She shook her head. “It is not all right. Avner, I told you not to involve these people. They will make it worse. They will get us all killed.”
“This is mine wife, Naomi,” Avner said to us. “She is upset by this.”
“Anyone would be,” I responded. “It’s very upsetting. I’m very sorry, Mrs. Kaspi.”
Julian looked at the paper and turned to me. “This may change things,” he said. “About Patricia.”
“That she was killed by neo-Nazis instead of diamond thieves?”
“That she may have been killed by diamond thieves who are neo-Nazis.”
Avner looked back and forth between us anxiously. “This means what? This means that they know about the replacement diamonds?”
Julian frowned, sliding the card carefully into a plastic bag. “We’ll see what we can get for fingerprints,” he said, and then turned to Avner. “Are you familiar with any neo-Nazi groups operating in the area?”
“You ask me this because I am Jewish? What, every Jew knows this? Because I am Jewish, I should spend my time looking under rocks for crazies?”
“Someone will know,” I said. “They keep records of these people somewhere.” Offhand, I couldn’t think of where. The Holocaust Museum? “If that’s even what we’re looking at. This whole thing could be just a prank.”
“A prank that we’re going to take seriously until proven otherwise,” said Julian.
Avner had more practical considerations in mind. “So I should not leave my house? No work? No minyan? What about mine Naomi?”
Naomi had an answer for that. “I have to do the shopping,” she said. “Every day, I do the shopping. I have to go out and do the shopping.”
“Can’t you arrange for someone to guard them?” I asked Julian.
“On our budget? You’ve got to be kidding.” A beat, then, “I’ll see what I can do.” He looked at Avner. “I think we need to take this threat seriously. Is there somewhere else you and your family can stay?”
“For how long? I am not anxious to begin living mine life in fear of the crazies. I have not for many years. I will not start now.”
Naomi clearly had other ideas. “And what, then? You want they should kill us in our beds? It’s not funny, Avner. You know it’s not supposed to be funny. We’ve seen this before.”
Avner put his arm around her shoulder. “Mine wife, the rabbi’s daughter,” he said. “We cannot leave this neighborhood,” he said. “This is our home. Your policeman, he can guard us here.”
I understood his reluctance. Literally and figuratively, Montréal is a series of villages, and people tend to be fiercely loyal to their own quartier. Living somewhere else is like living in another city altogether. I’d made the switch from the Plateau to the old city, but it had taken some time to really feel at home in my new neighborhood. Now, of course, I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. “I’d like to see you somewhere else,” said Julian.
Avner considered it. “Mordecai Kaufman, he rents out rooms,” he said.
“That would be good,” I told Avner.
Naomi clearly didn’t agree. “A room? You want us to stay in a room, now? Like refugees? This is what we have come to?”
“We’ll come back,” he said, but she shook her head. “We will stay at my father’s home,” she said firmly.
“Mine father-in-law,” said Avner, in the same voice he’d use to say, “a snake.”
“Your father-in-law, yes,” Naomi told him. “There at least I can cook, I can see my mother, we’ll be next door to the synagogue, what more do you want?”
“How about Lev? Can he go with you?” asked Julian. “Or maybe stay with a friend?”
“You think mine son, he is in danger also?”
Julian and I looked at each other. “I think,” I said, “that we don’t want to take any chances.”
Avner shrugged. “So, he will come, too, to the rabbi’s house, to his grandfather’s house,” he said resignedly. “I go now, make the arrangements, oh, we have so much to pack, so much to do!”
“Better than arranging for a headstone,” I reminded him, and he grimaced. Naomi was already halfway up the stairs. “And you think that he will appreciate seeing those slippers you wear, my father? How many times have I said, those slippers, they have to go?”
Avner turned to us and shrugged. “Mine Naomi, she will take care of things,” he said. “But I had better go now and pack these slippers of mine away before this wife of mine takes them.” He paused. “It is maybe good for her, to be with her family. Lately she is not looking so good.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, a little helplessly. I didn’t know much about mental illness.
