Heart of Lies (4 page)

With a slight bow Xavier invited his client to his private office, where Leo settled comfortably into a low-backed chair. Xavier displayed the necklace in front of him. The diamonds sparkled like liquid fire.

“Some champagne, sir?”

“No, thank you. A loupe, if you please.”

Xavier removed a jeweler’s loupe from his pocket and handed it to Leo. “They are all colorless, and perfect.”

Leo gave him a look of polite dismissal, clearly communicating, “
That, I will have to judge for myself.
” He had only a general idea of what to look for
in
a diamond, but he knew precisely how one should look
when looking
at
a diamond. After a few moments of seemingly careful study, he handed the loupe back to Xavier. Both he and Xavier seemed satisfied.

“Beautiful. And the price?”

“Fifty thousand francs.”

Leo steeled himself against any reaction. Was he carrying that kind of money?

“I’ll take it.”

“Ah, an excellent choice, Monsieur Printemps. Will you carry it with you, or shall I have it sent?”

“I’ll take it with me.”

“And, the financial arrangements?”

Leo reached into his breast pocket and pulled out the wallet Károly had given him. He opened it. It contained a stunning quantity of crisp 1,000 franc notes. He began to count them. He reached fifty. To his amazement, there were still several left. Leo nonchalantly redeposited them into the wallet and tucked it back into his breast pocket.

“Merci, monsieur,” said Louis Xavier as he handed Leo a velvet box containing the necklace. “I hope that it gives the wearer enormous pleasure.”

Leo could not resist. “So do I,” he said in a deadpan manner as he collected his hat and coat. “It’s for my mother.” He allowed himself a small smile at the startled look on Xavier’s face.

Back on the street, he tried to decide what to do. It was now just past two-thirty. He would never have agreed to be the guardian of the necklace had he known its value, not when the owner was someone like Imre Károly. Now he understood the significance of Károly’s warning.

Seeing a potential pickpocket on every corner, Leo nervously made
his way back to his hotel. He was a bit concerned that Károly was not already in the lobby when he walked in. After waiting a few moments he approached the young man behind the front desk.

“Good afternoon. Are there any messages for room 415?”

“Just a moment, please, I’ll check your box.” He returned with two envelopes, one embossed with the crest of the Ritz, the other plain, white, and inexpensive.

Leo stepped away from the desk and opened the plain one. Scrawled in a sloppy hand was a message from Károly. He read the short note:

What was going on? He tore open the second envelope. It was an equally cryptic message from Bacso:

Now what? Leo was becoming increasingly suspicious. Something had gone awry, and he was not a party to the details. Well, he was just a peon, albeit a valuable one. Still, the whole situation smelled sour, and Imre Károly’s stench was the foulest of them all. Leo realized that he did not know how to get in touch with anyone other than Janos Bacso
at the Ritz. Surely Janos would enlighten him. No, his note clearly said to wait to be contacted by Károly. Well, at least he would get rid of the necklace.

He took a step toward the desk then stopped himself. How could he hand over an item of such tremendous value to the desk clerk at a second-rate hotel? He knew how easily a small bribe could open the safe of an unscrupulous establishment. Well, what of it? Károly had told him to put the necklace there. It would serve him right if the thing were stolen. But no, if the hotel clerk couldn’t come up with that necklace tomorrow, he, Leo, would be a dead man, no matter what the story of its disappearance.

Another idea sprang into his head. He could put the necklace in the safe at the Ritz. The Ritz was a hotel used to safekeeping important jewelry, and the concierge would give him a receipt. Then he could just walk over with Károly tomorrow and retrieve it. The police chief might be angry at first, but he would certainly calm down once the necklace was safely in his hands.

Leo congratulated himself on his plan. With the necklace safely stored at the Ritz, he could enjoy his evening in Paris with Martha. Then tomorrow he would see what was going on with the rest of this business, and decline to participate if he found anything not to his liking.

