Treasure of Saint-Lazare

by John Pearce

  Everyone’s eyes were fixed on Philippe, who sat at the head of the dining table. The women, especially, gave him their rapt attention. At two inches shorter than Eddie and reed thin, he looked like an actor playing a French aristocrat, down to the tonsured bullet head fringed with short gray hair. In fact, he was the son of a small-town policeman and a schoolteacher, and had risen to the upper ranks of the Paris police on the strength of a strong performance in school, keen investigative skills, and his political sense, which included his friendship with Margaux’s father. Gabriel, tall and trim in his working uniform of starched white shirt and blue trousers, sat at his left to take notes. Margaux had placed his kepi carefully on a sideboard.

  “They were in fact Germans, and they made the very serious mistake of nearly killing the night porter. He was cut up very badly with a large knife that the driver picked up in the street. I believe he will live, but it will be a long time before those Germans are released.

  “I saw the knife,” Eddie said. “It was an old American Army bayonet. Very sharp and very dangerous, and if its main purpose was to threaten us it succeeded. The tall one dropped it when I pushed him off the sidewalk into his car.”

  “I recall that you have some experience with weapons like this one,” Philippe said drily. “Please tell me how it first came to your attention.” He was ready to hear the full story.

  Jen interjected, “The German who threatened us with the knife made it clear he was looking for a valuable painting, and he thought we knew something about it. Do you know anything about them, other than their identities?”

  “I don’t think we even know that. Their papers are almost certainly false. We are checking the two we arrested through the German police. We don’t have anything on the driver, other than his odd appearance. One of the citizens who saw him stab the porter said the bottom half of his right ear was missing.”

  Jen looked up quickly with a sharp intake of breath. “Oh. They are from the East, which frightens me.”

  “We don’t know that,” Philippe responded. “How can you be sure?”

  “From their accents — definitely eastern. I haven’t heard that accent since I moved to Florida with Roy, but it brings back bad memories. It’s the way my stepfather sounded, and we only found out later he was an old Stasi agent.”

  Philippe reassured her. “We will be careful. If they do have connections with the old East German government we’ll need to take special care. They seem to be interested mainly in one painting, but their friends the Russians looted many more artworks and treasures that the Nazis had already stolen. Who knows what else they might be after?”

  Eddie recounted how the Germans had followed Margaux’s car around the corner, then stopped in front of the wax museum. He summarized the brief fight and their escape through the Hôtel Chopin, then the call from Margaux when she had discovered the burglary.

  After an hour of questions, Philippe stood up to leave. He agreed with Margaux that Eddie and Jen should stay with her that night, and offered to survey Eddie’s home later in the morning. “Give me time for a little sleep. Can we meet at 10:30? I can pick you up here and we’ll drive over together.”

  Promptly at 8:30, Jen heard a sharp rap on her door then a few seconds later a knock on the next one down the hall. She opened the door and saw Eddie leave the room to her left.

  He smiled at her. “Today’s the day the real work begins. Aurélie said she has a class at 10, but as soon as that’s finished she’ll start on this project. There are several art historians with offices near hers, so she’ll see what they know about the missing painting. They may have heard about other cases like this one, too.”

  Jen followed them into the dining room and came face to face with Martine, thin, unsmiling, and wearing a black dress trimmed with white lace, very unlike the blue smock Jen had seen the day before. It was all she could do to keep from laughing out loud. She had no idea French maids still wore French maid uniforms — the last one she’d seen was laid out on the bed of an older lover ten years before. She’d refused to wear it.

  “Oh, Madame, I am so sorry to hear of your father. And now all of this …” She did not finish the sentence.

  Margaux jumped in to fill the uncomfortable silence. “This is all unpleasant, but we’ll get it cleaned up. The concierge has already called a contractor who does work in the building and in two or three days everything will be back the way it was.”

  They ate quickly, a classic French breakfast of café au lait and croissants, with ham added. Then they moved into the living room. Jen took in the postcard view of the Invalides through the long windows that had been covered with heavy drapes the night before.

  Even though the sun had been up for four hours it was far from overhead and the dome still cast a strong shadow to her right. The gold leaf on it shone brilliantly, much brighter than it had under the floodlights. Jen thought it must be spectacular to live in a city with such views whose summer days were three hours longer than hers.

  “Margaux,” she asked, “do these views ever bore you?”

  “Never, my dear. I could spend all day every day just moving from this chair to the terrace and having Martine bring me lunch. This is where I plan to be until the day I die.”

  Eddie pulled a wooden chair close and said, “Time to work. As I see it, somebody thinks we have something valuable dating from the war, or at least know where it is. It’s almost certain the ‘something’ is a painting, because that’s what the Nazis stole the most of, and that’s what the Germans wanted last night. It must be something that was well known at the time — I suspect one of Aurélie’s colleagues will be able to tell us off the top of his head what we’re dealing with, especially now that we know, from Mother, that Hans Frank was involved.”

  His iPhone chirped. He looked at the screen and said, “Philippe.” He listened a few seconds and then said, “I’ll be right down.”

