Deadly Jewels

by Jeannette de Beauvoir

  We were driving along the canal toward the highway and he abruptly turned in to a parking lot. “Okay,” he said.

  The restaurant had clearly just opened for lunch, but already there were tables occupied, a good sign in terms of the food. I didn’t care; I was still trying to recover. Should I tell Ivan? Should I keep the kids away from Montréal until this business was sorted?

  We were seated and I blinked at the menu. “This place is called Le Capitaine Pouf?”

  “Apparently so.” He was scanning the drinks offerings. “I need a beer.”

  “Or four,” I agreed, and we put in those orders right away. Only French-speaking, I noted; Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu didn’t seem to have Montréal’s tendency to bilingualism. “How did you come by the name?” I asked the server in French.

  “A long story,” she said, not unkindly. “What will you have to eat? Our specialty is fish and chips.” We both ordered it, and she left.

  The man at the table next to ours leaned over. “I can tell you about the name, if you wish,” he said.

  I was about to decline, politely, when Julian roused himself. “Yes, tell us,” he said, and cut me a glance. Something going on here.

  He seemed pleased to be asked. “It’s a popular drinking game,” he said. “Well, at least, popular among students. It goes like this. One person is chosen to be Capitaine Pouf. The others buy the drinks for as long as he plays without making a mistake.”

  Sounded like a deal to me.

  He glanced around and, needing refreshment, took a swig of his own beer before resuming. “He is given a glass of beer, and says, ‘Le capitaine Pouf prend sa première verre de la soirée.’” I glanced at Julian, but he seemed to have understood about the captain drinking the evening’s first glass. Probably had played it many times himself.

  “He grabs the glass between the thumb and forefinger of one hand, drinks the beer down in one draught, wipes the beer off his upper lip or moustache with one forefinger, once for the left side and once for the right, wipes the beer from that finger, once on his left knee and once on his right, gives one satisfied sigh (or belch, if he can), and raises his posterior from the chair once in order to fart (although he need not necessarily do so), the last action in the sequence supplying the ‘pouf’ part of the name.”

  It was an exhausting narrative; he had to refresh himself again. I thought that if I was doing any serious drinking I’d never remember all those rules. Julian, with a glance at the man’s glass, signaled the server for a refill. “Merci,” our new friend said in acknowledgment. He wasn’t finished. “Then the second glass of beer arrives. He repeats exactly the same sequence of actions, in exactly the same order, but this time he says, ‘le capitaine Pouf prend sa deuxième verre de la soirée,’ grasps the glass with his thumb and two fingers, drinks the glass off in two draughts, wipes his lip twice on each side with two fingers, which he then wipes twice on each knee, belches and rises to fart twice. If he hasn’t made a mistake, it’s on to la troisième verre, three fingers, three gulps, and so on. As soon as he makes a mistake—any mistake—he is out, and it’s somebody else’s turn to be Capitaine Pouf.” He looked at us with pleasure. “It’s fun,” he said.

  “It’s a great way to get free drinks if you have a capacity for beer,” said Julian.

  “That, too,” he said as his new glass of beer arrived. “But,” he added mournfully, “you really do have to be young.”

  “Apparently,” I said. I was still unclear what we were doing here.

  Our friend wasn’t finished. He leaned in confidentially and I was quite sure he was ready to fulfill the belching part of the game. “The owner of the restaurant was once a real captain in the merchant marine,” he informed us. “He dresses as a pirate with a three-cornered hat, eye patch, horizontally striped black-and-white shirt when he’s on the premises.”

  “We’ll watch for him,” promised Julian, and the man nodded and returned to his lunch.

  Somewhere in the narrative the fish had arrived, and everyone was right: it was amazing, crisply fried but tender and flaky inside. I didn’t think I’d ever eaten anything that good. “What was that all about?” I asked Julian.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re interested in stories about drinking games now?”

  “I’m interested in giving my thoughts time to settle,” he said, taking a long swallow of his beer.

