Deadly Jewels

by Jeannette de Beauvoir

  “Okay. I’ve been reading since we last spoke.” She sighed. “Apparently, energy doesn’t dissipate, not when it’s been built up through time, or intensity, or both,” she said. “Look: it’s a documented fact that churches are traditionally built on top of earlier, pagan centers, to provide continuity, to tap into the holiness of the place. You’ve heard of ley lines, haven’t you?”

  She was speaking in a language that wasn’t part of my repertoire. “What are ley lines?”

  “Back in the 1920s, somebody in England noticed there were these lines that crisscrossed parts of the country, and that they connected locations that were significant. He said you could draw a straight line between, say, a church and a circle of standing stones and a spring, that sort of thing: that these holy places were all in alignment with each other. This is going back to the Iron Age, mind: the Christian churches came later and just insinuated themselves into the landscape that had already been marked by the lines.”

  I was staring at Élodie, but all I was seeing was Julian’s map, the grid of crisscrossing tunnels and waterways underneath the city. A power network. Ley lines.

  She took a sip of her cocktail. “No one knows what the leys were used for, but of course there are theories, everything from the scholarly to the crackpot. They may have been spirit paths, letting the dead travel through the countryside. Or fairies. Or something.”

  “How on earth do you know this?” I asked.

  She looked surprised. “James,” she said.

  “Your husband?”

  “Well, yeah. He thinks the concept of ley lines is rubbish, of course, but really it’s not whether it’s true or not that’s the issue, it’s if people believe it to be true.”

  I was still a beat behind. “James works for the government,” I said. “What does that have to do with this?”

  “It’s not his job,” she said, impatient. “It’s his brother. Don’t you remember? James spends enough of his life rescuing Philip one way or another that it sometimes feels like we’ve got a social services office in our house.” She paused. “Philip lives in England, in Glastonbury—where the music festival is?—and that’s supposedly Power Central when it comes to ley lines and site energy, and Philip is way into it, as you can imagine.”

  I’d met Philip only once, but he’d been wearing a black cape fastened at the shoulder with a large dragon brooch. Not an image you were likely to forget anytime soon. Yeah, I could imagine.

  “So anyway, I know about all this, because it’s all he ever talks about. Earth energies and fairy paths and sacred springs. And who’s to say that some of it isn’t real? I mean, if you have a lot of people in one place believing the same thing, really passionately believing it, I guess that something can happen. Just because we don’t understand it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. Some people think of it as magic. Some people think that it’s just because we haven’t developed the knowledge to understand the science of it yet.”

  “But there aren’t ley lines here,” I said. “We’re talking about jewels, not Stonehenge.”

  She stared at me. “You’re kidding, right? We’re practically sitting on one of the most significant ley lines in North America. It’s the Trois-Rivières line. And there’s a network of smaller leys connecting various sites in Montréal itself. I can’t remember them all, but I know that one goes from the oratory down through a couple of small churches and hits the basilica, and there’s another that intersects with Pointe-à-Callières.”

  All roads—or ley lines—seemed to connect back to Pointe-à-Callières. It was where Patricia had done much of her research, and it was the director who’d made her go to the mayor in the first place. I remembered him sitting in Jean-Luc’s office, his bland approval of the project.

  The power grid, in many more ways than one, holding the city together. The tunnels followed the waterways and the waterways followed the leys; the network was one and the same. “Oh, merde,” I said suddenly.

  “What is it?”

  “Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu,” I said with some desperation. “Is it on a line?”

  * * *

  The camp commandant was terrified.

  He had reason to be, of course. Anyone who wasn’t afraid of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring was a fool, and probably a dead one at that. And there was no reason for him to come to Buchenwald.

  Ilse, his wife, was frightened, too, but she showed it in different ways. She worked the horses in her private indoor ring harder than ever, and then ordered prisoners—randomly, it seemed to her husband—to be strung up from the trees.