  “Philippe will be downstairs in a couple of minutes. I’ll go meet him so we can survey my place. If nothing’s out of line I’ll come back here at once and we can go check the bank box. Is that OK with both of you?”

  “That’s a good plan,” Margaux told him. “It will give me a chance to learn a little more about Jen and her father.”

  “Well, my dear,” Margaux said after Eddie had left through the service door. “We’ll have some time together before Charles Edward comes back. Let’s learn a little more about each other. Nothing in this world is ever as simple as it seems on the surface.

  “For instance, have you and Charles Edward kept up with each other since your dalliance in Sarasota? For that matter, is dalliance still a word in America?”

  Jen’s face reddened but she looked Margaux in the eyes without flinching. “Not once. If he’d come back I would have left with him, and things might have been different. I still don’t know anything about his life since then, and he doesn’t seem anxious to tell me about it.”

  “No, I don’t imagine he is. He was ashamed of the way he acted, because he was engaged to Lauren at the time. He swore he would never do anything like that again, and as far as I know he hasn’t. But I do know you enchanted him and it tortured him to think he’d made the wrong choice.”

  “Please tell me what happened to his wife.”

  “You need to know, because it still affects Charles Edward. Our family had a terrible year in 2001. I lost Artie and Charles Edward lost both Lauren and their son. It isn’t something I ever want to live through again.”

  “Eddie had a son?”

  “His name was Sam, and he was born the year after they moved back to Paris, so he was nine years old. They lived across the river in the 16th, in a lovely old apartment they had renovated.

  “That was the year Artie died. He normally went to Rennes once a month to talk to the managers of a commercial property we own there. He would go over on the train in the evening, rent a car and stay in the hotel next door to the shopping center, then meet with the property manager the next mornin
g and take an early-afternoon train back to Paris.

  “One day in the spring the manager called me to say Artie hadn’t arrived for their meeting. Artie was never late, so this worried me a lot. He didn’t have a portable telephone then. He said he didn’t need one in Paris, and at that time there wasn’t widespread coverage in the smaller cities, much less the country. So I called Philippe and he asked the Rennes police if they knew anything.

  “They found Artie’s body in the rental car in a grove of trees. The gasoline had caught fire…” Margaux stopped and Jen stepped closer to put her arm around her shoulders. “I’m very sorry you had to tell me that,” she said.

  “Philippe had to go to Rennes to identify the body,” Margaux said. “I’ve always appreciated that he did that.”

  Jen said, “That was in the spring. Then Lauren and Sam died the same year?”

  “Just a couple of months after 9/11, so the year was pretty bad already. Charles Edward was in Rennes on the same inspection tour Artie used to make. He came back in the afternoon and called Lauren but there was no answer and he figured she was out shopping.

  “But earlier Philippe had called me to say Lauren and Sam’s bodies had been found in their apartment. They’d been murdered quite brutally, and the apartment was set on fire.”

  Jen stood back, horrified. “That’s absolutely terrible. Poor Eddie.”

  “He did not take it well. Philippe and I went together to his office to deliver the news. He knew it was something bad when we came through the door together, and when we told him he did not say a word. In fact, he said almost nothing until the funeral was complete and they were buried, then he went to the Hotel Negresco in Nice for a week. I understand he was drunk the entire time.

  “When he returned he refused to discuss Lauren or Sam. He didn’t mention her name for five years. He was very seriously depressed, although he has so much personal discipline it didn’t show in his work.”

  Margaux stood. “I’ll show you a picture. We don’t leave it out any more because it makes Charles Edward very sad, so I moved it to my bedroom.”

  She returned and handed Jen a gold frame containing a family portrait of Eddie and Lauren seated, with a handsome boy standing between them. All three looked at the camera, the boy with an impish grin on his face. “This was made the year before Lauren and Sam were killed.”

  “I didn’t realize Lauren was black,” Jen said in surprise. “Wasn’t she pretty.”

  “She was a lovely woman and a very good mother, although I’m afraid Paris turned out to be a disappointment to her,” Margaux said.

  “Charles Edward is the best of France where race is concerned. It doesn’t matter to him at all. I think he took some grief about it at college, even though Lauren was the daughter of the campus military commander — ROTC, I think they call it. He was a decorated Army officer and Charles Edward looked up to him. I believe he’s still living, although I haven’t seen him since the funeral. His wife, interestingly enough, is French, with a Vietnamese grandfather. She worked at the American Embassy here when he was a young attaché.

  “The police never made any arrests. They were pretty sure Artie’s death was an accident, but the fires in both cases made them suspicious. Philippe says they never even got any good leads.”

  Margaux took the picture back to her bedroom and, as she returned, Eddie knocked on the service door, and Martine went to admit him.

  “That didn’t take long,” he said. “There was no sign anyone had been in the house. Anyway, it would be tough for a burglar to get in without the desk clerk seeing him.

  “Why don’t we go to the bank now?”

  Jen asked, “Would you mind if I stay here? I’m still exhausted from the flight and an hour’s nap would help me a lot.”

