The Paris Apartment, page 13
“The crown jewels are about the least of my concern at the moment.”
Gabriel bent to his task. The padlock was old and bulky but protected from the elements and free from rust. It gave way fairly easily.
He opened the trunk and shuffled to the side so that Lia could have access.
On top were a few sets of what appeared to be men’s clothes—pants, shirts, socks, and even underwear. A threadbare coat had been neatly folded alongside, the fabric faded to a mousy brown. Lia took out each item of clothing with care, placing them all on the bed behind her. Beneath the clothes was an old rifle, gleaming and free from the usual signs of age. Beside that rested a square biscuit tin. Lia pulled that out, set it on the floor, and levered the lid off. Inside was a stack of what appeared to be identity cards. She examined each one and then passed them to Gabriel. There were Belgian and French papers, battered and covered with stamps and ink, all with black-and-white images of unsmiling men.
“Any of these names familiar to you?” Gabriel asked. He peered at a set of Belgian papers proclaiming the unfamiliar image to be Jacques Brunet of Charleroi.
“No. None of these names mean anything to me.”
They tucked the papers back into the tin and continued to search the trunk. With a small gasp, Lia withdrew a violin case.
“You recognize that?” Gabriel asked as she set it down.
“Not this one in particular. But Grandmère played the violin, and she—” Her words died as she opened the case.
Inside rested the ruins of what had once been a beautiful instrument. The body of the violin was splintered into three pieces, the neck sheared at the base. A length of pink satin ribbon had been tied sadly around the top.
Lia touched it gingerly. “Grandmère would have been beside herself if this was hers.”
“Maybe it belonged to someone else?”
“Why keep it, then?”
Gabriel shrugged, at a complete loss.
Lia snapped the lid shut as if she couldn’t stand to look at it any longer. “What else is left in the trunk?”
Gabriel reached inside and withdrew a leather-bound tool kit remarkably similar to his. With deft movements, he unrolled it to reveal not tools but a set of four wicked-looking blades that gleamed in the light, ranging from a long-bladed stiletto to a stubby knife no longer than his middle finger. A cord with loops at the end had been coiled and secured against the leather.
“This looks like a set of James Bond assassination tools,” Gabriel said, examining the blunt end of the small thumb dagger. “All of these weapons could be concealed in a pocket or a lapel or a handbag.” He gestured to the ringed cord. “Including the garrote. Do you think they might have belonged to your grandmother?”
“I don’t see how,” Lia mumbled. “She would leave the room if I was watching TV with any sort of violence. She hated it.”
“Perhaps this set belonged to one of the men she was hiding, then. Look.” He pointed to the lower corner of the leather sheathing. “There is an initial. S.”
“Are you suggesting that my grandmother hid an assassin?” Lia asked dubiously. “After what I just said about her abhorring violence?”
Gabriel sat back on his heels and stared at the array of items. “More likely is the possibility that one of the men she might have hidden was a special agent,” he suggested, warming to the idea. “There were people all over Paris who helped Allied intelligence.”
“If this was true—if she had helped the Allies during the war—why wouldn’t she have said something? Told her story?”
“Perhaps she was trying to forget?”
“Forget what?” She shook her head. “I just don’t understand. Any of this.”
Gabriel pushed himself to his feet and stepped toward the opening, running his fingers along the edge of the wardrobe’s false back where it had been cleverly cut.
“My grandfather,” he said after a moment, “the one who painted that little landscape, was an RAF pilot during the war. He spent almost five years in a POW camp after his plane was shot down. He has never spoken of those years—of the war and everything and everyone it cost him—to me. Ever.” He turned and leaned back against the wall. “Perhaps your grandmother was no different. Perhaps the cost of whatever she endured was too painful.”
“Perhaps.”
“Would it have changed anything?” he asked. “Between you and your grandmother if you had known about all of this?”
“Maybe.” Lia looked up at him. “I admit that I was a little afraid of her as a child. My parents left me with her every summer while they travelled, and she always seemed so severe. Distant. Though as I got older, she seemed less distant and just more…alone. Does that make sense?”
“Yes,” he replied.
“And maybe that was part of the reason that I still visited her every summer on my own accord as I got older.” She made a soft noise. “I’m not sure who was more surprised by that, her or me.” She sighed. “I don’t know what might have happened here or why she never came back but maybe, if she had shared some of it, I might have understood her more.”
“Maybe this is your chance. She chose you, after all, to find this part of her life.”
Lia smoothed the flyaway strands of hair back from her face. “I think I would have preferred to find it with her and not alone.”
“You’re not alone. I’m with you.” Gabriel could have bitten his tongue. That was the second time he had made that sort of declaration. He edged away a little more so he would not embarrass them both further with an uncomfortable lack of professionalism. “What’s in the envelope?” he asked, grasping for a distraction.
“Envelope?”
“At the bottom of the trunk.” He could see a thick yellowed envelope that was wedged in the bottom corner of the trunk, as if it had slid down the side amidst the contents.
Lia retrieved it and stood, emptying the contents out onto the table next to the stack of novels.