  Elias stayed in his workshop. This was not the time for baubles for Ilse, or for schnapps with the commandant. This was the time to be very, very quiet. Göring was less anti-Semitic than most of the others, but that meant nothing: like Ilse’s, his spurts of anger and cruelty could be random, and no one wanted to be in his path when that happened.

  As it turned out, Elias had no choice. Early afternoon a kapo—not one of the resistance men—came for him. “Commandant’s office,” he said, jerking his head toward the door. “Now.”

  “Me? What does he want with me?”

  “Did I say you could speak? Move quickly, or I’ll see that you can’t move at all!”

  Elias stumbled up and out, trotting across the square to the gatehouse, staying as far ahead of the kapo’s baton as he could. He’d only ever seen the Reichsmarschall in photographs, but there was no mistaking him, portly and self-satisfied and downing the commandant’s schnapps at an impressive clip. “This is the man?”

  “Yes, Herr Reichsmarschall,” said Karl. “He has been creating beautiful things here. We can show you a selection—”

  Göring waved the suggestion away. “You know which pieces I need,” he said, still looking at Elias with something not unlike curiosity.

  “Of course, Herr Reichsmarschall. They’re here, in the safe.”

  Elias watched as the commandant fumbled with the combination, twice, before finally getting it right. He moved quickly to shield the view of the interior, and Elias remembered the camp gossip about him lining his pockets. He brought out a case; inside, carefully wrapped in cloth, were the stones, the ones crafted to look like the small tiara, part of the British royal jewels.

  Göring looked at them. He brought out a jeweler’s loupe and examined them. He ran his chubby hands over them. And, finally, he looked up and smiled.

  “You are to be congratulated,” he said to Elias. “What they all say about you is true.”

  What they all said about him? Elias looked at the camp commandant, but Karl was busy avoiding his eyes. “You may speak,” Göring said, his voice encouraging.

  “Thank you,” Elias said. What did the man expect of him? “It is about the cut. If you cut stones correctly, they are—beautiful.” He didn’t know what else to say.

  Karl waved a hand. “You may go,” he said.

  Behind him, Elias heard the two men talking. “I will take these to Berlin at once.”

  “Yes, Herr Reichsmarschall.”

  “Good. The Führer will be pleased.”

  “It is all I ask, Herr Reichsmarschall.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  By the time the conversation got around to the political issues involved, I realized that I was becoming increasingly and thoroughly frightened. I only half believed all the information I seemed to be amassing, but as Élodie said, perhaps it didn’t really matter what was real and what wasn’t. The energy of belief was what was important.

  Élodie had her mind on other things. She solved problems. Ancient secrets or New Age concerns were interesting to her, but only for a while. Over a dinner that I did little but move around on my plate, she came back to her own dilemma. “I’m not convinced that the best route is to tell London,” she said.

  “Let them keep the paste? Sort of like, let them eat cake?”

  She smiled. “Must be damned good paste, to have fooled people for this long.”

  Damned good past
e, I thought. Crystal forgeries hammered in the dark distillery of a death-camp workshop. “Shouldn’t you wait until we have them all, anyway?” I asked. “Julian’s determined to find the missing diamond.”

  “Possibly.” She thought for a moment, swirling her wine around in its glass. “I know somebody at MI6,” she said suddenly. “Spies are usually the best bet for moving information. And they work for the Home Office, that’s pretty much where we’d have to start anyway.”

  I was staring at the fish on my plate. It was really good halibut, but tonight it tasted like cardboard. “Fine,” I muttered. “D’accord.”

  “It’s important to get this right, Martine.”

  I looked at her. “You don’t think I know that?” I took a deep breath, ticking items off on my fingers. “We have Aleister Brand who wants, at the very least, to resurrect the Nazi Party. We have Patricia Mason, who finds missing crown jewels and keeps one and shows it to Avner Kaspi, and now she’s dead and he’s missing. We have a police captain who spends his time tracking down neo-Nazis but is more interested in the missing diamond than he should be. I have an interesting family situation where I should be centering my attention, not to mention on my job, and instead I have to figure out if Aleister Brand really did kill Patricia and take the diamond and is planning to use it for black magic, which if you’re right could work because so many people believe it will and it’s happening on one of the most powerful ley lines in North America. Do you really think I don’t want to get this right?”

