He reared back like a frightened horse. An overweight frightened horse. One hand went to his chest. “Ack. You almost killed me, there, with your ‘bonjour, monsieur’. What is it you’re wanting? Hmm? Is it me to have a heart attack? This will make you happy?”
“I’m wanting,” I said carefully, “to know why you’re following me and my children.”
He produced a handkerchief and mopped his forehead. “Your children, no, I don’t need to follow them. But you, yes, you I am following. You are of great interest to me. You, I need to learn more about.”
“Really? And why is that?”
He looked at me, surprised. “Why,” he said, “because of the diamonds, of course!”
* * *
The fat man was laughing.
Everyone in the room exchanged nervous smiles. When Hermann Göring was amused, it usually seemed to mean that someone was in trouble. Sometimes, very bad trouble. “I thought we’d have a time of it, convincing the English that we’re serious about invasion,” he said, wiping a tear from the corner of his eye, still laughing. “They’re the ones convincing me!”
“But, Herr Reichsmarschall—”
He waved the incipient objection away. “I know what I’ve said,” he said. “And I stand by it. We won’t need a ground invasion. We’ll take the damned island by air.”
“The Luftwaffe will always reign supreme, Herr Reichsmarschall,” one of his aides said.
The laughter faded. “If I need a sycophant, Horst, I’ll tell you to speak,” he said.
“Yes, Herr Reichsmarschall.”
The fat man regained his good humor. “But if this is correct—and I believe my general—then what an opportunity for a delightful trick to play on the Englanders!”
“A trick, Herr Reichsmarschall?”
He rubbed his hands together. “Indeed. They’re so afraid of us they’ve sent their precious crown jewels, the pride of the empire, across the sea, out of reach! Obviously—and rightly—they believe in invasion.” He chuckled. “The scenario’s perfect, gentlemen. We take over England, and when we make them claim them from Canada, poof! They’re not all there.” He paused. “Or, better still, they’re not all real!”
“If it can be done, Herr Reichsmarschall…”
He turned on the group. “I don’t want to hear anybody talking about problems! It can be done! It will be done! I will not stand for negativity here!”
“Jawohl, Herr Reichsmarschall!” Everyone had stiffened in their chairs.
“We will locate these jewels and we will do what we want with them and we will break the backs of the damned Englanders!”
“Jawohl, Herr Reichsmarschall!”
The fat man was smiling again—that was how most of his victims remembered him. “So. We will take care of the Englanders’ jewels. But not a word of this to the Führer! Not yet! It will be a pleasant surprise for him.”
“Jawohl, Herr Reichsmarschall.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
We were sitting in a restaurant whose name I couldn’t readily dissect from all the writing on the sheet glass advertising special plats du jour and urging customers to apporter their own wine. Claudia and Lukas were sitting at a table nearby, eating ice cream and pretending that they didn’t know me.
And I was talking with the man from the Insectarium: Avner Kaspi.
“You have to understand, perhaps you do not, that the diamond trade, it runs in families, it is passed from father to son as a birthright,” Avner was saying. That we were already on a first-name basis indicated probably nothing more than my complete shock when we’d met; but after ten minutes with the man, I felt I’d known him for years. “There is my son Lev, a fine young man, a real mensch, if you were not already married I would recommend him to you. He will do well in the diamond trade he gets from his father once he stops this thinking that he belongs in school forever—what did I do wrong there?—and starts looking for the right girl.”
“I see,” I said faintly. I actually saw nothing.
“Ah, but you are not here to talk about my son or his matrimonial plans, or perhaps I should say lack thereof,” said Avner. “I understand. You’re like mine wife Naomi. ‘Avner, get to the point,’ she is always telling me, but it’s not so easy to do, is it, when there’s a long story to tell?”
“Why don’t,” I said carefully, “you start at the beginning?”
“This is a good question. You are a smart woman, I could tell that right away about you. So this is where I will start. I will start at the darkest time in Europe’s history, I will start as the war began.”
