Deadly Jewels (5 page)

They were preparing to move more wealth than had ever been moved in the history of the world. And he was the man in charge.

It was extraordinary, really. Who could ever have imagined?

He was going on ahead of the family, getting ready in a matter of days. That first evening he spent trying to design crates that would carry the securities—imagine, him, designing crates! And then packing hastily, leaving most of the moving up to his wife. “You need to take more,” she said, worried. “You're not going to have much money out there.”

A rather delicious irony, wasn't it?

First time he'd ever been to Scotland, and he wasn't seeing much of it now. Sheeting rain; if this was what it was like now, he wouldn't care to be here in winter. They could keep this weather, the Scots.

He didn't have to stay there very long, anyway. The gold and securities had already traveled from London and were under guard in Greenoch; he'd met the administrator, Faith Spencer, and she struck him as a woman who knew what she was about. They gave him a bed in the officers' quarters and he slept soundly.

For the last time in quite a while, if he'd but known it then.

They'd spent the night loading the
Emerald
, and by the time Alex had breakfasted and dressed they were ready for him.

Faith Spencer met him dockside, wearing a mac and carrying a clipboard. “2,229 boxes of gold bullion,” she said, reading from a rain-soaked list, “and 500 boxes of securities, worth two hundred million pounds.”

He stared at the ship for the first time. “Good God.”

“There wasn't enough room,” she said, apologetically. “The gold all fit in the ammunition lockers, that was fine, but we didn't know about all the securities. We've had to get them tucked in wherever we could.”

That was an understatement. Crates were in all sorts of odd places, in the captain's day room, in the mess hall, everywhere. The captain himself, Francis Flynn, was unhappy about it. “No room to breathe,” he grumbled. “Ah, Mr. Craig. These your babies, then?”

“It would seem so,” Alex agreed, shaking the other man's hand.

“Well, we'll make a run for it,” the captain said. “Have some help along the way”—he swept his hand out over the harbor where four other naval vessels were being readied to put to sea—“and good weather for the first day, anyroad. Hope you're comfortable on a vessel at sea, Mr. Craig.”

“I don't know,” Alex confessed, “I've never been to sea before.”

“Really?” It seemed a novel and bizarre concept to the captain.

Alex shrugged. “I work in the City.”

“Not now, you don't. Well, come on board, laddie, and make yourself at home.”

Faith Spencer was sympathetic. “Good luck, Mr. Craig,” she said. “I trust you will all arrive safely.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Spencer.”

He was remembering that conversation a day later as they rounded the tip of Northern Ireland. Safety? They didn't need Germans: they had the weather.

It was like sailing into a wall of water: a full gale blowing and mountainous waves hammering the vessel. Up one side of the wave and down the other. Up one side of the wave … Alex dashed for the railing again.

His City overcoat wasn't doing much for him in the North Atlantic cold, and he'd long ago thrown up anything that remained in his stomach. How long could this nightmare go on? Minutes moved like hours. If he were dashed over the side, he thought miserably, it would be an improvement.

Captain Flynn was equally unhappy, though for different reasons. “The destroyers are slowing us down,” he complained on the third night.

“We need them,” said the first officer. “They've got the asdic sonar, they can locate the U-boats.”

“There won't be any need to locate them soon, we'll all know where they are, they'll be clustered around us,” said the captain. “There's a gale blowing out there, and we're sitting ducks.”

“What's the alternative, then?” asked Alex, who had no idea what they were talking about. He wondered if he looked as green as he felt.

The two other men conferred some more and then the captain turned to Alex. “We're going to send the convoy back,” he said. “We'll move faster without the escort.”

Oh, excellent, the man from the Bank of England thought. Moving even faster than this.

He wanted to die.

 

CHAPTER FOUR

We took the Métro's yellow line to the Jean-Drapeau station, named for one of Montréal's more beloved mayors (hence my own boss's craving to be memorialized in a similar manner; he harbors delusions that we all love
him
, too) and located out on the Sainte-Hélène Island. The station connects people to the La Ronde amusement park—now part of the Six Flags franchise—and to Montréal's casino, located in what was originally constructed as the French pavilion of the 1967 Expo, a sort of world's fair that did a lot for the city's economy back in the day.

Drapeau is credited with the establishment of the Métro itself, along with securing the city as the site for both Expo '67 and the 1976 Summer Olympics. Not a bad legacy, altogether. Jean-Luc, on the other hand, so far is credited with $500 lunches and $450,000 petty cash accounts.

Yeah, okay, they're about even.

Patricia was quiet for most of the ride, and my efforts at small talk got little response. She wasn't interested in the weather. She agreed unenthusiastically that the Métro was faster and quieter than other subway systems she'd been on. She didn't have a lot to say about McGill as an institution. I thought she might be miffed for my having cut her triumphant presentation short, but I wasn't about to bring the subject up in the crowded Métro car, even speaking English, so I kept babbling inanely about superficial topics. If my PR gig didn't work out someday, I could always try out for a tour guide position.

“Do you gamble?” Patricia asked, finally, having apparently decided that I wasn't going to talk about her research and getting tired of comments about the temperature.

“Gamble?” I repeated and laughed. “No, no, it's nothing like that. It's just that we can get some privacy out here.”

Her eyebrows went up. “Privacy? In a casino?”

I smiled. “Wait and see.”

The Montréal casino looks a lot like a spaceship—even now, over a half century after it was built, it looks futuristic; I can only imagine what visitors to Expo '67 thought of it. Inside, it's—well, it's a casino, where round-the-clock bright lights, a lack of windows, and the absence of timepieces encourage gamblers to stay for just one more hand, one more roll, one more drink. Some people call it preying on the weaknesses of others. Some people call it providing a service.

