by M. J. Rose
“So then I can buy the last four weeks?”
“Yes, but just the first week has a column in it.”
She sold it to me.
I stood in the street outside the building and opened the paper, but as soon as the first fat raindrops fell on the newsprint, I tucked it under my arm and looked around for a café.
Minutes later, I was ensconced in a corner table, and while the rain beat on the windows and I waited for my coffee, I opened the paper again, searching for the column.
The waiter brought my café crème. While it cooled, I started to read.
Ma chère,
Missing you has become a scar I keep opening. Just as it begins to close, I think of some moment we were together, and afresh it tears like a new wound. Is it this way for you? Do you miss me as much as I you?
The trench is wet tonight. It has been raining for days, and I think of you and your pretty blue-and-green umbrella with the silver handle and the blue agate gems set in the top of the curve. I picture you walking down the Champs-Élysées and stopping to glance in a shop window. If I were by your side, I’d take you inside and buy you whatever you liked, just to see the delight in your eyes.
Pining for you, I think of other lovers like us, separated unfairly and through some injustice of society. You and I never went to the tomb of Héloïse and Abelard, did we?
I want you to go there today or tomorrow, and if you can find some anemones, leave them there for me. Do you know the story? Bring this with you and read it while you are standing with them. Put the flowers at their feet, where the dog lies, a symbol of faithfulness . . .
My eyes took in one word and then the next and then I wasn’t reading anymore. I was hearing Jean Luc speaking to me. Whispering the words printed on paper.
I closed my eyes.
His voice continued.
“And then turn to your left and walk. There is another tomb . . .”
I looked down—yes, those were the next words.
I shut my eyes once more. The voice continued.
“. . . there. I don’t want to tell you too much, but it is a message for you. From me because . . .”
I checked these words against the words on the paper. The same. No, it was not possible.
My heart raced. My hand trembled.
I lifted the coffee, some of it splashing in the saucer. My hand none too steady, I sipped the hot liquid, sorry it wasn’t hot enough to burn my mouth because I wanted a distraction from thinking about what had just occurred.
There must be an explanation, I thought. I wasn’t a scientist, not well educated in how the mind works, how the eyes work, but surely I’d read ahead without realizing it.
I closed the newspaper, folded it, and put it in my pocketbook. I didn’t want to read any more of the column there at the café. Jean Luc planned for it to be read at Père-Lachaise Cemetery. I’d never been. I looked at my watch. There was no time to go that afternoon. It was at least a fifteen-minute ride on the metro, and once there, I wasn’t sure it would be easy to find the tomb that Jean Luc wrote about. I would need to go on Sunday.
There were soldiers buried there as well. I’d seen photos of funerals in the paper. Some services held without caskets, tombs without bodies.
I hadn’t asked Madame Alouette for any of the details of Jean Luc’s death, but suddenly it felt imperative to find out if his body was in Père-Lachaise. Maybe if I could face the reality of his death, I could quiet his voice.
Perhaps the paper had reported his funeral service. I left some coins on the table and went back to Marie Lund’s office at Le Figaro.
“I’m sorry to bother you, but did the paper print Jean Luc Forêt’s obituary and information about his burial services?”
She said she thought so and asked me to wait. While she went to get it, I watched the large room fill up as the lunch break ended and reporters took their desks. Most of them were women; the only men were either over fifty or wounded. Nothing good came of war, but at least this one was showing the world how capable women were of doing jobs previously held by men. Like my own.
I heard a commotion to the right and inched toward it, straining to listen. I suddenly remembered Monsieur Orloff’s request and wandered farther into the offices to listen for talk of Russia, the royals, or the revolution.
“They found them under the Montparnasse catacombs,” said a gray-haired woman with a telephone receiver up to her ear. Covering the mouthpiece with her hand, she relayed information as she received it to the group of reporters who’d surrounded her desk.
“How many were there?” one of the reporters asked.
“Two of them,” she said.
“How long have they been underground?” another asked.
She asked the question of the person on the other end of the phone. Everyone waited.
