Deadly Jewels (3 page)

“And can you tell me what it is about, monsieur?” I was starting to feel testy with his drama. For this I gave up my afternoon with François and the Gray Line?

“Madame, all that you need to know is this. You must be there. Monsieur Rousseau must be there. And you must be prepared to launch a campaign that will bring the eyes of the world to Montréal!” Well, you can see how he got elected. Who isn't up for a little overstatement served fresh with their morning
café
and croissants? “I came here myself,” he added importantly, “to be sure that you understand, and to see that you are on time.”

That was a little unfair. I'm always on time. In fact, I'm usually the first to arrive for any appointment or meeting. Courtesy, one would think; yet actually it's because I like to be able to pick my geography. There's nothing worse than coming late to an awkward encounter and finding oneself sitting in the least comfortable seat. And with Jean-Luc, most encounters tend toward the awkward.

“I'll be there, monsieur
,”
I said levelly.

“
Bon
.” He tapped his knees and lifted himself out of the seat, acting for all the world as though we'd just made an important decision. “My office. Four o'clock.”

“I'll be there,” I said again; but I said it to his back.

Chantal was hovering in my doorway in the wake of his departure. Jean-Luc always made her nervous. One of his predecessors had once sacked the entire secretarial and administrative staff at City Hall, and she remembered that. Of course the strikes and marches that followed hadn't been to
his
advantage. “Are we in trouble?” she asked, eyes wide.

“
Some
thing's going on,” I said slowly. “I don't know what to think. Where's Richard?” Richard Rousseau was my deputy and always seemed to have his finger firmly on the pulse of City Hall. If anyone knew what this was about, it would be him. And if
he
didn't know …

“In his office, I think,” said Chantal. “Shall I tell him to come in?”

“Would you?”

I turned and looked out the window behind my desk while I was waiting. If I hadn't wanted this job for the substance, I'd have wanted it for the view: City Hall sits on a rise in the Old City, and my window takes in the esplanade and the river, an ever-changing panorama of action. I could even see the cruise ship that the geriatric tour goers had debarked from, and I could imagine François's tour continuing: “These are silos and grain elevators: the island is manmade, using rock that was excavated from the Métro and the Underground City. They call this the Canal Lachine, does anyone know why? It is because when the French arrived here, they thought it was China, eh?”

Or something to that effect.

Behind me, Richard cleared his throat. Dressed impeccably—he was always dressed impeccably, always looked like he just stepped out of a magazine spread, elegant and at ease, even during that bad time last year when his new girlfriend was murdered and he was briefly on the list of suspects—and bemused. “Monsieur Boulanger is in good spirits,” he said cautiously.

“So it would seem.”

“It makes one nervous,” Richard said.

“It does indeed,” I agreed. “You don't know anything about this magnificent PR coup we're about to be orchestrating, I assume?”

He shook his head, sitting down in the chair that Jean-Luc had vacated and crossing one elegant leg over the other, flicking an imaginary bit of lint off his trousers. I swear this man should be gay. “I hear it's good news, for once.” He smiled. “That makes for a change, anyway, doesn't it?”

“Boulanger's not exactly about change,” I reminded him. Jean-Luc wanted everything exactly the same all the time, so that he wouldn't take the fall if any innovation failed. Change was bad; status quo was good.

Richard shrugged elegantly. “Perhaps he is now.”

*   *   *

Richard and I were on time, but that turned out to be meaningless: everyone else was already there. Maybe the mayor had things he wanted to talk about with them before I came into the room.

“Ah, Madame LeDuc,” Jean-Luc said as we entered. “Kind of you to join us.” He was speaking English, and that underlined my earlier conclusion that this was indeed something different and, for once, positive:
monsieur le maire
doesn't do anger in English. If he were going to list failures, the numbering system he used would be French.

“I don't mean to interrupt,” I said, taking in the table and the people sitting around it.

“It is nothing. Thank you for coming,” the mayor said, gesturing a welcoming hand. Richard and I slipped into the only two vacant seats at the conference table. Richard was looking amused; he'd tell the story, later, and everyone would laugh.

