by Cindy Dees
I said politely, “I am Agent Ana Reisner of Interpol. I believe you asked to speak to me?”
“I did. Come sit beside me.” She gestured gracefully toward a second wingback chair angled toward the one from which she’d risen.
“To whom do I have the honor of speaking?” I asked. Surely this was Madame Villecourt, but I wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice.
“I am Elise Villecourt.” She waited until I’d sat down on the edge of my seat to deliver the coup de grace. “I knew your grandmother.”
I blinked. “Gladys Roberson?” She and my Grandpa Ted live in a three-bedroom, brick ranch in Pennsylvania, a world away from this splendor. To my knowledge, they’d never been west of the Mississippi or east of Philadelphia, let alone visited the chic end of Paris. I was the only person in my family afflicted by the wanderlust that had landed me in France.
“No. Your other grandmother. Ana Reisner.”
An involuntary tingle shot down my spine. Whoa. Ana Reisner died over sixty years ago during World War Two. My father was just a baby when she disappeared and was never seen again. Years later, her name turned up on a list of people buried at an obscure cemetery in Italy, but that was all anyone knew—other than the fact that I look exactly like pictures of her at the same age.
I revised my age estimate of this woman well into her seventies. Dang, she was well-preserved. “You and my grandmother were children together?”
“It seems like that now,” Madame Villecourt answered with a small smile.
What was that supposed to mean? I forced my attention back to the business at hand and pulled a small notebook and pen out of my purse. “My superiors told me you wished to speak to me about a murder. Whose murder would that be?”
“Mine.”
I looked up slowly from my notebook. Blinked. Felt my eyebrows rise. “I beg your pardon?”
“I am reporting my own murder.”
I stared at her. She didn’t look crazy. In fact, the woman looked extremely calm. Collected. Entirely in possession of her faculties. St. Germain and the president firmly in my mind, I said carefully, “Forgive me, Madame Villecourt, but you appear alive and well to me.”
The woman laughed gaily, the sound incongruously young. “My dear Analise, you are just like your grandmother. Such a gift for understatement.”
How did she know my full name? I’d only introduced myself as Ana. Besides, it was incredibly forward of a French person to use my first name with such familiarity.
As if she’d read my mind, she answered my unspoken question. “It is a long story.”
I frowned slightly. “I have nowhere else to go this evening.”
Her smile grew even wider. “I’d forgotten the fire in her eyes. But you have it, too. I’m so glad she is not entirely lost.”
I was entirely lost here. “Your alleged murder?” I prompted.
“Have you not asked yourself why, out of all the law enforcement officials and agencies in France, I specifically requested to speak with you?”
“I have, Madame. But what does this have to do with your…death?”
“Please. Call me Elise. You’re named after the two of us, you know. Ana and Elise.”
Her casual remark was a punch in the gut. Threw me off balance all of a sudden. Out of kilter. My world is stable. Orderly. Free from surprises, the way I like it. I’m from a safe little town in central Connecticut, grew up in a German-American home of strict Presbyterians, went to Radcliffe University, majored in art history and minored in French literature. My grandfather, Otto, came to live with us when I was a kid, and never, not once, did he ever mention the existence of this fabulously wealthy French aristocrat in his dead wife’s past. I bit back an urge to blurt, “Who are you?” to this mysterious woman.
Instead, I managed to mumble, “I didn’t know I was named after you.”
“Otto never said anything about me, did he? He always blamed me for her death. But it was not me. I swear. It was—” She broke off. “Well, that’s a story for another time. I suppose he never mentioned—” a delicate pause “—a key?”
“I’m afraid not,” I answered cautiously.
“Indeed. That, too, then, is a story for another time, my dear.”
She kept calling me “her dear” like she was some elderly aunt of mine. It was disconcerting. And I still didn’t know the first thing about this supposed murder—of the person who was speaking to me at this very moment.
“Tell me about…your murder.”
