Treasure of Saint-Lazare

by John Pearce

  Eddie knelt down to scrape at the floor with a stone. About three inches below the surface he found a smooth layer of small gravel.

  “Jerôme, what were the sub-basement floors of buildings this old? This layer of rock looks like it might have been the floor at one time.”

  “Packed stone would have been usual for a second basement.” Jerôme bent over to look closely at the small excavation Eddie had made. “This top layer is much looser than I would expect. We’ll know shortly, but if I had to guess I would say that this was the dirt taken out of a room hidden somewhere behind these stone walls.

  “That tells us pretty much all we need to know. Let’s get started. We’ll begin at the stairway.”

  Philippe interjected, “Perhaps we should try inside the little room first. It might have been built so they could close up the work while the digging went on.” Jerôme agreed.

  “After everything that’s happened maybe we’ll get some good luck,” Aurélie said to no one in particular.

  They all crowded into the small room. The older technician told his assistant to remove the handle and give him the computer. The slightly built young man proved stronger than he looked as he picked up the cumbersome machine and placed it against the rough wall. Jerôme held his bright lantern as the humming machine slowly made its way down the ten feet of the wall.

  The man with the computer looked up. “Wrong wall,” he said with disappointment. “This is the one facing the tracks. After three meters it’s showing me air.”

  They turned 90 degrees to try the other wall. The young technician set the machine carefully against it and began to push it toward the corner. “Slower,” his boss said. “There’s something there.”

  “Look at this,” he said excitedly, holding the laptop screen out to the others. To them it looked different from the demonstration they’d seen earlier, but there was no detail they recognized.

  “Look,” he said again, pointing toward the left edge of the screen. “This is the wall where we started. After about 30 centimeters we see an opening just behind the wall, here. Then after another meter we see this heavy solid object, which completely blocks the signal, and then more open space.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we have discovered your hidden room.” He took a pencil and made a faint mark on the wall, then another almost a meter to its right.

  “The stones you see between these marks are just decoration. Behind them is a solid steel door, and behind that there is an open room that appears to be about three meters by three meters, a small bedroom. I cannot tell how high it is, but it will not be large. There are some odd reflections from within the room but my machine cannot resolve them well enough to tell what they are.”

  Jerôme asked the radar technicians to survey the entire wall just in case there was more than one hidden chamber. He gave them his light and as they moved away he huddled with the others.

  “Mes amis,” he said, “we have definitely found something. When we get through that door we will probably find at least five cases of gold and one old painting, but there could be other treasures as well. On the other hand, there could be nothing.

  “Do we report this to our bosses and go through a lot of bureaucracy or do we find out first what lies there?”

  It would be Philippe’s decision, although there would certainly be differences of opinion between the police and the building department.

  “If we go through the proper channels it will take weeks and become a complete circus. Then if the room is empty it will be more than a disappointment, it will make us all look like fools. I believe we need to find out what is there, but not move it.”

  “Good!” Jerôme responded. My view exactly.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “When the radar men are finished I will swear them to secrecy. I brought some tools with me today. I will get them and we will find out now what is there.”

  They waited a half-hour while the radar crew circled the room.

  “Nothing,” the senior man said. “I hoped there might be a second room.”

  “You have done well. Thank you for your work,” Jerôme told them. “And please remember that you must not speak of this to anyone. When you prepare your report for billing, simply refer to a survey and not to the results.” They agreed.

  Jerôme saw the radar technicians off and returned with a heavy canvas tool bag. “I was a carpenter before I became an inspector, but I did a little masonry on the side. In Paris, every tradesman has to do that. So let’s find out what’s behind the wall.”

  Philippe added, “Let’s just remove the stone, then we’ll consider what to do about the steel door.”

  “This will probably do the job,” Jerôme said as he pulled a heavy bricklayer’s hammer from the sack. “With the pick end I can pull out the stones and with the hammer end I can use a chisel if they don’t yield immediately. This can be dangerous work, so you’ll need these.” He pulled out four pairs of protective goggles and handed them around. “Who will hold the light?”

  “I’ll do it,” Aurélie said quickly. She stepped to Jerôme’s left and pointed the heavy lantern at the pencil marks on the stone. “Will you start with this one?”

  Jerôme carefully inserted the pick end of his hammer into the crack between the marked stone and its neighbor to the left and pried. It moved but would not come loose, so he tapped all the way around to loosen the mortar. This time it came free and he caught it as it fell.

  “The light?” He took the lantern back from Aurélie and held it close to the opening he had made. Then he struck the back of the hole with his hammer. It responded with a dull thud.

  “Wood. They faced the steel door with wood to make a level surface, then mortared this wall on it. They probably used the rocks they’d removed earlier. One good thing is we won’t have to worry about supporting the top of the doorway, assuming the steel looks strong. The last thing we want is for the building to sag.”

  In an hour he pried fifty stones from their wooden backing. Paul, Eddie and Philippe had stacked them neatly outside the small room, and a solid wall of old wood planks now faced them.

  “Take it down,” Philippe said.