“Your family—” I started to say, and then broke off. “I’m sorry. That’s none of my business. Go on, please.”
“But it is your business, Martine LeDuc! This is why I have looked for you, to find a time to talk. Yesterday I look for you, but could not find you, all day I wait near City Hall to see you, but the directrice de publicité is somewhere else, so they tell me, always she is somewhere else, and I cannot see her.”
Light dawned. “Were you following me yesterday? Or Patricia?”
He frowned. “No. I go home to my Naomi and I say, ‘Ach, I cannot find her, this Martine LeDuc person.’”
It was just an idea. “Go on,” I said again.
“Yes. So my father, he was in the diamond trade, of course, I tell you this is how it works, we pass it on so it all stays in the family. If there is no son, God forbid, there is a nephew always, a son-in-law, someone. It’s part of our history, yes? Diamond trade routes follow the Diaspora, so this trade, it is particularly suited to Jewish enterprise.” He smiled. “And since these diamonds were a relatively rare and new commodity in Europe, we find a niche there. You see how it is? You are following me?”
“Yes,” I said. “Faint but pursuing.”
“So my father, him, he is in Antwerp, in Belgium. It is a big center for the diamonds, Antwerp. And he is doing very well, thank God: there is always food on the table. There were bad things happening, yes; there was reason to fear. But still they stayed there, in Antwerp. Still they think they can ride out this storm. Until 1939.”
I didn’t have to ask what had happened in 1939.
Avner was unemotional. “My father and his wife, this is his first wife I speak of now, they were sent to a transit camp, and then he went on to Buchenwald. We think his wife, she was sent to Ravensbrück, maybe much later. Who can say? My father, he survived. Everything they made him do, everything he endured, and he came out. His wife, she did not.”
He paused, and there was an awkward silence. I had no idea what to say.
“So after the war, my father, he returned to Antwerp, to take up again the diamond trade. And things, they went very well for him then. He found my mother, and married her, and I was born. It was all good.”
A happy ending for someone, at least. “I’m glad,” I said awkwardly, inadequately.
He smiled. “You do not have to be embarrassed,” he said. “This is the past of which I speak now. But the past is never completely gone, do you not find this is so?”
“Especially lately,” I said.
“Yes. I see that you know what I am going to speak of next.” He took a deep breath. “My father, he who is in the diamond trade, he teaches me the diamond trade. From a small boy I learn it. I know what there is to know.” He glanced at me. “My son, Lev, he is in the business, when he is not in classes at McGill. And my son, he has changed the business for me. Grading systems and something he calls e-commerce, and e-mail. Currency exchanges.” He shook his head. “He is very smart, my Lev.”
I had a time limitation—i.e., how long Lukas and Claudia were going to be willing to sit still. “What happened, Avner?”
“Ach, well you might ask. So here we are. And my family, we are not all of us happy with life in Antwerp. My brother, he does aliyah, you understand this? Goes to live in Israel. He thinks he can be a better Jew in Israel. Me, I think, you take who you are with you. And I meet a girl, a nice Jewish girl, I wi
sh that my son Lev would meet such a nice Jewish girl like this one, only mine, mine Naomi, I married. And she is the daughter of such an important rabbi in this city called Montréal! A very famous rabbi, he is. So this is where I come, for my father-in-law, he wants to have his daughter close, and who can blame him? He tells her to live in Montréal, so we live in Montréal.”
I tried to imagine telling Claudia and her future husband where they should live, but gave up. “How did you meet her?”
“Sorry?”
“Your wife,” I said. “How did you meet her?”
“Ah. Yes. This is also a story. Mine wife, she was in Antwerp for a doctor who practices there.” He glanced at me. “She stays for some time to get better. In a special hospital, you understand? After the war, there are many not right in the head, you know this? And she was not right in the head, no, but she is always right in the heart, and that is where it counts. She takes pills now, they help her.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s really none of my business.”
