Deadly Jewels

by Jeannette de Beauvoir

  “Yeah, I was afraid you were going to say something like that.” A silence, stretching out taut between us, filled with unanswered questions. “Where are they now?”

  “The two diamonds? The city police still have them. I can find out for sure.” Julian would know. “The other one—well, we have an idea, but no proof.”

  “You mean the one that the Mason woman stole?”

  “Right.” A nagging thought was intruding. If the New Order of the Black Sun needed the diamond so desperately, why kill Patricia Mason at all? Why not just follow her and take it then? The police weren’t officially involved until after she was shot, and certainly they didn’t have the diamonds in custody until then. Wouldn’t it have been easier to just follow her into the underground tunnels? Had one of them been doing that the day at the museum when Julian chased him off?

  “Martine? Are you there?”

  I snapped back to my office; my mind had been wandering down too many dark tunnels that all ended in despair. “I’m here, Élodie.”

  She seemed to sense my unease. “Okay. This is a big deal. I’m convinced. How about I fly out there tonight and take a look at the diamonds myself? I can talk to your expert, I can decide what to tell the people here who are asking the questions. Will that work?”

  Gratitude washed over me. “Absolutely. Yes. Please.”

  I was feeling much more cheerful. Élodie, aside from being a good friend, was also one of the smartest women—no, people—I knew. And sensitive. If anyone could help me piece all of this together, she could. And she knew people in Montréal that even my boss didn’t know. “Let me know your flight information, I’ll meet you at the airport.”

  “I’ll text it to you. Gotta get some things done here first.” A pause. “Don’t worry, we’ll get it sorted.”

  I smiled. “I know we will. Thanks, Élodie.”

  “I’m not doing you a favor. This is a pretty big deal, no matter which way the pieces fall. It’s going to end up involving more people, but I think that may be a little premature. Maybe we can figure something out together before it comes to that.”

  Maybe we could. I was smiling like an idiot. Aleister Brand had infected me with his darkness; Élodie was all light. We’d sort it, she’d said. Élodie did that kind of thing to you, made you believe.

  The phone rang under my hand and I jumped. Deep breath, Martine, you’re turning into a nervous wreck. “Martine LeDuc,” I said crisply.

  It was Julian. “Saddle up,” he said grimly.

  “Why?”

  “Avner’s gone missing. Slipped his police protection, so it’s not your friend Brand after him this time. And I have a feeling I know where he went.”

  * * *

  It had been three years since Elias had made the first imitations of the royal jewels, and he’d been working all this time, perfecting the technique, getting the sapphires to glow with the brilliant light of the gems he knew and loved.

  And it had been one year since he’d started working with the Communist resistance movement in the camp.

  “You have privileges,” Vladimir told him. “You need to use them for the good of the many.”

  And so Elias had made dazzling stones for Ilse, the commandant’s wife, to wear, putting the stones shyly on the commandant’s desk and waiting to be invited to stay for a schnapps, which he almost always was. He pressed for more privileges for the inmates and, to his surprise, many were granted: the camp built a movie theater and a library, organized an art show.

  The few Jews at Buchenwald were confined to Block 17, and Elias spoke for them as well. “We work as hard as all the others,” he’d said. “We always get the last servings at meals, the last showers when there’s no longer hot water.” And the commandant acquiesced, because Elias kept bringing him stones, and Ilse became soft when he gave her jewelry.

  He drew the line at the camp brothel, though. “No Jews can have sex with the German prostitutes,” he said. “They’d have my head if I gave in to that one!”

  The resistance was well-informed. It knew that the commandant was embezzling money from the prisoners’ accounts and from the camp itself. It knew that the commandant’s wife was sleeping with the guards.

  And it knew, well ahead of time, when Hermann Göring was coming to visit.