She nodded. “Yes, indeed. To business. Something has been stolen from me. Out of this very room, in fact. And without it, I shall die. It is of relatively little value in comparison to the other works of art in my home. Therefore, I can only conclude that whoever stole it specifically targeted it…and knew that doing so would kill me.”
Aha. Now we were swimming in familiar waters. A stolen piece of art. This, I could work with. My feet on solid ground for the first time since I’d arrived here, I asked briskly, “What exactly was stolen?”
“I can’t tell you.”
I stared at her, dumbfounded. Yes, she looked serious. “You can’t tell me?” I repeated, my feet knocked right back out from under me.
“No. Its existence is the deepest of secrets, and I cannot reveal what it is to anyone. Not even to you.”
The President of France clearly chose his friends in lunatic asylums. “What can you tell me about it? Has this item been catalogued for insurance purposes? Its identification markings photographed, perhaps?”
“No, no. I told you. It’s a secret. According to the art world, it doesn’t exist. I do not display it even when my closest friends come for tea.”
“Forgive me, Madame Villecourt—”
“Elise.”
“Elise,” I repeated. “But what do you want from me? You want me to investigate a murder that obviously has not happened and a theft of something that doesn’t technically exist?”
“It is a legend,” she answered obliquely.
“Is it real?” I demanded. Whatever the hell “it” was.
Her voice took on the singsong tone of a mystic. “Who’s to say if a legend is real or not? We must each decide a legend’s truth or falsehood based on the evidence of our own eyes and hearts.”
Mumbo jumbo. Exasperation tickled my lungs. Time to try another approach. “Why me?”
“Because I knew your grandmother. I hoped you might have inherited some of her determination to succeed.”
Oh, I had that all right. I never did anything halfway once I put my mind to doing it. Failures had been few and far between in my life. My love life being the notable and glaring exception, of course.
I felt as if I were pounding my head against a brick wall here, but it was my job, and I could practically feel the eyes of President Pierre Dupont drilling into my back. “Why is the loss of this item going to cost you your life?”
Elise looked at me for a moment. And then her eyes went blank as if she were looking right through me. She tilted her head, almost as if she were listening to someone speaking. Then she said suddenly, “Yes, I agree. She is not ready to hear the answer yet. She must learn the rest first. Then I can tell her about its special properties.”
The woman blinked as if to shake herself out of a reverie and focused on me once more. “I’m sorry, my dear. I cannot tell you just yet why I shall die soon. But trust me. I will die.”
“How soon?” I asked, alarmed. How in the world was I going to tell Littmann and St. Germain that President Dupont’s friend was a complete nutcase?
“Oh, I should think I’ll live only a matter of weeks, perhaps a few months at most.”
“Have you been poisoned?” I tried, searching for something, anything, tangible to sink my investigative teeth into.
“Good heavens, no!”
“I’m sorry, Madame Villecourt, but I don’t see how I’m going to be able to help you if you can’t give me more information to go on.”
“We believe som
ebody obtained the security code to the alarm on the servants’ entrance. He came up the back stairs this afternoon and let himself in that way. There’s a fingerprint scanner on that door, and the thief must have gotten past it somehow. There were no signs of—how do you police say it?—forced entry.”
“Where were you when this theft occurred?”
“Out. Attending an exhibition at the Cluny.”
Ah, yes. A display of medieval tapestries, some from a century before the Cluny Museum’s own Dame à la Licorne tapestries were woven. I catalogued the exhibit last month before it opened to the public. Nothing in it compared to the piece hanging in this woman’s front hallway. Aloud I said, “So you were out of your home for several hours. Where were your servants?” It wasn’t uncommon for a theft like this to be an inside job.
“There is only the housekeeper. My needs are not great. Madame Trucot was with me. And there’s no possibility whatsoever that she had anything to do with this. We are…like sisters.”
The sour nun and this obscenely wealthy and sophisticated woman? That was hard to picture.
“Did the doorman see anyone out of the ordinary?”
