Deadly Jewels (6 page)

She finally sipped her wine. “Later on, during the war, there was this rumor circulating that the jewels were hidden in a cave somewhere in Wales. But no way: if England fell, Wales was going to fall, too. That wouldn't have made any difference. So they were here. They were here all the time.”

“And still, in a sense, on British soil, with Canada being Commonwealth,” I said slowly. “Still part of Great Britain, with whatever meanings people wanted to ascribe to that.” She nodded. “Still in Great Britain,” she said. “Just a lot safer.”

“Okay. I'm convinced of the logic of it,” I said. “But you said something about proof. And you also said something about some of them being stolen.”

She nodded, her eyes steady over the rim of her glass.

I took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “I'm not going to pretend that there aren't any problems with what you're saying, but let's say for a moment that it's true.
If
it's true, why has it taken so long to find out? No offense to you, I'm sure that you're really good at what you do, but there've been a lot of researchers in Montréal since 1945. Historians, archaeologists, people like that. If there was something to find, surely they'd have found it by now.”

“Only,” said Patricia, “if they were looking in the right place.”

*   *   *

“I can't feel my hands.”

“Count yerself lucky, then. Haven't felt me toes since we left Scotland.”

“Didn't feel mine even when we was
in
Scotland.”

It had to be the North Atlantic, the lookout thought sourly. And on a bleeding light cruiser. Not built for these waters, innit? Should be doing the Mediterranean route, picking up them New Zealand and Australian and Indian troops from Cairo. But no: it had to be the bleeding North Atlantic.

The bleeding
frigid
North Atlantic.

There'd been storm warnings when they'd left port, but that wasn't enough to deter the Royal Navy and His Majesty Captain Flynn, no sir, guv'nor. Not a bit of it. And now here they was, in gray seas against a gray sky, the seas running higher since morning, and watching for U-boats that could blow them out of the water at any moment.

And not just them. A bleeding convoy, it was. H.M.S.
Emerald
, Uncle Tom Cobley, and all.

He could just about make out the shape of one of the escort ships to the west. Rain sluicing down since midmorning, hard, when the seas had started to kick up. Spotter plane left yesterday, more's the pity: there was no help now. With them submarines out there, making the ocean their playground, lurking under the water and the first you knew of it was when the torpedo hit.

And now a storm coming on. Didn't need no bleeding meteorological officer to tell him that: bin goin' to sea nine years, innit? Can tell the weather out yere sure as anybody else.

Couldn't hardly see the destroyer now anyway, and the speed well down, making them sitting ducks, if you asked him: sitting ducks for any prowling wolf packs. The animal imagery was pleasing in a depressing sort of way. Quick as you like, that was the way to cross the Atlantic safely. Not like this, jest waitin' fer a break in the weather and halfway across with nowhere to hide. Trust the captain with his life, he'd done it before an' he would again, guv'nor knew what he was doing. But still, feelin' like a sitting duck.

An' weather worsening all the time.

The lookout braced himself to light a cigarette, shielding the lighter from both weather and possible periscopes. Still, all in a day's work, innit? Convoy's got to get through, God and King, I vow to thee my country, all that.

Halfway to Halifax. God help them.

 

CHAPTER FIVE

“Why didn't you tell me you were coming out to the casino? We could've had dinner together.” Ivan came up behind me as I stood at the kitchen sink, wrapping his arms around me and pushing back some of my dark hair to kiss my neck. Beside us, Bisou the cat cried plaintively for his dinner.

I finished rinsing the plate and stuck it into the dishwasher. “Didn't know I was going,” I said. “It just worked out that way. Actually, I'd meant to spend the day with someone called François.”

“François?” asked my husband, lifting one eyebrow.

I grinned. “He's a tour guide.”

“Oh, right, you were doing the tourist thing today.” He reached past me to grab an apple out of the wire three-tiered basket suspended next to the sink. Ivan is always hungry. Even when he's just eaten, he's hungry.

He says it has to do with the privation and pogroms suffered by his Jewish ancestors in Russia. The truth is that he's only ever visited Moscow on a college package tour that involved more vodka than history; his worst privations as a young adult had to do with not being able to find “pahking” in his native Boston.

Still, he can play the fiddler on the roof to perfection.

“Got sidetracked.” I put the detergent into its little door, shut the dishwasher, pushed the requisite buttons. I turned to lean against the sink and face him. “Ivan, what do you know about the Second World War?”

“My people—”

“Don't even go there!” I poked at his chest. “I'm serious. I've been reading, this afternoon. And, um, talking to some people. Did you know that Canadian participation in the war has been seriously underplayed? One of the beaches at D-Day, Juno Beach, was exclusively Canadian. Plus, between 1939 and 1945, more than one million Canadian men and women served full-time in the armed services. Come on, I'll tell you about it.”

I went into the living area and sat on the sofa; Ivan followed me, still polishing his apple on his suit jacket. “You've become a font of historical information today,” he observed.

“Pretty, too,” I said.

“That as well.” He sat next to me. “Why this sudden interest in twentieth-century wars?”

I half turned to face him, drawing one of my legs up under me. “There's this woman, a doctoral candidate from McGill,” I said. “She's stirring things up a little. The thing is, Ivan, she's found proof—well, she
says
she's found proof—that the British crown jewels were here. In Montréal. They were held in a vault under the
édifice Sun-Life
during the war.”

He took a bite out of the apple and chewed reflectively. “Think I already heard that somewhere. Maybe in a magazine?”

“It's probably been a whole lot of places. It's no secret, it's actually part of the Gray Line tour narrative,” I said. “Except that it's said so casually that you really don't have the time to reflect on it. You know, statistic this, statistic that, so forth. And anyway, you're right: for most people, it feels like ancient history.”

