“Trepanning?”
“Drilling a hole in the skull,” I said. “Medieval medicine.”
He chose to ignore that. “It’s a he?”
I shrugged, then realized he couldn’t see me. “I’m guessing. Could be anybody: it’s just bones.”
He whistled. “LeDuc, how do you get yourself involved in these things? All right. Where is this mysterious body?”
I shifted uncomfortably in my office chair. “Well, see, that’s the thing. I can’t tell you. I need to show you. And just you, at least for now. I promised somebody.”
“Well,” he commented, “this ought to be good. I’m sufficiently intrigued. Tomorrow do you?”
“Sure,” I said, wondering what I’d tell my staff about yet another absence. Hell, it was Friday, let them think what they wanted.
“Lunch,” said Julian. He never meets unless it is over food, a passion he has in common with my husband.
I’d known it was coming. “Jardin Nelson,” I responded, naming one of the restaurants on the Place Jacques-Cartier. At least it got him into the Old City.
“Haven’t had pouding chômeur in a while,” he said, naming one of the restaurant’s specialty dishes, a maple pudding cake.
“How did you know they have it?”
“I’m not a detective for nothing.”
I grinned, finished packing up, and headed home.
I hadn’t been inside for two seconds when the apartment erupted. First the sound of shrieking, then a door slamming and an adolescent girl’s voice: “I hate you!”
I put my briefcase on the hall table, slipped out of my shoes and jacket. “Ivan?”
He was in the kitchen area, in the act of sipping some wine, and looking sheepish. “The kids are here,” he said.
“I had managed to deduce that fact.” I went over to kiss him. “Aren’t they a day early?” Ivan’s children, Claudia and Lukas, stayed with us for a month in the summer and every other weekend during the school year. Weekend: meaning arrivals on Fridays, departures on Sundays. Or so one might think.
“I forgot,” my husband confessed. “We’d agreed to a long weekend ages ago—well, at least two months, anyway—but I didn’t mark it on the calendar. First thing I knew was when they called me from the airport.”
I walked past him, pulled the cork from the bottle of Côtes du Rhône on the counter, and poured myself a glass. Ivan had wisely already started; from the sound of things, we were both going to need it. “Well, that’s all right, I don’t mind, but what are we doing with them tomorrow?” Another burst of earthshaking noise. “And what’s Claudia slamming doors about?” Good thing our new place was in an old piano factory, I thought: it could withstand years of abuse, including even the dramatic tantrums of an adolescent girl.
“What’s she ever slamming doors about? Cheers,” said Ivan, touching his glass to mine. “I’m cooking goulash,” he added, a little unnecessarily: he’s a great cook, but finds himself unable to produce anything without using every pot and pan we own. I loved our new loft-style apartment. I loved it especially because it had a dishwasher. “I think that Lukas threatened to tell somebody named Brittany that she has a crush on somebody named James.”
“Why should Claudia care who Brittany has a crush on?”
“Funny woman,” Ivan said. “I should be the one worried about who she has crushes on. I’m telling Lukas to mind his own business, when the truth is that I’d rather be pumping him for information.” He stirred something thick and red on the stove. “I guess I need to come to terms with not being the only man in her life forever.”
“You’re already not the only man in her life,” I pointed out. “She lives with a stepfather, don’t forget.”
“Right to the heart,” said Ivan, miming a heart attack. “You’re cruel.”
“Not half as cruel as I’ll be tomorrow when you ask me to leave work early so I can keep an eye on them, and I say no.”
“You haven’t even heard my persuasive arguments yet. I’ve been practicing for hours.”
“Answer’s still no. I’ve got a date after lunch.”
“Not with the tour guide again?”
I smiled. “No. An old flame.”
He got it at once. “You said you were going to be careful.”
“And I am. Don’t you see? That’s why I called Julian.” Well, that—and the little matter of a murder.
Don’t ask, don’t tell.
