Once more Gabrielle came to greet them in the foyer. As she descended the stairs, Rachel considered her legs. They were long and shapely, and the stiletto heels made them seem longer and shapelier still. Maybe they could wrap around someone twice.
“We’re so grateful to Antoinette for agreeing to see us so quickly,” she said as the girl led them up the steps.
“And in the middle of such big changes,” Magda added from behind her.
“She was eager to help. She’s very interested in anything to do with her grandpère. And with Monsieur Guipure, of course.”
It seemed to Rachel that this was as close to an opening to question Gabrielle as she and Magda were likely to get. “Yes.” She made her voice solemn. “How is she adjusting to his … absence?”
“She’s managing well.”
“And all the rest of you?” Rachel made her tone carefully sympathetic. “Antoinette told us Sauveterre is like a family. Losing Monsieur Guipure and having Monsieur Lellouch take his place so quickly must be hard for you.”
“Well, we knew Monsieur Guipure would need to be replaced quickly if the house was to continue. And Monsieur Lellouch is already familiar with Monsieur Guipure’s language and aware of his legacy, so in many ways he’s an ideal choice.” Gabrielle’s voice sounded normal, Rachel thought, but who knew what was going on in the face she couldn’t see?
“And it works out well for you.” Was it her imagination, or did one of Gabrielle’s heels stutter for a moment on the steps? She kept her voice neutral. “I mean, because you already know Monsieur Lellouch so well. I remember that when we were here before you were going into a meeting with him. As Madame Guipure’s assistant, you must spend a lot of time with him.”
“Yes. We’ve worked together occasionally.” Now she knew she wasn’t imagining: the girl’s voice had become very careful. “And I’m sure we’ll continue to work together in the future.”
With this bland remark, they reached the door to the business offices. Gabrielle turned around and gave a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Here we are, then. Antoinette is expecting you, so please follow me.”
Even in mid-May the interior decoration of Maison Sauveterre made the rooms feel cold, so Rachel wasn’t surprised to find a fire burning in the fireplace of Antoinette’s white office once again. She was interested, though, to see that both the desk and the windowsill now held vases of flowers, although the effect of the purple tulips and daffodils merely enhanced their icy backdrop.
“Madame Field and Madame Stevens,” Gabrielle announced, and as Antoinette came forward, she detached a sheet of paper from her clipboard and held it out. “I’ve also heard back from Saint Roch. They said yes about the cameras, and this is their suggestion for pew allocations.”
“Superb.” Antoinette smiled at Rachel and Magda. “Gabrielle is handling the logistics of the memorial service.” She nodded her thanks. The girl slipped noiselessly from the room.
Like the room, Antoinette had begun to take on color. She wore a soft top of very finely woven gray wool with a pleated linen collar that stretched over the shoulders and chest, which she had tucked into a calf-length magenta skirt that fastened at the waist with a huge gray button. Sauveterre prêt-à-porter autumn/winter 2013 and autumn/winter 2006, Rachel identified silently.
Antoinette’s manner was as different as her clothes. No longer a pathetic figure, she walked briskly to the little island of furniture and sat forward on a chair. Even her posture telegraphed intense focus and a limited amount of available time.
Her smile was quick. “It’s good to see you again. Gabrielle tells me this time you come on behalf of an American friend?”
“Remarkable,” she said as Rachel finished her explanation. “When Gabrielle told me about the situation, I had her print out the relevant calendar pages, and I still had trouble believing it.” She shook her head. “Still, coincidence is more common in real life than we think.” She hesitated for a moment. “But forgive me … you say the police told Madame Ochs that her husband was killed during a robbery. So she has been in contact with them. Is there a reason she asked you to step in? Does she not trust their conclusions?”
Rachel had anticipated this question. “It isn’t that. But the police investigation of the robbery is progressing very slowly, and …” she sighed, “Madame Ochs is an American.” She met Antoinette’s eyes and smiled apologetically.
