Deadly Jewels (14 page)

“The English Civil War,” I said. “You know, the antimonarchy mob. Didn't you do English history at school? King Charles was executed in—oh, sixteen-something, I can't remember. And all the royal gold was melted down. The jewels themselves—the gemstones, you know?—they got taken out of their settings and sold. Cromwell was determined that anything that was a symbol of royalty and kingship should be completely eradicated.”

“So none of the current crown jewels are older than the 1600s,” said Julian.

“None of the ones that came from England,” I said. “They acquired older pieces from other countries, but essentially that's correct. And that's where the curse comes in.”

“Go on.”

I settled myself even more snugly into the sofa. “So there was this tiara,” I said. “All diamonds—it came from France. It was put into the collection—it was stored at Westminster then, not the Tower of London—and the first thing that happens is that it's getting cleaned, and the person doing it gets cut and dies.”

“Every curse has to start somewhere,” Julian observed.

“And a little infection will kickstart it,” I agreed. “No one talked about a curse, though, until the tiara started stacking up bodies. Over time, mind you. Decades. In the twentieth century, the jewels were out for Elizabeth II's coronation, and one of her ladies-in-waiting, who apparently handled the tiara, died within the week. Of course, she already had emphysema, but curses don't care about that.”

“And you think the diamonds that Patricia found are from this tiara?”

“Avner thinks so. He's seen one of them, remember, and he's a guy who really knows his diamonds. So, yeah, we probably have the cursed jewels here.”

“Well, whoever got shot down there no doubt agrees,” said Julian.

“About him, Julian—”

“Yeah?”

“Well, what's the plan? Are you going to launch an investigation? Get forensics and crime-scene people down there?”

“Probably not,” he said. “I had a talk this morning with the boss, and he's less than impressed. He only wants to catch killers if they're alive so they can have a spectacularly expensive trial and go to prison. It's about notches on the bedstead. Um—metaphorically speaking, of course.”

“Of course,” I agreed. “He'd probably be thrilled to arrest Patricia, though.”

“Not giving him the option. I'm going to find her first, get the diamond back. That's a headache for other people, by the way. The moment I talked about the crown jewels his eyes glazed over. Way above our pay grade. But Ottawa's going to have to get involved.”

“I thought they might.” And I was going to have to explain all this to Jean-Luc on Monday. I wasn't exactly looking forward to that. “Do you know where she is?”

“Not at this actual moment. But I'm going to find her tomorrow and see if we can lift this curse.”

I put down the wineglass. “I'd rather like a word with her then, too.”

The evening wound down, and the later it got, the more depressed I felt. Ivan didn't call. I checked my phone to make sure the battery hadn't run down. I thought about calling him, and didn't.

Ivan didn't call, but Julian did: he called me back just as I was getting ready to go to sleep. “You know that curse?” asked Julian. “It worked.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It's Patricia Mason,” he responded. “She's dead.”

*   *   *

The sign over the main gate said it all.
JEDEM DAS SEINE
, which, loosely translated, meant that if you were here, you were getting what you deserved.

But nobody deserved what they got at Buchenwald.

It went operational in 1937 and was the first camp to be liberated by United States troops in 1945. There was a lot of time in between. A lot of time, and a lot of bodies.

But not Elias Kaspi's body. Not if he could help it.

There was a large oak tree in the center of the camp, Goethe's Oak it was called, funny thing it seemed, to be naming trees. They say he wrote
Faust
right there, under that tree, and what a thought, a deal with the devil in a place that, if you believed in hell, was right here, right now.

Elias didn't like looking at the tree. He'd made his own deal with the devil.

Someone had to live, he told himself. And he'd been given the opportunity. To live on. To someday leave this place.

Ruth hadn't been given the opportunity; they'd been separated, and the officials who'd requested Elias didn't request that his wife come along with. He didn't know where Ruth was. He didn't know if she was alive or dead, in Belgium or Germany, in another camp or had escaped, God willing, fleeing down a road and then, perhaps, strafed by the Luftwaffe. He'd seen that happen enough on the roads around Antwerp.

He couldn't think about Ruth. Not now. At night, in his bunk in the long barracks he shared with forty other equally emaciated men, after the obligatory head count and nibbling on the bread he'd saved from the morning's rations; then he thought about her. But during the day he had work to do. Work that was keeping him alive.

Who would have thought that his trade, his
gesheft
, was what in the end would have saved him?

A diamond merchant. A man who knew diamonds, intimately, who lived and breathed diamonds. Who had generations of diamond trade singing in his blood. Who knew, in fact, everything that there was to know about diamonds.

Because Elias didn't only sell diamonds. Elias could cut them, too.

Who would have thought?

His brother Herman had emigrated to Eretz Israel in 1930 along with a large group of Jews from the low countries, Jews who established an important diamond industry in Palestine, bringing their technical skills and commercial connections with them.

At first, Elias had gone with Herman. It seemed like an exciting plan, something daring, to go to this place of their ancestors, to live in the strange heat shimmering off the desert. He was young, and eager, and had worked hard with Herman in Netanyah for three years. But it was not his home, this strange hot country, and in the end Elias returned to Antwerp to marry Ruth and take up his father's business, taking care of
shteyn
s there.

But Herman had helped make Palestine into the gem diamond center of the world, and the Nazis knew all about him. And because of Herman, they knew about Elias.

So they hadn't put Elias into one of the trains that nobody was talking about yet, that the world learned about later. They had been polite. They had knocked on his door. It was only when he'd refused to go with them that they had shown their true colors. And by then it was too late.

Still, here at Buchenwald, there was a chance of survival. They gave Elias a workshop and two apprentices. They paid him in camp money. And they had something very specific in mind.

