Deadly Jewels (19 page)

It turned out that Bernie knew all about her. “Livia? You talkin' about Livia?”

Livia. What a name. The most beautiful name he'd ever heard. “The girl in the green sweater,” he clarified, nodding.

“Yeah, that there's Livia. Nice girl.”

“She's beautiful.”

Bernie sized him up. “Like that, is it? Caught the love bug? You'll have a time of it, my boy.”

“Why? Is she married?” If she is, he thought in desperation, I shall have to kill myself.

“Nope.” Bernie shook his head, throwing his dishcloth over his shoulder. “Just quiet, like. Not much of a talker. An' you bein' a foreigner an' all … Well, like I said, you'll have a time of it. But, hey, best of luck to you.”

“Wait!” Bernie was the conduit to Livia. “When does she come in, usually?”

“Can't say, really. Couple times a week, anyway. Works somewhere near here.”

“Where?”

“Slow down, Romeo.” He wagged his finger at Hans. “You're a nice guy an' all, but she's special. She's a good girl, is Livia. I don't want you treatin' her badly. She's got it hard enough as it is.”

“Why? What has happened to her?”

Bernie gave an exaggerated sigh. “Gonna get it all out of me, aren't you? All right, then. I'll tell you. Her mom died—oh, I'd have to ask Sadie, but I want to say 'bout ten years ago.” He shook his head. “Tuberculosis, you know. Terrible thing. And no brothers nor sisters, so Livia's been on her own, you could say, ever since then.”

“What about her father?”

“Ah, him. First Canadian Infantry Brigade.” He saw that Hans wasn't making the connection. “Forget you're a foreigner, sometimes, I get so used to you.
Nu
, here's what happened there. Went over there to your neck of the woods, the First Canadian,” he said. “Fighting in Belgium and France and whatnot. Damned Germans drove 'em back to the sea. Had to get pulled off the beach at Dunkirk.” He shook his head. “Night from hell, from what I've heard. Fires from Calais so bright they could see 'em burning all the way over in England. And those Germans, killing boys on the beach, killing boys in the water, shooting them from the cliffs and out of airplanes…” He sighed. “
Nu
, that was the end of Livia's dad. Didn't never leave that beach.”

Hans shook his head. “So she's all alone.”

“She's all alone, and don't you be gettin' any ideas in your head about changin' that unless you're serious. Like I said, she's something special. Sadie an' me, we keep an eye on Livia, and I won't see any Johnny-come-lately breakin' her heart. She's a good girl and she don't deserve that.”

“I won't break her heart,” said Hans.

 

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

We went to the main headquarters downtown where Julian supposedly had an office, though I'd never seen it. This was the Service de Police de la Ville de Montréal
,
or SPVM, the city police.

Just to keep our lives interesting, we have three police forces that can potentially all be working in Montréal at the same time. They sometimes even actually acknowledge each other's existence.

There was the SPVM (the city police), the Sûreté de Québec—police who cover all of the province—and the national Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Three levels of policing—city, province, and federal—and they do not always play well together. The city police resent it when the provincial police try to home in on anything in the city; and they both resent the Mounties, who aren't all that popular anywhere in the province.

Here in Québec we often choose to forget that we are, after all, part of Canada.

Julian parked blatantly in a clearly marked no-parking zone. Fine: if he got towed, it wasn't my problem. Probably everyone knew the TT by now anyway. Up the stairs, down a corridor, and then he asked me to wait outside. “It might be tricky,” he cautioned me.

“Tricky? Why?”

“He got divorced a couple of years ago.”

“And that makes it tricky how, exactly?” I caught his look. “Oh, no. Julian. No, you didn't.”

Yes, he had. “She was very attached to me,” Julian said. “Wait here, okay?”

“All right.”

I waited. Two young officers in camouflage pants and bulletproof vests walked by, glancing at me curiously, and my mind strayed for a moment. Weren't camouflage pants supposed to—camouflage? As in fit in? No one but the police wore them.

A couple of people in an adjacent office had an argument. My watch ticked slowly. I thought about calling Richard and seeing what was happening at the office. I waited some more.

