Rachel lifted her heels in an effort to avoid making noise as they climbed the marble stairs. Up they went, past the couture fitting rooms and the ateliers behind them, past the storage rooms and across white landing hung with white-framed mirrors that reflected blankness back at itself. Finally they reached the business offices on the third floor. Rachel nudged Magda. The framed receipt that had hung on the wall was gone.
The door to the reception area was open, the white desk and chair unoccupied. They walked through to Gabrielle’s office. Once again Rachel’s eyes were drawn to the giant button, the knife-edge hem, but only for a moment before she switched her attention to Gabrielle’s desk. Its surface was empty.
She drew a deep breath and let it out, crossing the room to the doorway to Antoinette’s office. The carpet in the two outer offices had muffled her footsteps, so the sound of her first step across the threshold, clacking on the naked wood, surprised her. She started, then gave a little snort at her own foolishness. Tossing her head, she crossed the threshold and entered the room.
“Hello,” said Antoinette.
Chapter Thirty-Four
The shock of seeing her there was so great that Rachel actually staggered back. Antoinette stood behind her desk, the eternal fire burning in her fireplace. They had come upon her in the act of warming her hands at its flames, and her arms were still outstretched as she turned to face them.
“Madame Field, Madame Stevens. Come in. I left the memorial service early. I told them I found it too emotional to stay, but really”—her voice became confidential—“I had some work I needed to do. And I was just finishing up when I saw the two of you from the window. I guess you wanted to take advantage of the empty building to do some work of your own.” She smiled at her joke, then gestured at the chairs in front of the desk. “Please, sit.”
Shit. Rachel looked over her shoulder at Magda, who made a helpless gesture. There was nothing for it but to do as they were asked.
They crossed to the desk and sat in the chairs in front of it. The scene was like a replay of their first encounter. Once again Antoinette was dressed all in black, and once again Rachel saw that the skin around her eyes was swollen from crying. The only difference was that this time she sat down behind the desk rather than coming out in front of it.
“You figured it out.”
It wasn’t a question, but Rachel nodded anyway. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Magda do the same.
“Yes. I worried you might be coming close when you came to see me the second time, but I hoped I’d steered you in the wrong direction. Ah, well.”
Antoinette turned her head and stared out the window for a moment, her eyes losing focus and looking at nothing. It was a bit like being called into the principal’s office, Rachel thought: the same amorphous fear, the same terrifying wait. She shifted her bag from the left side of her lap to the right.
At last Antoinette spoke again.
“The war.” She sighed as if the word itself were a disappointment. “You can never get away from the war. Resistance, collaboration … you’d think it had all happened yesterday.” Another sigh. “Did you know that France trained and armed militias that participated in the Rwandan genocide? In the war in Algeria, the French killed seven hundred thousand people. That’s more than ten times the number of French Jews killed in the Second World War. But no one is destroyed by the revelation that his grandfather fought in Algeria, or that he works for Nexter Systems making the weapons France sells to half the world.”
Rachel didn’t speak. She didn’t disagree with Antoinette’s assessment. It was true that France had its own arms manufacturers selling death around the globe, and it was also true that every day groups of people were being killed senselessly by other groups, in Paris and everywhere else. But she wasn’t sure how to respond to a monologue on relative morality delivered by a murderer.
“It was all that man Ochs’s fault. God!” Antoinette snarled. “He wrote to Rolé in February, saying that he was trying to track down a painting his grandfather sold to Grandpère to raise money to go to America. He’d found the receipt inside a book. He thought Sauveterre might have some idea of how to locate the painting, but when Rolé went into the archive to see if there was anything useful he could tell him, he found Grandpère’s copy of the receipt. And when they compared them, the receipts didn’t match.” She smiled thinly. “As I assume you already know.”
Rachel nodded. “Your grandfather’s receipt showed a much higher price paid than Ochs’s did.”
