Deadly Jewels

by Jeannette de Beauvoir

  They were sitting on a bench in the park, and Hans’s arm was around her shoulders. He willed himself not to move it, not to betray himself. “Yes, of course,” he heard himself saying, as though from a great distance.

  Livia was still talking about traditions, but Hans wasn’t listening anymore. How had he not known? It was the Hebrew Delicatessen, after all, it was Jewish food, and she—Livia, the embodiment of perfection—was a Jew, too.

  He felt as if he couldn’t breathe.

  He’d been told all his life that Jews were filthy, conniving creatures, little better than vermin. He’d believed the stories about Jewish men raping innocent young Aryan girls, about Jews defrauding good Germans, about their moral turpitude. He knew in his heart that these stories were true; they had to be.

  And now this girl, this angel, this goddess, was telling him that she was a Jew. And assuming that he was one, too.

  No. This couldn’t be so.

  Livia was still talking. “… and so of course I keep kosher as best I can, but it’s not easy, in such a small space. That’s why I eat at Bernie’s so much.” She paused. “And how I came to meet you. One of the happiest days of my life. You never told me, Hans, how you managed to escape.”

  “Escape?”

  “From Holland, silly! We’ve heard terrible stories about what the Nazis do to Jews when they invade a country. You were so clever to get out before that happened to you, I thank God for that every day.”

  “Yes,” he said, summoning breath and courage together. “Yes, it was difficult. But I decided on a new start in the New World.”

  She seemed to find that funny. “You have such a positive way of looking at things, Hans,” she said, and snuggled closer to him. “That’s one of the things I like so much about you. You never complain, no matter how bad things are.”

  “There’s no sense in complaining,” said Hans. What was he going to do now? He couldn’t lose Livia, not now that he’d found her. And she had said that meeting him was one of the happiest days of her life, too! She loved him! It didn’t really matter what she was: they were soul mates, that was all that mattered.

  But what would Berlin say?

  He didn’t care. He couldn’t care. As she lifted her face to his for a long kiss, Hans could feel his heart hammering wildly in his chest. He didn’t even know if it was from fear—or exhilaration.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “I have an address,” said Julian the next morning.

  I peered at him over my shiny plastic menu. Chez Cora is a chain of breakfast-and-lunch joints throughout Canada that specializes in—well, just about everything. Cheerful in décor and waitstaff, the chain’s food is decent and plentiful. And Julian apparently loves it here. “An address for what? Or whom?”

  “I think I’ll have the Cora’s Special,” he said.

  “Your funeral,” I responded, and when the waitress arrived I asked for the fruit plate. Julian stuck to his high-cholesterol choice. “And a bowl of café au lait,” I added before she left. I was going to need more caffeine to keep up with Julian this morning: he seemed bursting with energy.

  Which was a nice change.

  “So what’s the address?” I asked. “Or are you just playing with me?”

  “I play not,” he protested, but his eyes were twinkling. “Tell me, first, what you know about Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu.”

  My stomach twisted. So that was where this was going. “I know about the hot-air balloon festival,” I said. “That’s really about all.”

  “It’s a transportation hub,” said Julian. “Railroads and the Chambly Canal.”

  “Fascinating,” I said. “Any other tourist tidbits you’d like to share, or are you going to tell me what this is really about?” I knew what this was really about.

  Julian said, “You know what this is really about.”

  “You found Aleister Brand.”

  He nodded. “I found Aleister Brand. And some other guys you probably wouldn’t care to meet in a deserted alleyway on a dark night.” He stopped as our déjeuners arrived, and waited until the server had left again. “And not all of them the people you’d think.”

  “What people would I think?” I sipped at the café au lait, my hands wrapped around the bowl for comfort.

  He shrugged. “Well, skinheads, young angry guys. That’s the stereotype, right? Don’t get me wrong, they’re there, and Mr. Brand himself isn’t exactly a low-key figure. But it’s not just them.” He cleared his throat. “Do you know why Brand bought a place in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu?”

  I shook my head. “His mother just said that he settled there when he got back from living overseas.”

  “Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu,” said Julian, “is home to the Area Support Unit of the Canadian Forces. That’s where they do recruitment and officer training.”

  I put down the bowl and stared at him. “The army is involved?”

  “Not as an entity. But some of them, yeah. Some of them hang with him.” He shoveled some eggs into his mouth.

  “Holy hell,” I said. “This just keeps getting better and better.”

  “It’s nothing new. There’s always been this connection between the military and nontraditional religions. The Romans and their old mystery religions, Mithras and those guys, it’s what built the empire. And everything you told me, all that stuff about directing energy, about absorbing power, well, that’s pretty much right up the army’s alley, isn’t it? Who wouldn’t want to use all the weapons they can lay their hands on?”

  “The people in Hitler’s lodges were mostly military men,” I said slowly.

  “There you go,” said Julian comfortably, crunching his toast.

  “Have you talked to the local police?”

  “Briefly,” he said. “They thanked me and moved on. There was an army officer shot last week, it was on the news, remember? They’re still looking to solve that one. I couldn’t interest them in something dating back to the Second World War.”