An hour later he was once again headed away from the Place Vendôme, with the Ritz and the necklace behind him. Tucked into his shoe, to frustrate the notorious Parisian pickpockets, was a receipt for one diamond necklace, valued at fifty thousand francs. Leo had given Janos’ room number (plus a generous tip out of his own
pocket) to the junior concierge and asked the young man to deposit the necklace in the hotel safe. He assured Leo that, as a guest of the hotel, no one else would be able to collect the necklace, and that even he must present the receipt to do so. The concierge might somehow discover that Leo was not who he’d claimed to be, but he would have no reason keep Leo from retrieving the necklace.

Feeling confident that he’d put his troubles of the moment behind him, Leo sauntered back up the Rue de la Paix and headed toward the Madeleine. He was almost an hour early, but had no desire to go anywhere else.

Martha was already there waiting for him. “How wonderful to see you again,” he said as he approached. “No sneaking up behind me this time?”

“I will scale the walls from whatever direction necessary, in order to conquer the pathway to your heart.”

“My goodness. Do all Hungarians talk that way?”

“Only when properly inspired.”

“So why don’t I know of any great Hungarian poets?”

“Probably because they all write in Hungarian.”

“That would make sense.”

“Nothing about love makes sense.”

“Oh? Have you been in love so often?”

“Only once. I fell in love with a beautiful German girl I met in a café. Yesterday.”

She blushed, but did not respond. Leo took her hand, kissed her gloved fingertips, and then put his arm through hers. “Where to, mademoiselle?”

She was about to say, “It doesn’t matter, as long as you are holding
my arm,” but she wasn’t sure she could carry it off with Leo’s casual sincerity, and didn’t want to sound flippant.

“Have you been to Notre Dame?” she asked instead.

“Not yet. Is that where you’d like to go?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“It doesn’t matter where we go, as long as I’m with you.”

“I was just…I was just thinking the same thing.”

He smiled down at her. “Good.”

They meandered down the grand thoroughfares of Paris, neither really interested in anything but each other. At last they came to the cathedral of Notre Dame. When they entered it Martha looked up at the soaring vaulted ceiling and gasped.

“Think of it,” she whispered, just loudly enough for him to hear her, “the wonder of this place, all those hundreds of years ago. How could you walk in here and then doubt the existence of God?”

Leo did not answer. The events of the past seven years had taken their toll on his faith, but even before the war he’d felt the religion of his childhood slip away; from the very first day he’d moved into the Derkovits’ modern household, where there were no visits to the synagogue, no prayers said, and no Hebrew spoken: a place where one’s wealth and the wealth of one’s friends was openly discussed, but God was never a topic of conversation.

“It’s more like a tribute to the creative ability of mankind, I think,” he finally said.

“Maybe.”

When they emerged it was almost dark. Martha stopped outside the elaborate doorway and looked up at him. “I can’t just go home to Munich thinking that I will never see you again.”

His gaze locked onto hers. “You’ll see me again.”

Martha felt her mouth go dry, and another part of her become inexplicably damp. She must have him. She could not lose him. “I told the couple I’m staying with that I would be spending the night with a girlfriend tonight,” she said, “a friend from Munich who has family here.” It was a lie, but she had to be with him. She had a key. There was always the chance that her hosts would not wait up for her. If they did, well, she’d face the consequences tomorrow.

Leo’s eyes widened. To hell with the tourists, priests, and pigeons watching them. He had to kiss her, now. This was Paris, after all.

As he bent over her she tiptoed up to meet his lips. Then his arms were around her and she relaxed into him, opening her mouth slightly and letting out a delicate sound that was half sigh, half moan. Their embrace felt painfully brief, and left them both aching with the taste of unquenched passion.

“Are you sure?” he asked her. She nodded, too overwhelmed by their kiss to speak. He put one arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to him as they began to walk across the square in front of the cathedral.
Where could they go?
His hotel room was out of the question; he did not want to risk running into any of the men he was with. He thought of the thousand-franc notes still in his pocket. The price of the necklace had just gone up by one thousand francs. After all, he’d rendered Károly a service; he was entitled to a commission. If that cretin challenged him, Leo would explain that the extra thousand was a special luxury tax. He could not think of consequences beyond this moment, beyond his tremendous need to be with Martha,
now
.

