A Deal with the Devil

by Blake Ellis

  He was involved in a number of other spiritual organizations as well. One described itself as a gathering of men and women “of Desire.” Another was connected to a mystical order known as Martinism; and as we read more about it we were surprised to see a mention of psychic powers. “At the higher spiritual level you will benefit from improvement in awareness, as evidenced in intuitive flashes and special psychic abilities. The potential benefits are infinite,” said the Martinist magazine, Pantacle. It went on to explain that Martinism is based on esoteric teachings, involving everything from alchemy to tarot cards.

  We also knew that Antoine owned a bookstore named La table d’Hermès, which appeared to organize workshops on spirituality and sell tarot cards, Masonic memorabilia, and incense.

  All of this felt a little eerie, yet it was another reason Antoine could be the key to finding out more about Maria.

  • • •

  We couldn’t wait to check out Antoine’s eclectic bookstore for ourselves and hopefully find him in the process. As our luck would have it, after decades of operations, it had apparently just gone out of business. The bookstore’s telephone number was disconnected, as Antoine’s personal numbers had been. Neighboring store owners we called told us that the shop had closed six months earlier. But it was located in Toulon, only an hour away from our hotel. So we decided to drive there anyway—never expecting things would play out the way they did.

  After spending what seemed like hours trying to fit our SUV into tiny parking spaces, we walked through the center of town, past crêperies, candy shops, and busy outdoor cafés on our way to Antoine’s shop. While the town was relatively quiet on this January afternoon, we could easily picture it bustling with tourists during the summer, when it was a popular port for cruise ships.

  We finally arrived at the little store, which sat right next to a charcuterie. It was dark, empty, and obviously out of business. We stared at the locked door and vacant shelves inside, and noticed a sign for a tarot card reader advertising hour-long consultations at the store for fifty euros each. We had already figured out that Antoine was a spiritual guy but were becoming more and more convinced that he was part of the local psychic community, like his mother.

  Next to this ad was a for-sale sign with a phone number, which we guessed was for the real estate agent who was trying to sell the place. Out of other options, we tried the number to see if the broker could possibly put us in touch with Antoine.

  Right there, standing outside his store, we called. It was Antoine himself who answered.

  As Julia talked to him, we couldn’t believe this last-ditch effort had somehow landed us on the phone with Maria Duval’s son. He never admitted to avoiding our many, many attempts to reach him. He instead suggested we meet in person. He told us to come to a café called Le Chantilly near his now-defunct bookshop in Toulon two days later—the day before we were scheduled to leave Callas.

  The Attorney

  IN THE DAYS leading up to the big meeting with Antoine, there was one more person we wanted to find: Andrea Egger, the Swiss attorney who seemed to have been deeply involved with the Maria Duval operation and who we had been unsuccessfully trying to reach for months. This mission took us to one of the strangest and most beautiful places we had ever been: the tiny city-state of Monaco, where we had found an address for Andrea.

  Both a luxurious waterfront getaway and a notorious tax haven, Monaco is wildly popular among high rollers, who frequent its five-star resorts and world-famous casinos. But it is also known to be an oasis for unscrupulous businessmen, who are drawn to the financial secrecy the location provides. Even from the window of our car, we wondered about the backstories of all those we passed, with their designer clothing and flashy watches. Where was all their money coming from?

  While Andrea Egger wasn’t named in any of the government actions we had seen, or been charged with any wrongdoing in connection with Maria Duval, he had filed a number of trademark applications for both Maria and many of the businesses associated with her name. His was one of the first names we’d heard in our months-long hunt, when the New York attorney told us he communicated with Andrea via airmail when securing Maria’s very first US trademark. This attorney had described Andrea as a woman, but we’d since seen the name listed as a male on multiple Swiss business filings.

  A bare-bones Facebook page featured a profile picture of a sandy-haired man shirtless on the beach. Another photo showed him reclining in a lounge chair reading a newspaper. He appeared to be in his sixties, and he had an attractive but unmemorable face. Between this and his LinkedIn profile, we read claims that he had attended school in Geneva, studied at Columbia Law School in New York City, and worked for a large investment bank. Despite his impressive résumé, we found little evidence of his legal work beyond his name being listed on so many different Maria Duval filings.

  We had spent months trying to reach Andrea. Then, as we sat at our computer in our French hotel room looking through business filings once more, we spotted a personal address for him in Monaco. As it was only a couple hours away from our hotel, we knew we had to give it a shot.

  The drive there was gorgeous, unlike anything we had seen before, taking us through rock tunnels that cut straight into the sides of seaside cliffs. We passed a few men sitting at the border for security, and the streets became narrower and narrower as we drove into the center of town. It was such a small city that it was easy to locate his address, which appeared to be a high-rise apartment building. The problem was finding somewhere to park our SUV.

