Once again Dolly wasn’t home. Was Dolly ever home? Rachel tried to imagine her life and came up with days filled with complex exercise classes that nonetheless did not require perspiration, wine in various colors sipped from glasses of various shapes with various friends, and evenings spent flicking through books with those heavy pages that smelled like museum gift shops.
Emerging from this daydream, she realized that she had based it all on Dolly’s immaculate and unwrinkled brown silk shirt; from this she had extrapolated a life of ease and elegance. She remembered Magda’s earlier remark. Fine, since she had nothing to do but wait for one woman or the other to call her, why not use the time to do a little background research?
If Dolly’s LinkedIn profile was to be believed, she had indeed been born in Nancy, and on September 11, 1960. She had been working as an assistant since 1982, working her way up through the ranks at a series of magazines before moving to Givenchy. When Hubert Givenchy left in 1995, so did she, moving first to work at Louis Vuitton and then, in 2013, to Sauveterre. Her profile listed that job as ending on April 22, which made her story about being let go after Guipure’s death plausible.
Oh for a copy of How to Hack Like a BOSS! Or even just How to Hack. Like everyone else, Rachel was automatically inclined to believe what appeared in print, but this case had shown her clearly that there could be much more to someone than the bits the media offered. If she were Magda, she would probably have peered behind some firewall by now and learned that Dolly was a lost Romanov grandchild or a spy from Balenciaga sent to infiltrate other fashion houses and report back on their secrets.
On cue, her doorbell rang. Of course it was Magda. “God bless the Mormons for their belief in baptism of the dead. They’re out there trying to find every person ever born, and they’ve put their records online, for everyone to use, on something called FamilySearch. They’ve digitized every state census in the US. Including Florida, which is where I started looking for Albert Ochs.”
“And?”
Magda’s story was one of many leads and few results. She had found an Albert Ochs in the Florida 1945 census, living in Daytona and married to Muriel, with a two-year-old son named Paul. “But he wasn’t in the state census they did in 1935, or in 1925, and Florida birth certificates aren’t digitized that far back. So I used the FamilySearch website to find his death certificate, which showed he was born in Hypoluxo, Florida, on June 24, 1905. But I checked every census from 1890 to 1925, and no one with the last name Ochs is listed as living in Hypoluxo during that period.” She sighed, then added, “The nationwide census from 1940, however, did tell me that one thousand one hundred and seventy-six people named Albert Ochs lived in the United States in 1940. I suppose he could be one of those.”
“What about searching birth certificates?”
Magda shook her head. “Those aren’t accessible digitally. A relative of the deceased has to write or go in person to request.”
That left them with only a deep dive into the 1940 national census. Better to try every other avenue before attempting to track down 1,176 Albert Ochses. Rachel bit her lip and thought. If Albert Ochs had been born in Hypoluxo but was never listed as living there, what were the possible explanations? Could he have been an emergency birth to parents visiting the town? In that case, there would be a birth certificate on file. Her mind began to race. Perhaps her in-laws could be persuaded to visit Hypoluxo, wherever it was, to look through the birth certificates for 1905, to see if there had been an oversight? Maybe Ellen Ochs could appoint them her proxies in an attempt to locate the misplaced birth certificate of their Albert Ochs? But no, in order to do that they would need to know his place of birth.
“Stop thinking,” Magda broke in, “because I already did. I remembered what you said about Ochs being a Jewish name. And I thought … I know it sound far-fetched, but nineteen forty-five the tail end of the war. What if Ochs isn’t in any census before 1945 because he wasn’t in Florida before then? Because he wasn’t in the country before then?”
Rachel turned this over in her mind. “You’re saying that he came from somewhere else and just pretended to be a Florida native?” Magda nodded. “But why?”
“Well, someone who arrived in the US between 1935 and 1945 might have memories he didn’t want to talk about. He might try to suppress his past, try to deny it. He might even do that to the extent of pretending that he was just an ordinary American, born and raised. Remember that documentary we watched last year about that Clark Rockefeller man?”
Rachel nodded, unfazed by this apparent detour. She and Magda had both been fascinated by the case of the imposter who had pretended to be a Rockefeller. She knew where her friend was going. “You’re thinking of the way he changed his accent.”
“Lost it. Completely. We heard him interviewed, remember? No one would have guessed that he was actually German. And there are all those English actors who do flawless American accents. It can be done. Ochs would have needed to work hard to get rid of his original accent, but once he did that, he could pick a place and tell people he was born there, make up some stories about his childhood.” She held out a hand. “And then that becomes your life. Of course, if you don’t tell anyone that you’ve lied about those things, when you die, people think you were born where you said you were born, and they put that on your death certificate.”
It was the perfect explanation, so perfect that Rachel could scarcely bring herself to ask, “Do you have evidence to back any of this up?”
