Deadly Jewels (31 page)

“You sound like a kid at Christmas.”

“It's extraordinary,” he said. “Come on, it's this way.”

I'd been feeling the gradient rising slowly beneath our feet as we walked, and now, after a left twist, it started going up sharply. Julian took it in stride. We're all good with hills; Montréal is, after all, a mountain itself, and the cyclists who crisscross the city daily, many of them on the rental bicycles available everywhere, have the best leg muscles around. But this was unexpected, and my calves were burning.

“You okay?”

“I'm wondering,” I said, “whether I should join a gym.”

He laughed. Damn him for having the breath to do it.

“Are we almost there?”

“You sound like one of your kids,” he said. “Soon.”

One of my kids.

“Patricia had these maps in her apartment,” Julian was saying. “That's where I got the idea. She's apparently been down here a lot over the past six months. She was really careful, really organized. Worked out everything on a grid. Every time she learned something new, she marked the maps. I don't know where she learned that the jewels were down here, but she sure went looking for them.”

I remembered the Google maps that she always left open on her computer, just in case. She had anticipated getting lost, getting trapped, getting delayed.

She hadn't considered getting
shot
. “Where are we?”

“Close to where you started,” he said.

“Which is?”

He pointed. “About four hundred meters that way are the new excavations at the Pointe-à-Callière museum,” he said. “We're going this way. Remember reading about the cave drawings at Lascaux?”

“Of course.” Now closed because of the damage wreaked by pollution, the caves in southwest France were the beginning of humanity's obsession with art. “What—?”

“Wait,” he said, his Maglite searching the wall. An indentation, the sort of semicircle where Catholics are always throwing statues of Mary or the Infant of Prague or something like that. “There it is.”

“There what is?” Maybe I was starting to need glasses.

“Look,” Julian said impatiently, drawing me closer. And then the image emerged from the darkness. The black sun. The stylized swastikas.

“They were here,” I whispered.

“They were here,” Julian agreed.

I took a deep breath. “What is it? A warning?”

“I don't know,” he said. “He was down here looking, maybe he got the wrong coordinates, maybe he didn't realize that the vault was under the Exchange.”

“Maybe Patricia had a gun to her head and told him the wrong place and he shot her anyway,” I said.

Somehow, the tunnels were suddenly feeling a lot more scary.

*   *   *

Élodie arrived at Montréal-Trudeau Airport at seven o'clock.

I'd already called Ivan. “May be home late tonight,” I said. “Élodie's coming in, I don't know whether she'll want to get to work tonight or not.” I hesitated. “I'm sorry,” I said. “I don't mean to leave you alone with Margery and the kids.”

“It's not a problem.” Ivan sounded cheerful. “I took off early from work, we're planning Margery's stay.” Some noise from the background. “Everyone says hi,” said Ivan.

“Tell them hi from me,” I said faintly, an absurd picture forming in my mind of the four of them sitting around the table together. I had enough on my plate. I would
not
feel jealous.

“We're thinking of taking your Gray Line tour tomorrow,” Ivan said. “I'll go along if I can get away from work. You want to come?”

“I wish I could.” And in that moment I did. I wanted to go back to not knowing everything I knew, to not having met Patricia Mason, to be able to just deal with the usual headaches of my job and then go and spend time with my family. It was tempting. “I have too much to do right now, I'm afraid. But tell Margery I'll definitely take some time off before she leaves.”

“Okay, babe.” He paused as Claudia squealed in the background. “See you when I see you.”

“See you when I see you,” I echoed. All I wanted to do was go home. Instead, I got in the car and headed out to the airport.

Part of being a grown-up, I have learned, is doing the thing you're supposed to do when there's something else that you'd really
rather
be doing.

Élodie looked great. She's always looked smart, even when we were back in school together; but her authority gave her an edge that hadn't been there back in the day. Neat autumn-weight coat, her hair styled into a careful-casual knot, the scarf a brilliant blue at her throat. Glasses, I noticed, which I'd never seen her wear before. “Nice librarian look,” I commented.

