Deadly Jewels

by Jeannette de Beauvoir

  He looked at me curiously. “You have the advantage of me, madame,” he said.

  “Oh, sorry!” I wasn’t going to last much longer at my job if this was the best I could do in terms of politesse. “I’m Martine LeDuc,” I said, automatically putting out a hand to shake his. “I’m the—”

  “—directrice de publicité,” he said, nodding. “I thought it might be so, eh?”

  “So when you said that the jewels were being stored…”

  “It is the narrative,” he said. “We’re all trained with the narrative. We can say other things, yes, of course. You would be surprised at some of the questions I get.” He caught my eye. “Well, perhaps you wouldn’t, but it is always entertaining. But as to your question, it is from the tourism center that the narrative comes. Are you saying it isn’t true?”

  “No,” I said and sighed. “I think you can rest assured that that part is very true indeed.”

  * * *

  They all had the same thin cotton clothing: striped shirts over workpants, shoes that might or might not fit. But there were ways to get more. A thriving black market flourished at Buchenwald, kapos and prisoners—and even the guards—all participating. The camp had its own currency and there were things you could buy—chocolate, an extra undershirt, or even a jacket, boots, or oranges.

  Mostly the money was used to bribe kapos for better assignments. The quarry was the worst place to work; men didn’t last there very long, even the youngest, even the strongest: it broke everyone. Most of the bodies hauled into the crematorium came from the quarry.

  The factory was better: the work was indoors, and even though the building wasn’t heated, it was better than being out in the wind. The only ones there who had problems were the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who refused to do any munitions work, and their refusals earned many of them the quarry.

  But the best assignments were in the camp itself, which required scores of people to keep it running. Cooking, serving, washing dishes in the canteen all fell to prisoners; so did working the laundry and cleaning the offices. All of the officers had servants who were prisoners: cooks, cleaners, chauffeurs. Even personal prostitutes, the youngest, the best-looking men.

  There were unpleasant assignments, too. The infirmary didn’t deal much with people who were sick; at Buchenwald, it was simple: if you got sick, you died. But there were doctors all the same, doctors working, Elias was told proudly by the camp commandant, to perfect a typhus vaccine. Mostly they used the criminal prisoners, the ones who were there for killing or stealing or who were generally deemed antisocial, for experimentation; they died quickly, too. And then the crematorium detail took over, gathering the bodies and taking them to the ovens and adding to the smoke that lay over the camp like a haze.

  Some days, the crematorium didn’t run, and the smoke wasn’t so bad.

  The day ended as it had begun, with roll call at the Appellplatz, lit up at night with strong searchlights. Elias wondered why they bothered: everyone was so exhausted that it was difficult to think of escape.

  He was wrong, of course.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I called Julian on the way home. “We don’t have to go see your friend Marcus again,” I said. “Or if we do, it’s for us to give him information, not the other way around.”

  “What’s up?”

  “We may have a bigger problem than we thought. Depending on what you believe, of course.”

  “Tell me.”

  So I told him, about the inner circle and Gabrielle’s connection to it, about Crowley and the manipulation of elements and energy. I told him about the secret societies and the New Order of the Black Sun. “Christ,” Julian said. “Now we’ve got to involve the Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu police, too?”

  “Not yet. Nothing’s happened yet.”

  “They took the diamond from Patricia, didn’t they? And they meant to silence Avner?”

  “It’s their logo on the envelope, all right,” I said. I was suddenly exhausted. “She seems to think they don’t have all the elements in place yet to conduct this—”

  “—séance?” suggested Julian.

  “Whatever it is,” I said.

  “Whatever it is, it’s probably not a police matter.” He paused. “Unless the diamond is there.”

  “She seems to think they need it for focus,” I agreed.

  “Okay, let me get this straight. Hitler and his cronies dabbled in the black arts and it helped them come to power. Something happened and they lost it, and so lost the war. But people believe that somehow, somewhere out there, Hitler’s allegedly still lurking as this mass of pissed-off energy and all it takes are the British crown jewels and a group of skinheads in a basement somewhere to bring him back. And then what? He hangs out and drinks beer with them? Runs for prime minister? What?”