Finally the door opened and Julian signaled me in. “He'll talk to us,” he said. He didn't look very happy about the whole thing.

Whoever this guy was, he had one hell of a view, out over the rooftops looking west, the Place des Arts and the Museum of Contemporary Art. I noticed it—framed in a vast expanse of plate-glass window—before I noticed him.

The man behind the desk was dressed in civilian clothes, and probably could have used a little help in that department. I'm no fashion plate myself, but even I know that there's a way of putting together different prints for an overall effect, and this wasn't it.

Still, it was the scowl that really finished off the picture. Bushy gray eyebrows, dark recessed eyes, and that scowl.

“This,” said Julian diffidently, “is Capitaine Levigne. Captain, Madame Martine LeDuc.”

“
Parle français
,” the captain said to him, irritably, and then turned to me. “
Bonjour
,
madame
.” Oddly, he didn't stand up to shake my hand, and then I saw with some surprise that he was in a wheelchair.

I inclined my head. “
Mon capitaine.”

“Marcus,” Julian said to me in French, “is an expert on Nazism, neo-Nazism, skinheads, you name it. Anything right-wing that goes on in this city, he knows about.”

“It must be,” I said, “a challenging job.”

“But a necessary one,” he acknowledged, and the tension in the room lifted. He invited us to sit around a low table on the other side of the room, right up against the windows and the view, and wheeled himself over to join us. “How can I help?”

Julian pulled out the plastic bag with the envelope and note inside. “This was sent to a Jewish diamond merchant in Outremont,” he said. “As I told you, it may connect to the case the murder squad's working on, the graduate student from McGill, because the diamond merchant himself is involved.”

The other man took the bag. “This is interesting,” he said after a moment.

“Interesting?” I echoed. “Seems like straightforward skinhead nonsense to me.”

He shook his head, still peering at the envelope. “But you are wrong, madame.”

“Call me Martine. How am I wrong?”

He indicated the swastika. “This is highly stylized, as you can see,” he said, his finger tracing the contours of the symbol, which actually, now that I was really noticing it, looked like interlocking S shapes. I hadn't taken that in before.

“What does it mean?” Julian asked.

“That there is more to this than simple fanatical racism and hatred,” Marcus said.

“Such as?”

He passed the bag back to Julian. “You're going to try and lift fingerprints?”

“As soon as we leave.”

“Let's do it now. You may be here a while.” He turned the wheelchair and moved smoothly over to his desk, where he pressed some buttons on his phone. “Jean-Pierre? Can you send someone up to my office? I have a specimen for you. Very well.”

“Why do you say we may be here a while,
capitaine
?” I asked.

“You may call me Marcus,” he said absently. “How much do you know about Nazism and the occult?”

Julian and I exchanged startled glances. I'd thought he was going to talk about angry young white men, or suburban gangs with heavy-duty tattoos, or even crosses burning on front lawns. Whatever I'd been expecting, this wasn't it.

“I think I heard that Hitler was very much interested in it,” I said slowly. “I can't remember where I read that, though, or really anything else about it. Didn't he have an astrologer on staff, something like that?”

Before Marcus could answer, there was a discreet knock at the door. He wheeled himself over and opened it. “Ah, there you are. The
détective-lieutenant
will sign for the chain of evidence, yes?”

“Yes,” Julian said grimly and did so. The person in the corridor muttered something I didn't hear as Julian came back and sat down. Marcus closed the door and wheeled himself back to where we were sitting. “So: Hitler and the occult. You're partially correct, Martine. It does seem that everyone has a vague association there,” he said. “So I'll give you the story.”

“Maybe in condensed form?” suggested Julian.

That earned him a scowl. “The story is what the story is,” the captain said and turned back to me. “As soon as World War Two ended, there was a rush to connect Nazis with every imaginable conspiracy theory available. Everything from extraterrestrial visitors to madmen in caves. No doubt a way of psychologically dealing with the horrors they were still discovering. “He shrugged. “Some journalists published exaggerated accounts of occult groups in the Third Reich. What really happened, of course, was that some marginal atavistic ideas influenced Nazi policy. And thus, of course, the destiny of modern Europe.”