“Rudy saw no one. That is why we know the thief must have come up the back way.”
Or paid off ol’ Rudy to keep his mouth shut and look the other way. “I will need to question anyone with regular access to this apartment.”
Elise shrugged, a graceful movement of supple shoulders. “As you wish. I doubt you will find any fingerprints or the like. Whoever did this knew precisely what he was doing.”
“Nonetheless,” I replied, “I will send over a crime-scene team to check things out.”
The woman drew herself up and shot me a glacial look. “There will be no police in my home, pawing through my possessions. I will withdraw my crime report and deal with this in my own way if you insist on such a thing.”
Maybe that would be for the best. She could hire a private investigator to run around on this wild-goose chase and take her money from her. Except the thought of some brownshoe taking this woman to the cleaners bothered me. Deep in my gut, I felt a low-level vibration of connection to this woman, a need to help her—even if the only thing missing was her marbles.
The door opened, interrupting my troubled thoughts, and Madame Trucot entered, carrying a sterling silver tea service that I’d swear was a Paul Revere original. I recognized the simple, clean lines from my college days in Boston. I took a sip of the tea Elise poured for me—no doubt it was the finest Darjeeling—but I’m a coffee kind of girl and all tea tastes like strained weeds to me.
“Would you consent to let me catalogue your collection someday?” I asked. “It really is remarkable. It should be listed in Interpol’s database for safety’s sake.”
Elise glanced around the room and smiled gently. “These are only things, Analise. They are not important. Loyalty, friendship, family—those are the true treasures.”
Her nonchalance about her collection startled me. “They may be only things, but they are valuable things. And based on the lack of security I saw on the way in, it’s no surprise that you’ve been robbed. Frankly, I’m stunned that you haven’t been before now.”
Elise laughed. “I am not so defenseless as all that. I just don’t like to look at cameras and sensors. They’re here. They’re just hidden.”
They were hidden well, then. I hadn’t seen any.
Elise continued, “Ask Rudy to show you the building’s security system on the way out.”
I nodded and made a note on my pad. My only note so far, in fact. I sighed. “Where was the stolen item kept?”
Elise’s hand waved toward a corner behind me. “Over there.”
An empty pedestal stood behind me, tucked into the corner next to a stunning, jewel-encrusted globe of the world, decorated with marvelous inlaid stones and a fine, irregular network of gold lines crisscrossing its entire surface.
Now we’re talking. Must have been a three-dimensional object, a sculpture or pot perhaps that stood on that pedestal. Definitely not a painting, or anything wall-mounted, then. I looked more closely at the scale of the pedestal. Not wide or tall enough to support something large and still look proportionally correct. A small object, then. Maybe a foot tall, no more than two feet at the most. Probably slender, given the narrowness of the pedestal. A vase or a statue of some kind.
I asked Elise, “Can you tell me what it was made of? Its age, perhaps?”
The woman pursed her lips. Not going to talk, apparently. Damn. But then she surprised me by saying, “I took a vow of silence about it when it was given to me. If you can learn more of it yourself, then I suppose I could tell you if you’re right or wrong without breaking my promise.”
Who’d ever heard of a theft investigation where the police guessed and the victim told them whether they were right or wrong? I hoped to God none of the real cops at Interpol got wind of this or I’d never live it down!
I noticed that Elise was mumbling to herself again.
“…but I insist. She wouldn’t believe me if I told her…it has to be you…I don’t know how. Just show her. She’s a smart girl.”
Presumably, I was the smart girl in question. At the moment, however, my brain felt like oatmeal. Elise rejoined this space-time dimension and said firmly, “We will speak again when you have learned more. I am tired. It has been a long day.”
And I was supposed to learn more how? On cue, the housekeeper came in to show me out. I was ever so politely getting tossed out of here.
“But I have more questions—” I started.
“The madame is tired,” Madame Trucot said firmly.
