Betrayals (2 page)

“I don’t blame you,” Annette said, feeling stronger. “Please don’t blame me. We are what we are, Jean-Paul, and I’m only doing what I have to do. I have no desire to see you in prison, and I’m aware of the acute embarrassment testifying against you in court could cause me. I have a husband and a son I need to respect me—a life that I won’t allow
Le Chat
to destroy.”

“I should kill you,” he said calmly.

“Perhaps. But then you’d be a murderer as well as a jewel thief.” She dug beneath the flowers and pulled back the calico cloth, removing the gun and a leather pouch. The automatic she held in her right hand, awkwardly; the pouch she handed to Jean-Paul. “I decided to warn you because I don’t want you to be arrested and sent to jail. Here’s twenty thousand dollars. A generous amount under the circumstances and enough, I should think, to get you out of the country and settled elsewhere.”

He bit down on his lower lip, the only outward sign of the effect her words were having on him. “And if I choose not to go?”

“You can’t win, Jean-Paul. Remember who I am. I’m giving you a way out. Consider yourself lucky and take it.”

“What about the Jupiter Stones?”

She took no pleasure in how his voice cracked. In the last five minutes, she’d shattered his life.
Better yours than mine, my love.

She said, “I don’t care about the Jupiter Stones. I only care now that you get out of the country before you’re arrested. Jean-Paul, I can’t have what we’ve been together come out. Don’t fight me. You’ll only do yourself worse damage.”

His eyes fastened on the gun, briefly, and Annette blanched at the thought he might actually force her to use it. But all at once he shot to his feet, and before she realized what was coming, he cuffed her hard on the side of the head. She sprawled backward against the tree, biting the inside of her mouth and crying out with pain as she tasted the warm saltiness of her own blood. Only by a miracle did she keep hold of the gun. If Jean-Paul reached for it, she’d kill him.

“Au revoir, ma belle.”

Annette shuddered at the hatred in his voice. But he walked away, quickly disappearing in the thickets, and she brushed herself off and staggered to her feet, fighting back tears. She began to run. Through the field, her flower and herb gardens, across the terrace, and into the quaint stone farmhouse where so long ago her nanny had taught her how to dry herbs and debone a fish. Thank God Thomas wasn’t around. She basked in the house’s familiarity, its welcome.

She made herself and the children tall glasses of iced, fresh-squeezed lemonade and put sugar cookies onto a plate—and, in a few minutes, she began to laugh.

Baroness Gisela Majlath was buried in a simple nonreligious ceremony attended by her closest friends and the tall Bostonian, Thomas Blackburn. As if his vaunted presence could change anything, Jean-Paul thought bitterly, as he hid among a stand of oaks. He stared at the plain white coffin and choked back his sobs lest anybody should hear him. He didn’t want to disturb the funeral. Had the police known their missing
Le Chat
would be there, they would have sent more than a single uninterested gendarme. And the Bostonian in his frayed, pinstriped suit? What would he have done?

The stiff breeze off the Mediterranean whipped tears from Jean-Paul’s eyes. Thomas Blackburn, he thought, would have done nothing.

Gisela had been a favorite on the Riviera. Her suicide forty-eight hours earlier had caught everyone by surprise and abruptly ended
Le Chat’
s welcome on her beloved Côte d’ Azur. For weeks, his presence had lent a spirit of romance and adventure to an otherwise ordinary season. With visions of Cary Grant in their heads, eager young heiresses, jet-setters and bored wives of American tycoons
had ignored warnings not to wear their valuable, albeit heavily insured, jewels to crowded cafés, parties and casinos. In truth, they had vied to tempt
Le Chat
to commit one of his daring robberies, each longing for the excitement and attention of being his next victim. After all, he never hurt anyone.

Even Gisela had emerged from her brush with the Riviera jewel thief physically unscathed.

If
it had ever occurred. Fact and fancy were often inseparable in Gisela’s quirky mind, an eccentricity that prompted more amusement than outrage among those who knew her. To be sure, her encounter with
Le Chat—
real or imagined—would never have happened if he hadn’t been stalking the Côte d’ Azur for victims.

