Deadly Jewels

by Jeannette de Beauvoir

  Julian stopped and I bumped into his back. “What’s that?”

  “How did he find her? You said it yourself, the apartment isn’t even in her name. For that matter, how did he know she had the diamond? How did he know she even existed?” Something skittered off to my right, something high up, and I swung around to look. Bats? Really?

  “It wouldn’t have been that difficult to find the apartment, all you’d need was a contact at McGill,” said Julian. “One of his group could be there, could have contacts. Marcus isn’t the only one who sees himself at the center of a spider web.”

  “And the diamond?”

  “Secrets are never secrets,” he responded. “Listen, back during the war, someone found out about the jewels, right? And then Patricia found out, she brought a stolen one to Avner; who knows who he told? That’s juicy information to sit on. Aleister could have found out easily enough.”

  “Marcus knew,” I said.

  There was a silence, water dripping dramatically in the background. “Marcus is a cop,” said Julian.

  “Yes.”

  “Marcus is in a wheelchair.”

  “Yes.”

  “Marcus hasn’t got a motive, damn it!” He was visibly upset; Marcus was, after all, a fellow officer.

  “No,” I conceded. “Probably not.” But isn’t greed one of the major motivators for murder? I thought I’d read that somewhere.

  “I still think it’s Brand. I think you really think so, too. Listen to me.” He turned and his Maglite swept across me. “Whoever pulled the trigger on Patricia, that isn’t the guy we want. The police’ll find him, all right: they’re actually very good at what they do. And when they do find him, what are they going to find? Some kid. Some skinhead kid who will say he did it as a rite of initiation into a skinhead club and will go off to prison and join the Aryan Nation there or some such group and sublimate his anger and hatred there. He’s not the one who matters.”

  I stood still, waiting for it.

  “You know who matters,” Julian said. “They’re getting the kid. If I have anything to say about it, we’re taking down the New Order of the Black Sun.”

  “And Aleister Brand,” I said.

  “And Aleister Brand. In fact, most especially Aleister Brand.”

  “I wondered what was going on there,” I confessed, “with all your talk about him not having broken any laws. It sounded like you weren’t interested in going after him at all.”

  “We just,” said Julian, “need to go after him in a different way. Now—is it okay for us to move on? It’s cold down here.”

  He was right about that. It was a damp cold, the kind that we’d be experiencing soon enough on the surface, the kind that seeps into you and makes you feel that you’ll never really be warm again. I pulled my light jacket closer around myself. “Where are we going?”

  “Wait and see.”

  I was grateful for the cold and the damp, actually. Last year I’d spent some very tense moments underground, in the dry air of steam tunnels under an old asylum with someone who wished me very ill indeed, and it wasn’t a feeling I was eager to get back anytime soon. I’d been suffering from mild claustrophobia ever since, and had been rather surprised I’d been able to tolerate my adventure with Patricia last week.

  But this was different: damp, actually dripping in places, water inching down the walls, with a smell I couldn’t identify but somehow—fancifully, no doubt—associated with the grave.

  Well, and why not? For all of Julian’s steampunk excitement about the inner workings of the city underground, these tunnels, the rooms they opened into or closed off, were no doubt the final resting place for hundreds of Montréalers, some marked, most unmarked.

  I shivered and looked at Julian’s rapidly retreating back. “Wait for me!”

  * * *

  Once Hans had decided what to do, there was no turning back.

  He stood in Livia’s cramped room with the table in front of him spread with fresh white linen, and watched her as she lit two candles and spoke words in a language he had never heard before.

  She was curious about his lack of experience. “But surely, when you were small, your parents observed the shabbat! Your father must have taught you the prayer over the wine, over the challah?”

  “I cannot remember,” Hans said. “I think—so much of my childhood was filled with grief, there is much I cannot remember of it. I think I have forgotten everything that was important.”

  She took his hand. “Then I will help you,” she said softly. “I will help you to remember.”

  Now, when he went alone to the Hebrew Delicatessen, Bernie was all smiles. “Well, you are a man of your word, I will say that for you.”

  “Why? What are you talking about?”

  “Livia Rosen,” he replied. “In all the years I have known her—and I have known her for many, many years!—I have never seen her happy like this. She is a new woman.” He tossed the dishrag over his shoulder, planted his elbows on the counter, and leaned in to Hans. “So when is it you will be popping the question?”

  “The question?” Hans looked at him blankly.

  Bernie guffawed. “To marry her, of course! It is what people do when they are in love, no? So when is this going to happen?”

  “There’s a war on,” Hans reminded him.

  “There is always a war, somewhere. That is why you do it! You take your happiness while you can! You start your family!”

  He was right, of course. If things had been different … Hans slowed his thoughts down. Not if things had been different: if he had been different. Not a German soldier. Not a member of the Nazi Party. Not a spy.

  “We will see,” he told Bernie, put some coins on the counter, and left.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  After that, the tunnels were, surprisingly, lighted. And, apparently, used: we passed large pieces of equipment whose use was mysterious, large looming metal artifacts that just increased the whole steampunk feeling. I almost expected a Dr. Who impersonator in a top hat to step out in front of us at any moment.

