

  “While she was stocking a wine cellar and paying cash for an apartment.”

  “So it appears.”

  “Where did she get all that money?”

  “Where?” He shrugged. “I didn’t ask. If I thought about it at all, I’m sure I assumed it was income from the tontine.”

  “Trust me, the tontine was never that flush,” I said, leaning beside him. “You told me that Gérard had pilfered fixtures from the original building. And some books.”

  “Aha. I see where you’re going. Like brother, like sister?”

  I handed him my list. “The books with check marks are downstairs on the shelves or stacked on a table. One more is up here in Isabelle’s desk.”

  “And those without check marks are not?”

  “Exactly. I found that two of them were sold at auction last year, after Isabelle died. But there are eight more that I can’t account for, or anything that may have disappeared before anyone got around to recording titles. If I had better information about the Russian books, information I would find on a standard library catalogue listing, I might be able to track them down. But I have next to nothing.”

  “Is this number you wrote in the margin next to the two that sold, the amount they sold for?”

  “It is,” I said. “When did Freddy learn that he was not inheriting a share of rue Jacob?”

  He put his finger next to the first of the two books sold. “About here. Roughly the same time Gérard would not let him encumber your grandmother’s Paris townhouse.”

  “We all know that Freddy’s wife destroyed him financially. But somehow, he was able to come up with funds to get his building project in Normandy underway last summer.”

  “Did he and his mother both pick the pocket of the library?”

  “I have a lot of questions for the notaire,” I said. “When do we talk to him?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Perfect,” I said. “Because I’m wondering whose pocket was picked. I understand the Vatican staking a claim to texts that belonged to a once-sanctified church property. And the French state museum claiming documents that are historic state documents. But ownership of books from a private collection that may have been in the basement of a legally acquired house for about a century is, it seems to me, a very different matter.”

  “You think the book sales were legitimate?” he asked, looking at me over the top of his glass before he took another sip.

  “Not entirely. No more than it was legitimate for Gérard to sell off fixtures to the property without bothering to speak with his partners, you and Isabelle. If what I’m thinking is correct, then Isabelle stole from you to buy this apartment, and to stock the wine cellar. So, drink up. Enjoy.”

  He laughed as he took me in his arms. Both of them. />
  The gate buzzer interrupted a very pleasant moment.

  “Guido is here,” I said, and went to let him in.

  Poor Guido had deep, dark circles under his eyes. After eating something in Laos that he knew he should have stayed away from, he was thinner than ever.

  “Rough flight?” I asked, taking his bag from him and leading him up the stairs.

  “Is there any other kind? And damn, it’s freaking cold here.”

  “No colder than Ukraine. Hope you packed long johns.”

  “I never had a chance to unpack them.” He was out of breath climbing the single flight of stairs. “My cousin Luigi told me to tell you that when you’re ready to dump Jean-Paul, you should call him first.”

  “That isn’t going to happen, but thank Luigi for me. Poor guy didn’t know what he was getting into when he picked us up in Ravenna.”

  “He still doesn’t know, but he had a great time. Felt like James Bond or Mad Max out there on the road. Did you really take out a motorcycle with a bottle of Prosecco?”

  “Jean-Paul did.” I opened the apartment door. “Thanks for helping us, my dear friend.”

  Jean-Paul greeted him with les bises and a glass of wine. “Ça va, Guido?”

  “I’m okay. You?” He got his first real look at Jean-Paul after his first gulp of that exquisite wine. “Holy shit, man. What happened to you?”

  “A drone dropped a bomb on me,” Jean-Paul said.

  “Uh-huh. Slip on some ice?”

  “The other is a better story, but sure.”

  Guido left his shoes by the front door, found a comfortable chair, and plopped down. “Do I ever have to get up again?”

  “If you want dinner you do,” I said. “We’re going out. But later, when you’re ready. Your choice, Chinese or Mexican.”

  “Is the cook at the Mexican a Mexican?”

  “She is,” Jean-Paul answered.

  “I’ve had MexMex, TexMex, NewMexMex, and CaliMex. So I need to try FrenchMex to see what it’s all about. This wine’s good, by the way. Now, tell me what we’re doing tomorrow.”