* * *
“So,” said Lukas during dinner, “What are we doing this weekend?”
Lukas is a planner. He’s the only ten-year-old I know who keeps a diary with dates and appointments. He measures out his time, not in coffee spoons, but in squares on the page. Something, I understood, about trying to restore order to a life that must have, at least occasionally, felt chaotic.
Though I had to say that the kids handled having two homes with more aplomb than I probably would have managed at their ages—or perhaps even at any age. The good side to the split-home deal was that they had four adults who loved and cared for them. The downside, of course, was that two of those adults lived in a Boston suburb and the other two lived in Montréal.
Ivan and Margery, his ex, may have had their differences, but they coparented together pretty well. Claudia was five and Lukas three when Ivan moved to Montréal, so neither of the kids really remembered a life that didn’t involve regular airplane trips and having different bedrooms in different places—different countries, even. Margery had remarried before Ivan; I came into the kids’ lives two years on, and spent one pretty horrible year getting grief from them (“Mom doesn’t cut the bread that way!”) before they started seeing me as part of the landscape.
For myself, I’d never wanted children. My own mother instilled enough guilt and grief into me to last for several generations, and my father had been perennially absent from my life, an academic with an obsession that kept him far from Montréal.
I used that as an excuse, of course; the truth was that I felt way too self-centered to be a good parent. I loved my life. I loved my work. I loved my weekends spent in cafés, strolling the streets of the Plateau, where I lived back then (or, in winter, the thoroughfares of the Underground City), going out with friends, reading a good book. I loved all the indulgences I permitted myself, the luxury of time being my own, the ability to take off at a moment’s notice for Toronto or New York.
I didn’t know when we first met that Ivan had children, and once I learned of their existence, I was already too far gone in love with him for it to make much difference. Now, I couldn’t imagine my life without them—though, of course, I had them in the relatively small doses we’d arranged in custody hearings.
Now I looked blankly across the table at my husband. He would just love me to do something with the kids tomorrow rather than spend the day with Julian, whom he associated with my nearly getting killed last year.
Not that any of that was Julian’s fault, mind you; but our brains work in mysterious ways and make illogical associations. “We’d planned to go to the Insectarium on Saturday,” I reminded them.
“Ewww,” said Claudia.
Lukas whipped out his notebook, sat with pen poised. “What time?”
I glanced at Ivan again, but he wasn’t in the mood to help. “It’s the dégustation,” I said. “I don’t know what time they do it, I’ll have to check the Web site.”
“Oh, even more ewww,” said Claudia. “I’m not eating any bugs.”
“They’ll crawl around inside you!” Lukas told her, delighted.
“Stop it! Ohmygod Lukas you’re not funny! Make him stop it!”
“You’ll feel their creepy-crawly little feet and wings coming back up your throat!”
“That’s enough, Lukas,” Ivan said mildly. “And, Claudia, the insects are very dead and some of them are actually delicious. You’d be surprised. Some taste just like chocolate.”
“I’m going to be sick,” Claudia promised.
“Then go to the ba
throom,” I said.
“Ohmygod, not now, Belle-Maman! I’m going to be sick Saturday. If I even have to see anyone eating bugs! That’s dis-gust-ing!”
“You don’t have to eat the insects if you don’t want to,” I said. “You do have to eat your goulash now, though.”
“It’s too spicy. You know I don’t like it too spicy, and you do it anyway. You hate me!”
“I made the goulash, Claudia,” Ivan said.
She leapt to her feet. “Then you both hate me! That’s fine—I hate you, too!”
Another slamming door.
Lukas spoke into the silence of her wake. “So,” he said, pen poised, “what time on Saturday?”
* * *
Maurice met him at the port, where the ships docked.
“Our ship didn’t come in here,” he said unnecessarily. “Docked in Halifax, sent the cargo on by train. Arriving two thirty today.”
“Yes,” said Hans encouragingly. “I do understand that.”
