“That’s what I like to hear,” said Kurt. “Bear your frustrations for the Fatherland, Peterson. This is your war, right here.” He couldn’t help but snigger as he looked around. Anjou was blue-collar and unkempt, not like downtown; Hans suspected that Kurt had selected it on purpose. Unworthy thoughts of my superior, he reminded himself, but thought them anyway.
“Is there news?” he asked diffidently. Kurt would prolong this as long as he could.
“There is always news,” Kurt responded. “Tell me, is there a decent restaurant in this city, or do I have to take the train back right away?”
Hans started to defend Montréal, then thought better of it. “Nothing to your standards,” he said. The sooner Kurt was out of his hair, the better.
“Thought not,” said the other. He was looking with ill-disguised disgust at a woman walking toward them on the towpath. Waiting for her to pass, he said, “Everyone’s pleased that we know where the royal jewels are,” he said. “There’s a lot of interest from Berlin.”
“Am I to do anything about them?” A little action would be nice.
“Not for the moment.” He shook his head. “Me, I’d think they’d be after the securities. But that’s not the case. They have a plan. And it’s not for us to question it!” He scowled at Hans as if he’d done just that.
“Jawohl,” said Hans neutrally.
“So you are to wait,” said Kurt with some relish. “Wait until you hear from me. Make yourself part of the community.” He glanced over. “Your cover is still good?”
“It’s still good.”
“All right.” He grinned. “I think I will take the early train down after all. There’s a show at Radio City Music Hall tonight I don’t want to miss.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
By the time we got home, I was fuming. I’d tried calling Patricia several times on her mobile, but it went straight to voice mail. So did Julian’s. So did Ivan’s. Nobody, it seemed, wanted to talk to me.
Claudia was clamoring about having dinner in the Underground City, and as she hadn’t made our trip to the Insectarium an actual disaster, I was inclined to agree. I’m not crazy about the Underground City as a destination, mind you: it’s really just a shopping mall that spreads its tentacles all over, connected by corridors and, of course, the Métro; but it is certainly popular and, in the winter, extremely useful.
There’d been various attempts over the years to make it more attractive to those seeking culture along with their fashion and fast food, and of course there was Québec’s “one percent” rule: any building constructed for public use has to put aside one percent of said building for the arts. So there’s always an attempt. The corridors connect some cultural venues, of course—the museum of contemporary art, some theaters, a tremendous movie house—but, by and large, it’s a mall.
Still, there’s a lot to be said for it. Underground, you can eat, drink, visit bookstores and pharmacies, pay your taxes at one of the government offices, book a trip at a travel agency, buy your dinner wine at one of the societé des alcools du Québec outlets, and of course shop, shop, shop.
The reality is that most Montréalers use it as a means to an end: the Underground City is a commuter’s dream. No rain, no snow, no traffic. Weekdays they’re all there, morning and evening, walking briskly to and from their workplaces downtown, grabbing the Métro, stopping occasionally for a quick coffee.
But it was the bright lights, the window displays, the fashion, and the relative safety of the mall environment that drew Claudia and other adolescents like moths to a flame.
It was a particularly fine day and so we eschewed the Métro and walked up the hill to the Eaton entrance. “I need to go to La Baie,” Claudia was babbling. “And to Ailes de la Mode, and to…” Her eyes were glittering, and I shook my head. Nothing like offering a fix to an addict.
We did a little shopping and a lot of looking around and finally found ourselves in one of the lower-level food courts, eating hamburgers and fries. Ivan, who was on an organic-foods-only kick, would have been horrified, but the kids were ecstatic and I felt they’d earned it. Ivan was never away when they were with us, and they must have been feeling it.
“Belle-Maman? Belle-Maman!”
Distracted, I focused back on the kids. “What is it?”
“Can we look around?”
“Did you finish eating?” Lukas had; he inhaled food, and his intake was prodigious. Claudia picked delicately at hers and had clearly eaten everything she planned to eat. “All right. Check back with me in fifteen minutes.”
