A Rather Curious Engagement

by C. A. Belmond

  Yep. It was going to be awfully hard to say goodbye to Lake Como.

  Part Six

  Chapter Twenty-two

  The repairs on our villa at Antibes were coming along nicely, but the workmen were still at it, and they acted as if we had no business being there, getting underfoot on their work site. We didn’t linger; Jeremy and I were in a tearing hurry to get to the yacht in Nice. But now we had my little chariot awaiting us. There it was, sitting in its parking slot on the left side of the garage—Aunt Penelope’s 1936 Dragonetta, all spruced, repaired, shined up and ready to go.

  I almost didn’t recognize it, because when it was first bequeathed to me, it was perilously on its way to becoming a rust-bucket, with upholstery all torn up by those disrespectful mice. But Denby had lovingly repaired it all, being careful to use materials that were natural to its period, and avoiding turning it into one of those cars that have been so completely overhauled that they bear no real resemblance to their original glory. He’d left a note on the windshield. She’s a real beauty, Penny, and she’s ready to rock and roll. Enjoy!

  “He did a great job,” Jeremy commented as I ran around squealing over every beautiful restoration. “Let’s go to the harbor in this car today,” he suggested.

  Dare I drive it? I did. Fortunately, when I was sixteen my father had insisted that I learn to drive a manual as well as an automatic. At the time, I suspected him of dark motives, like trying to postpone my inevitable freedom on wheels. But now I saw the wisdom of it. I hopped in the driver’s seat, Jeremy slid into the passenger seat, and I tentatively started her up. The motor purred promisingly. Very carefully, I backed it out of the garage and turned around in the circular drive. Smooth as silk, with an engine worthy of a great little airplane. Halfway down the driveway I carefully tested the breaks.

  “Nice and easy,” Jeremy observed approvingly. Confident, I began to pick up speed. I liked the way she responded, and it was a thrill to feel so connected to the road, hugging the turns and emerging from them with pinpoint control. Finally, I set that cobalt-blue baby loose on the main corniche road of the Riviera. And I could swear that, like a horse, it was happy to be back on familiar turf. It was light, fast, and powerful. Every time we passed through a village and I paused at a light, people came out of shops and cafés to admire it.

  “You’re a natural in this car,” Jeremy said in amusement. I felt I was travelling in another era, and yet, I knew that this little auto would always be a part of my future, having been the instrument that first set me on the path to our inheritance, and the wider, more exciting realm of chasing after one’s destiny.

  Penelope’s Dream was sitting serenely in the harbor. One of the day workers was hosing down her decks. Yachts, as Claude had warned us, require constant care—washing, polishing, tinkering, fussing—because one is always fighting the elements of salty sea and air that want to corrode and rot and wear the thing down and take it back to the sea. Gerard, the engineer, was busy in the engine room. He nodded and grunted to us but went right back to work.

  Louis, our French lawyer, was waiting in the main salon for us. He had taken seriously his assignment of watching out to make sure that nobody, not even the crew, disturbed anything from the curio cupboards or anywhere else.

  He conferred with us in a low tone. “Nobody’s touched anything since you called,” he said. “The captain isn’t here yet. He’ll come later. But the German gentleman has arrived. I told him to wait on the forward deck so I could keep an eye on him.”

  Louis went now to invite Kurt to join us. Kurt seemed to understand the situation, and did not look offended at being kept waiting out on the deck. He and Louis both had that old-world courtesy which goes a long way when dealing with a situation requiring diplomacy. (Like, when nobody really trusts anybody.)

  Jeremy explained that Louis would supervise the searching of the yacht.

  “Perhaps,” Jeremy suggested to Kurt, “before we begin, you could fill us in on this trip that the Count says he took when he was searching for the Lion.”