  Jerôme had to remove another twenty stones to find the edges of the false wall, but then it pulled away effortlessly to reveal an opening made by removing stones from the foundation. Behind it, cemented to the remaining foundation stones, was the steel door they’d expected. “It looks like a cell door from some Berlin basement,” Philippe said. “And that’s probably exactly what it is.”

  The door was the width of a normal door but short, about five feet from the floor to the top. It appeared to have been cut off at the bottom with a torch.

  Philippe pulled on it but it refused to yield. “Smart of them to put the hinges inside so we can’t cut through them. But this lock shouldn’t be hard to pick. It looks like something from the 30s. I think we’ll have to stop here and get help.”

  Jerôme said, “I don’t really think we should stop. I know the radar men said they’d keep quiet, but they won’t, and by tomorrow this will be common knowledge around the building department and maybe the police. Could you get a police lock specialist over here this afternoon?”

  “I suppose so.” Philippe went to the street to find a cell signal and called the préfecture. Within a few minutes he had a promise of a locksmith, two photographers, and two uniformed officers to provide security. Worse, the Préfet de Police himself said he would be there for the opening, and they were not to proceed without him.

  An hour later the police photographers and the locksmith had arrived. Philippe had the entire basement carefully photographed and narrated a brief video explaining how radar had been used to see through the walls. The photographers had brought lights, which brightened the dim space considerably.

  The lock itself, which the locksmith was inspecting carefully with a magnifying glass, was mounted in a six-inch-square steel box welded securely to the door. “There are still some cylinders like this around Paris,�
�� he said. “It’s a 1930s German model. It will take a few minutes but I can open it. My big concern is that the door may be rusted into the frame.”

  “Don’t just stand there, man. Get on with it,” the police chief said, not unkindly.

  “Oui, Monsieur le Préfet.” The locksmith asked everyone to leave the room and turned to his work.

  “So you are the man who untangled this old knot?” the préfet asked Eddie. “We have not met but of course I know of you. This doesn’t seem the sort of thing an English teacher would do.”

  “I had a lot of help…” Eddie started to talk but Aurélie cut him off.

  “Monsieur le Préfet, I found the outstanding detective work Édouard did to be entirely consistent with his background as a decorated officer of the American Special Forces,” she said. Philippe stood in the background and smiled.

  “Is that true?” the chief asked. “I had no idea.”

  “Sir, this was a team effort and I am part of that team. I became involved because my father and his old friend were murdered by the people seeking this treasure. When this door is open I hope my brief career as a detective will be over,” Eddie said.

  The locksmith shouted, “I got it.” Everyone moved back into the small room as he tried without success to pull the door open.

  “Let me try,” Jerôme said, moving up with his bricklayer’s hammer. He inserted the pick end between the lock and the stone and began to pull on the handle. At first there was no movement, but then the hidden hinges emitted a high-pitched shriek and it budged a quarter of an inch. After ten minutes he had it open by an inch.

  “Time for new manpower,” Philippe said. “Eddie, would you give it a try? Still lifting weights?”

  Eddie put both hands on the handle and one foot on the wall and pulled as hard as he could. The door suddenly moved another inch and the hammer came loose. He stumbled backward into the arms of the police chief, who caught him deftly and put him back on his feet while telling him, “Keep going. You’re going to get it done. It should be your privilege, in any case.”

  With another minute of tugging on the hammer handle Eddie opened the door enough to get both hands around it. Philippe joined him and together they opened the door halfway, enough to gain access.

  “You do the honors, M Grant,” the préfet said, handing Eddie the inspector’s flashlight.

  He stepped carefully to the door frame and pointed the light in — and whistled. “We’ve found most of what we’ve been looking for and I don’t see any nasty animals, so we can go in. Be careful because the ceiling is only five feet high, and it’s rough.

  The préfet stooped to enter behind him, followed by Philippe, Aurélie and Paul. On the opposite wall a rack of three rough wooden shelves had rotted away and spilled their contents on the rough concrete floor. At their feet lay a pile of pristine gold bars mixed with the decomposing wood of the crates, plus several moldering leather suitcases marked with SS runes.

  “Those valises probably have jewelry taken from concentration camp prisoners,” the préfet said. “But there must be at least twenty of the wooden crates. I thought there were only five.”

  “Five is all Eric Kraft brought,” Aurélie told him. “What this tells us is that Hans Frank sent much more than one shipment. I just wonder how many other Erics were out there, and if any of them had nasty sons.

  “Édouard, what about the painting?”

  “There seem to be several, all wrapped in canvas. I suggest we leave them to the experts. It’s not as damp in here as I feared, but they may have been damaged already and we could do more damage by moving them. The Raphael is on a wooden panel, and we can see what’s happened to the wood in here.”

  Philippe said, “Sound thinking. What do you think, M le préfet?”

  “We need to call in the experts from the Louvre right away, to take the paintings to their laboratory. We’ll seal this basement and leave two officers on guard but out of sight, and tomorrow we’ll have it all cleared out.

  “M Grant, you have done a great service. I will see it is not forgotten.”

