Raiders of the Lost Corset

by Ellen Byerrum

  “That might be true, but you were almost killed today, Lacey. Just think what could have happened if you’d gotten a bigger dose of whatever chemicals were on that rag. Toxicity by inhalation can be lethal. You want to stop at the hotel bar for a nightcap?”

  “Thanks, but I’d rather not, if you don’t mind.” Lacey’s head was feeling a little woozy, and she wondered if it was more than just the wine with dinner. Maybe she shouldn’t have had anything to drink after being knocked out by a suspicious chemical.

  “We’ll leave first thing in the morning,” Brooke said.

  “No way,” Lacey protested. “We just got here.”

  “But we need to check on that address in Paris.”

  “I’m sure the Rue Dauphine will still be there whenever we arrive, and no one has the address but us and Jean-Claude. Besides, I’m taking a tour of the Abbey tomorrow, then I thought we’d take a drive to the D-Day beaches in Normandy. Omaha Beach, Brooke.”

  “But we have things to do, people to see! Corsets to chase!”

  “And places I’ve wanted to see my whole life. You go ahead, I can take the bus.” Brooke started to protest, but Lacey said, “Maybe if you’d been flat on your back in that cellar, you’d feel like taking a breather, too.”

  “Of course. My God, you’re exhausted after what you’ve been through. And I let you down. I’m sorry, Lacey. Maybe we should find a doctor to check you out.”

  “Not necessary.” She wrapped her shawl a little tighter against the breeze coming off the Bay of Mont-Saint-Michel.

  “Are you sure? There might be other side effects of that secret Russian knockout gas. You know, brain tumors. Amnesia. Split personality.”

  “I’m taking your comic books away from you, Brooke. And I’m unplugging that Web site of Damon’s that feeds your lurid imagination.” Lacey turned to take one last look for the evening at the towering Abbey that was called Saint Michael in Peril of the Sea. It seemed magical to her. “I have to come back here again someday.”

  “Right. Quite a sight.” Brooke was a little less enthralled by the scenery. “What was that Bible verse? Genesis? You suppose there are French Gideons who put Bibles in French hotels?” she asked. “Never mind, I’ll find the Bible on the Internet.”

  “Yes, but will you find God on the Web?”

  Brooke ignored her. “So we think this Drosmis Berzins character took the corset years ago. But he couldn’t have fenced it, could he? It’s never surfaced.”

  “Not that we know of,” Lacey said. “He could have sold the gems off one by one. Or sold the whole thing to a private collector, one of those strange characters you read about who have chambers full of priceless stuff and never show it to anyone.”

  “Some rich Russian Mafia guy? Maybe that’s who this Gregor Kepelov character is? Or who he’s working for? Some collector who doesn’t know that the corset or the egg or whatever they think it is has already been collected?”

  “Russian Mafia? And ex-KGB? Possibly.” Lacey picked up her pace and readjusted her shawl around her as a sharp breeze kicked up, carrying a rich aroma from the sea.

  “I didn’t find an ex-KGB Kepelov on the Internet.”

  “You wouldn’t expect him to have a Web site.”

  Brooke’s skin looked a little blue in the night and her teeth began to chatter. “And what about this Griffin character? No trace of him either.” She stopped and slapped herself on the forehead. “What’s wrong with me!”

  “Are you all right? You look pretty cold,” Lacey said. “It’s not much farther.”

  “It must be the jet lag! They’re using false names, these guys, whoever they are. Maybe he’s not KGB. Maybe he’s MI5. Or CIA. Or—”

  “Well, of course they’re false names, Brooke. But the CIA doesn’t look for buried stolen treasure.” I don’t think. “Do they?” Lacey realized she actually knew no more about the CIA than what she read in her own newspaper, The Eye Street Observer—not exactly an unbiased viewpoint.

  “Rogue CIA.” Brooke always had an answer.

  “There’s a redundancy for you.” Lacey picked up the pace. “Tell me again, what did my mysterious assailant look like?”

  “I just saw a bald head, from the back, running away. Big. Tall. Bald.”

  “Bald?” Lacey stopped short. That didn’t fit with Lacey’s preconceived notion of a dashing ex-spy. “You’re telling me our bogeyman is bald?”

  Brooke laughed. “Looked bald to me.”