“Haven't you heard? Librarians are the new
in
thing,” she said, kissing my cheeks. “You look tired.”

“You mean I look old. When people say you look tired, they mean you look old.”

She looked at me sharply. “Where did that come from? Are you all right?”

“Not particularly,” I said. “Do you have luggage?”

She hefted the carry-on slung across her shoulder. “Traveling light. I have a reservation at the Queen Elizabeth.”

“You could have stayed with me,” I complained, then remembered that the guest room was taken. Well, there was always the couch.

“Sounds like you have enough on your plate,” she said, reading my mind. “Speaking of which, let's get something to eat. We need to talk.”

“We can eat at your hotel,” I said. She knew that; Élodie always stayed at the Fairmount Queen Elizabeth when she came to Montréal, and she nearly always ate there, at the Le Montréalais Bistrot-Bar, for dinner, brunch, afternoon tea … not a great one for exploring, Élodie.

“Good,” she said, as though just learning of the restaurant's existence. She wasn't wasting any time, though. As soon as we were in the car, she turned to me. “Update,” she said.

“Avner Kaspi's disappeared,” I said, my eyes on the lights of the traffic around us. “We don't know where he is, or why he slipped his police guard, but I don't think it can be good.” I took a breath, braking at a red light. “The diamond that Patricia stole still hasn't surfaced. I guess the police are waiting to hear from your people about what to do with the other two.”

“They've been authenticated? You were going to check on that.”

I nodded, switching into first gear and moving through the intersection. Richard had been following that process for me, being careful to keep anything he learned just between us. Our boss, up at his conference in Québec, was happy with the bland noninformative e-mails Richard sent him. “And before you ask, yeah, sworn to secrecy.”

But how secret could it really be? Like the existence of the treasure ships themselves: the more people knew, the more potential there was for the information spreading, getting into the wrong hands.

Not that it wasn't there already.

Élodie sighed. “What a mess,” she said.

“More than a mess,” I said with some asperity. “One person's been threatened and is missing, another's dead. That's a little more than just an international kerfuffle.”

I could feel her eyes on me. “You're taking this personally,” she said, her voice neutral.

“Yes,” I agreed. “I totally am.”

“Hmm.” She settled back in her seat after that and contented herself with watching the city go past. We pulled up in front of the hotel and I let the valet take the car; I wasn't in the mood to look for a parking place. “Go check in, Élodie. I'll meet you in the restaurant.”

I hadn't realized how tired I was until I got to the restaurant and sat down and tried to relax. A waiter materialized and I ordered a cocktail. I was halfway through it when Élodie joined me, her coat gone, her blue dress a statement against the restaurant's beige-and-brown color scheme. “Drinking already, I see.”

“That kind of day,” I said.

She'd already spoken to the waiter on her way in; Élodie doesn't waste time. Now he delivered her gin and tonic. “
Voilà, madame
. Would
mesdames
like me to tell you about today's additions to the menu?”

“Not yet.” She waved imperiously and he disappeared quickly; the staff here was used to visitors behaving in all sorts of different bizarre manners. She took a gulp of the g-and-t and then commanded, “Tell me who's worrying you. And don't say there's nobody: I know you too well for that.”

She did, too. “His name is Aleister Brand. He lives down in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, in this old warehouse. He's some kind of journalist.” Deep breath. “And he's a neo-Nazi. I met his mother a couple of days ago, and she's concerned that he may be using some kind of dark magic to—to cause things to happen. I know that's vague, but it all really does come back to the crown jewels. Eventually, anyway.” I took a sip of my own drink. “Brand is Göring's grandson—you know, Göring, Hitler's right-hand man?—and he's convinced that he's got this special blood in him, that his heritage is a sign somehow.”

