A Rather Curious Engagement (20 page)

“I don’t know,” Jeremy said. “We saw nothing like these objects on the yacht.”

“What’s it got to do with Beethoven?” I asked, intrigued.

“Why, because it looked like the great composer himself,” Kurt said, as if it were the most obvious reason in the world. “Or so they say! The Lion’s head, with that great mane and its ferocious scowl, you know—” Kurt screwed his face into a frown—“supposedly resembled Beethoven’s fierce face and all that wild hair of his.”

“Your father said something about an auction,” Jeremy prompted.

Kurt sighed an existential kind of sigh. “Oh, that old chestnut is a legend in my family by now! Papa says the Lion was stolen from our family hundreds of years ago, and my grandfather sought to retrieve it when he thought he came across it—only to have it disappear yet again.”

“And now your father says the same thing,” I said. A shadow crossed Kurt’s face. I realized I might have inadvertently suggested that craziness ran in his family.

“Is this object very valuable?” Jeremy asked.

Kurt shrugged, “To my family, of course, for sentimental reasons. Perhaps to music fans, because of the possible Beethoven connection—which is questionable.”

“I’d love to see it!” I exclaimed.

“Yes, well, so would Father,” Kurt said ruefully, as the servant girl came in again, opened the dumbwaiter and pulled out another platter, this time with a silver coffee service and a pot of whipped cream.

“Is that why there are so many lions in his collection?” I asked.

Kurt, looking embarrassed, said, “Obviously this is not the first time that my father has gone out on a wild chase, thinking he’d found it. Come, see for yourself.”

He led us back into the smoking room, and he marched right up to that bookcase with those tall skinny things that looked like books, but which I’d suspected were hiding-boxes. When Kurt pulled down one box and opened it, revealing that there were large envelopes hidden in them, I smirked triumphantly at Jeremy.

“Take a look,” Kurt said, opening the envelopes and spreading their contents out on the table. These were X-rays of several lion aquamanilia. He held them up to the light, so that we actually could see the interiors of the animal figures, and their clever construction, with holes where gas escaped as the molten metal was poured; and you could also see the iron rods inside that held the figure of a knight upright on one of them.

“It is a way of verifying the authenticity, I suppose. Father hired so-called experts to track down his lost treasure, and whenever they thought they’d found it, he authorized them to buy it for him. But not one of these turned out to be the Beethoven Lion,” Kurt said dolefully. “My father even went so far as to install his own X-ray machine upstairs which his nurse knows how to use. I wish I could make him give this up.”

“What happened to your father when he went out on the yacht?” Jeremy asked.

“Ah, that’s the question!” Kurt exclaimed. “Did he really get his hands on the Beethoven Lion? Father insists he did, and believes he left it on the boat; which is why I’d like to see for myself if perhaps he hid it in an odd place, or if he was merely—dreaming again. Sure, it would be marvellous if we found it, but even so, it would probably turn out to be just another mistake,” he said, gesturing at the X-rays as he put them away again. He really did look dubious. “However, if I find no lion at all on the yacht, at least I can tell Father that I searched with my own eyes and it simply is not there. Maybe then he will stop asking me over and over about it.”

“But whoever took the yacht may have already stolen it,” Jeremy said.

Kurt said, “Of course, that’s entirely possible.”

Jeremy had been sharply sizing up the situation. Now he said, very neutrally, “We will be happy to search the yacht with you, to see if it was somehow overlooked. If the Lion turns up, then of course we’ll make some arrangement. But you do understand that the yacht was sold to us with its contents, so everything else on that boat must stay on it. Agreed?”

“Yes, certainly.” Kurt made a small, polite bow, and Jeremy told him when to meet us at the yacht in Nice. Then Kurt walked us to the front door, and we went out into the cool, mysterious night.

“Boy, you were pretty tough,” I observed as we got into the car.

“I wanted to make sure that he doesn’t show up and try to claim half the stuff on that yacht,” Jeremy said in his lawyerly way.

“He won’t.”

“Well,” Jeremy said as he started the car and we headed out into the cool, dark night, “these guys must know more than they’re telling us.”

“You don’t trust the Count?” I asked incredulously.

