The Grandfather Clock (14 page)

I felt out of body as I emerged from
the Louvre, clutching the box tightly. Be careful who you trust. I
thought about what I should say to Marianne. Surely she could be
trusted. But who else had she told about the gun? I questioned how
my grandfather came to have it and who might lay claim to it. I
wished he were alive.

My phone rang. It was Howard
Nixon.

He gave me directions to a small
corner café tucked into a narrow street a few blocks off the river.
He was inside drinking a glass of red wine when I got there. The
tiny café tables were set up close together and I fumbled to store
the box on the floor next to me. We ordered sandwiches.

“
Wait until spring,” he
said. “The weather is unimaginable. It’s a different city. The
clothes, the women. The women! And I don’t even care about women,
but the women in this city are exquisite,” he laughed.

“
It beats New Orleans,” I
said.

“
I know a couple nice
girls, I could introduce you, if you want to meet some people your
age,” he said. “Models, of course. But they aren’t typical
models.”

“
I’ll keep that in mind.
I’ve made a few friends. The daughter of the woman who I live with,
who also lives there. And her friend.”

“
Whoa. Really, my friend?
You know better than that.” He laughed. “You can’t date your
roommate. And her friend? Sounds like a recipe for
disaster.”

I smiled and shook my head. “The
daughter is dating a soccer player. The friend seems single. But
I’m not trying to get involved.”

“
Please. Neither was I.
Here I am five years later. Wait until spring. This place is
intoxicating. My advice is to have fun and don’t get
attached.”

“
I’ll keep that in
mind.”

“
How’s your French?” he
asked.

“
Not bad. Getting better
every day. But not where I’d like it to be.”

“
In a few months you’ll be
dreaming in French.”

I was distracted. Desjardins words
were still hanging in the air. “Be careful who your trust.” Did he
mean Marianne? No. Marianne was eager, and I worried she might be a
little naïve.

“
So, aren’t you going to
tell me what’s in the box?” Howard asked, breaking my
trance.

“
You’re a photographer,
right Howard?”

“
Yeah.”

“
If I’m going to tell you
what is in the box, I’ll need your help with a couple of
things.”

“
Wow. Intriguing. What do
you need?”

“
I need to keep this item
someplace safe. I’m not sure my residence is the best place. You’ll
understand after I tell you what it is.”

Howard grinned. “I love
it.”

Telling Howard was a strategy. I
wanted a third party, completely uninvolved with my move to Paris,
to know about it.

“
I need to take some high
resolution, detailed pictures of this.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Now I’m really
curious.”

“
Can I get a safe deposit
box here?” I asked.

“
Hmm. Not sure. You might
need a French bank account, and a permanent French address. It’s
probably possible, but may be difficult. And that’s a decent-sized
box. You’re not talking about a few documents. How about a train
station locker?”

“
Not secure enough,” I
said.

“
You can keep it at my
place. Depending upon what it is.”

“
No offense,” I said, “But
I don’t know you that well.”

“
Maybe a hotel
box?”

“
I think I’m going to have
to sleep on it. Literally.”

“
Well, what the hell is
it?”

I picked up the box and put it across
two café tables.

“
Just a peek,” I
said.

“
Fine.”

“
I think I told you that I
am working on a museum project.”

“
Yes.”

“
Well, until last month, I
was a bartender in New Orleans, and before that I ran a credit card
call center. In this box is a two hundred-year-old gun called a
blunderbuss, or tromblon, in French.”

“
Where did you get
it?”

“
It was my grandfather’s.
But a long time before that it likely belonged to
Napoleon.”

He gasped. “Unbelievable!”

I cracked the top open slightly and he
looked in.

“
I need to find out where
this was before my grandfather got it. And I need its existence to
remain under wraps.”

“
You don’t want people
coming out of the woodwork to claim it,” he said. “Why tell
me?”

“
If something ever happens
to it, I want to have someone who isn’t involved to attest that
they saw it.”

“
I’ll swear on Vogue
magazine.”

“
I just met with a
scholar. This was hanging in a museum. There’s a chance that the
Nazis took this from whoever owned it, and somehow my grandfather
came upon it. He wasn’t in the war, but traveled through Europe a
few years later.

“
So, you’re sure he wasn’t
a Nazi.”

“
That is about the only
thing I can be sure of,” I said.

“
And why the
photographs?”

“
If it gets to the point
that I’m sharing this with people, I don’t want to be carrying
something potentially worth millions around everywhere I
go.”

“
Let’s get out of here and
shoot this thing,” he said with a wink.

Howard took me to his apartment not
far from the Champs Elysées, in the fashion district. It was small,
with fashion magazines piled by title. He had wooden desk with a
laptop and about a dozen lenses lined up on it. The walls were
covered haphazardly with pictures of models, both women and men, in
various states of dress and undress. He pulled out a stack of
photos from his last shoot. It had been done in an indoor swimming
pool for a watch company.

“
Would I have seen your
work?” I asked.

“
Oh, probably,” he said
modestly. He thumbed a GQ magazine to a photo of tennis champion
Rafael Nadal and a piece of expensive luggage. “Shot this in London
right after Wimbledon. It’s up and down. Sometime I’m busy,
sometimes I’ve got to hustle.”

He spread out a black fabric and
several lights. For about an hour he took shots of the gun,
including extreme close ups, working methodically, end to end. He
refused payment for the photos, which we transferred to my
phone.

“
I’ll keep all this under
my hat,” he said with a wink.

