Deadly Jewels

by Jeannette de Beauvoir

  It never became necessary. They desperately needed people for the work crews, what with all able-bodied men signing up ever since it had become clear that Canada was following Britain into war.

  Someone like Hans, with an official-looking exemption from military service, was a gift from the gods. No one ever commented on his name. No one ever commented on his accent. And this in spite of what they were all talking about, the only topic of conversation, it seemed: the war with Germany.

  Hans talked about it, too. Rationing; everybody talked about rationing, and so he talked about rationing. They talked about the insanity of following a crazy clerk bent on world domination, and so he talked about the Leader in disparaging ways, too. But mostly he talked to the foreman about the rush job they were on, building this ultrasecret, ultrastrong vault under the Sun-Life Building in Dorchester Square.

  “Peterson! Hey! You gonna marry those plans, or what, you keep staring at them like that?”

  Hans forced himself to laugh. It was no laughing matter, though, and he was intensely aware of that, every day. He had a mission, and he was going to carry it out. For the Führer. For the day when Great Britain fell. For the day when Germany finally had the Lebensraum it deserved, the necessary space to give to the people who deserved it.

  Here was what he knew: the British were sending something over by secret convoy. Whatever it was, it was going to be hidden here, in a vault in this place that he was helping build, and it was up to him to find out when, and what, and what could be done about whatever it was.

  Hans frowned; he didn’t like the vagueness of his orders. But they were orders, for all of that, even though he wasn’t in uniform, even if he wasn’t called by his rank anymore. He was a Dutch workman installing a vault under an insurance building in the heart of Montréal.

  And he had his orders.

  These people, they were all alike. All fat and contented with their lot. Not like what they’d all put Germany through after the war. His father … Hans could barely think about his father. A life savings of one hundred thousand marks, money put away, year after year, from his job as a steelworker. His mother’s modest savings from household expenses, kept in a can, doled out for Hans and his young brother Gerhardt for special treats, the cinema, ice cream.

  They’d survived that war, the Great War. Somehow, they’d survived it, the family reeling from deprivations, cold and hungry and depressed, Hans’s father gone to fight the Tommies in the Ardennes. And then it was over, his father back from the front with a distant look in his eyes and a hacking cough that he never lost.

  But he hadn’t given up. He hadn’t given up yet.

  Not until the currency plummeted. It had taken a mere five months—five months!—in 1923, for that hundred thousand marks to not be enough to buy the family a loaf of bread. A loaf of bread! As long as the money had been there, there was a future.

  Not anymore.

  And so Hans’s father took out his service revolver and killed his wife, killed Gerhardt, and killed himself. Hans had been away, on an overnight hiking trip with a friend. He came back to dried blood spattered across the rose-printed wallpaper of the family living room, to the stench of decaying bodies, to his life over.

  He was only sixteen.

  And all because of the powers, the French and the Belgians, the Americans and the Canadians and the British. They had killed his family as surely as if they’d held his father’s gun in their dirty multinational hands.

  But by 1923 Adolf Hitler had organized the SA, and there was a place for Hans in the new order. A decent place. A place with a future. And he embraced it with all of his heart.

  “Peterson! Get a move on! Lorries here!”

  Crates, heavy crates. Hans had volunteered to stay and help move whatever it was into the vault. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police had arrived yesterday, examining the square, the building, the cellars. “Where does that tunnel go?”

  “Into the sewer system, sir.”

  “Make sure it’s blocked off.”

  “Right away, sir.”

  Hans watched as the RCMP corporal scurried to get the iron ordered. Good luck with that: all the country’s iron was needed for the war effort. It would be a makeshift affair. That was good. And he’d be sure to be on the work crew. He’d be sure to have access.

  Whatever this was, it was going to be important.

  Drinking one night with the corporal—Maurice, his name was—beer and messy reminiscences. On the cop’s part, not on Hans’s. Finding secrets, that was what it was all about. Finding secrets that he could use. Finding secrets that would allow him to take a peek inside the mysterious crates loaded into the vault. There were rumors of all sorts of things, gold and riches beyond belief, because the Brits were running scared. It was only a matter of time before Germany could take the British Isles, and even the English knew it. Who knew what might be in those crates?

  Hans was going to find out.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I think that maybe Patricia screamed. I know for certain that I did.

  My spotlight went clattering to the floor, but she kept hers trained on the bones. A stronger woman than I was. I took a deep breath, picked mine up, shook it, and found that it wasn’t going to work. “Merde!”

  “Just use your headlamp,” she said.

  “That means I have to keep looking at it.”

  “Yes, well, there’s that,” she murmured distractedly. She was already pushing one of the crates aside, moving forward.

  “Wait,” I said. “What are you doing?”

  “Looking at it.”

  I forced my gaze back to the skull, which had fallen back slightly from the rest of the body. Well, that would happen, wouldn’t it? After a while, when the rodents had had their way with your body, and time had passed, there wouldn’t be much reason for your head to stay attached anymore, would there?

  The bones weren’t the pristine white that one imagines when one thinks of skeletons—not that I’ve ever spent a lot of time thinking of skeletons, come to that—but browned and dirty and certainly not intact; some of the smaller bones were scattered around willy-nilly. “You didn’t see this before?” I asked Patricia.

