Under it there was a small, folded white paper packet, thoroughly wet but tied round with a bit of brown wool, something hastily pulled from something else and of the moment.
‘Hochfeines Weiss,’ said Louis, having carefully cradled the bag while opening the packet.
‘A dozen beautifully cut and flawless brilliants, each of about two carats and maybe eight millimetres in diameter. Just how the hell did Josef Meyerhof, and it must have been him, keep these from the Third and Glorious Reich?’
A good question, but Hermann still needed calming. ‘Maybe she’ll tell us.’
‘Those shoes are a problem, Louis. We can’t have that bastard Ludin finding her.’
To open the bag, they would have to move away to a spot among the rocks uphill a little where Louis first spread a handkerchief. Suddenly, sunlight was trapped, caught, reflected back and forth until finally releasing itself in flashes of fire. ‘Six for a necklace that needed eight, mon vieux.’
And nothing but big trouble, felt Kohler. ‘Meyerhof’s great-great-grandfather beginning the search, the next keeping clarity, colour and size fully in mind while viewing thousands of others.’
‘And so on up the ancestral line to the present, Meyerhof having carried on that search even with the Great War raging elsewhere and after it, the Great Depression.’
‘When things were so tough, De Beers and the central selling organization in London found they had to buy up the overhang.’
The old diamonds that had flooded onto the market, forcing prices down, but Hermann had been right to be concerned. A rainbow of colours was before them, a sky-blue like no other, a canary-yellow, too, but clearer than clear, others of the softest, most memorable rose or deepest emerald green, others still, of a cocoa-brown. Some had been cut and polished, but were without their mountings, others still in the rough.
‘And those are but the “fancies,” the rarest of all,’ said St-Cyr. ‘The rest are exceptional whites of five, ten, even fifteen or twenty carats, lesser sizes too.’
A spread of maybe sixty to forty percent whites to fancies, but it would have to be said, and Louis had known it too. ‘The “sight” of “sights,” and not at all usual for the “life” diamonds most would have squirreled away to tide the family over the hardest of times. These are more than enough to have not only reminded their inheritor of the family but to have started up the business again and elsewhere.’
Good for Hermann. ‘An absolute fortune on the marche noir. No wonder she felt she had to hide them.’
‘And be very quiet about them, Louis, since greed can be everything to far too many. That bag would have been flattened and bound tightly against her middle, probably with a band of linen.’
‘She’d have made sure there wasn’t any unevenness in her clothing.’
‘And will have hidden the linen elsewhere. Under a root, or maybe in a knothole.’
‘A half-and-half.’
‘A submarine.’
‘A pair of shoes.’
‘And a hell of a lot of trouble not just for ourselves, but for her, too, Louis. Her.’
It was Etienne who had cornered her, Etienne whose forehead and pointed chin emphasized the piercing intensity of his gaze. He had come up to this room she had been given in this house he seldom used, a room Frans Oenen had told her to stay in or else. Softly closing the door, he listened to the house while noting everything he could about her, the way she stood to one side of this window so as not to be seen by anyone chancing to arrive or pass by, the clogs she now had to wear, the leather belt and Norwegian trousers in whose right pocket was that coin. Or was he simply noting the frayed left cuff of her sweater from which she had managed to tear a desperately needed bit of thread with her teeth?
Grabbing a chair, he pointed to it and found one for himself, their knees all but touching. ‘Whether you like it or not, you’re far too noticeable. Blue eyes, blonde hair, and a complexion so perfect even with the lack of food and milk and all the rest, Martine still can’t stop going on about it, yet you bring out the desperate in all of us. Myself, because you’ll not have been forgotten with that hand, and I must choose a safe way into Paris. Arie, because, though I’ve yet to tell him, he knows you’ll be the last we deliver. Thanks to you, it has simply become far too risky-insanely so, if you ask me-and we’ve done what we had to anyway.’
‘Make a fortune?’
‘Please don’t be disappointing. We’ve put our lives on the line for far more important packages than yourself, and many of those have been from the Reich and all of them hunted.’
‘And Frans, what does he say about it?’
‘That you doubt his loyalty and will do some dumb thing that’ll get us all arrested. So now you’ll tell me why Josef Meyerhof would have given me these to get you out of the clutches of the Boche?’
It was a belt of louis d’or, something a businessman who travelled a lot would wear under his clothing. ‘I can’t for a moment imagine how he could possibly have given you anything like that, seeing as he must be under constant surveillance if still in Amsterdam and in the Jewish district behind that horrible fence with all its forbidden-to-enter signs and its barbed wire.’
Perhaps she didn’t know. ‘He was among the last of them and is probably gone by now.’*
‘To Vught or Westerbork and on,’ she said. ‘Mijnheer Meyerhof was my father’s employer.’
‘Your own as well?’
She would shake her head because he couldn’t possibly know the truth. Mijnheer Meyerhof wouldn’t have let him know, nor would the contact he had used, and that left only Frans who wouldn’t have either even if the Boche had told him. Besides, very few women were involved in that business and far fewer girls. ‘I met Mijnheer Meyerhof once when I was five and my father took me to his place of work. He wouldn’t even know what I look like now, and I could never have gone up to that wire to speak to him in any case. Indeed, why would I, seeing as I am what I am?’
And fierce about it. ‘Yet he pays me the whole of my fee up front?’
In May of 1940, those louis d’or would each have been worth about 1,000 francs but now a good 10,000, and there were at least twenty of them. ‘He can’t have kept those hidden in that ghetto. Someone must have given them to whomever handed them to you. Have you thought of that?’
‘He’d have bought his way out and not yours, would he? Instead, early last year he sends his son and that one’s wife and their four children to France and tells them to head for the zone libre.’
Into which the Germans moved on 11 November 1942 in response to the Allied landings in North Africa, the Italians immediately extending their occupied zone west and all but to the Rhone, making the city of Nice a much preferred refuge.
‘Arie and I took them in two trips.’
‘With Frans?’
There it was again, that distrust. ‘He didn’t join us until February of this year.’
‘The tenth, was it? Wasn’t that the first time he saved yours and Arie’s lives by running into that cafe to shout out a warning that company was on its way?’
The Boche-the Moffen to the Dutch-but she hadn’t hesitated shy;. ‘Frans should never have told you that.’
‘Nor should you have told me of those louis d’or.’
Why was she after Frans so hard? ‘He was on the run and had been hit in the arm.’
‘The perfect submarine, a resistant, eh, a bullet graze that missed the heart?’
‘You don’t like him, do you?’
The urge to show him the rijksdaaler and to tell him where she had found it was almost more than she could bear, but if she did, Frans would be forced to defend himself and use that gun. ‘He’s too flippant. He presumes far too much. His toasting the killing of those two men was not just upsetting. It was sickening even though I certainly knew what they had intended. And as for any kind of relationship, I haven’t the least interest in taking up with anyone, let alone a person like him, and it’s equally sickening of him to have suggested it.’