Maurice pulled a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and shielded the lighter with his hands. Hans waited for the first inhale-exhale. “Well?”
“Well,” Maurice said. “Came from England. Or Scotland, guess it’s not the same thing, eh?”
Hans wanted to shake him. “Apparently not. And?”
Another quick puff and he dropped the cigarette and ground it under his heel. “And it’s the Brits sending everything that’s anything over here to keep it safe from the Nazis when they invade,” he said. “Sorry, I know they’re in your country, too, eh? Anyway, the Brits got the drop on ’em. Sent it all over here. There’s gold. There’s securities, though damned if I know what them are.”
“I see,” said Hans, thinking about it.
Maurice grinned. “Saved best for last, eh?”
“What do you mean?”
“What I’m hearing,” said Maurice, “is that they’ve got the royal crown jewels in with it all.”
Hans stared at him. “The crown?”
Maurice shrugged. “I dunno what it means. Crown, crowns, who knows what these people wear? But that’s it. I got you what you want.” He glanced nervously at Hans. “We’re even, right?”
Hans was watching a freighter being unloaded. “Yes,” he said absently. “We’re even.” At least for the moment, he thought.
He had a message to send.
CHAPTER NINE
Late September, it was easy to get a table at Jardin Nelson. In the height of the summer season, there’d have been a twenty-minute wait. Worth it, mind you; but a wait nonetheless.
On the other hand, I had a feeling that Julian Fletcher never had to. Wait, that is. He’s in his early thirties with the kind of crooked smile that women fall for, and everything about him whispers money. Even though he’s a cop. Well, he was one of the Fletchers of Westmount long before he became a cop, and would remain one long after he retired from the force.
If the city police let him last until retirement.
He held my chair for me as I sat down. That was definitely a Fletcher thing. “Martine. You look well.”
“As do you, Julian.”
He handed me my menu. “So, why all the mystery?”
I closed it. I didn’t need to look: apart from the two Breton crêperies, Jardin Nelson has the best crêpes in town. “Because the secret’s not mine. Well, not really.” I paused. “Well, maybe.”
He nodded. “I like your decisiveness. It’s becoming.”
“Sarcasm always sat well on you, too.”
We beamed at each other. The waiter came and we ordered, Julian glancing around, automatically checking the environment. That wasn’t a Fletcher thing; that was a cop thing. “So what do you have for me?”
“Some remains down in one of the sewers. Well, a room off the sewers. It’s a skeleton, actually, but parts of it are disarticulated.” I was rather proud of that word: I’d just learned it that morning, sitting in my office and reading about how one determined the age of corpses. Lovely stuff.
“And it concerns me because…?”
“A bullet hole in the skull,” I said with my sweetest smile. “Don’t you remember? Does that work for you?”
He whistled. “Does it ever.”
The waiter came and brought us the bottle of wine Julian’d ordered, poured, and left again. “I’m glad it cheered you up,” I said. “Me, I could have done without it.”
“That’s what you get when you muck about in sewers,” said Julian cheerfully. “What got you mucking about, anyway? Wouldn’t have thought it part of your job description.”
“I am in a challenging and exciting line of work.”
“Apparently so.”
I took a deep breath. “Okay. Voilà. There’s a doctoral student at McGill. Her name is Patricia Mason. She’s been following up on the rumor about the British crown jewels being in Montréal for safekeeping during the Second World War.”
“Thought that was fact, not rumor.”
“Depends on your source,” I said, remembering François and the Gray Line tour narrative. To him, it was gospel, anyway. Probably everyone in the city who knew anything about it thought it gospel, too. I spared a moment of pity for the sad folks still championing the “cave in Wales” story. “Anyway, she’s been spending a lot of time underground. She’s been part of the team over at Pointe-à-Callière, opening up the underground rivers, but she’s also been doing a lot on her own, pretty much sub rosa. She calls it recreational trespassing.”
