Disturbing the Dark

by Wendy Hornsby

  “So that’s what Jacqueline was up to,” he said. “She came in last night dressed in jeans, with her hair in a long braid. I thought she was headed for a barbecue or something with this other officer who was dressed in shorts and old sneakers. But she picked up a uniform for Pierre and headed out again. I wondered if she was going undercover. Is she at the camp?”

  “She is.”

  He leaned in close. “She and Pierre are really tight, you know. I think there’s something going on with them.”

  “There is,” I said. “But it’s not what you’re thinking. She’s his sister-in-law.”

  That cheered him up. “So, she’s single?”

  “Guido.” I took a deep breath. “Give it a rest, huh? Could you wait until you’ve been out of the slam for maybe a full day before you get yourself into something?”

  “No harm in asking.”

  Lunch taken care of, we got up to leave. Through the door into the adjoining bar, I saw a familiar Hawaiian shirt. I took Guido by the arm and led him in.

  “Oi, Harry,” I said, perching on the stool next to his; Guido stood beside me, leaning an elbow on the bar. “Things turn out the way you expected today?”

  “What a bunch of bollocks, huh?” He looked Guido up and down. “The old bird promised me she had something really big, gold worth half a mill easy, she tells me. Antique jewelry. But what does it turn out to be? Some crappy little box full of wedding rings this bloody Nazi ripped off the fingers of war widows. I like a good deal when I can get it, sure. But I have my limits. And something like that? Makes my blood curdle, I tell you. Makes my blood curdle.”

  “Did she ever offer you any proof that the gold existed?”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded envelope, which he dropped onto the bar in front of me. “Treasure map, she said. She neglected to tell me she had no access to the house on the map. Another cock-up for Harry.”

  I picked up the envelope and took out a photocopy of a letter written in German, addressed to Frau Streicher. Neither Guido nor I speaks much more German than we need to order a couple of beers and a sausage, so the hand-written text meant nothing to us. But the diagram of the upper floor of my grandmother’s house was clear enough. The date on the top of the letter was January, 1944, so the diagram did not include the alterations my grandparents had made to the house after the war. But by following the map a person could still find his way to the spot marked by a star in a corner of my bedroom.

  I slipped the letter into my pocket without bothering to ask if I could keep it. “What now for you, Harry?”

  He shrugged as he signaled for another shot of scotch. “I stay at it. There’s always another deal down the road. You just have to keep your options open. I learned my lesson though. I’ll never give anyone a finder’s fee up front again.”

  “You gave Erika Karl money?”

  “For travel expenses,” he said. “But never again.”

  I slid off the stool and started to leave, but turned back.

  “Harry, does your friend Vincent know you were expecting to get gold, and not maybe German weapons?”

  “In the first place, that cockhead is not my friend, so get that straight. He’s just another bloke out there looking for this and that to buy and sell. Except he has that shop up there near where tourists coming to see the invasion beaches can’t miss it. The farmers up around there know they can take the war junk they dig up out of their fields over to Vincent and he might buy it from them. Now and then he takes a special order from a collector and puts out the word. Right now he’s got a buyer looking for old firearms in top condition, offering top price for them.”

  “He seems to think I have something he wants,” I said.

  “Well, you can lay blame for that on the crazy lady. That’s where I met her, in Vincent’s shop, where I met you just a day later.” He tossed back his scotch and tapped the counter asking for another. “Not much of a coincidence if you think about it. Vincent has the biggest signs on the road and he’s the first shop you come to when you get out of Caen headed toward the beaches.”

  “Okay, but why can I blame the crazy lady for having Vincent on my back?”

  “So, she comes into the shop end of last week when I happen to be there looking for old aircraft parts, and she asks if Vincent would be interested in some stuff her father put away during the war. She says she hasn’t inventoried it yet—that was her word, inventoried—but it was quite substantial, she said, and it hadn’t seen light of day since the war. She said there would be antique gold jewelry and there would be military stores, meaning firearms to me. So me and Vincent say, sure we’re interested. Later, the two of us divide things up. I’ll check out the gold and leave him the firearms.”

