Treasure of Saint-Lazare (25 page)

The cottage was larger than they expected. Like the three-story chateau just visible in the forest behind it, it was constructed of cut stone several shades darker than the 19th-century buildings of Paris, most of which were built using limestone quarried deep beneath the city. Four stone steps, two of them with chips broken out of the tread edge, led to the ornately carved entrance door. A brass plaque that said simply, PRIVATE, was screwed to its center. The right end was a quarter-inch lower than the left, which made the entire door seem off balance.

“Well, here we go,” Eddie said, as his hand reached for the lion’s-head door-knocker just above the plaque. “Wish us both luck.”

“We’ll find out whatever he knows,” Aurélie said. “If we do it right, that will be more than he wants to tell us.”

The sound echoed back at them. After a minute Eddie lifted it to knock again, but stopped when he heard a loud voice inside shout sourly, “
Attendez! J’arrive
!”

“That doesn’t sound like a weak old man,” Aurélie said as she tried unsuccessfully to suppress a smile.

The door opened to reveal an improbably tiny figure, fully a foot shorter than Aurélie in her low-heeled shoes. “I didn’t know there would be two of you,” he said with no sign of friendliness. He looked at Aurélie and smiled, making Eddie glad she had agreed to accompany him. “Monsieur Flic didn’t tell me there would be an attractive mademoiselle. Please come in.”

“You make the introductions,” Eddie whispered quickly as Aurélie walked past him through the door.

Jacques was dressed like a city Frenchman’s idea of an English country gentleman out for a walk in the woods. He wore heavy forest-green trousers with a brown flannel shirt under a worn houndstooth jacket sporting leather patches at the elbows. Wellington boots with many miles on them stood just inside the entrance next to an empty brass umbrella stand. He wore corduroy slippers.

Inside, the house looked smaller. The entrance door opened directly into a generous living room, which contained enough overstuffed furniture for two rooms, all upholstered in dark colors. Dark, heavy wainscoting topped with a chair rail surrounded the room. Above was an expensive and once-elegant wallpaper depicting country hunting scenes, mainly of baying hounds chasing terrified foxes, probably left over from decorating the main house.

An open door to the right, beyond a carved oak dining table with six chairs, led to a small kitchen. To the left was a closed door that probably led to the bedroom. It was essentially a one-bedroom apartment. Jacques led them across the room to a fireplace with one large leather chair to the right and two smaller visitors’ chairs on the left. He eased himself into the large one.

“You know that I am Jacques Ranville d’Estry, Jacques to all my friends. My old friend Philippe didn’t say there would be two of you, but of course you are both welcome.”

Aurélie hurried to introduce them. “Jacques, I am Aurélie Cabillaud, and Philippe is my father. I am here today to help my friend Édouard Grant. I believe you have met his father Artie Grant, who visited you in March of 2001 to ask about a certain dinner party you gave.”

“Mr. Grant. I remember him. At first I thought he was just a rich American businessman but we had a long talk and I realized he was deeply knowledgeable about rural France. I believe he said his wife was French.”

Eddie said, “Yes, my mother is Margaux d’Amboise. My father was part of American intelligence and met her father at the little town of Bompas, near Perpignan, when he came in by submarine to help the Resistance coordinate D-Day attacks with the Allies. Artie — my father — grew up in Paris, as I did.

“Unfortunately, Artie died a month after you met him and we believe the dinner party you gave may have a connection to his death. May we ask you some questions about it?”

“I regret that he is dead. He was not a young man, though. About my age, I believe.”

“That is true,”Eddie said, “and if he had died a natural death it would be easier for my mother to accept. But he was murdered in Rennes. I just learned last week that the people who kidnapped and killed him did so because they thought he knew the location of the famous but missing Raphael painting called ‘Portrait of a Young Man’.”

“Murdered!” 

Aurélie spoke up. “Édouard was able to confirm this only last week in Florida. He had a very narrow escape from the same people, so it’s very important that we learn as much as you can tell us about the dinner party.”