“More pictures, ration cards, and a railway pass. It seems my grandmother hid women as well,” she said on a breath.
Gabriel left his post and joined her at the table, still careful to keep a respectful space between them. On top was a twelve-month rail pass for one Sophie Beaufort, of Marseille, France, dated and stamped January 17, 1943. The black-and-white photo on the left side of the pass depicted an unsmiling woman with the cheekbones of a supermodel and the fair hair and pale eyes of a Nordic fairy-tale princess.
Lia handed it to Gabriel, who took it from her, careful to hold it at the edges. He studied the photo, frowning as a sense of familiarity nagged at the edges of his mind.
“Whoever this woman was, she was beautiful,” Lia murmured beside him.
He tore his eyes from the rail pass to see that Lia had spread out a half-dozen photos, all of the same woman. Only in these photos, Sophie Beaufort was laughing, smiling, or looking at the camera over her shoulder with a sultry expression. Each of the photos was a headshot, her hair expertly styled, cosmetics applied to her lips, eyes, and cheeks with the sort of professional precision that put Gabriel in mind of glossy fashion adverts.
He reached for the closest one, holding it up to the light.
“That’s impossible,” he muttered.
“What is?”
“The woman in this photo. I know her.”
Lia laughed with a snort of disbelief. “I think you’re about seventy years too late to know her.”
“This is my great-aunt. Sophie Seymour. I’m sure of it.”
“And she was from Marseille?” Lia asked skeptically.
“No.”
“Well, this woman was. And her name isn’t Sophie Seymour.”
“There’s a photo—a portrait of her—that hangs on the walls at Millbrook,” Gabriel said. “I’ve seen it a thousand times. And my grandfather has a photo of the two of them together on his bedside table. They were always very close until she—” He stopped.
“Until?” Lia prompted.
“Um.” Gabriel ran a hand through his hair self-consciously. “Never mind. Forget I said anything.”
“Come on,” Lia said. “You can’t leave me hanging. What happened to her?”
Gabriel winced. “She was working for the Foreign Office as a translator in Warsaw. She disappeared—died—when the Germans bombed the city in 1939.”
“Which one was it? Disappeared? Or died?” To her credit, Lia wasn’t laughing at him.
“The records say she fled her post before Warsaw was bombed. But she vanished without a trace in the carnage that followed. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed in that initial invasion. She was one of them.”
“Well,” Lia said dryly, her lips twitching, “she looks pretty good for a dead person given that the pass is dated 1943.”
“Do you think we might just pretend I didn’t say anything so that I can preserve whatever shreds of dignity I have left?”
“They say everyone in the world has a doppelgänger,” Lia offered. “We just happened to have found hers.”
“Now who’s being kind?” Gabriel muttered.
“I think I owe you a little kindness,” she replied with a grin. She picked up one of the glossy headshots. “Whoever she was, she looks bold and daring. Like the way my grandmère looks in the photos out in the apartment. I wonder if they were friends.”
“Hard to say. It’s possible.”
“I’m trying to imagine what a girls’ night out for these two might have looked like in Paris before the war. Like a Thelma and Louise meets Moulin Rouge. Less the car off the cliff, of course, though they probably kept Brad Pitt for fun.” She laughed lightly and stole a glance at him. “Think your great-aunt might have joined them?”
“God, no. Sophie Seymour was nothing like that,” Gabriel told her, thankful that Lia could find the humour in his idiocy. “She was a serious scholar, not a socialite. Wasn’t exactly known for her charm and congeniality,” he said ruefully. “She was a keen student of sciences and maths, and an utterly brilliant linguist. Spoke a half-dozen languages by the time she was twelve, a half-dozen more by her twenties. She fully intended to be the first woman to earn a full professorship at Oxford. Her job at the Foreign Office was to have been a step toward that dream.”
“She sounds driven.”
“She was. Intimidated the hell out of most men her age, as my grandfather tells it. She never married, never even dated, according to family lore.”
“She still must have broken a few hearts if she was this beautiful,” Lia murmured, eyeing the photos.
“She told more than a few people that she didn’t see the value of courtship with men who didn’t see the value of her studies.”
Lia smiled. “I think I would have liked this great-aunt of yours very much. It’s sad that she died before she could realize her dreams and ambitions.”
“My grandfather thought the same. He looked for Sophie for a long time after the war. He refused to believe that she had abandoned her post, knowing just how important that job was to her. He wanted so badly to believe that she had somehow survived.” He leaned his hip against the edge of the table. “He never found anything, of course, but my grandmother said his search saved him.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was injured and struggled with depression when he came home from the war. My grandmother was a nurse, hired to help with his recovery, and she ended up helping him search for his sister. It gave him purpose again, she said.”
“And they really found nothing?”
“Nothing. But hope is a powerful motivator, especially when it’s mixed with stubbornness. I can’t imagine how devastating it would be to return home to find that everyone you loved was gone. I can’t imagine anything worse than losing your family without ever having a chance to say good-bye. If I had been in my grandfather’s shoes, I would have done the same.”
“It sounds like your family is close.” Lia sounded almost wistful.
