Deadly Jewels

by Jeannette de Beauvoir

  “Wouldn’t we all,” he said. “Mum’s the word, and that’s straight down from the rarefied air of the upper echelons. Rumor is the feds want to get involved, and the border people, and we’re bracing for an all-out turf war.”

  “As opposed to doing any actual, you know, policing?”

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  “And Avner? Any news on him?”

  “Well, funny you should ask that. I think Avner’s doing a little sleuthing of his own.”

  “Oh?” I reached across the table and picked up Ivan’s unfinished croissant, balanced my smartphone while I buttered it and took a bite.

  “Had a word with his son Lev last night,” Julian said.

  “Lev, the one who needs to find a nice Jewish girl and settle down?”

  “The very same. And I checked up on him, too. It seems that Lev might not be what we’d call a model citizen.”

  “Oh really.”

  “Oh really indeed. A whiz with computers, apparently, I’ll grant him that, but he gets bored easily and likes to go places he’s not supposed to go. Online, I mean.”

  “A hacker,” I said.

  “A hacker,” he agreed. “He knew Patricia, by the way. In fact, he’s the reason she got started with all this. He hacked into the museum’s archives. Digitized archives.”

  “Well, yeah, of course they’re digitized, it’s a computer—” I stopped myself. “Digitized? As in, old records digitized?”

  “The very same. And we’ve got paperwork about the gold, and paperwork about the jewels. The whole treasure-ship manifest. He passed on all that info, and I’d guess told her about his father being a diamond expert. Maybe even told her about the diamond substitutions—that’s my guess, anyway. He must have liked her.”

  “Pity she wasn’t a nice Jewish girl.” I sat and thought about it for a moment, eating the croissant without thinking about it, without tasting anything.

  “Well, there’s that and then there’s that matter of being dead, not exactly Avner’s dream daughter-in-law.”

  “Funny man. What did Lev tell his father?”

  “Apparently the captain isn’t the only one to know about the New Order of the Black Sun,” Julian said.

  “Christ, Julian!” I jumped up, sending my chair spinning away. “He’s gone to Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu!”

  “That would be my guess, too.”

  “They’ll kill him! Julian!”

  “If they haven’t already, they’re probably not going to. Yet, anyway. And stop panicking, I’ve got some people out there, watching the warehouse.”

  “It might not be enough.” I took a deep breath. “I don’t know how to condense this, but Élodie has this hippie brother-in-law who lives in Glastonbury.”

  “You don’t know how to condense telling me that Élodie has a hippie brother-in-law?”

  “No, no. Just listen. The important part of that sentence was that he lives in Glastonbury.”

  “That in Saskatchewan?”

  “You’re such a funny man. Anyway, it’s because of him that she knows all this.”

  “Knows all what?”

  “Shut up and I’ll tell you.” I ran a hand through my hair, trying to organize my thoughts. They felt feather-light, ready to disappear in the smallest puff of air, clear at the time and becoming more amorphous the further I drifted from them. “Okay. In a nutshell, this energy thing we’ve been talking about, you know? It’s apparently particularly potent, I guess you’d say, in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu. The city’s sitting at a crossroads of two ley lines—”

  “Two what?”

  “Ley lines,” I said impatiently. “Spirit paths. Energy tracks. Take your pick. It’s some kind of liminal space where anything can happen, like the Bermuda Triangle, maybe, but the point is that energy is attracted there in a big way. It’s why Aleister Brand chose to live there instead of Montréal: it’s got stronger vibes.” I paused and visualized his expression of disbelief: I didn’t need a Skype video session. Maybe I was getting more psychic.

  Or maybe I just understood how strange the things were I was talking about.

  “Listen, Julian, these lines, I looked at them again last night. Remember your map, the one of all the tunnel networks under the city? The gas lines, the sewers, the electricity, the rivers, all that? The lines that Élodie told me about, these energy lines, they correspond almost exactly to the network of tunnels you showed me, the secret underground city. Do you see what that means? All the city’s infrastructure was built on these other, these older lines.” I took a deep breath. “The infrastructure’s tapping into Psychic Central.”

