Deadly Jewels

by Jeannette de Beauvoir

  Fortunately Naomi didn’t need to be prodded. “So he could not know. He could not know. We would all have been shamed. Our lives would not be worth living.” She shook her head. “What I did was what was right for all of us,” she said.

  “Naomi,” I said suddenly, fearing the worst, “where’s Avner?”

  “He’s here,” she said. “I made him come here.” She lowered her voice. “He does not understand, but he will.”

  Lukas said, suddenly, “He’s in your bedroom, Belle-Maman. She made him go in there when he got here. He has rope on his hands.”

  “You be quiet!” She rounded on him, and Margery and I cried out together. “Then, fine! You want Avner? You want to shame my husband? Fine, fine!” She gestured to Lukas. “Go and get him!”

  Lukas looked at me and I nodded, and he went up the stairs. There was an extension of the landline in the bedroom; I hoped he was using it.

  Avner appeared at the top of the stairs. He looked definitely the worse for wear, but he didn’t seem to be actually hurt. He was rubbing his wrists and I could see that they were raw; he’d probably been trying to get away the whole time we’d been there.

  Naomi watched him with detachment, and didn’t say anything when he got down to our level and sat on the loveseat adjacent to the sofa. Lukas came down the stairs, slowly, and she waved him over to the sofa again. “So now you know,” she said to Avner.

  He shook his head. “I know nothing,” he said, “but that mine Naomi needs help.”

  “All I want,” she said, “is to go back to being fine.”

  There was a short silence. I tried to catch Lukas’s eye, but he was examining Avner. “Are you all right?” he asked him finally, anxiously.

  Avner smiled. “You are a good boy to ask,” he said. “Fine, I am not, but okay for now, yes. You are a good boy, and a lucky one, to have two mothers. Thank you for asking.” He turned to his wife. “And so I want to know what is happening,” he said. “You use a gun. This is not right. It is not righteous. We are Jews. We are righteous. We do not threaten people with guns. So this you must tell me, what is wrong here.”

  “You are righteous,” she said. “My father the rabbi is righteous. Not every Jew is righteous.”

  “This, what you say, this is true. Not every Jew. But our family, Naomi, we are.”

  “Your family, Avner,” she said, and there was a mixture of sadness and bitterness in her voice. “Your family, yes. Your father, he was a survivor. He survived the camps. He lived a good life, a strong life. And you are good like that, and strong.” She started to cry, tears running soundlessly down her cheeks.

  “What has happened to you, Naomi?”

  “Don’t,” she said, as he started to rise. “Stay where you are. We will be together again, but only once the problem is gone.”

  “People are dead. This did not solve your problem?”

  “He was the problem, but now he is not.” She looked at him. “Do you not remember, Avner? Do you not remember when our son Lev came to us and told us about this shiksa?”

  Avner’s face reflected horror for one split second before the love flooded in again. “Mine dear wife—” he began.

  She waved the gun at him. “He should never have done that,” she said. “The past should stay buried.”

  “No,” said Avner. “This is not true. If we have learned anything, it is the opposite. We must always remember. We must never forget.”

  “That is simple for you!” she burst out. “Your father, he was a survivor, he was a hero! Easy that you should say never forget! Well, me, I have to forget!”

  “I do not understand,” said Avner. “Your father is a great rabbi—”

  “My father was a Nazi!”

  Margery gasped. The rest of us stayed where we were, staring at her, riveted. She must be mad, I thought. Delusional. Where did that come from?

  Avner was staring at her. “No,” he said quietly. “You are confused, it is understandable, so much has happened here. You are confused, Naomi. We can call your father, yes? Have him come here and be with us?”

  “No!” There was definite hysteria in her voice now. “He’s not my father. Not my real father.” She stopped speaking and looked down at the gun in her hands. Steadying herself. “My mother was with a Nazi in the war,” she said, getting a grip on the hysteria that even she must have heard in her voice. “Here in Montréal. She went away to have the baby—to have me. She invented a husband who died. She married the rabbi as a widow, and he adopted me.”

