Monsieur Deneaux tucked his chin, making it nearly disappear into his narrow neck. “It was not stolen. Not from the Ritz. We have always had excellent security.” He seemed personally affronted.
“Yes, I know,” I reassured. “It’s only the newspapers at the time—and you know how unreliable they can be—stated it had been stolen. Can you at least share with us what you think might have happened to it? We understand that the talisman disappeared during the war, and we are merely trying to find out what happened to it.”
Apparently mollified, André nodded. “It did disappear, but it certainly wasn’t stolen. Not from the Ritz, at any rate.” He leaned closer and lowered his voice. “I believe that it was taken by the husband of the comtesse’s granddaughter. Pierre Villon.” He said the name with such loathing that I almost expected him to spit.
“Why do you say that?” Drew asked.
“He was a French government official, a bureaucrat without much real responsibility. But he and his family lived in a very grand apartment in the sixteenth arrondissement that his position shouldn’t have afforded.”
“Was there ever any proof that he took it?” I disliked this Pierre Villon but thought I should be fair.
André shook his head, his lower lip curled in distaste. “People like him always covered their tracks, like cats with their excrement.” He tapped his forefinger against his graying temple. “But I know. I know his type. I know what he was capable of.”
“Do you know what happened to him? After the war.”
Andre shrugged. “Who knows? He disappeared at some point—I do not recall when. Like so many during the war, he just poof.” He illustrated the word by opening his fists in a starburst of fingers.
A very large woman carrying a small dog under each arm approached, calling for Monsieur Deneaux. “Please excuse me. If you need anything else, please don’t hesitate to let me know.” He bowed his goodbye, then left.
“Well, hello.”
We turned at the familiar Southern accent that stretched the two syllables of the last word into three.
Precious Dubose, immaculately turned out in ice-blue linen, smiled at us. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation with that lovely Monsieur Deneaux. Actually, it was the word jewels that caught my attention. I do so love jewelry. Is there anything I might be able to help you with?”
I recalled her telling me that she had lived at the Ritz, at times with Coco Chanel. “You were here during the war, right?”
She pressed her pink lips together and looked up at the ceiling as if thinking. “Off and on. Why do you ask?”
“We’re looking for the de Courcelles talisman,” explained Drew. “It was displayed in a case in the Comtesse de Courcelles’s suite, then disappeared in 1942. My father, who was OSS during the war, was dropped into France to retrieve it, but something happened to it. We think La Fleur might have stolen it.”
Her delicate eyebrows rose. “La Fleur? I’ve always been fascinated by her. Such a woman—and such a legend. My knowledge of French history is very good, you know. If you think I can be of any help, I’d love to hear the whole story.”
Drew and I looked at each other and then back at Precious. “Three brains are always better than two,” Drew said.
“Wonderful,” Precious said, drawing out the word. “Let’s go have a drink, and you can tell me all about it. I always think better with a drink in my hand.” Precious winked at Drew. “Come on. The Bar Hemingway is the only place in town that knows how to make the perfect mint julep.”
We followed in her perfume-scented wake toward the bar, the incessant clatter of Prunella Schuyler’s typewriter like little reminders that the closer we got to finding La Fleur, the closer I got to facing the ghosts I’d told Drew I didn’t believe in.
Chapter Twenty
Aurélie
The Château de Courcelles
Picardy, France
April 1915
There were no ghosts in the back corridors of the castle, only dust.
Aurélie stifled a sneeze as she crept along an abandoned passageway built into the thickness of the wall in the new wing. It wasn’t a secret passage, not as such. It had been put in when the new wing was built in the eighteenth century, the very latest in modern conveniences, so that servants might appear, as if by magic, without passing through the grand chambers and anterooms, unseen and unheard. When she was young, the passages had bustled with servants, whisking around one another. But there were no grand house parties at Courcelles anymore. The staff had dwindled even before the advent of war.