  “I am so disappointed,” Lacey said, joining her in laughter. “I’m expecting a Russian James Bond and I get a big bald guy.” They picked up their heels and raced to the hotel.

  “Bad news, Lacey,” Brooke said, staring intently at her laptop computer screen. “Drosmis Berzins is dead.” She turned the laptop so Lacey could read the obituary.

  “He would be dead, wouldn’t he,” Lacey pointed out, “if he was a young man in Ekaterinburg in 1917? Or else he’d be a hundred and some years old.”

  Brooke had insisted on Googling Berzins’ name directly upon their return to the hotel. She eventually found the old news about Berzins’ demise posted on a largely defunct Latvian genealogy Web site, along with his obituary from a Mississippi newspaper in 1988. It didn’t say much, only that Drosmis Berzins was born in 1896, he emigrated to the U.S. from Latvia, and he was a quiet, modest man who ran a small tailoring shop and was well respected in his community. Berzins left two sons and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Brooke clicked on the links to the rest of the Web site, but they were as dead as he was.

  “That would make him about ninety-two when he died,” Lacey said. So Berzins had gone to America, but there the trail went cold. She suggested they search on the Bible verse, and Brooke’s fingers flew over the keyboard.

  “As the man said, ‘Seek and ye shall find,’” Brooke said, pulling up an online Bible database. “Ah, here it is, Genesis chapter 3, verse 19, in the King James Version: ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return under the ground; for out of it wast thou taken.’ Oh, here’s the famous part, Lacey: ‘For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.’ Hmmm.”

  “I don’t like the way that sounds,” Lacey said.

  “So it’s all about death. Great. Nothing but dead ends.” Brooke sneezed and stared at the screen moodily. Lacey said good night and returned to her own room. Maybe the verse was meant to be Drosmis Berzins’ little joke on his old friend Juris Akmentins, saying, in effect, “I went under the ground in your cellar, Juris, and out of it I took what you had hidden, nyah, nyah, nyah.” As usual, she thought drowsily, you could read anything you wanted to into a verse from the Bible. All she really had left to go on was an address on the Rue Dauphine.

  Life and death are a puzzle, but what better place to contemplate the vagaries of fate, Lacey thought, than the amazing Abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel? The next morning, Lacey hoped St. Michael of the Dangerous Seas would at least give her a sense of peace and some quiet to contemplate the information she had so far, which wasn’t much. It may have been an illusion, she thought, but she felt perfectly safe there, on a tiny walled island in the sea with danger far away.

  Shafts of golden light illuminated the Scriptorium, the room where the monks copied and illuminated the ancient manuscripts. It would have been the best job available for an educated monk; the room had to be kept warm and dry to facilitate the work. Lacey imagined their centuries-old warm and dry ghosts must be laughing at her foolish quest to find a bloodstained corset, a relic of a horrible execution amid a bloody revolution, its survival (if it did survive) a testament to the optimism of human greed and the desire to fend off death with the indestructibility of gems. She wandered languidly through the vast, cool spaces of the Abbey with a headset and a tape player with a self-guided tour in English, appreciating the stonework and the graceful arches that made each room a delight. At the moment, she had no idea where Brooke was. Her friend had gamely taken a headset of her own and marched off with a purpose.
/>
  A trip through the Cloister, the serene Gothic garden ringed by a covered walkway near the top of the Abbey, lacked only the atmospheric accompaniment of a Gregorian chant. Tourists could no doubt buy a CD, Lacey reflected, in the store on the lower level. She realized that here in the Abbey, among the majestic columns and the collected blood, sweat, toil, and prayers of centuries, treasure was a relative term. Peace could be a treasure too.

  Lacey thought of the pilgrims over the centuries who had tried to reach the Abbey, only to be swept away by the raging currents of the sea or caught by the treacherous quicksand that separated the island from the mainland at low tide. The thought brought her back to her present predicament. She didn’t know what dangerous currents might sweep her into deep trouble, or where the quicksand might lay in wait, but she felt very peaceful there. She wondered about buying a CD in the little store, maybe Gregorian chant sung by the monks of the Abbey.

  “Lacey, have you had quite enough flying buttresses?” Brooke swept in on her meditation and grabbed her elbow. “Thank God I found you. Come on, you can buy the book and look at the pictures. We’ve got to lose that phony jewel retriever of yours and his KGB buddy.”