Nothing but the sound of him biting into the apple, chewing, swallowing. “But?”

“But what?”

“I can feel it coming. There's another shoe due to fall at any moment. And don't give me that blank look, you're not that French, you know the idiom. Your English is better than my grandmother's.”

“Everyone's English is better than your grandmother's.”

“
Alors
?”

“Well, it's a bit of a long story, but essentially the Brits sent a lot of stuff here at the beginning of the war. They sent the country's gold reserve, and everyone's securities, too, private securities they'd confiscated. It wasn't just to keep them safe: they were payments, agreed between the governments to pay for convoys sent from Canada and the States to supply the British.” I hesitated. “Believe it or not, it was something they called Operation Fish.”

“Appropriate,” my husband commented. “What about the crown jewels? Were they part of this fish thing?”

“They came with the second shipment,” I said, picking my notes off the coffee table. “Complete secrecy, of course, they even had the crew put on tropical white uniforms to confuse any lurking German spies into thinking they were heading south—well, there were U-boats all over the North Atlantic. The
Emerald
survived a bad storm and docked in Halifax; the gold and jewels went on from there by train to Montréal.”

“It would make a good movie,” Ivan said. He runs the casino; he always has an instinct and eye out for entertainment.

“It did,” I said tartly. “Something called
The Bullion Boys
, produced in the nineties by the BBC, has Liverpool dockworkers plotting to steal the gold before the
Emerald
sails.”

He nodded approvingly. “Good premise.”

“Why do I feel you're not taking any of this very seriously?”

Ivan sighed, stood, stretched, took his apple core into the kitchen, came back. “It's all fascinating, Martine, but I don't see the connection to Montréal's public relations in the twenty-first century.” He headed up the open staircase that leads to our bedroom on the second level of the loft. “I'm going to change my clothes.” For reasons best known to him, Ivan stays in his elegant work suits during dinner. It's a little like having a date, albeit one in which I have to still do the cleanup.

“There
is
a connection!” I yelled after him. “We saved their jewels for them!”

“Not exactly hot off the presses, that news.” His voice was muffled; I imagined he was pulling a sweater over his face.

“But
proof
of it would be,” I said. “And there may be more. In fact, there may be a
lot
more. This researcher—she's been hinting around at it, giving me bits and pieces, I think she's being cagey because I work for Jean-Luc. I don't think she trusts the government that much—”

“Amazing that anybody could feel that way,” my husband interrupted drily, coming back into the room in a sweater and sweatpants.

“Sarcasm will get you nowhere,” I told him. “She's feeling us out. Well, me, anyway. I got her away from Jean-Luc as quickly as I could.”

“He isn't one to inspire confidence,” Ivan agreed.

“And I do think there's a mystery here, Ivan. I think that maybe something happened back in 1939, and now we need to find out what it was. I think that—”

Ivan sat down on the coffee table, right across from me, his knees touching mine. “No,” he said.

“You haven't even heard—”

“I've heard enough,” he said. “Remember, I've heard that from you before. Something about the past having repercussions on the present. And the last time you got involved in anything mysterious, you came way too close to getting killed.” He put a hand on my knee. “I've gotten used to you, see,” he said easily. “Don't want to have to break in a new model.”

He was right: I had, in fact, come perilously close to getting myself killed when I'd decided to “assist the police with their inquiries” into some murders in Montréal the summer before. And my flippant “murders aren't good PR” hadn't gone over too well with my husband then, either. I reached out and touched his wrist. “This is completely different. If anything happened, it happened so long ago that nobody will care.”

His eyebrows went up. “Right. Like investigating something that happened in the Duplessis years,” he said, then raised his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay, I know that look. Just be careful. Your extracurricular activities make me nervous sometimes.”

“You said it yourself. You just don't want the bother of shopping for a newer model.”

“The shopping isn't the problem. The price tag is.”

I swatted at him halfheartedly and we settled companionably down to our evening. After all,
Orphan Black
was on television.

It was the next day that we found the body.

*   *   *

They'd put a mattress on top of the securities crates in the captain's day room, and that was where Alex was sleeping.

If one could call it sleeping.

Every time the
Emerald
pitched or rolled—and he had no idea which was which—he was dumped onto the floor. He considered simply putting the mattress down there, but there was scarcely room, and the space was needed frequently.

Just as well: it got him on his feet in time to go and get sick again.

The gale blew on and the captain dismissed the destroyers. “I'm not leaving us sitting in the middle of the ocean, not with this kind of cargo,” he told Alex. The convoy steamed eastward and they stood in the wheelhouse watching it go, seeing the lights disappear into the rain. “On our own, now,” said Captain Flynn cheerfully.

Alex looked at him. “You sound elated,” he said, curious.

“I am, laddie, I am. Best way to be, on our own. We'll show them a thing or two!” He turned to the officer of the deck. “Increase speed to twenty-two knots,” he instructed.

“Twenty-two knots, aye, sir.”

The captain was doing everything but rubbing his hands together in glee. “Now we'll show them what we've got.”

And it must have worked, because the next day the gale died down and the sun came out. Alex felt like Noah when the dove returned with the branch: not only did he finally believe that he might actually live through the ordeal, he found that he now actually
wanted
to.

He mentioned it to Captain Flynn, and the other man smiled. “Sunday service tomorrow,” he said. “Time to show your gratitude.”

Alex grinned. They might well play darts and sing hymns, he thought; but he'd never seen anything like the men he met on the
Emerald
. “They signal action stations every time there's a U-boat in the vicinity,” he wrote in a letter to his wife once the seas were calm enough for him to manage a pen. “Every time, no matter what a man is doing, he's at his battle station. Immediately. Quietly and without drama. We bankers could take a page from their book.”