Deadly Jewels (13 page)

“Patricia Mason,” I said, and swore. “
Bordel
, I don't believe it.” There are four major universities in Montréal, two of them English-speaking. What were the chances of the diamond merchant's son and the doctoral student fetching up in the same place? “What kind of coincidence is that?”

“The world, it is smaller than you think, and only in movies do they say, ‘I do not believe in coincidences,'” said Avner. “There is a word for coincidence in all the languages I know. And so it does exist. She has not told him everything, but she has told him what she has found. I think that if you identify your skeleton, Martine LeDuc, you will find someone who worked for the Nazis.”

“So who killed him?”

He shrugged again. “This, also, I do not know. There is very much I do not know. What I know, only, is diamonds. About diamonds, I know everything. And I would like very much to see the other diamonds. I think they are the real ones that my father made copies of. The one I have seen, it is perfect, it is like his drawings that I have seen.”

“Hang on,” I said. “What do you mean, the other diamonds?”

He looked at me blandly. “Besides the one that Miss Mason has shown me already, of course,” he said. “The one from the room under the theater.”

“Yes,” I said faintly. “Of course.”

*   *   *

It wasn't the way he would have chosen to fight the war, living this double life. He loved the Wehrmacht uniforms, everything correct and commanding respect when a soldier walked into a room; and he could have been more than just a soldier, too. Hans was sure of it. He could have become an officer, had ribbons on his chest; everyone would know that the boy whose father had killed his family had risen high, far above his beginnings, his tragedy, know that he had become a real man.

Instead, he was forced to live far away from anyone he knew, pretend to be someone he wasn't, fight a war without a gun. It was dispiriting.

He had very little contact with anyone from the Fatherland. That might have helped, Hans told himself. Hear someone speaking German—any German, any accent, it wouldn't matter. Making jokes that only another German would understand. Talk with people from the Party, hear the Party gossip.

Instead, he had Kurt.

Kurt was stationed in New York City. He sometimes sent coded messages—Hans had taken the requisite course in codes and cyphers—and sometimes came up to Montréal himself. Even though he longed for German companionship, Hans preferred Kurt's communiqués to Kurt's actual presence: there was nothing about Montréal that the other man couldn't find to criticize. It was too cold; it was too hot. The French was incomprehensible; Kurt had been in Paris and considered himself a connoisseur of all things French. The food was good enough to feed to the dogs. The women were all too thin. And so on.

New York, on the other hand, was the center of Kurt's universe. He was, of course, a good Party member, a staunch Nazi, and he knew that the depravities of the United States of America were its ultimate weakness—but that knowledge never kept him from exploring and enjoying those depravities to the fullest. “Times Square, you should see Times Square,” he said to Hans as they strolled along the river in Montréal's quiet residential section called Anjou. “The women there—not very proper, not very careful, completely edible!”

“What do you have for me today?”

Kurt turned away from the water and looked at Hans, his eyes narrowed. “You're very eager,” he observed.

“I am eager to do my duty for the Fatherland,” Hans said. “Sometimes it feels—”

“Ah, yes, I see what you are saying.” He turned and resumed the walk, his hands clasped behind his back. Hans told people it was his brother who was visiting. “You wish that you had more excitement here. You wish that you could make a difference for the Führer. I can sympathize. It must be terrible, stuck in a provincial backwater like this.”

“I do my duty,” said Hans stiffly, wishing he could just push Kurt into the river. There were rapids in the St. Lawrence, fast water that, with a little luck, could take him all the way out to sea. It was not an unpleasant thought.

“That's what I like to hear,” said Kurt. “Bear your frustrations for the Fatherland, Peterson. This is your war, right here.” He couldn't help but snigger as he looked around. Anjou was blue-collar and unkempt, not like downtown; Hans suspected that Kurt had selected it on purpose. Unworthy thoughts of my superior, he reminded himself, but thought them anyway.

“Is there news?” he asked diffidently. Kurt would prolong this as long as he could.

“There is always news,” Kurt responded. “Tell me, is there a decent restaurant in this city, or do I have to take the train back right away?”

Hans started to defend Montréal, then thought better of it. “Nothing to your standards,” he said. The sooner Kurt was out of his hair, the better.

“Thought not,” said the other. He was looking with ill-disguised disgust at a woman walking toward them on the towpath. Waiting for her to pass, he said, “Everyone's pleased that we know where the royal jewels are,” he said. “There's a lot of interest from Berlin.”

“Am I to do anything about them?” A little action would be nice.

“Not for the moment.” He shook his head. “Me, I'd think they'd be after the securities. But that's not the case. They have a plan. And it's not for us to question it!” He scowled at Hans as if he'd done just that.

“
Jawohl
,” said Hans neutrally.

“So you are to wait,” said Kurt with some relish. “Wait until you hear from me. Make yourself part of the community.” He glanced over. “Your cover is still good?”

“It's still good.”

“All right.” He grinned. “I think I will take the early train down after all. There's a show at Radio City Music Hall tonight I don't want to miss.”

 

CHAPTER TWELVE

By the time we got home, I was fuming. I'd tried calling Patricia several times on her mobile, but it went straight to voice mail. So did Julian's. So did Ivan's. Nobody, it seemed, wanted to talk to me.

Claudia was clamoring about having dinner in the Underground City, and as she hadn't made our trip to the Insectarium an actual disaster, I was inclined to agree. I'm not crazy about the Underground City as a destination, mind you: it's really just a shopping mall that spreads its tentacles all over, connected by corridors and, of course, the Métro; but it is certainly popular and, in the winter, extremely useful.

There'd been various attempts over the years to make it more attractive to those seeking culture along with their fashion and fast food, and of course there was Québec's “one percent” rule: any building constructed for public use has to put aside one percent of said building for the arts. So there's always an attempt. The corridors connect some cultural venues, of course—the museum of contemporary art, some theaters, a tremendous movie house—but, by and large, it's a mall.