  Margaux and Eddie took the elevator to the ground floor and walked out onto Avenue de Breteuil. At the gate a policeman touched his cap and wished them bonjour. “Philippe said he’d have someone watch for a day or two,” Eddie told Margaux. “He thinks only one of the Germans is still free and is unlikely to try anything by himself, but he doesn’t want to take the chance they might be able to call on local help.”

  They walked in silence down the shell walkway bordering the first long block of the broad green esplanade, passing a homeless man dozing on a green bench, then a few yards further along a couple nuzzling in the sun, the remains of a picnic spread on their blanket. A plastic wine glass had tipped over, spilling its red stain dangerously near his trousers, but they were oblivious to it.

  They turned down the narrow street leading to the HSBC Bank branch where Margaux kept her accounts, just a few yards from the ornate church of St. François-Xavier, where the establishment of Paris goes to preen on Sunday mornings.

  The bank manager brought a locked steel box large enough to hold a stack of file folders and placed it on a small desk in the corner.

  Margaux tried to insert her small key into the box’s lock but fumbled. “Nerves,” she said, then turned and handed it to Eddie, who opened the lock and raised the lid of the box. Inside were two large envelopes, one marked “Place Vauban,” the other blank.

  “We want the blank one,” Margaux said. “That’s where I put everything except the deed for the house. There were some letters and papers in the safe and some on Artie’s desk, so I put them all together in the second envelope. I tried to keep them more or less in the same order I found them.”

  Eddie said, “Let’s look quickly at them here, just in case there’s something we don’t want Jen to see just now.”

  Margaux was surprised. “Are you concerned?”

  “I just don’t know much about her, and I’d rather avoid a problem now than try to make it go away later.”

  Artie and Roy had communicated almost entirely by mail, and Artie had clipped their correspondence together with the latest on the top, mixing the originals of Roy’s letters with carbon copies, then photocopies during the later years, of his own. The only exception appeared to be the last one, which was two handwritten pages dated only a few days before his death.

  “It doesn’t look like he mailed that one,” Eddie said.

  “I found it in a desk drawer and just put it on the stack without thinking.”

  Eddie looked at the next one in the stack, dated several weeks before Artie’s unsent reply. It appeared to have been printed on a laser printer.

  “Damn,” he said under his breath. Then, louder, “Roy was onto something and he wanted Artie to follow it up. This talks about a dinner party he attended down in the Loire Valley, at some chateau near Tours. There was an art dealer there who said some interesting things about old Nazi treasure — like he knew where some of it was hidden. But Roy couldn’t get any more information out of him, and asked Artie to go talk to him.”

  “I remember that,” Margaux said, showing more interest than she had before. “He did go see someone near Tours just the month before he died. It was his next-to-last trip. He took the train back as far as LeMans and rented a car to drive down to the chateau country. He had to stay an extra night there, but he told me when he came back that he didn’t get anything worthwhile because the old man wouldn’t open up to him. And he said he was tired of Roy’s wild goose chases.”

  Eddie looked back at the first page on the stack. “This says he didn’t find out anything but was suspicious the man was hiding something. It’s not much, but it’s something and it’s apparent he intended to pursue it further. I wonder if he ever asked Philippe about it?

  “Anyway, this is the first semi-solid lead we have, so maybe there’s something real here, and not just the imagination of some old Nazi who moved back to Germany. The Germans who met us outside the museum last night seemed convinced there really is something to be found, and here we find a story about an art dealer who might still be alive saying he knows where it might be. It’s all vague, but there obviously are forces at work out there we need to know about, if only for self-protection.”

  “Jen asked
me today if you’d be willing to go back to Sarasota with her. Would you do that?”

  “I suppose so, for a few days. I’d like to find out if the police there think her father’s death is anything more than a tragic accident. It’s just too coincidental that the Germans came after us last night just a few days after Roy’s death. It could be an accident…”

  “But you don’t think so.”

  “I don’t know what I think. What I fear is that something evil, something that Artie thought was dead history, has come back to life, like desert flowers that bloom every twenty years.”

  7

  Sarasota

  Jen and Eddie had carried their second glasses of wine to the covered deck that overlooked the cool, green garden spread under two ancient live oak trees.

  “We don’t have Martine or your mother’s crystal, so you’ll have to make do with the Wetzmuller special,” Jen said with a smile.

  She seemed more relaxed than she had been in Paris, which Eddie thought meant she was more comfortable back on her home ground. He had wanted to stay at a hotel and at first she hadn’t resisted, but then she suggested that after all the problems they’d had in Paris she would be more comfortable with him in the downstairs guest room. She would stay in her upstairs apartment, as usual. He yielded to her logic, secretly pleased.

  They had flown to Tampa via New York on a Delta flight that gave them time to drive to Jen’s home before 7 p.m. “Neither of us will feel like going out,” she told him. “We’ll have steak and a baked potato, which is something I’ve never seen in Paris.”

  “You could probably get it somewhere, maybe Hippopotamus, but it wouldn’t be the same. That’s also where Americans go to get a Coke, but they aren’t the same, either. Steak and baked potato sounds good.”