The lack of a mistress, her mother would have said. But whatever the reason, it meant the old servants’ passageways languished unused. Except, of course, by a rebellious girl who sometimes liked to slip from her rooms without her governess seeing her.
It didn’t matter that the passage was in darkness. Aurélie knew the location of her own rooms in her muscles, in her bones. She reached out and felt the handle of the hidden door just where it was meant to be, the brass worn smooth with age beneath her palm.
For a moment, Aurélie was sixteen again . . . twelve . . . nine. And this was her room, her own special place that always felt so much more her own than her lavishly decorated bedchamber at the Ritz, never mind how much money her mother had spent.
But it wasn’t. Not anymore. A man’s shaving set dominated her dressing table. There were spectacles beside the bed and piles upon piles of papers overwhelming the desk of the escritoire she had almost never used. Hoffmeister hadn’t torn the boiseries from the wall or the hangings from the windows, but the casual debris of his belongings was almost worse, somehow, because it was still the same, all of it, but he’d marked it as his, as surely as a dog in the woods with a contested tree.
How dare he? How dare he drape his hideous uniform over her chaise longue? How dare he leave the dent of his ugly head on her pillow? Aurélie wanted to scrub it all with carbolic and lye, to fling his belongings out the window as he’d flung hers.
Her nails were making dents in her palms. Aurélie forced herself to relax, finger by finger. She couldn’t scrub out the taint; she couldn’t let him know she had ever been here. Hoffmeister was downstairs, presiding over another endless supper, toasting the Kaiser over a feast that would have fed the village for a week. And she . . . she was here to see what she could see. To find something, finally, that might make her father look at her again, really look at her, as though she weren’t Minnie Gold’s daughter, but the true heir to Courcelles. As though she were the son he had always wanted her to be.
The son she had tried to be, for him, scorning the modiste for the hunting field, racing cars and horses, practicing and practicing until she could outshoot Jean-Marie, until she could skewer any man with a fencing foil, drive the faint of heart off the road.
But it wasn’t enough. It was never enough.
Of course, this wasn’t about that, not really. This was about France, and the people of the village, Aurélie hastily reminded herself. It was about finding something, some snippet of information that might prove the key to ousting the conqueror. The date of the next big offensive . . . damning information about an officer . . . movements of munitions that might be intercepted . . .
Aurélie went to the overburdened escritoire, placed beneath the skeptical countenance of an ancestress who had been a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette and had escaped the guillotine due to the good offices of an Englishman with an impossibly floral nom de guerre.
She started on the piles with a will, but her determination soon turned to dismay. It wasn’t the language. She could read the German easily enough, thanks to the tutors her mother had hired in the forlorn hope that one day Aurélie would be seized with the urge to study Kant in the original. Nor were the papers disorganized; quite the contrary. They were meticulously, painfully detailed. All the hideous, petty regulations Hoffmeister had imposed upon the surrounding villages, all were recorded here, in ledger upon le
dger. There were weekly accounts of everything from the number of eggs collected to the number of men executed.
It was chilling and boring all at the same time, which rather summed up Hoffmeister. How could one man be both so deadly and so dull?
There was correspondence, too. Letters about English soldiers found sheltering in the woods and shot; pigeons sighted and shot down.
There was, Aurélie noticed with relief, no reference to either her father or the chapel. Hoffmeister seemed to think the pigeons were coming from a deserted boathouse by the lake and was having Kraus keep it under surveillance. Which explained, she supposed, the many fishing expeditions from which Lieutenant Kraus returned thoroughly sloshed, but with no fish.
And then, at the very bottom of the pile, she saw something else entirely. The distinctive paper of a telegraph form. The writing was very dark; there were places where the nib had pierced through the paper.
Erster Generalquartiermeister W.H.F. von Witzleben. Wire soonest. Delicate matters to discuss. Yr loving nephew, M v S.
M v S. Maximilian von Sternburg?
