Deadly Jewels (29 page)

“This just gets better and better.”

“But the thing is, really, we're only going on her word, in a way. In the research she did, in what she says happened. It's entirely possible that those diamonds aren't actually from the crown jewels.” Yeah, possible also that pigs will someday fly. I seriously doubted that Aleister Brand would waste time on paste. Or Marcus Levigne. I was starting to get a funny feeling about Marcus, too. “They've been authenticated locally. The police are handling that. But I think that Avner knew from the beginning that they would be.”

“Avner?”

“Avner Kaspi. He's a diamond expert. Patricia—she's the researcher who started this whole thing, she's the one who stole one of the diamonds—”

“—which were already stolen—”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “She took her diamond to him. To Avner.”

“Why?”

I took a deep breath. “I think she found out about his past. Who he is.” I passed a hand over my forehead. “Sorry. I'm explaining this poorly. Avner Kaspi says when his father was in a concentration camp early in the 1940s he was forced to create some artificial stones. Stones that are, apparently, just like ones in a certain crown, part of the cache of British jewels. That seems to be too much of a coincidence to not believe that something's going on.”

“Yeah, I was afraid you were going to say something like that.” A silence, stretching out taut between us, filled with unanswered questions. “Where are they now?”

“The two diamonds? The city police still have them. I can find out for sure.” Julian would know. “The other one—well, we have an idea, but no proof.”

“You mean the one that the Mason woman stole?”

“Right.” A nagging thought was intruding. If the New Order of the Black Sun needed the diamond so desperately, why kill Patricia Mason at all? Why not just follow her and take it then? The police weren't officially involved until after she was shot, and certainly they didn't have the diamonds in custody until then. Wouldn't it have been easier to just follow her into the underground tunnels? Had one of them been doing that the day at the museum when Julian chased him off?

“Martine? Are you there?”

I snapped back to my office; my mind had been wandering down too many dark tunnels that all ended in despair. “I'm here, Élodie.”

She seemed to sense my unease. “Okay. This is a big deal. I'm convinced. How about I fly out there tonight and take a look at the diamonds myself? I can talk to your expert, I can decide what to tell the people here who are asking the questions. Will that work?”

Gratitude washed over me. “Absolutely. Yes. Please.”

I was feeling much more cheerful. Élodie, aside from being a good friend, was also one of the smartest women—no, people—I knew. And sensitive. If anyone could help me piece all of this together, she could. And she knew people in Montréal that even my boss didn't know. “Let me know your flight information, I'll meet you at the airport.”

“I'll text it to you. Gotta get some things done here first.” A pause. “Don't worry, we'll get it sorted.”

I smiled. “I know we will. Thanks, Élodie.”

“I'm not doing you a favor. This is a pretty big deal, no matter which way the pieces fall. It's going to end up involving more people, but I think that may be a little premature. Maybe we can figure something out together before it comes to that.”

Maybe we could. I was smiling like an idiot. Aleister Brand had infected me with his darkness; Élodie was all light. We'd sort it, she'd said. Élodie did that kind of thing to you, made you believe.

The phone rang under my hand and I jumped. Deep breath, Martine, you're turning into a nervous wreck. “Martine LeDuc,” I said crisply.

It was Julian. “Saddle up,” he said grimly.

“Why?”

“Avner's gone missing. Slipped his police protection, so it's not your friend Brand after him this time. And I have a feeling I know where he went.”

*   *   *

It had been three years since Elias had made the first imitations of the royal jewels, and he'd been working all this time, perfecting the technique, getting the sapphires to glow with the brilliant light of the gems he knew and loved.

And it had been one year since he'd started working with the Communist resistance movement in the camp.

“You have privileges,” Vladimir told him. “You need to use them for the good of the many.”

And so Elias had made dazzling stones for Ilse, the commandant's wife, to wear, putting the stones shyly on the commandant's desk and waiting to be invited to stay for a schnapps, which he almost always was. He pressed for more privileges for the inmates and, to his surprise, many were granted: the camp built a movie theater and a library, organized an art show.

The few Jews at Buchenwald were confined to Block 17, and Elias spoke for them as well. “We work as hard as all the others,” he'd said. “We always get the last servings at meals, the last showers when there's no longer hot water.” And the commandant acquiesced, because Elias kept bringing him stones, and Ilse became soft when he gave her jewelry.

He drew the line at the camp brothel, though. “No Jews can have sex with the German prostitutes,” he said. “They'd have my head if I gave in to that one!”

The resistance was well-informed. It knew that the commandant was embezzling money from the prisoners' accounts and from the camp itself. It knew that the commandant's wife was sleeping with the guards.

And it knew, well ahead of time, when Hermann Göring was coming to visit.

Göring had been one of the architects of the camps, but had largely left the role of running them to Heinrich Himmler and the Shutzstaffel, who'd been in charge ever since. Himmler had visited Buchenwald more than once, and the prisoners had learned to stay well away from him when he visited, despite his tradition of ordering the release of one prisoner every time he came. If he was in a bad mood, bad things could happen. The Nazi policy may well have been to eschew wanton violence; it was possible that Himmler had not read the policy.

But Göring? No one knew what that was about.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The young officer was nearly incoherent with distress. “There was nothing out of the ordinary,” he said. “Really, sir, there wasn't. The family does the same thing every day. They get up, they have breakfast, early—around six o'clock. Then the son leaves, and about five minutes later the subject leaves, to the synagogue. After that, to work, diamond shop on Sainte-Catherine. He comes back from work. Sometimes he goes to the synagogue again. Him and his wife have dinner together. Sometimes the son's there, sometimes not. Mostly he's in bed by nine.”

Julian nodded. He wasn't going to offer any comfort; the kid had to learn. “So what happened?”

