Deadly Jewels

by Jeannette de Beauvoir

  “Would you stick around if you found a body and you’re part of a group known for violence?” Now he was being flippant. We were both dealing with a severe case of anticlimax.

  “I don’t suppose they killed him,” I said.

  “Can’t rule it out.”

  “Probably not, though.”

  “Probably not,” he agreed. “You okay here? I have to go do the liaison thing for a while, then we can head back into the city.”

  “Yes, of course.” I was still looking at the canal ten minutes later when my phone rang. I glanced at the screen: Ivan. “Hey, babe.”

  “Hey, Martine. Listen, are the kids and Margery with you?”

  “Who? The—kids?” It was so unexpected, I found myself stammering. “No—no, of course not. Weren’t they all going to the Underground City?”

  “Thought so, but Margery’s not been answering her cell for a while. Neither are the kids.”

  “Well,” I said, “it might not be anything, you know reception isn’t always great down there.” I know I sounded lame—I’m not so advanced at this detective thing yet that seeing a dead body isn’t upsetting, and I realized that my hand on my smartphone was shaking. I wasn’t ready to talk about something as ordinary as losing cell-phone reception.

  “Could be,” said Ivan, “but we were supposed to meet out at the casino, spend the afternoon at the Ronde.”

  I felt my stomach lurch. Maybe this wasn’t ordinary, after all. “There has to be an explanation,” I said. “Have you called the police?”

  “Not yet. I wanted to check with you first. I’ll keep calling them.” He sounded worried.

  “I’ll check with Julian,” I said, feeling my heart start to race. This was way too coincidental for me. “I’ll call you back, Ivan.”

  I tracked Julian down by the warehouse, where Aleister’s body was being loaded onto a gurney. I wondered, fleetingly, how Gabrielle would take the news. He turned to me. “What’s up?”

  “The kids and Margery.” I took a deep breath. “They’re missing.”

  “They probably—”

  “No,” I said, cutting him off. “They’re missing. For real. No one’s answering their phones, and those kids live with their phones glued to their bodies.” I looked at the big building behind us. “What if he took them? And then someone killed him? Maybe they killed the kids, too? Or maybe he hid them so we’ll never find them?” I was sounding a little hysterical. I tried to get by Julian. “Maybe they’re in here, somewhere, tied up or—”

  “Stop.” He grabbed me. “This isn’t helping.”

  “Someone has my kids,” I said, the panic rising until I felt I was going to be sick. Everything about the day suddenly crystallized, clear and sharp, the canal, the impossibly blue sky above it, the people in uniform still moving about the property. The barometer was still playing with the pressure inside my head. I suddenly realized that my chest was hurting, that I couldn’t breathe. “Julian, Julian—”

  “Okay.” He was already on his cell phone. “And somebody get me a paper bag, now!”

  A constable came trotting up with a bag and Julian stabbed me on the shoulder with his forefinger. “Sit down, LeDuc, and breathe into the bag.”

  I grabbed it like it was a lifeline and a moment later, my head down, stopped hyperventilating. Lukas and Claudia. The kids I saw as a charming—or, sometimes, not-so-charming—interruption to my real life, my important life, my chosen life. How long had I been treating them as symbols instead of people? Claudia, pretending indifference, ostentatiously filing her nails and drawling affectedly in an effort to look and sound sophisticated and maybe even cutting herself when she was alone and scared. Lukas, organized and having OCD, but eager to please, eager to try new things, go new places, filled with an energy that I’d always allowed to sap my own.

  Lukas and Claudia.

  I pulled the bag away from my face. Julian was still on the phone. “Yes. Yeah, okay. I want reports every five minutes, you got that?”

  “Julian,” I said. He held up a finger, signaling me to wait. “Yeah, that’s what I said. Then do it now,” he said into the phone and clicked off. “Are you all right?”

  I shook my head.

  “Stupid question,” he agreed and reached his hand down to help me up. “Come on.”

  “Where?”

  “Montréal.” He sounded grim. “Seems we just got a call from Lev. Your kids aren’t the only ones gone missing.”

