Treasure of Saint-Lazare

by John Pearce

  Jen stopped to stare. “That’s absolutely magnificent.”

  Eddie quickly took her elbow. “Let’s get out of traffic first.”

  They turned right, crossed in front of the fortresslike Bourse, then left up a two-lane street with little traffic.

  In a few minutes they reached the front of Pierre-Victor, whose glass windows were filled with elaborate displays of its wares — it was famous for oysters, and seemed to have dozens of different types.

  The headwaiter recognized Eddie immediately. “Bonsoir, Madame. M Grant, bonsoir. Votre mère vous attend au fond du restaurant.” He turned to lead them to a large table, set off from others at the rear.

  The table had clearly been set aside for dignitaries, celebrities, or lovers — anyone who wanted space to talk without being overheard. To Eddie’s practiced eye, the other customers settling themselves into the comfortable chairs appeared to be an even mix of couples and groups of three or four men out for business meetings. In the front corner of the room, with their backs to the wall so they could see everyone in the room, he spotted Paul with Gabriel Domingue, the tall police officer assigned to drive Philippe. Both had the ramrod posture of military men and would clearly have been more comfortable with their jackets off in a bar in the 19th arrondissement than in a white-tablecloth restaurant in the 2nd.

  The waiter was middle-aged, a man clearly at home in his work, polite without being obsequious. As she followed him, Jen surveyed the small group waiting for them. Margaux, clearly in command, watched expectantly as they approached. Eddie had told her his father first met Margaux when he was smuggled into southern France by submarine to coordinate D-Day preparations with her father. She was 11 at the time, which meant she had to be 75 or 76 years old now, although to Jen she looked closer to 60. She had dark eyes and hair of a deep chestnut, with reddish highlights that shimmered under the restaurant’s flattering lights. Jen wondered briefly how long she had spent that afternoon having it done into a perfect chignon, and decided she was a Frenchwoman of the old school, the ones who get dressed and made up to take out the trash, for whom the time invested would always take second place to the result. At her right sat an older version of the policeman sitting with Paul, whom she took to be Philippe Cabillaud. Philippe’s daughter Aurélie, a striking blonde about 30 years old, sat across from Margaux.

  Eddie said a quick hello to his mother, then introduced Jen to Aurélie, who looked up with a friendly and open smile, her green eyes sparkling. He and Philippe shook hands warmly. Philippe kissed Jen gravely on both cheeks and told her in quiet French that Margaux had explained her trip and he was enchanted to meet her although it was unfortunate it had to be at such a sad time for her. She thought he was wonderful.

  Aurélie had already heard the story of Jen’s surprise visit and of Margaux’s certainty that it had something to do with her husband’s wartime work.

  Even though Aurélie wasn’t born until a generation after the war, she grew up in its shadow. She had watched as the large American military presence in Europe was dismantled during her childhood, and her doctoral studies in French history had required her to spend a great deal of time examining the mangled relations between France and its European neighbors that led up to the two brutal 20th-century wars. To her it seemed completely natural that the theft of Europe’s patrimony could reverberate for seven decades and fire the imagination of men like Roy Castor and Artie Grant. European countries had been stealing each other’s art treasures for centuries — to wait decades to avenge a theft or settle a grudge was nothing.

  “Hello again,” Margaux said to Jen with a smile. “I’m glad to see you again. Were you able to divine the meaning of your father’s letter?” She spoke English fluently but with the tinge of formality common to French speakers who learn English as adults.

  “Unfortunately, it is still a mystery to us, Madame Grant. Eddie thinks you might be able to help decipher it.” She heard herself mirror Margaux’s formal language and thought it sounded very strange coming from an Americanized German.

  “We can talk about that after everyone’s had a glass of champagne. I think a trans-Atlantic flight on short notice deserves an apéritif a little more elegant than a kir, and Aurélie and I have already started. Philippe just arrived.” Margaux signaled to the waiter.