“At least a week,” she said.
“What are they going to do with them?” another reporter shouted.
“They are spies, you fool, they are going to throw them in prison,” someone in the crowd answered.
“Based on information the police were able to collect, they think there are dozens more Germans who’ve infiltrated the city.”
“Spies under our feet,” one of the reporters said. “In the tunnels and the mines.”
“Mademoiselle?”
I turned. Marie Lund held a copy of Le Figaro.
“He died on July eighth,” she said. “Here is his obituary.”
The black border was the same as the one on the clipping I’d retrieved after it had fallen out of Madame Alouette’s purse.
“There was no formal burial,” she read. “No bodies were recovered from that explosion. There was too much damage and all the soldiers—” She broke off.
With the war all around, with its never-ending reports of casualties, there were only so many barriers one could erect. Some stories still broke through and shook you to your core. You’d find you could endure hearing about the unnamed troops—the hundreds, the thousands, yes, the millions of soldiers—who died, but not any one of those lives that touched yours, and it wasn’t so easy to just buck up and go on as we were supposed to. Sometimes you needed to stop and bow your head and give in to the loss and grieve for the one who always said hello, or once waited for you at the door to help you carry your packages, or kissed you good night, or gave you your children. We could not be like the amazing automatons we’d seen on display. We were not just flesh and blood; we were also tears.
Marie Lund wiped hers away and handed me the paper.
“He was just such a lovely man,” she said with a last little sigh.
Chapter 10
I returned to the shop in an even worse rain than when I’d left. Inside, Monsieur Orloff raised his eyebrows at the time of my arrival. I didn’t apologize as I put away my umbrella and hat. I stayed in most of the time. Ten minutes of tardiness should have been overlooked.
“Did you hear anything about the Bolsheviks or the Romanovs?”
“No, but there was news about some German spies,” and I told him what I’d overheard.
“Above us and below us.” He shook his head. “There are Bolsheviks underground too. I’m sure of it. Where else would you hide in Paris?”
I didn’t answer. He’d asked a rhetorical question I heard at least once a day.
“You remember the last piece we made for the actress Paulette Gillard, yes?”
“Of course.”
I knew her lover Pierre Zakine well. A longtime friend of my great-grandmother’s, he owned an art gallery and met my mother when she’d lived at Maison de la Lune. He’d become her dealer over twenty years ago and visited us in Cannes often. Once I moved to Paris, he’d started coming to the store just to check up on me and always picked up a little trinket, as he called the ready-made pieces in our cases, sometimes as a gift for
his wife or his daughter. After many such visits, he commissioned a piece of high jewelry for his mistress and, liking it so much, began to order more of Monsieur Orloff’s creations. Like many men of the upper classes, he’d not allowed the war to interfere in his life any more than absolutely necessary. After all, the nightclubs were still open and Maxim’s still served. As long as you could pay, there were still oysters to feast on and champagne to buy and lovely ladies to bed.
“Well, we’re making another gift for her,” Monsieur said. “So let’s go over it.”
This was how Monsieur Orloff mentored me, by involving me in his own pieces. First, he’d show me his design, always a gouache on fine paper from Sennelier’s store. After discussing the piece’s intricacies, he’d explain about his choice of gems and color values. Then I’d estimate the number of stones, and together we’d visit the vault to choose and collect them. Monsieur Orloff often allowed me to make the first selection; then he inspected and either approved or replaced my choices, always explaining why.
When I first came to work for him, he rejected at least three-quarters of what I’d selected, but we’d reached a stage where he rarely found fault with any of my picks. If I couldn’t find stones that were the right shade or size, Monsieur would send me to the gemologist, Monsieur St. Croix, to purchase what we required.
“This is a daunting design,” Monsieur said that morning. “It’s a necklace, yes, but the flowers can be removed from the stem here and here and worn as a clip. And then, I want the petals to be en tremblant.”