“It is what God sends,” said Avner philosophically. “She takes her medications, it is good. Mine wife is a beautiful woman, a beautiful mother, but I say to you it is maybe good that we go to the house of her father. I will go now and help her.”
Alone in the cavernous room, I turned to Julian. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking that we need to rethink everything,” he said. “And that we need more information.”
“Who knows about neo-Nazi activity in Montréal?”
He gave me a smile that bordered on irony. “We do.” He pulled out his smartphone. “Let’s see if I can get us an audience.”
“Sounds like we’re going to see the pope.”
“Naw. That would be easier.”
* * *
It was on a Monday that Hans had first noticed the girl. Once he’d seen her, of course, he couldn’t understand how he’d ever missed her. Or could ever think of anything or anyone else.
And now she had smiled at him. And he had smiled back.
It turned out that Bernie knew all about her. “Livia? You talkin’ about Livia?”
Livia. What a name. The most beautiful name he’d ever heard. “The girl in the green sweater,” he clarified, nodding.
“Yeah, that there’s Livia. Nice girl.”
“She’s beautiful.”
Bernie sized him up. “Like that, is it? Caught the love bug? You’ll have a time of it, my boy.”
“Why? Is she married?” If she is, he thought in desperation, I shall have to kill myself.
“Nope.” Bernie shook his head, throwing his dishcloth over his shoulder. “Just quiet, like. Not much of a talker. An’ you bein’ a foreigner an’ all … Well, like I said, you’ll have a time of it. But, hey, best of luck to you.”
“Wait!” Bernie was the conduit to Livia. “When does she come in, usually?”
“Can’t say, really. Couple times a week, anyway. Works somewhere near here.”
“Where?”
“Slow down, Romeo.” He wagged his finger at Hans. “You’re a nice guy an’ all, but she’s special. She’s a good girl, is Livia. I don’t want you treatin’ her badly. She’s got it hard enough as it is.”
“Why? What has happened to her?”
Bernie gave an exaggerated sigh. “Gonna get it all out of me, aren’t you? All right, then. I’ll tell you. Her mom died—oh, I’d have to ask Sadie, but I want to say ’bout ten years ago.” He shook his head. “Tuberculosis, you know. Terrible thing. And no brothers nor sisters, so Livia’s been on her own, you could say, ever since then.”
“What about her father?”
“Ah, him. First Canadian Infantry Brigade.” He saw that Hans wasn’t making the connection. “Forget you’re a foreigner, sometimes, I get so used to you. Nu, here’s what happened there. Went over there to your neck of the woods, the First Canadian,” he said. “Fighting in Belgium and France and whatnot. Damned Germans drove ’em back to the sea. Had to get pulled off the beach at Dunkirk.” He shook his head. “Night from hell, from what I’ve heard. Fires from Calais so bright they could see ’em burning all the way over in England. And those Germans, killing boys on the beach, killing boys in the water, shooting them from the cliffs and out of airplanes…” He sighed. “Nu, that was the end of Livia’s dad. Didn’t never leave
that beach.”
Hans shook his head. “So she’s all alone.”
“She’s all alone, and don’t you be gettin’ any ideas in your head about changin’ that unless you’re serious. Like I said, she’s something special. Sadie an’ me, we keep an eye on Livia, and I won’t see any Johnny-come-lately breakin’ her heart. She’s a good girl and she don’t deserve that.”
“I won’t break her heart,” said Hans.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
We went to the main headquarters downtown where Julian supposedly had an office, though I’d never seen it. This was the Service de Police de la Ville de Montréal, or SPVM, the city police.
Just to keep our lives interesting, we have three police forces that can potentially all be working in Montréal at the same time. They sometimes even actually acknowledge each other’s existence.
There was the SPVM (the city police), the Sûreté de Québec—police who cover all of the province—and the national Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Three levels of policing—city, province, and federal—and they do not always play well together. The city police resent it when the provincial police try to home in on anything in the city; and they both resent the Mounties, who aren’t all that popular anywhere in the province.