  “Who?” Avner was already gone.

  “Naomi Kaspi. Mrs. Avner. And Lev sounds in worse shape than you.”

  * * *

  The Americans came in and liberated the camp.

  Their voices hearty, a never-ending supply of cigarettes in their pockets. And food—even the black-market food in the camp couldn’t compare to this. Inmates were pushing it down their gullets as fast as they could, diarrhea coming out the moment the food went in, their bodies unable to assimilate it.

  The camp guards had fled; Karl and Ilse had fled; there was no one there but the prisoners and the kapos. The camp resistance created huge signs to put up, and everyone had their own message: the politicos created one that read THE GERMAN POLITICAL PRISONERS WELCOME THEIR AMERICAN FRIENDS, while the Communists countered with a poem—well, something that rhymed, anyway—that read, WE ANTI-FASCISTS WANT TO GO HOME TO ERADICATE NAZI CRIMINALS.

  Elias tried to feel elation, but all he really felt was tired. A GI stopped him as he trudged from the commandant’s office to his barracks. “Hey, buddy!”

  “Yes, sir?” He’d spent too many years saying “sir” to anyone in uniform.

  The soldier liked that. “Hey, Stoney, get that? He called me sir!”

  “He don’t know you too well, then.”

  The soldier turned back to Elias. “Where you goin’ when this is over, buddy? You got a girl back home?”

  “I did, once,” Elias said. “I do not know if she is still alive.”

  The boy—and he was a boy, probably younger than Elias himself—looked genuinely distressed. “I sure hope she is, buddy,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Elias. “I am sure she is.”

  But he knew in his heart that he was wrong.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Julian put the siren on and slapped a blue light on top of the TT. I’d never seen either before. He caught my look. “LeDuc, don’t worry. We have three separate police forces looking for them. We’ll find them.”

  “Yes,” I managed to say, and even to my own ears my voice sounded dead and cold. “Yes, I’m sure we will.”

  He was on the telephone all the way back. “Who’s coordinating? Who? Okay, yeah, I know him. Yeah, I know he did. Okay.” A quick glance at me. “Listen, handle it how you normally would, but I have some additional information that you need. They’re Martine LeDuc’s stepchildren and their mother. Yeah, I know, and that’s a decent line of inquiry, too, but you have to hear me. She’s been working with me on this jewel heist … yeah … I’m just throwing it out there, it could be a connection.…”

  I bit my lip and turned away from him, looking out the window instead. Big-box stores, cinemas, hotels, all looking ridiculously normal. How could people go shopping for appliances? How could everyone behave as though the ground weren’t crumbling beneath our very feet? And then we were sweeping onto the bridge and the traffic was snarled and we worked our way through the maze of vehicles, curious glances, wondering what desperate mission we were on, what tragedy we were racing to face. I’d done it myself, sent a small prayer aloft at the sight of active ambulances, fire trucks, police cars.

  My stomach was so tight it was nearly unbearable.

  I punched Ivan’s icon on my smartphone. “Have you heard anything?”

  “No.” His voice was rough and I could hear, behind it, the shimmer of fear, the spiderweb gossamer thread holding him a millimeter away from screaming, from losing it. “The police are on it,” I said.

  “Yeah, I know, they’re here with me now.�
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  I glanced at Julian, holding up my phone, and he nodded. “I’m putting you on speakerphone, Ivan,” I said, pressing buttons. “Julian’s here with me.”

  “Ivan,” Julian said, calm and clear. “Are you at the casino?”

  “Yeah. They said I should stay—”

  “They’re right. Stay put. Who’s there with you?”

  Some blurred voices, and then a louder one. “This is Commander Harrison, RMCP. With whom am I speaking?”

  “Détective-lieutenant Fletcher, city police,” Julian said. “Are you coordinating from there?”

  “We’ve set up headquarters downtown, at City Hall,” the voice said. “I’m staying with Mr. Petrinko in case a call comes through.”

  “Has anyone been to the house to check?” Julian asked.