“Did it ever occur to you that your nice little Count might just be the mastermind behind ‘Le Boat-Jacking’?” he inquired.

“Oh, please,” I scoffed. “That sweet old bean? He’s barely got all his marbles in place.”

“Those are the ones,” Jeremy said darkly. “A father-and-son team of con artists.”

“You don’t really believe that,” I observed, “or you wouldn’t have agreed to this. You know as well as I do that there’s no Lion on that boat.”

“Says who?” Jeremy demanded.

“I say,” I said. “I can just feel it isn’t.”

Jeremy groaned. “Then why didn’t you ‘feel’ that the boat was going to be stolen?” he said. “That would have been useful.”

“I didn’t say I was a soothsayer,” I said huffily. “I merely said I could tell that the thing isn’t on the yacht. But of course, we should look.”

“Exactly. I’ll call Claude and make damned sure he doesn’t let anybody near that boat until we get there,” Jeremy said.

“Maybe we should also ask Louis to keep an eye on everybody down there,” I pointed out in a rare burst of pragmatism. “Louis did a great job protecting our interests with the French part of Great-Aunt Penelope’s estate. After all, Claude may still be loyal to the Count. And even Thierry and those gendarmes like the Count. So I say, let’s put a man of ours on the case.”

“What?” Jeremy said with mock surprise. “You mean to say you don’t trust your little French cop boyfriend?” He had been regularly teasing me about Thierry, saying that the guy had a crush on me, and implying that it was somewhat mutual (it wasn’t) or that at the very least, I was enjoying it (I was) and therefore possibly encouraging it (I wasn’t. Well. Not really.)

“Ho, ho,” I replied. Then I said more soberly, “Oh, Jeremy. I hope neither one of us ends up like the poor Count. ‘Shipwrecked,’ as he said. Isn’t life so sad in the end?”

“Well, if I go a bit senile someday, just park me in the corner like him,” Jeremy said, “but be sure to hire somebody to fire off the cannon every evening for the cocktail hour.”

When we returned to our room at the Grand Hotel, and Jeremy put the gold-tasseled key into the lock, we found that the maids had made up our room again with fresh towels, and had laid white linen squares on the floor along each side of the bed, atop the rug, so that, if we got up in the middle of the night and couldn’t find our little terrycloth slippers, we could step on something clean and gentle. On each pillow were little wrapped candies and chocolates (that actually were worth unwrapping), and our bathrobes had been hung up; but my half-filled bottle of water and its glass remained on the nightstand, politely unmolested. Jeremy flung open the window and we gazed out at the beautiful mysterious lake, and inhaled the night scent of flowers as the moon sent its shimmering glow across the water.

Yep. It was going to be awfully hard to say goodbye to Lake Como.

The repairs on our villa at Antibes were coming along nicely, but the workmen were still at it, and they acted as if we had no business being there, getting underfoot on their work site. We didn’t linger; Jeremy and I were in a tearing hurry to get to the yacht in Nice. But now we had my little chariot awaiting us. There it was, sitting in its parking slot on the left side of the garage—Aunt Penelope’s 1936 Dragonetta, all spruced, repaired, shined up and ready to go.

I almost didn’t recognize it, because when it was first bequeathed to me, it was perilously on its way to becoming a rust-bucket, with upholstery all torn up by those disrespectful mice. But Denby had lovingly repaired it all, being careful to use materials that were natural to its period, and avoiding turning it into one of those cars that have been so completely overhauled that they bear no real resemblance to their original glory. He’d left a note on the windshield.
She’s a real beauty, Penny, and she’s ready to rock and roll. Enjoy!

“He did a great job,” Jeremy commented as I ran around squealing over every beautiful restoration. “Let’s go to the harbor in this car today,” he suggested.

Dare I drive it? I did. Fortunately, when I was sixteen my father had insisted that I learn to drive a manual as well as an automatic. At the time, I suspected him of dark motives, like trying to postpone my inevitable freedom on wheels. But now I saw the wisdom of it. I hopped in the driver’s seat, Jeremy slid into the passenger seat, and I tentatively started her up. The motor purred promisingly. Very carefully, I backed it out of the garage and turned around in the circular drive. Smooth as silk, with an engine worthy of a great little airplane. Halfway down the driveway I carefully tested the breaks.

