In the Musée Bellefroide
When I walked into the Musée Bellefroide, for some reason I thought of Cecilia Driscoll and her house on Rhododendron Road, which supposedly had a foyer with a “cathedral ceiling.” Cathedral ceiling, pooh. Even furnished with a ticket-taker’s desk and a wire rack of postcards, the Bellefroide’s foyer made Cecilia’s look sick. It was oval-shaped, the floor a checkerboard of black and white marble. A wide staircase with an ornate railing swept upward under a huge, unlit chandelier. Tall urns stood in niches, sconces flowered from the walls. The atmosphere was hushed, as if the rich people who lived here were still asleep upstairs, unaware of less fortunate early risers tiptoeing around below.
Mallet gestured to us to follow him and we went down a hall, past a series of open doors. I got a blurred impression of paintings and tapestries, gilded furniture, sculpted busts on marble pedestals, twisted candelabra. Light reflected off glass-fronted display cases. Through the tall windows, I glimpsed a sun-dappled garden.
Mallet unhitched a red velvet rope barrier and we went down a staircase that was very plain-looking after the luxury we’d just passed. At the bottom was a hall with a linoleum floor. Mallet went to a closed door and pulled a ring of keys from his pocket. After he unlocked the door he pushed it open and stood back, ushering us in.
I got a brief impression of what seemed to be a storage room. An altarpiece, surely the Madonna and Child Overton had come to inspect, was standing on a table. The walls were lined with wooden cabinets and shelves, and there was a smell of paint and glue.
I had no intimations of disaster, no feelings of foreboding. My mind was on the story, on whether Overton would unbend. My overriding emotion was modest hope.
The first hint of anything extraordinary was a loud clattering on the staircase we had just descended. A moment later, three people burst violently into the room.
One of them, stumbling as if he’d been pushed, was the blue-uniformed guard I’d seen upstairs. The other two wore jeans, burgundy-colored ski masks, brown leather bomber jackets, and gloves. Both of them held stubby black guns. They looked around at us. One of them spat out some sort of order in French.
It was the most ungodly nightmare. Here were these killers, or terrorists, or who knew what, telling us to do something, and they were telling us in French. At that moment, I couldn’t have understood Bonjour. But the others— the guard, Mallet, Overton— were getting on the floor and lying face down, so I did the same. In a second, one of the intruders grabbed my wrists and taped them together, tight. I heard them shuffling around taping the others.
I lay with my nose pressed against the cold linoleum, wishing to God I’d never left Florida. Any indignity I’d had to put up with at the Sun was nothing compared to this. I was going to be killed, and all because of a story about art conservation that probably wouldn’t have worked out anyway. I thought about Mama and Daddy, and about Twinkie, who was just getting adjusted to Paris. I’m happy to say I didn’t give more than a passing thought to Ray Brown, the man I’d left in Bay City who wasn’t worth a damn.
All of this took just seconds. I heard a drawer opening and closing. The back of my head prickled. In everything I’d read about these situations, people got shot in the back of the head. The prickling became a numbness that crawled down my neck and along my spine.
Only a moment later, the shot came. First one, then another, deafening in the quiet room. My body jerked with such force I almost thought I’d been hit. There was no sound, no cry. Then running feet, the door slamming, the key turning in the lock, where Bernard Mallet had left it.
Now Mallet was on his feet, hurling himself against the door, shaking the handle violently. Overton and I were struggling to our knees. He was so pale that his lips looked purple. All three of us, it seemed, realized at the same moment that the guard wasn’t moving.
The guard’s navy blue cap had fallen off. His head was a bloody mess. I remember thinking: I was right. They do shoot in the back of the head. I felt as if the real me, the me who would have been horrified, was hovering somewhere out of reach. Mallet said, “Pierre!” and dropped to his knees at the guard’s side.
The guard was dead. We had plenty of time to free our hands and make sure of it in the surreal interval before other members of the museum staff arrived for work, let us out, and called the police.
