Treasure of Saint-Lazare

by John Pearce

  “Just one door?”

  “This floor was an afterthought some time after the building was built. It’s a little smaller than the others, which is the reason the city has winked at it. The French are pragmatic about that sort of thing. If it pushes a little over the edge of the law but doesn’t hurt anything, they generally close their eyes. It was a little risky, but I decided to turn the entire floor into my own apartment.”

  “How did you work that?”

  “I needed a place to live seven years ago. This old hotel needed a lot of work but the owners didn’t have the money to do it, so I bought it.”

  He opened the door and with a sweep of his arm invited her inside, following with the suitcase. They walked down an entrance hall hung with bright oil paintings. She recognized one of them, a streetscape at dusk showing an early twentieth-century trolley passing the square of Châtelet, and stopped to look at it.

  “Is that an Éduardo Cortès? I had one of them in my gallery. I hated to sell it.”

  “I remember that painting, and this is one almost like it. My father gave it to me as a wedding present. It’s the only thing I kept from that part of my life.”

  “Will you tell me about it?”

  “Later. It’s not a pretty story.”

  She knew not to pursue the issue. They continued into the living room, where he invited her to sit in a gray leather armchair to one side of a fireplace. He sat in its twin opposite her. A glass wall faced southeast over the city, with the spires of Notre Dame in the distance.

  All the furniture was upholstered in muted shades of gray and beige except for one armchair on the opposite wall, which was a brilliant cardinal red. Jen first thought it was an error, but with a second look realized it was the bridge between the low-key furniture and the two dozen striking oil paintings that lined the wall from floor to ceiling.

  “What a beautiful room. And you have a lovely view, like your mother’s.”

  “Thanks. At Place Vauban she has Les Invalides and Napoleon’s Tomb across the street, I have Notre Dame on one side and the Champs-Elysées on the other. I’ll show you more of the sights a little later, but I think we should get business out of the way first.”

  “You’re right.” A sigh. “Roy is dead. Killed ten days ago by a hit-and-run driver just a couple of blocks from home.”

  “I was sorry to hear that. I remember him as a kind and interesting man.”

  “The police think it may not have been an accident, but aren’t sure yet. I’m here because of something that was important to him. When I went to find his will, there was one other envelope in the bank vault — addressed to your father. It looks pretty old.”

  She paused and took a deep breath, then drew a heavy beige envelope from her purse and handed it to Eddie. On it was written in blue ink, in a European script, “For Artie Grant. Please hand deliver to him as soon as possible.” It listed his mother’s address on the Place Vauban, where his parents had bought the penthouse apartment shortly after they were married in 1952. Eddie was born 16 years later and grew up there.

  “I caught a flight from Tampa as soon as I could. I had only the address on the envelope, no telephone number, so when my plane arrived I took a taxi straight there and met your mother. She asked me to pass the letter directly on to you. She handled it like it was radioactive.”

  “Margaux believes in letting the past stay in the past.”

  And in this case I agree with her, Eddie said to himself. Anything that involved Roy Castor was bound to deal ultimately with the immense quantities of art and other treasure the Nazis stole during the war, much of which had never been found. For a time it had been Artie’s holy grail as well, but he’d eventually turned his attention elsewhere.

  Eddie dropped the envelope on his lap, willing it to disappear. When it did not, he picked it up like something distasteful he’d found on the street, touching it only with his thumb and forefinger.

  “Was it sealed?”

  “I wasn’t about to fly all night to deliver a dirty joke.”

  “Tell me what’s in it.”

  “A short letter, very cryptic, one paragraph. I don’t understand it, but I can tell it refers back to their work at the end of the war. It’s not exactly a code, but an outsider would have a hard time getting it — I certainly didn’t. I don’t know a lot of details about my father’s war duties, but I know that after the Germans surrendered he and your father worked in Munich helping find stolen paintings. I know there was one special painting that interested him more than any other. Maybe you’ll understand it better.”

  “Or maybe Mother will.” Eddie unfolded the single sheet of rich beige stationery, heavy and stiff as though Roy had chosen it to last a long time. There was no date, but the paper had American dimensions, not European, so Eddie knew it had been written while Roy was in Florida. Just great, he thought. That narrows it down to the last thirty years or so.

  “Dear Artie:

  “The young fellow has disappeared into a dead end. I think the long-necked bastard planned to wind up in Paris and sent him there but he may also have used the underground railroad. Ask your round-heeled contact. Maybe you can find more than I could.

  “Roy”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Eddie asked, puzzled.

  “I don’t know. But he thought it was important enough to make sure I’d find it and get it to you. And he didn’t want to give up the chase during his lifetime — otherwise he would have mailed it, maybe years ago. We have to find out.”

  “We need to get on it right now. If your father was murdered there may be other things going on we need to know about. We’ll start with my mother. She’s the best one to fill you in on what your father and mine did together during the war, and she knows a lot more about the history of the time than I do. After all, she lived through it.”