  “There are no firearms,” I said. “If you talk to Vincent, I’d appre­ciate if you passed that along to him.”

  “Well here’s some news: there’s no gold either. Not anything that I’d have truck with, anyway.” He wrapped his fist around his new drink. “Now bugger off. I’m going to get seriously pissed.”

  Jean-Paul’s car was still in the lot behind the mairie. As we came out of the hotel, I heard a motorcycle speed off down the side street.

  “Nice,” Guido said, straining to get a look at the motorcycle. “A Kawasaki.”

  21

  “The floor in your bedroom was never touched during the renovation,” Grand-mère said, looking from von Streicher’s hand-drawn map to the corner of my bedroom that corresponded to the star on the drawing. “Nothing was done to this room, except that your grandfather cut a door in the wall for access into the old nursery next door when he converted it into a bathroom.”

  “Then maybe there actually is something under the floor,” I said.

  “Merde,” she sighed, handing von Streicher’s letter back to me. “What does the letter say?”

  “Jean-Paul found someone who could read it for me. The letter is the usual miss you, love, kisses to the children wartime stuff. But von Streicher also says that he will try to send more to his wife. He doesn’t say more what, but he admonishes her to bargain more aggressively than she has in the past because it’s difficult to get packages through, especially now that the Allies are dropping bombs on Germany.”

  “I wonder what he sent her.”

  “Grand-mère, may I take up the floor in my room?”

  “Of course. I’ll call Antoine to bring some tools.”

  “And I’ll call Pierre,” I said. She started to protest, but in the end she didn’t.

  I crossed the hall and roused Guido from his nap. When he came to the door, I said, “Grab your new camera, matey, it’s show time.”

  Guido and I pushed all of the furniture in my room against one wall to give Antoine and Pierre more room when they came with tools. When we moved the bed, we found a tire iron on the floor.

  “You have a Luger in your drawer,” Guido said, looking at the tire iron. “Why do you need a tire iron under your bed?”

  “I didn’t put it there, but I have an idea who might have. Don’t touch it. There might be prints.”

  “Whose?”

  “Erika von Streicher Karl’s. She was in here, I told you, on Sunday. I have a feeling that we interrupted her before she could get at the floor.”

  “She could have swung that thing at your head, Maggie,” he said with sincere concern.

  “We never got within her striking range.”

  The tire-iron discovery slowed the start on the floor demolition for a few minutes. Pierre dutifully dropped it into an evidence bag, but he said there wasn’t much point in sending it for prints. Erika was on her way to Orly Airport and, if her flight was on time, she would be out of the country before any results came back. He set the tire iron inside the armoire to get it out of the way and set to work with Antoine lifting planks of the old, and very solid, oak floor.

  Guido brought a stepladder up from the kitchen. Standing on the top rung with one of the new video cameras on his shoulder, and
a happy grin on his face, he recorded the proceedings.

  I stood to the side with Grand-mère to watch. Like serving the first slice from a pie, it took a lot of finesse for Antoine to remove the first plank without damaging it. After the first plank was up, its neighbors came more easily.

  Pierre, on his knees beside Antoine, turned to look up at me. “Maggie, that man who was calling you, Vincent something. I asked a colleague from the Caen barracks to send some officers out to search his shop. I wanted them to shake him up a bit, let him know that they were keeping an eye on him for illegal firearms sales as well as contraband Nazi paraphernalia.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I hope that scares him off.”

  “Don’t thank me. Before they arrived, Vincent had already been taken in for interrogation by the D.G.S.E. When the anti-terrorist unit comes for you and asks questions about ordnance and weapons, you know you’re in trouble.”

  “Fancy that.” I saw the hand of Jean-Paul Bernard at work. Just who did he know in the anti-terror organization that he could call and get such a service provided? In more than a few ways, his network of connections was just a little bit scary. Useful, but scary.

