Deadly Jewels (9 page)

Maurice shrugged. “Don't know, do I?” he asked. “Not privy to what them higher-ups is about, eh? I do what they tell me to do, and I collect my pay. Whose round?”

“Mine,” said Hans, even though it wasn't. He held up his hand to the bartender. “But what I'm thinking,” he said, as the man refilled their glasses, “is that if you had to, you could find out what's in that shipment.”

“Cheers,” Maurice said and downed a third of the whiskey. “Whew! What was that you said?”

Hans took a deep breath.
Gott
grant me patience, he thought. “This shipment from Halifax,” he said. “If you wanted to find out what's in it, you could. If you really wanted to.”

“Yeah, probably could, eh? But why would I want to?”

The perfect opening. “I can give you three good reasons,” he said.

“Eh? What's that?” Another blink through the smoke, another swallow of whiskey. “What're you on about, then?”

“They have names,” said Hans. “Monique, and Adele, and Ethel.”

Maurice was staring at him openmouthed. “Here,” he said. “Enough of that. How'd you know?”

“You told me,” Hans said, adding under his breath, “you imbecile.”

Maurice was still uncomprehending. “Whose round?” he demanded, finishing his drink in one fast swallow.

Hans's hand came down fast and clamped on Maurice's wrist. “Listen to me,” he said, his voice low. “You told me about them. And about Felicity, who's expecting your first baby. Felicity wouldn't want to know about them. And they probably wouldn't like to know about each other. Would they?” He paused. “Me, I don't know where you find the time. But I've got plenty of time and I know what to do with it if you don't help me.”

Maurice seemed to have gotten very sober very fast. “What do you want me to do?”

“Not much,” Hans said, lessening the pressure on the other man's wrist, but not letting go altogether. “All I want to know is what's in the shipment.”

“That's all?”

“That's all,” Hans said reassuringly. He squeezed Maurice's wrist one last time and let it go. “For now.”

 

CHAPTER EIGHT

Julian returned my call just as I was getting ready to go home, packing up my briefcase. “So they're letting you out to play again? Never thought I'd see the day.”

“Don't ask, don't tell,” I said. “How are you, Julian?”

“
Comme
ci, comme
ça
,” he said. “So-so.”

“You don't actually need to translate for me,” I pointed out. Montréal is a city divided, and the Fletchers are most
definitely
on the Anglophone side of the line. The
wealthy
anglophone side. LeDuc is just as aggressively francophone, though the nuns had made sure that I grew up perfectly bilingual. It wasn't strictly necessary—French is Québec's official language—but there were still, amazingly, people in the city who spoke no French at all, legal language or not. On the other hand, in my professional capacity, I'd have welcomed knowing far more languages than I did.

“Just showing off,” Julian was saying.

“Impressive.”

“It is, isn't it? I rather thought so, too. So how can I help our fair city's even fairer
directrice de publicité
?”

I hesitated. “Julian, if I show you something, what's your obligation for passing it along? Do you have to tell anybody about it?”

“If it's a crime, then I have to.”

“It's a crime,” I said. “But it could be—archaeological.”

He gave a snort of laughter. “Don't tell me you've found a body!”

“Well, what used to be one,” I conceded. “And unless this particular person was the patient of someone who did some nifty trepanning, he was shot.”

“Trepanning?”

“Drilling a hole in the skull,” I said. “Medieval medicine.”

He chose to ignore that. “It's a he?”

I shrugged, then realized he couldn't see me. “I'm guessing. Could be anybody: it's just bones.”

He whistled. “LeDuc, how
do
you get yourself involved in these things? All right. Where is this mysterious body?”

I shifted uncomfortably in my office chair. “Well, see, that's the thing. I can't tell you. I need to show you. And
just
you, at least for now. I promised somebody.”

“Well,” he commented, “this ought to be good. I'm sufficiently intrigued. Tomorrow do you?”

“Sure,” I said, wondering what I'd tell my staff about yet another absence. Hell, it was Friday, let them think what they wanted.

“Lunch,” said Julian. He never meets unless it is over food, a passion he has in common with my husband.

I'd known it was coming. “Jardin Nelson,” I responded, naming one of the restaurants on the Place Jacques-Cartier. At least it got him into the Old City.

“Haven't had
pouding chômeur
in a while,” he said, naming one of the restaurant's specialty dishes, a maple pudding cake.

“How did you know they have it?”

“I'm not a detective for nothing.”

I grinned, finished packing up, and headed home.

I hadn't been inside for two seconds when the apartment erupted. First the sound of shrieking, then a door slamming and an adolescent girl's voice: “I
hate
you!”

I put my briefcase on the hall table, slipped out of my shoes and jacket. “Ivan?”

He was in the kitchen area, in the act of sipping some wine, and looking sheepish. “The kids are here,” he said.

“I
had
managed to deduce that fact.” I went over to kiss him. “Aren't they a day early?” Ivan's children, Claudia and Lukas, stayed with us for a month in the summer and every other weekend during the school year. Weekend: meaning arrivals on Fridays, departures on Sundays. Or so one might think.

“I forgot,” my husband confessed. “We'd agreed to a long weekend ages ago—well, at least two months, anyway—but I didn't mark it on the calendar. First thing I knew was when they called me from the airport.”

I walked past him, pulled the cork from the bottle of Côtes du Rhône on the counter, and poured myself a glass. Ivan had wisely already started; from the sound of things, we were both going to need it. “Well, that's all right, I don't mind, but what are we doing with them tomorrow?” Another burst of earthshaking noise. “And what's Claudia slamming doors about?” Good thing our new place was in an old piano factory, I thought: it could withstand years of abuse, including even the dramatic tantrums of an adolescent girl.