  I realized that my hands were shaking. When we took the kids to the amusement park, Claudia screamed the loudest on the rides, and I asked her once if she was frightened, if she’d rather not go on them. “Oh, no, Belle-Maman!” she explained. They’re scary, but they’re scary-fun.”

  This was definitely not scary-fun.

  “And here’s the thing, Julian—maybe this is just me overthinking it, and maybe this whole thing is making me crazy, but—well, here it is, if something bad happens in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, it’s going to go seismic. Go fizzing all up the line to Montréal, and then around the network, like some sort of supernatural Roman candle. Completely out of control. Chaos magic for real.” I stopped for a moment. “It can’t happen. We can’t let it happen.”

  There was a moment of silence before he spoke again. “Okay,” he said. “I’m gonna take your word for all this, because honestly, I have no idea what you’re talking about. But let’s make sure it doesn’t come to that. Like I said, I’ve got guys watching him. Do you think you can rope the mother in? Would he be likely to listen to her?”

  “I have no idea,” I confessed. “I don’t think they’ve spoken in years.”

  “Worth a try, though, wouldn’t you say?”

  I shrugged, then remembered he couldn’t see me. “Worth a try,” I agreed.

  “Okay. You call her. I’m checking in with the guys I have out around her son’s place.”

  “They’re watching for Avner?” Absurdly, I was more concerned in that moment about him than I was about anything else. I really, really wanted Avner to be all right.

  “Yeah. He’s not there, LeDuc, okay? Wherever he is, you don’t have to worry, he’s not with Brand. I would’ve heard.”

  “Okay.” But I was feeling uneasy all the same. Something was teasing the edge of my consciousness, something dark, like the feeling you have when you know you’ve forgotten something important—but can’t reach deep enough to find what it is. Something about his house, perhaps? Something was nagging at me, and I had no idea what it was.

  And somehow I didn’t think that Julian’s recruits out at Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu were going to be much help.

  Do something, Martine. I paged through the recent calls on my smartphone and pressed Gabrielle’s name. Voice mail, the same German-accented French I remembered from the conversation on the mountain—which also felt as though it had happened a long time ago. “Hello, Madame Brand, this is Martine LeDuc. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about—well, about what we were talking about, before. Please call me back as soon as you can.”

  I thought about calling Marcus, but decided to check in at the office first instead. “Hey, Richard.”

  “Bonjour, Martine. Are you all right?”

  I frowned. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  He cleared his throat. “I have received a telephone call,” he said. “Just three minutes ago, in fact. It came from a blocked number. A male voice. Very sure of himself, very smooth. He said—well, it was not a threat, not exactly, but when he heard that you were not here, he said that it was very important that you come into the office today. Immediately, he said. He was very forceful.”

  Something cold gripped my stomach. “Richard,” I said.

  Oblivious, he went on. “He seemed to know that you have been working outside and—”

  “Richard,” I inte
rrupted. “Get out of there. Now.”

  “What? But—”

  “Leave,” I said urgently. “Oh, Christ, we have to evacuate the building. Richard, pull the fire alarm, and get the hell out of there. Now!”

  I disconnected before he could say anything else and pressed Julian’s telephone-number icon. “Someone just called my office and said that it was important I go into work right away,” I said without preamble. “I’m getting City Hall evacuated.”

  “I’ll call you back.” No small talk. I liked that about Julian: he might well have been skeptical about my offering of ley lines and dark magic, but when it came down to it, he didn’t question me, or my motives, or my judgment.

  I looked around the apartment but suddenly didn’t want to be there. I wanted to be sure I’d been right. If it turned out that Richard’s call was just about someone really, really needing to see me on another matter, I was going to have a hell of a lot of explaining to do when Jean-Luc got back in town.