Antoinette nodded. “And the serial numbers didn’t match either. Every receipt and its carbon had the same identifying number,” she explained, “but Grandpère’s copy of the Ütz receipt was numbered much higher than the one Ochs sent. It showed a one hundred thousand franc difference in price.”
Rachel let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding.
“Roland wanted to tell everyone,” Antoinette said. “He wanted to make amends.” She folded her hands on the desk in front of her; Rachel could see the pressure from her fingers turning her knuckles pale. “I wore the white. I paid for him to redecorate this whole building to achieve equilibrium. I supported the daily hourlong meditation and the meetings every afternoon with his sobriety counselor. I found that nightclub for his party and paid when he demanded it be redecorated. He was a genius, an absolute genius, and anything he needed to produce his art, I was willing to do. But this …” She faded off, then focused again. “He explained that one of the twelve steps was righting your wrongs. I said he hadn’t done anything wrong. But according to him, since Grandpère’s wrongs had funded the business, they were Roland’s wrongs too.”
Not an entirely unreasonable argument, Rachel thought. After all, a similar rationale had prompted German reparation payments to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s.
From the mystified way Antoinette shook her head, though, it was clear she felt differently. “I said, ‘But what about the people who work for us? Should people lose their livelihoods over something they had nothing to do with?’” She looked at Rachel. “Do you know how many people the ateliers employ? Never mind those who work in the shop, in the office, in our factories worldwide. Should a man’s employees have to pay for his grandfather’s wrongs?” She stopped as if she expected answers, but when none came she kept going. “Roland didn’t care. He was going to meet Ochs to verify his receipt, and then he would announce to the press that our grandfather had made his money by cheating Jews and forging evidence to cover it up. Sauveterre would have been ruined.” She put out her hands, asking for consideration. “Everyone knows the story: Maximilien Sauveterre paid fair prices for Jewish art sold in desperation, then held onto the pieces in case the sellers came back. When they didn’t come back, he sold the pieces at the same prices he bought them for. What did Roland think would happen once people found out that Maximilien really waited until he was sure those sellers weren’t going to come back, then forged receipts so he could sell the works at an inflated price?” She took a huge, ragged breath. “No one is going to buy from a fashion house founded on blood money! And you saw how many receipts our grandfather forged. The heirs of all those people could have sued for reparations. We would have spent a fortune on court costs alone. And what for? What does it matter now what one dead person did to some other dead people nearly eighty years ago?”
What did it matter? Rachel thought. Hadn’t she struggled with that very question? What possible purpose could it serve now to unmask one man as a cheater of Jews, especially a man who couldn’t be punished for it? It wouldn’t bring anyone back, or right any wrong.
Yet it did matter. She couldn’t explain how it mattered, but she felt the knowledge of injustice like an instinct. She said, “Your grandfather died in his bed when he was eighty-six. But my great-uncle Paul died at Buchenwald when he was twenty.” That was the closest she could come.
Antoinette only sighed, exasperated by the obstinacy of other people. “Roland didn’t understand either. I’m
not saying our grandfather didn’t do anything wrong. Of course he did. But trying to make it all better would be impossible, and it would only have hurt more people. Roland refused to see that.”
“So you killed him.”
Antoinette looked down at the desktop. “I loved my brother.” Suddenly she began to cry. “Do you know what it means to be a twin? What it really means?” She wiped her eyes. “It means reassurance. He was always there. I could take his existence for granted. And now—” She stopped.
“But you killed him.” Magda spoke slowly and clearly, as if pointing out a logical flaw to a five-year-old.
“And do you have any idea how hard that was for me?” Antoinette bit her lips. “I had to inject him, and then I had to stand there and wait. Not for a short time, either. Stand there and watch and act like nothing was wrong, and then force myself not to follow him when I finally saw him go outside.”
Rachel was almost breathless with disbelief at this description. How to respond to such egotism?
The response came: by exploiting it to get the details of the crime. “But how did you do it? With the club so crowded, how was it possible to manage the injection without being seen?”
