Treasure of Saint-Lazare (17 page)

She took him to the porch to introduce him to a 35-year-old man in jeans and a blue shirt, wearing a yellow hard hat with “Jim” lettered flamboyantly on the front. He introduced himself as Jim Smith, the contractor who had done work for Jen at her gallery and whom she had now asked to repair her house.

“You’re the man from Paris?” Jim asked, glancing suspiciously at Jen as he finished the question. Eddie suspected they had been more than business acquaintances at one time.

“That’s me.”

“Jen was really, really lucky. First, the neighbor called the fire department so quickly. Second, when her father renovated the house thirty years ago he did it right, and the ceiling of the kitchen was made of fireproof gypsum board. Without that the fire would have burned into the second floor. As is, it will be a big cleanup job and a couple of weeks’ construction work. It could have been a new house. It’s a good thing you weren’t here.”

“We were very fortunate,” Eddie told him. “Detective Anderson recommended we move to a hotel after some unpleasantness that had to do with Mr. Castor’s death, so we did what he suggested. It was a good thing.”

“Well, we’ll be ready to move ahead with the construction as soon as the fire marshal releases the house. At the moment it’s still a crime scene, but we’ll probably get access Monday morning. Jen’s insurance company is ready to pay us, so there’s no issue there. You’d be surprised how often they can be jerks.”

“No, I wouldn’t. I live in France, the mother church of bureaucracy.”

He turned to Jen and said, “I need to go back to the hotel and make some calls, see how my business is doing. Knock on my door when you’re ready to go to dinner. I need to get away very early in the morning for my flight to Dulles.”

“OK,” she said, then turned to the contractor. “Jim, I’ll be at the gallery tomorrow. If you get the go-ahead and are willing to work the weekend just call and I’ll meet you here.”

They chose the hotel dining room that night because of Eddie’s early flight. They each had a steak and didn’t linger — by eight o’clock they were back in their room. Jen opened a bottle of the burgundy she’d rescued from her fire-damaged refrigerator but neither had drunk more than an inch before they began again to make love.

At ten she finally said, “OK. You can go to bed now.”

“Not quite yet.”

“No promises, but I’ll try to remember. Where are we going?”

“Bethesda, right inside the Beltway. They moved us from Langley a year or so ago. It’s never a good sign in a bureaucracy when you get moved away from headquarters, but at least all us asset chasers are under the same roof. The agency has gotten so big since 9/11 there just isn’t room for us in one place, so we’re spread all over the area.”

Eddie recalled the day they’d first met, when they found themselves on opposite sides of a pickup basketball game their first year at West Plains University. Icky had been a high school star in Massachusetts, and Eddie, who’d come to America as the French kid more comfortable at soccer than basketball, was learning quickly enough to play a respectable game. They’d hit it off immediately and had been inseparable through college and the Army, up through the first Gulf War. When they were discharged Eddie and Lauren had chosen Paris, while Icky went dutifully back to Massachusetts to work in his family’s textile business.

Both had been recruited by the CIA. Eddie didn’t see much future in an organization that seemed fixed on a large monolithic enemy that had already collapsed. Icky thought the agency was flexible enough to update itself, so after two unhappy years he had left the family firm and moved to Washington. Since then he’d learned five languages and been posted to a half-dozen overseas jobs. From time to time he’d called on Eddie for unofficial help, but Eddie had stopped accepting the assignments when his wife and son were murdered. He’d signaled clearly that he wanted to be left alone, so Icky had seen him only twice in seven years.

At the first, a year after Lauren’s death, Eddie was a lost soul, unreceptive to friends or family. Margaux had said he was his own ghost, sliding around life and glancing off the things that once had given him joy.

The second time was a year or two later, when Icky had to be in Paris on company business. They’d had dinner at Margaux’s home because she was recovering from surgery, and Icky was amazed at the difference in his friend. He was also amazed at Aurélie, whom he called “that astounding creature.”

“If you get tired of her or she kicks you out, your job is to call me immediately,” he’d said the next day as he tried to persuade Eddie to take on a small investigation in Switzerland.

“Wouldn’t work, Icky. All your friends would think she’s a raving pinko. Even the French right wing is to the left of what passes for progressive politics in the States these days. And your outfit lives in the days of John Foster Dulles. Or worse, W.”

There wouldn’t be any time for jokes this trip, Eddie told himself as Icky turned the Corvette smoothly onto the toll road that would take them to the Beltway and then across the Potomac into Maryland.

Icky set the cruise control. “Your call didn’t leave me much time, but I’ve lined up some people who may be able to help. My office deals with all sorts of hidden assets, and frankly right now we’re putting most of our energy into finding the sources of terrorist money. But there’s a woman in the old-money section who spends a third of her time on wartime stuff — and, believe it or not, some of the old Nazi loot has been turning up in the same places as terrorist money. She’s very interested in talking to you.”

A half-hour later the Corvette nosed off the Beltway and into the parking lot of a large glass-walled building. It was identical to the buildings to its left and right and reminded Eddie unfavorably of the Mitterrand library in Paris.