Here in Québec we often choose to forget that we are, after all, part of Canada.
Julian parked blatantly in a clearly marked no-parking zone. Fine: if he got towed, it wasn’t my problem. Probably everyone knew the TT by now anyway. Up the stairs, down a corridor, and then he asked me to wait outside. “It might be tricky,” he cautioned me.
“Tricky? Why?”
“He got divorced a couple of years ago.”
“And that makes it tricky how, exactly?” I caught his look. “Oh, no. Julian. No, you didn’t.”
Yes, he had. “She was very attached to me,” Julian said. “Wait here, okay?”
“All right.”
I waited. Two young officers in camouflage pants and bulletproof vests walked by, glancing at me curiously, and my mind strayed for a moment. Weren’t camouflage pants supposed to—camouflage? As in fit in? No one but the police wore them.
A couple of people in an adjacent office had an argument. My watch ticked slowly. I thought about calling Richard and seeing what was happening at the office. I waited some more.
Finally the door opened and Julian signaled me in. “He’ll talk to us,” he said. He didn’t look very happy about the whole thing.
Whoever this guy was, he had one hell of a view, out over the rooftops looking west, the Place des Arts and the Museum of Contemporary Art. I noticed it—framed in a vast expanse of plate-glass window—before I noticed him.
The man behind the desk was dressed in civilian clothes, and probably could have used a little help in that department. I’m no fashion plate myself, but even I know that there’s a way of putting together different prints for an overall effect, and this wasn’t it.
Still, it was the scowl that really finished off the picture. Bushy gray eyebrows, dark recessed eyes, and that scowl.
“This,” said Julian diffidently, “is Capitaine Levigne. Captain, Madame Martine LeDuc.”
“Parle français,” the captain said to him, irritably, and then turned to me. “Bonjour, madame.” Oddly, he didn’t stand up to shake my hand, and then I saw with some surprise that he was in a wheelchair.
I inclined my head. “Mon capitaine.”
“Marcus,” Julian said to me in French, “is an expert on Nazism, neo-Nazism, skinheads, you name it. Anything right-wing that goes on in this city, he knows about.”
“It must be,” I said, “a challenging job.”
“But a necessary one,” he acknowledged, and the tension in the room lifted. He invited us to sit around a low table on the other side of the room, right up against the windows and the view, and wheeled himself over to join us. “How can I help?”
Julian pulled out the plastic bag with the envelope and note inside. “This was sent to a Jewish diamond merchant in Outremont,” he said. “As I told you, it may connect to the case the murder squad’s working on, the graduate student from McGill, because the diamond merchant himself is involved.”
The other man took the bag. “This is interesting,” he said after a moment.
“Interesting?” I echoed. “Seems like straightforward skinhead nonsense to me.”
He shook his head, still peering at the envelope. “But you are wrong, madame.”
“Call me Martine. How am I wrong?”
He indicated the swastika. “This is highly stylized, as you can see,” he said, his finger tracing the contours of the symbol, which actually, now that I was really noticing it, looked like interlocking S shapes. I hadn’t taken that in before.
“What does it mean?” Julian asked.
“That there is more to this than simple fanatical racism and hatred,” Marcus said.
“Such as?”
He passed the bag back to Julian. “You’re going to try and lift fingerprints?”
“As soon as we leave.”
“Let’s do it now. You may be here a while.” He turned the wheelchair and moved smoothly over to his desk, where he pressed some buttons on his phone. “Jean-Pierre? Can you send someone up to my office? I have a specimen for you. Very well.”
“Why do you say we may be here a while, capitaine?” I asked.
“You may call me Marcus,” he said absently. “How much do you know about Nazism and the occult?”
Julian and I exchanged startled glances. I’d thought he was going to talk about angry young white men, or suburban gangs with heavy-duty tattoos, or even crosses burning on front lawns. Whatever I’d been expecting, this wasn’t it.