“Urban exploration,” Julian said and nodded. “Have a couple of friends who’re into it.”
He would. They probably got around on skateboards, too. I was feeling old. “She found some documents—I think they were letters—in London saying that some of the jewels had been stolen, maybe replaced with imitations,” I said. “She thinks that at the end of the war they were moved from the Sun-Life Building, and that’s when some of them were stolen.”
Our lunches arrived, and Julian continued to look at me, steadily, while plates were put in front of us. “No, merci, that’s all for now,” he said to the waiter.
I cleared my throat. “When they were still in London, the jewels had been taken out of their settings—I guess there’s not much secrecy in packing a bunch of crowns and scepters and what-have-you—and apparently put into hatboxes. The hatboxes were put into mislabeled crates and sent over here along with the gold that was paying for convoys. When they were returned at the end of the war, they were in different packaging.”
“Hatboxes didn’t fit in the vault?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. But someone took away the hatboxes and the crates, and they turned up under another building—the old stock exchange.”
“Which, presumably, also had a decent vault,” said Julian, making the connection instantly.
I took a forkful of cheese and mushrooms simmered in béchamel and wrapped in a crêpe, chewed, and nodded. “Presumably so. Patricia got under the Exchange—well, it’s that theater now.”
“A very good theater.”
“Just so. And she found—”
He held up a hand. “The suspense is killing me, so let me guess. The hatboxes.”
“One of them. And the crates. And a skeleton with a bullet hole in its skull. And”—I took a deep breath—“some of the missing jewels, right where his pockets used to be.”
He choked on his wine. “You’re kidding.”
“Never,” I said, solemnly.
“But this is all just speculation. You have to look at the facts, and you don’t know for a fact if any of the jewels went missing.”
“Okay, you’re right.” I put up my hands in surrender. “Then someone else was running around with priceless jewels in hatboxes during the Second World War. City was probably full of them.”
We sat for a while without saying anything. I took a couple of swallows of wine and scoffed most of my crêpe while Julian thought about it. Finally he put his napkin on the table. “Even if they knew,” he said slowly, “no
one was going to say anything.”
I nodded. I’d already worked that out. “There would have been English opposition to sending the jewels across the ocean,” I said. “It was a risky move. The North Atlantic was already full of U-boats. To have it proven that they’d have been safer, after all, in some lonely cave in Wales—well, it wouldn’t have made anybody popular. And Britain after the war needed a rallying point. There had been so much damage, there was so much rebuilding to do. Everything was still scarce, and the king and queen took leadership roles in keeping things positive. They couldn’t afford to admit that everything having to do with the royals wasn’t perfect.”
“So the guy with the bullet’s the thief?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Depends on who he was when he still was … him, I guess.”
“Hmm.” He signaled for the bill. “Is Miss Mason going to take us there?”
“Bien sûr. I’m pretty sure that I couldn’t find my way again on my own, and it’s creepy enough that I wouldn’t want to. And anyway, it’s really her find.” I hesitated. “She’d like to keep it as quiet as possible, Julian. Her academic career is kind of hanging on it.”
He gave me a look as he sorted through bills and coins. Obviously the success of Patricia’s dissertation was way down on his list of priorities; but I’d given her my word, and I was going to at least try to keep some discretion in the proceedings. “I told her we’d meet at the theater at two.”
“Then let’s be off. And, you know, you need to get out more, Martine,” he said. “Used to be you only worked in the Old City; now you live down here, eat down here, discover corpses down here…”
“Don’t quit your day job,” I said, and he grinned at me and we were on our way. On foot, fortunately: Julian had an Audi TT and an approach to driving that was guaranteed to turn your hair white. Always supposing, of course, that you survived the trip.
Patricia was hopping from one foot to the other when we arrived. I introduced them, and she kept looking around, still moving, not really seeming to be present. “What is the problem?” Julian asked her.
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