Treasure of Saint-Lazare

by John Pearce

  Jen looked at Eddie with surprise. “You killed Dmitri?”

  “I electrocuted him. He shot himself at the same time and probably would have died from that, but I did kill him.”

  Paul continued, “Artie was almost 90 years old at the time, and his heart just couldn’t take the beating. Finally, they put a plastic bag over his head to frighten him, make him believe he would suffocate, and he had a heart attack. They put his body in his car to fake an accident, then doused it with gasoline.”

  Eddie asked, “You’re sure?”

  “Yes,” Paul said, “The police and prosecutors have opened up to me, I think completely. They have a full confession from Sonny. I am sorry.

  “Sonny also explained the long delay between 2001 and Mr. Castor’s death. Sommers thought things would go smoothly when your father was kidnapped, because Erich Kraft was experienced in such things, according to a reference he gave Sommers. Kraft would question Mr. Grant, using intimidation if necessary, he would tell them where to find the painting and everyone would leave as friends. It was a major miscalculation on his part, just like it was a major error to trust a thug like Kraft.

  “He was so bummed by Mr. Grant’s death that he called off the entire project. Then he ran short of cash and the price of gold started to shoot up, so he reactivated it. He thought he could control the Germans but he was wrong there, too. He should never have tried to snatch Mr. Castor off the street.”

  Jen started to push back her chair but Eddie told her sharply to stop.

  “I don’t need to know much from you, but I do need a few things, and we’re not leaving until I have them. First, tell me about your fake brother, Erich Wetzmuller. And I do know he’s fake, that he’s Erich Kraft, and he was involved in Artie’s death and Roy’s. And I know you sponsored him for citizenship. I just don’t know why.”

  “Why? Why?” Jen’s demeanor shifted in an instant from resignation to rage. “You saw those blackmail letters. When Roy didn’t come up with what the bastard wanted he came to see me. He told me he’d kill both me and Roy if I didn’t. And he raped me. Not once, but repeatedly. Every time he came to town. He made me introduce him to Al Sommers. But I didn’t know he killed Roy. I would never have done that. God knows I’m no saint, but I wouldn’t kill my own father.”

  Her shoulders slumped. She reached for her purse, but Paul snatched it quickly from the table and looked inside. Then he handed it across the table and she took out a tissue and dabbed at her eyes.

  “Did you think I’d have a gun? That’s not me, but I wish I’d killed that bastard and his father when I was a kid, or when he came back into my life.

  “I was happily working in the shop when he came through the front door one day. He’s a big man and I like big men…” A wan smile for Eddie. “Then a second later I saw his ear. It was missing a notch. I’d seen it before on my mother’s East German husband and I knew instantly I was in trouble.

  “He was nothing but sweetness and light at first, entirely different from the vicious teenager I remembered. We went to dinner and he told me his father had died. I knew it already, from Roy, but I didn’t tell him. He came home with me and I gave him my second bedroom, but in the middle of the night he came into my room and raped me. And it wasn’t just sorta rape, I didn’t want him at all but he forced me.

  “The next day was a Saturday, potentially a busy day at the gallery. But he told me he wanted to meet Al Sommers. I thought if I gave him what he wanted he would leave town, so I took him out there and left him. Sonny brought him back later. Roy was in France consulting on a film, so Erich stayed three more days and then he disappeared as silently as he’d arrived.”

  “The Loire dinner party,” Eddie muttered.

  Jen continued, “The next time he appeared he wanted something more specific. He’d been officially living in the States for six or seven years and had a green card, and he wanted me to vouch for him to become a citizen. It wasn’t until I signed the form that I realized he’d also stolen my name. The son of a bitch had renamed himself Erich Wetzmuller.

  “I didn’t see him again until last year. I finally got up the courage to tell him if he touched me again I’d cut his dick off and feed it to the garbage disposal, and after that he stayed with Al. He seemed to have lost interest in me.”