“So I move to Montréal,” Avner was saying. “And I bring with me my diamond trade, and there are more Jews here who do it, too, so I am happy to find that I fit right in.”
I cleared my throat. “Avner, I’m not seeing the connection between—”
He interrupted. “Three years ago, my father died. It is no surprise; he was a very old man. A very old man,” he emphasized, looking at me as though I’d been about to accuse him of murdering his father. “And I take mine wife Naomi and mine son Lev and we go to Antwerp to sit shiva with my family. You understand this?”
“It’s like a wake, isn’t it?” I said cautiously. “Only it lasts longer. Days?”
“Days,” he confirmed, nodding. “So we are in Antwerp, and I am remembering how to speak the language, because I have not spoken it in many years, here it is only French and English and Yiddish, you see.”
I nodded.
“And so I am speaking Flemish again, and my aunt, she who also endured and survived the Shoah, she is giving me my father’s possessions, that she says he wanted me to have. It is boxes and boxes. Too much to deal with. Too much sorrow, too many memories, too many people to see. So we have the boxes sent to Montréal and we stay for two weeks in Antwerp and then we return home. And you are thinking, I know you are thinking, that this is the end of my father’s story, but no! It is not. Because finally when I look at my father’s papers, I find out things. He wrote of the camp where he was, of Buchenwald, and I must force myself to read it, because I do not want to know.”
“I can understand that.”
“But as much as I do not want to know, I want to know. It is a very confusing feeling. So I read it all. He is writing this after he has returned to Antwerp, after the camp is liberated, you understand: he is writing of his memories. And he is writing of what he did for work when he is in the camp.”
I sat very still. Behind me, Lukas’s laughter.
“The Nazis, they found him very interesting, my father. They like that he knows about diamonds.” He took a deep breath. “And here it is, now I tell you this thing. They find him especially, my father, they look for him and find him and bring him on purpose to Buchenwald, because he works with white sapphires, and special garnets, and can make from them what looks like diamonds, cut just so, even an expert might think they are diamonds.”
It felt inevitable. “They knew that the crown jewels were here,” I said. It was the only place this could possibly be going, and at the same time I couldn’t see how.
Avner nodded. “Very quick, you are. Would that Lev could find such a nice girl—Jewish, though, of course—as quick as you are. Yes. And here is the thought. The English hide their jewels, and the Nazis, they take them. Not all of them, just some of them. They think these diamonds, they hold magical powers, some of them. For centuries they hold the power of kings, king after king, some people, they believe that this builds the power, that it gets bigger. And Hitler, everyone knows, he thinks highly of such things. Very interested, he is, in tales of mine people, of kabbalic mysticism. He believes that these jewels will bring him the greatest power of all.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “He will be able to make nature itself bend to his will.”
“Then why replace them with anything?” I asked. “Why not just steal them outright?”
“This is another very good question, Martine LeDuc. You do not maybe have a little Jewish sister, a younger one maybe, one we can introduce to my son Lev? They will steal the diamonds, yes, but replace them with clever fakes, fakes that my father makes for them from white sapphires at Buchenwald. And why, you ask. Well, I will tell you the why. It is because they believe that they will take England. It is a matter of time only. And when the English call for their magical crown jewels, they will be shown to be paste, to be nothing, just as the English, they are nothing. This is the plan.”
“How did they learn the jewels were in Montréal? It was supposed to be a secret.”
He lifted his shoulders in a very Gallic gesture; he’d lived in Montréal long enough to pick that up, anyway. Or maybe they shrugged like that in Antwerp. “Who can say? This, I do not know. Except that secrets very often are not secrets at all. People, they are very bad at keeping secrets, and the more time passes, the more it is possible to share them around.”