  “I have been trying to get my father to do just that,” Kurt said ruefully. “Claude can tell you the details, but here’s the important facts: My father thought he tracked down the Beethoven Lion to a dealer in Corsica. Papa didn’t want to let it slip through his fingers, so he immediately went to meet with the man. Papa returned to the boat with a wrapped parcel that he took aboard. The whole crew saw the package, but he never let them touch it or unwrap it. They hit bad weather on the way back to Nice, and my father fell ill and had a stroke. It was many months before he could recover his speech and other faculties, and we had to keep him in the nurse’s care. His memory came back, slowly, but in patches. And he told my sister it was all right to sell the yacht, for he seemed to know that he would never race her again.”

  Kurt had been looking off in the distance, remembering. Then his gaze settled on the boat as if he were returning to the present. “Later, Father began to remember buying the Lion, so he searched the castle for it. But when the news reached him that the sale of his boat at auction had gone through, this apparently triggered something in his mind. He now seemed to recall that he’d left the Lion behind on the boat. He described getting up out of bed in the night to check on it, in a suitcase in a linen closet just outside his cabin.”

  Kurt looked up at us now. “You can see why I would like to lay this story to rest,” he said. “Father gets agitated every time he remembers it.”

  I’d noticed that Kurt seemed genuinely pained at the picture of his father conducting this odd transaction. His father’s mind had been intact then, so I wondered if Kurt’s discomfort was due to the possibility that his father had been conducting business that may not have been entirely on the up-and-up. This is a real hazard for collectors. When they want something badly, it’s too easy to cross the fine line between “found” and “stolen” goods, and a buyer might end up commissioning an art “dealer” who thinks nothing of looting an archaeological site and smuggling the treasure out of the country illegally.

  From the look on Jeremy’s face, all this had crossed his mind, too. “Okay,” Jeremy said to Kurt. “Let’s take a look.”

  Louis conducted the search. He started with the dining salon, the bar, and the main salon. Initially, it seemed a perfunctory exercise. Jeremy and I had been through these cupboards over and over, first when we explored the boat upon buying it, then to assess what supplies we needed, and again after the boat was stolen. I knew darned well that there was no Lion here. This was merely for Kurt to see for himself.

  But then, he casually dropped a bombshell. “My father, like many collectors, has special hidden compartments for his greatest treasures,” Kurt said. “Even I did not know all his hiding places on the boat until just yesterday when he told me where they were. May I?”

  He returned to the trophy shelves in the bar, and began tapping on wall panels alongside them, which opened to reveal hidden cupboards.

  “Secret compartments!” I cried. “Wow!” Kurt and Louis smiled in amusement, then glanced at Jeremy as if to say And where did you find this slightly naive, wildly enthusiastic American girl? Jeremy allowed himself a pleased but complicit Euro-smile. I ignored them, fascinated with all the compartments, which were like miniature versions of the secret doorway in the castle. I kept trying to guess the next little hideaway; it was like staring at a drawing and looking for all the hidden faces imbedded in the artwork. We found a hidden drawer beneath the mini-refrigerator under the bar; and, in the main salon, there was a false bottom in the side-table near the sofa.

  When we went down below, Louis began with the linen closet, sliding the door open so that we could see it had only towels, sheets, blankets, napkins and tablecloths in it. Then we tried the master cabin, where Kurt found a drawer beneath the bed-table, and a cupboard behind the vanity mirror, and even under the wash-stand in the bathroom. But, every single cupboard was empty.

  “You see,” Kurt was saying, “when Father was a
younger man, and went on expeditions to dangerous places, these secret drawers kept things safely hidden, both at sea and when the boat was docked.” And, I thought, in case the police took it into their heads to board the boat and search for stolen antiquities.

  “They were for father’s guests, too,” Kurt continued, “so the ladies could hide their jewelry in these secret places, when they swam or bathed or slept at night, or went ashore to shop.”

  Which meant that they didn’t trust the hired help, either, I mused. Another hazard of wealth. You buy too much stuff, and then you have to be suspicious that everyone on earth—including friends and servants—wants to steal it from you.

