Treasure of Saint-Lazare (3 page)

The apartment’s high ceilings, ornate plaster decoration and designer furnishings reminded her that Eddie’s father had been the last member of the founding family to work at Norway Steel, which had been an industrial giant from the Civil War until U.S. corporations became multinationals and moved their jobs offshore in search of cheaper and more docile workers. The company had disappeared in the wave of mergers that had swept over American business in the 70s and 80s (“stupid financial engineering by mental defectives,” Roy had called it), but Artie had known when to sell and as a result his widow and son were among the wealthiest Americans in Europe. The apartment showed it.

His grandfather had been born in 1890 and fathered Artie in 1917, shortly before he went off to die of pneumonia at Château-Thierry. Artie had never known him, and his French mother had abandoned Hyde Park as soon as the war ended and taken her young son to Paris, where he had lived until it was time to go to college and law school. Eddie’s experience had been almost the same, except that he had chosen to join the Army instead of going to law school. The Grant men had always been drawn to military service.

Artie married a Hyde Park debutante as soon as he returned from the war in 1947, but the marriage wasn’t a success and they divorced when he returned to Paris four years later to become European president of Norway Steel. He lived for a while with his wartime friend Alain d’Amboise, a genuine Resistance hero and rising political star in the Gaullist government, and daughter Margaux, no longer the child he’d met once in 1943 but a rigorously educated dark-eyed beauty of 19. In a week they were lovers, in a month they were engaged and three months later they were married. They ignored the malicious society chatter about their twenty-year age difference and short courtship, and for the next 16 years Margaux worked alongside Artie to turn Norway Steel into the largest of the companies furnishing basic materials to Marshall Plan projects. Their fortune, already large, grew to mammoth proportions.

After Eddie was born she turned her attention to him. Neither she nor Artie let him forget that she had been an important part of the family business, never mind that French women didn’t get the vote until the end of the war. Her attitudes had shaped Eddie’s.

Eddie forced his attention back to the letter, which he had let fall to his desk as he reminisced. He tried to avoid random walks down the gnarly paths of family memory because they led to dark comparisons between his life and his father’s. He shook off the thought. He was getting better at that.

There was a certain rootlessness and self-doubt about him, a feeling of not being fully involved in his own life. He hid it well, except from his mother, who thought it had no merit and thus ignored it. During his youth in Paris he had been fully and unconsciously French; during his college years in the United States he had worked very hard at becoming American. Then came his experience of war in Kuwait and Iraq, the first time he had felt completely at home outside of Paris.

His return to Paris was partly an effort to ground himself somewhere — anywhere — and he believed as the years went by that it had worked. That is, he believed it until the terrible year 2001, when his American wife and son were murdered, his father died under suspicious circumstances, and his ancestral country was attacked. For the next two years he was lost, wandering in the wilderness of his own confused mind. He went through a series of short-term relationships, always with French women, but the ghosts of his unhappy year were stronger and each of them wandered away confused and disappointed. After three or four years his doubts lessened but even after seven years he wondered almost daily how so much could have gone so wrong in that one year. The police had never found good suspects for the murder of his family, and remained uncertain that his father’s death had been anything other than an old man’s loss of control just long enough to run into a tree.

Eddie looked again at the letter. Roy’s clues pointed back to his and Artie’s war, of that he was certain. It seemed clear that “wind up in Paris” meant the art — whatever it was —  was supposed to be somewhere in his city, or at least was supposed to have been there at the end of the war. The “long-necked bastard” baffled him, as did the reference to a “round-heeled contact.” He knew it told him to seek out a woman, and one for whom Roy had little respect, but it didn’t remind him of anyone his father had mentioned. He tucked that clue into the back of his mind for later. Then he ran the page through his scanner, printed six copies and folded them into an inside pocket of his jacket, and locked the original in his safe. He showered quickly and changed to a blue suit with a maroon tie.

Jen opened the door before he had time to knock twice. She had changed to a trimly cut dark-gray silk blouse with black slacks, just the right color for Paris, and added a black-and-red Hermès scarf that fell from her neck to a loose knot at her waist, the fashion currently popular among chic Parisian women. The contrast of the dark ensemble against her blonde hair was dazzling, and Eddie remembered that twenty years before he had thought her a lovely girl. He forced into the background a picture of how she had looked naked.

“Do you think your mother will like it?” she asked, spinning to give Eddie the full effect. “She was wearing a scarf like this. I got the idea from her and from women I saw on the street on the way over here. Roy gave me the scarf during our last trip to Paris.”

“She will,” he replied. “I certainly do. Are you up to a short walk? That is, short by Paris standards. We could get a cab but the walk will only take 15 minutes, and the city views are terrific, especially the Opéra.”

“Then we’ll walk.”

The elevator door opened immediately. Her perfume was more mature than twenty years before but it suited her just as well, he thought as they descended to the lobby. He nodded goodnight to the night clerk, who responded with a sober “Bonsoir, M Grant, Madame” then together they pushed the revolving door and walked out into Rue Saint-Roch to hear the sound of piano music filling the air.

“What is that?” she asked, surprised.

“Our regular concert. One of my neighbors across the street is famous for her Chopin.” He stopped a moment to listen. “That’s one of his Études, I think. Sometimes I move a chair to the window and listen to her entire practice session.

