Deadly Jewels

by Jeannette de Beauvoir

  “It did,” I said tartly. “Something called The Bullion Boys, produced in the nineties by the BBC, has Liverpool dockworkers plotting to steal the gold before the Emerald sails.”

  He nodded approvingly. “Good premise.”

  “Why do I feel you’re not taking any of this very seriously?”

  Ivan sighed, stood, stretched, took his apple core into the kitchen, came back. “It’s all fascinating, Martine, but I don’t see the connection to Montréal’s public relations in the twenty-first century.” He headed up the open staircase that leads to our bedroom on the second level of the loft. “I’m going to change my clothes.” For reasons best known to him, Ivan stays in his elegant work suits during dinner. It’s a little like having a date, albeit one in which I have to still do the cleanup.

  “There is a connection!” I yelled after him. “We saved their jewels for them!”

  “Not exactly hot off the presses, that news.” His voice was muffled; I imagined he was pulling a sweater over his face.

  “But proof of it would be,” I said. “And there may be more. In fact, there may be a lot more. This researcher—she’s been hinting around at it, giving me bits and pieces, I think she’s being cagey because I work for Jean-Luc. I don’t think she trusts the government that much—”

  “Amazing that anybody could feel that way,” my husband interrupted drily, coming back into the room in a sweater and sweatpants.

  “Sarcasm will get you nowhere,” I told him. “She’s feeling us out. Well, me, anyway. I got her away from Jean-Luc as quickly as I could.”

  “He isn’t one to inspire confidence,” Ivan agreed.

  “And I do think there’s a mystery here, Ivan. I think that maybe something happened back in 1939, and now we need to find out what it was. I think that—”

  Ivan sat down on the coffee table, right across from me, his knees touching mine. “No,” he said.

  “You haven’t even heard—”

  “I’ve heard enough,” he said. “Remember, I’ve heard that from you before. Something about the past having repercussions on the present. And the last time you got involved in anything mysterious, you came way too close to getting killed.” He put a hand on my knee. “I’ve gotten used to you, see,” he said easily. “Don’t want to have to break in a new model.”

  He was right: I had, in fact, come perilously close to getting myself killed when I’d decided to “assist the police with their inquiries” into some murders in Montréal the summer before. And my flippant “murders aren’t good PR” hadn’t gone over too well with my husband then, either. I reached out and touched his wrist. “This is completely different. If anything happened, it happened so long ago that nobody will care.”

  His eyebrows went up. “Right. Like investigating something that happened in the Duplessis years,” he said, then raised his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay, I know that look. Just be careful. Your extracurricular activities make me nervous sometimes.”

  “You said it yourself. You just don’t want the bother of shopping for a newer model.”

  “The shopping isn’t the problem. The price tag is.”

  I swatted at him halfheartedly and we settled companionably down to our evening. After all, Orphan Black was on television.

  It was the next day that we found the body.

  * * *

  They’d put a mattress on top of the securities crates in the captain’s day room, and that was where Alex was sleeping.

  If one could call it sleeping.

  Every time the Emerald pitched or rolled—and he had no idea which was which—he was dumped onto the floor. He considered simply putting the mattress down there, but there was scarcely room, and the space was needed frequently.

  Just as well: it got him on his feet in time to go and get sick again.

  The gale blew on and the captain dismissed the destroyers. “I’m not leaving us sitting in the middle of the ocean, not with this kind of cargo,” he told Alex. The convoy steamed eastward and they stood in the wheelhouse watching it go, seeing the lights disappear into the rain. “On our own, now,” said Captain Flynn cheerfully.

  Alex looked at him. “You sound elated,” he said, curious.

  “I am, laddie, I am. Best way to be, on our own. We’ll show them a thing or two!” He turned to the officer of the deck. “Increase speed to twenty-two knots,” he instructed.

  “Twenty-two knots, aye, sir.”