A brief expression of pride flashed over Antoinette’s face. “I counted on its being crowded. I hid the syringe up the sleeve of my coat and waited until late to come to the party, so it would be crowded. Then, when I hugged him, I just slid the needle into my hand and stuck him. He felt it—of course he felt it!—and I said I’d probably just scratched him accidentally.”
Rachel could feel Magda beside her, stiff with disgust and disbelief, and she knew that if she turned to look at her, she wouldn’t be able to keep her composure. Instead, she took a deep breath to keep her voice level. “And Ochs?”
“Oh.” Antoinette sniffed. “That was a pleasure. After the trouble he stirred up.”
“You shot him.”
She nodded. “With the Luger Grandpère got as a present during the war. I made sure Rolé’s assistant saw me supposedly take a sedative and fall asleep, and when she left I went to Rue la Boétie and called Ochs from Lellouch’s office.”
“You told him your brother couldn’t make it.”
“No. I didn’t know if he would have seen the news on TV. They announced Rolé’s death right after I identified him. So I said he had died, but I knew the meeting had been important to him, so I wished to come in his place. Could he find somewhere quiet for us to go to talk? I said I would pick him up at his hotel room and we could go from there. It all went very smoothly. No one argues with a grieving woman.” A sigh. “Only I was nervous. I’d never shot anybody before. He turned to reach for something, and I thought—well, I don’t know what I thought, but I grabbed a cushion and shot him through it.” She made a little clicking sound of irritation. “Afterward, I realized he must have been reaching for the receipt. But I couldn’t find it, and I was worried about the noise. So I left without it. I threw the gun in the Seine on the way home, and the next day I came in before anyone else and took the forged receipt out of the archive. I figured if the police showed up with Ochs’s version I could just pretend not to know what was going on. After all, I wouldn’t be lying if I said I’d never seen it before.”
Rachel closed her eyes. She swallowed hard before opening them. “And poor Cyrille?”
“Poor Cyrille? Please, he was a parasite. From the moment Rolé decided to cut him off, I told Gabrielle not to put him through to me if he ever called trying to whine his way back in. Which he did for a while. Then a couple of weeks ago, she told me that he’d started trying to contact me again, and she’d been putting him off. By sheer luck, last week he tried one day after she’d left, and I picked up my own line. He said he wanted to discuss something I might find very valuable, something that I would want to keep within the walls of Sauveterre.” She gave a little sneer. “Always so obvious. That’s when I knew he knew about the receipts.”
Rachel wasn’t going to stop Antoinette’s flow of words to tell her that she was wrong, but she did spare a pitying thought for two men killed because of what Antoinette Guipure thought she knew. Ochs shot when he was about to give her the very receipt she wanted, and Cyrille reaching for the croquis, thinking his ship had come in, not knowing that in a few minutes he would be dead.
“So you arranged to meet him at his apartment?”
Antoinette nodded. “I had the carte couteau I always carry in my bag. As soon as we were in the room, he bent to get something from under the bed. I was very quick. Once in each kidney, and when he straightened, once in each lung.”
“And what about us?” Magda’s voice shook a little. “We’re not here for money. We’re just going to take what you’ve told us straight to the police.”
But Antoinette gave a little shake of her head. “I don’t think you’ll be doing that.” Her voice was calm, but it was certain.
Did she have another gun? Had she told them what she had because she’d been planning to kill them all along? But Rachel could see that Antoinette’s hands lay softly folded on the desktop, unmoving. There was no weapon in sight.
Still, the other woman seemed unconcerned. She turned to look out the window for a moment, gazing into the distance, before turning her attention back to them. Then she said conversationally, “Do you think the police will believe the claims of two women who broke into my company headquarters when they knew everyone would be out at a memorial service, ransacked my files, and made their way upstairs to do further damage? That will be my version of events. They’re more likely to arrest two self-proclaimed amateur detectives than they are the head of a highly successful company, a respected woman of business now shaken all over again after the terrible recent loss of her beloved brother.”