  Jen told herself it was a good thing she’d remembered to bring the stylish scarf. Without it, she would have been underdressed next to Margaux and Aurélie, who radiated the understated elegance of Parisian women out for a fine summer evening. Margaux, her fashionable chignon set off by simple gold earrings, wore a slim black skirt with a silk blouse of tiny multicolored stripes — the effect was somewhere near the red end of the spectrum.

  Aurélie, on the other hand, would have been just as comfortable in New York as in Paris. She looked like what she was, an affluent young professional approaching the peak of her beauty. Her shoulder-length ash-blond hair contrasted starkly with an all-black outfit of slacks and a trim short-sleeved sweater cut low enough to emphasize her figure. She wore only one piece of jewelry, a wide choker the distinctive brilliant color of high-carat gold.

  Margaux had the olive complexion of her Mediterranean origin. She and Jen were a few inches over five feet tall, much shorter than anyone else at the table, with Jen an inch or two taller.

  “I think the langue du soir should be English,” Eddie said to the entire table after the champagne arrived. “I heard Jen speak good French when I first met her years ago, but it’s been a long time and she’s tired. So English it will be?”

  Jen said with relief, “I appreciate that. I learned French in school but I’m shaky now. We don’t speak a lot of French in Sarasota. Or German, for that matter, so I’ve pretty much become a monoglot American.”

  The waiter came and went. As they waited, Aurélie turned to Eddie with a smile and said, “Édouard. I haven’t seen you in a while.”

  He was Eddie to his friends and Charles Edward to his mother, but to Aurélie Cabillaud — and only Aurélie — he was Édouard, with its silky drawn-out syllables that always made him think of languid afternoon romance. He was christened with the name on just such an afternoon five years before, the day before he bought her the necklace.

  “I’ve stayed busy with the usual. You?”

  “Much the same. New students, different classes, but I still like my work, and I’m going to start a new book soon, one about the Revolution as it was seen in the distant provinces. It should be fun to do the research.”

  Eddie and Aurélie’s friends had been disappointed when they broke up. His closest friends weren’t as surprised as hers because they’d seen his dark moods and flashes of sharp, unexpected anger. Hers, on the other hand, saw none of that because he hid it behind the veneer of bonhomie he had first erected for his clients. Aurélie did not enlighten them. She said only that both had wanted a permanent marriage and had simply decided the time was not right.

  As they chatted, Margaux turned to Jen and said, “I was very sorry to hear of your father’s death. He was a very important part of my late husband’s early life, before we married, but for one reason or another I never met him. Would you mind telling us about him and your life in Florida? It may help us figure out what’s happening.”

  Everyone else fell silent.

  Jen thought for a few seconds, then lowered her voice.

  “I’ll do my best. You should know about it.” She paused and took a deep breath.

  “You know Roy owned an antique and art business in Frankfurt. It was successful — after the war many new fortunes were built, and all of those people wanted to flaunt their new wealth, and Roy was always there to sell to them. He also was one of the first dealers to sell in great quantity to American dealers.

  “My mother worked as Roy’s office manager and accountant, in a converted house across the street from a wonderful park. Her name was Gutrud Wetzmuller, and she had been born in Berlin during the war. Her mother didn’t want either of them to be cap
tured by the Russians, so in the chaos near the end she found a way to escape toward the west with a German officer. She wound up in Frankfurt, in the American zone of occupation.

  “My grandmother raised my mother in poverty but paid close attention to her education, and by the time she finished what we call high school in the States she was a pretty good accountant, so she had no problem finding jobs. She was also very attractive, which didn’t hurt.

  “We never lived with Roy, but he paid my mother a far larger salary than he had to, and she told me he also paid my school fees. I actually spent two of my middle-school years in Lyon, which is where I learned my French. That was while she was married to a very odd man, an older Frenchman who had been a collaborator during the war and found it more comfortable to live in Germany afterward. He hit her from time to time, he drank too much, and he had a nasty son about my age. She divorced him and brought me home from France the year before she died.