  “Martine,” she said, “think about it. You have these guys—they’re all guys, right? Aleister Brand’s mates?”

  I nodded. “I think so.”

  “Okay. Young, testosterone-driven, neo-Nazis, probably full of anger and resentment that they’re not rich and famous. You get a charismatic leader to step in and he shows them a few magic tricks and pouf! you’ve got a circle. Probably need about nine or ten, right?”

  Nine or ten. Just like the minyan. We still had to find Avner. “Right,” I said.

  “Okay. And let’s say for the sake of argument that it all works just right. That the place—you said it was a warehouse, right?—is right on the ley line. That they have the diamond, and it’s retained its power separated from the other jewels, which isn’t even necessarily a given, but for the sake of argument again, let’s say it does. And let’s say that they have the wherewithal to focus the kind of energy this would take. Let’s say that it all comes together and that it works. What happens then?”

  “What do you mean?”

  She sighed. “Adolf Hitler in Montréal. What’s he going to do, Martine? Find another beer hall? We’re not even in the same century anymore.”

  Julian, I thought, had asked almost exactly the same thing, but I was getting irritated. “You think it couldn’t happen again? You haven’t seen a drift toward the right everywhere—in the U.S., in Europe, here in Canada? Merde, Élodie, you work in Ottawa, you know what’s happening. We’re about eighteen goose steps to the right of center, and marching merrily along toward fascism, everyone’s doing it, and yeah, I think it could happen again. The middle class is disappearing, the poor are starving, literally, and if that isn’t the best possible backdrop for someone to come along and rally them behind a swastika, I don’t know what is.”

  I stopped and took a deep breath, held it, released it. Calm down, Martine. “I don’t know what it would look like, Élodie. I don’t know if he’d get summoned and be a little man with a Chaplin mustache … or be a nice white conservative member of parliament. I don’t have to know the specifics to know that we can’t let it happen.” I sighed. “I think I have to talk with his mother again. And maybe with Marcus Levigne.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Captain with the city police. And he—Oh, I don’t know, maybe I’m just tired, but I’m getting a feeling about him, Élodie. I think he’s involved in this somewhere, and not in a good way. But for now—he’s an expert on hate groups, especially neo-Nazis.” I thought for a moment. “He’s the one, actually, who sent me to talk to Gabrielle Brand in the first place.”

  “Your magician’s mother.”

  “Not my magician,” I said. “But yeah, that’s Gabrielle. Marcus gave me her name.”

  “Sounds helpful,” Élodie said, her voice distracted. She wasn’t with me anymore: she was already thinking about what to say to her contact in London. You didn’t have to be a mind reader to deduce that.

  “We’ll see,” I said. “What’s your plan now?”

  “I’ll call Jeremy tonight,” she said, glancing at her watch. “Wake him up. See what he says. I’d like to meet with the police tomorrow and see where they are with recovering that diamond.”

  Probably not very far at all, I thought, but I didn’t say it. “You can talk to Julian,” I said. “He’s more likely to tell you what’s really going on than the higher-ups are.”

  “Courtesy call,” she said absently. “I can’t be in town and not see them. But, yeah, let me talk to Julian, too.” The waiter reappeared, and Élodie signed the check with her room number. “You haven’t talked about Ivan,” she reminded me when the waiter was gone.

  I sighed. “Margery—Ivan’s ex—wants to go work abroad with Doctors Without Borders. She’s really amazingly brave, ready to confront Ebola, anything. And that’s great, that’s impressive—but it means the kids moving in with us. Full-time. Maybe even permanently.”

  “I see.” She looked at me thoughtfully.

  “I know what I’ll say. I just need to be able to say it—wholeheartedly, you know? I’m still digesting the idea, all the changes it means.” I paused. “They’re in town now, actually. The kids wanted to show Margery around Montréal.”

  She lifted her eyebrows. “Now?”