  I sipped the coffee again. “What about the skinheads? Have the police had troubles with them in the past?”

  “Not particularly,” said Julian. “Model citizens, most of them. Your Aleister guy, he writes for the local rag, ghostwrote a book last year on the history of the military academy. Neighbors like him.”

  “Neighbors liked Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, too,” I said, thinking of creepy people in history. “Probably liked Jack the Ripper.”

  “Let’s not get carried away yet,” Julian said. I’d never seen anyone eat like that, not even Ivan. Not even Lukas. “Brand hasn’t killed anyone.”

  “That we know of,” I said darkly.

  “That we know of,” he agreed. “So I thought, why not meet the guy?”

  I stared at him. “You’re going to go knock on his door and say, hello, we were wondering if we could get an invitation to your next satanic ritual?”

  “That’s what I like about you,” said Julian. “You cut straight to the chase.”

  “You don’t know what you’re getting into, Julian,” I objected. “These people—”

  He waved a hand airily. “Oh, I know a lot about them. Neo-Nazis and skinheads, racists and the Aryan Nations and all sorts of offshoots. I’ve been spending a lot of time getting acquainted with every racist homophobic misogynist thing that’s ever crawled out from under a rock in this province.” He shook his head. “I’ve been taking a lot of showers, too. We’ve been lucky here, actually, they don’t seem to like the east coast. Out west, British Columbia and Saskatchewan and Alberta, those places, they’ve got it bad.”

  “Maybe they need space to practice in?”

  He ignored my frivolity. “Don’t get me wrong, Canada’s got a far-right network. We’re not on the level of the States yet, but we could get there. Depends on the economy: when it’s bad, there’s more of them, blaming it on everyone but the people who created it—ironically enough, white men.”

  He picked up his cup, took a swallow of coffee, set it down again.
“You know about the Ku Klux Klan, right?”

  “The KKK, sure. They’re here?”

  He nodded. “Out west. Not so much in Montréal, though nothing would surprise me.” He smiled suddenly, vividly. “Know how they started?”

  “I’m not sure I want to.”

  “Sure you do. You have to wait for me to finish my coffee, anyway.”

  “Tell me,” I said, resigned. Julian loved telling stories.

  “Right after the American Civil War ended, the South was defeated, and—wait for it—the economy crashed. Mass violence is always about the economy, one way or another.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Well, small town in Tennessee, these six young bucks, just out of the Confederate army and looking for something to do. Lawyers, I think, most of them were. Bored out of their skulls. So Christmas Eve they decide to start a social club.”

  “A social club? Like the Knights of Columbus?”

  “More like a secret society, but with the only goal being to have fun. All the fancy northern colleges had secret societies, why shouldn’t they? They’d play pranks, wreak mild havoc, and have a good time of it. One of them wanted to call the group the Merry Six.”

  That was a long way from cross burning and lynching. “Sounds like Robin Hood.”

  “Ah, but there wasn’t anything altruistic about this group,” said Julian. “None of that taking from the rich to give to the poor. These guys were just about having fun. One of them knew a little Greek and thought they should call the group kuklos, which means circle, and someone else added the word clan. The name got a little massacred after a lot of bourbon, but eventually became Ku Klux Klan. All as a prank. And there you go.”

  I waited while he ate some more. “What about the white robes?”

  “Well, see, that’s the thing: this was all meant as a joke. They decided first to give each other titles, the more ridiculous, the better. The Grand Cyclops. The Grand Magi. The Grand Turk. They’d attract members and call them Ghouls.”

  “Hence the ghostly outfits,” I said.

  He nodded. “Right on. They put sheets over themselves, with masks and pointed hats, got on their horses, and rode through town one night, screeching and generally creating mayhem. Then back to the bourbon.”

  “I can see where that would be frightening, even if they didn’t do anything really bad,” I said.

  “Depends on your definition of bad. The American South at the time was not a nice place to be. Too much fear—and fear always stokes violence.”

  “I thought the economy was what stoked violence.”

  “Any economy. The money economy, sure. But there’s also the security economy—will you be able to live out your life the way you want to? Fear of losing what you have.” He shook his head. “The Ku Klux Klan grew—there was a lot of unemployment and a lot of former soldiers, young men with anger and nothing to do. And slowly the founders’ intent, to have fun and make mischief, got lost. The emancipation of slaves freaked them right out. So the organization started targeting black people and they went from threats to injury to lynching. And they grew and grew and grew. But it’s ironic, isn’t it, that it just started out as a boys’ club?”

  It was ironic that fear could be manipulated to the point they had. But hatred always did, I thought. Fear of the “other,” fear of loss. Julian was right about that, anyway.

  “Didn’t happen right away,” said Julian, signaling for the check. “They were formed in the 1800s down in the States, and they reached Montréal in 1921. They targeted Catholic institutions in Québec, burning them down. Then they headed west, burned Université de Saint-Boniface in Winnipeg, killed some students. And except for a little activity here around 1980, they’ve pretty much stayed in the west.”

  “So what do they have to do with Aleister Brand?”

  “Nature,” said Julian, “abhors a vacuum. So do people attracted to hate groups.”