I nodded. “C’est vrai,” I said. “Okay. So you read about what your father did, and you probably wanted to learn more about it, since here you were, living in Montréal yourself. How did you find out about…”
“… the diamonds under the theater?” he asked. “Because my Lev, he is a genius with a computer, have I told you this? Always doing this with the computer, that with the computer. Me, I know nothing about this, but mine son Lev, he does. It is what he studies.”
“At McGill,” I said, light dawning.
He nodded. “At McGill, where he meets this girl—she is not as smart as you, I think, and she is not a Jewish girl, but mine boy Lev, he likes her.”
“Patricia Mason,” I said, and swore. “Bordel, I don’t believe it.” There are four major universities in Montréal, two of them English-speaking. What were the chances of the diamond merchant’s son and the doctoral student fetching up in the same place? “What kind of coincidence is that?”
“The world, it is smaller than you think, and only in movies do they say, ‘I do not believe in coincidences,’” said Avner. “There is a word for coincidence in all the languages I know. And so it does exist. She has not told him everything, but she has told him what she has found. I think that if you identify your skeleton, Martine LeDuc, you will find someone who worked for the Nazis.”
“So who killed him?”
He shrugged again. “This, also, I do not know. There is very much I do not know. What I know, only, is diamonds. About diamonds, I know everything. And I would like very much to see the other diamonds. I think they are the real ones that my father made copies of. The one I have seen, it is perfect, it is like his drawings that I have seen.”
“Hang on,” I said. “What do you mean, the other diamonds?”
He looked at me blandly. “Besides the one that Miss Mason has shown me already, of course,” he said. “The one from the room under the theater.”
“Yes,” I said faintly. “Of course.”
* * *
It wasn’t the way he would have chosen to fight the war, living this double life. He loved the Wehrmacht uniforms, everything correct and commanding respect when a soldier walked into a room; and he could have been more than just a soldier, too. Hans was sure of it. He could have become an officer, had ribbons on his chest; everyone would know that the boy whose father had killed his family had risen high, far above his beginnings, his tragedy, know that he had become a real man.
Instead, he was forced to live far away from anyone he knew, pretend to be someone he wasn’t, fight a war without a gun. It was dispiriting.
He had very little contact with anyone from the Fatherland. That might
have helped, Hans told himself. Hear someone speaking German—any German, any accent, it wouldn’t matter. Making jokes that only another German would understand. Talk with people from the Party, hear the Party gossip.
Instead, he had Kurt.
Kurt was stationed in New York City. He sometimes sent coded messages—Hans had taken the requisite course in codes and cyphers—and sometimes came up to Montréal himself. Even though he longed for German companionship, Hans preferred Kurt’s communiqués to Kurt’s actual presence: there was nothing about Montréal that the other man couldn’t find to criticize. It was too cold; it was too hot. The French was incomprehensible; Kurt had been in Paris and considered himself a connoisseur of all things French. The food was good enough to feed to the dogs. The women were all too thin. And so on.
New York, on the other hand, was the center of Kurt’s universe. He was, of course, a good Party member, a staunch Nazi, and he knew that the depravities of the United States of America were its ultimate weakness—but that knowledge never kept him from exploring and enjoying those depravities to the fullest. “Times Square, you should see Times Square,” he said to Hans as they strolled along the river in Montréal’s quiet residential section called Anjou. “The women there—not very proper, not very careful, completely edible!”
“What do you have for me today?”
Kurt turned away from the water and looked at Hans, his eyes narrowed. “You’re very eager,” he observed.
“I am eager to do my duty for the Fatherland,” Hans said. “Sometimes it feels—”
“Ah, yes, I see what you are saying.” He turned and resumed the walk, his hands clasped behind his back. Hans told people it was his brother who was visiting. “You wish that you had more excitement here. You wish that you could make a difference for the Führer. I can sympathize. It must be terrible, stuck in a provincial backwater like this.”
“I do my duty,” said Hans stiffly, wishing he could just push Kurt into the river. There were rapids in the St. Lawrence, fast water that, with a little luck, could take him all the way out to sea. It was not an unpleasant thought.
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