  Ivan said, “No. But I tried the house phone, too. No one’s answering anywhere.”

  “That’s okay,” said Julian. “We’ll head over there now, just to be sure.” He reached over to my phone to click off the connection and said, “Okay, so what changed? Why did Aleister have to die?”

  “I know you’re trying to get my mind off things, but I can’t—”

  “They’re related. It’s all related, and you know it,” he said. “Focus.”

  “Okay.” I swallowed hard. “Avner disappears, then…”

  “Wait. Before that. Let’s start at the beginning. Lev Kaspi and Patricia Mason are connected. Right? Through McGill?”

  “Yeah. He’s the one who tells her about the treasure ships, and the jewels under the Sun-Life Building. He’s the one who found out they got moved, too.” I was fighting hard to stay in control.

  “So he knew about all that, but he never talked about it until she came along. And she was around because the excavations at the museum had opened up some of the sealed underground tunnels. So she sees her opportunity and the museum, whose director was with her when she first opened the room, makes her get you involved. And now the circle of people who know about the sealed room where she found the diamonds is getting bigger.”

  “Right,” I said. I couldn’t see where this was heading.

  “Think,” urged Julian. “What if we’ve been too focused on the diamonds? Was there anything else in that room?”

  “Papers,” I said. “Documents. But probably all of it just duplicates of what was already digitized. Lev told me he had the Emerald’s manifests, he had lists of securities, he had the diary kept by the guy from the Bank of England, for heaven’s sake.”

  “Still,” said Julian, “what would be more precious than a diamond? Information?”

  “Don’t see what it could be,” I said stubbornly.

  “I don’t either,” he confessed. “But I’m starting to think that’s what this is about.”

  We pulled onto my street and I had the door open before the TT had even come to a full stop. “LeDuc! Wait for me! You don’t know—”

  I didn’t listen. There was a clue there, somewhere, a clue in the apartment that would tell me where he’d taken them. I didn’t even know who the “he” was—Aleister, before he was killed? Marcus? Someone outside of our radar? Someone who’d now taken Naomi Kaspi, as well.

  All I had to do was find the clue.

  I had the key out and ready before I even reached the door, before I heard Julian in the entryway behind me, swearing as the street-level door closed on him. It didn’t matter. There would be a clue here.

  There were three people sitting in my living room. Margery was perched on the edge of the armchair. Claudia and Lukas were together on the sofa. No one was doing anything; they were frozen in a tableau.

  I walked through the door and it closed behind me. Margery said, in an anguished voice, “No!”

  And then Naomi Kaspi said, “It is time you finally get home.” And showed me her gun.

  * * *

  I never saw it coming.

  I looked at the kids. “Are you all right?” They both nodded. They were holding hands, which had to be a first. When we got out of this, I’d remind them of it.

  When we got out of this.

  Avner’s wife looked terrible. There were red splotches on her face and neck, and her hair was disheveled. But it wasn’t her face or hair that worried me: it was the steadiness of her hand.

  The one with the gun.

  “What do you want?” I asked her. “If it’s me you’re waiting for, then here I am. I’ll do whatever you want me to do. And so you can let them go, right?”

  “Let them go? You think that I can do that, yes? So they can get the police here?”

  “The police are already here,” I said. “I came with the police. Didn’t you hear the siren?”

  “We heard the siren,” said Margery, her eyes on Naomi.

  “So if you let them go, we can have a conversation,” I said. “You can tell me why you wanted me here.”

  “I can tell you right now. They don’t have to go nowhere.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So tell me what the problem is, Mrs. Kaspi.”

  “The problem is you. Before, not so much, but now the problem is you. Before, the problem was other people, but now the problem is you.”

  Alice through the looking glass, I thought: I could hear the words, but they weren’t making any sense. This wasn’t getting us anywhere. And I didn’t even know where to begin trying to make it make sense. “Is this about the swastika?” I asked. “The death threat to Avner?”