Elise didn’t look tired to me. She had a vitality about her that suggested she could party the night away and come home at dawn, fresh as a daisy. Yup, I was definitely getting thrown out. More confused than ever, I followed Madame Trucot back to the front door. The housekeeper pressed a small card into my hand that I vaguely registered had a phone number written on its back. I turned it over. The engraved card read simply, Mme. Elise Villecourt.
The heavy lion door swung closed behind me with a solid thunk. I stared around the black marble vestibule, my head spinning. I could just hear my report now. “Forgive me, Mr. President, but your friend is as crazy as a loon. She reports her own murder but clearly is not dead. She reports the theft of an item that doesn’t technically exist. And as if that’s not enough, she talks back to the voices in her head.”
Not.
Now what the hell was I supposed to do?
Chapter 2
R obert Fraser slid the heavy backpack of books off his shoulders and set it on the stone floor with a solid thunk beside his motorcycle helmet. Letting his Scots roots show, he said, “Top o’ the mornin’ to ye, Lorraine. How goes it?”
The art department’s blue-haired secretary and unofficial matriarch looked up from her desk. “You have a visitor. You’d better clean yourself up. Toot soo-weet.”
Her bad French for “right away,” liberally accented with the round vowels of Edinburgh, made him wince. “I have a visitor? Who is it?”
“Some old guy. Very mysterious. Came in the back door and disappeared into the chairman’s office about twenty minutes ago. Professor McManus has been buzzing me to ask if you were in yet about every two minutes. Angus is in a fair tizzy over this gent, so he must be a personage with a purse, if you catch my meaning.”
Angus McManus in a tizzy? The old geezer was usually half-comatose these days. No retirement for that bloke, no sir. He’d die at his post, old Angus. The art history department he chaired at Edinburgh University was his life. Robert sighed. Sometimes he wondered if he was fated to end up the same way, shriveled and musty, hunched over tattered old books and half-assed papers from snotty graduate students.
“Go on in, luv, and rescue Angus before he has a stroke.”
Robert sighed again. Schmoozing rich patrons—hell of a way to start the day. He dropped his black leather jacket on top of his rucksack,
straightened his knitted tie and headed in to Angus’s office. It was a spacious corner room with beautiful oak wainscoting on the walls and good light, although the books stacked absolutely everywhere ruined the sense of space entirely. Apparently, Angus didn’t believe in that newfangled invention known as the bookshelf.
“Robert, my boy!” boomed a white-haired little gnome from behind a huge walnut desk that all but swallowed him.
Angus must’ve lost his hearing aids again. “Good morning, Professor McManus,” Robert shouted as he wended his way between piles of books.
“Was just singing your praises. Come in. Come in. Sit.”
Robert crossed through a shaft of dust-filled sunlight and headed for a chair in front of the desk. He sank down onto a humped leather seat so old and slippery he had to plant his feet firmly on the floor not to slide out of it.
“Professor Fraser, this is…errm, yes, well…a patron of the arts,” Angus bellowed.
Robert nodded at the silver-haired man seated quietly beside Angus’s desk. The man’s face was hidden in shadow, but the hawk-nosed profile and strong jaw were visible. The guy’s suit looked like Armani. A wealthy art collector, then. Looking for recommendations on a purchase perhaps?
“How d’you do?” Robert said.
“Fine, thank you,” the man answered cordially enough. A slight accent of the continent lurked behind the precise English, but its nationality eluded Robert. Too faint to identify. And the man didn’t offer his name. Odd. The man just sat there, studying him.
“What can we do for you today?” Robert finally asked. He hated having to work at conversations like this.
“I need the provenance of an item traced. A work of art.”
Ahh. That, he could handle. He nodded and said, “Then you’ve come to the right place. I teach both classes here at the university on tracing the history of artwork. Usually, it’s a simple matter of accessing the Getty Museum’s or Interpol’s databases of registered works of art. Between the two of them, they maintain provenance histories on most of the valuable pieces of art in the world.”