I stood by his shoulder and gazed at the gouache study. The new piece comprised two roses on stems, with leaves. The bud and the bloom met in the center, their stems wrapping about the neck. Because Monsieur wanted the petals to tremble, they would be mounted on hidden springs.
“We’ll use rose-colored diamonds, Opaline. As well as pink sapphires. Dark rubies for the shadows and folds of the petals. We want to complement her complexion, so you know the shades to pick. Tsavorites and emeralds for the leaves and brown diamonds for the stems. I’m expecting a client, so why don’t you go down today on your own, find what you think will work, and I’ll join you later and see how you’ve done.”
I nodded, too excited to trust myself to speak. Monsieur had taken me into the vault hundreds of times but had never sent me down alone. Going on my own constituted a large step. In addition to jewelry and gems, the vault contained objets d’art Monsieur was safekeeping for émigrés. He also kept some of the smaller antiques Grigori had bought but hadn’t put on display yet. And I knew from overhearing an argument between Grigori and his father that Monsieur did not allow even his son to visit the vault alone.
“If you’d become a jeweler, you would be going into the vault,” Monsieur said whenever Grigori complained.
“Is that the only thing you can ever say to me? ‘If you were a jeweler’ this . . . ‘if you were a jeweler’ that . . . ,” he’d spit back, and storm out of the room.
I ached for Grigori. As much as I admired and revered Monsieur, he was too angry at his eldest son for being the only one of his children to not follow in his footsteps. Making jewelry is not just a profession; one needs passion to sustain oneself through the long hours of sitting at a bench, sometimes wearing cumbersome glasses, using minute tools and always being careful and meticulous.
While Grigori possessed a great love of beautiful things and an excellent eye, he was best on the floor, describing with just the right phrases the artistry of a piece. Why it was a worthwhile investment. The joy it would bring.
With great ceremony, Monsieur Orloff handed me his keys to the vault.
After lighting a kerosene lamp to take with me, I unlocked the first door just outside the workshop. Downstairs, at the landing, instead of going right toward my suite, I went left, walked past the bomb shelter down an incline and reached a second locked door.
I unlocked that door and opened it, immediately getting a nose full of the musty scent rising from the quarries. Walking the long twisting hallway to the vault, I held my breath at every turn. As always, I feared what I might hear. Some days the hum of the burial chambers, even though they were far away, was more audible than others. I’d gone down a few times without being assaulted, but most days I heard the dead’s whispers and they frightened me.
That afternoon was one of the worst days. Twice I thought about turning around and running from the din, but the image of Monsieur’s disappointed face kept me moving.
Using Monsieur Orloff’s keys, I opened the next door, which led to a narrow hallway only wide enough for one. The rough-hewn stone walls and floors and thick wooden crossbeams hadn’t been rebuilt since the seventeenth century. In the dark, the lamp’s beam and my form cast more shadows. Twice I tripped on rocks, only barely finding my balance before falling. Heart pounding, I kept going till I reached the very last door.
Made of steel, it was the only modernity in the ancient passageway. Using the last of the keys, I opened the heavy portal and shone my lantern in, setting alight an Ali Baba’s cave of riches.
I never could enter the vault without sucking in my breath. I’d been to the famous gilt Palais Garnier opera house, seen the ornate riches of Versailles, visited the Louvre and examined the cases of ancient jewels and objets d’art, frequented the finest jewelry stores in Cannes and in Paris. None of them was preparation for the Orloff vault.
The long narrow room consisted of a series of archways carved out of stone walls. Each fitted with wooden shelves covered with forest green felt. Altogether, there were five archways on the right wall, three on the back wall, and five on the left. Ninety-one shelves crammed to overflowing with gold and silver jewelry and objets d’art. Platters, goblets, plates, picture frames, pitchers, creamers, teapots, coffeepots, candlesticks, and candelabras. Head mannequins with necklaces of pearls and diamonds and rubies and emeralds and sapphires encircling the painted flesh-colored wood. Velvet cases, some holding rings, others with earrings. Almost nothing was enclosed; everything was on view. I once asked Monsieur why. He said stones need to breathe like we do. They need to be seen and show off their colors; gold needs to shine.