  “You’ve seen them?”

  “I went to turn in my headset. I saw them picking theirs up and I turned right around. They’re together. And they’re following us.”

  “Together? You’re sure they’re not just taking the tour?”

  “Very amusing. Not a chance, these headsets would be a great cover to wander around and look for us. But they didn’t see me. I think.” Brooke looked way too excited about this development. She pulled Lacey into a run to drop off their headsets at the entrance to the Abbey. They raced outside the thick Abbey walls, down the hundreds of stone steps to the village gates, and across the causeway back to their hotel.

  “Let’s hit the road for Paris,” Brooke said as they threw their hastily packed bags into the rental car. “We’ll see how many tiny French horses our little blue Citroën has under its hood.”

  Chapter 17

  Brooke brought them back to Paris alive, after a harrowing high-speed drive through the green Normandy countryside. Brooke apparently thought she was qualifying for the legendary twenty-four-hour endurance race at Le Mans. Lacey was enormously grateful when the keys of the little blue Citroën were turned over to the rental agency near the Arc de Triomphe and they were back on the terra firma of the sidewalks of Paris.

  They took an expensive taxi ride, on the newspaper’s tab, back to the Hotel Mouton Vert and dropped their luggage in their rooms before taking a stroll. After the nonstop three-hour-plus drive from the Atlantic coast, Lacey needed to stretch her stiff legs, and Brooke agreed. And if Brooke was correct that she hadn’t been seen in the Abbey, they were free, for the moment, from the duplicitous duo of Griffin and Kepelov.

  An hour later they were accosted by Nigel Griffin in the Montparnasse Cemetery, near the grave of the American actress Jean Seberg. Lacey and Brooke hadn’t planned to wind up there—they simply started walking at the hotel and soon found themselves in the graveyard, passing beneath the statue of an angel with spreading wings and a sculpture of praying hands. A jaunty British accent said, “Hello, girls. Back so soon? Lovely drive, what?”

  Lacey spun on his words. “Oh, no, not you again. Go away.”

  “My dear Smithsonian, is that any way to talk to a dear old friend?”

  “With a friend like you, I need an armed guard,” Lacey said.

  “And Nigel Griffin isn’t your real name, you bastard,” Brooke growled.

  He stopped and stared at her in amazement. “It is so. Who says it’s not?”

  “Why isn’t it on the Web?” she said.

  “Because I’m careful, of course. It’s a stealthy line of work, mine is. I don’t exactly have a Web site. ‘Missing jewels? I’m your man! E-mail Nigel at Griffin dot com!’”

  “That’s Griffin dot con, if you ask me. And you should be more careful about who you try to con,” Lacey said, fed up at the very sight of him. “Why don’t you go away and leave us in peace? We don’t know any more about your silly Fabergé egg than you do.”

  “But you owe me one. I carried your bum up the stairs from the cellar.”

  “Don’t forget I helped,” Brooke pointed out.

  “I am black and blue from your tender loving care!” Lacey raised her voice and then lowered it; bystanders were enjoying their little scene. They exited the cemetery with Griffin hard on their heels.

  “Ladies, I’m crushed by your distrust,” he pleaded. “Come on, I want you to meet Kepelov. My treat.”

  “Kepelov?” Brooke exclaimed, her eyes blazing. “The spy? So you two are working together. A conspiracy!”

  “Kepelov? Where?” Lacey looked up and down the street for a hulking, bald ex-KGB killer in an idling car, waiting to chloroform her and torture her last secret from her. She hefted her heavy leather purse, ready to use it as a weapon.

  “Why so jumpy, Smithsonian? Is this the valiant seeker of truth I read about on Conspiracy Clearinghouse?”

  “Take a pill, Griffin. I don’t plan on being chloroformed again.”

  “Oh, I doubt if he actually used chloroform. It’s dangerous stuff, you know. Not his style.”

  “Aha, you are in league with him!” Brooke cried. “You said you’d only heard of him, this KGB loose cannon, that he was a deadly menace.”

  “We’re more like casual acquaintances, actually.” He grinned. “He’s not such a bad sort.”

  “Right. He attacked me,” Lacey snarled. “What did he use to knock me out?”

