Treasure of Saint-Lazare (7 page)

They turned down the narrow street leading to the HSBC Bank branch where Margaux kept her accounts, just a few yards from the ornate church of St. François-Xavier, where the establishment of Paris goes to preen on Sunday mornings.

The bank manager brought a locked steel box large enough to hold a stack of file folders and placed it on a small desk in the corner.

Margaux tried to insert her small key into the box’s lock but fumbled. “Nerves,” she said, then turned and handed it to Eddie, who opened the lock and raised the lid of the box. Inside were two large envelopes, one marked “Place Vauban,” the other blank.

“We want the blank one,” Margaux said. “That’s where I put everything except the deed for the house. There were some letters and papers in the safe and some on Artie’s desk, so I put them all together in the second envelope. I tried to keep them more or less in the same order I found them.”

Eddie said, “Let’s look quickly at them here, just in case there’s so
mething we don’t want Jen to see just now.”

Margaux was surprised. “Are you concerned?”

“I just don’t know much about her, and I’d rather avoid a problem now than try to make it go away later.”

Artie and Roy had communicated almost entirely by mail, and Artie had clipped their correspondence together with the latest on the top, mixing the originals of Roy’s letters with carbon copies, then photocopies during the later years, of his own. The only exception appeared to be the last one, which was two handwritten pages dated only a few days before his death.

“It doesn’t look like he mailed that one,” Eddie said.

“I found it in a desk drawer and just put it on the stack without thinking.”

Eddie looked at the next one in the stack, dated several weeks before Artie’s unsent reply. It appeared to have been printed on a laser printer.

“Damn,” he said under his breath. Then, louder, “Roy was onto something and he wanted Artie to follow it up. This talks about a dinner party he attended down in the Loire Valley, at some chateau near Tours. There was an art dealer there who said some interesting things about old Nazi treasure — like he knew where some of it was hidden. But Roy couldn’t get any more information out of him, and asked Artie to go talk to him.”

“I remember that,” Margaux said, showing more interest than she had before. “He did go see someone near Tours just the month before he died. It was his next-to-last trip. He took the train back as far as LeMans and rented a car to drive down to the chateau country. He had to stay an extra night there, but he told me when he came back that he didn’t get anything worthwhile because the old man wouldn’t open up to him. And he said he was tired of Roy’s wild goose chases.”

Eddie looked back at the first page on the stack. “This says he didn’t find out anything but was suspicious the man was hiding something. It’s not much, but it’s something and it’s apparent he intended to pursue it further. I wonder if he ever asked Philippe about it?

“Anyway, this is the first semi-solid lead we have, so maybe there’s something real here, and not just the imagination of some old Nazi who moved back to Germany. The Germans who met us outside the museum last night seemed convinced there really is something to be found, and here we find a story about an art dealer who might still be alive saying he knows where it might be. It’s all vague, but there obviously are forces at work out there we need to know about, if only for self-protection.”

“Jen asked me today if you’d be willing to go back to Sarasota with her. Would you do that?”

“I suppose so, for a few days. I’d like to find out if the police there think her father’s death is anything more than a tragic accident. It’s just too coincidental that the Germans came after us last night just a few days after Roy’s death. It could be an accident…”

“But you don’t think so.”

“I don’t know what I think. What I fear is that something evil, something that Artie thought was dead history, has come back to life, like desert flowers that bloom every twenty years.”

“Roy bought this old cracker house right after he moved here from Frankfurt, then he renovated it from the top down,” she told him. “He wanted something in the classic Florida style, with wide porches all around to catch the breeze, and a metal roof because he liked the sound of the rain on it. I think he was captivated by Sarasota when he came here on vacation a couple of times, and this is certainly the best part of the state. A lot of the rest is a little rough.”

“So you’ve lived here since your mother died?” Eddie asked her.

“I was just 13 when I came here, and I wasn’t a happy teen-ager. I was a handful for Roy the first few years. I had a European attitude toward sex, which was heaven for the high-school boys I dated but wasn’t really a good way to grow up. I think Roy sent me away to college mainly to get me out of his hair. And I matured a lot there. When you and I met I was just about to finish my art history degree, which seemed to come naturally, maybe because both Roy and my mother were interested in the same thing. I was here mainly because I was trying to decide what to do when I graduated, come back to Roy or go to New York. I finally decided to come back and I’ve only regretted it occasionally. Roy really was my family, and he didn’t have a lot of friends, so we became each other’s best friend.”

She told Eddie more details of how she had started working in her downtown art gallery when it was much smaller. Summers, she was a showroom assistant to an owner who mainly wanted to cut a swath through the town’s embryonic black-tie scene. She started to work full time when she graduated, then three years later she bought it at a very good price from his Michigan family after he died of a heart attack during the finale of a concert in the city’s purple symphony hall. “His heirs couldn’t get rid of it fast enough, which was great for me.

“The gallery took a lot of work at first and Roy was a big help to me. At the time it handled a lot of local art, which tended — still does — toward seagull sculptures and paintings of old Florida houses under the waving palms. I wanted to make it something more classic, and that was what he was good at.