  Julian had been here before: that was clear. He didn’t hesitate, striding past forks in the way, large inviting passageways that were better lit and bigger than the one we were in. “What are these places?” I asked.

  He glanced at me. “Was going to be part of the Métro system,” he said. “Private company’s exploring the option of running tours down here. You know, like the sewer tours of Paris. Could be pretty fantastic, actually, can you imagine? Rats and all…”

  “Why don’t I know about that?”

  He grinned, suddenly, vividly. “Probably because I just made it up,” he said. “But hell, it would be a great idea, wouldn’t it?”

  It would. Just not at this precise moment. I cleared my throat. “Part of the old Métro?”

  “Following a river course,” he said. “That’s what all the underground network is about, anyway: they just dropped the waterways.”

  “Some of them are still running,” I said, vaguely remembering Patricia’s voice in the mayor’s office, talking about the hidden underground metropolis, the one that shoppers and commuters in the interior city never saw. It felt like it had been months ago, not less than a week, that conversation. A sense of inexpressible sadness closed around me. “The waterways, I mean.”

  “A whole network, crisscrossing the city,” Julian said. He hadn’t lost his enthusiasm for his new urban exploration discoveries. “Waterways, sunken streets, even buildings down here. And all out of view. Every Montréaler thinks they know the underground, and they don’t know anything.”

  “Don’t get too smug,” I said. “You’ll trip over your ego. How do you know where you’re going?”

  “There’s a map,” he said, surprised. “Who knew? Some of it’s a grid, like the Métro tunnels, and some of it just meanders, all crisscrossing each other at different levels, different depths, and not knowing that right behind a wall there’s another set of tunnels.”

&nbs
p; “You sound like a kid at Christmas.”

  “It’s extraordinary,” he said. “Come on, it’s this way.”

  I’d been feeling the gradient rising slowly beneath our feet as we walked, and now, after a left twist, it started going up sharply. Julian took it in stride. We’re all good with hills; Montréal is, after all, a mountain itself, and the cyclists who crisscross the city daily, many of them on the rental bicycles available everywhere, have the best leg muscles around. But this was unexpected, and my calves were burning.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m wondering,” I said, “whether I should join a gym.”

  He laughed. Damn him for having the breath to do it.

  “Are we almost there?”

  “You sound like one of your kids,” he said. “Soon.”

  One of my kids.

  “Patricia had these maps in her apartment,” Julian was saying. “That’s where I got the idea. She’s apparently been down here a lot over the past six months. She was really careful, really organized. Worked out everything on a grid. Every time she learned something new, she marked the maps. I don’t know where she learned that the jewels were down here, but she sure went looking for them.”

  I remembered the Google maps that she always left open on her computer, just in case. She had anticipated getting lost, getting trapped, getting delayed.

  She hadn’t considered getting shot. “Where are we?”

  “Close to where you started,” he said.

  “Which is?”

  He pointed. “About four hundred meters that way are the new excavations at the Pointe-à-Callière museum,” he said. “We’re going this way. Remember reading about the cave drawings at Lascaux?”

  “Of course.” Now closed because of the damage wreaked by pollution, the caves in southwest France were the beginning of humanity’s obsession with art. “What—?”

  “Wait,” he said, his Maglite searching the wall. An indentation, the sort of semicircle where Catholics are always throwing statues of Mary or the Infant of Prague or something like that. “There it is.”

  “There what is?” Maybe I was starting to need glasses.

  “Look,” Julian said impatiently, drawing me closer. And then the image emerged from the darkness. The black sun. The stylized swastikas.

  “They were here,” I whispered.

  “They were here,” Julian agreed.

  I took a deep breath. “What is it? A warning?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “He was down here looking, maybe he got the wrong coordinates, maybe he didn’t realize that the vault was under the Exchange.”

  “Maybe Patricia had a gun to her head and told him the wrong place and he shot her anyway,” I said.

  Somehow, the tunnels were suddenly feeling a lot more scary.

  * * *

  Élodie arrived at Montréal-Trudeau Airport at seven o’clock.

  I’d already called Ivan. “May be home late tonight,” I said. “Élodie’s coming in, I don’t know whether she’ll want to get to work tonight or not.” I hesitated. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t mean to leave you alone with Margery and the kids.”

  “It’s not a problem.” Ivan sounded cheerful. “I took off early from work, we’re planning Margery’s stay.” Some noise from the background. “Everyone says hi,” said Ivan.

  “Tell them hi from me,” I said faintly, an absurd picture forming in my mind of the four of them sitting around the table together. I had enough on my plate. I would not feel jealous.

  “We’re thinking of taking your Gray Line tour tomorrow,” Ivan said. “I’ll go along if I can get away from work. You want to come?”

  “I wish I could.” And in that moment I did. I wanted to go back to not knowing everything I knew, to not having met Patricia Mason, to be able to just deal with the usual headaches of my job and then go and spend time with my family. It was tempting. “I have too much to do right now, I’m afraid. But tell Margery I’ll definitely take some time off before she leaves.”

  “Okay, babe.” He paused as Claudia squealed in the background. “See you when I see you.”