Jacques stood up abruptly and asked, “Would you like a cup of tea? I always make one for myself about now.”

He returned with three cups and a steaming teapot on a wooden tray and set it on the small table between them. He carefully poured two cups and offered them to Eddie and Aurélie, pointing to the sugar, then poured one for himself. He did not speak until he had sat back in the chair and taken two sips of the tea.

“May I call you Édouard and Aurélie?” he asked, then without waiting for an answer continued.

“Édouard, I have to confess that I did not tell your father much when I met him. Times were much different then. I was still the master of the chateau…” he waved his hand in the general direction of the large house “… but it is no longer mine. I had some reverses in the stock market and some tax problems, so I was forced to sell it three years ago. As part of the sale, the new owners gave me a lifetime lease in this small house and an income although not a grand one. I have absolutely nothing to lose now, and I doubt that Commissaire Cabillaud is going to chase someone 92 years old, even if there were something I should suffer for, which I doubt. In any case, I no longer care much one way or the other.”

“Neither of us can speak for the police, but we have no desire to bring you trouble,” Eddie said. “The only reason we’re here is to follow up on the meeting you had with Artie. It has come up now because Roy Castor was killed about three weeks ago in Sarasota, Florida, by the same people who kidnapped and killed Artie and who kidnapped me in Sarasota. They would certainly have killed me if I hadn’t managed to escape.”

“Roy is dead? That’s terrible. Well, I’ll tell you anything I can but I’m not at all sure it will help you.”

“I remember that party. It was a big one I threw to celebrate the end of filming a TV show. I’d invested in yet another program about the art the Germans had stolen. As I recall, it was a joint venture between one of the French channels and one of the German one
s. That was when I had money.” A brief, wry smile.

Jacques sat back. He set the teacup aside and picked up a much-used pipe, carefully loaded it, then continued without lighting it.

“That was a pretty good group. Roy was there. Of course I knew him from earlier, though not well. He brought a friend from the Marais with him, which was pretty bold for him. The times I’d seen him before he was fully in the closet. The director sat on my right. One of those hostile German dykes. Then there was the producer, the narrator, a couple of others. All told I think we had a dozen people. I didn’t often get the chance to throw a dinner party that big.

Eddie prodded him. “There was another man there, I think. When my father visited you the year after the party, you told him this other man had been much more insistent than Roy.”

Jacques thought for a minute. “Yes, I remember him. He was a businessman and art collector who’d also put some money into the movie, so the producer invited him. I think he was more of an agent than a collector, because most of the art he bought was never seen again. I presume he sold it to people who put it on their living room walls and left it there. Not much of it in France, I’d guess.”

“Why do you say that?” Eddie asked.

“Because it was all non-representational stuff, almost no people in it. He was a secular Arab, so if I had to venture a guess I’d say most of what he bought went to the oil billionaires.”

Eddie pursued him. “What did you say that got Roy and this Arab so interested, anyway? And what was his name?”

“He called himself Alain Alawite, but it was a made-up name, a joke. I never knew his real name, but it should be easy enough to find out. He’s an investor in businesses that go after the Muslim immigrant market. One of them was a chain of low-priced halal burger restaurants with stores all over France. I don’t think he’s an Alawite, even if he did adopt the name. He’s a desert Arab, from Saudi Arabia or another one of the Gulf countries. He speaks French like a native, too. Must have learned it young.

“Like I told both Roy and Artie, I didn’t really tell them anything they couldn’t figure out with some common sense. I had a lot of wine so I may have overstated it a little, but was getting fed up with the director. She was talking on and on about how all the remaining paintings were gone forever, most of them to the Soviet Union and the rest lost to American military looters. She might be right, but I still didn’t like it, so I said I was pretty sure there was unfound treasure in Paris, and that one day it would rise like Lazarus. That was a mistake. I don’t think anyone picked it up, but I never should have mentioned Saint-Lazare.”