  All of the planks in the area the map seemed to mark were up and neatly stacked against the wall. Antoine sat back on his haunches and looked over at Grand-mère. Shaking his head, he said, “Sorry, nothing here.”

  She went over for a closer look into the opened space under the floor, as did I. There was a tiny scrap of paper caught on a nail. I bent down and pried it loose. Hand printed, I could make out the number fourteen, and part of a word: taschenu. I typed the word fragment into the search engine on my phone.

  “I think it said pocket watch,” I said. “Fourteen pocket watches.”

  “Antoine,” Grand-mère said. “Pull up some more floor, please.”

  Two planks further, a floor board, though tightly fitted, wasn’t tacked down. Antoine pulled it up and the edge of a box appeared. Grand-mère had to sit down on the edge of the bed when she saw it. I sat beside her and put my arm around her as we watched Antoine and Pierre pull up another plank, a second loose one, so that they could get the box out of the space between the joists.

  Guido came down from his stepladder and leaned over Pierre’s shoulder for a close-in shot as Pierre, wearing latex gloves, pulled the box out from its nest under the floor and turned it over to look at it from all sides, rattling the contents. The box was made of heavy metal painted light brown, longer than it was deep, with a hinged lid and a wire fastener. On the sides, a series of numbers and letters and a German eagle were stenciled in black.

  “It’s an ammo can,” Pierre said. “It was meant to transport Luger shells.”

  “Bring it up here to me.” Grand-mère patted the bed beside her. She reached toward the wire latch to open the box, but her hands shook. In the end, she asked me to open it. I folded the lid back on its hinges and we all leant in for a look.

  A jumble of gold rings and gold pocket watches glimmered in the light from Guido’s camera. I reached in and took out a plain gold band that was so worn that the back was no thicker than a fine wire. With a gasp that was nearly a sob, Grand-mère took the ring from my hand and slipped it onto her finger.

  “That despicable beast,” she murmured. “Whose precious ring did he steal?”

  “During the war, everyone was required to turn in their gold,” Antoine said.

  “True,” she said, plucking another ring, one with a small stone, out of the jumble. “But the gold was intended to be used for Germany’s foreign trade, not to buy potatoes for Madame von Streicher or music lessons for her children.”

  Carefully, she upended the can onto the bed and spread out the contents. Some of the rings had inscriptions inside the bands, but most did not. Antoine opened watch cases, looking for inscriptions that might identify the owners.

  “What will we do with this, Grand-mère?” Antoine asked.

  “If we can identify any of the owners, we’ll return what we can. For the rest, I’ll call Gaston and Ma Mère. They’ll know what to do.”

  “What do you think all that’s worth?” Guido asked.

  Pierre shrugged. “A few thousands at the most. Hardly worth that woman’s efforts.”

  Guido was on his knees behind Grand-mère, shooting down over her shoulder at the array of gold. Antoine’s brow furrowed as he watched my partner work. He said, “Grand-mère, does that camera bother you?”

  She leaned to the side to get a better look at what Guido was doing. Then she shrugged and told Antoine, “The camera is just fine, dear. People should see this. Fear enabled that man’s corruption. If we don’t take him out of the dark and expose him for the cheap, venal tyrant he was, then men like him will always have the power to make us afraid.”

  She looked back at Guido again. “How do you say it when you have to ring a bell to cover bad language on television?”

  “Bleep,” he said.

  She laughed. “Maggie, my dear, you may have to bleep my words, but I say piss on that pissant von Streicher.”

  “What is all this, then?” Jean-Paul appeared at the door wearing a beautifully tailored suit and a perfect red tie. His overnight bag was at his feet. “What have I missed?”

  “A treasure hunt.” I went over to him for a better kiss than the glancing pecks of la bise. I took him by the hand to show him what we had discovered.

  “So, it exists.” He picked up a watch and opened the cover, read the inscription, and sighed. “A larger fortune in imagination, perhaps, than in reality. But the marvel is that it does, in fact, exist.”