  “I don’t know,” I said wearily. “I don’t know what the plan is. But it’s bad energy, Julian.”

  “Okay.” A long pause. “Actually, I’ve not been sitting around twirling my thumbs while you’ve been off having tea and crumpets with Himmler’s daughter.”

  “Göring’s daughter.”

  “Whatever. Let’s compare notes. You want to get together?” He sounded energized, finally, and I was pleased to hear it. Julian defeated wasn’t a Julian I recognized.

  “Not tonight,” I said. “I have to see Ivan.”

  “Aha. Trouble in paradise?”

  “Not as much as you’re in, sleeping with officers’ wives. What were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking that she had nice—”

  “Never mind.” I cut him off. “I get it, I get it. Tomorrow?”

  “Breakfast at Chez Cora?”

  “Have a heart, I live in the Old City now.”

  “Relax, there’s one on Drummond. Eight o’clock?”

  “Yeah, okay,” I said and disconnected. It felt bizarre to shift gears. I felt overwhelmed by this whole esoteric thing that I really didn’t understand. I needed a long walk, or a session on the massage table, to process it, get it out of my system. Instead I was working my way through Montréal’s evening traffic, on my way to what could only be an uncomfortable conversation with my husband about the course our lives were going to take for the next ten years or so. Small potatoes.

  I left the car in the garage where we rented a space and made my way to the apartment. The evening was warmer here than it had been on the mountain, and I moved among couples and groups of tourists intent on finding just the right outdoor seat at just the right restaurant so that they could look so much more hip than all the others milling about, buying postcards and tins of maple syrup. “Henry!” yelled a woman near me, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. Her Midwestern accent did nothing to quiet my heart rate: what were the chances of her husband being called Henry? “Henry, over here! Jack and Lois are already inside!”

  Ivan was wearing his evening uniform of sweatpants and T-shirt, this one proclaiming his allegiance to Boston College. He looked at me suspiciously. “Where’s my chicken?”

  “Chicken?” I was baffled, and then it came back to me. “Oh, merde, that’s right. I was going to stop at a Saint Hubert.”

  He came over and put his arms around me. “That’s okay, I prefer you, my little chicken.”

  I squirmed away. “I’m starving,” I said. I wasn’t ready to be held. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was ready for. “I can’t believe I forgot it.”

  “It’s nothing,” he said lightly, moving away from me, but not before I saw the hurt at my rejection flit across his face. “I’ll put on some decent clothes, we can go out.”

  “You’re sure you want to have this conversation out?”

  “Don’t have to have it over dinner,” he said, heading up the stairs and into the bedroom. “It can be a postprandial discussion.”

  I had to smile in spite of myself. Who can resist someone who works “postprandial” into his daily vocabulary?

  He reappeared wearing khakis, a sweater, and a jacket, with his fe
dora tipped dangerously over one eye. “How about Brazilian?”

  “Rodizio? Why not?” It meant having people coming by the table every few minutes to offer us more meat, but perhaps that was the point. We walked there in silence, but after a moment I reached out and took Ivan’s hand, tentatively, and was reassured when he held mine.

  The truth was I didn’t know how I felt about the whole situation.

  Two caipirinhas and a full churrasco meal later, I still didn’t know. But my heart rate was back to normal, the headache that had been threatening when I was driving through town had receded, and I’d even managed to talk about how I’d spent my day.

  A little, anyway. I had a feeling that Ivan wasn’t going to be thrilled with a lot of what I was uncovering.

  Walking home, he said, almost diffidently, “Don’t think I don’t realize what I’m asking of you here. I do. I know how enormous this is.”

  We were like salmon swimming upriver: the flow of tourists down Saint-Paul was nearly overwhelming. Ivan grabbed my hand and we fled down a side street, ending up at the riverside, along Montréal’s “beach,” tonight lit up and filled with tables, people drinking and laughing, grabbing what they could of the last days of good weather. Ivan took a deep breath. “They’re my children,” he said. “I divorced my wife, not my kids. It would have been my dream to have them come and live with us from the beginning.” He paused. “But I know that’s my dream, not yours. And I know—I think I know—how much it’s asking of you.”