  Göring had been one of the architects of the camps, but had largely left the role of running them to Heinrich Himmler and the Shutzstaffel, who’d been in charge ever since. Himmler had visited Buchenwald more than once, and the prisoners had learned to stay well away from him when he visited, despite his tradition of ordering the release of one prisoner every time he came. If he was in a bad mood, bad things could happen. The Nazi policy may well have been to eschew wanton violence; it was possible that Himmler had not read the policy.

  But Göring? No one knew what that was about.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The young officer was nearly incoherent with distress. “There was nothing out of the ordinary,” he said. “Really, sir, there wasn’t. The family does the same thing every day. They get up, they have breakfast, early—around six o’clock. Then the son leaves, and about five minutes later the subject leaves, to the synagogue. After that, to work, diamond shop on Sainte-Catherine. He comes back from work. Sometimes he goes to the synagogue again. Him and his wife have dinner together. Sometimes the son’s there, sometimes not. Mostly he’s in bed by nine.”

  Julian nodded. He wasn’t going to offer any comfort; the kid had to learn. “So what happened?”

  “He went into the synagogue this morning, like he always does,” the officer said. “I don’t go in after him, sir. I always wait outside. Watching the street, like.” He drew a breath. “Seems disrespectful, somehow, to go in when they’re all praying.” He was one of the new politically correct cops, I thought. They’d been a long time coming. “So the prayer service breaks up and they come out. All men, always. Sometimes just a few, sometimes more, depends on the day.”

  “What about today?” asked Julian.

  The cop consulted his notes. “Fourteen, sir. Sometimes they all come out together, that’s when it’s mostly old men, gray beards, some of them go down the street to the coffee shop afterward. When it’s the younger ones, they’re in a hurry to get away, they come out pretty much one at a time. I figure the older guys, they’re retired, they have all day. The younger ones, they’re fitting this in before going to work.”

  “Probably true,” said Julian. “And Kaspi?”

  “The subject went in at his usual time, sir, and I took up station outside as usual.” Thankless job, I thought, but at least he had the weather on his side. Late September was still glorious … and comfortable for hanging out on street corners. “Today it was mostly old guys. Well, the subject’s pretty old, too, he knows them all, but he still goes to work. Well, not every day, and not necessarily for long. I’d say he’s semiretired. Sure t’be.”

  “Yes?” asked Julian. He was fast losing patience.

  “So these other guys, they come out. Nice morning, sunshine, they stand out there in a clump and talk. Funny sort of language they have, not French or English, I never can really understand them.”

  “Yiddish,” I said.

  “And then I noticed that the subject wasn’t there, wasn’t chatting with them like he usually does. But I saw him go in. So I went over to them and asked if they knew where he’d gone, if they’d seen him after the prayer service.”

  I could well imagine that one, the young officer trying to interrupt the flow of words as politely as possible, the inquiring looks, the thoughtful shaking of the heads. If Avner had ducked out voluntarily, then these guys weren’t going to give him up.

  “I got nowhere, sir,” the kid said, apology coloring his voice. “They all started talking at once, where they’d seen the subject, when they’d seen the subject, what he might be doing. At the end of it I just went into the synagogue myself.”

  That would have been interesting.

  “I got in
side the door, and—well, sir, I don’t know anything about their traditions, do I?”

  “I don’t know,” said Julian. “Do you?”

  “I don’t, but I thought that maybe I should take my shoes off,” the boy said. “I mean, my brother, he goes to a mosque, they take their shoes off there. It’s a sign of respect. So I took my shoes off, and I’m walking around, and this other old guy came up and asked me what I was doing, and I said I was looking for the subject, I was his police detail, there to protect him.” It was boots the kid had taken off, and he’d probably felt awkward in his camouflage pants and socks. “He wanted me to put the shoes back on,” he said. “He said it’s not part of Jewish tradition. And so I said I was sorry, I said that I was trying to show respect, and he started talking about shoes and how maybe it really was a good idea to take off your shoes and how God told Moses to take off his shoes and perhaps Jews should try it but perhaps not because it really wasn’t what they do traditionally.”