  “As I grew older I became less certain Roy was my father. He and my mother didn’t socialize, and I never knew him to be involved with another woman, either in Frankfurt or Sarasota. I think he was just one of those people who are a little confused about their sexual identity and deal with it by doing nothing. But none of that matters now. In Sarasota he treated me like his daughter.

  “My mother asked him to take me when she found out she was dying. Roy had moved to Florida when he sold his business a few years before. She’d already had one bout with breast cancer before she was 30, and the doctors just couldn’t handle the second one. When she died she was just a little younger than I am now.

  “I remember he came to Frankfurt to get me. He arrived the day my mother was buried.

  “Ten years or so ago, only when I asked him directly, he told me he thought he was my father. He and my mother had a short affair on a buying trip to the East. She was living with someone else at the time, so neither of them could ever be sure, but I was happy to think so, and I believe he was, too.”

  Aurélie could see Jen was having more and more difficulty talking about her father, so as the appetizers arrived she tried to move the conversation back to safe ground. “Did he talk to you much about what he and Mr. Grant did during the war?” she asked in a gentle voice.

  Jen was relieved to change the subject. “He said they first met in Paris just after the Liberation in 1944. Roy was a sergeant in the Signal Corps and Artie was a major in intelligence who was very much involved with the Resistance in the last year before the Normandy invasion. After Paris was liberated he was recruited by the Monuments Men.

  “When Major Grant was ordered to Munich to help look for looted art treasures he asked for Roy as his assistant. Roy always said it was Major Grant who picked him out of the Signal Corps and set him on the way to such an interesting life. There was quite a difference in their ages, and Major Grant was an officer and a very educated man while Roy was a sergeant with a high-school education, but they became friends. He always told me it was because they were both very curious.”

  Margaux jumped in. “That was Artie, curious about anything and everything. He told me he was surprised to be invited into the Monuments Men, because most of them were highly educated in their field, while he was a lawyer and a spy.

  “And I’m curious right now about this letter from Roy you found. May we take a look at it before dinner arrives?”

  Eddie took the copies from his pocket and passed them around the table.

  “I have part of the answer,” Margaux announced after only a few seconds. “Artie once used the same words. Hans Frank was governor general of Poland, a thoroughly brutal man. Artie met him and never could understand how a trained lawyer could bring himself to act the way Frank did. And he was known for his stolen art collection. In fact, behind Hitler and Göring he was one of the worst of the art thieves.

  “Artie called him the long-necked bastard because he was hanged after the Nuremberg trials.”

  Aurélie asked, “So the young fellow is someone or something Hans Frank wanted to send to Paris so he could find it later?”

  “More than likely he thought he’d get a prison sentence and wanted to keep it safe until he got out,” Eddie said. “I doubt he thought he’d be hanged, and in fact the allies only executed about half of the Nazis they tried, and that was a pretty small group to start with — too small for my taste. Frank knew he would need money to start a new life, and by the end of the war it must have been clear the allies were going to occupy Germany and not repeat the mistake they had made after the First War. He probably figured the French would have no stomach for a military government once the war ended, which would make it easier to pick up his loot in Paris than in occupied Munich.

  “It’s most likely some sort of valuable art that Frank wanted to hide until he and his friends could resurrect the Fourth Reich. Hundreds — maybe thousands — of pieces of treasure the Nazis stole are still missing. The Jews were the easiest marks. They were sometimes offered exit visas in exchange for all their valuables. Other times they were just shipped off to Auschwitz and the property was stolen outright. The same thing happened in all the occupied countries. Poland under Hans Frank was one of the worst.”

  The waiter arrived with their main courses. Jen discovered she was hungrier than she thought, and wished she had ordered more than a salad, even a very good one.

  Minutes passed, then Aurélie broke the silence. “So we have a couple of questions for which we have no answers. Who or what is the young fellow — it’s probably art, maybe gold or jewels, but we don’t know — and who is this round-heeled person? And then there’s the underground railroad angle.”

