Treasure of Saint-Lazare (32 page)

“And you got all this information where?” Eddie asked as he carried two espressos from the kitchen into his study, where they had spread their papers on the desk. They had just finished their lunch of fritto misto, small fried fish, with a cucumber salad and a glass each of Pinot Noir.

“From city hall. An old friend of Philippe’s works in the office that issues building permits. Actually, I guess he runs it. His name is Jerôme Fontainbleu. I called him before class this morning, and by the time the class was over he had found the old construction plans from 1980 and described them to me. To get a building permit you have to write an essay about what you’re doing and why, so that’s the most likely source of the background. Plus the fact that he was a young inspector at the time and saw the building go up.”

“Damn, you’re good,” he said in admiration.

Eddie had spent the morning at his language school reviewing the last month’s results with his accountant. Aurélie taught a long seminar on Louis XIV. They had agreed they would meet at his apartment at 1 p.m. to organize their findings and decide what action they would request of Philippe at dinner that night. Eddie would bring in lunch.

“Good job picking out lunch, by the way,” Aurélie said. “A lot of the stuff the Italian carryout places
sell is too heavy.”

With a smile, he reached out to touch the back of her hand softly. “Where do you think this leaves us?”

“Hard to say, but I told Jerôme what we’re looking for and he’d put money on the lower level of that cellar. He never knew the old Count or the daughter but he thinks the same thing Jacques seemed to believe, that the Count would keep the treasure under his own control. And then he was arrested an
d
died just a few months after he was released from prison. He may not have told anyone what he had. What good would it be to the Fourth Reich if the new Hitler didn’t know about it, whoever he turned out to be?”

“Maybe it wasn’t for the Fourth Reich after all. Maybe it was Hans Frank’s own golden parachute. When he got away from the Russians he must have thought he was home free. I know from my father’s interview notes that his death sentence was a big shock to him.”

“Any of that could be true,” Aurélie said. “Maybe he figured Eric Kraft was enough. After all, he was the son of his own sister. Things get very confused in wartime, loyalties get switched around or forgotten. We may be searching for an answer that doesn’t exist. In any case, we probably need to look at that cellar. The question is, do we go there on our own and try to talk our way in, or do it with the backing of the French police?”

“In this case I think we need to get the police involved. I’ve pissed off Philippe more than enough for one day.” He explained his and Paul’s meeting with Erich the night before.

“So you just let him go?”

“Well, I got his fingerprints and the identity of his contact. I suspect they’re both already in custody by now, if one of them hasn’t taken things into his own hands.”

“You mean … “

“Let’s just see what happens.”

She turned away from him for a moment. “Then you think we should bring this up with Philippe tonight?”

“That’s certainly one approach. How does it strike you?”

“Good. It’s the right way.”

“Then let’s do it that way.”

Eddie and Aurélie walked arm in arm from Rue Saint-Roch across the river to Les Mini
stères, a favorite. “I seem to spend a lot of time walking down this street,” he said.

“Is this how you used to come to meet me at The Sorbonne?” she asked.

“Almost every time. It’s one of my favorite walks.”

“Maybe we can start that up again.”

At precisely nine o’clock he pushed open the door and waited for her to enter. The waiter recognized both of them and was surprised and pleased to see them together. He led them immediately to a banquette off to one side, where Margaux and Paul were already seated, a bottle of champagne open between them.

Eddie stooped to buss his mother, followed by Aurélie. Margaux noticed immediately that she was wearing almost no makeup and jumped to the conclusion that she and Eddie were a couple again. “Bon!” she said softly, just to Aurélie.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Margaux said to the group. “Philippe said he’d have to be about a half-hour late because something came up. Aurélie, he said he tried to call to tell you.”

“Sorry. I’ve had the phone turned off while Édouard and I went over all the things we need to discuss with Philippe.” She reached into her purse to turn it back on and glanced guiltily at Eddie.

Margaux had told the waiter Philippe would be late so he brought small plates of cheese pastries for them to snack on. The bottle of champagne quickly disappeared, and by the time the second was half finished Philippe sat down next to Margaux and immediately began talking.

“I hate to be late like this, especially for a table of beautiful women, but I thought you’d want to know what’s happened. Eddie, you will be especially interested.” Eddie looked at Aurélie and raised his eyebrows in interrogation but she shrugged to say she had no more information than he.

“Everyone, last night Eddie and Paul…” He looked meaningfully toward Paul, who didn’t blink. “Eddie and Paul had a chance to talk to Erich Kraft. Erich got away, but they were alert enough to get his fingerprints on a 100-euro note as well as the fingerprints of the owner of a little restaurant in the 18th who gave it to him.

“Eddie took the note to the
préfecture
last night and I had them analyze the fingerprints immediately. Erich was indeed who we thought he was, but the restaurant owner turned out to be a terrorist named Hamid we’ve been looking for since the 90s. He’d been hiding in plain sight. To the public he was an upstanding citizen running a small business and keeping his nose clean.

“Except that he wasn’t. We don’t know yet who he was fronting for, but he was running some of Erich’s activities on behalf of a third party. Not very often, but he did pay out a thousand euros last night.

“But that’s all just a sidebar to the story. As soon as we identified his fingerprints we put watchers on his café, since he lives in an apartment above it. We used the hotel across the street — was that the one you used?” Eddie shrugged noncommittally. “We also tapped his phone.”