  I stopped and turned to face him. “Actually, I don’t think I’d want to be married to you if you were the sort of person who wouldn’t create a home for his children, who would feel okay turning them away from his door just because his wife couldn’t have them live with her.”

  Ivan started to say something then, but I cut across it. “That doesn’t mean that I can do it, Ivan, and this isn’t a decision I can make in a heartbeat, either. We’re in completely different situations here. There’s only one decision you can make, and for once you’re lucky, your head and your heart say the same thing. It’s a lot more complex than that for me. This is eight or ten years we’re talking about. And you think I can do that overnight?”

  “Yes,” he said, finally. “Yes, actually, I do. You love Lukas and Claudia. You’ve told me so. I assumed that—”

  “Of course I love them. It doesn’t mean that I want to live with them permanently, deal with them every day, make sacrifices of time and energy and money for them. You don’t understand this, do you? You chose to have children. You chose to make those sacrifices. You didn’t have another person’s children foisted on you.” I took a breath, realizing how ragged it felt. “Whatever I decide, at some point, it’s going to be the wrong decision. I know that. There’s no right way to do this.”

  At home, we switched on the television as if by common accord: it was clearly time to back off each other. “I met a woman today,” I said, trying to find something else to talk about, “who’s Herman Göring’s daughter.”

  “Really?” Ivan frowned. “Which one was Göring?”

  I didn’t like saying it, but I didn’t really know, myself. “Didn’t he commit suicide?” I asked uncertainly.

  Ivan reached behind the sofa for his tablet. “Wikipedia will know,” he said. “Wikipedia knows everything.”

  “Wikipedia is sometimes wrong.”

  “Shh! The gods of the Web will hear you. If it’s on the Internet, it must be true.” He settled the tablet on his lap and typed. “Hermann Göring,” he read aloud. “He was a German politician, military leader, and leading member of the Nazi Party. A veteran of World War One, an ace fighter pilot. Hey, he flew in the Red Baron’s squadron!”

  “Hey, watch out there, Snoopy,” I said.

  “Let’s see … the second most powerful man in Germany. He founded the Gestapo but later handed it off to Heinrich Himmler when he became head of the air force. By 1940, he was at the peak of his power and influence. In 1941 Hitler designated him as his successor and deputy in all his offices.”

  I was wondering about the maid. He sounded like someone who would take whatever he wanted, consent or no. Had Gabrielle been the product of rape?

  “Looks like once the war turned, things went downhill fast. Hitler blamed him for the Luftwaffe’s failures, and when he heard that Hitler was going to commit suicide, Göring wrote to him and said he would then take command of the Reich.” He glanced up. “Seems a stupid thing to say to a dictator.”

  “Suicidal,” I agreed.

  “Hitler called it treason and told people to arrest him, named someone else as successor, and then killed himself. Göring surrendered to the Americans after that, and was tried and found guilty at Nuremberg, but—hey, you’re right, he committed suicide with cyanide before he could hang.”

  “I used to do pub quizzes,” I offered by way of explanation.

  “Not an altogether attractive person,” said Ivan.

  “No, I’d say creating the Gestapo and ordering the killings of millions isn’t exactly going to make one the sexiest man of the year.”

  “I meant physically. Fat,” said Ivan, who worked out every day.

  “I wonder how he got the cyanide,” I said.

  Ivan shrugged. “Wow. Listen to the verdict,” he said, and read it out loud. “Göring was often, indeed almost always, the moving force, second only to his leader. He was the leading war aggressor, both as political and as military leader; he was the director of the slave labor program and the creator of the oppressive program against the Jews and other races, at home and abroad. All of these crimes he has frankly admitted.”