  Margaux said, “That name was a sadistic play on the Underground Railroad that smuggled American slaves north. The old Nazis set up their own version and used it mainly to move their people. They called it Die Spinne.

  “It flourished for a couple of years after the war, and there was some activity until the early 50s. Its main purpose was to take Nazi fugitives to South America, but there’s no reason it couldn’t have been used to move looted treasure as well. One of its main relay points was a small town near Munich called Memmingen. As I recall, the local priests were very active. And Artie told me he suspected some of the Americans in his unit knew about it but did nothing to stop the traffic.

  “So the mysterious young fellow is our key,” Aurélie said. “We know Hans Frank was an art thief, and that he was in charge of Poland. I know a little bit about art history of that period, but this doesn’t ring a bell. I have some friends who teach nothing else. I’ll ask them tomorrow.”

  Eddie signaled to Paul that Margaux was ready to go. While they waited for him to bring the car, they finished their small cups of dark, aromatic expresso. Margaux and Eddie argued good-naturedly over the bill, but in the end she paid. Eddie invited Aurélie to walk part of the way with him and Jen and she accepted, curious to know more about this American woman who, she suspected, also had a history with Eddie. Philippe waited on the sidewalk while his driver got the car.

  Paul stopped the Peugeot at the restaurant door. Eddie bussed his mother on both cheeks and told her, “We’ll walk. It’s not far, and Jen — all of us — will love passing the Opéra while it’s all lighted. Call me first thing if you think of anything else about the letter, and we’ll work on it in the morning as well. We’ll come to Place Vauban.”

  5

  Paris

  Eddie stepped into the street to close the car door for Margaux and noticed two men who had left the restaurant just ahead of them waiting on the sidewalk a hundred yards away. An image of Mutt and Jeff, from the American comic strip his father read faithfully for years, flew through his mind as he watched them climb hurriedly into the back of a large black Mercedes sedan as soon as it glided to a stop.

  “Odd,” he said to himself as his mother’s car disappeared up the street and turned left.

  The smile Aurélie had worn through the dinner changed to a look of concern. “We can figure out Roy’s
letter. Margaux got us partway there tonight, and I’m confident my friends at the Sorbonne will help tomorrow. But we haven’t even started to think about what it really means.

  “It could be the musings of an old man who had decided to give up, or it could have been a serious warning to Mr. Grant. And that probably means to you and Jen as well.”

  Jen replied, “The police in Sarasota say officially Roy’s death was an accident, but the detective in charge thinks there’s something fishy about it, and so do I. It’s very unlike Roy to cut across a street in the middle of the block.

  “The police are out looking for the car. They think it’ll turn up in a repair shop sooner or later.”

  The black Mercedes pulled away from the curb and turned behind Paul and Margaux. The boulevard was brightly lighted and bustling with pedestrians and theatergoers as they crossed a few minutes before 10:30.

  Eddie reached for his telephone, intending to alert Paul to the possible tail, when the Mercedes stopped in front of the wax museum, Musée Grévin, a hundred yards from the corner. The right rear door opened and tall Mutt stepped out, followed by short Jeff, and then a city bus pulled out to avoid them, blocking his view. When the bus passed the two men had disappeared.

  Aurélie was pleased to show off her Paris to a fascinated visitor and kept up a running commentary. Jen, no longer tired, asked question after question and suggested they stop for a last cup of coffee along the walk to Rue Saint-Roch.

  Eddie half listened because his attention was focused on the Mercedes. It stood idling in a no-parking lane, rear door fully open. That wasn’t uncommon in this part of the city, where drivers often had to wait for their passengers to finish dinner or the theater, but to leave a door open in the June heat struck him as odd. The two men had disappeared, either into the alcove entrance of the Musée Grévin or Passage Jouffroy, one of the most charming of the city’s many covered shopping arcades.