“Fifteen minutes!” It was a wail.
“All right. Twenty. Let me see your phones.”
“Lukas has his.”
“Twenty minutes,” I said again, and they were gone.
So what should I worry about first? The fact that Patricia had clearly grabbed one of the diamonds and hadn’t bothered mentioning it to me, or the question marks that surrounded Ivan’s sudden need to see Margery?
How fortunate that I had a plethora of things to choose from that I could feel anxious about.
What was Patricia’s game, anyway? She presented as so straightforward, the graduate student with the great ideas, pushing her glasses up her nose and talking about history as though she’d lived it. Was she becoming obsessed? I’d considered it, but at the end of the day I’d have said not: I’ve met some obsessed people in my life, and Patricia was more grounded than that.
But why steal a diamond? Why show it to Avner? Why go completely off the reservation when she’d promised to work with me? She didn’t trust me, hadn’t trusted me since I’d brought Julian in. But she’d taken the diamond before that.
And then there was Ivan. My mind approached that one more delicately. Margery had been sick last year; what if it hadn’t been the cut-and-dried situation, the successful surgery she’d told us it was? What if it were something far more serious? How could the kids lose their mother?
The cold feeling in my stomach was intensifying. I took a deep breath, shook my head as though to banish the images, and consciously moved my thoughts off the subject. Patricia: there was a puzzle that was less emotional. Why would she have taken one of the diamonds? Did she think they were going to disappear, that for some reason the government was going to bury them in red tape and international relations; did she feel she needed to save one to prove that they existed? Or did she just want it?
And was it really accidental that she’d run into Avner’s son Lev at McGill?
I took a deep breath. Ivan would have to wait, but Patricia? Her, I could do something about. I punched her contact icon on my mobile and when the voice mail clicked on, I left a terse message. “Contact me as soon as you get this message, or I’m going to the police.”
How cliché can you get?
* * *
Julian, when I finally spoke to him, was more sanguine. “I’m not especially surprised,” he said.
I frowned. I was curled on the sofa, Claudia and Lukas having taken their various packages to their bedrooms, both clearly tired. I’d just poured a glass of wine when Julian returned my call. “You’re not surprised?”
“She’s emotionally involved,” he said. “She’s got a lot at stake here.”
“So that means it’s okay to steal a crown jewel? I just left her a message threatening to call the police, but, gosh, apparently the police don’t care.”
“Didn’t say I didn’t care, just said I wasn’t surprised,” Julian said. “My, you’re prickly tonight.”
I took a swallow of wine. “Sorry, Julian. Bad day. So tell me—what’s your take on Patricia? And do you even know where she is?”
“I think that she’s probably getting the diamond assessed,” he said. “It’s certainly the first thing I’d do.”
“Too late. She’s already done that.” And I told him about Avner of the black raincoat. “He says she met his son, who’s some kind of computer genius but apparently lacking in the marriage department, at McGill, and asked Avner
to look at the diamond.”
“What did he say?”
What had he said? He’d talked about the Koh-i-Noor, the most famous of all the diamonds. About the replacements for the jewels that King John had supposedly lost when crossing the Wash at Sutton Bridge. And then he’d told me about the curse.
“Of course there’s a curse,” said Julian, delighted. “Tell me, tell me!”
“Let me see if I remember,” I said. “I wasn’t taking notes.” Another swallow of wine. “So first you have to understand what we’re talking about here. They’re not all actually jewels, though a lot of them are. All sorts of jewels, not just diamonds, though that’s what we’re dealing with here. When you say the crown jewels, you’re actually referring to anything that’s used or worn or even is just present at a coronation. So there are scepters and swords and all that sort of thing, too.” I paused. “Valuable objects that can allegedly pick up—influences—along the way.”
“Influences,” said Julian.