  “So anyone here who would have otherwise joined the Klan—”

  “—could well find themselves in sympathy with neo-Nazis. The hatred’s the same. The fear’s the same. The need for violence is the same.”

  I thought about it. “I don’t know. From what Gabrielle said, I’m thinking that the violence is a little different here. That it’s not violence for the sake of violence.”

  “What, then?”

  “That it’s used to transcend. That the cruelty is somehow necessary in order to get past normal accepted decent human boundaries.” I remembered about chaos magic and how it decimated taboos.

  “I don’t know that people who want violence care about taboos.”

  “Brand cares,” I said. “He may have recruited people who don’t. If he did, then he’d have to indoctrinate them. This is sophisticated stuff, Julian. This isn’t about galloping through a village wreaking havoc, or even stringing someone up from a tree. This is about concentrated evil.”

  “All the more reason to pay him a visit.”

  “And do what?” I asked again. “Walk up to his house, introduce ourselves? Hi, we think that you’re doing something bad, and we’d like you to please stop it? Isn’t that a bit more information than he needs about us?”

  “If he’s the magician you seem to think he is,” said Julian, “then he already knows.”

  * * *

  He’d been wrong about the escapes. There’d been quite a few, most of them successful, and all carried out by the same group of people.

  They met in the cellar under the canteen.

  Elias had been sensing an undercurrent ever since he’d been brought out of the quarantine of the Little Camp, a sense of some of the prisoners being closer than others, having some sort of shared secret. He ignored it, by and large: his plan was to do what he was supposed to do and stay alive. Some days, that alone felt like a tall order. The workshop, the daily report to the camp commandant, the hours spent standing still in the Appellplatz; they were all taking a toll on him. Elias had no interest in joining any groups, or factions, though he was well aware of their presence.

  But if he’d been ignoring them, they weren’t ignoring him.

  He was awakened one night, a rough hand shaking his shoulder, a light shining in his eyes. “Come on, Kaspi.”

  “What? What is it?”

  “Come with us.”

  It wasn’t even all that secret, he thought as they marched him across the square; now that they were out in the blinding spotlights he recognized several of the kapos, the high-ranking prisoners, the ones who really ran the camp. No guards were in sight. “What have I done?”

  “Shut up! Come on!”

  Under the canteen the cellar was oddly cozy. A stovepipe extended from the chimney, and a wood-burning stove offered welcome warmth. There were chairs, and tables, and lamps hanging from the low ceiling.

  About twenty men were in the room.

  Elias was forced into a chair and the others grouped themselves around him. One of the kapos, a Russian called Vladimir, was directly facing him. “So, the Diamond Man,” said Vladimir.

  “Yes,” said Elias nervously, his eyes darting around at the men. “I don’t want any trouble.”

  “You hear that?” Vladimir demanded of the room. “He doesn’t want any trouble!”

  They laughed as though at a joke.

  “No trouble, Diamond Man,” said Vladimir, holding up his hand for them to stop. “No trouble. Do you know who we are?”

  Elias shook his head.

  “We’re the ones who will liberate this camp someday,” said Vladimir. “We’re your comrades. Do you get it now?”

  “Communists,” Elias said. There was no secret of their presence in the camp; at least a third of the inmates were Communists. Some said the guards were afraid of them.

  Vladimir nodded. “We’re the resistance,” he said. “We’re the ones who make life better for you here, by not letting those sons of bitches get away with what they do in other camps. We’re organized. We have a printing press. We have a wirel
ess.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” It couldn’t be good, he was thinking.

  “Because you’re one of us. You’re a worker, like we are. You’re exploited, like we are. And you can help us, Diamond Man.”

  “How?”

  Vladimir nodded as if Elias had just confirmed something for him. “You meet with Commandant Koch every day,” he said. “You are in his office. He trusts you.”

  “I don’t think he trusts anybody.”

  “All right, all right. See that? Did you all hear that? I told you!” Vladimir cried to the other men. “Diamond Man is smart! All right, he does not trust you. But he needs you, and that is even better.”

  “What do you need me to do?” Elias asked.

  He knew already that he would say yes.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  We deferred the trip out of town when Julian got a call from headquarters. “Marcus has something to show me.”

  “I thought Marcus wanted you off the face of the earth.”

  “We cops,” said Julian airily, “can separate out our personal feelings from our professional work.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  What Marcus had, in point of fact, was a slideshow. “You got me interested,” he said to me, wheeling over to the table where the laptop was connected to the projector. “So I did a little digging.”

  “Into what?”

  “The New Order of the Black Sun.”

  I exchanged a quick glance with Julian. I was reasonably sure we hadn’t talked to Marcus about that—in fact, I hadn’t heard about it until Gabrielle told me about it, up on the mountain.

  Marcus was still talking. “Very interesting, how they’ve managed to stay under the radar,” he said. “We usually get wind of any activity … there’s an echo. I’m a little like a spider, you see,” he added, looking at me, winking as he shifted metaphors. “I sit here at the center of the web, and I can usually tell when something hits one of the lines I have out there—it sets up a vibration, you might say. And I feel it. I check into it. I look and see who might have been setting it up.” He shrugged. “Didn’t get a feel for this one right away.”