“He went into the synagogue this morning, like he always does,” the officer said. “I don't go in after him, sir. I always wait outside. Watching the street, like.” He drew a breath. “Seems disrespectful, somehow, to go in when they're all praying.” He was one of the new politically correct cops, I thought. They'd been a long time coming. “So the prayer service breaks up and they come out. All men, always. Sometimes just a few, sometimes more, depends on the day.”

“What about today?” asked Julian.

The cop consulted his notes. “Fourteen, sir. Sometimes they all come out together, that's when it's mostly old men, gray beards, some of them go down the street to the coffee shop afterward. When it's the younger ones, they're in a hurry to get away, they come out pretty much one at a time. I figure the older guys, they're retired, they have all day. The younger ones, they're fitting this in before going to work.”

“Probably true,” said Julian. “And Kaspi?”

“The subject went in at his usual time, sir, and I took up station outside as usual.” Thankless job, I thought, but at least he had the weather on his side. Late September was still glorious … and comfortable for hanging out on street corners. “Today it was mostly old guys. Well, the subject's pretty old, too, he knows them all, but he still goes to work. Well, not
every
day, and not necessarily for long. I'd say he's semiretired. Sure t'be.”

“Yes?” asked Julian. He was fast losing patience.

“So these other guys, they come out. Nice morning, sunshine, they stand out there in a clump and talk. Funny sort of language they have, not French or English, I never can really understand them.”

“Yiddish,” I said.

“And then I noticed that the subject wasn't there, wasn't chatting with them like he usually does. But I saw him go in. So I went over to them and asked if they knew where he'd gone, if they'd seen him after the prayer service.”

I could well imagine that one, the young officer trying to interrupt the flow of words as politely as possible, the inquiring looks, the thoughtful shaking of the heads. If Avner had ducked out voluntarily, then these guys weren't going to give him up.

“I got nowhere, sir,” the kid said, apology coloring his voice. “They all started talking at once, where they'd seen the subject, when they'd seen the subject, what he might be doing. At the end of it I just went into the synagogue myself.”

That would have been interesting.

“I got inside the door, and—well, sir, I don't know anything about their traditions, do I?”

“I don't know,” said Julian. “Do you?”

“I don't, but I thought that maybe I should take my shoes off,” the boy said. “I mean, my brother, he goes to a mosque, they take their shoes off there. It's a sign of respect. So I took my shoes off, and I'm walking around, and this other old guy came up and asked me what I was doing, and I said I was looking for the subject, I was his police detail, there to protect him.” It was boots the kid had taken off, and he'd probably felt awkward in his camouflage pants and socks. “He wanted me to put the shoes back on,” he said. “He said it's not part of Jewish tradition. And so I said I was sorry, I said that I was trying to show respect, and he started talking about shoes and how maybe it really was a good idea to take off your shoes and how God told Moses to take off his shoes and perhaps Jews should try it but perhaps not because it really wasn't what they do traditionally.”

He paused for breath and I glanced at his notebook. He'd actually written all that down. “So,” he resumed, with a quick glance at Julian, “I said how I really needed to find the subject and he said, oh, you're looking for old Avner, are you, and I said yes, sir, I am, and he said he'd left right after something called minyan. I think that's what they call that prayer service, sir.”

Julian was gritting his teeth.

“So I said, no, he couldn't, because I was outside all the time. And he said yes, you know, I, too, was surprised that he would use the kitchen door to leave, he hasn't ever left by the kitchen door in the thirty years he's been a member of the congregation. And then he asked me if I wanted to talk for a while, he was happy to talk with me if I was interested in the religion.”

“Like I said,” Julian turned to me, “Avner skipped out.”

“He'd never gone that way before, sir.”

“You couldn't watch both doors,” I said soothingly. And probably the city police couldn't spare two officers, though that was mildly surprising: we take hate crimes very seriously here. The figured swastika on the envelope glowed in front of my eyes. “Where do you think he went?” I asked Julian.

“Report back to your unit,” said Julian to the kid. “We'll let your commander know when we've found him.”

“Yes, sir. I'm sorry, sir.”

“Where do you think he went?” I asked again.

Julian turned to me. “I think,” he said grimly, “that Avner is being seriously stupid. Come on.” He paused. “Loïc?”

“Sir?”

“This is the rabbi's house, yeah?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay, you can go.”

The rabbi's house was far less imposing than the Kaspis' mansion; but I gathered that the rabbi himself made up for it. I was not unaware of him: not Hasidic, but radical in other ways, an ardent Zionist and intense anti-Nazi. Oddly enough, from what I'd read—and I do keep an eye on everyone in the city who has that kind of stature—he echoed some of the Nazi principles of racial purity, though his rants had to do with Jews keeping to their own communities. I'd always found that mildly ironic.

Naomi was inside the house, looking frightened. “They took him,” she said, her voice accusing.

“Who took him?” asked Julian.

“Them! Whoever they are, sent us that swastika! Who do you think? Nazis, there are Nazis everywhere!” She was biting her fingernails and I could see they were down to the quick. As she spoke, she paced restlessly, fast, back and forth in front of us.

Julian was unruffled. “Let's sit down, Mrs. Kaspi,” he said gently. “Would you like a glass of water?”

“No. I do not want a glass of water. What I want is, my husband back, this is what I want.”

“And that's what we're going to do.” I could feel his impatience humming in the air, but his voice was slow, soothing. “Did he say anything to you before he left this morning?”

“Say anything? Why should my Avner say anything to me? Thirty-eight years we've been married, thirty-eight years he leaves every morning for shul, what should he say to me?”

Yeah, but this morning, he didn't come out. I managed not to share the thought.

“Okay,” said Julian. “I'm going to have an officer come and stay with you, Mrs. Kaspi. Here's my card. If your husband contacts you, I want you to call me right away.”