“We are. Probably too close for my sister’s liking at about the time she started dating. The Spanish Inquisition had nothing on us.”
“Your poor sister.”
“I regretted nothing. At least until I brought a girl home for the first time.”
Lia laughed.
“Are you close with your parents?” he asked.
“I suppose. They were busy with their jobs and travelled a lot when I was younger. And now I travel with my own work. We try to keep in touch as much as possible.”
Gabriel only nodded, finding it hard to imagine not speaking to or seeing his family regularly. It was also none of his business, he reminded himself.
“Was there anything else in that envelope?” he asked, guiding the conversation away from the personal.
“Yes, two more photos.” Lia handed him a smaller photo that lacked the professional, posed composition of the others. This was the spontaneous sort that one took on holiday, and it featured the same flaxen-haired woman sitting bareback on a horse, squinting into the sun and laughing. Gabriel turned it over. Zawsze będę pamiętał had been scrawled in faded ink across the back.
“Zawsze będę pamiętał?” Lia read over his shoulder. “Is that Polish?”
“Yes,” Gabriel said, “though my Polish is appalling, I’m afraid.” He pulled out his phone to translate. “It says ‘I will always remember.’”
“I wonder who took it,” Lia mused.
“Someone Polish, I presume.” He looked up. “And the other photo?”
“This.” Lia’s voice sounded strange as she held it up.
It was a black-and-white photo of a large home that could have been a country house anywhere between Manchester and Munich. The background offered no specific details that would suggest location, and there was nothing written on the back of this photo. One of the edges had been damaged and creased, but the image was clear. And distinctly familiar.
“It’s the house in the painting, isn’t it?” Lia breathed. “Millbrook. Your family house.”
“Yes,” Gabriel said rather stupidly.
They stared at each other.
“Holy shit,” Lia said presently.
“Yes,” Gabriel agreed.
“Your aunt didn’t die in Warsaw in 1939.”
“No, it doesn’t seem that she did.”
“Those photos are really her.”
“Yes, they are.”
“And she was here. In this apartment. With my grandmother.”
“Yes.” Gabriel was trying to sort the thoughts and questions that were exploding into his brain but it felt a little like an uncontrolled game of Whack-A-Mole.
They continued to stare at each other.
“Do you think your grandfather found evidence that she didn’t die in Poland? Something specific that made him look for her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think she had a connection to the art hidden here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think that she was working with my grandmother? Hiding people during the war?”
“I don’t know.” It seemed that Gabriel had lost the ability to say anything else.
“Huh.” Lia was looking at the three Degas dancers on the wall as if she was willing them to speak. To spill their secrets. “Well, whatever your aunt was doing here in Paris after 1939, I don’t think it had anything to do with the Foreign Office or translation.”
“No,” Gabriel agreed faintly. “I don’t think so either.” He put the photo of Millbrook on top of the others with exaggerated care.
“I think she might have been a spy.”
Chapter
10
Sophie
Hampshire, England
4 March 1943
Sophie was wakened by a blow to the head.
It wasn’t hard, not enough to cause any real damage, but it left her momentarily stunned as she was dragged from her bed. She blinked against the harsh light that flooded the room, trying to get her bearings.
“Move!” The command was issued in German. She stumbled, the floor freezing beneath her bare feet.
Rough hands grasped her upper arms and propelled her forward with bruising force. Sophie twisted her head, trying to get a glimpse of the men who held her, and was rewarded by a backhand to the side of her head. “Eyes front,” one of her captors barked.
Sophie was half carried, half dragged through the hallway outside the bedroom and then down a flight of stairs. She was manhandled into a darkened room, empty save for a single chair and a bare bulb that flickered feebly above. The men shoved her into the chair, yanked her arms behind her, and tied her wrists with rope. Then, without a word, they turned and left.
Sophie forced herself to take a deep, calming breath, trying to slow her pulse and her breathing. She had not heard the men come into her bedroom, and there was a distinct regret in that. But for right now, she needed to focus on what she could control. What she could see, hear, smell, touch. What she could use.
The room was freezing, and her thin nightdress offered little in the way of warmth. She could see nothing but blackness beyond the pitiful pool of light that surrounded her. The room smelled of damp and mildew, though cigarette smoke and the rank scent of an unwashed body nearby lingered underneath. Farther away in the darkness, someone coughed. There were at least two people down here with her, unseen and unknown.
Sophie casually shifted her weight, and the chair groaned and creaked, its legs wobbling beneath her. The thin spindles of the chairback pressed against her spine. Unsure who might be watching, she surreptitiously tested the bonds around her wrists next. Not as tight as they should have been. By curling her fingers, she could already feel the knot slip. Sloppy, sloppy.
“What is your name?” The sharp question came out of the darkness.
Sophie kept her eyes fixed straight ahead. “My name is Sophie Beaufort.”
“What are you doing in Paris?”
“My husband, he has a cosmetics company. He sells cosmetics. I am helping him.” The knot at her wrist slipped a little farther.
“Cosmetics?” Someone laughed. “In the middle of a fucking war? You’re lying.”