A welcoming fire flickered in the lobby of the small, elegant hotel where Leo signed them in under a false name as Mr. and Mrs. Hoffman,
swearing to himself that he would make the title genuine as quickly as possible. The matron working the desk listened sympathetically to Leo’s sad tale of luggage lost by an idiotic porter who stupidly loaded their bags onto the wrong train.

“And on your honeymoon, too,” she clucked, carefully making change for the large note Leo had given her and then handing him a key.

“How did you know it was our honeymoon?” Leo asked, genuinely taken aback.

“Chéri
, if it is not, it should be. In all my years behind this desk, I have learned to recognize love. You two are positively glowing with it.”

Given the education he’d received during his brief affair with the hedonistic Countess Podmaniczky, there was little that Leo did not know about the mechanics of physical intimacy; but nothing about that relationship or his subsequent, less complicated experiences with women had prepared him for the rapture of making love to a woman with whom he was in love. Martha’s passionate eagerness, even given the pain she felt initially, both fueled his desire and filled him with incredible tenderness.

Consummation,
he thought hours later as she lay lightly sleeping, their bodies intertwined.
In any language, this is exactly what the word “consummation” is supposed to mean.

Leo awoke before Martha, and marveled again at the exquisite curves of her body. Then he ran his fingers lightly down her back to waken her. Her stunning green eyes opened, and she smiled.

“Hello, Mrs. Hoffman.”

“Mrs. Hoffman? Is that a proposal?”

Leo laughed, a warm, rippling sound, full of contentment. “Martha, I adore you. Will you marry me?”

“Leo, you’re speaking German.”

“Do you have an objection to being proposed to in your native language?”

“Darling, you could propose to me in Swahili and I would still say yes.”

“Do you speak Swahili?”

She giggled. “Wouldn’t you be surprised if I said yes? But, sadly, no. I am limited to the more practical European tongues of German, French, and a little English.”

“Excellent. Then in which language shall I ask, ‘Are you hungry?’” Martha extricated her limbs from Leo’s with exaggerated slowness. This completed, she arranged their bedraggled bed sheets around her primly and replied, “I am indeed, very hungry, in any language, and will permit you to escort me to dinner.”

“With pleasure, my treasure. Luckily we’re near the Latin Quarter and ten o’clock is still a perfectly acceptable time to go searching for a meal.”

They dressed like playful children, snatching each other’s clothes and chasing each other around the room. Leo had trouble getting Martha to stifle her laughter long enough to make a quiet exit from the hotel under the knowing eyes of the patroness behind the desk.

Hand in hand, they strolled across the bridge connecting the Isle de la Cité with the famous Left Bank, the River Seine glistening beneath them like liquid silk. Once in the Latin Quarter they
took their time exploring the narrow streets, tempted by the jazz in this restaurant, the smell of potatoes frying in that one, and finally settling on a small café that offered “rabbits stewed until midnight.”

“What if the rabbit can’t stay awake that long?” Martha asked with affected innocence as they took their seats.

“My tender-hearted one, worry a little less about
le pauvre lapin
and a little more about what wine you’d like to drink,” Leo suggested, tapping her lightly on the hand with the wine list.

“No violence, if you please, honorable sir, or I shall reconsider my response to your proposal.”

He turned serious. “Martha, please don’t say that. Don’t even tease me about that.”

The expression on Leo’s face made Martha regret her glib comment. She picked up his hand, brought it to her lips, tenderly kissed his knuckles, then nestled his palm against her cheek. After a moment he withdrew his hand and brushed a strand of hair away from her face.

“When can we get married?”

“Well, I suppose you ought to meet my father.”

“Then I’ll come home with you.”

“Now?”

“In a few days.”

“Now that’s what I call a special souvenir from Paris.”