  The captain was doing everything but rubbing his hands together in glee. “Now we’ll show them what we’ve got.”

  And it must have worked, because the next day the gale died down and the sun came out. Alex felt like Noah when the dove returned with the branch: not only did he finally believe that he might actually live through the ordeal, he found that he now actually wanted to.

  He mentioned it to Captain Flynn, and the other man smiled. “Sunday service tomorrow,” he said. “Time to show your gratitude.”

  Alex grinned. They might well play darts and sing hymns, he thought; but he’d never seen anything like the men he met on the Emerald. “They signal action stations every time there’s a U-boat in the vicinity,” he wrote in a letter to his wife once the seas were calm enough for him to manage a pen. “Every time, no matter what a man is doing, he’s at his battle station. Immediately. Quietly and without drama. We bankers could take a page from their book.”

  And so, quietly and without drama, the Emerald entered the harbor at Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was time to unload.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Patricia handed me the headlamp. “You attach it to your helmet,” she said.

  I looked at her dubiously. I already was wearing more foreign objects than I’d ever even seen on a single person: chest waders (now there’s a fashion statement), climbing equipment, ropes slung casually over my shoulder, a tool belt with portable spotlights, and now a headlamp.

  And none of it particularly light to wear or carry.

  Patricia, on the other hand, seemed completely comfortable with the equipment. And the process. “What we do is, we mark it on Google Maps,” she’d explained to me that morning when we met for coffee in the glass and chrome of Café Pavé, probably the last time in a while that we’d be bathed in light. “This way, just in case anything goes wrong…”

  I looked at her sharply. “What’s going to go wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she said and laughed as she pushed her glasses back up her nose. “It’s just a precaution, don’t worry.”

  Easier said than done. But it was my own fault; when she had started to describe the urban exploration that had brought her to the center of her dissertation, I’d held up my hand. “You mean there’s something still there? Something from the forties?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Why of course? And why hasn’t anyone seen it? And what is it?”

  “It wasn’t always open,” she said reasonably. “Urban explorers have been down in these tunnels before; you’re right, they would have found anything there was to find. But the museum’s expansion work diverted some of the waterways, and one of them broke through into these rooms I’m telling you about. The rooms are under Sun-Life and they’ve been sealed off, bricked up. I think the vault was probably in there.”

  “The vault’s gone?”

  “High-tech for its time,” she said. “They probably sold it.”

  “So how do you know—?”

  “Because it’s a mess in there, and I didn’t take time to look at everything because frankly I was a little spooked, but there were some empty crates. And there was a hatbox.”

  “A hatbox?” I wasn’t getting the significance.

  She leaned forward. “The story is that King George and his two daughters—one of them is Queen Elizabeth to us, by the way—took the jewels out of their settings and packed them into hatboxes. Diamonds and rubies and emeralds and God only knows what else—well, you see why I got excited.”

  “I see why you got excited.”

  “So
when do you want to go?” She caught my look. “Well, don’t you? Isn’t that the point? You don’t want your boss or those cops finding it first, and neither do I. Listen to me, this is perfect. I want the discovery to be mine, you want to keep this under wraps, so we both win. I need a witness to the discovery, and once you see what’s at stake, you’ll know how to handle the politics—which, frankly, is way beyond either my interest or ability.”

  “Uh-huh.” I thought about it for a moment, rubbing my finger around the rim of my wineglass. The longer we waited, I thought, the more likely it was that it wouldn’t be our secret. Someone else would find the underground rooms. The feds, or customs, or my boss would get involved; and Patricia was right—once that happened, the genie was out of the bottle. I’d rather be able to decide on the timing of its release myself. “Tomorrow.”

  “Sorry?”

  “We’ll do it tomorrow. Unless you have anything more—”

  “No,” she interrupted. “This is all I have.”

  I looked at her and thought, she’s telling the truth. It was there if you looked for it, the gleam of obsession, the single-mindedness that’s probably shared by crazy people and geniuses alike.