She was frowning at the paper, trying to figure out why it was here, what it meant, when the sound of footsteps and voices made her start. Aurélie shoved the telegram back where she’d found it. Her body was faster than her mind; she was halfway to the passage by the time the footsteps stopped outside the door. A key was inserted into the lock.
Aurélie escaped into the passage, pulling the door softly shut behind her, grateful for those long-ago servants whose movements were meant to be inaudible, the door padded and the floor covered in drugget.
“—another telegram,” Hoffmeister was saying. “He sent it this morning, from the village.”
“Or thinks he has, eh?” Someone giggled unpleasantly. Aurélie recognized the voice as Dreier’s. Putting her eye to the crack in the door, she couldn’t quite see him, just a leg dangling off the edge of her chaise longue. But the voice was unmistakable. “How many does this make?”
“Four,” said Hoffmeister succinctly. “All to his uncle in Berlin. Wire soonest. Delicate matters to discuss.”
“Is that brandy?” said Dreier hopefully, and Aurélie heard the sound of her father’s Napoleon brandy being poured into one of her great-grandmother’s crystal glasses. There was silence for a moment, punctuated by slurping. “Won’t he realize when he doesn’t hear back?”
“Berlin has other matters to attend to,” said Hoffmeister drily. “They sent him to spy on me, you know.”
“Cheek,” said Dreier indistinctly. “More brandy?”
Crystal clinked against crystal. “These Junkers look after one another. Never mind that their world is done. Like all this. The arrogance of them. That Von Sternburg would sell out his country for a girl.”
“Or her, ahem, jewels, eh?” Dreier made a noise that was somewhere between a burp and a laugh.
In the passage, Aurélie stood as still as she could, scarcely daring to breathe, her hands like ice. The telegram she had seen beneath the ledgers. The promised intervention from Berlin . . . Intercepted. Gone. She had never quite believed in it, but it had been comforting to hope it was there, that the old laws of behavior still governed, that there would be recourse. Now, she felt marooned, as surely as Crusoe on his island. There was no law but Hoffmeister’s law, and his law was no law at all.
“Get your mind out of the gutter, lieutenant,” said Hoffmeister without heat. “I don’t care if he’s swiving her six ways from Sunday. But I want that relic.”
“With those jewels,” said Dreier, eager to agree, “you could buy a palace that would make this one look like a hovel!”
“With those jewels,” Hoffmeister corrected him, “I could buy the men who would make me a lieutenant colonel. And then there’s the relic itself . . .”
“I didn’t know you believed in all that,” hiccupped Dreier.
“I don’t,” snapped Hoffmeister. Cutting off Dreier’s hasty apologies, he said, “But they do, those peasants. They think it’s magic. Miracles and hocus-pocus. They say—what is it?—that France cannot fall while the demoiselle holds the talisman.” He made the archaic title a slur. “So we’ll show them who holds that relic. And then we’ll burn it.”
“Not the jewels!”
“No, you cretin. Not the jewels. The relic. That disgusting, decaying scrap of fabric they claim is saturated in the saint’s own holy blood. We’ll show them it will go up in flames as quickly as your grandmother’s kerchief.”
It might not have been grandmother’s kerchief he had said. Aurélie’s German was serviceable, but it didn’t quite run to vulgar colloquialisms.
“And then France will fall?” slurred Dreier.
“What, do you believe in all that rubbish? No. But they’ll think it will. So it will.”
“Perhaps we burn the demoiselle with it,” proposed Dreier. Through the crack in the door, Aurélie could just see his hand holding out his glass to be filled as though he weren’t suggesting her immolation as casually as one might an afternoon picnic.
“And make a martyr? No. But what will the French think when they learn that their prized demoiselle was a German officer’s whore? We tell them, I think, that she gave her lover the talisman. . . . She sold her body and her country. That will take care of the demoiselle.”
“Wait—you’re going to give Von Sternburg the talisman?”
“Von Sternburg,” Hoffmeister said calmly, “won’t be alive to enjoy it. There will be an accident. In an old structure like this, there are often such little accidents.”