Jean-Paul knew that the graveside mourners and the gossips and the snobs would blame
Le Chat
entirely for her suicide, without looking to themselves for culpability. He believed, however, that they, as much as their now-despised jewel thief, were responsible for her death.

No one had believed Gisela’s blithe assertion that she was a member of the displaced Hungarian aristocracy, never mind that she had possessed the fabled Jupiter Stones until they’d been stolen by
Le Chat.

Engaging and vivacious, she had arrived on the Riviera in 1955—from whence no one could exactly say—and immediately made a name for herself with her irrepressible charm and her unique talent for decorating country cottages and farmhouses. She never called the people she helped clients, simply “friends.” Nor did she call herself an interior decorator or formalize what she did into anything as depressingly ordinary as a business. She did favors, that was all. Her “friends” always insisted on paying her, but how, she maintained, was up to them. Few
ever caught her actually working. She loved to play and, especially, to take chances—with the roulette wheel, with her treks along the rocky coastline, with men. She had never made an enemy. Or, conversely, a true friend.

She had talked about the Jupiter Stones for years, but had never shown them to anyone—not that anyone had ever asked to see them. Why embarrass her? She couldn’t possibly own anything so valuable. The Jupiter Stones were her good luck charm, she liked to tell people. They were the source of her boundless energy and enthusiasm for life. She rubbed them over her body every night, she told friends and strangers alike, and the stones restored her spirit.

Who could believe such talk?

The Jupiter Stones had existed. They had been a gift from Franz Josef, emperor of Austria, king of Hungary, to his beautiful, haunted wife, Empress Elisabeth. The exacting monarch, who ruled the troubled Hapsburg empire for sixty-eight years until his death at eighty-six in 1916, had had his court jewelers search the world for ten exquisite corundum gems, not just the coveted cornflower-blue sapphire or pigeon’s-blood ruby, but in the other colors in which corundum was found: white, yellow, orange-yellow, green, pink, plum, pale blue and near-black. Each stone was perfectly cut, each given a name by Franz Josef himself. Four were named for the planets with a variety of corundum as their stone: the yellow sapphire was called the Star of Venus, the orange-yellow sapphire the Mercury Stone, the beautiful pigeon’s-blood ruby star-stone the Red Moon of Mars and the velvety cornflower Kashmir sapphire the Star of Jupiter. Individually the ruby and the cornflower-blue sapphire—each flawless, each cut into a perfect six-sided star—were the most valuable. But as a whole, the unique collection was worth a fortune.

In tribute to his wife’s unusually simple tastes, Franz Josef left the remarkable stones unmounted. He presented them to her in a ruby-red velvet bag embossed with the imperial seal. Elisabeth, it was said, took them with her everywhere. She was an incurable wanderer, and it was on one of these wanderings that she seemed to have “misplaced” the Jupiter Stones. Unlike her husband—and cousin—Franz Josef, Elisabeth, “Sisi” as she was known affectionately, wasn’t an orderly person. A lover of riding and endless walks, she was generous and careless with her possessions; she could have lost the unique gems or simply given them away—as she did so often with her things—on a whim. She never said. Whatever their fate, the fabled stones weren’t discovered among her countless jewels after her assassination in 1898, when, while boarding a steamer in Geneva, she was stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist who wanted to kill someone important enough that his name would get into the papers. He succeeded.

Almost sixty years later, Baroness Gisela Majlath claimed the unpredictable empress had given the stones to Gisela’s mother after she, as just a girl of eight or nine, had endangered her own life to help Elisabeth after a riding accident. Gisela had inherited the extraordinary bag of gems when her mother and most of her family were killed in the two World Wars that decimated Hungary. She herself had narrowly escaped death when fleeing Budapest after the Communist takeover in 1948. All she managed to take with her were the clothes on her back and, tucked into her bra, the Jupiter Stones.

It was the sort of tale that everyone loved to hear, though no one believed it.

If Gisela had fled to the west dispossessed and penniless, why hadn’t she cashed in the stones to reestablish
herself? They were a family heirloom, Gisela had explained. And of course, they were enchanted; they had saved her from poverty and despair and even death. She couldn’t just sell them as she might ordinary gems.