  At least it was another gorgeous fall day.

  I walk-trotted the five blocks to City Hall, half enjoying the sun on my face and half dreading what I was going to find there. It was clear even from a distance that Richard had taken me seriously: people were leaving the building, a steady stream of them, and already the first fire truck was on the scene along with two police cruisers. A couple of officers, their camouflage pants standing out in the crowd of office workers, were moving people back from City Hall and putting up tape. The inevitable gaggle of tourists was madly taking photos and asking what had happened in several different languages.

  I found Chantal, though not Richard, in the crowd. “What’s happening?”

  “Monsieur Rousseau said there might be a bomb,” she said, her voice low.

  “He’s not saying that?”

  She shook her head. “No, no, just to me. He told Amélie down the hall that he smelled smoke.”

  “Is he in there now? With the fire department?” Dear God, if it went off now …

  “No,” she said. “He is conferring. The fire department is on its way. There will be the bomb-disposal unit from the police coming soon. They are doing the routine fire drill, managers making sure that everyone from their departments are out. But the police, they are suspicious. Privately. Someone from the detective unit told them it could be a bomb.”

  Good for Julian. I knew how much of a risk he was taking, professionally, believing I was right about this. Maybe risking something that even being a Westmount Fletcher couldn’t get him out of. I sucked in air and realized that I’d been holding my breath. “Are you okay?” I asked Chantal.

  “Yes, yes, of course.” She was wrapping her cardigan closely around her. “It is a thought that brings no comfort,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Was it meant for you, Martine?” she asked.

  “We’re getting ahead of ourselves here. We don’t even know for sure.” But I did.

  The bomb-disposal unit was unmarked, just a big black van, and people made way for it, citizens disgruntled that their business in City Hall had been interrupted, secretaries pleased at the change in their routines, everyone more or less good-natured. That was because of the weather. If it had been February, it would have been a different story.

  The men who emerged from the van, on the other hand, were anything but ordinary. Kevlar and then some. They strode past us and as they did I felt a tap on my shoulder. “LeDuc?”

  It was Julian. “Thanks for coming,” I said. Even I could hear the relief in my voice.

  “They’ll need to talk to Richard,” he said, watching the police, hands in his pockets. Just another office worker.

  “I know,” I said.

  “Okay,” said Julian. “Keep your eyes out.” And he headed over to talk with one of the men from the black van.

  “Who are we looking for?” asked Chantal. I’d forgotten she was there.

  “Someone that the détective-lieutenant is interested in talking to,” I said. “Never mind. Chantal, don’t say anything to anyone about a bomb, all right?”

  She shook her head solemnly, and I squeezed her arm. “Good,” I said. “I’ll tell you about it later, okay?”

  “Of course.”

  I smiled and squeezed her arm again and made my way through the crowd. As I got closer in, more and more of them were people I knew, and we exchanged suitably shocked and curious remarks. Julian caught up with me at the edge of the police tape. “Come on, time to go,” he said, grabbing my elbow.

  “But I wanted to see—”

  He pulled me close against him so that his lips were by my ear. “There’s at least one device in the building. They haven’t finished going through it yet. You want to risk someone with binoculars and a remote detonator? We’re getting out of here, now.”

  I allowed him to lead me through the people and away from the building, off onto a side street, the Champs de Mars. We were alone. “That’s better,” said Julian.

  My hands were shaking. “Then there really was…”

  “Someone,” Julian said, looking at me consideringly, “wishes you a great deal of harm indeed.”

  “Merde, alors,” I said, and sat down, hard, on the curb. The only other time in my life when someone had wished me this kind of harm was very personal; he was a hands-on sort of person. But exploding a bomb in a public building? We were entering a whole new level of craziness here.

  Still, why not? If Aleister Brand really did want to bring Hitler back from the dead, why would a little thing like killing dozens of people at City Hall bother him in the least? “He was in the military,” I said to Julian.