  “And have they?”

  “I wasn’t,” he said, “taking your black magic stuff very seriously. I’m sorry, Martine, but like I said, for me it’s all about facts.”

  “And now?”

  “And now, I’m not so sure. He’s the one.”

  “The one what? Who killed Patricia?” He didn’t say anything, and I rushed on. “For God’s sake, Julian, talk to me. He’s behind the whole thing? He’s dangerous?” Another pause and I reached across the table and put my hand on top of his. “Julian,” I said urgently, “he knows about my children. Are they in danger?”

  His eyes met mine. “To tell you the truth,” Julian said, “I have no idea.”

  * * *

  In the end, it wasn’t that difficult after all. All he had to do was put the old images out of his mind, replace them with new ones. Jews were not snarling dogs, they were not rapacious old men, they were music and laughter and sunlight. If Livia was a Jew, then being a Jew was a wonderful thing.

  And yet he still didn’t tell her the truth about himself. She asked questions—the woman could ask questions!—but he was evasive, made up stories, told her about the life of someone who didn’t exist. There was too much at stake. He had to remember who he worked for. He had to remember what could happen to him if he betrayed them.

  And not just to him. Now, he had someone else to worry about.

  “I do not pay attention to religion,” he told her, and she laughed. “Sometime Bernie will take you to shul, you’ll see,” she predicted. “You’ll end up the most observant of us all!”

  He laughed it off with her, but he was becoming more and more fearful. They went everywhere together these days; he’d even moved rooming houses to be closer to her. What if someone saw him with her? He had no doubt but that there were other spies like him in the city; there was no reason to think otherwise. He could say it was for better cover of Hans the Dutchman, but the thought of answering those questions made him feel cold all over.

  And then there was Maurice.

  Hans continued to keep an eye on the police corporal, making sure that he was still indulging his wildly active libido, making sure that Maurice knew he knew. No one told him anything, but he knew that there was interest in what was in that vault he’d installed—two years ago, now?—under the Sun-Life Building. He knew that there was going to be more to the story.

  He knew that he’d have another visit from New York.

  One week, without having planned it at all, without meaning to say anything, he heard himself speaking: “Can I share Sabbath with you? I don’t know how to do it anymore, but you can remind me.”

  Livia’s eyes widened. “That,” she said, “is the best thing in the world you could have asked!”

  And that was the beginning.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  He was the one.

  I knew it. Julian knew it. Gabrielle knew it. No doubt Aleister Brand himself knew it.

  So what were we going to do about it?

  We didn’t say much of anything on the drive back to Montréal. The wind had picked up again and was whirling dead leaves all around us; late October weather. It was too early for that.

  “How can we connect him?” I asked suddenly into the silence.

  “Pardon me?”

  “The New Order of the Black Sun,” I said impatiently. “Aleister Brand’s outfit. How are we going to connect them to the missing diamond? That’s what you need to do, isn’t it? To get your evidence? Find the diamond?”

  “That would help,” Julian conceded. He seemed to be oceans away from me, to be pul
ling himself back with some effort from some other foreign place. I wondered what he had been thinking.

  “I mean,” I went on doggedly, “at the end of the day it doesn’t matter that he’s related to Göring. And it doesn’t matter, at some level, what kind of rituals he plans to preside over. What matters to you is that diamond.”

  “It would be helpful,” Julian said carefully. “Whoever has the diamond is probably whoever killed Patricia.”

  “And you need something concrete so you can arrest him.”

  I could feel his glance in my direction, sharp and focused. “Why this sudden interest in his arrest?”

  “Because,” I said, “I don’t really understand much, but I do know that he can’t enact any rituals from the inside of a prison cell. And that’s what matters to me, stopping him.”

  “Doesn’t it matter to you that he killed her? Or that he ordered someone to kill her?”

  I flipped my hand impatiently. “Of course it does. I’m only separating it out for your benefit. You’re the one who doesn’t want to talk about evil, you want to talk about crime. So I’m talking about crime. But it’s all intertwined, all of it. The crime and the evil. The past and … what they want to do to the future.”