The other woman smiled back. “She wants everything done faster, hein? And she wants—” she suddenly broke into perfect, unaccented English—“every avenue explored.”
Rachel grinned. “Exactly.”
“And you’ve already been to the hotel? You’ve asked about people who might have requested Monsieur Ochs’s room number, or anyone suspicious that night?” Then she shook her head. “I’m sorry; I shouldn’t tell you how to handle things. It’s a bad habit you get into when you run a company.”
“It’s fine.” Rachel shifted awkwardly. “As it happens, we haven’t been to the hotel yet. That’s our next stop after talking to you.” She shot a surreptitious glance at Magda to remind her that they needed to check out the hotel.
“But for now this connection to my brother is an avenue in its own right.”
“Exactly,” Rachel said, glad that Antoinette had relieved her of having to make the connection.
“And Madame Ochs told you her husband’s conversations with Rolé had to do with my grandfather?” Rachel nodded. Antoinette moved a little further forward. “Did she say with what, specifically?”
“He only said that it was about someone both his grandfather and yours had known ‘before the war.’” She added apologetically, “His wife says he loved to be mysterious.”
Antoinette sat back in the chair for a moment as if winded by frustration. Then she straightened and shook her head again. “Unfortunately, there’s no way for me to know what my brother and Monsieur Ochs spoke about now that Rolé is … gone. We worked under the ‘divide and conquer’ model: we didn’t discuss our meetings unless they were relevant to both of us. And I don’t remember ever hearing the name Albert Ochs from my grandparents. Or my mother, for that matter.”
“Well, we wondered …” Rachel felt Magda shift beside her, ready to jump in if she delayed. “Ochs is a Jewish name, so we thought perhaps the connection to your grandfather lay in a mutual friend your grandfather had helped?”
Antoinette exhaled in a little puff. “I don’t recall seeing the name on any of my grandfather’s receipts. But then there are a lot of receipts; he helped many people, even before the war. You are welcome to look in our archive.” She gave a little smile, and Rachel remembered Naquet saying Sauveterre was justly proud of its archive. “We have the records from all of Grandpère’s transactions.”
“Yes, that would be terrific. Thank you.”
“Not a problem. Gabrielle!” The girl appeared again. “Gabrielle organized the renovations of the archive last year. Gabrielle, please take Madame Levis and Madame Stevens down and help them find what they need. She’ll have to stay with you while you look.” Antoinette’s smile was apologetic. “Nothing personal; it’s company policy.”
On the way downstairs Rachel tried once again with Gabrielle.
“You seem to handle everything that needs organizing at Sauveterre, Gabrielle,” she said mildly.
“Yes. I’m fortunate that Antoinette trusts me enough to give me so much responsibility.”
“That must interfere with your social life. Do you have to spend a lot of time here after hours?” That would be the ideal time to arrange a delivery better left unseen.
“Monsieur Guipure used to say that fashion has no clock. I usually stay until I’m done working on whatever needs to be finished.”
“So in the days before a show, or in the run-up to something like Roland’s birthday party, that could mean being here until quite late.”
“Well, the shows are handled by creative, so they don’t involve me very much. But when we’re preparing the annual report, or in the run-up to one of the quarterly financial meetings, I do stay late, yes. I was here very late sometimes while Antoinette was working on the licensing agreement.”
“Well”—Rachel gave a little laugh—“I suppose what you lose in a social life outside you gain in a social life inside. You must have made a lot of friends in the company, spending so much time here.” Perhaps the girl could be led into revealing her connection to Lellouch.
“Not so many. The offices are quite separate from the ateliers. I do see some of the seamstresses sometimes.”
Gabrielle walked toward the back of the foyer. “The archive is just down here.”