We didn’t talk much during that time. Overton sat in a chair, half-closed eyes fixed on the floor, hands pressed between his knees, hunched as if in pain. I gnawed my lips and stared at the guard. I couldn’t seem to look anywhere else. The sticky, oozing wound, the body slumped gracelessly in the blue uniform, the scuffed brown shoes pulled my eye. I couldn’t see his face. I tried to remember what it had looked like, but could only summon up his slightly bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows. Pierre, his name had been. I swallowed. Pierre.
Bernard Mallet, meanwhile, was busy searching the storage room, opening cabinets and drawers. The altarpiece hadn’t been taken. It sat on the table exactly where it had been, looking impossibly serene. When I heard Mallet give an inarticulate, shocked cry, I dragged my attention from the dead man.
Mallet’s face was rigid. Behind his glasses, his dark eyes were blank. “How very bizarre,” he said. “They’ve stolen Nostradamus’s mirror.”
Weirdly enough, I understood him perfectly, even though he spoke in French. I had understood everything everybody had said since the gunshots. I understood something else, too. I may never have been on the police beat, but I knew what a story was. I definitely had a story here.
Nostradamus’s Mirror
A traveling carnival came to Luna Beach every year, and set up in a weed-grown vacant lot. Somewhere in the warren of knocked-together booths where you won teddy bears or bought candy apples, between the Loop-the-Loop and the Ferris Wheel, would be a fortune-teller’s booth. “See the Future!” the weather-beaten sign out front might read. “The Wisdom of Nostradamus Reveals All!” As a child, no matter how many times I was dared to, I wouldn’t go in. I felt even then it was a dangerous business.
The inspector from the Criminal Brigade who interviewed me was an older man, balding and dapper. He didn’t show much reaction as I bumbled through my story, and if he made an effort to put me at ease, I missed it. What he wanted to know, several times, in French and in English, was why I just happened to show up, unexpectedly, at the Bellefroide that particular morning. Obviously, Bernard Mallet had told of his attempt to defend the museum against me. Any hope that Clive Overton would be a strong supporter of my version of events was in vain. When the police arrived, he had collapsed— taken two steps and gone down like a ton of bricks. They had to cart him away before they could gather up the guard’s body, and for all I knew, Overton was dead of a heart attack by now.
“Please explain to me again, Madame… Mademoiselle…”
“Madame.” There’s no French equivalent of Ms., and I was too old to be called Mademoiselle.
“Yes. You say Monsieur Overton suggested that you accompany him here this morning?”
“That’s right. I called him about an article I was going to write about him, and I asked if I could see him in action— you know, on the job. And he said he was coming to the Musée Bellefroide, and I could come along with him.”
“When did this conversation take place?”
“Yesterday afternoon.”
“So you came here very much at the last minute.”
“Well— yes.” Was doing something at the last minute a crime in France? I felt guilty. I started to dry my palms on my skirt, then realized how suspicious that looked and stopped fast, and then saw that he’d been watching the whole time.
We went through it again. If my story had begun to sound as unlikely to him as it did to me, I was in trouble. And in the meantime, what did I know about what had happened? Precious little.
The dead guard’s name was Pierre Legrand. He was fifty years old, and had worked at the museum for several years. If he had made some attempt to
stop the robbery, none of us had realized it. Nobody could figure out why he had been shot, or why the mirror— a fortune-telling mirror that supposedly had belonged to the prophet Nostradamus— had been stolen.
The inspector released me in time for Bernard Mallet’s press conference, which was good because in the midst of everything I had managed to call and pitch my eyewitness account to the International Herald Tribune. They had jumped at it, offering to pay me a pittance plus cab fare. The glory, however, would be considerable.
As I headed for the salon where the conference was to take place, the television lights went on and I was suddenly surrounded by microphones. Blinking, trying to rise above the thought of how dreadful I must look, I listened carefully to the questions being tossed at me but heard only gibberish. I mustered my best accent and said, in French, “I was afraid. It was horrible.” When their further efforts didn’t produce anything else from me, they switched off the lights and I went into the elegant room and took a place in a row of gilt chairs more appropriate for an afternoon chamber music concert than for the eager and rambunctious press.