Icky swiped his access card at a gate separating the elevators from the entrance lobby. Outside the gate Eddie saw a Starbucks, a magazine stand, and a dry cleaner’s pickup station. A uniformed guard made a copy of his American passport and buzzed him through the gate, where Icky held an elevator door. He pressed the button for the fifth floor and when the car stopped he led Eddie through a door marked only “Export-Import.”

Behind the door a guard welcomed them with, “Good morning, Mr. Crane. Is this your guest?”

“It is. Eddie, we need to make another copy of your passport, if you don’t mind.”

Security cleared, the guard pressed a button that opened a heavy metal door. Behind it, stairway rose to the floor above.

“Import-export. What do the other tenants think you do?”

“Oh, they know what we do. It just gives us a little deniability and them a little security, so everyone’s happy.”

“And this is your kingdom?”

“You could say that, in the sense that Napoleon’s brother was king of Naples.”

They paused in a windowless anteroom at the top of the stairs as Icky passed his access card through a reader. A discreet chime sounded, an LED changed from red to green, and he opened the door to lead the way down a long beige hall completely free of decoration. Halfway to the end he turned into a reception room furnished with two gray steel desks. The back wall was lined with fireproof file cabinets, each of which had a combination dial in the center of its top drawer.

“Eddie, this is Stella Marcos, my right hand.”  Stella stood to greet them. She was a tiny Filipina, who without her tall heels would hardly have been five feet tall. She wore her jet-black hair in an elegant French twist echoing Margaux’s style.

“Stella. Delighted,” he said.

“It’s really Estrella, but no one could handle that.”

Icky’s office was larger but no more elegant. His desk was T-shaped, with its own conference table, and was larger than Eddie had expected.

“Where we came from you had to be a bird colonel to get this kind of setup.”

“That’s still the way it is. But don’t confuse Washington with the outside world. Out there the colonel or the one-star really have serious responsibilities. Here we’re a dime a dozen. At least I’m not some general’s aide.”

He turned serious. “Eddie, I know you have a real problem going, and I intend to help solve it. My initial information is that it may be more serious than you know — although I’m not sure how anything could be more serious than what you’ve been through.”

“Do you think this is connected with the murder of my family?”

“Too early to say. They may be totally separate crimes, but let’s just say we’ve found some evidence in looking at the missing painting that might lead back to someone who might have been a part of the murders. But it’s too early yet. We have miles to go.

“When you called, I asked Carole Westin to start looking around. Her official job is dealing with the old lost assets, most of which are the property of Jews deported and murdered during the war. But like all of us, she’s been working mainly on finding terrorist money. Yesterday I asked her to put that on hold for a day or two and work on the painting and anything that might be related to it. Needless to say, she was very familiar with Hans Frank.

“I’m pretty sure now that what I thought was going to be a freelance project for an old friend has turned into something that just might move one of our old cases forward. Let’s hope we can work together again on it.”

Two minutes more of small talk, then Icky held up his hand and said, “Here she is now.”

“Eddie, please meet Dr. Carole Westin, director of our recovered assets branch. Carole, this is Eddie Grant of Paris, my old company commander and the guy with the intriguing problem I told you about yesterday.”

Carole Westin appeared to be about 35, although Eddie thought he might be off by five years either way. She had hair nearly as black as Estrella’s and an olive complexion that would have marked her as Mediterranean, perhaps Italian, except that the name didn’t match. Maybe it was a husband’s name, but there was no wedding ring. She wore a beige shirtwaist dress that looked expensive, and gold earrings that matched a simple chain necklace. She reminded him of a picture of Margaux at the same age that had sat on his father’s desk.

“I’m sorry to have dropped this on you on such short notice, but Icky may have told you this whole affair came up rather suddenly.”

“I was sorry to hear of your friend’s death ….”

“It was very hard on his daughter, but that is what led to my call. Maybe something useful will come out of it.”

“Let’s go across the hall to a conference room and get out of Icky’s hair,” Carole said. “Excuse me, out of Thomas Jefferson’s powdered wig.” She looked at Icky with an impish half-smile.

She sat down at the head of a steel conference table and signaled to Eddie to sit at her left. “Is there anything specific I can tell you now?” he asked.

“May I just summarize what I know, then ask you to fill in any obvious blanks? Then I’ll tell you what we have found so far and see if that sparks any new ideas.” Eddie had no objection.

“First, your recently deceased friend worked with your late father in the Allied Central Collection Point in Munich. As part of their work they interviewed Hans Frank just before he was hanged but he didn’t give them any useful information about the missing Raphael, other than to indicate it might have been shipped earlier than the other paintings.

“Mr. Castor stayed in the Army a few months longer than your father, still in Munich, then was mustered out and returned to St. Louis. But soon he went back to Germany, where he settled in Frankfurt and opened an antiques business. He spent thirty years building it, plus or minus, then sold it to a German company and retired to Florida, where he lived for another thirty years until his recent untimely death. One of his acquaintances in Sarasota was his commanding officer in Munich, Lieutenant Colonel Albert Sommers.