Deadly Jewels

by Jeannette de Beauvoir

  She was instantly sympathetic. “Oh, no! I’m so very sorry. Is that why you came to Canada? To get away from the memories?”

  It was as good a reason as any. “I like it here,” he said. “I like Montréal. Though I still don’t speak any French.”

  “That’s all right,” she said and laughed. “Mine is terrible, too.” She stopped. “This is me, then.”

  He looked at the storefront. “You—make dresses?”

  “I work for someone who does. Thanks awfully for lunch, and for the walk.”

  “I wonder,” said Hans, “if I can see you again. I enjoy very much talking with you.”

  Livia smiled. “You can take me to the cinema on Thursday night,” she said.

  He didn’t think to ask why she didn’t choose the weekend. It didn’t matter; he would go anywhere on any day with her. He was late back to work, and didn’t even mind the foreman’s reprimands.

  He was in love.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Richard was coming in just as I headed out. “There is a problem?” he asked.

  “Do I look that bad?”

  A delicate shrug. “You look worried.”

  “I am, but it’s nothing to do with the office.” Well, not quite true, but I didn’t have time to explain. “Richard, do me a favor. Find out what’s happening with these diamonds on the political front. Is Ottawa talking to London? It would be good to know.”

  He inclined his head gracefully. “Of course. Something else?”

  “No. I have a meeting—probably won’t be back in the office today. Can you hold down the fort?”

  Another bien sûr. I sighed. “Richard, I’m sorry. You probably think I’m totally scattered and not pulling my weight around here these days—”

  He put up a hand to stop me. “It is always,” he said gravely, “easy to work with you. You work harder than anyone I have ever known. If there are things you need to deal with, then you must go and deal with them. We will be fine.” A mischievous gleam. “Beside, while the mayor is away…”

  “I wish this mouse were playing!” I said and laughed. “Thanks, Richard. I don’t deserve you.”

  “It is nothing,” he said, and I remembered how, last year, I’d covered for him. We took care of each other. I really was lucky in the team I’d assembled.

  A brisk walk down a few streets to the garage where we kept the car. It started right away—a very good sign—and I headed out. It’s easy to get to Mount Royal from anywhere in the city: just find a hill and go up it. Eventually you’ll reach the “mountain”—part of a range of long-extinct volcanoes—that gave Montréal its name.

  It’s home to a whole lot of life. There’s the park itself, the city’s largest green space, where we all flock summer and winters alike. Saint Joseph’s Oratory, Canada’s largest church, is here, as well as two cemeteries; my mother lives in one of them, a beautiful and incredibly peaceful place. We take the kids there most Sundays they’re in town.… I stopped my thought there. No reason to start stressing about more than one thing at a time.

  The overlook was crowded; it nearly always is, in good weather and bad, tourists gawping at the view, Montréalers taking the walking paths that branch off from the lookout. I was early, so parked the car and got out, even though the day was clouding over. I had no idea how I would know who Gabrielle Brand was. I could only hope that she’d found me online and knew who to look for.

  She had, and she did.

  The woman who approached me was just past a certain age; I’d peg her in her early seventies, but a very healthy early seventies. She was dressed in the remnants of the sixties, not hers but the world’s: a long print skirt with warm woolen socks and clogs under it; several layers of brightly colored sweaters and a dazzling pink scarf at her neck. “Mrs. LeDuc?”

  I pushed myself off the car and held out my hand. “Martine. I’m glad to meet you, Mrs. Brand.”

  “Perhaps you won’t be.” But she took my hand anyway.

  “So,” I said, conversationally, “your grandchildren are gone?”

  She looked startled at first, then relaxed. “Their mother has come for them,” she said. “There is a path down here, and a bench. Would you care to walk?”

  She clearly cared to, and so I nodded, grabbing my keys and my jacket. Up here, it was brisk, with an edge to the air indicating winter wasn’t all that far off. We took the trail that led down through a thicket and at once it was as though we were alone on the mountain. As was, no doubt, her intention. “I am going to tell you some things,” she said, her eyes on the path, not even glancing at me. “I knew when Marcus told me about you, when you called, that it was time to say something. I’ve been waiting with it inside me for too long.”

  I didn’t want to prompt her; the reality was I had no idea what she was going to say, and assuming anything could get us off on the wrong foot altogether. She seemed to be waiting for some response, though, so I said, “Thank you for trusting me.”

  That earned me a quick sideways glance. “Perhaps,” she said. I could hear it again, the echo of an accent in her voice, something from the east. German, Polish, Eastern European? I couldn’t tell.

  We walked for a moment in silence. I was scuffing the leaves that had already started falling and were crunching under my feet. Usually I found that to be delightful; today, it felt like a presage of something dark and ominous. There were clouds moving in from the south, and the wind was rising.

  Gabrielle seemed to be preparing herself for something. “First I must tell you some history,” she said, and the accent was stronger now. “It is important, so that you understand what is happening now.”

  She seemed to be waiting for a rejoinder, so I nodded. “I’m happy to hear whatever you have to tell me, Mrs. Brand.” But I was hearing an awful lot of history lately, I thought. Everyone seemed to have something from the past that was resurfacing.