  “So if you’re so sure that this famous ritual is about to take place, what do you plan to do about it?” He sounded impatient.

  That was, of course, the million-dollar question. What could we do? How could we stop it? The New Order of the Black Sun had been planning it for … oh, for God only knew how long. Waiting for the right artifact to surface.

  “We can’t exactly stake out the warehouse,” Julian was saying. “Even if it was within my jurisdiction, I couldn’t do it. And you and me alone? Don’t make me laugh. There’s no way to keep him under surveillance.”

  “So there has to be another way to stop him,” I said urgently.

  “Listen, LeDuc, his own mother doesn’t know how to stop him,” he said. “She wouldn’t have come to Marcus and you if she could handle it. She wants to just hang out with her grandkids and let you take care of defusing her Satanist spawn.”

  “What if she’s right, Julian?”

  “Is that what you believe?”

  “I don’t know what I believe,” I said slowly. “I think there’s a lot going on here that I can’t begin to understand. That maybe nobody could understand.” I took a deep breath. “But I’d feel a lot safer if we could disband this group. Stop whatever it is that they’re planning. Arrest Aleister Brand.”

  “We’re back to that. He has to break a law before we can arrest him,” Julian said prosaically. “All right, he gives me the creeps, too. There’s something about him, it’s not even in what he said, it’s in my gut reaction to him. It’s bad, I’ll grant you that. Maybe even what you’re calling evil. But I still don’t see what can be done.”

  We’d crossed the bridge and were back in the city now, everything gray and oddly austere. Gotham City, North. “I want him gone now,” I said urgently. “If he’s in prison, he can’t hurt anyone.” I took a deep breath. “I don’t care about eventually,” I said. “If he’s in prison he can’t get to my kids.”

  There was a long silence. “Well, well. Don’t look now,” said Julian finally, “but I think you just got your answer.”

  “About what?”

  “Lukas and Claudia.” He smiled, his eyes on the traffic ahead of us. “Anyone who’s about to leave their father and cancel them out of her life isn’t going to take on the devil for their well-being, is she?”

  “It’s not the devil,” I said, but my heart wasn’t in it. He was right. I had my answer.

  * * *

  Julian dropped me off at City Hall and I walked up the stairs to my office in a daze.

  Chantal was frantic. “The mayor has called from Québec,” she said, “twice. He wants to know what is going on around Mademoiselle Mason’s death.”

  “He should call the police,” I said. “They’re the ones who investigate crime in this city.” I knew how absurd that sounded the moment the words were out of my mouth. My boss would be well within his rights to chastise me for trying to do the police’s job. Martine LeDuc, Amateur Crimefighter.

  “And Richard has been dealing with the trade delegation from Japan. They’re very upset.”

  “Richard’s good at that,” I said. “Chantal, did anyone named Gabrielle Brand call, by any chance?”

  She looked doubtful. “No—I think not. It is not a name that I recognize.”

  “It would have been too much to hope for,” I said, heading for my office.

  “But wait,” said Chantal. “Madame Maréchal called.”

  That stopped me in my tracks. “Élodie? From Ottawa? When?”

  “Twice, also. First thing this morning, and again”—she checked her computer monitor—“about half an hour ago.”

  “Merde,” I said with feeling, and this time made it into my office. Closed the door. Took great breaths of air. It all seemed, suddenly, like too much. There were black clouds gathering in my heart.

  I’d met Élodie Maréchal in graduate school. She was my closest friend back then; we went on the occasional vacation together, drank coffee daily, and told each other everything. For a while we shared an apartment up on the Plateau; I remember the old lady downstairs complaining that we were too clean, that we ran the vacuum cleaner every morning, and us laughing about it—it was our coffee-bean grinder she’d been hearing.