  I said, “That doesn’t make any difference, Naomi, who your father—”

  Avner put up his hand. “Please, Martine,” he said quietly. “Do not speak of this. We know different, Naomi and me.” Nothing but sorrow in his voice. “The rabbi who has adopted her, Rabbi Samuel Kahn, my father-in-law who makes me move to Montréal, this man he would never accept the child of a Nazi. This man, he wants to keep our community pure. Separate from the rest of the world. Perhaps too separate; perhaps it is not right. But it is what he does. It is what he stands for.”

  It sounded a lot like Nazism in reverse to me, but maybe there was something here I wasn’t understanding.

  Naomi was nodding. “Shame,” she said. “Shame for his name, shame for the community. This I cannot allow.” She looked at Avner. “This is why that swastika comes to our house,” she said. “This man, he has learned of my secret, he will tell everyone unless I give him money.”

  Avner shook his head. “And all this time, you cannot trust me? To tell me this? All these years when you are mine wife? Am I so difficult to talk to? Have I ever been so difficult to talk to?”

  She looked at him and her whole expression softened; I saw a glimmer of the girl she’d once been. “Not even you could I tell, Avner,” she said. “I was too ashamed.”

  “How did this happen, that your mother—”

  I cut him off. The longer she stood there with a gun in her hand, the longer my children were in danger. There would be time for the whole story eventually. “Naomi, what matters is how you act now, not how your parents acted in the past,” I said. “Whatever’s happened, whatever you’ve done, whatever anybody’s done, there’s a way out. Taking hostages like this, it isn’t the way. Let the children go. They have nothing to do with this. They’re innocent. Let them go.”

  Avner pulled himself together and nodded. “You cannot hurt the children, mine wife,” he said softly. “No matter what else has passed, you cannot do this.”

  “No,” she agreed suddenly. Her face looked gray. I wondered if telling Avner had taken the last ounce of strength she’d had. She looked at me. “They can go. That woman, too. You stay.”

  Avner began, “Why—” but I was already standing up. Reaching across to the kids. “Come on,” I said. “Quickly. Just go down to the street. They’ll take care of you.”

  Lukas said, “Dad’s down there.”

  So that was the call he’d made. “Good,” I said. “You go down, and tell him I’ll be there as soon as I can.” I looked at Margery. “Take care of them.”

  “Of course,” she said. She walked cautiously across Naomi’s line of fire and opened the door. “Quickly,” she told them. Claudia gave me a quick scared smile as she went through, and then the door closed, and the three of us were alone.

  * * *

  “So, Naomi,” I said, “What do you want?”

  She looked at me blankly. “What do I want?”

  I nodded. “Now. What would make this turn out all right for you?”

  She looked at Avner, helpless. “I thought I could make it right,” she said. “I thought, if this woman dies, then our Lev, he stops talking silly talk of treasure and jewels and papers. But she dies, and he doesn’t stop, this talk.”

  “Lev wanted to know about his past, his mishpocha,” said Avner. “This is normal.”

  “His past, it is not normal,” she said. “I am not normal! I am a monster! And I have hidden it! I have hidden it since I first knew of it, when my
mother died and told me, that she was this German’s whore, and I think then that I must kill myself for shame. But suicide is shame, too. So I live with it and I keep it secret, always such a secret, from my father and my husband and my son, but now because of Lev and that shiksa and the swastika, now everything is known. I may as well have killed myself.” She looked at him, her eyes wild. “I have killed now, mine husband. I have killed.”

  “Yes,” said Avner quietly. “But you can stop now.”

  “Can I?”

  Avner said, “It is not for us to say what happens, mine Naomi. But what we can do, we can do what is right at every turn. You can do what is right now.”

  “You are not angry with me?”

  Nothing but sorrow in his face. “I think you have a sickness,” he said. “I think you’re fermisht. I think you need some help. But angry? How can I be angry with mine wife of thirty-eight years? This, this does not happen.”

  “Naomi,” I said suddenly, “do you have the diamond?”

  She shook her head. “It is cursed. I am sorry, my Avner, I know that it reminds you of your father, but this diamond, it has brought our mishpocha nothing but terrible luck. I gave it away.”