  He paused for breath and I glanced at his notebook. He’d actually written all that down. “So,” he resumed, with a quick glance at Julian, “I said how I really needed to find the subject and he said, oh, you’re looking for old Avner, are you, and I said yes, sir, I am, and he said he’d left right after something called minyan. I think that’s what they call that prayer service, sir.”

  Julian was gritting his teeth.

  “So I said, no, he couldn’t, because I was outside all the time. And he said yes, you know, I, too, was surprised that he would use the kitchen door to leave, he hasn’t ever left by the kitchen door in the thirty years he’s been a member of the congregation. And then he asked me if I wanted to talk for a while, he was happy to talk with me if I was interested in the religion.”

  “Like I said,” Julian turned to me, “Avner skipped out.”

  “He’d never gone that way before, sir.”

  “You couldn’t watch both doors,” I said soothingly. And probably the city police couldn’t spare two officers, though that was mildly surprising: we take hate crimes very seriously here. The figured swastika on the envelope glowed in front of my eyes. “Where do you think he went?” I asked Julian.

  “Report back to your unit,” said Julian to the kid. “We’ll let your commander know when we’ve found him.”

  “Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir.”

  “Where do you think he went?” I asked again.

  Julian turned to me. “I think,” he said grimly, “that Avner is being seriously stupid. Come on.” He paused. “Loïc?”

  “Sir?”

  “This is the rabbi’s house, yeah?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay, you can go.”

  The rabbi’s house was far less imposing than the Kaspis’ mansion; but I gathered that the rabbi himself made up for it. I was not unaware of him: not Hasidic, but radical in other ways, an ardent Zionist and intense anti-Nazi. Oddly enough, from what I’d read—and I do keep an eye on everyone in the city who has that kind of stature—he echoed some of the Nazi principles of racial purity, though his rants had to do with Jews keeping to their own communities. I’d always found that mildly ironic.

  Naomi was inside the house, looking frightened. “They took him,” she said, her voice accusing.

  “Who took him?” asked Julian.

  “Them! Whoever they are, sent us that swastika! Who do you think? Nazis, there are Nazis everywhere!” She was biting her fingernails and I could see they were down to the quick. As she spoke, she paced restlessly, fast, back and forth in front of us.

  Julian was unruffled. “Let’s sit down, Mrs. Kaspi,” he said gently. “Would you like a glass of water?”

  “No. I do not want a glass of water. What I want is, my husband back, this is what I want.”

  “And that’s what we’re going to do.” I could feel his impatience humming in the air, but his voice was slow, soothing. “Did he say anything to you before he left this morning?”

  “Say anything? Why should my Avner say anything to me? Thirty-eight years we’ve been married, thirty-eight years he leaves every morning for shul, what should he say to me?”

  Yeah, but this morning, he didn’t come out. I managed not to share the thought.

  “Okay,” said Julian. “I’m going to have an officer come and stay with you, Mrs. Kaspi. Here’s my card. If your husband contacts you, I want you to call me right away.”

  “So you can keep him thinking about murders and missing diamonds, when he has his family to think about, his business?”

  “We want to keep him safe, Mrs. Kaspi, that’s all.”

  She started pacing again before we’d even left the room. Julian didn’t say anything until we were back in the car. “Avner,” he said, “is unhappy with us.”

  “Why?”

  A quick glance. “Not happy to be on the periphery of the investigation. He’s been making Loïc crazy with questions.”

  “Loïc?”

  “Officer in charge back there who lost him.”

  “Oh, right.” I thought for a moment. We’d taken a left on Saint-Laurent and were starting to pick up downtown traffic. “He must be scared,” I said. “He gets a credible death threat and gets assigned a kid to babysit him and has no idea how close or far we are from making him safe again.”

  “First of all,” said Julian, “that kid is a crack shot. He’s young, and maybe he’s not too articulate, but he’s good. We gave Avner the absolute best we had to offer. We’re taking this very seriously. And you know that Marcus’s been working round the clock.”

  “Marcus,” I said. “We keep coming back to Marcus.”