It was dark when I got back to the
apartment. Celeste was walking out the door with Marco. She greeted
me effusively and I realized this was a show for Marco. Marianne
wasted no time asking about my meetings.

As she stirred a pot of soup I opened
the box on the small side table.

“
Well,” I said with a
dramatic pause, “we found this.” I pulled out the curled
card.

She read the card and said
nothing.

“
It’s probably a museum
placard,” I said.

“
Of course!” she said,
almost short of breath. “Or a display in a private home. There’s no
telling.”

“
So,” I offered
hesitantly, “It’s real.”

“
Well,” she said with a
smile, “I thought it was real. But now we know whose it
was.”

“
Now I need to retrace its
steps.”

“
Hmm.” She seemed to
choose her next words carefully. “Was there any discussion of how
it might have gotten away from its original owner?”

“
Only speculation,” I
said. “We need to find out if it was taken by the Nazis. I’m going
to the Musée de l’Armée tomorrow.”

“
Good,” she said. She had
a distant gaze and I could see her wheels turning. “Michael, in
your research at the Musée de l’Armée, try to be
discrete.”

“
I understand,” I
said.

Marianne watched a French crime drama
while I did research on the Internet. We hardly spoke the rest of
the night. I liked Marianne, but I wanted her to be Claudette. My
connection with Claudette was instant and easy. Marianne was a
great host, but she wasn’t as open.

I fell asleep on my futon with the
laptop open. After midnight I heard Celeste come in the door. A few
minutes later, I received a text. “Are you up? Join me for a
cigarette?”

I tiptoed to the living room. Celeste
came from her bedroom in pajamas and a long coat. I put on my
jacket and we slipped onto their small balcony. I hadn’t smoked a
cigarette in five years. The dry burn from the first drag went
right up into my nostrils. My eyes watered.

“
Are you okay?” Celeste
laughed.

“
Yeah,” I said, trying not
to cough. “Been a while.”

The odd French cigarettes were
strong.

“
You seem stressed out,” I
said.

“
Marco leaves in two
days.”

“
How long have you been
dating?” I asked.

“
As in, ‘Have I been
dating him long enough to go back to Argentina with his family,’ or
‘Have I been dating him long enough to be upset about
this’?”

“
Both,” I said.

“
You’re blunt,” she
said.

“
I just mean, if you look
at it from his perspective, he went to France to play soccer. You
said he was married before. How would it look to his family for him
to show up with a French woman on his first trip home?”

She smiled. “The same way my mother
felt when I brought home an Argentinean footballer.”

“
And how was
that?”

“
Not so good. I think it’s
mostly the football thing. Not that he’s Argentinean.”

“
Don’t worry about it,” I
said, watching my cigarette burn down. “He’ll be back and it will
be fine.”

“
Unless he makes the team
there,” she said. A thin wisp of smoke floated into the cold night
sky.

“
Maybe he’ll ask you to
move there,” I said, uselessly.

“
Not in million years.”
She leaned to the side and put her head on my shoulder. “Enough
about me. How’s the Da Vinci Code going with the gun?”

“
You wouldn’t believe me
if I told you,” I yawned.

“
It’s real,” she
said.

“
Yes. And inside the
muzzle was a card saying it actually belonged to
Napoleon.”

“
My mother must be
thrilled,” she said without a hint of surprise.

“
She is,” I said. “You
don’t seem to be.”

Celeste sighed. “My mother has poured
her heart and soul into that old place. I’ve seen her get let down
before. Where did it come from?”

“
That’s what I need to
find out,” I said. “Someone owned this gun at some point. It’s
likely the Nazis took it. I need to find out how my grandfather
ended up with it.”

“
And he’s
dead.”

“
Long dead. Grandma too.
And my mother has no clue. Claudette is sending me a bunch of old
photos from his travels. Hoping for a clue in there.”

“
You’ll be rich,” she
sighed.

“
I don’t think it’s
mine.”

“
That’s too bad,” she
whispered.

She lifted her hand toward our faces
and for a fleeting moment I thought we were about to kiss. She took
a final drag of her cigarette and dropped it into an empty wine
bottle.

“
Thanks for listening to
me,” she said. Her face was snow white behind her dark hair. I
could see the woman without the harsh modern facade. Maybe I was
drawn to her vulnerability. Maybe it was a seed planted by Howard
Nixon and thoughts of springtime in the Tuileries, but I was
feeling ready to let someone get close.

I was becoming comfortable with the
idea that I would find out that some museum, or perhaps a Jewish
collector, had once owned the Tromblon de Napoleon. But the answer
was elusive. I went to the Musée de l’Armée. Using my credentials
from the Château I was able to go through books of photographs of
items in the collection. The contents on display in the museum were
a fraction of the many guns, swords, uniforms, and other military
paraphernalia in their collection. I thought that Napoleon’s own
gun might be a prominent piece, so I started with a book of
photographs from the museum display published in the 1920s. I found
nothing. It was like the proverbial search for a needle in a
haystack. I didn’t want to ask the woman who assisted me in the
museum library specifically about the item because I didn’t want to
raise the potential for its existence.

I scored a coup when Sam called to
tell me that a friend of his was working in a Bank USA office in
Paris. He said he would help me arrange a meeting with someone in
charge. The notion spurred me to compile a list of American
companies that I had noticed with a significant presence in Paris.
It was a start. I set the appointment with Sam’s friend who said he
would be bringing a marketing executive to the meeting as
well.