“That’s where Hitler came in,” I said. “See, it’s all about a certain tradition, isn’t it? And there were all these treasures accumulating over the decades in the royal coffers, and everything was lovely in the garden until Cromwell arrived.”
“Cromwell?” He was sounding bewildered. That was fine; I’d felt bewildered, too, between Avner’s version of history and what I’d looked up since I’d gotten home.
“The English Civil War,” I said. “You know, the antimonarchy mob. Didn’t you do English history at school? King Charles was executed in—oh, sixteen-something, I can’t remember. And all the royal gold was melted down. The jewels themselves—the gemstones, you know?—they got taken out of their settings and sold. Cromwell was determined that anything that was a symbol of royalty and kingship should be completely eradicated.”
“So none of the current crown jewels are older than the 1600s,” said Julian.
“None of the ones that came from England,” I said. “They acquired older pieces from other countries, but essentially that’s correct. And that’s where the curse comes in.”
“Go on.”
I settled myself even more snugly into the sofa. “So there was this tiara,” I said. “All diamonds—it came from France. It was put into the collection—it was stored at Westminster then, not the Tower of London—and the first thing that happens is that it’s getting cleaned, and the person doing it gets cut and dies.”
“Every curse has to start somewhere,” Julian observed.
“And a little infection will kickstart it,” I agreed. “No one talked about a curse, though, until the tiara started stacking up bodies. Over time, mind you. Decades. In the twentieth century, the jewels were out for Elizabeth II’s coronation, and one of her ladies-in-waiting, who apparently handled the tiara, died within the week. Of course, she already had emphysema, but curses don’t care about that.”
“And you think the diamonds that Patricia found are from this tiara?”
“Avner thinks so. He’s seen one of them, remember, and he’s a guy who really knows his diamonds. So, yeah, we probably have the cursed jewels here.”
“Well, whoever got shot down there no doubt agrees,” said Julian.
“About him, Julian—”
“Yeah?”
“Well, what’s the plan? Are you going to launch an investigation? Get forensics and crime-scene people down there?”
“Probably not,” he said. “I had a talk this morning with the boss, and he’s less than impressed. He only wants to catch killers if they’re alive so they can have a spectacularly expensive trial and go to prison. It’s about notches on the bedstead. Um—metaphorically speaking, of course.”
“Of course,” I agreed. “He’d probably be thrilled to arrest Patricia, though.”
“Not giving him the option. I’m going to find her first, get the diamond back. That’s a headache for other people, by the way. The moment I talked about the crown jewels his eyes glazed over. Way above our pay grade. But Ottawa’s going to have to get involved.”
“I thought they might.” And I was going to have to explain all this to Jean-Luc on Monday. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to that. “Do you know where she is?”
“Not at this actual moment. But I’m going to find her tomorrow and see if we can lift this curse.”
I put down the wineglass. “I’d rather like a word with her then, too.”
The evening wound down, and the later it got, the more depressed I felt. Ivan didn’t call. I checked my phone to make sure the battery hadn’t run down. I thought about calling him, and didn’t.
Ivan didn’t call, but Julian did: he called me back just as I was getting ready to go to sleep. “You know that curse?” asked Julian. “It worked.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s Patricia Mason,” he responded. “She’s dead.”
* * *
The sign over the main gate said it all. JEDEM DAS SEINE, which, loosely translated, meant that if you were here, you were getting what you deserved.
But nobody deserved what they got at Buchenwald.
It went operational in 1937 and was the first camp to be liberated by United States troops in 1945. There was a lot of time in between. A lot of time, and a lot of bodies.
But not Elias Kaspi’s body. Not if he could help it.
There was a large oak tree in the center of the camp, Goethe’s Oak it was called, funny thing it seemed, to be naming trees. They say he wrote Faust right there, under that tree, and what a thought, a deal with the devil in a place that, if you believed in hell, was right here, right now.
Elias didn’t like looking at the tree. He’d made his own deal with the devil.