It was Rachel’s turn to be unfazed. “Except that there’s evidence to back up what we say. They’ll have to search the building, just to be sure our story isn’t true, and when they do, they’ll find your grandfather’s receipts.”
“Oh, the receipts!” Antoinette raised her eyebrows. “The evidence of the inciting scheme.”
“Yes.”
“There’s no need for the police to search for the receipts. They aren’t very far away.”
The two women exchanged a look. Was this some new plan, Antoinette pretending to give them the evidence as a way to rope them in to something else? Magda spoke before Rachel could. “Where are they?”
Antoinette moved her chair sideways. She stretched out a hand behind her. “There.”
In the space behind her the two women saw the fire, now a pile of red and orange embers with a heap of ashes beneath.
Chapter Thirty-Five
“I’m so sorry,” Alan said.
They were gathered in Bistrot Vivienne for their usual end-of-investigation debriefing. This time, though, they weren’t celebrating. Rachel had ordered a cup of watery French tea for herself as a penance, and now she sat taking tasteless sips as she waited for what her husband would say next.
“Maybe you could find some comfort in the knowledge that this isn’t a unique occurrence? I mean, if news reports and cold cases are anything to go by, there are a lot more murders than there are murderers captured.”
He looked over at Capitaine Boussicault, who had invited himself along when Rachel telephoned to tell him what had happened. The capitaine nodded reluctant confirmation. “Although this particular instance is unusual. We don’t normally have them confessing and still getting away with it.”
“Was it really a confession? What exactly did she tell you?”
Alan was looking for a way to make her feel better, Rachel knew. If there hadn’t been a real confession, perhaps she could pretend that Antoinette hadn’t really triumphed.
But there was no way around it.
“It was a confession,” Magda said. “She started with Ochs’s first letter and told us everything Rachel just told you.”
“But why not just pay Ochs reparations?” Alan took a sip of his whiskey. “J
ust speaking purely practically, Sauveterre is very successful. They could afford to quietly give him the money he was owed.”
“Guipure wouldn’t do it,” Rachel said. “He felt this was a wrong that the steps of his recovery program required him to right. His label literally couldn’t have existed without the money his grandfather made from reselling those paintings, and therefore he felt that he was complicit. He was going to make his amends by going to the press.”
“But she chose an incredibly risky way to circumvent that.” Alan frowned. “Injecting him at a party, in public …”
“No,” Rachel shook her head. “She needed it to be that way. It was part of her plan. The party meant he wouldn’t be paying as much attention as he would be if they were alone. And it meant there were two hundred witnesses to say they hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary, just a man being hugged by his sister. And the very boldness of the way she did it made it so unbelievable that no one would even think of it as a possibility. It made her safe.” She smiled at him. “You told me she had a brilliant financial mind, and this has all the hallmarks of brilliance. It was risky, and it was audacious, but its risks and audacity were carefully calculated.”
“But it didn’t pay off,” Alan pointed out.
“No, but that was because of something she didn’t factor in. She thought that because Guipure was a former addict, the police would dismiss it as an accidental overdose. She didn’t expect them to investigate further.”
“Don’t underestimate the Paris police,” Boussicault said with satisfaction.
But Alan was still unsatisfied. “And did she say how she managed to persuade Gabrielle to buy the heroin?”
“Gabrielle didn’t buy the heroin.”
“But the security video showed her passing it to Thieriot!”
“No.” Rachel gritted her teeth. “The security video showed her bumping into Thieriot. We were the ones who assumed it must be a handoff. We saw what we wanted to see, just like we assumed that a woman in a white dress with red hair buying heroin must have been Gabrielle. We forgot that anyone can fake someone’s most memorable characteristics. It’s easy to buy a red wig and wear a white dress.”
Designs on the Dead Page 24