  She put her face in her hands and wept, her back heaving as she sobbed.

  “I’ve done such stupid things. All I wanted was to live my own life my own way.” She looked at Eddie, tears streaming down her cheeks, and put her hand on his. “And I so hoped that we ….”

  He did not move, could not move. “Jen, there can’t be a we, not now.”

  Paul asked her, more gently, “Do you know what he was here for last year?”

  She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “He was working with Al and somebody in France on finding the missing Raphael. Al was having money troubles and he wanted to restart the search for some treasure he thought might be hidden near the Saint-Lazare railroad station in Paris. There was supposed to be some gold with the painting and the price was going through the roof. It was a fatal combination of need and greed. Erich was representing someone over there. I never found out who. But it was money Al needed. His bank had failed and the legal problems from that almost wiped him out. He had some church silver he brought home at the end of the war but there wasn’t much of it left and he was having a hard time selling it since the FBI came and questioned him about it. It made him afraid to try.”

  “Do you know the identity of his partner in Paris?” Paul asked.

  “No, I never heard the name, but I could tell Al was afraid of him, and so was Erich. Roy and I went to dinner at Al’s house a few years ago, while he was still riding high as the hotshit banker. Sonny was there and they all talked quite openly about the painting. Roy told them how he’d tried to trace it but failed. He’d picked up one good lead at a dinner party but it turned out to be a dead end. He said he’d quit working on it several years ago when his friend died. That was Mr. Grant, I guess.”

  15

  Paris

  Eddie stepped out of the bathroom in a well-worn terry robe Aurélie had given him during their too-short time together five years before. He walked across his bedroom to the open window, where coffee and a pot of hot milk waited, still rubbing his wet hair with a large towel that matched the robe. He’d made the coffee before his shower, but the steamed milk was in a heavy porcelain pitcher and it held the heat. Hot enough, he thought as he took the first sip, then turned his attention to the half baguette, butter and jam on the plate next to it.

  He tore off a piece of the crispy bread, buttered it, then added a small dot of strawberry jam. Then he sat back with a satisfied sigh to watch the play of sunlight turn the stone towers of Notre Dame a golden honey color.

  “Damn,” he muttered, “It’s good to be home.”

  It was his first full day back from Sarasota. Last night had run late, a dinner with his mother at her home. Normally Martine made dinner and left it, but for her son’s return Margaux had made dinner herself and brought a fine Bordeaux up from her cellar. She wanted all the details about his week in Sarasota, and he’d given them to her for hours, unvarnished. The news he’d brought of how Artie had died had been difficult for her to absorb. She had wept quietly as he told her the story and Eddie — who normally kept his emotions tightly in check — had shed a few tears as well. When he left at midnight both were exhausted but agreed to meet for dinner the next night at Pierre-Victor, and to include Philippe.

  “Ask him to bring Aurélie, too,” Eddie said as he left. “She gathered a lot of interesting information for me and if she’ll help it will make everything much easier.”

  “Why don’t you ask her yourself?” his mother responded.

  “That’s what Philippe said. But I don’t want her to think it’s personal.”

  “It’s not?”

  He raised one eyebrow and walked through the repaired front door into the waiting elevator.


  Today he had to plan the next step. He’d given up any idea of dropping the search for either the Raphael or Erich Kraft, although the painting had faded into near insignificance after he learned that Erich was his father’s killer — for that, he would pay dearly. He didn’t want to just turn it over to the police. He thought Philippe would eventually find Erich but he wasn’t so sure he would search for the treasure with the same diligence, and it was the treasure that would lead to the mastermind behind Erich.

  “The art is detective work,” he said to himself. “Paul and I can do that, and if we track down Erich so much the better. We need to find out what’s behind Erich. He was an apparatchik, not an art critic. He wouldn’t know what to do with a Raphael if it arrived in the mail.”