“I think I do.” Magda opened the folder and laid a sheet on the coffee table. “I went to the Ellis Island website. They have a database with the name of everyone who passed through from 1820 to 1957—really, the internet is fantastic. I searched ‘Albert Ochs,’ and I found this.”
The sheet was a printout of a screen shot. Purchase Passenger Record it said at the top. Beneath that was what looked like a graduation certificate, albeit one with SAMPLE written all over it in gray letters. Through those letters it was possible to see that it certified the arrival of one Albert Ochs, thirty-five years old, at Ellis Island. This Albert Ochs had been born on June 25, 1905, in Alsace, and had arrived in New York on the SS Pennland on January 4, 1940, having embarked at Le Havre.
“My God.” Rachel realized she hadn’t quite believed Magda’s theory until then. She reached out and rested an index finger on the printout. “There he is. Albert Ochs, supposed Florida native, arriving on the boat from France.”
“Wait. It gets more interesting.” Magda took out some stapled pages. “The Pennland is a ship with a history. It carried troops in the Second World War and was bombed by the Germans. That makes it of interest to World War II buffs, and one of them digitized its passenger lists—all of its passenger lists, including the one for the passengers embarking on the January 1940 Le Havre to New York crossing.” She put the sheets on the coffee table. “Here are passengers N through P.”
Rev. J. L. R. Nisbett, Mrs. Nisbett, Mrs. Northacker, Master Northacker, Mrs. Emily Offutt, Miss Nancy Offutt, Miss Frances O’N—
“He isn’t listed.”
“No, he isn’t. No Ochs at all is listed as embarking on that voyage. But”—a small smile twitched Magda’s lips—“these people are.”
She laid another sheet on the table. It was a different portion of the passenger list, but here she had highlighted two names. Rachel squinted at the yellow stripes. Mr. Septime Aubert, Mr. Jacques Aubert.
Magda took Rachel’s silence for forgetfulness. “Aubert. Aubert as in Gabrielle Aubert. Remember?” she prompted, “You said that Gabrielle told Dolly about a relative named Septime Aubert.” When Rachel still didn’t say anything, she prodded again. “The one who had caviar on a boat to America just before the war?”
“Yes, I remember.” Rachel picked up the stapled sheets. “I’m just trying to put it all together.” She bit her lip again. “So you’re saying that you think Albert Ochs, the grandfather of Jack Ochs, was also one of these Auberts?”
Magda nodded. “The younger one.”
Rachel nodded back. “And that for some reason he left France and went to America, changing his name on the ship that took him there?”
Magda nodded again. “Or he changed it when he got off the ship and entered the US.” She pushed the printouts closer to Rachel, as if she was emphasizing their evidence.
Rachel squinted, calculating. “Okay …” She wanted to believe—she was almost willing to believe—but, “Did both Auberts disembark at Ellis Island too? That’s what we would need to know to make the hypothesis plausible.”
Now Magda broke into a grin. “That’s the very question I asked myself. So I went back and looked, and I found this.” She put down another sheet. Again Rachel saw the certificate template, again the SAMPLE watermark, but this one certified the arrival of Septime Aubert and Jacques Aubert, born in Paris on January 8, 1880, and June 2, 1905, respectively, at Ellis Island, both arriving on the same ship as Ochs.
“Well,” Rachel felt her excitement ebbing away, “that takes care of that. Both of them are listed, so they both got off.”
“I disagree.” Magda held up a finger. “I went through all the passenger records of entry for this ship—five hundred and seventy-three of them. Every single other record looks like the one for Albert Ochs, with just one person on it. This is the only one that has two people together.”
“No one else was listed together? No husbands and wives, no families … What about this”—Rachel looked at the passenger lists—“Master Northacker? He wasn’t listed on a certificate of arrival with his mother?”
Magda shook her head. “This is the only one.” Then, as if to make sure Rachel understood what she meant: “Septime Aubert and Jacques Aubert are the only two passengers listed on the same record of entry. That suggests that at least something odd was going on.” She sat back, satisfied.
Rachel didn’t know if she felt the same. She decided to push back. What if another explanation fit? “Maybe one of the two Auberts was sick. Maybe he went to the bathroom. So the other had to fill out the certificate for both of them.”
“That would mean that the missing Monsieur Aubert was the only person out of five hundred and seventy-three people who was sick or needed to use the bathroom. That seems like an unlikely explanation to me.”