“But . . . his uncle . . .”
“Will know only that his nephew perished serving his country. There will be no inconvenient telegrams to say otherwise. There have never been any telegrams to advise him otherwise.”
Murder. He was talking about murder. Max’s murder.
There was a moment of stunned silence, and then, of all things, the sound of applause. Dreier was clapping. “It’s brilliant! You’ve thought of everything!”
“Not quite everything,” said Hoffmeister modestly. “One would have to determine how such an accident might be arranged. You were a pharmacist once, were you not?”
“I, er, yes, but . . .”
“If a man were to dose himself for, oh, sleeplessness, might he not become confused and walk somewhere he ought not?”
“Ye-es,” said Dreier, sounding less than clearheaded himself. “But . . .”
“It is no crime for a man to take a sleeping draught. Or another man to give it.”
“No,” said Dreier, relieved. “No, not at all.”
“But, not, I think,” said Hoffmeister, rising to his feet, “until we have the talisman. Do you understand me, Klaus? Wait for my guidance. And tell me if our friend attempts to send any more letters.”
Aurélie heard the other man rise clumsily to his feet. “But what about the letters to his mother?”
“Bring them to me. If there is nothing of interest, you may replace them in the dispatch bag. We don’t want his mother expressing her concern to her brother.”
“Yes, sir. No, sir.” Dreier made an attempt to click his heels, nearly overbalancing himself in the process. “Will there be anything else, sir?”
“Try not to break your own neck on those stairs,” said Hoffmeister, as Dreier careened off a Louis XIV commode and into the side of the bed, cursing fluently. Hoffmeister took him firmly by the arm, although, through the crack in the paneling, Aurélie didn’t miss the look of distaste he gave the other man. “I’ll see you out.”
They were standing at the door, on the far side of the room. Now was her chance, under the cover of their conversation, to retreat down the passage. Aurélie forced her sluggish limbs to move. No crime for a man to take a sleeping draught, Hoffmeister had said, as though already preparing his report. No crime.
Max, lying broken beneath the parapets.
Max, dead on his bed, with an empty vial beside him. A miscalculation, too much sleeping powder, a tra
gic accident, condolences wired to Berlin . . .
How? How was this happening? How could this be allowed to happen? The world had gone mad. They had opened Pandora’s box and let all the demons out, given them uniforms and room to play.
Aurélie paused at the base of the passage, leaning her forehead on the roughly whitewashed wall, pressing her palms against the worn paint, feeling the scrape against her skin, raw and real. It was talk, only talk, but even such talk, that Hoffmeister could consider such a thing, was monstrous. She’d seen the Germans kill before, certainly. She and her people were the enemy, to be exterminated like vermin should they prove inconvenient. That was war.
But Max was one of their own.
This wasn’t war, it was murder, murder out of self-interest and cowardice and greed, and by God, she wouldn’t stand for it. She’d stop them, thought Aurélie feverishly, hurrying through the tunnels with more speed than grace. She’d stop them and Max would see them court-martialed, and it would be two birds with one stone, really. She’d save Max and free her people from Hoffmeister, and, merciful heavens, she couldn’t let him kill Max.
Max’s room wasn’t in the new wing with Hoffmeister and Kraus; it was clear across the courtyard in the old watchtower, above the long unused guardroom. Aurélie had seen his lamp burning long into the night, the outline of Max’s tall form hunched over a desk, his back bent with weariness.
Not that she’d stood in the courtyard and watched him; one wouldn’t do such a thing. But it was hard not to see into a lit window in passing.
There were ways to get to the old watchtower without being seen, through the tumbledown rooms where men-at-arms used to dice and drink, back when there were such things as men-at-arms. Now those chambers were crowded with bundles and boxes, dangerous contraband like coffee grinders confiscated from the people of Courcelles; porcelain plates requisitioned from a neighboring manor and packed into a box marked with the major’s Hamburg address.
All the Ways We Said Goodbye Page 29