  “To whom?” I couldn’t resist the question.

  “To the man in the wheelchair, of course,” she said. And then she handed Avner the gun.

  For the second time that day, anticlimax set in. There was a long silence in the room, and then Avner nodded at me. “We will go,” he said.

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  We all three trooped down to the street where the police took Naomi off in a car right away, and Avner with her. He wouldn’t let go of her hand.

  I looked around me, blinking: it felt like hours since I’d run into the house. My street was cordoned off, with onlookers and tourists craning their necks at either end to catch a glimpse of what was happening. But all I saw, after that first glance around, was Ivan. Ivan, and Claudia, and Lukas, and I was already moving past Julian, toward them.

  And I knew I was home.

  * * *

  The war was over.

  Everywhere there were victory dances, victory parades. She even ran into one of them as she walked hesitantly up the hill, back into her old neighborhood, pushing the stroller.

  Bernie was standing in front of his delicatessen, just as she remembered him, his belly vast despite the war’s privations, his apron starched and white, watching the parade. “Livia Rosen, as I live and breathe! Now there’s a sight for sore eyes! You’ve been missed, you have.” His eyes lighted on the stroller. “Hello, and who’s this?”

  “This is my daughter,” she said. “Say hello, Naomi.”

  “Cute little thing.” Bernie and the little girl peered at each other. “Where’s Hans, then? Don’t tell me you are moving back to the neighborhood? That’s almost as good news as the parade! I’ve missed you both. No one liked my smoked meat like Hans did.”

  She took a deep breath, trying out the story for the first time. “He couldn’t stand not helping with the war, Bernie,” she said. “He was that brave. He went in on Juno Beach.” She sniffed. “They buried him over there, in France.”

  Bernie nodded, unsurprised, his face grave. “Country’s full of young widows, just like you,” he said. “Don’t be sad, Livia. You and this little girl, you’ll still have a good life. We’ll take care of you; the neighborhood’ll take care of you. Come on in, I’ll get you and little Naomi something to eat. Smoked meat, just the way you like it, extra pickles.” He laughed. “Everything is going to be fine. You’ll see: we can start thinking about the future again. Now that I think of it, there’s a fellow here for you to meet, someone who could use a wife like you. Just starting to get a reputation in the community. Building quite a following. We’re going to hear a lot from him, mark my words.”

  “Why?” asked Livia. “Is he a politician?”

  Bernie grinned. “Oh, much better than that,” he said. “He’s a rabbi.”

  EPILOGUE

  The diamonds—the two that were left—were returned to London. Discreetly. They never found the third one—and never found Marcus Levigne, either, who oddly enough sent me a letter months later. “The détective-lieutenant thinks it was all about wealth,” he wrote. “But imagine yourself, Martine, spending your whole career looking at the worst of all possible specimens of humanity. I made it my life’s work to know about them, to understand their inner workings, to be at one with them, and after a time I came to the only possible conclusion: that there is no hope for the human race. We are petty, cruel, stupid self-serving individuals. So better to be a wealthy one than an impoverished one.”

  The story of Livia and Hans emerged finally, and, sadly, Naomi was right: her adoptive father distanced himself from her as completely as possible once it became news.

  When Patricia brought the stolen diamond to Avner for appraisal, she set in motion a string of events that no one could have anticipated. It became the worst-kept secret in the city: Avner couldn’t resist talking about it. Gabrielle found out; Marcus found out; Aleister found out.

  Naomi didn’t care about the diamond. She cared about the secret that Patricia now knew, and she killed Patricia to silence her—even though Patricia couldn’t have cared less about it; for Naomi, it was the only thing that mattered. Lev was the one stunned to learn of his real parentage, but again, absorbed it and moved on; he was that sort of person.

  Aleister, thinking that the Kaspis had the diamond, and party by now to the information about Naomi’s real father, intended to frighten the couple with a death threat that he’d then follow up with blackmail. While Avner was ducking around town playing amateur sleuth, Naomi met Aleister in a park and gave him the diamond. She meant to kill him, but Marcus beat her to it, having access to a car and having, like us, circled the October date on his calendar.