  “Ask him yourself,” he dared her. “At the café just down on the corner of Avenue Maine. He’s waiting for us.”

  “I don’t think so. We have nothing to talk about with either of you.”

  “But Lacey,” Brooke pleaded, her eyes wide. “A spy? Maybe a real ex-KGB spy? A real conspiracy.”

  “More like real BS.” Lacey relented with a glare at Brooke; it might be useful to get a good look at her attacker, she reflected, and possibly throw a drink at him. And surely, she thought, we’ll be safe in a public place in broad daylight; won’t we? Griffin led them a few blocks to a nearly empty corner café with green marble-topped tables. A man sat alone at one of them, his back to the wall, the front section of Le Monde hiding his face.

  “Kepelov?” Lacey asked.

  “Gregor Nikolai Kepelov.” Griffin nodded. “Gregor, old man, meet my friends.”

  “Is he bald?” Brooke whispered. The newspaper inched down, leaving Lacey face-to-face with a man she remembered. Big and bald, with a handlebar mustache, like a cowboy. But this time Tex wasn’t wearing the Stetson and the Hawaiian shirt.

  Lacey looked at him closely. He was not actually quite bald, but his thin, blond hair was cropped very close to his scalp. At first glance, Kepelov was good-looking and muscular, but the closer you looked, Lacey decided, the more you noticed that his face was just a quarter turn off normal. His head was round but his face was gaunt, with sharp cheekbones that stretched the skin, angular features, and a thin, pointed nose above the handlebar mustache. Kepelov’s pink skin was puckered by an old scar, a thin white line along his jawline, and his round, pale blue eyes seemed empty of emotion. The big mustache called for merry, twinkling eyes; these were nothing of the kind. His eyes made Lacey think of electroshock therapy for some reason. He gave her the creeps.

  “Hello, Tex,” she said. He nodded.

  “Wait a minute, you know this man?” Brooke said accusingly.

  “No, but I saw him boarding our plane at Dulles. ‘Tex’ was just my shorthand for his wacky style. Cowboy hat, Hawaiian shirt.”

  “Yes, you saw me,” Gregor Kepelov said. His voice had a trace of a Russian accent. “And I saw you.”

  “I don’t remember him,” Brooke said.

  “How could you miss him?” Lacey rolled her eyes.

  “Really, mate,” Griffin said with a smile, “aren’t you spies supposed
to be more subtle? No wonder the Soviet Union went out of business.” He hailed the waiter for a black-and-tan and leaned casually against a table.

  “Shut up, Nigel,” Kepelov said, crumpling the newspaper with force. “You bore me.”

  Kepelov’s mood didn’t dampen Griffin’s spirits. “He’s just cranky. A little tiff with the long and leggy girlfriend du jour. Course he likes them short and chubby too, don’t you, Kepelov? Sit down, Smithsonian, you two make me nervous.” Lacey and Brooke stood their ground. Griffin pulled out a cigarette and a lighter.

  “Griffin, you’re not lighting that,” Lacey said, “or we’re out of here. Right now.”

  “Give me a break, Smithsonian, this is Paris!”

  “Fine. See ya.” Lacey nudged Brooke and they headed for the door.

  “Put the cigarette away, Nigel,” Kepelov ordered. “For the ladies.”

  “Oh, come on, Gregor, you can’t be bloody serious—”

  Kepelov pierced him with a cold blue glare. Griffin sighed and put the cigarette away. Kepelov turned to Lacey. “Ladies. Nice of you to come. Where is the egg?”

  “I don’t have any idea.” Lacey held up her hand. “Scout’s honor.”

  “We didn’t even know it was an egg,” Brooke said and was met with the frigid glare.

  “Shut up,” Kepelov commanded. “You go chasing to France after the old woman dies, and you don’t know it’s a Fabergé egg you’re hunting for? You must do better than that.”

  “I am a reporter. I’m writing a feature story on a seamstress and her craft. How did you hear this fantastic tale anyway?” He was silent, so Lacey changed direction. “And what’s the big idea attacking me? You could have killed me, you big oaf.”

  “If I wanted to kill you, Miss Smithsonian, you would be dead by now.” He indicated that she and Brooke should sit down. “You were looking for something in that farmhouse. What?”