Now it was Bernard Mallet’s turn. His perspiring face was liverish in the television glare. “The mirror wasn’t even on display. From the artistic point of view, it wasn’t at all important,” he was saying. He sounded aggrieved, as if the theft of something as unworthy as Nostradamus’s mirror had been an insult to the Musée Bellefroide.
My pocket-sized tape recorder, brought along to catch all the goodies Overton never said, was winding. I put intense effort into understanding what was going on, and succeeded fairly well. Someone asked, “Could you describe the mirror for us?”
“The mirror is not the sort of glass mirror we are accustomed to today,” Mallet said. He consulted a piece of paper. He held it with both hands, but it trembled even so. After clearing his throat, he read, “The mirror is made of polished obsidian, which is a black volcanic glass. It is approximately circular, fifteen centimeters in diameter, one and a half centimeters thick.” (I had learned to do the conversions. About six inches in diameter, three-quarters of an inch thick.) “It is in a green, tooled-leather case which dates from much later than the mirror itself.”
Another questioner: “Its origin?”
“Such mirrors were made by the Aztecs in Mexico. Some were brought to Europe by Cortes and his followers in the middle of the sixteenth century.”
A heavyset man in the front row rose majestically to his feet. “Monsieur le Directeur, does this Aztec mirror have any particular interest or value, aside from being an example of an ancient handicraft?”
The questioner’s smarmy tone betrayed that he knew the answer already. Mallet looked like a man about to eat an obviously spoiled mussel. “Legend claims that the mirror once belonged to the prophet Nostradamus,” he said. “There is absolutely no proof that this is true.”
Everyone had known, but still the words caused a stir in the room. It was a moment or two before the heavyset man could go on. “Do you mean that Nostradamus supposedly looked into this mirror to see the future, to help him make his famous predictions?”
“So it was said,” Mallet answered in a tone of resignation. In the hubbub that followed he continued, “I must repeat that there is no basis for that assertion!”
Of course nobody wanted to hear that. The questions flew: “Were other such mirrors used in divination?” “How did the Bellefroide acquire this mirror?” “Is it recorded that Nostradamus used a mirror?”
“I am not an expert on magic, or divination, or Nostradamus!” Mallet snapped. “Apparently, mirrors are used in fortune-telling in much the same way as crystal balls, or other reflecting surfaces. I can tell you that another mirror of this particular type, one which belonged to the British sorcerer Dr. John Dee, is on display in the British Museum. I can also tell you that the Bellefroide’s mirror was acquired toward the middle of the nineteenth century by Francois Bellefroide, a family member with an interest in the occult. In his catalogue of purchases, he noted”— Mallet read from the paper again— “ ‘A divining mirror once used by the celebrated prophet Nostradamus,’ and the dimensions I have just given to you. To be frank, I suspect that the seller fabricated the Nostradamus story in hopes of getting a better price.”
“And who was the seller?”
“A Monsieur J. Claude, of a firm of dealers in antiquities and curios called Claude et Fils. The firm no longer exists.”
“Who owned the mirror before Monsieur Claude?”
“I have no idea.” Mallet looked relieved to say so.
The questions drifted back to the break-in and murder, and Mallet explained once again that the criminals had apparently forced their way past the guard, Pierre Legrand, after Overton and I had been let in. The look he shot me said it was all my fault.
The heavyset man was on his feet again, addressing Mallet with ponderous politeness: “It seems these thieves had chosen their time to strike. There were early visitors, the storage room would be unlocked. How might they have come to know this?”
Mallet’s face froze. “I can’t imagine.”
“You can imagine no way such knowledge could be obtained?” The edge of sarcasm was obvious, even to me.
Mallet drew himself up. “Monsieur, if you are implicating me or my staff in this tragedy, let me point out that anyone with inside knowledge would surely have chosen an easier way to steal the mirror. The storage room is usually locked, yes, but the mirror was hardly our most precious holding. Taking it would have been simple enough. This cumbersome, murderous episode was completely unnecessary.”
After that, things started to slow down. I paged back through my notes. Thank God Kitty had been in the office and willing to go down the hall and look up Nostradamus for me in the Worldwide Wire Service encyclopedia. I hadn’t even known whether he was an actual person or a legend, but he turned out to be totally historical: “His real name was Michel de Nostredame,” Kitty had said. “Dates 1503 to 1566. Born and lived most of his life in the south of France. Profession doctor—”
“Medical, you mean?”