  “That reminds me. Pierre,” I said to get his attention. “Erika Karl apparently told the two dealers who have been such a nuisance, Harry and Vincent, that there was half a million in gold here. We know of course that there isn’t. But she also said that there were military stores in pristine condition that have been hidden away since the war. The two collectors interpreted her to mean firearms. So, as Jean-Paul said, we’ve found that a cache of gold does exist. But what about the other? Can there be weapons stashed somewhere?”

  Pierre looked at Antoine. They both shrugged. Antoine spoke first.

  “Grand-mère, shall we pull up the entire floor?”

  “Merde,” was her response.

  Jean-Paul spoke up. “Pierre, do you have access to a metal detector?”

  He did. He made a call and within half an hour an officer was lugging the necessary equipment up the stairs. First, they put the empty ammo can back between the floor joists where it had been found, and then laid loose planks over it to see how the metal detector would register. When the base line was established, the detector was run over the rest of the floor. I think that we all stood at once when the metal detector signaled that it had found something. Again, there was a floor board that was tightly fitted but not tacked in place. Antoine pulled it up and underneath, wrapped in an oiled cloth, was a pristine Luger and three boxes of bullets.

  Pierre laid claim to the Luger immediately and sent us all out of the room because the gunpowder in the ammunition was old and probably unstable and could explode in unpredictable ways if moved. He called in an explosives removal team from the barracks at Carentan to come and get it. Ignoring the tire iron in the armoire for the moment, Pierre scooped the rings and watches, shimmering on the bed in the sunlight from the windows, back into their box, and sealed the box in an evidence bag. When he turned to leave the room, he seemed surprised that we all still stood there, watching him.

  “Allez, allez,” he ordered, shooing us all down the stairs.

  In the kitchen, I took a bottle of cold cider out of the refrigerator. “One Luger hardly amounts to a stash of pristine military stores any more than a couple of handfuls of rings is half a million in gold. But once again, something was there.”

  Jean-Paul pulled off his tie. “If you tried to persuade the Karl woman that this was all that was found, she would never believe you.”

  “I’m happy that I�
��ll never need to persuade her of anything.”

  “Maggie, Jean-Paul.” Antoine pulled cider glasses out of a cupboard. “You’re welcome to stay with me tonight. We’ll get the floor fixed in your room tomorrow. I have to warn you, though, that Grand-mère Marie snores like a jackhammer. But I can put you at the far end of the hall.”

  “Antoine, mon chèr, I prefer that you take the film students home with you,” Grand-mère said. “Zach and Taylor are perfectly lovely, but their padding back and forth across the hall in the middle of the night was annoying. Maggie, why didn’t you just put them in the same room to begin with?”

  I would have raised my hands to connote “coulda shoulda” but I was pouring cider so all I could do was shrug.

  “Maggie and Jean-Paul can go into Bébé’s room,” Grand-mère said, settling any issue about where we were to sleep that night.

  Jean-Paul was being very quiet. I knew he wanted to talk with me, but we had been surrounded ever since he arrived. On the pretext that I could use some help setting up for a film shoot, I invited him to come with me down into the basement. It was hardly a ­romantic place, but we could be alone there.

  Pierre’s crime scene people had come and gone from the backyard by early afternoon so there was no legitimate reason for Pierre to keep us away from our studio. He had Grand-mère’s permission to post a few officers on the property, but they were doing their best to stay out of sight.

  Earlier that day, while I was still in the village for the arraignment, a locksmith was called in to put a new lock on the studio door, a hefty bolt that took a little muscle to turn. I asked Jean-Paul to come with me to the studio to help me collect extension cords and spotlights we would need to film in the basement first thing in the morning. When we went into the studio, it was a relief to see that everything in the studio had been returned to its place, a task that had been handed to Devon and Miller, the quieter of our interns. I showed Jean-Paul the spotlights that we would use for filming. Manfully, he picked up two of them at a time and carried them down the basement steps while somehow managing to hold onto a flashlight.