“I think I heard that Hitler was very much interested in it,” I said slowly. “I can’t remember where I read that, though, or really anything else about it. Didn’t he have an astrologer on staff, something like that?”
Before Marcus could answer, there was a discreet knock at the door. He wheeled himself over and opened it. “Ah, there you are. The détective-lieutenant will sign for the chain of evidence, yes?”
“Yes,” Julian said grimly and did so. The person in the corridor muttered something I didn’t hear as Julian came back and sat down. Marcus closed the door and wheeled himself back to where we were sitting. “So: Hitler and the occult. You’re partially correct, Martine. It does seem that everyone has a vague association there,” he said. “So I’ll give you the story.”
“Maybe in condensed form?” suggested Julian.
That earned him a scowl. “The story is what the story is,” the captain said and turned back to me. “As soon as World War Two ended, there was a rush to connect Nazis with every imaginable conspiracy theory available. Everything from extraterrestrial visitors to madmen in caves. No doubt a way of psychologically dealing with the horrors they were still discovering. “He shrugged. “Some journalists published exaggerated accounts of occult groups in the Third Reich. What really happened, of course, was that some marginal atavistic ideas influenced Nazi policy. And thus, of course, the destiny of modern Europe.”
I tried to sort out something useful but was stuck on the “marginal atavistic ideas.” He had to have been an academic before joining the police force. A twinge of pain as I thought, automatically, Patricia would really get along with this guy.
Not now, she can’t.
“So all the wild speculation about Hitler and the occult?” asked Julian, clearly not plagued as I was by the ghost of a different scholar in the room. “That’s all it is, wild speculation?”
“Occultism generally becomes popular when there are political and social upheavals,” said Marcus, still in professor mode. “It’s a way of coping, of assigning some sort of new meaning, when the old structures of meaning fail.”
I got it. “Like wondering why God would allow the Holocaust,” I said.
Marcus nodded briskly. “The nineteenth century saw another revival of occultism in Europe with the in
dustrial revolution and the abrupt displacement of traditional ways of life.” He glanced at me. “And of course the connection between occultism and racism. That started long before the Nazis.”
“Hitler just latched on to it,” Julian said, nodding despite himself.
“But Hitler wasn’t the real occultist. That would be Himmler, the head of the SS, who actually retained a self-proclaimed Aryan mystic as part of his personal staff, didn’t make decisions without consulting him.”
“Like Rasputin in the Russian court,” I said.
Julian was watching us. “And what does this have to do,” he asked, “with the swastika on the note?”
“You are a man with little patience,” observed Marcus, looking at him with what could only be described as distaste. “A little man.”
“Tell me,” I urged, eager to avoid the situation getting personal again. Seriously: I’d have thought that Julian knew better than to sleep with married women.
Marcus cleared his throat importantly. “I draw your attention to one Karl Maria Wiligut, who claimed to be the last descendant of an Aryan priesthood that could trace its origins back to god-like creatures who once inhabited Germany,” he said. “He suggested to Himmler that the SS expropriate a castle in Westphalia. Wiligut prophesied that the castle would become a Nazi stronghold against invading barbarians from the East. Himmler used the place as an indoctrination center.”
“It seems to me that organization was their strong suit,” I murmured.
“Occultism,” said Marcus, ignoring me, “is a symptom of alienation from society, but it is also a symptom of alienation from reality itself. As the Nazis clearly demonstrated.”
“But what has that to do with a murder that happened last week?” I wanted to know. This was all interesting, but it didn’t answer the fundamental questions of who had killed Patricia and who had sent the stylized swastika threat to Avner.
Marcus looked at me thoughtfully and with, I sensed, a little disappointment. “Ideas such as these do not die simply because the men who believe in them do,” he said.
“So someone else is linking Nazism and the occult in Montréal,” said Julian briskly. He wanted to get to the point and get out of there, too. “They know about the diamonds—somehow—and they know that Avner is involved. They killed Patricia Mason, probably to steal the diamond she’d stolen.”
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