My husband, Ivan, calls it his workplace. He's the director of the casino, and its bright colored lights and smiling staff are the backdrop to his everyday professional life.

I didn't come out to the island often enough for the croupiers to know me by sight, but there's always someone watching through closed-circuit television in any gambling establishment, and we hadn't gotten very far before a smooth voice at my elbow stopped our progress. “Martine! How pleasant to see you.”

I turned, a smile ready, and dutifully kissed one of Ivan's managers on the cheeks in greeting. “
Salut
, Jean-Yves.
Ça va?
”

“
Bien, bien
,” he responded, looking past me to my companion. A stellar friend, Jean-Yves, and a terrific manager, but one with the curiosity of a cat that hasn't yet embarked on any of its nine lives. “This is my friend, Patricia,” I said in English before turning to her. “Patricia, this is Jean-Yves, who runs many parts of the casino.”

They shook hands. Patricia was looking around her like a child visiting Disney World for the first time. “You are here for Mr. Petrinko?” Jean-Yves asked me in English.

“If he's not busy, I'd love to see him,” I said. “But actually, Jean-Yves, I just wanted to use his office for a little while.” My husband's office is the only place I know of that's absolutely, positively, no-questions-asked secure. Ivan makes sure of that on a daily basis.

“Of course. He is in the poker rooms, I believe. I will let him know that you are here, if you wish. There is no one in the office right now, you will be undisturbed.” He inclined his head and looked at my companion. “Mademoiselle, pleased to have made your encounter.”

“Thank you,” said Patricia. She looked a little dazed.

I swiped my magnetic identification card at the door that didn't look like a door, and let us into the back corridors that shot through the building like rabbit runs, linking the prosaic undercurrent that enables the fairy-tale aspects of the casino to operate smoothly. Waiters passed us with carts of food, dishes protected by gleaming silver domes. Security officers gave us automatic sharp looks as we went by. A cleaner was rattling her trolley on the way to some spillage.

In Ivan's office, I closed the door behind us. Patricia was staring at the bank of screens on one wall, monitoring the myriad security cameras placed throughout the building. “This is fascinating,” she said.

“This is big business,” I told her. The bright colored lights, the mesmerizing tables, the seductive whispers, none of it did anything for me. There's no mystique to gambling as far as I'm concerned. I know that for some people it's an addiction akin to that of alcohol or drugs; but it's always seemed to me that the greater addiction is to money, the money to be made from all the world's addictions. It was an uneasy thought. “Come on, sit down. That sofa's more comfortable than it looks. Can I get you something? A coffee? A glass of wine?”

“Wine would be nice.”

I pressed a button on the intercom and spoke to Ivan's new administrator. “Marie-Claire?
C'est
Martine.”

“
Bonjour
,” the box said.

“Will you ask Raoul to bring two glasses of Ivan's Côtes du Rhône to the office?”

“But of course.”

I settled back into a chair and smiled at Patricia. “I'm sorry for all this,” I said. “The secrecy, everything. You must be wondering what kind of crazy woman I am. And, forgive me—but you may not have thought of this—but there are a number of important political ramifications to your work. Consequences. Things that call for specialized treatment. And I'd rather take it slowly, think about the information you have and what we will release, when we will release it, that sort of thing. You saw that already there are many parties interested.”

“The whole
world
should be interested,” said Patricia vigorously, pushing her glasses up her nose. “Already, as it is, not many Canadians know about Operation Fish. I think that's terrible. It was one of the major coups of the war.”

I thought that not many of us knew much about history, period, but that was beside the point.

Patricia was pursuing her thought. “Still, it's good for me, I guess. I mean, it's a guaranteed career, isn't it?” That would be the way she'd look at it, of course. “The thing is, I'm doing something significant, isn't that what everybody wants for their life? And after this, everyone will know about what happened, because this was part of it.”

“What was part of it?”

She looked at me. “The jewels! The British-goddamned-crown-jewels. I mean, it's a lot more glamorous, isn't it? It's sexier to talk about jewels than about gold or plain old securities.”

So she did know something about public relations. I checked myself: I'd been treating her like an
enfant terrible
, a prodigy who didn't know anything outside of her own limited field. She was smarter than that.

“It
is
sexier,” I agreed. “It's a natural human impulse, to be fascinated by anything that expensive.” Or that shiny, as the case may be.

“It's not just the expense,” Patricia said. The glasses had slid down again and she pushed them back, her finger on the nosepiece. “It's—well,
everything
. Jewels are gorgeous all by themselves. Glittering, brilliant, glamorous, Audrey Hepburn and Queen Elizabeth all rolled into one, you know? And then there's the symbolism—you know, centuries of history.”

There was a knock at the door, and Raoul came in with a tray. “Thank you,” I said distractedly; Patricia kept talking. “Imagine if London had been invaded and occupied—like Paris. It's what everyone thought was going to happen, after all. Imagine Hitler posing with the British crown jewels, maybe even sitting on the throne, can you see it?” She pushed the glasses back up again. She stopped to think for a moment. “And
that
would have killed the English faster than any bomb.”

I sipped my wine and thought about it, the little man and the glittering jewels that had inspired and defined an empire. “But hang on,” I objected. “Letting them leave England—wasn't that taking a big risk? What if the convoy had been lost at sea? How could they trust people in another country to keep them safe?”

“But that's the genius of it,” she said persuasively, the glasses sliding down again. “No one
knew
. The jewels were the last thing on anyone's mind.
Think
about it! London's getting bombed to bits and all you're going to be doing is wondering where the king decided to put the fucking crown jewels? I don't
think
so.”