  A half-hour later he left for his mid-morning appointment with Philippe, who in semi-retirement had borrowed an office in the Préfecture de Police on the Île de la Cité. From long habit he walked, starting with the stairs down to the lobby and continuing on a path that took him down Rue de Rivoli under the looming dark stone wall of the Louvre, across the north arm of the Seine on the Pont Neuf, along the charmingly named but in fact utilitarian Quai de l’Horloge, then across the center of the Île to a side entrance of the préfecture, where a suspicious policeman demanded his identity card but softened considerably when he heard Eddie was there to visit Philippe.

  With a halfhearted salute he waved Eddie through to a wide staircase. On the third floor, Philippe waited at the head of the stairs. They walked to the end of the hall and into a large office full of heavy wooden furniture, ornately carved, the chairs tightly upholstered in red. A flag stood in the corner behind the oversized desk.

  “Bigger than I had when I was a commissioner,” he said with a broad grin. “It’s temporary and I don’t know how long I’ll get to keep it. The next one may be a cleaning closet, so let’s get this all wrapped up. Tell me about your adventures in Sarasota.”

  Eddie told the story of his kidnapping and narrow escape, then of the arrest of Al Sommers and Sonny Perry, and the death of Dmitri.

  “With just an electric outlet and a pair of pliers? Very creative,” Philippe said.

  “Not a lot of choice,” Eddie replied. “We had a couple of screwdrivers, but he had a Glock. The Americans say you should never take a knife to a gunfight, and screwdrivers wouldn’t even have been as good as knives.”

  “What is your next step?”

  “I want to go down to the Loire and talk to an old art dealer. He gave a dinner party in 2001 that Roy Castor attended. Roy’s memo to Artie said this dealer intimated he knew where some World War II art and maybe some other valuables were hidden. He claimed later it was just the wine talking, but Roy thought it was significant enough to ask Artie to follow up, which he did, but the old guy wouldn’t talk. Things might have changed by now, if he’s even still alive.”

  Philippe thought a moment then responded, “I may be able to help with that. I used to do some work among the art dealers, maybe twenty years ago, and I know a few of them. I’ll make some calls and try to have something ready for dinner. What was this guy’s name?”

  Eddie opened his old brown briefcase and found Roy’s message to his father and Artie’s unmailed response.

  “Artie went to see this man on his next-to-last monthly inspection trip to our property in Rennes. He wrote a report to Roy but never mailed it, and Margaux found it in his office. Here’s the name. Jacques Ranville d’Estres. He used to have a gallery near the Champs Élysées.”

  “Jacques! That old thief. I got pretty close to arresting him in the late eighties, but couldn’t quite get enough evidence together to satisfy the magistrate. He was guilty as hell of diverting funds from his customers. He paid a big tax penalty, as I recall, then he sold the gallery.” Philippe beamed at the prospect of another shot at his old adversary.

  “It’s too bad you can’t talk to his wife. Former wife, actually. She died about five years ago but she was really the crooked one.

  “They were like two scorpions in a bottle. They married right after the war and together built a tiny gallery into a pretty good business, after time had washed away most of the stench of collaboration. But she’d fuck anything. He finally divorced her in the sixties but they couldn’t come to an agreement on the gallery, so she continued to work there. It drove him crazy.”

  Eddie asked, “Could she have anything to do with the missing painting?”

  “Impossible to say. She handled a lot of Jacques’ business with the Nazis before they married. She could easily have been the round-heeled source Roy asked about. I heard she made a pass at Artie once, but I don’t think anything came of it.

  “I’ll call him and soften him up. He’ll probably think I have something new on him, but of course I can’t say that. But I’ll talk to him today if he’s there.”

  “That would be great,” Eddie said. “I’d like to go down and interview him as soon as possible. We can make more detailed plans at dinner.”

  Dinners with Margaux were normally sparkling affairs, but this one dragged. Philippe had Eddie go over the story of Sonny’s questioning three times, and would have asked for a fourth if Aurélie hadn’t put her hand on his arm and told him, “Enough. If Édouard thinks of anything else he’ll tell you. Let’s go on.”