  “Well, that’s that,” Kurt said as he stood up, having examined the last hiding-place in the guest cabins. “I can tell Father that there was no sign of the Lion aboard this boat. Either he never had it—or somebody stole it off the boat—that is what Father will say.”

  He looked at us now as if he’d just made a decision about something that had been hovering over the whole discussion. “I would like to make a proposition. You see, my father is unlikely to abandon his pursuit; he’s already been talking about hiring another investigator to find his Lion. When I pointed out where this has led us—to that menagerie of wrong lions—he said, ‘Why not ask that delightful girl and her young man who came to visit? She is an expert.’ ”

  “Us?” I said in surprise. Kurt nodded, and turned to Jeremy now.

  “I hope you do not mind, but I did some investigating of my own,” Kurt said. “It wasn’t hard; many museum people are talking about the American heiress and her English lawyer who work as a team. They say you tracked down a hidden, priceless painting that had been in your family’s possession for a long time, but which everyone else had been unable to find. And that you took great care in choosing the museum you sold it to. Everyone said that you kept your head, and conducted this fairly, taking time to verify your find, with a meticulous attention to detail.”

  He had turned back to me now. “The other investigators were—clumsy—with my father’s feelings, getting him over-excited for nothing. I saw how gentle you were with him. And so I wonder if you would allow me to engage both your services to look for this little treasure? Do you think you would possibly accept such an engagement?”

  I stifled a gasp. I was thrilled. Our very first commission for the firm of Nichols and Laidley. Or Laidley and Nichols. Whatever.

  But Jeremy, cool hotshot lawyer that he is, said very calmly, “Well, that is an interesting proposal, I must say. But we will have to give it some thought.”

  I surreptitiously pinched Jeremy’s arm to communicate my opinion on the subject. Being English, he didn’t even say “ouch.”

  “It would be great if you could find out, once and for all, if the damned thing ever really existed,” Kurt said.

  “In that case,” Jeremy said, “you must tell us all you know about the Beethoven Lion.”

  “Ah,” Kurt said. “Not very much, I’m afraid. But I do know that most aquamanilia made during this period, though valuable to collectors, are not usually as prized as the ancient and the medieval ones. You see, the Beethoven Lion was supposed to have been made in the 1800s. In those days, it became a real vogue among the wealthy to collect aquamanilia. Only, there wasn’t enough of the real antique stuff to go around. So metalworkers began to make copies of the medieval ones—and sometimes they actually sold such copies as genuine originals, but they were outright fakes! Very ingenious what they did, even deliberately putting a false patina on them to convince buyers that they’d bought bona fide antiques.”

  “But the Beethoven Lion, surely, was considered a genuine contemporary item at the time, right?” I asked.

  “If it actually existed at all!” Kurt said. “My father always believed so. But many collectors and music experts began to doubt it, and the story died down. Until, very recently, a picture was published by an English travel photojournalist who claimed to come across it. That got everyone looking again. Then, supposedly, this antiques dealer got his hands on it.”

  “What was the dealer’s name?” Jeremy asked. Kurt shook his head.

  “ ‘Jones’ somebody. He was English. That’s all Father could recall. But I am beginning to suspect that the whole thing was a hoax, and the dealer tricked him. I’ve been unable to locate the man. He has apparently vanished into thin air.”

  This wasn’t much to go on. But I found it fascinating. Yessir. Digging needed to be done. I was surprised at how happy I was to be back in the saddle again.

  “What did your father pay for the Lion?” Jeremy asked.

  “Now that he remembers!” Kurt exclaimed. “He says he paid a hundred thousand euros.” Kurt sighed. “So, if you think you might take this on, then perhaps you could tell me your fee . . .” he suggested.