  “Mrs. Brand,” she echoed and laughed, but there was no pleasure in it. “You will hear about that, too.” She indicated a bench ahead of us. “Come, and sit, and listen.”

  Here there was a break in the bushes and the view off the mountain was again spread out before us. It was dramatic and intense and, I thought, by no means accidental.

  And the wind seemed to have disappeared, even though we were in a less protected area.

  Gabrielle Brand was looking out, impassive, over the city below. “There is some history you must know, to start,” she said. “Back in 1912, several German occultists with radical anti-Semitic inclinations decided to form a magic lodge. They named it the Order of Teutons.” Her voice was almost conversational. Almost. “The Order of Teutons was organized along the lines of the Freemasons or the Rosicrucians, with differing degrees of initiation, different levels of belonging, ja? Only those people who could fully document that they were of pure Aryan ancestry were allowed to join.”

  I thought, 1912? Yes, we were indeed starting at the beginning.

  “Later, many of those who had belonged to the Order of Teutons joined another group called the Thule Society.” She paused. “The German Workers Party, which I know you will have heard of, was only one of many associations founded and controlled by the Thule Society, and eventually Hitler became the most prominent personality in the party as well as being very high up in the society itself.”

  So that was where it had started. The link between politics and magic began inside Hitler himself.

  She was still talking. “He filled key positions with his own friends from the Thule Society and the army. During the summer of 1920, upon his suggestion, the party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. The new name was intended to equally attract nationalists and proletarians. To go along with the new name, his mass movement also required a flag with a powerful symbol. Among many designs under consideration, Hitler picked a red cloth with a white circle in the middle containing a black swastika. So the mystical and the political were closely allied from the beginning.”

  I didn�
�t want to interrupt her flow, but she seemed to be waiting for a comment. “Did people on the political side know about the mystical one?”

  “Some did. Most did not.” She still hadn’t looked at me. “Thule was supposedly a legendary island in the far north, similar to Atlantis. It was destroyed, but its secrets were guarded by ancient, highly intelligent beings, and the initiated could establish contact with these beings by means of mystical rituals.”

  It sounded like the B movies on television on Saturday afternoons. I didn’t say anything, and she continued. “The initiated would be given supernatural strength and energy. With that energy they would create a race of Aryan supermen to exterminate other, inferior races. The symbol of the Thule Society was a swastika with a dagger enclosed in laurel leaves.”

  None of this sounded particularly new to me; it sounded like cards taken at random from the Nazi recipe file: eugenics, racism, genocide. Nothing particularly wholesome, but nothing that should be causing havoc in the twenty-first century, either.

  “And you must understand, there were a great many intellectual—well, undercurrents, as we might call them. During Hitler’s years there, Vienna was a vortex of modern thinking. Think of what was happening then, think of who was sitting in the cafés and strolling in the parks.” She glanced at me. “Freud was in practice at Berggasse. Ludwig Wittgenstein was in residence pondering avant-garde philosophy and metaphysics. Gustav Mahler had returned home to die and to name his protégé, Arnold Schönberg.” She sighed. “Under different auspices, it could have been a good time, a creative time. But that was not to be. In contrast with this creative thought there persisted the deep anti-Semitic currents that had caused Mahler to convert to Catholicism, that forced Freud eventually to flee to London, and that informed the ancient pan-German folkloric nostalgia espoused by Guido von List. Von List substituted the swastika for the cross in perversion and practiced magic. He even looked like a wizard, in a floppy cap and long white beard.”

  Somewhere from close behind us, a crow cawed and I jumped. The cold was settling into me.

  “Another player came onto the scene about then,” Gabrielle continued. “It was called the Luminous Lodge, and its objective was to explore the origins of the Aryan race and to perform exercises in concentration. Aleister Crowley was one of them.”

  There was a name I’d heard: Crowley, the English occultist and magician. Satanist, also, I thought. “And Hitler was a participant?”

  She nodded. “Hitler’s unusual powers of suggestion become more understandable if one keeps in mind that he had access to the secret psychological techniques of these esoteric lodges. That is how in a remarkably short period of time he was able to move an obscure workers’ party from the beer hall to a mass movement.”

  The clouds were still moving out in front of us, over the city. I shivered.

  “Throughout the Nazi régime,” Gabrielle Brand said, “these lodges exercised almost limitless power over the politics and policies of the Third Reich. Because they combined old rituals with new people performing them.”

  “Can’t that be said of all religions?” I asked mildly.

  She inclined her head. “But the rituals in mainstream religion are fixed,” she said. “They weren’t, not for these people. Listen, when you create something new, you’re free to put whatever you’d like into the mix. You can look at what works, what has worked, for other belief systems, and incorporate those elements into your own.”

  “Religion à la carte,” I said.

  “Precisely. And in that regard, though the term was not used until decades later, we can say that it was the beginning of the use of chaos magic.” She glanced at me. “In chaos magic, you take what you need for your purpose. What you use depends on what you are trying to do. And you can take it from any tradition, create customized rituals that don’t have the inconvenience of elements you don’t want, that aren’t useful, within it.”