I tried to sort out something useful but was stuck on the “marginal atavistic ideas.” He had to have been an academic before joining the police force. A twinge of pain as I thought, automatically, Patricia would really get along with this guy.

Not now, she can't.

“So all the wild speculation about Hitler and the occult?” asked Julian, clearly not plagued as I was by the ghost of a different scholar in the room. “That's all it is, wild speculation?”

“Occultism generally becomes popular when there are political and social upheavals,” said Marcus, still in professor mode. “It's a way of coping, of assigning some sort of new meaning, when the old structures of meaning fail.”

I got it. “Like wondering why God would allow the Holocaust,” I said.

Marcus nodded briskly. “The nineteenth century saw another revival of occultism in Europe with the industrial revolution and the abrupt displacement of traditional ways of life.” He glanced at me. “And of course the connection between occultism and racism.
That
started long before the Nazis.”

“Hitler just latched on to it,” Julian said, nodding despite himself.

“But Hitler wasn't the real occultist. That would be Himmler, the head of the SS, who actually retained a self-proclaimed Aryan mystic as part of his personal staff, didn't make decisions without consulting him.”

“Like Rasputin in the Russian court,” I said.

Julian was watching us. “And what does this have to do,” he asked, “with the swastika on the note?”

“You are a man with little patience,” observed Marcus, looking at him with what could only be described as distaste. “A little man.”

“Tell me,” I urged, eager to avoid the situation getting personal again. Seriously: I'd have thought that Julian knew better than to sleep with married women.

Marcus cleared his throat importantly. “I draw your attention to one Karl Maria Wiligut, who claimed to be the last descendant of an Aryan priesthood that could trace its origins back to god-like creatures who once inhabited Germany,” he said. “He suggested to Himmler that the SS expropriate a castle in Westphalia. Wiligut prophesied that the castle would become a Nazi stronghold against invading barbarians from the East. Himmler used the place as an indoctrination center.”

“It seems to me that organization was their strong suit,” I murmured.

“Occultism,” said Marcus, ignoring me, “is a symptom of alienation from society, but it is also a symptom of alienation from reality itself. As the Nazis clearly demonstrated.”

“But what has that to do with a murder that happened last week?” I wanted to know. This was all interesting, but it didn't answer the fundamental questions of who had killed Patricia and who had sent the stylized swastika threat to Avner.

Marcus looked at me thoughtfully and with, I sensed, a little disappointment. “Ideas such as these do not die simply because the men who believe in them do,” he said.

“So someone else is linking Nazism and the occult in Montréal,” said Julian briskly. He wanted to get to the point and get out of there, too. “They know about the diamonds—somehow—and they know that Avner is involved. They killed Patricia Mason, probably to steal the diamond she'd stolen.”

“They didn't get the diamond,” I said. Both men looked at me. “Otherwise they wouldn't be going to Avner, threatening him,” I said.

“I think,” said Marcus heavily, “that it's time you spoke to someone.” He wheeled his chair over to his desk and wrote something on a piece of paper. Old-school: I'd have used my smartphone to send it to ours. Or maybe this was something he didn't want on the Internet. He turned back, wheeled himself over, and handed me the paper. “She may be more likely to talk to you than she is to the
police
,” he said, indicating Julian.

It was a name, a telephone number. I looked up again. “Who is it?”

“Someone,” said Marcus, “who knows firsthand about these things. Talk to her.”

Julian nodded to me and I stood up reluctantly. “But—”

“Écoute,”
said Marcus. “You find out anything, I can probably point you to the right group, to the people who are most likely involved. Believe it or not, even with all this talk of history, my real expertise is with groups currently active in Québec and Canada. You just need the background in order to narrow it down: there are enough neo-Nazis in North America to fill another stadium, and they all have some sort of philosophy, even if it's badly thought through. So you have to start with the beliefs rather than the corpse. This is something that my brothers in the police department appear to have a problem understanding. They think that you begin with the violence. I say that you begin with the reason for the violence.” His eyes were on Julian.