  “You think that was for Avner? Everyone thinks that was for Avner!” She shook her head. “That was for me. That man, he knew we have money. We are in the diamond business, nu? Of course we have money. He wanted payments. Lots of payments. That note? That was to remind me. To remind me to keep paying.”

  “Someone was blackmailing you?” Somewhere in here there had to be a sane thread of conversation that I could catch hold of.

  Somewhere.

  “Was it Aleister Brand?” It was a decent guess, since the swastika was from the New Order of the Black Sun.

  “That man,” she said, nodding. “He would ruin everything, he would. Everything it is good until he finds out about that girl and that diamond.” She changed tack. “It was her fault. Really. Her fault.”

  “Patricia Mason,” I said. “What did she do, Naomi?”

  She didn’t seem to mind my use of her first name. “Him, and her, and now you,” she said vigorously. “But we have all been through too much. We have survived too much. We have survived worse than you. You are not going to ruin our lives now, now that we have them back.”

  I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. It was becoming pretty clear that she was off whatever meds Avner had mentioned she took. “Tell me, Naomi,” I said. “Tell me what happened. Tell me what went wrong.” Even if I wasn’t going to be able to follow her disjointed logic, the more time she spent talking, the less time she was spending putting bullets into my family.

  The landline rang then, suddenly and shrilly. Margery jumped; it was on the table next to her. “Don’t touch that!” hissed Naomi.

  “It’s the police,” I said. “They’re here to help.” It kept ringing. “They want to talk with you, Naomi. They want to help you solve this problem.”

  “You are the problem,” she said. This was a woman with focus. The telephone was loud and getting on my nerves; I couldn’t imagine what it was doing to hers. “Then tell me how I can help,” I said, a little desperately, not daring to look at the kids.

  “Lev should never have met that girl, that shiksa,” said Naomi. “I told him she was bad for him. He should stay with his own kind.”

  “I don’t think they were romantically involved,” I said gently. “He was just helping her—”

  “He should stay with his own kind,” she interrupted. “This would never have happened. That was the start of the troubles. Everyone should stay with their own kind. My father is right. It is important not to mix with other people.”

  The ringing stopped as suddenly as it had begun.<
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  She had to be getting tired, and I didn’t want that gun going off accidentally. “Naomi,” I said, “why don’t we sit down? It will be so much easier to chat that way.”

  “You sit.”

  “Okay.” I eased my way gently into the stiff-backed chair near the door, the one that had once been my mother’s. Odd, the thoughts one has. “Okay, I’m sitting now. You can put the gun down.”

  “No. You will not trick me that way.” But she lowered it, all the same.

  I took a deep breath. “So tell me what happened, Naomi,” I said.

  “It was all right,” she said. “Avner never knew, and that was all right. My father never knew, and that was all right. That was better. It was the way it should be. We were happy. We were all so happy.”

  I couldn’t decide which fork to take, which of the two obvious questions to ask. I could hear Julian’s mantra in my head, and I followed it. “What changed, Naomi? What happened to make you unhappy?”

  “They found out! You don’t understand; you don’t come from our community. It is not right. The new Jews in the city, for them it is fine, all this tolerance. These new Jews, they do not know better. But it is not fine. It is not fine.”

  “No,” I agreed, completely in the dark. “It couldn’t have been fine.”

  “You see!” She nodded vigorously with something approaching a smile. “You see. Something had to be done. My father—no, he could not know. He could never know. No one could ever know, could ever think less of him for it. It would have shamed him. It is unimaginable. A million times over, it would have shamed him. He has a place in the community. He has stature.”

  “Rabbi Kahn,” I said cautiously.

  “He is not just a rabbi,” she said. A flash of pride. “He is important. He writes—significant things. Many books. Learned books. Books that tell us how we must live.” She drew in a deep breath. “He tells us that we cannot trust them, the goyim, people like you. That we have to stay inside our community. If we do not, we betray our people. We betray their history, their sacrifices.”

  What was she talking about? I glanced at Margery and she met my eyes, lifting her shoulders slightly: she had no idea. Was it Lev and Patricia? But Lev had said they were just friends.