Still, the fact that Jean-Luc was in a good mood had to be appreciated.

I looked around the room to see what—or who—had inspired this generosity of spirit. Three men, one woman, and I only knew one of them, Dr. Pierre LaTour, curator of Montréal's Pointe-àCallière archaeological museum. When one considers that my job really involves knowing people, a lot of people, knowing only
one
of them? That alone was strange.

“You know
monsieur le docteur
LaTour, of course,” said the mayor, and Pierre and I nodded to each other. “This is Mademoiselle Patricia Mason.” Her name—which he managed to mangle—made it clear why we were all speaking English.

She smiled. “Hello.” The other two men were, apparently, not to be introduced.

The mayor cleared his throat. “We have wonderful news,” he informed me.

Okay. I settled my face into an I'm-waiting-to-hear-wonderful-news expression and shot another look at Richard. He gave a very Gallic shrug in response.

Patricia Mason was about ten years younger and about ten pounds heavier than I was, with neat black hair in a bob and glasses that kept sliding down on her nose; she used her left index finger to keep pushing them up.

“It's for my doctorate,” she explained now, her voice earnest, her eyes eager behind the thick lenses. “I've been doing research in London and Scotland and here in Montréal for my dissertation, and the mayor thought that you might be interested in it. In what I've been studying, and what I think I'm about to find—um—what I'm going to confirm.”

“I see.” I was noncommittal, my interest level ratcheting down a notch. Doctoral research may be—
must
be, I suppose—intensely exciting for those involved in it, but my experience has been that long dissertation titles and pages of footnotes have little to do with anything related to public relations.

Museums, yes. My office? Not so much.

Patricia was undaunted by my lack of enthusiasm. “As you probably know, in Europe, World War Two displaced a lot of valuable items—art, jewelry, that sort of thing.”

“Wasn't most of it stolen by the—er—Germans?” I asked. Like everyone else since the book and its subject had been made into a George Clooney movie, I knew about the Monuments Men.

She nodded. “Of course, but that's normal. Well, normal, no. I mean normal in terms of war. That's what occupying forces do, they steal stuff.” She brushed it away with her hand, an annoying gnat of an idea. “But what's known, also, is that the United Kingdom was looking at what would happen if the British Isles were occupied, and so, very early on, they conducted a massive shipping effort, sending a lot of their treasures abroad.”

“Gold,” said the mayor, nodding. I could almost see it reflected in his eyes. He managed to restrain himself from licking his lips.

“Gold,” Patricia agreed. “A whole lot of gold. Gold that they needed to pay for war expenses. Gold to pay for the American and Canadian convoys that were supplying Great Britain. The island would have starved, otherwise.” The glasses had slipped a little and she pushed them up again. “It went on for months, this shipping stuff to North America in payment. It was called Operation Fish—yeah, I know, but it really was called that, I'm not making this up. It was the largest movement of wealth in history.” She looked around the room, her face positively glowing. “The treasure ships,” she said softly.

Jean-Luc's eyes were predatory. “Treasure ships,” he repeated.

“The first shipment,” said Patricia, “was sent to Canada in 1939 on a British cruiser called the HMS
Emerald
—I'm not making
that
up, either—which docked at Halifax.”

“Interesting,” I said. I still had no idea where this was going, but I could suddenly see it clearly, what she was describing: rain sluicing down on the ships plowing through the North Atlantic waves, the holds filled with gold. Gold to pay for food and supplies. Gold to pay for the life of a besieged country.

She caught my eye and smiled. “Bear with me, Ms. LeDuc,” she said. “It really
is
interesting, and the story gets better.” A deep breath. “So, anyway, the gold was transferred off the cruiser in Halifax. There was a train waiting, and the next day it arrived here in Montréal. The gold spent the war in a specially designed underground vault three stories under the Sun-Life Building on Metcalfe Street. No one knew: it was all very hush-hush.”