“That’s lovely. I guess my equivalent would be country music on a car radio.

“But tell me about yourself. What do you do now? I should have asked your mother.”

“Business. I moved back as soon as I could after I got out of the Army and bought a little school where we teach business English. I’ve expanded into a few other cities. The French officers I met in Kuwait all told me they needed better English, because even then it was just about everyone’s second language. Our office is just a block from here, in fact.” He pointed up Avenue de l’Opéra toward the Palais Garnier. It had recently been refurbished, and what appeared to be acres of gold leaf gleamed in the setting sun.

Jen stopped to stare. “That’s absolutely magnificent.”

Eddie quickly took her elbow. “Let’s get out of traffic first.”

They turned right, crossed in front of the fortresslike Bourse, then left up a two-lane street with little traffic.

In a few minutes they reached the front of Pierre-Victor, whose glass windows were filled with elaborate displays of its wares — it was famous for oysters, and seemed to have dozens of different types.

The headwaiter recognized Eddie immediately. “
Bonsoir, Madame. M Grant, bonsoir. Votre mère vous attend au fond du restaurant
.”  He turned to lead them to a large table, set off from others at the rear.

The table had clearly been set aside for dignitaries, celebrities, or lovers — anyone who wanted space to talk without being overheard. To Eddie’s practiced eye, the other customers settling themselves into the comfortable chairs appeared to be an even mix of couples and groups of three or four men out for business meetings. In the front corner of the room, with their backs to the wall s
o they could see everyone in the room, he spotted Paul with Gabriel Domingue, the tall police officer assigned to drive Philippe.  Both had the ramrod posture of military men and would clearly have been more comfortable with their jackets off in a bar in the 19th arrondissement than in a white-tablecloth restaurant in the 2nd.

The waiter was middle-aged, a man clearly at home in his work, polite without being obsequious. As she followed him, Jen surveyed the small group waiting for them. Margaux, clearly in command, watched expectantly as they approached. Eddie had told her his father first met Margaux when he was smuggled into southern France by submarine to coordinate D-Day preparations with her father. She was 11 at the time, which meant she had to be 75 or 76 years old now, although to Jen she looked closer to 60. She had dark eyes and hair of a deep chestnut, with reddish highlights that shimmered under the restaurant’s flattering lights. Jen wondered briefly how long she had spent that afternoon having it done into a perfect chignon, and decided she was a Frenchwoman of the old school, the ones who get dressed and made up to take out the trash, for whom the time invested would always take second place to the result. At her right sat an older version of the policeman sitting with Paul, whom she took to be Philippe Cabillaud. Philippe’s daughter Aurélie, a striking blonde about 30 years old, sat across from Margaux.

Eddie said a quick hello to his mother, then introduced Jen to Aurélie, who looked up with a friendly and open smile, her green eyes sparkling. He and Philippe shook hands warmly. Philippe kissed Jen gravely on both cheeks and told her in quiet French that Margaux had explained her trip and he was enchanted to meet her although it was unfortunate it had to be at such a sad time for her. She thought he was wonderful.

Aurélie had already heard the story of Jen’s surprise visit and of Margaux’s certainty that it had something to do with her husband’s wartime work.

Even though Aurélie wasn’t born until a generation after the war, she grew up in its shadow. She had watched as the large American military presence in Europe was dismantled during her childhood, and her doctoral studies in French history had required her to spend a great deal of time examining the mangled relations between France and its European neighbors that led up to the two brutal 20th-century wars. To her it seemed completely natural that the theft of Europe’s patrimony could reverberate for seven decades and fire the imagination of men like Roy Castor and Artie Grant. European countries had been stealing each other’s art treasures for centuries — to wait decades to avenge a theft or settle a grudge was nothing.

“Hello again,” Margaux said to Jen with a smile. “I’m glad to see you again. Were you able to divine the meaning of your father’s letter?” She spoke English fluently but with the tinge of formality common to French speakers who learn English as adults.

“Unfortunately, it is still a mystery to us, Madame Grant. Eddie thinks you might be able to help decipher it.” She heard herself mirror Margaux’s formal language and thought it sounded very strange coming from an Americanized German.

“We can talk about that after everyone’s had a glass of champagne. I think a trans-Atlantic flight on short notice deserves an apéritif a little more elegant than a kir, and Aurélie and I have already started. Philippe just arrived.” Margaux signaled to the waiter.

Jen told herself it was a good thing she’d remembered to bring the stylish scarf. Without it, she would have been underdressed next to Margaux and Aurélie, who radiated the understated elegance of Parisian women out for a fine summer evening. Margaux, her fashionable chignon set off by simple gold earrings, wore a slim black skirt with a silk blouse of tiny multicolored stripes — the effect was somewhere near the red end of the spectrum.

Aurélie, on the other hand, would have been just as comfortable in New York as in Paris. She looked like what she was, an affluent young professional approaching the peak of her beauty. Her shoulder-length ash-blond hair contrasted starkly with an all-black outfit of slacks and a trim short-sleeved sweater cut low enough to emphasize her figure. She wore only one piece of jewelry, a wide choker the distinctive brilliant color of high-carat gold.