  “All right,” I said. “Tomorrow.”

  Which was how I was now finding myself wearing gear that I hadn’t known existed, and listening to someone talking lightly about leaving a bread crumb trail in case things turned nasty.

  What could be nasty, after all, about wading through sewers?

  “We’re not actually going to cross any active ones,” she said, uncannily reading my mind. Or perhaps it was my expression. “It’s just a precaution.” Like leaving Google Maps open on her computer, I thought. This woman didn’t leave much to chance.

  We went down into the complex two blocks away from my apartment, which was also a little unsettling, down through a manhole that Patricia slid carefully back into place once we were through. “Put on your flashlight.”

  “It’s on,” I responded. “How did you figure this out?”

  “What, getting around underground?”

  “For want of a better description.”

  “This way.” She touched my elbow and slipped past me. “Follow me.” There was a pause. “How did I figure it out? I’ve always been into this.”

  “Wading through sewers?” I was skeptical. “What, did you have a particularly bad childhood?”

  She laughed, and the sound echoed down the tunnel in front of us. “I guess you could call it recreational trespassing,” she said. “I was studying history and I was particularly interested in urban history—how cities came to be, you know?”

  I didn’t, not really. “I don’t know that I’ve ever given it a moment’s thought.”

  “Most people don’t. Watch your step, here: stay on the brick if you can, it’s older.”

  “It’s older? That’s supposed to be reassuring?”

  “The brick’s better. It’s more solid. They started working with concrete in the 1920s, but it cracks over time. Anyway, so I was interested, and I felt that a lot of historical significance of cities ended up buried, one way or another. So I started hanging out with this group of people, some students, some not, and we did all sorts of exploring. The Paris catacombs. The Neglinnaya River, which flows under Moscow. New York.”

  “Recreational trespassing,” I said, nodding, thinking that it takes all sorts to make a world.

  We were advancing slowly, and while it was certainly damp, it wasn’t wet. Yet, I reminded myself darkly. There was the occasional sound of something skittering away, lightly, invisibly; rats, no doubt. The tunnel was large and wide, with an arched ceiling and so far mostly brick.

  We were probably under my building right now.

  “It shows you how much work went into all the stuff we take for granted,” said Patricia earnestly, leading us forward. Her voice echoed around us. “Any city’s infrastructure, you know, it’s how they function, but it’s mostly in places that people never see. And it’s in layers, like an archeological dig. First, you see the utility networks, that’s right under street level. Then, under that, there’s centralized steam heating. At the lowest level is the water supply system.”

  I contemplated for a moment explaining to her why, after last summer, I wasn’t quite ready to embrace the idea of exploring a steam tunnel, and decided against it. “Where are we now?” I asked instead.

  She stopped and looked around her, the floodlight she carried swinging around crazily. “Place Royale, more or less,” she said. “Anyway, it’s all connected, isn’t it? These tunnels were built in the nineteenth century, and yet any new building that goes up in a city will be relying on them. The past is never really past.”

  “Nice phrase.” Not bad for marketing copy, either.

  “True phrase. Come on, this way.” Her goggles were keeping her glasses in place, I noticed. We were branching off the main tunnel and still moving north. A thought struck me and I stopped. “Aren’t we supposed to be up closer to Dorchester Square?” I asked. That was, after all, where the Sun-Life Building still stood, on Metcalfe Street, even though Sun-Life itself was long gone; a whole list of corporate and noncorporate entities leased space in the building now. And it was a good distance from where we’d entered the tunnel, in the Old Port section of the city.

  Not that it was all that meaningful: unlike other big cities, you can walk across Montréal in less than a day.

  Patricia had stopped also and was waiting for me. “I can feel you thinking,” she said. “Pity you can’t walk at the same time.”

  “You’re so funny. So answer the question.”