  He leveled a glance at me. “What are you saying?”

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “No, don’t look at me like that. I still think it’s Aleister Brand who killed Patricia, who took the diamond. I think so. But Marcus … there’s something going on with Marcus.”

  “Brand’s alibi checks out,” Julian said, his voice neutral.

  “So what is it you’re saying now?” I demanded.

  He shrugged. “Maybe we’re not casting a wide enough net, is all,” he said. “But, sure, his guys would give him an alibi in a second, so we’re probably right.”

  “Marcus is in a wheelchair,” I said.

  “And he’s a decorated police officer,” Julian agreed.

  I didn’t like where this was going. “What about Avner?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said thoughtfully. “What about Avner?”

  * * *

  We pulled up and did what Ivan calls movie parking—that is, finding an empty space directly in front of wherever one is going—in front of the Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours chapel, part of the city’s patrimony that we’re always talking about. Or, at least, that my office is always talking about. The chapel, these days, houses a museum dedicated to Marguerite Bourgeoys, our own French missionary saint; but it’s also long been known as the sailors’ chapel where mariners expressed their thanks to Our Lady of Good Hope for seeing them through another perilous journey. She was Leonard Cohen’s “lady of the harbor” in his song about Suzanne.

  Julian was, surprisingly, heading into the church. “Where are you going?”

  “Patricia wasn’t the only one who knew her way around underground,” he said cheerfully. “Come on, LeDuc. I want to show you something.”

  I followed.

  He flipped his badge at the woman selling tickets and included me with a sweep of his arm, and I trailed obediently along in his wake. Part of this museum was underground, accessible through the crypt (of course), and the carefully placed lights threw dramatic shadows up over the roughly excavated walls, making it feel a little like a stage set. It’s an ongoing archaeological site where the remains of Marguerite’s first church can be seen as well as a First Nations settlement that dates back 2,400 years, one of the oldest in the city.

  I informed Julian of all this. He seemed unimpressed. “Come on,” he said impatiently.

  Through a door hidden beh
ind a statue. And down some stairs into a lower section still, with a dark archway gaping black. “Used to be one of the tributaries of the Little Saint-Marie River,” he told me.

  Another one of them. “You’ve been doing your homework.”

  “Turns out there’s a veritable warren of tunnels crisscrossing the city,” Julian said.

  “I knew that,” I said. “Not sure why you do.”

  He was opening a wooden storage crate bolted to the wall. “Put these on. It’s wet down here.” He pulled out some rubber boots, putting a pair on over his own expensive shoes. “I never really got it myself,” he confessed. “All this digging around. Even all the urban exploration that you said Patricia was into. I know people who do it, sure, it’s actually pretty hip, but it all seemed like a kid’s pastime, and I had important things to think about. You know, this case, how to catch her killer, all that. But yesterday I got one of the city engineers to take me through the architectural drawings of the tunnels, the maps, and what’s inside them … and, well, you can’t help but get excited. This is the real city, Martine.”

  “You’re feeling okay, right?” I took the massive flashlight he handed me.

  “Of course I am.” He moved his own flashlight around the tunnel entrance. “I never realized it, most people don’t even think about what’s under their feet unless they see repairs going on … but everything that makes the city actually run is underground. Everything’s down here. The energy. The sewage. The ways that we connect with each other. The whole infrastructure is buzzing along under the streets and the buildings all the time and we don’t know anything about it.”

  “Julian, what has this to do with—”

  He reached for my hand and helped me up onto the lip of the passageway. “Come on,” he said gently. “You’ll see.”

  We dropped down a couple of levels—Julian jumped first and helped me down, I had no idea how we were going to get back up—and then we were in a stone-walled tunnel, this one higher and broader than the ones I’d traversed with Patricia. The thought of her, not so long ago, suddenly brought a lump to my throat. She should have written her dissertation, got the recognition she’d worked so hard for. She should still be living and breathing and … “How did Aleister know where she lived?” I asked suddenly.