  “What?” He squatted down beside me. “What did you say?”

  “He was in the military,” I repeated. “Aleister Brand. Gabrielle told me. Maybe he was in ordnance. Maybe he learned this there.”

  Julian said, “Let’s let them figure out who did this, and why, okay?”

  I looked at him. “We know who did this,” I said. “We know why he did this.”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “What aren’t you telling me?”

  Julian sighed. “I just found out myself,” he said. “Marcus Levigne has, as of this morning, also gone missing.”

  I stared at him, trying to figure out what that meant. “He’s in a wheelchair,” I said slowly. I felt like we’d had this conversation before.

  “Not at the moment. He left it in his office.”

  “He left it in his office?” I absorbed what that meant. Was that the thought that had been following me—had I picked up on it, somehow, when we were together? Did Marcus Levigne have a tell I’d copped to without even being conscious of it? “What’s his angle?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Money? A diamond like that … the price would be incalculable.” He sat down on the curb next to me. “Maybe we’ve been looking at this wrong, Martine,” he said. “Your magician … maybe he’s just in it for the money, too. Skinheads, splinter groups, they can always use funding.”

  “We’re assuming that whoever killed Patricia has the diamond,” I said. “But they can’t both have it—Aleister Brand and Marcus Levigne.”

  “So we need to find out who does.”

  I shook my head. “I have to talk to Gabrielle.”

  “Then I’ll take you.”

  I looked at him. “You really don’t have to babysit me, you know. I’m perfectly fine.”

  “Sure. You always sit down in the middle of the street.”

  “It’s not the middle of the street.”

  “Listen, LeDuc.” He sounded thoroughly exasperated. “Someone just tried to kill you. Spectacularly, with a whole lot of collateral damage. What do you think he’s going to do when he learns it didn’t go off as planned? Call it a day? You’re stuck with me, or with somebody I choose, until this is over.”

  I was beginning to think it would never be over. Had it really been less than a week since I’d jumped on François’s sightseeing tour? And what was he going to say
in his narrative, today, when he drove past City Hall? In fact, with Ivan and Margery and the kids on his tour, or someonelike him … “Oh, hell,” I said suddenly.

  “What?”

  I was fumbling for my phone. “I have to tell Ivan I’m all right.”

  “It just looks like a fire drill,” Julian reminded me.

  “I can tell you’re not married,” I said, then stopped, stricken. “Oh, Julian, I’m sorry. I didn’t think—”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I didn’t get much practice at it, anyway. Call away.” He stood up and dusted off the seat of his pants.

  I got voice mail. “Just checking in to see how your morning’s going,” I said cheerfully. “We had some excitement at City Hall, but it was all a false alarm. I’ll tell you about it later. Have a great tour.”

  “You good now?”

  “Okay,” I said, pushing myself up off the curb. Julian grabbed my arm and helped me the rest of the way up. “I’m going to see Gabrielle. You’re welcome to come along.”

  “I think that’s an excellent plan,” said Julian.

  “We’ll see if she does.”

  * * *

  The next day, Maurice had news for Hans.

  “They’re moving the contents of the vault,” he said, puffing nervously on a cigarette.

  “Why?”

  A lift of the shoulders. “Who knows? Who cares? They don’t consult me on these things, eh?”

  Hans thought about it. “Where are they going?”

  “Another vault. The gold and the hatboxes.”

  “Hatboxes?”

  “With the jewels. They’re what you’re interested in, right?”

  “Who told you I was interested in them?”

  Maurice actually looked frightened. “No one! No one, boss, sorry!”

  “Don’t talk about this to anyone,” hissed Hans. He had to think. “When are they moving?”

  “Don’t know. Listening at keyholes, that’s how I knew, eh?”

  “You have to find out,” Hans said. “I need to know exactly when, and where.” He got up close to the other man. “I don’t need to tell you what will happen if I’m disappointed,” he said. “Don’t disappoint me.”