  He read the letter again from start to finish. “I’d like to look at this more closely and think about what it might mean. Would you like to rest before we talk about it? You’ve been traveling a long time. And we’d like it if you would join us tonight. There’s a long-standing dinner with my mother on the schedule.”

  “We?”

  “Margaux, of course. Then there’s our friend Philippe Cabillaud, a semi-retired executive in the Paris police. When you arrived Margaux told him about it and he offered to bring his daughter, who’s a history professor at the Sorbonne. She should know something about the lost art.

  “My mother is bound to have more insights than either of us. And Aurélie, Philippe’s daughter, has solid connections in the intellectual world here. Even though it has a really high BS level, it is very intellectual.”

  “I won’t say it sounds like fun, but thank you for inviting me.”

  “You can use the guest room to get ready for dinner. I’ll show you a sight or two on the way to the restaurant.”

  As she followed him down the wide central hall past the formal dining room, Jen glimpsed exercise equipment behind a half-open door. “You’re still a weight lifter?” she asked.

  “A casual one. I walk a lot and do some lifting a couple times a week, play some tennis. Not as much as I used to.”

  “It seems to be working.”

  He pushed open the door to an elegant bedroom, classically decorated except that the heavy brocades and mahogany popular in old Paris had been updated to light fabrics and woods, accented with brass. He twisted the handle of a wide double window and opened both panels into the room.

  “In Sarasota we’d call that a French door. It’s far too big for a window,” Jen said with a little laugh. She leaned out over a waist-high protective bar set firmly into the thick stone walls, all that separated her from an eight-story drop to the tree-shaded courtyard below.

  “There’s almost no air conditioning in Paris,” Eddie said. “With windows like this, we don’t regret it more than two or three days a year. And we’re too far north for many bugs, so no screens.”

  She looked across the courtyard
and asked, “How many people have this view of Notre Dame?”

  “Not many. It’s beautiful this time of day, with the sun shining from behind us on the towers and the spire. From the front of the building you can look up the Champs Elysées to the Arc de Triomphe.” He turned toward the door.

  “We need to leave in an hour and a half. Please make yourself comfortable, and plan on staying here while you’re in Paris.”

  As he closed the door, Jen tried to sort out what she knew about Eddie Grant. For one, he looked much like the pictures of his father Roy had shown her. Artie had been tall and Eddie was a bit shorter, a touch under six feet. Like his father, he had a large head topped by carefully cut and brushed black hair, so black its highlights appeared purple, long by American standards but fashionable in Paris. His hands were large, like those of a basketball player or a pianist — Jen hoped he was a pianist but they hadn’t talked about either music or sports during their three days together. It was the end of the day, but his navy blazer showed little wear. Neither did his gray slacks or checked shirt. Even the tie was still tightly knotted. It was, she thought, a man’s outfit of the sort she hardly ever saw any more in Sarasota, and missed.

  The apartment’s high ceilings, ornate plaster decoration and designer furnishings reminded her that Eddie’s father had been the last member of the founding family to work at Norway Steel, which had been an industrial giant from the Civil War until U.S. corporations became multinationals and moved their jobs offshore in search of cheaper and more docile workers. The company had disappeared in the wave of mergers that had swept over American business in the 70s and 80s (“stupid financial engineering by mental defectives,” Roy had called it), but Artie had known when to sell and as a result his widow and son were among the wealthiest Americans in Europe. The apartment showed it.

  4

  Paris

  Eddie walked back to his office, leaving the door ajar in case Jen called him. He read Roy’s letter again, then began turning over in his mind some of the wartime stories his father had told him. As he always did during the rare times he allowed himself to think back over his father’s accomplishments, he pondered the unusual mix of circumstances and abilities that had put Artie in position to achieve big things — scion of American industrial royalty but reared in Paris, a Harvard Law graduate persuaded to turn his back on a lucrative but boring career at the family firm and join Army intelligence a full year before Pearl Harbor. Military officers weren’t the public heroes they became after the war started, so his decision appeared bizarre to his friends and family.

  He rejoined Norway Steel after the war, only to abandon an almost certain chance to become its president. He was repelled by McCarthy and thought he could contribute more to helping Europe rebuild if he lived in Paris, where he had spent happy childhood years with his mother. And his marriage was failing.

  The Grants were part of the Dutch burgher community that had settled in and around Hyde Park, a wealthy unprepossessing town best known as the home of FDR, in a scenic part of the Hudson River valley less than 100 miles north of Times Square. Eddie’s great-great-grandfather and a few other farsighted businessmen pooled their resources just as the American railroads accelerated their historic expansion to the West. His distant cousin the Civil War hero and president had added an unquantifiable but tangible strength to his efforts to line up buyers for the fledgling company’s products.

  His grandfather had been born in 1890 and fathered Artie in 1917, shortly before he went off to die of pneumonia at Château-Thierry. Artie had never known him, and his French mother had abandoned Hyde Park as soon as the war ended and taken her young son to Paris, where he had lived until it was time to go to college and law school. Eddie’s experience had been almost the same, except that he had chosen to join the Army instead of going to law school. The Grant men had always been drawn to military service.