They followed her into the shadows. Here the marble banister became a cheap iron railing, the stairs ordinary metal ones with nonslip cross-hatching. Even Rachel’s practical flats made noise on these. At their bottom was a metal door locked by a deadbolt, an ugly gray contraption with a knob sticking out of its right side. Gabrielle tucked the ever-present clipboard under one arm and used that hand to put a key in the lock. As she turned it, she simultaneously pulled the knob to the right. A long iron bar emerged—a second bolt under the first. Rachel the lockpick was impressed.
“It seems old-fashioned, but it’s more secure than even the best digital lock.” Gabrielle’s voice was proud. “No malfunctions, no possibility of overrides.” She turned the doorknob and pushed.
As they crossed the threshold, fluorescent lights flickered on. They stood at one end of a huge room, its white walls lined with filing cabinets occasionally interspersed with chests of deep drawers. From her experience at the Bibliothèque Nationale the previous summer, Rachel recognized these as map cabinets, used to hold items that needed to lie flat. In the center of the room were two tables with white Formica tops, two chairs tucked under each, and each with a box of white cotton gloves in the center. Gabrielle crossed to the fourth filing cabinet, opened the top drawer, and removed all the folders it held, putting them on the closest table. Then she did the same with the folders in the top drawer of the fifth cabinet, a much smaller number.
“Those are all the Galerie Sauveterre’s bills of sale and purchase receipts for the years 1936 to 1946. Please wear gloves as you look at them.” She pulled out a chair and sat down at the far table, frowning at something on the clipboard.
The gloves snagged slightly on the skin of Rachel’s hands, and as Magda finished pulling hers on, she whispered, “I feel like Mickey Mouse!” When Rachel began opening the folders, though, she saw the wisdom of them. Some of the documents already had crumbling edges; some were so damaged that they’d been slipped into protective plastic sleeves. Even with the gloves on she was careful to handle them gingerly.
The folders were organized by year and month, January to December, and the sheer number of receipts suggested that every one had been preserved. No wonder Gédéon Naquet had praised the archive: it was a researcher’s dream.
But in the entire collection of thin yellowing sheets spanning 1936 to 1940 there was no mention of anyone named Ochs, as buyer or seller. She started on the smaller pile of 1940 to 1946. Whereas the folders for the years preceding the German invasion showed a roughly equal division of buying and selling, in the 1940 to 1946 grouping, buying predominated. And the names of the sellers were all similar: Pierre Goldman: Marc Chagall, The Drunken Fiddler, 112,000ff; Hélène Dreyfus: Paul Klee, Tale à la Hoffman, 105,000ff; Maurice Ephrussi: Jean Metzinger, Two Nudes Asleep in a Garden, 190,000ff. As she flipped through this history of Sauveterre’s decency she felt her throat tighten. Something about the recognizably Jewish names, each following the next in neat handwriting on identical carbons, brought home to her the desperation, and the hope, of the Jews in occupied France in a way that no book or museum exhibition ever had. How many of these people made it out, and how many sold their treasured art in attempts to fund escapes that never came to pass? Seventy-three thousand French Jews died in the camps during the war. How many of those had their names preserved only in the purchase receipts of the Galerie Sauveterre?
After an hour of flipping through folders, though, such thoughts had been driven from her mind by the aching muscles between her shoulder blades, and by one simple certainty: however many of Sauveterre’s customers had succeeded in fleeing and however many had failed, the receipts showed that none of them had been an Albert Ochs. Across the table from her, Magda closed her final folder and massaged her lower back. She looked at Rachel and shook her head. No luck there either.
Outside on the pavement once more, Rachel ran a hand through her hair, dislodging imaginary dust that could never have hidden in an archive as clean as Sauveterre’s. But just as she was about to sigh, she stopped herself. If she knew from experience that there came a moment in each investigation where the case took over, didn’t she also know that there came a moment when the case seemed hopeless? And hadn’t experience shown her that such appearances were wrong? Neither of her previous hopeless cases had turned out to be hopeless. It turned out that the secret to solving a mystery was the same as the secret to any other success: just keep going.
“Let’s check out the hotel.”