Read Online Deadly Jewels by Jeannette de Beauvoir - Free Book Online Page B

the cluttered floor, now smelling rank; the walls that were perfectly dry above where the water had coursed through. A doorway into another room.
    Crates, several of them, one or two completely falling apart, held together only by the sturdy iron reinforcements at all the corners. Stencil-stamped. I played my light over the labels: H OUSEHOLD G OODS .
    â€œHere it is,” she said, and I followed the beam of her spotlight to the faded circular hatbox beyond. Treasure, I thought. Even if nothing else ever comes of this, here is treasure. I imagined for a moment the two princesses, one now dead, the other elderly, giggling at the game their father had invented, wrapping up diamonds and sapphires and rubies. In the stillness of the underground, I could almost hear the echo of their laughter.
    And then I played my own light beyond the crates and looked into the empty orbs of a skeleton’s eyes.
    *   *   *
    Hans had told them he was from Holland.
    Not many people really could grasp the difference in accents, not if they didn’t speak either German or Dutch. And, in fact, he’d actually spent a summer in Amsterdam, back in 1933, so he could even throw in a word or two for color if necessary.
    It never became necessary. They desperately needed people for the work crews, what with all able-bodied men signing up ever since it had become clear that Canada was following Britain into war.
    Someone like Hans, with an official-looking exemption from military service, was a gift from the gods. No one ever commented on his name. No one ever commented on his accent. And this in spite of what they were all talking about, the only topic of conversation, it seemed: the war with Germany.
    Hans talked about it, too. Rationing; everybody talked about rationing, and so he talked about rationing. They talked about the insanity of following a crazy clerk bent on world domination, and so he talked about the Leader in disparaging ways, too. But mostly he talked to the foreman about the rush job they were on, building this ultrasecret, ultrastrong vault under the Sun-Life Building in Dorchester Square.
    â€œPeterson! Hey! You gonna marry those plans, or what, you keep staring at them like that?”
    Hans forced himself to laugh. It was no laughing matter, though, and he was intensely aware of that, every day. He had a mission, and he was going to carry it out. For the Führer. For the day when Great Britain fell. For the day when Germany finally had the Lebensraum it deserved, the necessary space to give to the people who deserved it.
    Here was what he knew: the British were sending something over by secret convoy. Whatever it was, it was going to be hidden here, in a vault in this place that he was helping build, and it was up to him to find out when, and what, and what could be done about whatever it was.
    Hans frowned; he didn’t like the vagueness of his orders. But they were orders, for all of that, even though he wasn’t in uniform, even if he wasn’t called by his rank anymore. He was a Dutch workman installing a vault under an insurance building in the heart of Montréal.
    And he had his orders.
    These people, they were all alike. All fat and contented with their lot. Not like what they’d all put Germany through after the war. His father … Hans could barely think about his father. A life savings of one hundred thousand marks, money put away, year after year, from his job as a steelworker. His mother’s modest savings from household expenses, kept in a can, doled out for Hans and his young brother Gerhardt for special treats, the cinema, ice cream.
    They’d survived that war, the Great War. Somehow, they’d survived it, the family reeling from deprivations, cold and hungry and depressed, Hans’s father gone to fight the Tommies in the Ardennes. And then it was over, his father back from the front with a distant look in his eyes and a hacking cough that he never