Everything changed the night she tearfully reported to the police she’d been robbed and described her ten corundum stones in detail, estimating their value into the millions of francs and admitting she had no photographs, no insurance, no proof she had ever seen the Jupiter Stones, much less owned them.

Why didn’t she? The understandably skeptical police had asked what everyone but Gisela considered a reasonable question. She was insulted. Did the police doubt her word?

They did. So did all her friends and virtually everyone in France.

The gossips supplied their own answers. If the stones
were
in Gisela’s possession—through whatever means—they would have been too valuable for her to afford to keep in any open, honest way. Insurance costs alone would have been phenomenal. She must have come to her senses, capitalized on
Le Chat’
s prowling about the Côte d’ Azur, and hocked them, saving face by reporting them stolen. In which case, good for her.

But that scenario was far-fetched.

Far more likely she’d made up the stones altogether and had an ulterior motive for claiming she was
Le Chat’
s latest victim. A craving for attention? For notoriety? Had Gisela, too, yearned for romance and adventure?

Gisela, however, stuck to her story: the Jupiter Stones were hers,
Le Chat
had stolen them and she wanted him caught and her gems returned to her.

The gossips redoubled their efforts to come up with an explanation for what to them was decidedly
un
explain
able. What if there were a germ of truth to her story and some manner of stones
had
been stolen? The idea of flighty Gisela rubbing herself with pretty rocks every night wasn’t altogether implausible. She did have her idiosyncrasies. But did these stones of hers have to be the Jupiter Stones? Of course not. They could have been simple quartz or paste.

And if
Le Chat
had snatched a bag of worthless rocks…how
délicieux.

Enjoying their own fantasies, no one noticed Gisela’s growing despondency. The police didn’t believe her. Her friends were enthralled with the criminal who’d robbed her of her most precious possession. The gossips were having fun at her expense. All these years, she suddenly realized, people had simply been indulging her. Not a soul had believed she had ever had the Jupiter Stones, much less been robbed of them!

Humiliated and despairing of ever seeing her corundum gems again, Gisela had flung herself off a cliff into the Mediterranean.

And everyone suddenly cursed
Le Chat
and demanded his immediate capture.

Enter Annette Winston Reed, the woman who had led the police to the true identity of
Le Chat.

Word had spread rapidly that Jean-Paul Gerard was the culprit, and there was a collective gasp, a suspension of anger and grief, as people realized that if
Le Chat
wasn’t Cary Grant, he was awfully close. The notion of the handsome, sexy Grand Prix driver amusing himself—he
couldn’t
need the money—by stealing jewels went a long, long way toward renewing the romance of
Le Chat.

But the police had their evidence, and there was precious little romance in their souls. The search was on for their missing suspect.

If they had believed Gisela…

Jean-Paul felt the tears spill down his cheeks, and he watched Thomas Blackburn lay a pink rose on the coffin. If others wondered about his presence at Gisela’s funeral, Jean-Paul did not. “Thomas is a good man,” she would say. “A true friend.”

While the Bostonian closed his eyes in silent farewell, Jean-Paul turned away, whispering,
“Adieu, Maman.”

Tam curled up in the middle of
Tante
Annette’s bed and sobbed quietly so that the other children wouldn’t hear her. They would only tease her for crying. Even Papa had said she needed to be brave. France wasn’t their home, he had told her. But to Tam it was. She didn’t remember Saigon at all.

“Hi, Tam.”

“Go away,” Tam said, looking up at Rebecca Blackburn. She was only four and as big as Tam was at six. It wasn’t fair.
Nothing
was fair. “I don’t want you here.”

Rebecca climbed onto the bed. “Why not?”

“Because I hate your grandfather!”

“You shouldn’t hate my grandfather,” the younger girl said. “He likes worms.”

Tam sniffled and wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands. “He’s making Papa and me leave.”

“Where are you going?”

“Home.”

“But you live here.”

“Yes, but I’m not French.” She remembered her father’s words: “Our home is in Saigon.”

“I’ll come visit you,” Rebecca promised, curling up like Tam, her bare feet dirty from digging worms with her grandfather in the garden.

Tam shook her head, crying softly. “You can’t—it’s too far away.”