“Nice and easy,” Jeremy observed approvingly. Confident, I began to pick up speed. I liked the way she responded, and it was a thrill to feel so connected to the road, hugging the turns and emerging from them with pinpoint control. Finally, I set that cobalt-blue baby loose on the main corniche road of the Riviera. And I could swear that, like a horse, it was happy to be back on familiar turf. It was light, fast, and powerful. Every time we passed through a village and I paused at a light, people came out of shops and cafés to admire it.

“You’re a natural in this car,” Jeremy said in amusement. I felt I was travelling in another era, and yet, I knew that this little auto would always be a part of my future, having been the instrument that first set me on the path to our inheritance, and the wider, more exciting realm of chasing after one’s destiny.

Penelope’s Dream
was sitting serenely in the harbor. One of the day workers was hosing down her decks. Yachts, as Claude had warned us, require constant care—washing, polishing, tinkering, fussing—because one is always fighting the elements of salty sea and air that want to corrode and rot and wear the thing down and take it back to the sea. Gerard, the engineer, was busy in the engine room. He nodded and grunted to us but went right back to work.

Louis, our French lawyer, was waiting in the main salon for us. He had taken seriously his assignment of watching out to make sure that nobody, not even the crew, disturbed anything from the curio cupboards or anywhere else.

He conferred with us in a low tone. “Nobody’s touched anything since you called,” he said. “The captain isn’t here yet. He’ll come later. But the German gentleman has arrived. I told him to wait on the forward deck so I could keep an eye on him.”

Louis went now to invite Kurt to join us. Kurt seemed to understand the situation, and did not look offended at being kept waiting out on the deck. He and Louis both had that old-world courtesy which goes a long way when dealing with a situation requiring diplomacy. (Like, when nobody really trusts anybody.)

Jeremy explained that Louis would supervise the searching of the yacht.

“Perhaps,” Jeremy suggested to Kurt, “before we begin, you could fill us in on this trip that the Count says he took when he was searching for the Lion.”

“I have been trying to get my father to do just that,” Kurt said ruefully. “Claude can tell you the details, but here’s the important facts: My father thought he tracked down the Beethoven Lion to a dealer in Corsica. Papa didn’t want to let it slip through his fingers, so he immediately went to meet with the man. Papa returned to the boat with a wrapped parcel that he took aboard. The whole crew saw the package, but he never let them touch it or unwrap it. They hit bad weather on the way back to Nice, and my father fell ill and had a stroke. It was many months before he could recover his speech and other faculties, and we had to keep him in the nurse’s care. His memory came back, slowly, but in patches. And he told my sister it was all right to sell the yacht, for he seemed to know that he would never race her again.”

Kurt had been looking off in the distance, remembering. Then his gaze settled on the boat as if he were returning to the present. “Later, Father began to remember buying the Lion, so he searched the castle for it. But when the news reached him that the sale of his boat at auction had gone through, this apparently triggered something in his mind. He now seemed to recall that he’d left the Lion behind on the boat. He described getting up out of bed in the night to check on it, in a suitcase in a linen closet just outside his cabin.”

Kurt looked up at us now. “You can see why I would like to lay this story to rest,” he said. “Father gets agitated every time he remembers it.”

I’d noticed that Kurt seemed genuinely pained at the picture of his father conducting this odd transaction. His father’s mind had been intact then, so I wondered if Kurt’s discomfort was due to the possibility that his father had been conducting business that may not have been entirely on the up-and-up. This is a real hazard for collectors. When they want something badly, it’s too easy to cross the fine line between “found” and “stolen” goods, and a buyer might end up commissioning an art “dealer” who thinks nothing of looting an archaeological site and smuggling the treasure out of the country illegally.

From the look on Jeremy’s face, all this had crossed his mind, too. “Okay,” Jeremy said to Kurt. “Let’s take a look.”

Louis conducted the search. He started with the dining salon, the bar, and the main salon. Initially, it seemed a perfunctory exercise. Jeremy and I had been through these cupboards over and over, first when we explored the boat upon buying it, then to assess what supplies we needed, and again after the boat was stolen. I knew darned well that there was no Lion here. This was merely for Kurt to see for himself.