  To my delight, Jeremy, Louis and Kurt skillfully discussed what sort of terms we would consider if we took on this engagement. Jeremy suggested that, if we actually found the Lion, and there was a conflict about ownership, it could be sold to a museum and the proceeds would be split, just as we did with Great-Aunt Penelope’s painting; and that way, our fee would come from the sale. It was a way of our not taking a salary or any money up front, which Jeremy thought would protect us from being the kind of hired guns who’d end up worrying more about covering the client’s—er—butt—than about finding out the truth. Louis said that he could draw up proper papers to make the agreement legal, without in any way impinging on our ownership of the yacht and its other contents. Kurt actually seemed not only comfortable with this, but, somehow, relieved. I realized that he had been burdened with the task of finding out about the Lion, and he seemed cheered to have lucid company with whom he could talk about it freely. He thanked us politely, then went off and climbed into a black BMW and drove away.

  “How do you like that?” Jeremy demanded, once Kurt was gone. “He checked us out!”

  “But this is fantastic!” I cried. “It’s the beginning of our new enterprise.” I peered at Jeremy. “What made you agree to do it?”

  “Well, it came down to this,” Jeremy said. “I knew that you’d go investigating this thing anyway. I figure if we make it official, then at least you’ll have a legitimate reason for sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong. But you have to promise me one thing.”

  “What?” I asked suspiciously.

  “You have to run everything you’re going to do by me first, to make sure you don’t do something that will make me, your partner in this absurd enterprise, have to pay ransom to some kidnapper or go searching for you on the shady side of the Riviera.”

  “Huh!” I observed. “Could it be that you’re just as excited as I am about this? It’s because it’s got to do with Beethoven, right? That’s the part that intrigues you. Admit it!”

  “Promise me what I just asked you to promise,” Jeremy said firmly.

  “Oh, that, sure, okay,” I said evasively. Louis smiled.

  Jeremy said wearily, “I could do with a cuppa.”

  “What? Oh, tea,” I said. “Wish you’d speak English now and then. I’d love to make us some tea!” I enthused, remembering the adorable tea service on board. It had been so securely fastened to the china cupboard, which was lined with felt and had special indentations for the cups and saucers and plates to rest in securely, that the vandals didn’t bother to destroy them.

  “Are you sure you know how to make tea without the bags?” Jeremy asked mockingly.

  “With my English mother?” I said, offended. “Surely you jest, m’boy. Sit down and relax while I play house with this cute little kettle and this adorable stove. Fortunately for us, François went ahead and bought us some fresh tea and coffee. You guys go sit in the salon.”

  Louis and Jeremy went off, and I put the kettle on and arranged the tea tray. But then François, the steward, came aboard, horrified that we had to prepare our own food. I couldn’t shoo him away. Being French, he was appalled to find me doing something
unscheduled or pas normal, like showing up with guests without giving him advance instructions. He’d arrived with a shopping bag full of sandwiches, fruit and lemon, to make lunch for the crew.

  “But if only you had told me you were coming, I would have gladly prepared something really special for you to eat!” he cried, in genuine distress.

  “No prob,” I said, hurriedly trying to find a way to get him out of my hair. “We only want tea.” But he insisted on making it for us.

  So I went into the salon and sat down next to Jeremy on the sofa. Louis’s mobile phone rang, and after he took the call, he said that he must return to the office on another matter. He apologized profusely to me for having to miss my little tea party.

  After he’d gone, Jeremy said teasingly, “Why is it that we are suddenly surrounded by young French men instantly smitten with the American heiress? Thierry was nuts about you. Now Louis and François blush when you look at them. Even Kurt loves it when you ask him questions, and he’s not even French!”

  “Are you implying that men like me for my money?” I demanded, “and not my beauty, charm, wit, and innate loveliness?”

  “On the contrary, my dear,” Jeremy assured me. “What they like about you, money could never buy.”

  François arrived, and set the tray down in front of us, with cups for three people. When he saw that Louis had gone, I said quickly, “It’s okay, I’m sure Claude will want a cup when he arrives.”

  After François left us, Jeremy raised his teacup to clink with mine, and I said, “To our first ‘engagement’ . . . and the Beethoven Lion!”