  “If you say so,” Philippe responded sourly. “But the prosecutor in Sarasota is playing games with me and I suspect he’s going to resist giving me everything he has until they’ve tried Sommers and Sonny Perry. Of course I want both of them tried here as well, but I know we won’t get that. But I do want Erich, and I was hoping Eddie might think of some little fact he’d overlooked.”

  Eddie said, “I agree with you, by the way. Prosecutors are prosecutors, and the one in Sarasota is going to protect his case by telling us as little as he can get away with. So we’ll have to dig Erich out of his dunghill ourselves. Jacques Ranville may be a help. Supposedly Roy Castor and an unknown other person went to him after the dinner and asked about his broad hint that he knew something about a painting. He said, as I recall, it would someday rise like Lazarus.”

  “I talked to him today,” Philippe said. “Old Jacques hasn’t changed much. He’s always been crooked, but that’s hardly even illegal in his world. He did think I had something new on him, and he understands he needs to respond fully to your questions. He’ll see you at 10 day after tomorrow. Is that a good time?”

  Eddie responded, “The only better time would be tomorrow, but that will do.” He turned to Aurélie, who’d been quiet since the dinner began, other than her effort to keep her father from hectoring Eddie. “Would you be willing to go with me? It would improve our chances of getting worthwhile information. Your stuff has been really helpful so far.”

  She pulled an iPhone from her purse and made a show of checking her calendar. “Day after tomorrow. Thursday. I’m clear that day, but I do have to teach the next. Can we do it in one day?”

  “I think so. It’s less than an hour and a half on the TGV, then a drive of less than an hour. It may be a long day but we can do it. Are you game?”

  “What’s my role?”

  “We can talk more about it on the train down, but you’re our expert on the art itself, and I hope you’ll be able to tell when he’s lying, as he surely will. Can you talk to one of your specialist colleagues about questions we might put to Jacques, and what lies he might tell us?”

  Philippe added, “I don’t know how long he’ll be able to talk to you. He’s 92 years old and sounded weak.”

  The TGV pulled into Gare de St. Pierre des Corps near downtown Tours at nine o’clock. Fifteen minutes later they drove away from the Hertz parking lot in a blue Renault Megane, the largest and fastest car available. A minute later Paul followed in a white model. In less than a mile they crossed the River Cher on the A10, with a brief view down at the east tip of an island park named for Balzac. Eddie immediately looked for the exit to highway D976, which would take them the twenty miles up t
he river, past the famous Château de Chenonceau with its often-photographed arcade spanning the river.

  “There’s the main entrance,” Aurélie said a half-hour later, pointing to a stone archway marking the only visible opening in a high brick wall that extended for several hundred yards ahead of them. On the wall next to the entrance an elegant new sign advertised “Château Tours.” Under the name and telephone number, “Corporate Retreat” was repeated in French, English and Japanese.

  “We drive to a service entrance two hundred meters further, then turn in and follow the dirt road for 100 meters. His house is on the left. Used to be a groundskeeper’s cottage.”

  As they turned, Eddie saw Paul’s car pass behind him. They had agreed he would wait in the parking lot of a country hotel five hundred yards away.

  “Does he always follow you like this?” Aurélie asked after they passed through the gate.

  “Only when there’s somebody out there trying to kill me,” Eddie replied with a rueful smile. “This is the first time that’s happened, but I don’t want us to take any more chances than necessary and he’s very good at his work.”

  The cottage was larger than they expected. Like the three-story chateau just visible in the forest behind it, it was constructed of cut stone several shades darker than the 19th-century buildings of Paris, most of which were built using limestone quarried deep beneath the city. Four stone steps, two of them with chips broken out of the tread edge, led to the ornately carved entrance door. A brass plaque that said simply, PRIVATE, was screwed to its center. The right end was a quarter-inch lower than the left, which made the entire door seem off balance.