  I didn’t say anything for a moment. I was still wondering where he’d got the cyanide. My mind specializes in minutiae. Last summer, when Julian and I were trying to find out who had killed several women in Montréal, I’d obsessed on the cat that had belonged to one of the victims—the same cat who now went by the name of Bisou, had insinuated herself between Ivan and me, and was purring loudly. Sometimes minutiae is important.

  It was to Bisou, anyway.

  Probably someone had smuggled it in to him. Christ, Martine, I thought: you’d be terrible at this business of enacting magic, you can’t even focus on a topic, much less visualize and call something into being.

  Ivan was talking. “So his daughter—she lives in Montréal? Or was she visiting?”

  I gaped at him. Right. My husband hadn’t been traveling with me inside my head, contrary to what I sometimes assumed. “She lives here,” I said. “He didn’t know about her. Apparently he got a sixteen-year-old maid pregnant and she went home to have the baby.”

  “Tough situation,” said Ivan with compassion. Tough indeed. Another tough situation with a child one hadn’t planned on having come into one’s life. Gabrielle’s mother had done her best, but she’d given up something for the child. A marriage; other, legitimate children. Things she might have preferred. Things she might have dreamed of. And here I was, complaining because these two children might interrupt my life.…

  Stop it. This is not even close to being a parallel situation.

  But I wondered, all the same.

  The phone rang shortly soon after that; it was Margery. “Listen, I know this is last-minute and all, but would it be okay for the kids and me to come up tomorrow? I can stay in a hotel if that’s convenient.”

  “Let me put you on speakerphone,” I said, gesturing to Ivan. “It’s Margery. She wants to come up tomorrow with the kids.”

  Ivan frowned. “It’s not really a good time,” he said.

  “I get that.” Margery’s voice sounded tinny out of the speaker. “But it’s the only time I have, and I’d like to—well, at least see the place.”

  I could feel the longing in her voice. No matter what I was going through, Margery had to be hurting, too. You don’t just make up your mind to move away from your children on a whim: whatever was driving her to Doctors Without Borders had to be pretty intense.

  Ivan was talkin
g. “Aren’t the kids in school?”

  “It’s only a few days. They’re both on top of their studies, you know that, Ivan. They don’t even have to stay at your house if you don’t want them to, I can take them to a hotel. It’s just important that—”

  I cut her off. “Don’t be silly, Margery. Of course you should come, and of course you all should stay here. We have a guest room.”

  Ivan was looking at me like I’d suddenly started speaking Sanskrit. I made a silent palms-up gesture: what can you do? He cleared his throat. “We’ll both be at work,” he said. “The kids have keys. Just come in and make yourself at home.”

  “Really?” The relief was tangible. “I really appreciate this—Martine, thank you, thank you both.”

  “It’ll be good to see you, Margery,” I said. “Travel safely.”

  We disconnected. Ivan was still looking at me. “I didn’t say I’d decided,” I said, finally. “I just think she has a point. She needs to be able to shut her eyes and imagine where the kids are, what they’re doing, where they hang out.”

  “Yes,” said Ivan. “She does need all of those things.” He was trying hard not to smile.

  “Oh, stop it!” I said, and threw a cushion at him.

  “Why don’t,” said Ivan carefully, “we go to bed?”

  * * *

  After that, it started feeling natural for Hans to spend time with Livia. Normal. They ate lunch together at the Hebrew Delicatessen; he walked her home from work several times a week; they went roller-skating and to more movies and to dinner.

  It wasn’t until Hans asked her to a Friday night dance that she told him. “Of course I can’t, silly, it’s Friday.”

  “Yes,” said Hans. “I know it is Friday. That is when the dance is held, yes?”

  She sighed. “I had a feeling you weren’t practicing,” she said. “I just had a feeling about you. Maybe you turned away from it when your family died.” She looked sympathetic. “You know very well that Friday’s Sabbath. Even though I live alone, I still keep the tradition. I have my mother’s candlestick, and I light it at sundown.” She smiled. “It’s such an important gesture, isn’t it? Doing the same thing with other Jews all over the world? Someday”—this with a quick glance at him upward through her lashes—“someday I’ll have a family, and I’ll say the Sabbath prayers with them.”