“These photographs,” the camp commander had said when Elias first arrived. “Look at these photographs.”

They were crowns and scepters, tiaras and necklaces. “Very nice,” Elias said. He didn't know what they expected of him.

“The diamonds,” the commandant said. “Do you know what diamonds these are?”

They were big stones, what his father used to call
mame-zitsers
. Elias looked again and shook his head. “Crown jewels,” he said, that much was obvious. Whose? The Nazis were plundering so many countries, who knew?

“It doesn't matter.” He was brusque. “Can you imitate them?”

“What?” Elias was bewildered. “These are diamonds. They—”

A swift backhand across his cheek. “Enough! Do not play with me! It is my understanding that there are other gems that can be cut to have the same appearance. Am I incorrect?”

Light was dawning and with it, hope. “You are not incorrect,” Elias said. “There are some gems, yes, yes. It can be done. Yellow sapphires … there's a special garnet…”

“We will procure what you need,” the commandant said. “You will create copies of these jewels.”

“Yes,” said Elias. And lived.

The work was wretched, and the conditions even more so. Every morning he awoke to more death, more pain, more despair. Sometimes one or more of the men in his barracks had died next to him in the night. There were beatings; there was solitary confinement. There was so little to eat that men dropped around him of starvation; and Elias himself finally stopped dreaming of the Sabbath dinners that Ruth used to put on the table.

And then there were the singing trees.

Buchenwald, he knew, meant “beech forest,” a beautiful name for such a terrible place. And there were trees, a whole grove of them, where Goethe used to walk with his love. It was in these trees that Commandant Koch hung prisoners from the wrists, their arms behind them; the singing that he spoke of was their screams. They echoed inside Elias's head, those screams, even when he wasn't hearing them. He was sure that they would never leave.

They never did leave. But, one day, Elias finally did.

 

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

My husband is Jewish, though he sees it as belonging to a tribe rather than practicing a religion. Me, on the other hand, I'm as Catholic as they come, despite many reservations about how my church sometimes practices its faith. Margery, the kids' mother, occasionally attends a Unitarian-Universalist meetinghouse, but doesn't manifest a lot of enthusiasm for any organized religion.

So when Ivan and I got married, I took the kids' religious training firmly in hand. I don't care if, as thoughtful adults, they turn their backs on the church. I just want to give them something on which to turn their backs … or even, perhaps, not.

So Sunday mornings when they're in residence, our apartment is alive with protest. “I don't want to go!” howled Claudia from behind her closed door.

“Ten minutes, Claudia, and you are coming whether you want to or not.”

Lukas sat at the kitchen table, carefully noting the day's schedule in his planner. “What time's Dad getting in?”

“I have no idea,” I told him distractedly.

“What if he comes when we're at church?”

“I seriously doubt that he'll take that as a rejection, Lukas.” After a sleepless night—we call it a
nuit blanche
, a white night—I probably wasn't at my best. “Sorry. I didn't mean to snap at you.”

“I think someone should be here when he comes,” he said.

“It'll be fine, Lukas, I promise.” I raised my voice. “Claudia!”

“I'm not going!”

“You are if you ever want to see the Underground City again.” I'd agreed to another visit this afternoon, mostly so she could think overnight about spending forty dollars of her saved allowance on a skirt she'd seen yesterday. I was hoping she'd decide against it: it seemed like a lot of money, and Claudia wasn't finished growing yet. But it was her decision.

“That's blackmail!”

“It is indeed.”

“I hate you, Belle-Maman!”

Tiredness won out. “Get in line.”

Jean-Luc Boulanger, my esteemed boss, was going to be at the front of that particular line. Not only had I excluded him from the excitement of working with a McGill researcher about to uncover a triumphant moment for the city—hello, street named Boulanger Avenue—I'd managed to allow her to steal an international treasure and get killed in the bargain. To my boss, that was as good as wielding the weapon myself.

I roused myself from the dread: sufficient unto the day, so forth. I managed to coerce the kids into relatively clean clothes, make Claudia take off half her makeup, and get them and myself to the basilica with about two minutes to spare before the 9:30
A.M.
Mass. An accomplishment.

What I wanted, right then, more than anything else, was the feeling I get in this church. I was seriously shocked about Patricia—and starting to be seriously afraid, as well. I might not believe a story about a cursed set of diamonds, but something had reached out from the past to claim her, and until I knew what and why, there was a decent risk of it happening to someone else.

So I wanted to sit in this place that I loved above all others in a city that I love with all my heart. You'd think that after what happened last year the basilica would have bad associations, but it didn't: the weekly and occasionally daily comfort I derived from being here hadn't changed. Being in the basilica is like being already in heaven, its tall walls interrupted only by stained-glass windows, the blue of the soaring reredos behind the altar, the thousands of candles lighting up the darkened corners of the side chapels … it had always been, for me, a place of peace and comfort. My Happy Place, you might say. And I needed very badly to take Patricia here with me, in my heart and my mind.

She had, of course, been murdered.

*   *   *

“Shot,” said Julian, “through the head.”

Eerily familiar. I didn't need to close my eyes to see the heap of bones in the sealed room beneath the theater, the hole in the skull where no hole should be.

Julian was bringing in the troops. He couldn't, after all, keep a modern murder to himself. “My boss isn't very pleased to have gotten plunged into it after all, but it's not like I was keeping the secret for weeks. I'd only met her the day before,” he said.

“What happened, Julian?”

“Don't know yet. I wanted to find her and get the diamond back—you really,
really
can't go keeping priceless jewels that are about to have a firestorm of publicity around them to yourself.” He was trying for lighthearted, and not entirely succeeding. “I thought she'd get that, especially as she wants to have some fame around this discovery. So I went to her apartment.”