“Early this morning he made a phone call to an anonymous cell number, which connected somewhere in the Gulf states — we’ll know more about that tomorrow. A few hours later he received a call back from the same number, then he called a cell number, owner also unknown, and after that he left the café. He took the Line 4 and the tram all the way across town to Parc Montsouris. It’s green and beautiful this time of year — Aurélie and her mother and I used to picnic there long ago — but he was all business. No waiting around, no admiring the scenery or the girls, no looking for a tail. He went straight to the old railroad track that runs across the park.

He turned to Paul. “I think everyone here knows about it, but just in case, there used to be a circle line around most of Paris called the
petite ceinture
, or little belt, much of it in a cut well below surface level. It couldn’t run entirely in tunnels because it used steam engines, but it was deep enough not to be much of a bother to the residents around it. Its route was a short distance inside the path of the modern beltway.”

Aurélie interrupted. “Aren’t there openings to the Catacombs in the tunnels of the
petite ceinture
in the 14th?”

“There are,” Philippe replied. “But they don’t make for easy access and our man is my age, so he’d have a hard time getting through them. Nevertheless we had the
Cataflics
on alert.

“Hamid found an access ladder where the security fence had already been breached. It’s very overgrown along the track and it was too early for picnickers, so he had cover. He climbed down the ladder to the track level, then disappeared into the tunnel. We couldn’t follow him down because there’s nowhere in there to hide.

“We heard a loud scream, which ended suddenly, and after a few minutes he came walking back down the tracks. We waited until he’d got back to the surface and arrested him. At that moment we weren’t quite sure what the charges would be, although he did have a lot of blood on him. Then some of us went back down the ladder.”

Margaux smiled and said, “Must have been quite a climb for such an old man.”

“You do what you have to do,” he said, returning the smile.

“We walked down the tracks into the tunnel and about thirty yards in we found a body. Not an ordinary body, mind you. A body in two parts, a decapitated body. The head was on one side of the tracks, the torso on the other. There were no other injuries, so the victim must have been alive when his throat was cut.”

“How awful,” Aurélie said, covering her mouth with her hand.

“Awful for him, but there’s more.

“Both ears and all the fingers had been cut off. Hamid obviously hadn’t thought far enough ahead, because we found them in his pockets. I was late because I was waiting for the report from the fingerprint department. The head and the body belonged to Eric Kraft. There’s no doubt about it.”

Everyone at the table sat silently while the news sank in, then Philippe broke the silence.

“Eddie, is this the way you thought it would work out?”

“I’m not unhappy about it. It’s no less than he deserved.”

Dinner arrived and they turned their attention unenthusiastically to the lamb chops Margaux had ordered for everyone. In twenty minutes they began to share a plate of cheese and Philippe picked up the story again.

“As you can imagine, the café owner would tell us precisely nothing. He will go to jail for life for the murder but we won’t learn anything more about it. Eddie, maybe you’ve had better luck. Did you learn anything from old Jacques?”

“Quite a lot,” Eddie said. “We know now that Erich’s father brought the painting and six wooden cases of gold bars from Krakow to Paris on behalf of Hans Frank, and that he delivered five of them plus the painting to a collaborator, an old Count who lived in the seventeenth. Getting that much took quite a long time and quite a lot of persuasion, mainly on Aurélie’s part.

“But the most significant followup information came just today. Aurélie, why don’t you explain what you found.”

She detailed her conversation with Jerôme Fontainebleu, including his view that the treasure was probably hidden in the abandoned second basement under the apartment building.

“I know Jerôme, or at least I did once, and as I recall he was always pretty straight. But some of his co-workers aren’t, so we’d better act quickly just in case they get wind of what might be there,” Philippe said.

The plan he outlined was elegant in its simplicity. “If I go up the chain of command and tell them we think we’ve found millions of Euros worth of Nazi treasure the bureaucracy will be all over us and there’s a huge chance the delay will let someone get ahead of us. On the other hand, if we go into the building using a slightly misleading but not illegal subterfuge, we can find out if the treasure is there for someone to take. If it is, I’ll have uniformed officers secure the building and let the bureaucracy do its work. If it’s not, we won’t have raised any unreasonable hopes.”

He proposed to contact his friend the chief fire inspector and ask that an inspector go to the apartment building the next day for a safety inspection. He would have a larger entourage than usual, but it shouldn’t raise suspicions too much.

“Most people have no idea how much power the fire inspectors have in a city like Paris,” he said. “Basically, they can go anywhere for any reason so long as there’s a reasonable concern about public safety. We have so many people crowded together that, otherwise, we’d have a terrible risk of fire deaths. They are bad enough as it is.

“Is that OK with everyone?” No one disagreed.

“Good. Then let’s have our dessert and coffee, and plan to meet at the Rome métro station at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Aurélie, can you make it?”

“I’ll have to reschedule, but a colleague owes me a class anyway. I’ll be there.”

Margaux said, “I think I’ll wait for you to tell me the results. I couldn’t add anything and would just get in the way.”

She had ordered a light and soft chocolate mousse with fruit sauce for everyone but Eddie. “I knew you’d want the café gourmand.”

“Right as always,” he said. “Thanks.”

Eddie paid the check — “You got the last one,” he told Margaux sternly when she reached for it — and walked out onto Rue du Bac, the elegant seventh-arrondissement street connecting the Seine to Boulevard Raspail and the grand department store Bon Marché.

Eddie and Aurélie were the last to leave. On the sidewalk he looked at her and said, “Well?”

“I thought we settled that today, Édouard. Let’s walk up to my place so I can pick up some things, then we’ll go to the Luxor. You know my concerns, but I’m much more comfortable having seen how you handled Erich. Five years ago you’d either have called the police or killed him yourself and got in trouble. This was much more subtle. It took confidence. I like that. I think Philippe did, too, but he’ll never tell you.”