  “See you when I see you,” I echoed. All I wanted to do was go home. Instead, I got in the car and headed out to the airport.

  Part of being a grown-up, I have learned, is doing the thing you’re supposed to do when there’s something else that you’d really rather be doing.

  Élodie looked great. She’s always looked smart, even when we were back in school together; but her authority gave her an edge that hadn’t been there back in the day. Neat autumn-weight coat, her hair styled into a careful-casual knot, the scarf a brilliant blue at her throat. Glasses, I noticed, which I’d never seen her wear before. “Nice librarian look,” I commented.

  “Haven’t you heard? Librarians are the new in thing,” she said, kissing my cheeks. “You look tired.”

  “You mean I look old. When people say you look tired, they mean you look old.”

  She looked at me sharply. “Where did that come from? Are you all right?”

  “Not particularly,” I said. “Do you have luggage?”

  She hefted the carry-on slung across her shoulder. “Traveling light. I have a reservation at the Queen Elizabeth.”

  “You could have stayed with me,” I complained, then remembered that the guest room was taken. Well, there was always the couch.

  “Sounds like you have enough on your plate,” she said, reading my mind. “Speaking of which, let’s get something to eat. We need to talk.”

  “We can eat at your hotel,” I said. She knew that; Élodie always stayed at the Fairmount Queen Elizabeth when she came to Montréal, and she nearly always ate there, at the Le Montréalais Bistrot-Bar, for dinner, brunch, afternoon tea … not a great one for exploring, Élodie.

  “Good,” she said, as though just learning of the restaurant’s existence. She wasn’t wasting any time, though. As soon as we were in the car, she turned to me. “Update,” she said.

  “Avner Kaspi’s disappeared,” I said, my eyes on the lights of the traffic around us. “We don’t know where he is, or why he slipped his police guard, but I don’t think it can be good.” I took a breath, braking at a red light. “The diamond that Patricia stole still hasn’t surfaced. I guess the police are waiting to hear from your people about what to do with the other two.”

  “They’ve been authenticated? You were going to check on that.”

  I nodded, switching into first gear and moving through the intersection. Richard had been following that process for me, being careful to keep anything he learned just between us. Our boss, up at his conference in Québec, was happy with the bland noninformative e-mails Richard sent him. “And before you ask, yeah, sworn to secrecy.”

  But how secret could it really be? Like the existence of the treasure ships themselves: the more people knew, the more potential there was for the information spreading, getting into the wrong hands.

  Not that it wasn’t there already.

  Élodie sighed. “What a mess,” she said.

  “More than a mess,” I said with some asperity. “One person’s been threatened and is missing, another’s dead. That’s a little more than just an international kerfuffle.”

  I could feel her eyes on me. “You’re taking this personally,” she said, her voice neutral.

  “Yes,” I agreed. “I totally am.”

  “Hmm.” She settled back in her seat after that and contented herself with watching the city go past. We pulled up in front of the hotel and I let the valet take the car; I wasn’t in the mood to look for a parking place. “Go check in, Élodie. I’ll meet you in the restaurant.”

  I hadn’t realized how tired I was until I got to the restaurant and sat down and tried to relax. A waiter materialized and I ordered a cocktail. I was halfway through it when Élodie joined me, her coat gone, her blue dress a statement against the restaurant’s beige-and-brown color scheme. “Drinking already, I see.”

  “That kind of d
ay,” I said.

  She’d already spoken to the waiter on her way in; Élodie doesn’t waste time. Now he delivered her gin and tonic. “Voilà, madame. Would mesdames like me to tell you about today’s additions to the menu?”

  “Not yet.” She waved imperiously and he disappeared quickly; the staff here was used to visitors behaving in all sorts of different bizarre manners. She took a gulp of the g-and-t and then commanded, “Tell me who’s worrying you. And don’t say there’s nobody: I know you too well for that.”

  She did, too. “His name is Aleister Brand. He lives down in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, in this old warehouse. He’s some kind of journalist.” Deep breath. “And he’s a neo-Nazi. I met his mother a couple of days ago, and she’s concerned that he may be using some kind of dark magic to—to cause things to happen. I know that’s vague, but it all really does come back to the crown jewels. Eventually, anyway.” I took a sip of my own drink. “Brand is Göring’s grandson—you know, Göring, Hitler’s right-hand man?—and he’s convinced that he’s got this special blood in him, that his heritage is a sign somehow.”

  The waiter approached the table again and Élodie put up her hand to wave him off without looking at him, as though he were a recalcitrant sheepdog. “How do the jewels fit in? With this guy Brand, I mean?”

  “There’s this current of thought that they possess a certain energy,” I said. “I got that from his mother. She believes that after centuries of connection to royalty, of being the symbol of royalty, there’s power in them.”

  To my surprise, Élodie nodded. “That makes sense,” she said.

  “It does? It didn’t make sense to me.”

  “Why shouldn’t there be? There are places that are haunted, aren’t there? If that kind of energy can inhabit a place, why couldn’t it inhabit an object?”

  I was staring at her. This wasn’t my prosaic and practical friend speaking. “What are you talking about?”