“I had learned the academic side of art but he had been immersed in it for forty years and had developed a fine sense of what was good and what was not. And believe me, some of what’s still sold as good around here is not.”

“That sounds like a good reason to stay here with Roy.”

“While I was away at college he rebuilt the second floor into a nice two-bedroom suite with its own entrance and kitchen and told me I should live my own life there the way I wanted. He never went back on that, even when men lived with me for months at a time, or when I disappeared to live with them, once for quite a while, and once again when I was married three years to the society doctor. We usually found time to see each other several times a week, either at lunch downtown or for a drink on this porch. It was important to both of us. He was the reason I am whatever I am today. Sometimes I look around me at what’s become of some of my contemporaries and I think that could have been me. Not a happy thought.”

“It must have been a pretty good life. And by the way, what’s a cracker house?”

“Cracker is a cultural icon in Florida. Shakespeare used it to mean a windbag or braggart, and in the Florida frontier days it came to refer to the cowboys who herded cattle by cracking whips around them. But if you had to define it in one word today it would probably be redneck.”

Eddie tilted his head and looked at her for a moment, then said, “Redneck I understand. Lauren told me her father talked about all the redneck kids he had to supervise at college, and he didn’t mean it as a compliment.”

“It wouldn’t be. And they would have called him much worse behind his back.”

“A black man in the South, even an Army officer? I’ll say they would. The hardest lesson I had to learn was how much racial prejudice there was. Is it better now?”

“That depends on who you ask.”

As they talked the shadows in the garden lengthened, then it turned dark, illuminated only by a street light outside the privacy fence and small white lights Roy had installed to mark the garden path. Jen got up and went into the kitchen to serve the steak, potato and a small green salad. Through the screen door she called to him. “Why don’t you come in and open another Pinot noir? Then we can eat on the porch, at least until the bugs drive us in.”

At 9:30 they had finished dinner and had coffee. Jen said, “That’s it for me. It’s after 3 a.m. on my rundown body clock, and I’m going up to bed. Come in when you’re ready. And please lock the back door, just in case.”

The streetlight outside the fence turned the live oak trees a subtle gray. He poured the last glass of burgundy and sat back, his feet on the bench that ran along the edge of the deck. The light from Jen’s bedroom window shone into the garden, then went out. He remembered that twenty years before she had enjoyed the last minute before bed by standing naked in the window gazing out on the garden, and he thought briefly about turning around to see. The thought caused a not entirely unwelcome tightness. He forced his thoughts back to Roy Castor.

What was the nexus between his death in Sarasota and the Germans in Paris? It had to be Jen. That was the conclusion he and Philippe had reached two days before when they checked his apartment. The driver of the car had to be the only one of the three who knew what Jen looked like — Mutt and Jeff were hired muscle, and to t
hem both blondes looked the same, so they had tried to seize Aurélie and had changed their target only when the driver sounded his horn.

So Jen was the target. But why that particular moment in Paris? Wouldn’t it have been more logical to kidnap her in Sarasota before she left, or to wait until she returned? Or had the Germans simply been caught flatfooted when she left town suddenly? Were they afraid she’d found something that needed to be intercepted? He smiled in the dark — she had found something, but so far it had contributed nothing but more questions.

“Oh, well,” he muttered under his breath as he stood up. “Time for bed. Tomorrow’s when the fun really begins.”  He gathered the glasses and the now-empty bottle and took them into the kitchen.

He locked the door, went to the guest room’s small bathroom to brush his teeth, hung his clothes carefully in the closet and climbed under a single sheet.

In five minutes he was sound asleep and dreaming of his last visit to Sarasota and his first meeting with Jen. She was working that summer in the art gallery and Roy had called her to say he and Artie needed to have a private dinner. Would she take on Eddie for the evening? She had nothing else planned so agreed to entertain him.  “Just this once,” she’d told Roy. “I’m really not that fond of military men.”

Eddie had gone to meet her at the gallery. She gave him  a quick tour but soon realized he was bored by everything but one street scene of Paris at the turn of the 20th century. A streetcar, its headlight and windows brightly lighted, passed by the theaters at Châtelet. He had recognized the location immediately.

They had walked down sleepy Palm Avenue to a Spanish restaurant on Main Street. The dinner had been lively. Eddie told her of the changes in France since she’d been a student in Lyon and she told him of her life in Frankfurt before her mother had died, then of her life in Sarasota.

At 10:30 she looked at her watch and said, “We’re going to close this place. We’ve been here more than two hours and Sarasota’s not a late-night town. We can have a nightcap back at the gallery by the light of the pictures.”

She took his arm as they crossed the deserted street, holding it tight against her breast. They stopped once under a tree for a long kiss, and after Jen locked the front door behind them she took his hand and led him toward the back of the store.

“The previous owner lived in Orlando, and when he came here he didn’t want to go to a hotel, so …” She opened a door to reveal a small efficiency apartment with its own bathroom and kitchen and a large double bed. “My boss won’t be back for several days.”