  Down the road sat a vacant garage attached to a luxurious building, which we thought was a hotel because of the many large flags hanging out front. It turned out to be a very private residential building, and as soon as we entered, the security guards discovered we were not residents and promptly escorted us to our car, with a man in uniform watching us to ensure we left the premises.

  Back on the narrow streets, we drove in an upward spiral, trying to find anywhere to park. After a stressful drive that rivaled our treacherous trip that first day in France, we finally found a true public parking lot.

  In our desperation, we’d driven so high up that we had to trek down flight after flight of stairs and take a public elevator to get from practically the highest point of the hillside town back down to shore level. Andrea lived in a circular luxury building that sat just along the water. Curious about what such a residence would cost someone, we later looked for listings and found a two-bedroom unit for rent for €13,000 a month and another for sale for €6 million. To afford such a pricey pad, Andrea must have been successful at something.

  Finally it was time to confront this elusive man. Without a specific unit number, we walked into his building and headed straight past the security guard to the elevator, hoping there might be nameplates for the residents inside. We exited the elevator at a random floor and encountered nothing but barely lit hallways that felt like something out of a horror movie—and no names to be found. With no other options beyond aimless wandering through the dozens of floors in this large high-rise, we returned to the lobby and Julia buttered up the doorman with her singsongy French before asking him for the suite number. Knowing there was a very slim chance that this man would sacrifice the privacy of his tenant, we were elated when he gave us the precise apartment number and let us hop back in the elevator.

  We made it onto the correct floor and used the flashlight on our phones to try to find Andrea’s unit number. We walked briskly, running on a combination of adrenaline and fear, remembering that we were three young women (Jordan had returned to New York City the day before) in a strange building, in a strange land, looking for a man we were convinced was unscrupulous at best.

  Eventually we found the door and looked at each other, wondering what to do next. If Andrea was in there, he clearly wouldn’t be happy to see us, three CNN journalists who had been digging up information about him and raising questions about his role in a multimillion-dollar fraud.

  If
he had a knife or a gun, was there anything to keep him from using it as we stood very alone in this very dark hallway? People surely killed for less. Had we even told our bosses or our family where we were going? If we went missing, would anyone know where to find us?

  Nevertheless, we couldn’t leave without ringing his doorbell. Once, twice, and a third time.

  No answer—something we were very much getting used to. This time, we had to admit, we were kind of glad to still be standing in silence. Still, as journalists it was our duty to make sure this man knew that we were writing our story and that he would be a part of it, and to see if he had anything to say for himself.

  We walked over to a corner of the hallway so were out of sight of his door’s peephole in case he was looking out at us, and we crouched down to write him a note on yet another piece of paper ripped from our reporter’s notebook. We walked back and quickly slid the note under his door, before dashing to the elevator and getting out of the building as fast as we could. Julia did take a moment to ask the doorman if he had seen Mr. Egger lately, to which he said he hadn’t.

  We made it out of the building and back into the bright sunlight to breathe a sigh of relief. Slowly over the next few hours, our fear and panic were replaced with a satisfying picture of Andrea returning to his home to find a note slipped under his door—from three American journalists.

  The Deal

  PART OF US never thought Antoine was really going to show up to our scheduled meeting.

  We had returned to our hotel in Draguignan after our excursion to Monaco, and the next day we drove to Toulon hours in advance to scout out the perfect spot for our late-afternoon interview. The airy two-story café Antoine had selected was adorned with glass chandeliers and detailed crown molding. We settled on a quiet nook upstairs with a tufted velvet couch and a small table and went over our questions at length, preparing ourselves for what was to come. We suspected Antoine didn’t speak much English, so Julia was even more nervous, knowing she would bear the brunt of the interview.

  Finally, the man from our dossier began walking over to our table. He had a round face, short graying hair, and wire-rimmed glasses. And his daughter was with him. We knew it was her because of the photo of a dark-featured young woman that we’d printed out from LinkedIn. We were right that he didn’t feel comfortable speaking in English, so after shaking his hand and saying “Bonjour,” we awkwardly smiled and nodded our heads as he and Julia went through their formalities. While he was skeptical of our motives at first, even asking to see our official CNN IDs before he would say anything, the conversation ended up lasting for more than an hour. It could have gone much longer if we hadn’t gotten kicked out by the barista when the café closed, which we were convinced had been Antoine’s plan all along.

  We started out with some biographical questions, asking about his mother’s life and what she was like. Even though Julia was the only one who understood what he was saying, he looked each of us in the eye as he spoke. He began by telling us that after being born in Italy, Maria had come to France when she was young, and it was during this time in her life that she first realized her psychic gift. He said that there was no question his mother was a real psychic, and that she had started out intent on helping others. “As a little girl, things she would see would then happen,” he said.