  She shook her head and her headlamp swept a beam of light across the dark room. “No. I only got as far as the doorway. I saw the crates and the hatbox, and that there were a couple more rooms, but Dr. LaTour was with me and I didn’t want to make a big deal of it yet. I wanted to think about the ramifications. He was the one who made me take it to the mayor.”

  “I see.” I couldn’t stop looking at the skeleton. I was never going to feel the same about Halloween again.

  “Let’s take a closer look.” She moved past me, squatted beside the bones. “Martine.”

  “What?”

  “Martine.”

  “What is it?” I couldn’t tell if the pressure in her voice was a good or a bad thing. I pushed aside a rotting crate to make my way over to her. “Hang on, I’m coming. I mean, if you think that—“I broke off midsentence. Something very bright and very beautiful was in the middle of the bone collection. “No,” I said.

  “Yes,” she breathed.

  “They can’t be,” I said. “Not after all this time. Someone would have noticed them gone. Things like that don’t just go missing. Someone would have known, there would have been a scandal.” I was suddenly aware that I was babbling, and fell silent.

  Patricia was squatting beside the bones, her floodlight directed at the tiny cluster of brilliant jewels that, even after all this time, glittered as though they were still affixed to a royal crown. As if they emitted a light of their own.

  But I’d disturbed the skull, and my initial reaction of revulsion at touching it disappeared as I focused on what I was seeing now that it had rolled over.

  A hole in the back of the skull, in a place where no hole should be.

  * * *

  We were still sitting beside the boxes ten minutes later, our goggles pushed back onto our forehe
ads, our feet inches from the skeleton. And I was getting tired of arguing. “I trusted you,” said Patricia, and there was bitterness in her voice. “I trusted you to be my witness, not to ruin everything. I want to keep this my find, my information. You have no idea what will happen when academia gets hold of it.”

  “This person was shot, Patricia,” I said for what felt like the thousandth time. “That’s a crime. We have to have the police in.”

  “No! That will make it public.”

  I was losing patience. “They already know. They were at the meeting. They know you are on your way to proving the jewels were in Montréal, and they probably know you think some were stolen. Obviously you were right. They’ll want to know why.”

  “But they don’t know about this. About them being here.”

  I said, as reasonably as I could, “I know that your career is your first priority. But this person was murdered, don’t you see? You could lose your big scoop; he lost his life. There’s a matter of perspective here.”

  There was a long silence, and I could hear water dripping somewhere behind me. “But it was a long time ago,” she said persuasively. “Don’t you see? He was probably killed when the jewels were moved here from Dorchester Square. Sometime towards the end of the Second World War, for heaven’s sake! No one’s going to catch the murderer now.”

  She was probably correct, but that didn’t make it right. “Okay,” I said finally, biting my lip. “Here’s a compromise. I know someone with the city police. He’s—he’s a bit of a black sheep over there. He does things differently. Let me get him here to look at it. I don’t know at what point something becomes an archaeological find rather than a crime scene, but he’ll know. And he’ll be discreet.”

  “I don’t want—”

  “It’s nonnegotiable, Patricia,” I said, feeling the weight of my years and the lightness of hers. She sounded like a sullen two-year-old. “Someone has to see this. I’m offering you someone who won’t call up the newspapers. I’d take it if I were you.”

  She was regretting getting me involved. She’d wanted me to be her own private PR person, ready to make her famous. I didn’t really care.

  There was another silence, and while Patricia was struggling with her inner petulant child, I looked at the skull again and wondered how long he—or she—had been lying here. Had the bright stones been in a pocket, with the fabric rotting away over time? Why hadn’t whomever shot this person taken them?

  Finally, I felt rather than saw her pushing her glasses back up her nose. “Okay,” she said.

  “Okay?”

  “Just the one policeman.”

  “For now,” I cautioned. “Really, Patricia, if Julian—that’s the guy I’m talking about, Julian Fletcher—if he says it needs to be investigated, then there’s nothing either of us will be able to do about it. There will have to be crime-scene techs, probably some cold-case detectives assigned, who knows? It will have to go through the whole police procedure. You have to be ready for that to happen.”

  “I see.”

  “Look, they’re not going to call up the universities and alert the world. You still have the scoop. You were still the first to find this. It’ll be your dissertation. But that doesn’t mean it belongs to you.” Zut, I’d heard about academics being territorial, but this was ridiculous. Perspective, people: perspective. I tried again. “This was somebody’s life, Patricia.”

  Her headlamp swung in my direction. “You’re right, of course,” she said, so briskly that I found myself wondering why the sudden change of attitude. “Come on.” And then she was turning around in the small space, turning away from the bones, crawling, putting out a hand to help me. “I have to keep perspective.”

  Not to mention reading minds, I thought. Hadn’t I just been thinking about perspective?

  The way back seemed longer than getting there, and I was conscious only of a prickling feeling at the back of my neck, as though someone were following us, watching us. Or maybe it was just because of what—of who—we were leaving behind, abandoning to the darkness. He’d been there already for decades, I thought: there was no need to worry about leaving him alone now. Yet it felt wrong, somehow, to take the light and the voices away, to leave him back there in the dark and the damp.