They sat for a moment. In the corner a large clock ticked as its pendulum swung slowly. Jacques lighted his pipe and exhaled blue smoke.

“Jacques,” Aurélie interjected. “Édouard’s father was killed within weeks of his trip to see you. We know some of the story behind his death, but not all of it, and you’re one of the few remaining people who can tie all this history together, if for no other reason than to give Édouard and his mother a sense of closure.”

Eddie and Aurélie knew from their talk with Philippe that Jacques was a proud man who had once been prominent in Paris society. He’d bought the old chateau in the seventies, then in the eighties he had sold his highly regarded art gallery near the Champs-Elysées to a multinational conglomerate that was also buying auction houses.

He thought he would have enough money to support himself in luxury for the rest of his life, and 2001 was his final high point. But then had come 9/11 and the tense estrangement between France and the United States that resulted from the Iraq invasion. The stock market slumped and tourism went flat. The business tycoons he depended on to fill the vacation apartments in his chateau quit calling. Taxes went unpaid.

As a result, he’d been forced to sell the chateau to an American hedge-fund manager and his wife, who had redecorated it and started a marketing campaign to bring groups of culture-starved executives and their acquisitive wives to the green Loire, where they could play the châtelaine of the manse but not be too far from Paris for the shopping. He was not poor but he was bitter, especially when the guests mistook him for the groundskeeper.

“All right. I’ll tell you the story. I don’t have much to lose any more, but I’m not anxious to get in trouble with either the police or the Nazis. God knows I’ve seen enough of both.

“It was one day in 1944, just before the Liberation. The boches were jumpy as hell because they knew the Americans were headed toward Paris. Of course, their newspapers didn’t say that — they were always in the process of turning them back, except that every day they were turning them back from closer to Paris. The Resistance papers had more information, but we still didn’t know much.

“Anyway, I’d made friends with a young man a couple of years before. His father had been a French Army officer who was killed on the Maginot line. His mother was German, so of course his loyalty was suspect to both sides. She moved back to
schönes Deutschland
right after her husband was killed. The boy gravitated toward the Germans. God, was he an overcompensating super-Nazi. When the Vichy government was set up, he went there and became a member of the Milice, the French cops who were basically a front for the Gestapo, even though he was just a kid. Then for some reason of his own he moved back to Paris and applied for a job in my warehouse. And then one day he disappeared without a word. Just didn’t show up for work. No message, nothing.

“A week later, a customer came in to see me. He’s not a name you’d know any more, but he was a real Count, one of those whose titles go back six or seven hundred years. A lot of the make-believe nobles today trace their titles to Napoleon, but this guy went back further than that. Much further. His estate in the south was wiped out in the Revolution, but he still had his city mansion and a lot of other real estate in Paris. He was very comfortable.

“Weird man. Very Catholic as only the old French landowners can be, but most of them stayed away from the Nazis if they could. Not my Count, though. He was fully in bed with them. A complete, loyal Nazi. And he was a very good customer of my gallery. For that matter, I was a good Nazi too, or at least I talked the talk. You had to be. I even sold a few paintings to people like Haverstock who were collecting for the grand museum Hitler wanted to build in Linz after the war. It was to be the new Louvre. But I was never part of that group, although my wife was close to them. I was hardly more than a kid when the Germans invaded in 1940. The gallery was small, and they let me stay as the Aryan front man. The owner had already left for Belgium, where he survived the war and moved to New York. I made payments to him for five years and then the gallery was mine, and it was all on the up-and-up.”

Jacques paused for a minute to think, then continued.

“The battle for Paris started on August 19. It was the last week in July that the Count came to see me. He told me my warehouseman would visit me at some time during the next two weeks. He would be driving an Army truck and would have valid papers. I was to get in the truck with him and show him how to get to the Count’s home in the 17
th
arrondissement. There we would leave the truck in his garage and return by métro. I would receive a suitable reward when the task was finished.