The waiter approached the table again and Élodie put up her hand to wave him off without looking at him, as though he were a recalcitrant sheepdog. “How do the jewels fit in? With this guy Brand, I mean?”

“There's this current of thought that they possess a certain energy,” I said. “I got that from his mother. She believes that after centuries of connection to royalty, of being the symbol of royalty, there's power in them.”

To my surprise, Élodie nodded. “That makes sense,” she said.

“It does? It didn't make sense to me.”

“Why shouldn't there be? There are places that are haunted, aren't there? If that kind of energy can inhabit a place, why couldn't it inhabit an object?”

I was staring at her. This wasn't my prosaic and practical friend speaking. “What are you talking about?”

“Okay. I've been reading since we last spoke.” She sighed. “Apparently, energy doesn't dissipate, not when it's been built up through time, or intensity, or both,” she said. “Look: it's a documented fact that churches are traditionally built on top of earlier, pagan centers, to provide continuity, to tap into the holiness of the place. You've heard of ley lines, haven't you?”

She was speaking in a language that wasn't part of my repertoire. “What are ley lines?”

“Back in the 1920s, somebody in England noticed there were these lines that crisscrossed parts of the country, and that they connected locations that were significant. He said you could draw a straight line between, say, a church and a circle of standing stones and a spring, that sort of thing: that these holy places were all in alignment with each other. This is going back to the Iron Age, mind: the Christian churches came later and just insinuated themselves into the landscape that had already been marked by the lines.”

I was staring at Élodie, but all I was seeing was Julian's map, the grid of crisscrossing tunnels and waterways underneath the city. A power network. Ley lines.

She took a sip of her cocktail. “No one knows what the leys were used for, but of course there are theories, everything from the scholarly to the crackpot. They may have been spirit paths, letting the dead travel through the countryside. Or fairies. Or something.”

“How on earth do you know this?” I asked.

She looked surprised. “James,” she said.

“Your
husband
?”

“Well, yeah. He thinks the concept of ley lines is rubbish, of course, but really it's not whether it's true or not that's the issue, it's if people believe it to be true.”

I was still a beat behind. “James works for the government,” I said. “What does that have to do with this?”

“It's not his
job
,” she said, impatient. “It's his
brother
. Don't you remember? James spends enough of his life rescuing Philip one way or another that it sometimes feels like we've got a social services office in our house.” She paused. “Philip lives in England, in Glastonbury—where the music festival is?—and that's supposedly Power Central when it comes to ley lines and site energy, and Philip is way into it, as you can imagine.”

I'd met Philip only once, but he'd been wearing a black cape fastened at the shoulder with a large dragon brooch. Not an image you were likely to forget anytime soon. Yeah, I could imagine.

“So anyway, I know about all this, because it's all he ever talks about. Earth energies and fairy paths and sacred springs. And who's to say that some of it isn't real? I mean, if you have a lot of people in one place believing the same thing, really passionately believing it, I guess that something can happen. Just because we don't understand it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Some people think of it as magic. Some people think that it's just because we haven't developed the knowledge to understand the science of it yet.”

“But there aren't ley lines here,” I said. “We're talking about jewels, not Stonehenge.”

She stared at me. “You're kidding, right? We're practically sitting on one of the most significant ley lines in North America. It's the Trois-Rivières line. And there's a network of smaller leys connecting various sites in Montréal itself. I can't remember them all, but I know that one goes from the oratory down through a couple of small churches and hits the basilica, and there's another that intersects with Pointe-à-Callières.”

All roads—or ley lines—seemed to connect back to Pointe-à-Callières. It was where Patricia had done much of her research, and it was the director who'd made her go to the mayor in the first place. I remembered him sitting in Jean-Luc's office, his bland approval of the project.

The power grid, in many more ways than one, holding the city together. The tunnels followed the waterways and the waterways followed the leys; the network was one and the same. “Oh,
merde
,” I said suddenly.