  “The vault was under Dorchester Square,” she said patiently. “But the jewels were moved.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I’m a researcher. That’s what I do: I find out stuff like that. And I’m about to show you where they ended up,” she said, a current of impatience moving through her voice. “There were documents in London, that’s what started me on all this in the first place. Documents about them being afraid that Sun-Life was compromised. So, assuming that was right, ask yourself, Martine: who else had a decent vault at the time?”

  “I don’t know.” I was feeling a little irritable at her pedantic approach. Maybe academia does that to people. “Banks?”

  “Banks, sure. Good option. But also the Montréal Stock Exchange.” She put up a hand. “Don’t say it. They’re downtown now, yeah, but they used to be—”

  “—at the Centaur Theatre!” I couldn’t help the interruption; this part of history, at least, I knew about. The Exchange was in a Beaux Arts–style building in the Old Port when, in 1969, the Front de Libération du Québec set off a bomb there (the Exchange apparently representing a bastion of Anglo-Canadian power), blowing out the northeast wall.

  Now the Exchange lived in one of Montréal’s highest modern buildings, and the English-language Centaur Theatre played where stocks were once exchanged. About five blocks from the Pointe-à-Callière museum, where the excavations were going on.

  “Got it in one,” said Patricia cheerfully. “Come on.”

  We proceeded in silence, which was fine with me: I really didn’t want to hear any more about recreational trespassing, since we were pretty much doing the same thing now and the thought of possible professional consequences should we be caught had started wending its way through my brain. I could already hear Jean-Luc denying any knowledge of anything I happened to have done at any time.… I walked straight into Patricia’s back. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Look, we have to climb here onto that shelf … see it?” She moved the spotlight to an opening that was about shoulder height and seemed very, very dark. Probably filled with rats, too. “I can boost you up,” she said encouragingly.

  Okay, so I might not be twenty-three myself, but I wasn’t all that decrepit. “I’ll manage,” I said.

  “Not in those waders,” she said. “Come on. I’ll boost you, then you can give m
e a hand up.”

  “All right.” Even with her help, I struggled, and ended up on my stomach on what felt to be a very narrow ledge. “You’re doing great,” she said. “Now, just give me a hand.”

  She was up surprisingly quickly. Okay, so maybe there is something about being twenty-three.

  We had to crouch to enter this tunnel, and as the light moved ahead of us I could see scurrying forms, shadows moving fast. I’d been right. We were right up against the river, after all, and the Old City has always had a rodent problem. I wasn’t as concerned about them as I was about ending up on my knees if this thing got any smaller. I’ve never been particularly aware of being claustrophobic, but there’s no time like the present to find out something new about oneself.

  “Over here.” It was clearly an accidental opening, without the fine brickwork that had been in evidence in all the other openings I’d seen so far, and I could see where high water had left debris drying around it; it hadn’t happened all that long ago. Patricia pushed me. “Go on.”

  She’d been right; it opened up onto a room. I swept my flashlight around: the cluttered floor, now smelling rank; the walls that were perfectly dry above where the water had coursed through. A doorway into another room.

  Crates, several of them, one or two completely falling apart, held together only by the sturdy iron reinforcements at all the corners. Stencil-stamped. I played my light over the labels: HOUSEHOLD GOODS.

  “Here it is,” she said, and I followed the beam of her spotlight to the faded circular hatbox beyond. Treasure, I thought. Even if nothing else ever comes of this, here is treasure. I imagined for a moment the two princesses, one now dead, the other elderly, giggling at the game their father had invented, wrapping up diamonds and sapphires and rubies. In the stillness of the underground, I could almost hear the echo of their laughter.

  And then I played my own light beyond the crates and looked into the empty orbs of a skeleton’s eyes.

  * * *

  Hans had told them he was from Holland.

  Not many people really could grasp the difference in accents, not if they didn’t speak either German or Dutch. And, in fact, he’d actually spent a summer in Amsterdam, back in 1933, so he could even throw in a word or two for color if necessary.