Someone had to live, he told himself. And he’d been given the opportunity. To live on. To someday leave this place.
Ruth hadn’t been given the opportunity; they’d been separated, and the officials who’d requested Elias didn’t request that his wife come along with. He didn’t know where Ruth was. He didn’t know if she was alive or dead, in Belgium or Germany, in another camp or had escaped, God willing, fleeing down a road and then, perhaps, strafed by the Luftwaffe. He’d seen that happen enough on the roads around Antwerp.
He couldn’t think about Ruth. Not now. At night, in his bunk in the long barracks he shared with forty other equally emaciated men, after the obligatory head count and nibbling on the bread he’d saved from the morning’s rations; then he thought about her. But during the day he had work to do. Work that was keeping him alive.
Who would have thought that his trade, his gesheft, was what in the end would have saved him?
A diamond merchant. A man who knew diamonds, intimately, who lived and breathed diamonds. Who had generations of diamond trade singing in his blood. Who knew, in fact, everything that there was to know about diamonds.
Because Elias didn’t only sell diamonds. Elias could cut them, too.
Who would have thought?
His brother Herman had emigrated to Eretz Israel in 1930 along with a large group of Jews from the low countries, Jews who established an important diamond industry in Palestine, bringing their technical skills and commercial connections with them.
At first, Elias had gone with Herman. It seemed like an exciting plan, something daring, to go to this place of their ancestors, to live in the strange heat shimmering off the desert. He was young, and eager, and had worked hard with Herman in Netanyah for three years. But it was not his home, this strange hot country, and in the end Elias returned to Antwerp to marry Ruth and take up his father’s business, taking care of shteyns there.
But Herman had helped make Palestine into the gem diamond center of the world, and the Nazis knew all about him. And because of Herman, they knew about Elias.
So they hadn’t put Elias into one of the trains that nobody was talking about yet, that the world learned about later. They had been polite. They had knocked on his door. It was only when he’d refused to go with them that they had shown
their true colors. And by then it was too late.
Still, here at Buchenwald, there was a chance of survival. They gave Elias a workshop and two apprentices. They paid him in camp money. And they had something very specific in mind.
“These photographs,” the camp commander had said when Elias first arrived. “Look at these photographs.”
They were crowns and scepters, tiaras and necklaces. “Very nice,” Elias said. He didn’t know what they expected of him.
“The diamonds,” the commandant said. “Do you know what diamonds these are?”
They were big stones, what his father used to call mame-zitsers. Elias looked again and shook his head. “Crown jewels,” he said, that much was obvious. Whose? The Nazis were plundering so many countries, who knew?
“It doesn’t matter.” He was brusque. “Can you imitate them?”
“What?” Elias was bewildered. “These are diamonds. They—”
A swift backhand across his cheek. “Enough! Do not play with me! It is my understanding that there are other gems that can be cut to have the same appearance. Am I incorrect?”
Light was dawning and with it, hope. “You are not incorrect,” Elias said. “There are some gems, yes, yes. It can be done. Yellow sapphires … there’s a special garnet…”
“We will procure what you need,” the commandant said. “You will create copies of these jewels.”
“Yes,” said Elias. And lived.
The work was wretched, and the conditions even more so. Every morning he awoke to more death, more pain, more despair. Sometimes one or more of the men in his barracks had died next to him in the night. There were beatings; there was solitary confinement. There was so little to eat that men dropped around him of starvation; and Elias himself finally stopped dreaming of the Sabbath dinners that Ruth used to put on the table.
And then there were the singing trees.
Buchenwald, he knew, meant “beech forest,” a beautiful name for such a terrible place. And there were trees, a whole grove of them, where Goethe used to walk with his love. It was in these trees that Commandant Koch hung prisoners from the wrists, their arms behind them; the singing that he spoke of was their screams. They echoed inside Elias’s head, those screams, even when he wasn’t hearing them. He was sure that they would never leave.
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