“Yes. Did a lot of work with victims of the plague. He published a collection of obscure rhymed prophecies called The Centuries, and a lot of what he predicted seems to have come true. He was a favorite of Catherine de Medici, wife of King Henry II. One of his biggest coups was predicting Henry’s death, but that doesn’t seem to have turned Catherine off. It doesn’t say whether he used mirrors.”
The press conference was breaking up. My story was almost done, written at one of the Bellefroide’s office desks while I waited my turn to be questioned by the police. I’d go to the Herald Tribune and add the press conference stuff when I entered it in the computer. It was midafternoon when I left the Bellefroide and stepped out again into the glorious weather.
All went well at the Herald Tribune. The familiarity of being in a newspaper office, sitting and staring at my copy on the screen, was vaguely calming. They were talking page one for the story. I’d written it in third person, but it would run with an italic precede saying I’d been on the scene when it happened. Tomorrow morning, my words would be spread to all points of the globe. Odd, how numb I felt about it all.
I got a taxi on the Avenue Charles de Gaulle and headed home. Halfway there, I started to shake. By the time we pulled up at my building on the Rue Delacôte I could hardly totter inside. Fitting my key in the lock was a project, and when I finally got the door open I sat down on the floor right inside, and Twinkie came and nudged curiously at my fingers.
The Speculatori
The phone rang a couple of times that afternoon, journalists calling with follow-up questions, but my French was deserting me fast. Also, although I was sure I hadn’t heard the last of the police, I had had enough of them for one day. After a final check with the Herald Tribune, I took the receiver off the hook and got in bed. Sunlight flooded in from the balcony, where Twinkie was crouched next to the geraniums, her tail twitching as she studied the scene below. I
clasped my hands on my chest and watched the dust motes spinning in the rays of light.
Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall, the voice of one of my early Sunday school teachers whispered to me. Yes, I had been proud. Too proud to apologize to Cecilia Driscoll. Too proud to stay in my proper place and sphere, which was the Florida panhandle. Haughtily, I had flown off to an alien environment, and look what had happened. I began to sniffle, and I regret to say my tears were not for the death of my fellow human being Pierre Legrand, but for my own poor self. The mood of misery and self-recrimination continued until I was so worn out I fell asleep.
A knocking sound awakened me some time later. It was dusk. A chilly wind blew in through the half-open balcony door. The knock sounded again, louder. Quivering, I sat up, pulling the covers around me. Figures wearing ski masks and carrying guns tumbled through my mind in the couple of seconds before I heard Kitty calling, “Georgia Lee? Are you there?”
I jumped out of bed and ran to the door, ready to weep with relief. She looked so beautiful and familiar, with her blazing hair and her odd clothes (today it was caramel-colored leather, with buckles at unexpected places. She got her outfits practically free, I had learned, from a friend in the fashion business). Tears did fill my eyes when I saw that she had a baguette in one hand and a plastic bag from the charcuterie across the street in the other. The scent of freshly roasted chicken came through the door with her. “I tried and tried to call,” she said. “Is your phone off the hook?”
“I was being hounded by the press.”
As I went to replace the receiver, she said, “How do you feel? O.K.?”
“Oh— I guess.”
Kitty was glamorous, knowledgeable, younger than I was, and fluent in French. She was also warm, helpful, and kind. All this put a heavy burden on our friendship. Although I knew she had suffered, having married a Frenchman who turned out to be a dissolute ne’er-do-well, she didn’t seem to suffer in the same tacky ways I did. Her Frenchman had been a member of the minor nobility. She had done her suffering in places like Cannes and Gstaad. And now, having freed herself from Monsieur de Villiers-Marigny, she was pluckily making her way as a free-lance journalist, using her high-class connections to get fancy assignments. If she hadn’t been so thoroughly likable, I’d have detested her. As it was, I stood a little in awe of her, and sometimes found it hard to talk to her about how I really felt.
The Grand Tour: Four International Mysteries Page 3