This time, Rachel agreed. And it did look convincing, this link between Jacques Aubert and Albert Ochs. There was no Albert Ochs in any Florida census before 1945, even the census in his supposed hometown. How could that be squared with his insistence that he was from Florida? And Jacques Aubert’s birth date was so close to Albert Ochs’s—the only difference between them was one missing digit, exactly the kind you might take out if you wanted a different birth date, but one that you could still remember easily. Plus, of course Gabrielle had told Dolly that her great-uncle—or whatever he was—had made a journey to America. Okay, she’d said he’d moved before the war, but strictly speaking the Second World War hadn’t come to France until 1940, which was the year of this Pennland sailing. And Septime was such an unusual name! Could there really be two Septime Auberts? Then there were the passenger lists, Rachel thought. One man named Aubert got on the ship but didn’t get off, while Albert Ochs got off the ship but hadn’t gotten on … If you put it all together, it made a very suggestive story.
Except what was the reason? Why would Jacques Aubert have decided to eradicate himself and become Albert Ochs?
She asked Magda. Magda, of course, had an answer. “I thought about that all the way over, and I think it’s connected to Judaism.”
She paused. “Go on,” Rachel said.
“I can’t figure it out completely, but I thought maybe something like this. This Septime Aubert is Gabrielle’s great-great-uncle, or whatever relative he was. What if Jacques Aubert is … his son? Or someone close to him who needs to leave France because he’s Jewish.”
Rachel interrupted. “Aubert isn’t a Jewish name.”
“But it doesn’t need to be, right? Judaism is carried maternally. It could be that Septime Aubert married a Jewish woman. Then he wouldn’t be Jewish, but his son would count as Jewish to the Nazis.”
Rachel nodded, but Maga had already moved on. “Or maybe Jacques Aubert was in the Resistance, or he was a communist or a criminal or someone else the Nazis would have wanted to kill. I did some research about people-smuggling during the war, and it did happen. Not just people high up, like Raoul Wallenberg, issuing passports or hiding people in embassies, but ordinary people too. There was one couple who saved Jewish children by planting them with Christian families, and they made them new birth certificates—everything.”
“The Réseau Marcel.” Rachel’s mother had told her about them when she’d first moved to France.
“That’s it. We know Maximilien Sauveterre helped Jews one way; why not another? Or why not more people than just Jews? Maybe he helped Aubert get a new passport for his son, and on the ship Monsieur Aubert becomes Mister Albert Ochs, who disembarks at Ellis Island.”
“But then why kill a descendant of that person eighty years later? If Sauveterre smuggled out a Jewish friend, or even a member of the Resistance, surely that person’s family would have been thankful. How do we get from that to Gabrielle murdering members of both families seventy years later?”
“I don’t know; that’s the part I couldn’t figure out. I was hoping you might have some ideas.”
Rachel was about to suggest that they could have some tea and brainstorm together, when her phone rang. It was Dolly.
She had been out for a drink with friends after her yoga class, but now that she was home, her time was all Rachel’s. How could she help? Yes, as she had said, she phoned Ochs on the afternoon of his arrival, to confirm the meeting on Saturday. No, she hadn’t called him again after that. She was absolutely certain because the rest of the afternoon and evening had been taken up with managing Monsieur Guipure’s party, “and on Friday I was with Antoinette all day.” After Antoinette had finally fallen asleep on Friday, Dolly herself had been so exhausted that she’d headed straight home and gone to bed. She had slept from six PM until seven the next morning. But if there was a second call from a Sauveterre number … She had called nearly every extension in the company for one reason or another during her time there, so she might well recognize the number. Would Rachel read it to her?
Rachel read it, pausing between each numeral. When she’d finished, there was a hesitation, and then Dolly said, “That’s Keteb’s office extension.”
“Did she say he made the call, or did she say it came from his extension?” Magda took a swig from her mug of tea. “There’s a difference. Gabrielle told us she stayed late at company headquarters if she needed to. It would have been easy for her to stay late the night after Guipure died, when there were a million things to do, then purposefully use the phone in Lellouch’s office in order to implicate him.”
“That’s perfectly true. But it’s also true that we haven’t figured out why Gabrielle would want to kill Guipure, whereas with Lellouch we have a motive.”
“We haven’t found a motive for Gabrielle yet. We’re working on it.”
“But in the meantime, we have a phone call that was made from the office of a man who had a reason to kill at least one of our victims.”
“Was Lellouch even in the office the night that call was made to Ochs? Do we know that?”
“Do we know that Gabrielle was?”
They had reached an impasse. Without access to Gabrielle or Lellouch, or preferably both, they couldn’t get any further than speculation and theories about why Gabrielle might want to kill Jack Ochs, how her motive for killing Guipure was more credible than Lellouch’s, or why Lellouch’s might be more believable than hers. Really, Rachel said to herself, they’d done an exceptional job. Starting from nothing, they’d managed to discover evidence, put together a time line, and identify two plausible suspects, with no outside assistance. But as much as it pained her to admit, it seemed they’d reached the end of what they could do alone. Now only one collaboration could take them forward.
“We need to call the police.”