“What's she
ever
slamming doors about? Cheers,” said Ivan, touching his glass to mine. “I'm cooking goulash,” he added, a little unnecessarily: he's a great cook, but finds himself unable to produce anything without using every pot and pan we own. I loved our new loft-style apartment. I loved it especially because it had a dishwasher. “I think that Lukas threatened to tell somebody named Brittany that she has a crush on somebody named James.”

“Why should Claudia care who Brittany has a crush on?”

“Funny woman,” Ivan said. “I should be the one worried about who she has crushes on. I'm telling Lukas to mind his own business, when the truth is that I'd rather be pumping him for information.” He stirred something thick and red on the stove. “I guess I need to come to terms with not being the only man in her life forever.”

“You're already not the only man in her life,” I pointed out. “She lives with a stepfather, don't forget.”

“Right to the heart,” said Ivan, miming a heart attack. “You're cruel.”

“Not half as cruel as I'll be tomorrow when you ask me to leave work early so I can keep an eye on them, and I say no.”

“You haven't even heard my persuasive arguments yet. I've been practicing for hours.”

“Answer's still no. I've got a date after lunch.”

“Not with the tour guide again?”

I smiled. “No. An old flame.”

He got it at once. “You said you were going to be careful.”

“And I am. Don't you see? That's why I called Julian.” Well, that—and the little matter of a murder.

Don't ask, don't tell.

*   *   *

“So,” said Lukas during dinner, “What are we doing this weekend?”

Lukas is a planner. He's the only ten-year-old I know who keeps a diary with dates and appointments. He measures out his time, not in coffee spoons, but in squares on the page. Something, I understood, about trying to restore order to a life that must have, at least occasionally, felt chaotic.

Though I had to say that the kids handled having two homes with more aplomb than I probably would have managed at their ages—or perhaps even at any age. The good side to the split-home deal was that they had four adults who loved and cared for them. The downside, of course, was that two of those adults lived in a Boston suburb and the other two lived in Montréal.

Ivan and Margery, his ex, may have had their differences, but they coparented together pretty well. Claudia was five and Lukas three when Ivan moved to Montréal, so neither of the kids really remembered a life that didn't involve regular airplane trips and having different bedrooms in different places—different
countries
, even. Margery had remarried before Ivan; I came into the kids' lives two years on, and spent one pretty horrible year getting grief from them (“Mom doesn't cut the bread that way!”) before they started seeing me as part of the landscape.

For myself, I'd never wanted children. My own mother instilled enough guilt and grief into me to last for several generations, and my father had been perennially absent from my life, an academic with an obsession that kept him far from Montréal.

I used that as an excuse, of course; the truth was that I felt way too self-centered to be a good parent. I loved my life. I loved my work. I loved my weekends spent in cafés, strolling the streets of the Plateau, where I lived back then (or, in winter, the thoroughfares of the Underground City), going out with friends, reading a good book. I loved all the indulgences I permitted myself, the luxury of time being my own, the ability to take off at a moment's notice for Toronto or New York.

I didn't know when we first met that Ivan had children, and once I learned of their existence, I was already too far gone in love with him for it to make much difference. Now, I couldn't imagine my life without them—though, of course, I had them in the relatively small doses we'd arranged in custody hearings.

Now I looked blankly across the table at my husband. He would just
love
me to do something with the kids tomorrow rather than spend the day with Julian, whom he associated with my nearly getting killed last year.

Not that any of that was Julian's fault, mind you; but our brains work in mysterious ways and make illogical associations. “We'd planned to go to the Insectarium on Saturday,” I reminded them.

“Ewww,” said Claudia.

Lukas whipped out his notebook, sat with pen poised. “What time?”

I glanced at Ivan again, but he wasn't in the mood to help. “It's the
dégustation
,” I said. “I don't know what time they do it, I'll have to check the Web site.”

“Oh, even more ewww,” said Claudia. “I'm not eating any bugs.”

“They'll crawl around inside you!” Lukas told her, delighted.

“Stop it! Ohmygod Lukas you're not funny! Make him stop it!”

“You'll feel their creepy-crawly little feet and wings coming back up your throat!”

“That's enough, Lukas,” Ivan said mildly. “And, Claudia, the insects are very dead and some of them are actually delicious. You'd be surprised. Some taste just like chocolate.”

“I'm going to be sick,” Claudia promised.

“Then go to the bathroom,” I said.

“Ohmygod, not
now
, Belle-Maman! I'm going to be sick
Saturday
. If I even have to
see
anyone eating bugs! That's dis-
gust-
ing!”

“You don't have to eat the insects if you don't want to,” I said. “You
do
have to eat your goulash now, though.”

“It's too spicy. You know I don't like it too spicy, and you do it anyway. You hate me!”

“I made the goulash, Claudia,” Ivan said.

She leapt to her feet. “Then you
both
hate me! That's fine—I hate you, too!”

Another slamming door.

Lukas spoke into the silence of her wake. “So,” he said, pen poised, “what time on Saturday?”

*   *   *

Maurice met him at the port, where the ships docked.

“Our ship didn't come in here,” he said unnecessarily. “Docked in Halifax, sent the cargo on by train. Arriving two thirty today.”

“Yes,” said Hans encouragingly. “I do understand that.”

Maurice pulled a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and shielded the lighter with his hands. Hans waited for the first inhale-exhale. “Well?”

“Well,” Maurice said. “Came from England. Or Scotland, guess it's not the same thing, eh?”

Hans wanted to shake him. “Apparently not. And?”

Another quick puff and he dropped the cigarette and ground it under his heel. “And it's the Brits sending everything that's anything over here to keep it safe from the Nazis when they invade,” he said. “Sorry, I know they're in your country, too, eh? Anyway, the Brits got the drop on 'em. Sent it all over here. There's gold. There's securities, though damned if I know what them are.”