They never did leave. But, one day, Elias finally did.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
My husband is Jewish, though he sees it as belonging to a tribe rather than practicing a religion. Me, on the other hand, I’m as Catholic as they come, despite many reservations about how my church sometimes practices its faith. Margery, the kids’ mother, occasionally attends a Unitarian-Universalist meetinghouse, but doesn’t manifest a lot of enthusiasm for any organized religion.
So when Ivan and I got married, I took the kids’ religious training firmly in hand. I don’t care if, as thoughtful adults, they turn their backs on the church. I just want to give them something on which to turn their backs … or even, perhaps, not.
So Sunday mornings when they’re in residence, our apartment is alive with protest. “I don’t want to go!” howled Claudia from behind her closed door.
“Ten minutes, Claudia, and you are coming whether you want to or not.”
Lukas sat at the kitchen table, carefully noting the day’s schedule in his planner. “What time’s Dad getting in?”
“I have no idea,” I told him distractedly.
“What if he comes when we’re at church?”
“I seriously doubt that he’ll take that as a rejection, Lukas.” After a sleepless night—we call it a nuit blanche, a white night—I probably wasn’t at my best. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you.”
“I think someone should be here when he comes,” he said.
“It’ll be fine, Lukas, I promise.” I raised my voice. “Claudia!”
“I’m not going!”
“You are if you ever want to see the Underground City again.” I’d agreed to another visit this afternoon, mostly so she could think overnight about spending forty dollars of her saved allowance on a skirt she’d seen yesterday. I was hoping she’d decide against it: it seemed like a lot of money, and Claudia wasn’t finished growing yet. But it was her decision.
“That’s blackmail!”
“It is indeed.”
“I hate you, Belle-Maman!”
Tiredness won out. “Get in line.”
Jean-Luc Boulanger, my esteemed boss, was going to be at the front of that particular line. Not only had I excluded him from the excitement of working with a McGill researcher about to uncover a triumphant moment for the city—hello, street named Boulanger Avenue—I’d managed to allow her to steal an international treasure and get killed in the bargain. To my boss, that was as good as wielding the weapon myself.
I roused myself from the dread: sufficient unto the day, so forth. I managed to coerce the kids into relatively clean clothes, make Claudia take off half her makeup, and get them and myself to the basilica with about two minutes to spare before the 9:30 A.M. Mass. An accomplishment.
What I wanted, right then, more than anything else, was the feeling I get in this church. I was seriously shocked about Patricia—and starting to be seriously afraid, as well. I might not believe a story about a cursed set of diamonds, but something had reached out from the past to claim her, and until I knew what and why, there was a decent risk of it happening to someone else.
So I wanted to sit in this place that I loved above all others in a city that I love with all my heart. You’d think that after what happened last year the basilica would have bad associations, but it didn’t: the weekly and occasionally daily comfort I derived from being here hadn’t changed. Being in the basilica is like being already in heaven, its tall walls interrupted only by stained-glass windows, the blue of the soaring reredos behind the altar, the thousands of candles lighting up the darkened corners of the side chapels … it had always been, for me, a place of peace and comfort. My Happy Place, you might say. And I needed very badly to take Patricia here with me, in my heart and my mind.
She had, of course, been murdered.
* * *
“Shot,” said Julian, “through the head.”
Eerily familiar. I didn’t need to close my eyes to see the heap of bones in the sealed room beneath the theater, the hole in the skull where no hole should be.
Julian was bringing in the troops. He couldn’t, after all, keep a modern murder to himself. “My boss isn’t very pleased to have gotten plunged into it after all, but it’s not like I was keeping the secret for weeks. I’d only met her the day before,” he said.
“What happened, Julian?”
“Don’t know yet. I wanted to find her and get the diamond back—you really, really can’t go keeping priceless jewels that are about to have a firestorm of publicity around them to yourself.” He was trying for lighthearted, and not entirely succeeding. “I thought she’d get that, especially as she wants to have some fame around this discovery. So I went to her apartment.”
“Where did she live?” I didn’t even know that much about her.
“Up on the Plateau,” he said. “Near the Yellow Door?”
I nodded, then realized that he couldn’t see me over the telephone. “Yeah, of course, I know where that is. Noisy place to live.”
“Graduate students don’t always get to be choosy.”
“The McGill Ghetto,” I said, nodding again. I was referring to a neighborhood extending from University to Parc that had once been very affluent, then dropped in social status for reasons that were never clear—and where, lately, rents had begun to rise again. A few of the larger, unkempt apartment buildings are graying at the edges, while some of the four-story walk-ups have been renovated into condos. Victorian and Edwardian-style buildings feature dormer windows, spiral staircases, and Montréal’s signature balconies, many of them decorated with ornate woodwork. Groups of students congregate there in the summertime. As ghettos go, not bad at all. “So she was one of the cool kids.”
“Not all that cool,” Julian said. “Not now.”
“What happened to her, Julian?”
“Like I said, I went to her place. I rang the bell but didn’t get buzzed in, so I waited a while to see if she’d show. One of her neighbors arrived and I took the opportunity to slip in and see what was up. Her apartment door was unlocked.” His voice sounded clinical: Julian the cop, reading a report. “She was there, all right. But dead.”