Monsieur was a man of few words. Often curt. Difficult to read. But when he talked about his gems, I saw the lover he must have been to Anna, the poet’s soul living inside his craggy exterior.
Since so few Russian émigrés trusted the banks after living through an overthrown regime, they used La Fantaisie Russe to store their most prized possessions. Inside the vault, a large leather ledger sat on a podium. Every piece was recorded with a drawing, the name of whom it belonged to, and its particulars—weight, height, dimensions. Many of these items were heirlooms, and if I focused on them and touched them with my bare skin, I could sometimes be connected to the spirits of their owners and hear messages. An experience I had come to dread. Since we were supposed to wear white cotton gloves when we handled everything in the vault to avoid scratches, I made sure to keep mine on during the entirety of my visits.
At the far end of the room, I knelt beside the small safe. The enormity of the trust Monsieur placed in me worried me. I turned the tumbler to the right and then the left in the sequence he’d taught me. What if someone was to break in while I was there? I knew a pistol sat on the shelf to the right of the safe. Identical to the one upstairs in the showroom in the top drawer of the desk. Even with my small hands, I could hold it.
When I first went to work for him, Monsieur Orloff took me to the Bois de Boulogne and taught me how to use the gun. After several weeks of practice sessions, he declared me fit to defend the shop if I ever needed to. I was surprised at how brave I became with that small cold metal weapon in hand. In the midst of an angry war, with Paris going dark every night and rumors of spies infiltrating the city, knowing how to protect myself provided at least a kernel of comfort.
For a half hour, I sat on a small stool beside the safe and searched through pink
diamonds, rubies, sapphires, brown diamonds, emeralds, and tsavorites, picking out my choices for the jeweled flower.
Finally, I heard the distant footsteps of Monsieur coming downstairs. Nervousness fluttered inside my chest. I wanted him to approve of my selection and perhaps even offer a word or two of praise.
Looking up from the glittering gems, I listened. Something was wrong. The sound wasn’t coming from the right direction. The footsteps weren’t descending from the stairs, but approaching from behind the vault’s wall. From the tunnels running behind the section of the subbasement owned by Monsieur Orloff.
The noise increased in volume, sounding more like voices than footsteps but still muffled and hard to decipher. Was I picking up the hum from the dead and mistaking it for sounds being made by the living? Concentrating, I thought I could hear levels and tones of several people speaking.
It seemed that in a room or a cavern abutting Monsieur Orloff’s vault, people were gathering.
I put my ear against the back wall and listened, almost able to make out the chatter, but there was too much noise, too many people talking all at once, as if there was one set of voices on the other side of the wall itself and another beyond it.
I have a bad ear for languages. I know how to speak English since my mother was born in America and talked to us often in her native tongue. While I certainly heard the Orloffs speaking Russian often, I’d never picked it up. To me, Russian, Polish, German, Czech, and Yiddish were almost indistinguishable and equally indecipherable.
Choosing yet another section of the wall, I put my ear against the cold stone and tried again. No clearer. For a few minutes, I moved around, repeating the same action, searching for a spot where the sound would be more distinct, but the walls were too thick.
Was I hearing German? Could these be spies? Or was my sense of direction off and it was Monsieur Orloff hosting a Two-Headed Eagles meeting? I just couldn’t tell. Too many voices, too much noise.
As I worked my way around the room, I noticed one of the alcoves was set back farther, deeper into the wall. Maybe the sound would be more audible from there. As I quietly moved items off the shelf, I continued listening. Was it a mélange of unconnected voices from the heavens? Had I turned on some kind of psychic switch? Even though I wore gloves, was I hearing the people who’d once owned the antique objects in the vault before they were handed down or bought by their present owners? Had talking to Jean Luc opened a portal? Was I now a receptor even when I wasn’t trying to be one? I needed Anna’s help more than ever. I had to learn how to control my abilities so I could step out of the nightmare when it overwhelmed me.