  And even as her life took her in another direction, as she ran an industrial pool-cleaning business and opened four different clothing stores around the South of France, her psychic abilities remained, and she started giving psychic consultations to friends from her clothing stores. Eventually, as word of her powers spread, she began appearing on local television and radio, writing horoscopes and being called on by police and families to locate missing people.

  This yet again made us wonder whether some of the outlandish stories from the letters could actually be based on something more than a copywriter’s imagination, including the repeated claim that Maria had used her powers to locate the missing. Especially curious was the fact that Antoine even specifically mentioned the missing man from Saint-Tropez—the same story we’d heard Maria tell in her YouTube video, and very similar to the story involving the missing dentist’s wife. And while we hadn’t been able to locate an article about a Saint-Tropez rescue in the dusty archives of the local newspaper, the archivist had found one clipping that said Maria had helped find a missing elderly man. If she really had found so many missing people, it was interesting to us that he chose to mention the one she’d recounted in her promotional YouTube video.

  We also asked about the so-called Callas Parapsychology Institute, which was mentioned in all the letters as well, and to our confusion Antoine said that Maria had indeed been the president of the association a long time ago. We were never able to find any evidence of this group, even after reaching out to the Parapsychological Association in France.

  Antoine also claimed that his mother really had meet the pope, even shaken his hand, though he acknowledged it was from within a crowd of people and nothing like the personal consultation described in the letters.

  He said she had been married multiple times, to his father and later to another man. Her second marriage hadn’t lasted very long. We had suspected that Duval was nothing more than a stage name. Some investigators had referred to the name as an alias. But according to Antoine, it actually was the name she’d taken from her second husband.

  “What’s it like to grow up with a psychic as a mom?” we asked him at the beginning of our meeting.

  “Dangerous,” he answered. “You can’t do anything stupid. It’s delicate. . . . She’d say, ‘How was your day?’ and then ask, ‘And what did you really do?’ ”

  “She never used her gift in an obvious way,” chimed in his daughter Morgane, who, unlike her grandmother, had dark hair and dark features. “It was always more subtle. She gave us advice in our professional choices, in our love lives.”

  “She gets up really early, five a.m., and stays up,” Antoine added. “She takes no vacations. She is very passionate about her work. She does a lot of astrology, she’s always done it, since I was little.”

  Despite her old age and the sickness we’d heard about, Antoine said his mother remained eager to continue to help people, after years of advising everyone from politicians to employers and investors. “She has always been someone who loved to work with people, have conversations, she liked that very much,” he said. “Meeting new people. She has worked with ministers, with regular people, that was never an issue. She loved helping people, talking to people.”

  When Julia later filled us in on this part of the conversation, we couldn’t help but recall some of the stories Maria recounted in one of the YouTube videos. She claimed to have helped bank executives make financial decisions and crucial hires using her psychic abilities. Could there be an inkling of truth in those videos, which we had viewed as pure propaganda? Or maybe Antoine just knew exactly what to say.

  We were most curious about how his mother had become wrapped up in the scam. The story that unfolded was the tale of a woman who’d made a deal with the devil.

  “How did the letters start?” we asked.

  “Well, these letters . . . my mother sold her name.”

  “Do you know when?”

  “At least twenty years ago. And from the moment when the name was sold, the name didn’t belong to my mother anymore . . . it belonged to a company that could do with it whatever it wanted.”

  “Do you know the name of the company?”

  “No.”

  “Infogest?”

  “Maybe. That rings a bell.”

  “Do you remember any names?”

  “No, I cannot give you any names, that you’d have to see with my mother’s lawyer, since there is a lawsuit.”

  We would ask him again and again after this to speak with this lawyer, but he never did give us a name.

  “So we know she copyrighted her name in 1985, and this was before selling her name. Do you know why she did
that?”

  “To protect her name. She was already known under that name for a while. She started going by that in the seventies. . . . And since she helped find people who were lost. . . . Little by little she was known by that. Since it was in the newspapers, and she certainly had a real gift for clairvoyance.”

  We pressed him again. If her reputation was so important to her, then why did she sell her name?

  “I think there was a big company that proposed a lot a money.”

  “They came to her?”

  “It was the company that came to her, I think. Because she was well known. She practiced in Draguignan and Nice. She was on TV, on Matin Bonheur [a French morning show], then on newspapers. She also did television donation marathons. She even went to the US following the election of Reagan.”

  This was news to us. We had not seen any evidence of her being on US soil; nor did we find any after this interview.

  “Did she ever send any letters?”

  “No.”

  “So did she know what was being done with her name?”

  “I’m not sure. I don’t think so. She knew there were things going on, but whether she likes it or not, there’s nothing she can do about it. The name was sold so she had no more decision power.”

  We were skeptical, asking him if she truly didn’t know about the letters.

  “Not really. It was all the companies. For example, she had to go to Russia, Japan, to show people that Maria Duval exists—that it’s not just a name, there’s a physical person.”

  “So it was for the companies that she traveled? She was paid?”