I hated myself for asking, but I asked anyway. “And the diamond?”
“Nowhere that I could find, but I only did a cursory search in the apartment. The neighbor saw me go in, so I had to call in the cavalry.”
“Merde,” I said and thought for a moment. “Do you know…?”
“Nothing,” said Julian. “But you can bet I’m going to find out. I’m staying on the case, because I have background and my boss thought that would be useful.” Also, he was a Fletcher, a fact that continued to keep him employed with the city police. In this town, what the Fletchers wanted, the Fletchers got.
“I want to help.”
“Martine, thanks, but honestly, no thanks. The last time you helped, you almost got killed.”
“What, so you think I plan to make a habit of it?” First Ivan and now Julian worrying about poor little helpless me getting in trouble. It was nauseating. “Listen. I knew her, Julian. Not well, and I wasn’t completely nice to her, but I knew her. And I’m involved in this, whether you like it or not.”
“In other words, you’re going to investigate on your own if you don’t do it with me.” He sounded resigned.
“That’s one way of looking at it,” I said. “I prefer to think that I am offering the police my knowledge of the victim and wide range of expertise and resources.”
“Uh-huh,” said Julian. “All right. I’ll pick you up tomorrow.”
I hesitated. “I don’t want to be difficult, but—”
“If it’s my driving, you can keep your thoughts to yourself.”
“It’s not. I have the kids, and Ivan’s away. Not sure when he’ll be back. And I promised Claudia the Underground City.”
“So you’re saying we’re investigating with two children in tow.”
“Kind of.”
“Nothing surp
rises me about you, LeDuc. See you soon.”
Now, as I sat in the basilica and felt the music from the tremendous pipe organ washing over me, I thought about that. Ivan would probably be aghast if the kids were to meet Julian, but I didn’t see a way around it, and whatever was happening in Boston had to be pretty serious or he would have been back by now. Thus reminded, I said a quick prayer for Margery. And another for Patricia.
Patricia … I hadn’t spent the time listening to her that I should have. I hadn’t really gotten to know her, or tried to understand why she needed this so badly. I wondered if she’d started the dissertation. I wondered if I’d be allowed to read it.
I wondered if I had, somehow, failed her.
“Belle-Maman!” Claudia hissed, and I realized that everyone was standing but me. She passed me over the missalette, Prions en Église, with a whispered, “We’re already, like, at the prayers!” Even in such a large church, where she was pretty much guaranteed to know nobody, Claudia didn’t want to stand out.
I’d been exactly the same, at her age.
“Désolée,” I whispered back. Sorry.
She tossed her head and the blond hair whirled about her face for a moment, and for a second I saw glasses sliding down on a nose, a finger pushing them back up again. Patricia. Rest in peace, I thought, and turned the thought into a prayer. “Receive her, blessed Lord, among Your angels and saints. Let light perpetual shine upon her. May she enjoy the peace of Your everlasting kingdom.…”
And then it was time for the presentation of the gifts, and the organ again engulfed us in sound. And as I stood and sat and knelt in the rhythm of the Mass, I wondered exactly when it was decided that Patricia would have to die. Which meant figuring out who knew about the stolen diamond. Patricia hadn’t been a threat to anybody until she’d taken it, and talked about it to Lev, and shown it to Avner.
Avner?
Somehow I didn’t see it. I could see him being a little less than honest in declaring income tax, for example, or in bartering over some stones; but nothing about him indicated that he’d be willing to take a life.
His son, then, the lamentably still-unmarried Lev? He was probably in better shape than his father, physically—Avner looked for all the world like he was courting a heart attack—but simply being able to murder someone didn’t mean that one would. Or had.
There was still too much missing here. By the time we left the church it felt like my mind had been going far too long on overtime. Usually we had a coffee and a croissant after Mass, but I was anxious to see if Ivan had returned, so over not-so-muted protests, we walked the couple of blocks to the apartment. Where, naturally, there was no trace of Ivan.
Julian, however, was sitting on the stone stairs, smoking a cigarette.
“Since when do you smoke?”
He stood up, gracefully, and put it out against the side of the building in one fluid gesture. “Good morning to you, Martine,” he said, pocketing the cigarette butt and turning to the kids. “Lukas and Claudia, right?” Hand out to shake theirs. “Détective-lieutenant Julian Fletcher,” he said.
“Wow!” Lukas was impressed. “A detective!”
“In the flesh,” Julian said cheerfully, and winked at Claudia. She blushed, immediately, and turned away, but turned back just as quickly. “We’re going to the Underground City,” she told Julian. “Do you want to, like, come with us?”
“An invitation that’s difficult to refuse,” he acknowledged. “I was rather hoping for a coffee first.”
Claudia glanced at me, hopeful. I sighed. “Coffee,” I said, and her face lit up. Well, why not: Julian was extremely good-looking, and there’s nothing wrong with a teenage crush. As long as it didn’t actually go anyplace …
Lukas insisted on dragging Julian off to his room to see his model cars, and a few seconds later he was shrieking in delight at something Julian said to him. And then the coffee was done and Ivan was still nowhere to be found and we were sitting in the living area. “The détective-lieutenant says that I can go for a ride in his Audi TT sometime,” Lukas informed me, eyes shining.