  With the jewels.

  “You and Dr. LaTour were the only people to see this?” I asked finally.

  “They just got control of the stream that broke through,” she said. “We were here two days ago, and Pierre has so much on his plate, he wasn’t very interested. We left, but I’d seen the hatbox with the crates, and I knew. I came here from London to find it, and I found it.”

  There didn’t seem to be anything to say to that, so I didn’t say it. Patricia lapsed into silence, too, and it allowed me to think about contacting Julian. Détective-lieutenant Julian Fletcher, to give him his title and full name, both of which were meaningful: he had a decent rank within the city police force, and his surname was one of those echoed in the wealthiest enclaves of Montréal. Julian Fletcher, of the Westmount Fletchers.

  Last year, I’d served as liaison between City Hall and the city police in the business of a string of murders that had happened over the summer, and while everybody in Montréal was pointing toward a vagrant serial sex murderer, Julian and I had uncovered something deeper and far more troubling. You’d think they’d have given us medals, but instead Julian stayed at his desk for two months of forced paper pushing and Jean-Luc made sure that I got to represent the city at every irrelevant and miserable event—nothing too small—throughout the city until his pea brain had moved on to something else.

  Not without, of course, his having taken the credit for what we’d done.

  I wondered how Julian would feel about my contacting him again. But he was a self-anointed outsider, both in his family and in the police force, and I had a feeling that this particular adventure might just appeal to him.

  My boss? I was anticipating a different reaction altogether.

  * * *

  “So,” Hans said, leaning on the bar, pretending to be far more drunk than he was, “what’s in the shipment?”

  “Hmm?” Maurice blinked blearily at him through the smoke.

  “The shipment,” Hans said. “Coming tomorrow. From Halifax.”

  Maurice shrugged. “Don’t know, do I?” he asked. “Not privy to what them higher-ups is about, eh? I do what they tell me to do, and I collect my pay. Whose round?”

  “Mine,” said Hans, even though it wasn’t. He held up his hand to the bartender. “But what I’m thinking,” he said, as the man refilled their glasses, “is that if you had to, you could find out what’s in that shipment.”

  “Cheers,” Maurice said and downed a third of the whiskey. “Whew! What was that you said?”

  Hans took a deep breath. Gott grant me patience, he thought. “This shipment from Halifax,” he said. “If you wanted to find out what’s in it, you could. If you really wanted to.”

  “Yeah, probably could, eh? But why would I want to?”

  The perfect opening. “I can give you three good reasons,” he said.

  “Eh? What’s that?” Another blink through the smoke, another swallow of whiskey. “What’re you on about, then?”

  “They have names,” said Hans. “Monique, and Adele, and Ethel.”

  Maurice was staring at him openmouthed. “Here,” he said. “Enough of that. How’d you know?”

  “You told me,” Hans said, adding under his breath, “you imbecile.”

  Maurice was still uncomprehending. “Whose round?” he demanded, finishing his drink in one fast swallow.

  Hans’s hand came down fast and clamped on Maurice’s wrist. “Listen to me,” he said, his voice low. “You told me about them. And about Felicity, who’s expecting your first baby. Felicity wouldn’t want to know about them. And they probably wouldn’t like to know about each other. Would they?” He paused. “Me, I don’t know where you find the time. But I’ve got plenty of time and
I know what to do with it if you don’t help me.”

  Maurice seemed to have gotten very sober very fast. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Not much,” Hans said, lessening the pressure on the other man’s wrist, but not letting go altogether. “All I want to know is what’s in the shipment.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all,” Hans said reassuringly. He squeezed Maurice’s wrist one last time and let it go. “For now.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Julian returned my call just as I was getting ready to go home, packing up my briefcase. “So they’re letting you out to play again? Never thought I’d see the day.”

  “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” I said. “How are you, Julian?”

  “Comme ci, comme ça,” he said. “So-so.”

  “You don’t actually need to translate for me,” I pointed out. Montréal is a city divided, and the Fletchers are most definitely on the Anglophone side of the line. The wealthy anglophone side. LeDuc is just as aggressively francophone, though the nuns had made sure that I grew up perfectly bilingual. It wasn’t strictly necessary—French is Québec’s official language—but there were still, amazingly, people in the city who spoke no French at all, legal language or not. On the other hand, in my professional capacity, I’d have welcomed knowing far more languages than I did.

  “Just showing off,” Julian was saying.

  “Impressive.”

  “It is, isn’t it? I rather thought so, too. So how can I help our fair city’s even fairer directrice de publicité?”

  I hesitated. “Julian, if I show you something, what’s your obligation for passing it along? Do you have to tell anybody about it?”

  “If it’s a crime, then I have to.”

  “It’s a crime,” I said. “But it could be—archaeological.”

  He gave a snort of laughter. “Don’t tell me you’ve found a body!”

  “Well, what used to be one,” I conceded. “And unless this particular person was the patient of someone who did some nifty trepanning, he was shot.”