  Avner wasn’t quite as innocent about Naomi’s mental illness as he pretended to be, but certainly he’d no idea that she’d be able to hurt anyone.

  Lukas and Claudia had ten kinds of hissy fits each before they were officially moved into our loft apartment in the Old City, and even more once they started school—in French. And after they went to bed at night Ivan and I toasted them with wine and laughed a lot together. Margery went off with Doctors Without Borders and sent regular letters to the kids, who started—maybe—seeing that she hadn’t rejected them so much as having said yes to something new and important.

  Jean-Luc Boulanger didn’t fire me. He took full responsibility for the outcome at my apartment, and as my role in it couldn’t be eliminated, he made sure that the newspapers all knew I was working at his instigation at the time. As Claudia would say, “whatever.”

  Naomi was judged incompetent to stand trial and was hospitalized; Avner went to see her every day. “What can I do?” he asked me over smoked-meat sandwiches at the delicatessen now known as Schwartz’s, sitting perhaps at the same counter where Livia and Hans had met. “She’s my bubbela. You don’t turn your back on people you love.”

  “Rabbi Kahn did,” I reminded him.

  “Ha. He’s no mensch, that one. Better rid of him.” It was a refreshing point of view.

  Lev stood next to me at Patricia’s memorial service at McGill. “There’s only one thing to do now.”

  “What’s that?”

  He shook his head sorrowfully. “I have to get married. It’s the only thing that will make my father happy.”

  Élodie sent me a package from Ottawa. “Thought you’d like to see this,” she wrote. It was a declassified shipping manifest from Liverpool, England: the manifest for the treasure ships. On a soft spring day I went up to the cemetery at Notre-Dame-des-Neiges—where my own mother is buried—and sat down next to Patricia Mason’s grave, now beginning to blend in with the rest of them. “They’re writing it up, now,” I told her. “Your name will be associated with it forever.”

  She’d stolen one of the diamonds, and died because of it; but I still thought that it was an impul
se, maybe even one that she later regretted. Her priority was the priority of every academic, from my father grappling with his sea monsters to the young woman lying under this headstone: the truth.

  Perhaps, like him, she’d finally found it.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Depending on your source, either the British crown jewels were absolutely, positively stored under the Sun-Life Building in Montréal during the war—or, just as absolutely and positively, were not. You pays your money and you takes your pick, as the saying goes. I think it’s probable that they were in Montréal: the most popular alternate “undisclosed location” is in Wales, and if Great Britain had been invaded and occupied, as Patricia pointed out, the jewels would have been as unsafe there as they’d been in London.

  Wherever the jewels were eventually stored, they were first disassembled by the king and his daughters (who apparently found the process uproarious fun) and placed in—yes—hatboxes for transport.

  To the best of my knowledge, there is no Templar connection to any of the current crown jewels, and nor is there a curse on them. It is true that Cromwell destroyed all of the jewels then in existence, so what’s now included in the collection is of relatively recent vintage.

  The passage, storage, and use of the gold and securities on the HMS Emerald and via Operation Fish is extremely well documented: it kept convoys moving across the dangerous North Atlantic and supplying an island nation that would have otherwise been cut off from survival throughout the war. Patricia was right about that, too: it was the largest physical movement of wealth in history. Alexander Craig was indeed the Bank of England official who went across on the Emerald—and did apparently enjoy the irony of his wife worrying about him having enough money with him—and Francis Cyril Flynn was her captain.

  Where I deviated from the truth is in not respecting what is perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of Operation Fish: its complete secrecy. The needs of my novel dictated leaks, stolen jewels, and rumors; in fact there were none. This and other successful British naval operations, undertaken with unspeakable courage in the face of appalling odds, are documented in Alfred Draper’s Operation Fish as well as in Robert Switky’s Wealth of an Empire: The Treasure Shipments that Saved Britain and the World, and it is with complete respect and amazement that I write about them here. No one knew. There were no leaks. There were no rumors. They did this extraordinary thing and they kept it secret and it saved Great Britain from German occupation.