  So much to remember … Late nights and long talks, borrowing each other’s clothes, vetting each other’s boyfriends. Drinking too much and giggling together on our way home from a club or a café, debating each other in political science classes, deciding in the middle of the semester that what we really wanted to do was emigrate to the Yukon and study caribou and to hell with humanity (that last one was usually accompanied by shots of brandy). Being the closest of friends, holding each other when a romance ended, lying for each other to cover a late night or a missed class. We’d been so close, once.

  After we each got our degrees, though, we’d gone our separate ways: I to city government—or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof—in Montréal, Élodie to join the big cheeses, the feds, in Ottawa.

  We’d both gotten married; I had an instant family with Lukas and Claudia while Élodie decided to have her child the old-fashioned way, with her husband taking time off for paternity leave while Élodie continued to work. I can’t imagine him ever considering doing anything else: one simply doesn’t say no to Élodie.

  She worked for the Deputy Minister of National Defense. I’d never been sure exactly what it was that she did, but she had whole departments reporting to her at the National Defense headquarters in the Major-General George R. Pearkes Building on Colonel By Drive in Ottawa; even the names echoed with stiff military bearing. Élodie wasn’t in the military herself but that didn’t seem to matter much; she had the authority she deserved and didn’t much care what people thought about her beyond that.

  I’d had occasion, last year, to turn to her for help; had even made the drive to the capital to meet with her, and she’d responded in spades. We’d e-mailed from time to time since then, feeling mutual joy at the renewal of our friendship, however far apart we’d drifted; but Élodie never contacted me at work.

  This couldn’t be good news.

  I buzzed Chantal. “Can you get Madame Maréchal on the phone for me?” I waited for the call to go through, looking out the window at the port and wondering why the sun seemed so bright.

  Élodie didn’t waste time. “What the hell have you been doing?”

  “I’m well, thank you very much for asking, and how are you?”

  An exasperated sigh. “I don’t expect to see your name cross my desk, you know,” she said.

  “Believe me,” I said fervently, “I didn’t mean for it to.”

  “Okay.” She was fiddling with something, some sort of wrapper. “Sorry. Nicotine gum.”

  “Does it help?”

&
nbsp; “Not particularly. If they’d let us go on smoking in public buildings, I wouldn’t need the damned stuff. Seriously, Martine, what’s going on there?”

  I swiveled my chair around to look at the view again. “How much do you know?” I asked.

  “I’ve heard that we may have some bad news to break to our cousins across the pond. Report from the police in Montréal. That’s enough to be going on with.”

  I sighed. “Tip of the iceberg, but it’s probably the most important from your point of view, I suppose. The thing is, I don’t even know if it’s true. I mean, yeah, we found the diamonds with the remains of whoever stole them from the vault back during the Second World War.”

  “Dear God,” whispered Élodie.

  “And then probably Patricia Mason took one of the ones that were there, and then that one probably got stolen from her when she was shot. Presumably by whomever shot her.”

  “This just gets better and better.”

  “But the thing is, really, we’re only going on her word, in a way. In the research she did, in what she says happened. It’s entirely possible that those diamonds aren’t actually from the crown jewels.” Yeah, possible also that pigs will someday fly. I seriously doubted that Aleister Brand would waste time on paste. Or Marcus Levigne. I was starting to get a funny feeling about Marcus, too. “They’ve been authenticated locally. The police are handling that. But I think that Avner knew from the beginning that they would be.”

  “Avner?”

  “Avner Kaspi. He’s a diamond expert. Patricia—she’s the researcher who started this whole thing, she’s the one who stole one of the diamonds—”

  “—which were already stolen—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “She took her diamond to him. To Avner.”

  “Why?”

  I took a deep breath. “I think she found out about his past. Who he is.” I passed a hand over my forehead. “Sorry. I’m explaining this poorly. Avner Kaspi says when his father was in a concentration camp early in the 1940s he was forced to create some artificial stones. Stones that are, apparently, just like ones in a certain crown, part of the cache of British jewels. That seems to be too much of a coincidence to not believe that something’s going on.”