  Artie married a Hyde Park debutante as soon as he returned from the war in 1947, but the marriage wasn’t a success and they divorced when he returned to Paris four years later to become European president of Norway Steel. He lived for a while with his wartime friend Alain d’Amboise, a genuine Resistance hero and rising political star in the Gaullist government, and daughter Margaux, no longer the child he’d met once in 1943 but a rigorously educated dark-eyed beauty of 19. In a week they were lovers, in a month they were engaged and three months later they were married. They ignored the malicious society chatter about their twenty-year age difference and short courtship, and for the next 16 years Margaux worked alongside Artie to turn Norway Steel into the largest of the companies furnishing basic materials to Marshall Plan projects. Their fortune, already large, grew to mammoth proportions.

  After Eddie was born she turned her attention to him. Neither she nor Artie let him forget that she had been an important part of the family business, never mind that French women didn’t get the vote until the end of the war. Her attitudes had shaped Eddie’s.

  Eddie forced his attention back to the letter, which he had let fall to his desk as he reminisced. He tried to avoid random walks down the gnarly paths of family memory because they led to dark comparisons between his life and his father’s. He shook off the thought. He was getting better at that.

  There was a certain rootlessness and self-doubt about him, a feeling of not being fully involved in his own life. He hid it well, except from his mother, who thought it had no merit and thus ignored it. During his youth in Paris he had been fully and unconsciously French; during his college years in the United States he had worked very hard at becoming American. Then came his experience of war in Kuwait and Iraq, the first time he had felt completely at home outside of Paris.

  His return to Paris was partly an effort to ground himself somewhere — anywhere — and he believed as the years went by that it had worked. That is, he believed it until the terrible year 2001, when his American wife and son were murdered, his father died under suspicious circumstances, and his ancestral country was attacked. For the next two years he was lost, wandering in the wilderness of his own confused mind. He went through a series of short-term relationships, always with French women, but the ghosts of his unhappy year were stronger and each of them wandered away confused and disappointed. After three or four years his doubts lessened but even after seven years he wondered almost daily how so much could have gone so wrong in that one year. The police had never found good suspects for the murder of his family, and remained uncertain that his father’s death had been anything other than an old man’s loss of control just long enough to run into a tree.

  Eddie looked again at the letter. Roy’s clues pointed back to his and Artie’s war, of that he was certain. It seemed clear that “wind up in Paris” meant the art — whatever it was — was supposed to be somewhere in his city, or at least was supposed to have been there at the end of the war. The “long-necked bastard” baffled him, as did the reference to a “round-heeled contact.” He knew it told him to seek out a woman, and one for whom Roy had little respect, but it didn’t remind him of anyone his father had mentioned. He tucked that clue into the back of his mind for later. Then he ran the page through his scanner, printed six copies and folded them into an inside pocket of his jacket, and locked the original in his safe. He showered quickly and changed to a blue suit with a maroon tie.

  Jen opened the door before he had time to knock twice. She had changed to a trimly cut dark-gray silk blouse with black slacks, just the right color for Paris, and added a black-and-red Hermès scarf that fell from her neck to a loose knot at her waist, the fashion currently popular among chic Parisian women. The contrast of the dark ensemble against her blonde hair was dazzling, and Eddie remembered that twenty years before he had thought her a lovely girl. He forced into the background a picture of how she had looked naked.

  “Do you think your mother will like it?” she asked, spinning to give Eddie the full effect. “She was wearing a scarf like this. I got the idea from her and from women I saw on the street o
n the way over here. Roy gave me the scarf during our last trip to Paris.”

  “She will,” he replied. “I certainly do. Are you up to a short walk? That is, short by Paris standards. We could get a cab but the walk will only take 15 minutes, and the city views are terrific, especially the Opéra.”

  “Then we’ll walk.”

  The elevator door opened immediately. Her perfume was more mature than twenty years before but it suited her just as well, he thought as they descended to the lobby. He nodded goodnight to the night clerk, who responded with a sober “Bonsoir, M Grant, Madame” then together they pushed the revolving door and walked out into Rue Saint-Roch to hear the sound of piano music filling the air.

  “What is that?” she asked, surprised.

  “Our regular concert. One of my neighbors across the street is famous for her Chopin.” He stopped a moment to listen. “That’s one of his Études, I think. Sometimes I move a chair to the window and listen to her entire practice session.

  “That’s lovely. I guess my equivalent would be country music on a car radio.

  “But tell me about yourself. What do you do now? I should have asked your mother.”

  “Business. I moved back as soon as I could after I got out of the Army and bought a little school where we teach business English. I’ve expanded into a few other cities. The French officers I met in Kuwait all told me they needed better English, because even then it was just about everyone’s second language. Our office is just a block from here, in fact.” He pointed up Avenue de l’Opéra toward the Palais Garnier. It had recently been refurbished, and what appeared to be acres of gold leaf gleamed in the setting sun.