  “She didn’t know I’d be investigating a murder,” I said, trying for humor and not coming even close to bringing it off. “Well, one problem at a time.” I stood up and she followed, slowly, reluctantly. “I’ll call you in the morning, let you know when Julian’s free,” I said. We did the usual kissing of each cheek, and then, on impulse, I hugged her. “Thanks, Élodie.”

  I came home to the smell of popcorn and the sounds of an uproarious game of Pictionary taking place on the living room floor.

  Lukas saw me first. “Belle-Maman!” He scrambled to his feet and ran to hug me. “Mom and I are winning!”

  “Good for you,” I said. “Hey, Margery.”

  She, too, had stood up. Claudia already looks just like her mother: wavy blond hair, perfectly symmetrical face, Margery could have stepped out of the pages of Vogue. I always felt a trifle unkempt around her. We hugged, a little awkwardly, and I bent over to kiss Ivan. “Good game?”

  “Mom and Lukas cheat,” Claudia informed me.

  “Then cheat right back at them,” I said cheerfully, wondering what to do next. Pictionary doesn’t allow for a fifth player, and anyway, the truth was, I was exhausted.

  Ivan said, “Why don’t we call it a draw for now, since Belle-Maman’s home?”

  Lukas howled in protest. “No, don’t,” I said quickly. “Listen, I’ve had a really tiring day, and all I can think of is a hot bath and bed. You guys finish your game. Margery, I’m sorry, would you mind terribly?”

  “Of course not,” she said. Our eyes met over Claudia’s head and she acknowledged what I was doing with a grateful smile. “We can catch up tomorrow.”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  I didn’t even make it to the bath. I looked up a couple of things on the laptop, dutifully, still not really believing everything Élodie had said. Then, halfway through undressing, I leaned back into the bed, and that was, as they say, all she wrote.

  * * *

  Ivan and Lukas were already in the kitchen when I woke up—late—and wandered in sleepily in search of coffee. Ivan was sitting at the table with his tablet in front of him, consuming the morning news along with his croissants and orange juice, and Lukas was enthusiastically scribbling in his noteb
ook. “Belle-Maman! We’re taking a bus tour today!”

  “So I heard,” I said, kissing first Ivan and then the top of Lukas’s head, which was pretty much all he allowed me. “It’s a great tour; you’re going to love it.”

  “We already know all about Montréal,” he said. “It’s for Mom’s benefit, really.”

  “I see.” I exchanged smiles with Ivan and sat down. “Good heavens, these are warm!”

  “We got them specially this morning,” Lukas informed me. “It was on my schedule.” He turned the notebook to face me.

  “I see that it was. No, thanks, just coffee first.” I reached for the French press and poured. “Is everybody else still asleep?”

  “Not a chance,” said Ivan. “They’re already out and about. There was a great deal of talk about dresses and jewelry. They’re going to meet us at one for the tour.” He glanced up. “Margery says she’s sorry to miss you, but we’ll all have dinner tonight.”

  “Of course,” I agreed.

  “We’re going, too,” said Lukas. “Dad’s taking me to work with him.”

  “Just for two hours,” said Ivan. He grimaced. “Couldn’t get out of it,” he said to me.

  “Lukas is going to become a cardsharp before he’s twenty,” I said.

  “Yes, I am!” He was delighted for a split second, then, “Belle-Maman, what’s a cardsharp?”

  I made my way through a second cup of coffee and watched them gather themselves and get out the door. It took two this morning to clear the cobwebs: the bad dreams I’d had were still clinging stubbornly to my brain.

  Finally I called Julian. “Élodie Maréchal’s in town,” I told him.

  “So Ottawa’s going sub rosa,” he said, and whistled. “They’d have sent the deputy prime minister if they were going to go public.”

  “At least for now,” I agreed. “She knows someone in MI6, she’s doing all those cool spy things and getting in touch with him.”

  “Cool spy things? Like what, decoder rings?”

  “And invisible writing, no doubt,” I said. “She wants to know where things stand with the diamonds.”