Still, there's a lot to be said for it. Underground, you can eat, drink, visit bookstores and pharmacies, pay your taxes at one of the government offices, book a trip at a travel agency, buy your dinner wine at one of the
societé
des alcools du Québec
outlets, and of course shop, shop, shop.

The reality is that most Montréalers use it as a means to an end: the Underground City is a commuter's dream. No rain, no snow, no traffic. Weekdays they're all there, morning and evening, walking briskly to and from their workplaces downtown, grabbing the Métro, stopping occasionally for a quick coffee.

But it was the bright lights, the window displays, the fashion, and the relative safety of the mall environment that drew Claudia and other adolescents like moths to a flame.

It was a particularly fine day and so we eschewed the Métro and walked up the hill to the Eaton entrance. “I need to go to La Baie,” Claudia was babbling. “And to Ailes de la Mode, and to…” Her eyes were glittering, and I shook my head. Nothing like offering a fix to an addict.

We did a little shopping and a lot of looking around and finally found ourselves in one of the lower-level food courts, eating hamburgers and fries. Ivan, who was on an organic-foods-only kick, would have been horrified, but the kids were ecstatic and I felt they'd earned it. Ivan was never away when they were with us, and they must have been feeling it.

“Belle-Maman? Belle-Maman!”

Distracted, I focused back on the kids. “What is it?”

“Can we look around?”

“Did you finish eating?” Lukas had; he inhaled food, and his intake was prodigious. Claudia picked delicately at hers and had clearly eaten everything she planned to eat. “All right. Check back with me in fifteen minutes.”

“Fifteen
minutes
!” It was a wail.

“All right. Twenty. Let me see your phones.”

“Lukas has his.”

“Twenty minutes,” I said again, and they were gone.

So what should I worry about first? The fact that Patricia had clearly grabbed one of the diamonds and hadn't bothered mentioning it to me, or the question marks that surrounded Ivan's sudden need to see Margery?

How fortunate that I had a plethora of things to choose from that I could feel anxious about.

What was Patricia's game, anyway? She presented as so straightforward, the graduate student with the great ideas, pushing her glasses up her nose and talking about history as though she'd lived it. Was she becoming obsessed? I'd considered it, but at the end of the day I'd have said not: I've met some obsessed people in my life, and Patricia was more grounded than that.

But why steal a diamond? Why show it to Avner? Why go completely off the reservation when she'd promised to work with me? She didn't trust me, hadn't trusted me since I'd brought Julian in. But she'd taken the diamond before that.

And then there was Ivan. My mind approached that one more delicately. Margery had been sick last year; what if it hadn't been the cut-and-dried situation, the successful surgery she'd told us it was? What if it were something far more serious? How could the kids lose their mother?

The cold feeling in my stomach was intensifying. I took a deep breath, shook my head as though to banish the images, and consciously moved my thoughts off the subject. Patricia: there was a puzzle that was less emotional. Why would she have taken one of the diamonds? Did she think they were going to disappear, that for some reason the government was going to bury them in red tape and international relations; did she feel she needed to save one to prove that they existed? Or did she just want it?

And was it really accidental that she'd run into Avner's son Lev at McGill?

I took a deep breath. Ivan would have to wait, but Patricia? Her, I could do something about. I punched her contact icon on my mobile and when the voice mail clicked on, I left a terse message. “Contact me as soon as you get this message, or I'm going to the police.”

How cliché can you get?

*   *   *

Julian, when I finally spoke to him, was more sanguine. “I'm not especially surprised,” he said.

I frowned. I was curled on the sofa, Claudia and Lukas having taken their various packages to their bedrooms, both clearly tired. I'd just poured a glass of wine when Julian returned my call. “You're not surprised?”

“She's emotionally involved,” he said. “She's got a lot at stake here.”

“So that means it's okay to steal a crown jewel? I just left her a message threatening to call the police, but, gosh, apparently the police don't care.”

“Didn't say I didn't care, just said I wasn't surprised,” Julian said. “My, you're prickly tonight.”

I took a swallow of wine. “Sorry, Julian. Bad day. So tell me—what's your take on Patricia? And do you even know where she is?”

“I think that she's probably getting the diamond assessed,” he said. “It's certainly the first thing I'd do.”

“Too late. She's already done that.” And I told him about Avner of the black raincoat. “He says she met his son, who's some kind of computer genius but apparently lacking in the marriage department, at McGill, and asked Avner to look at the diamond.”

“What did he say?”

What
had
he said? He'd talked about the Koh-i-Noor, the most famous of all the diamonds. About the replacements for the jewels that King John had supposedly lost when crossing the Wash at Sutton Bridge. And then he'd told me about the curse.

“Of course there's a curse,” said Julian, delighted. “Tell me, tell me!”

“Let me see if I remember,” I said. “I wasn't taking notes.” Another swallow of wine. “So first you have to understand what we're talking about here. They're not all actually jewels, though a lot of them are. All sorts of jewels, not just diamonds, though that's what we're dealing with here. When you say the crown jewels, you're actually referring to anything that's used or worn or even is just present at a coronation. So there are scepters and swords and all that sort of thing, too.” I paused. “Valuable objects that can allegedly pick up—influences—along the way.”

“Influences,” said Julian.

“That's where Hitler came in,” I said. “See, it's all about a certain tradition, isn't it? And there were all these treasures accumulating over the decades in the royal coffers, and everything was lovely in the garden until Cromwell arrived.”

“Cromwell?” He was sounding bewildered. That was fine; I'd felt bewildered, too, between Avner's version of history and what I'd looked up since I'd gotten home.