“Over my dead body,” I said, conversationally, and then realized how malapropos the expression was. My eyes met Julian’s. “Claudia,” I said, “please go see if there are any rolls to go with the coffee.”
“But, Belle-Maman…”
“Now, Claudia.”
She got up with a flounce meant for me and a winning smile meant for Julian, and I added, “Lukas can help you.”
“Belle-Maman!” Outrage from both of them, for completely different reasons.
“You heard me.”
Julian watched them go. “Nice kids,” he commented.
“Yes,” I agreed.
“Their father?”
“He’s in Boston. With their mother.” His eyebrows went up. “No, nothing like that,” I said quickly. “But I’m worried just the same.” I felt vaguely guilty even saying it. Patricia Mason was lying in the morgue. Whatever problems I had were small by comparison. “Julian, exactly what are you doing here?”
“You wanted to investigate. We’re going to investigate. We’re having a coffee first.”
Bisou wandered in, hopped up on the sofa, sniffed Julian, and curled up beside him. He petted the cat for a moment, then frowned at her and looked up. “Is this—?”
“Yes,” I said. I’d adopted Bisou after her previous owner was murdered last summer, one of the killings I’d sort of investigated with Julian. Petting the cat of one murder victim while discussing another. Felt like we’d somehow come full circle.
Or were descending into one of them, anyway.
Julian was talking. “All right. I’ve been to see Lev Kaspi already. Their Sabbath not being our Sabbath, I found him hard at work, writing a program for sorting diamond futures.”
“What are diamond futures?”
He shrugged. “Beats me. Seems to know his way around the trade. And around a computer.”
“And what did he say about Patricia?”
“Liked her.”
“Seriously, between you and Avner, you’d think Lev’s love life was the only thing that counted in this whole story!”
“All right, all right. Let’s take a step back and ask the question we ask anytime anyone is murdered. Something happened that made it necessary to kill Patricia yesterday, when it apparently wasn’t necessary to kill her, say, last week. So what we have to do is look at what changed between last week and this week. We have to look at it from the point of view of the killer.”
“If he’s involved with the diamonds, everything changed.” That much seemed obvious. “Okay. The first question is, did he know about the diamonds under the theater. If he did, he wanted them left there in peace … for whatever reason. If he didn’t, then the obvious answer is that he didn’t want Patricia digging any deeper.”
“And she must have been going in that direction,” said Julian. “Starting with stealing the one diamond and taking it to Avner.”
“Who would Avner have told? His wife? She’s got some kind of mental illness, I’ll bet there’s a lot he keeps from her.”
He shrugged. “Probably he didn’t tell anyone. But his son might have.”
The rolls arrived and the kids with them, excited about their trip. Julian cleared his throat. “Your mother and I—”
“She’s not our mother,” said Claudia.
“Right. Your stepmother and I need to run a couple of errands.”
Lukas pulled out his notebook. “Does that mean we’re not going to the Underground City?” He clicked his pen in anticipation of a change in plans.
I looked at Julian helplessly. “No, of course not,” I said. “We’ll compromise. You can go for a while on your own and we’ll meet you there. And by then maybe your dad will be back, too.”
“We can go alone?” Claudia’s eyes were dancing. She’d given up on thoughts of Julian pretty quickly, I thought.
“You can go alone,” I said, “under certain conditions.
”
Claudia was still smiling. Her favorite place in the world, and without an embarrassing adult around? It didn’t get better than that. “Yes, Belle-Maman?”
“You will stay together at all times. Nonnegotiable.”
“Yes, Belle-Maman.”
“You will call me every half hour,” I went on, “and tell me exactly where you are. If I do not hear from you on the half hour, the détective-lieutenant here will send the police to your last known location. That will probably prove to be very embarrassing for all of us, so I’d advise you to avoid it.”
“Yes, Belle-Maman.”
“Bon. You both have money? You’ll get something to eat?”
Two solemn nods. “Claudia, I mean it about staying together.”
“We will.”
I turned to Julian. “What do we do now?”
“City police are investigating,” he said.
“Good for them,” I said. “What do we do now?”
He looked up at me. “Find the diamond,” he said.
* * *
Hans had developed a new habit: he loved going to the Hebrew delicatessen on the boulevard St.-Laurent.
He knew that it wouldn’t endear him to anyone at home, of course, patronizing a Jewish restaurant; but he was alone in Montréal, merely waiting for whatever further orders might come through, and there was no one to see him.
And Schwartz’s smoked meats were the best he’d ever tasted.
He was working in the area a lot: there were plenty of jobs for skilled workers, and he’d perfected his carpentry work. Who would have known that the hobby he’d shared with his father would ultimately earn him a living?
There was money from Germany, of course, which had gone through banks somewhere else before arriving in small packets every month; but he had to become part of the scenery here, to fit in, and so he took a job. Several, in fact: there were few enough men around, and Hans was in demand.
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