  I didn’t say anything. She sighed. “Do you follow a religion, Mrs. LeDuc?”

  “Martine,” I said again, automatically. “Yes. I’m Catholic.”

  She nodded as though I’d just confirmed something in her mind. “You are an intelligent, thinking person. And you are a Catholic. There are things about your religion that trouble you intellectually, yes?”

  Well, that or the way some people chose to practice it. “Yes,” I said.

  “When you attend Mass, there are parts of it that aren’t quite right for you. But you’re stuck with them. They’re part of the whole. In chaos magic, that never happens. Everything is customized. There are no parts of any ritual that are uncomfortable for the participants, because they’ve taken what they need from all sorts of different traditions and fused them into something new—and, potentially, extremely powerful. They’ve gathered the magic, if you will allow the term, of every tradition from which they have borrowed something, then reduced it all as you would reduce a sauce on the stove. Making it more concentrated. Making it more powerful.”

  “But the point of ritual,” I objected, “is that it’s handed down through the ages—”

  “The point of ritual,” she interrupted crisply, “is to find something that works. That is all. The beauty, if there is any, is window dressing. Organically, ritual is utilitarian.”

  I shifted uncomfortably. “Maybe if you’re talking about magic,” I said. “But religion is different.”

  “Is it? So you do not pray to be given anything? You never ask your god for anything?”

  “Of course I do. But I don’t believe in God because of what he can do for me.”

  “Of course you do,” she said. “You believe that he created the world, and gave you life. You believe that his son died a terrible death to free you from sin. You don’t have to ask for a new Porsche to see that, already, before you even said your first prayer, you loved this God because of what he’s done for you.” She shook her head. “Humans are utilitarian beings. We want to get things done. Some see religion as one way to do it.”

  “While others see magic,” I said. I wasn’t sure I bought her argument, but I didn’t want to stop her.

  “Magic is far more simple than you think,” said Gabrielle. “All it is, is training yourself to exercise your willpower and to harness energy. That is all. It is not creating something that has not already been there. It is capturing the wild and wanton energy of the planet and making it work for you.”

  That phrase—wild and wanton—sounded like she was quoting something. But I didn’t know what.

  “The other component of chaos magic—and remember, please, that no one was using that term in the forties—is that it can easily become extremely violent. If ritual is customized, then nothing is forbidden. Indeed, taboos are seen as the efforts of a society to keep the wild energies in check; violating the taboos will release the energy. And it is all about energy.”

  I turned in my seat and stared at her. “That means—”

  She nodded. “Oh, yes. The more taboos you can violate, the closer you will become to the source of the energy, and the more you will take it into yourself. The perverse has an energy all its own. They weren’t Satanists, Mrs. LeDuc. To believe in Satan, you must first believe in God. But evil? Yes: this, I think, is where you will find the root of evil.”

  I was already way ahead of her.

  * * *

  Once they got him the sapphires to work with, it all went smoothly enough. Oh, they weren’t perfect replicas, no, but they were respectable. “They don’t need to be exact,” the commandant said, “they have to be close.”

  And they were very close indeed.

  Life settled into a routine. Every morning they assembled in the Appellplatz, the roll-call square, standing in lines and staring straight ahead. Kapos—the high-ranking prisoners, most of them Communists—were quick to beat anyone who stepped or fell out of line, and there were dogs.

  Elias was mostly afraid of the dogs.

  After everyone had been counted, the prison orchestra assembl
ed itself and began playing music—Viennese waltzes, someone had told Elias they were. Such light music, such happy music. It accompanied the prisoners as they were marched off to their work details, either in the quarry or in the factory making munitions for the German war effort. But the music, Elias learned, was good; it allowed them to talk freely to each other.

  Some of the prisoners stayed behind. Several of them had been assigned office work; there were cleaners; and there was Elias.

  They gave him everything that he needed. They gave him two surly assistants. They gave him plenty of raw materials to experiment with. And he wasn’t just to imitate the crown jewels; there were other uses for precious stone substitutes. But the most important were the three he was doing on Berlin’s orders.

  Food was distributed twice a day. Weak coffee, weaker potato soup, a hunk of bread. The bread was the consistency of clay, and the coffee made from acorns. Prisoners, Elias noted, were rarely mistreated, and when it happened, it was only at the kapos’ hands. “Why?” he asked Franz, his German bunk mate.

  “No wanton cruelty, that’s the Nazi policy,” said Franz.

  Elias stared at him. “Now you’re making no sense.”

  The other man lifted his shoulders. “Policy is policy,” he said. “Reality, that is something else.” He scratched his head, hard. “Look, we are here to work. We cannot work if we are injured. If they want us dead, they just stop giving us food. It is simple. No gas chambers at Buchenwald.”

  “Gas chambers?” Elias didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “Ja. Other camps, they kill people with gas.” He glanced at Elias. “Jews, mostly. Then they burn their bodies.”

  “They do that here,” Elias said. It hadn’t taken him long to understand the meaning of the smoke that seemed to hang over the camp all the time, whether the crematorium was working or not.

  Franz shrugged. “Prisoners here die every day,” he said. “But they are not executed.”