  Aurélie turned to Eddie, her eyes shining in the light of Jerôme’s lantern.

  “It never would have happened if you hadn’t been so persistent. Thank you a thousand times.

  “And welcome back.”

  19

  Paris, three months later

  Late Spring may be the most glorious time of the year in Paris, but September has its own charms. It’s the time of new beginning, the rentrée, after vacations come to an end, students go back to class and the city’s professionals return to work with a fresh perspective and new energy. Eddie told himself for the hundredth time since breakfast that this rentrée was shaping up as one of the best.

  Neither the crowded sidewalk nor the tangle of traffic could dampen his mood as he crossed Rue de Rivoli, subconsciously dodging the pedestrians, most of them young, who dashed carelessly around him. He hung back for a heartbeat as a well-dressed woman stepped up on the curb and cut him off, heedless of anything but the small white dog tucked comfortably under her left arm. She murmured a stream of nothings into its uncomprehending ear — Eddie caught something about going home to see Daddy. Then he turned away into the manicured Tuileries Gardens and set a course for the other side, where he would cross the Seine to the Left Bank and take a long walk through one of his favorite parts of the city, the ancient quartier of the Sorbonne. It would take him three-quarters of an hour, just long enough for him to arrive at a favorite bistro near the Panthéon in time for his brief date with Aurélie. The thought made him walk a little bit faster as he ducked into the passage leading from the gardens to the river and crossed the Seine on the Passerelle Solferino. It had officially been renamed in honor of the president of one or another of the former African colonies, but Eddie had grown up playing near the Solferino and that was the way he remembered it.

  At the far end he passed the woman selling bad paintings under the statue of Thomas Jefferson, then skirted the bland river façade of the Musée d’Orsay before turning into Rue du Bac. He paused in front of Les Ministères, one of the names on his short list of favorite restaurants, where he’d learned Erich’s fate. He considered the menu and the appetizing pictures of oysters for a moment then walked on to Boulevard Saint-Germain, which would take him through the teeming Latin Quarter and its flocks of tourists, down tiny Rue Monsieur-le-Prince with its book shops, past the Luxembourg Gardens and on to the bistro just beyond the Rue Saint-Jacques, where he hoped to arrive before Aurélie.

  He waited impatiently to cross Rue Saint-Jacques as a swarm of gray-suited businessmen, each carefully helmeted, rode toward home on small motorcycles and scooters. The two-wheeler had only recently been put to use as a commuter vehicle, so he was careful to stay away from the curb because their drivers hadn’t yet learned either driving or manners. That would come with experience, but for now they were dangerous.

  He squinted hard up the low hill at the small round tables arrayed on the sidewalk of Le Comptoir du Panthéon, half hidden behind a bus stop on the right. He knew Aurélie would be sitting in the front row out of habit if she’d already arrived. She’d left home wearing black today, as had almost every other Parisian woman, so he focused on picking her long blonde hair out of the dark shadow the afternoon sun cast under the bistro’s crimson awning. At the crest of the hill sat the Panthéon, reminiscent of the U.S. Capitol in miniature.

  Just as he decided he had arrived safely on time he felt the warmth of her hand under his left arm. “Édouard. Did you think you’d get here first?” she asked, amusement in her voice. At the same time she squeezed his arm against her breast the way she knew he liked. “I had to counsel one of my less motivated students for a few minutes or I’d have been waiting for you.”

  They found a table in the front row and ordered espresso. “Another Wednesday,” she said. “My late night. Is Margaux happy with dinner around 9?”

  “She wants to go back to Ratatouille. Not my favori
te place, but not bad,” Eddie responded. “I have a really busy day tomorrow — four new students, a meeting with some prospects, lunch with a fellow who wants to open a branch in Lyon. That one isn’t too promising. But I’d rather not stay out too late.”

  “I know why you want to get home,” she said with a smile. “Me, too.”

  “But what did you think of that?” She pointed to his copy of Le Figaro, lying open to the arts page.

  “I’m surprised, but duplicity was the stock in trade of the Nazis.”

  The story announced that the three paintings found badly damaged in a secret basement near Gare Saint-Lazare had finally been identified as mediocre eighteenth-century German landscapes, none worth restoring.

  “So where is the young fellow?” she asked. “The paintings we found must have been second-rate stuff. Hitler’s taste in teutonic landscapes.”

  “We may never know. Frank’s son may be right, and it’s still hanging on a farmer’s wall in Bavaria, or maybe Frank’s curator really did take it. It makes me sad that so many people died chasing a chimera. The gold disappeared into the bureaucracy and the painting is still out there, or it’s not. I decided the day we found it that it didn’t matter to me and they don’t need us.

  “What matters to me is that we found each other again.”

  She smiled and took his hand under the table. “That’s the most important thing for both of us. But you found your own strength again. I can’t tell you how impressed I was with the way you handled the Germans, and then Dmitri. And I thought the way you outmaneuvered Erich and the police was a master stroke. It was brutal, but it will be a while before that group forgets it. I am proud of my Édouard.” She squeezed his hand.