It was tickling something in my mind; I'd heard about that already. The combination of gold and Sun-Life (which, in the normal Montréal custom of using both French and English when possible, was called the
Edifice Sun-Life Building
) sounded familiar.

Or maybe it just felt that way because of the voraciousness of insurance companies.

Patricia shifted in her chair, pushing her glasses up on her nose. “Something else that no one knew, but that's been circulating as rumors in the war-history community, was that the British crown jewels were on that first ship, on the HMS
Emerald
, as well.”

Okay. That was it. Not exactly stop-the-presses earthshaking news, since François of the Gray Line tours had already announced it as fact—and offhandedly at that—just that very morning. And I'd heard the rumor before, somewhere, sometime, I was pretty sure. Rumors came and went. But proof? I looked at Patricia Mason, doctoral student, and found her wavelength with a click. If there
were
proof positive, then we could work with that. I could see the press releases already, the headlines:
MONTRÉAL PLAYS VITAL ROLE IN WORLD WAR TWO. MONTRÉAL SAVES THE ENGLISH CROWN
.
Even as a historic event, it was good PR.

Who was I kidding? It was
great
PR. I exchanged glances with Richard and he was nodding. “The crown jewels
definitely
spent the war in the basement of the Sun-Life Building,” I repeated. “You have proof.”

She nodded, then qualified her agreement. “I have a
line
on proving it,” she said. “I'm at McGill, and so I have some resources, stuff that's open to scholars. Archives. Memories. And, of course, Doctor LaTour.”

Pierre LaTour caught the metaphoric ball from her and cleared his throat. “Mademoiselle Mason is interested in what we're doing with the museum expansion in terms of the access that might be available as we're opening up some of the disused underground tunnels,” he said.

Ah. I parsed his rather flowery language into museum expansion and tunnels. That, I knew about. The museum, which was primarily archaeological in focus, was engaged in a multimillion-dollar expansion slated to be finished in a few years—timed not coincidentally with the city's 375th anniversary. My office was already hard at work planning events in conjunction with the tourist board. There were milestones in the meantime, including excavating and opening up St. Ann's Market, the site of Canada's 1832 parliament.

But the largest and most ambitious part of the work was the underground network that would be made available for the museum complex via the collector sewer that was all that remained, now, of the Little Saint-Pierre River.

Montréal isn't exactly a stranger to the underground. Its own underground or interior city, dreamed of in the urban-loving 1930s and gradually coming into being in the decades after the war, is one of the world's largest, offering food, shopping, transportation, and entertainment to a city that gets more snow every winter than does Moscow.

What the museum was doing, however, had nothing to do with shopping for high fashion or the occasional bite of fast food.

The Iroquois—the First-Nations tribe that called this area Hochelaga and lived here until Samuel de Champlain claimed it for France—no doubt used the Saint Pierre River. In 1611 Champlain wrote about the river, the wild strawberries and other fruit and nut trees that grew along its banks.

But when Montréal needed land, the river went underground. Literally.

“As you know,” said Pierre, “we are undertaking an important project at the museum. The Little Saint-Pierre River, converted into a collector sewer, will be the backbone of the Montréal Archaeology and History Complex: a network connecting a unique collection of authentic archaeological and historic sites. The collector sewer, accessible along a distance of three hundred and fifty meters, is a magical place in itself, a dramatic and fascinating journey into the belly of our historic city. Aboveground, it will be transformed into urban gardens.”

Patricia Mason was nodding eagerly. “Most of Montréal's rivers were buried in the late 1800s,” she said. “Well, they had to be, they'd become open sewers, the city's reputation was terrible.”

“A public-relations nightmare,” murmured Richard.

She hadn't heard the undercurrent of amusement I'd caught in my deputy's voice. “Right? But then the William Collector, which diverted part of the Saint Pierre River, was built, and it was an amazing engineering feat for its time. So all the sewers went underground. And that's how Montréal grew, actually, because the villages around it couldn't afford to build sewers on their own, for themselves, so they became part of the city.”