“What about Ochs?” Alan asked when she’d finished telling him about the nightclub video and Magda’s idea. “That explains Guipure, but it doesn’t explain why Keteb or Gabrielle would want to kill Ochs. According to what you described earlier, Ochs’s grandfather was a member of Gabrielle’s family. If he was Gabrielle’s great-uncle, or great-great-uncle, that would make Jack Ochs her cousin in some way. It’s hard to see why she would murder her long-lost cousin.”
“Not necessarily. Maybe Jack Ochs knew something about his grandfather that could be a threat to Gabrielle’s family in some way.” Rachel felt herself growing hot, as she always did when Alan challenged one of her neatly constructed hypotheses. “Maybe Maximilien Sauveterre helped to smuggle him out because he was a threat.”
“Aubert isn’t a Jewish name,” Alan pointed out.
“Well, the fact that Sauveterre helped Jews doesn’t mean he only helped Jews.” Rachel realized she was echoing Magda, but it made sense. “He could have been doing a favor by removing the black sheep of a family he knew.”
“Which would mean all your ideas about thwarted love and being passed over for jobs would be irrelevant.” Alan was calm. “I don’t mean to be awkward, but this version makes much more sense to me. Guipure discovered something about the Aubert–Ochs incident that Gabrielle felt made him worth killing, and at the same time Ochs appeared, knowing or wanting something that made her feel the same about him. You still have the same murderer, just with a more logical scenario.” He peered into her face. “After all, Guipure and Ochs did have a meeting arranged. There’s a connection between them.”
Rachel chewed her thumbnail and thought furiously. It did make better sense. And it did have precedent. “Magda thought something similar, originally.”
“She thought Gabrielle killed Guipure and Ochs for the same reason?”
“She thought it was all connected to Judaism somehow.”
“Well, now you can call her and tell her she might be right. She’ll like that.” He smiled. “But before you do that, could you do something else? I called my mother to let her know I’d made it home safely, and she asked me to remind you to send Ochs’s stuff. Apparently Ellen has been asking after it. If I go find a box could you just gather it together? UPS will pick up tomorrow if I call them before five.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Right after I collected the suitcase from the commissariat everything started speeding up with Guipure, and I … yeah, let’s do it now.”
Alan reached for his keys. “I think I saved her box from Christmas in the storage cage downstairs. I’ll be right back.”
Rachel rolled the suitcase out from under the hall table, feeling guilty. Poor Ellen Ochs shouldn’t have been made to wait three weeks to receive her dead husband’s belongings. She would put a card in with the clothes, apologizing and inviting her to stay with them if she ever visited Paris. Although on second thought such a visit seemed unlikely …
She laid the suitcase flat on one of the dining chairs and unzipped it. The clothes, neatly folded to face upward when it lay horizontally, had slipped to the left during the three weeks it had been on end. She shifted them back and began to lift them out.
A sport coat, light brown tweed, with a collar label identifying it as Macy’s brand. A royal-blue Oxford shirt. A long-sleeved brown polo shirt. A short-sleeved gray polo shirt. Under those, a pair of pale khaki chinos, and under that three pairs of tan socks, two undershirts, and four pairs of plain white boxers. Without all of this to prop it up, a paperback that had been pressing against the right side of the suitcase flopped over, revealing itself as something called Fatherland, by Robert Harris. A label stuck to the upper right corner said “Miami-Dade Public Library System.”
Rachel could never resist a book. She flicked this one open to the first page, which had a diagonal “Canceled” stamp and a due date slip on which the last date was April 15, 2000. On the flyleaf someone had written Paul Ochs in cramped cursive script.
She flipped the book over to read the back cover, and as she did so a folded piece of paper fluttered out from between the pages, a thin grayish sheet, folded in half. She bent and picked it up, unfolding it. Galerie Sauveterre, it said across the top in a familiar elaborate font.
She went cold. Putting the book down, she held the piece of paper flat against the surface of the dining table with both hands. Its front side was slightly paler than its back and its central crease was sharp, as if it had been unfolded infrequently. It was the top copy of a receipt like those she had seen in Sauveterre’s archive. In the top right-hand corner was printed “007892”—she recognized it as the receipt number, having spent one nightmarish summer working in the accounts office of her uncle’s moving company. On the dateline underneath the scrollwork of the gallery name, someone had written 2 Novembre 1939, and in the space given beneath for recording the sale, Albert Ütz: Leger, Nature Morte. She recognized the handwriting from the receipts she had viewed just a few days before in the Sauveterre archive. In the column indicating the amount paid, the same hand had written, 12000ff.
That couldn’t be right. She squeezed her eyes shut. She knew Leger’s name: she and Alan had been to an exhibition of Cubism the previous spring, and a Leger had been part of the display. The plaque next to the painting had explained that Fernand Leger had been major figure in Cubism and was commonly considered a forerunner of pop art. The amount paid for a work by such an artist must have been 120,000 francs, not 12,000. Opening her eyes, she looked at the receipt again, more carefully this time.
She had been right. The amount was 12,000 francs. And who was this Albert Ütz? She had been through all the receipts in the folder for 1939, and she didn’t remember that name. Had he sold Maximilien Sauveterre a still life so small and cheap that the man hadn’t even bothered to retain a copy of the receipt?
She moved to her desk. She didn’t need to hack anything to find what she wanted. Instead, she went right to the website of Christie’s auction house, then to the page where they gave prices from their recent art sales. The lowest recent price for a Leger was $300,000.
She opened a second tab and found a site which told her that in 1940 a French franc had been worth two United States cents, then a second site that converted 1940s dollars into present-day dollars. Just as she heard Alan’s key in the door, she was able to understand that in June of 1941 the Sauveterre Gallery had bought a Fernand Leger still life for the 2016 equivalent of $4,000.
She realized she was gripping her lips between her teeth. She tried to remember the prices on the Sauveterre receipts she’d seen. True, she’d been looking quickly, and her memory wasn’t exact, but she couldn’t remember any number lower than 100,000 flicking through her fingers in that icy basement room.
“Ready?” She turned to find Alan holding an empty cardboard box big enough for Ochs’s suitcase to fit into. When he saw her face, he said, “What?”
“I found something strange.” She explained about the price on the receipt and her painful mathematics, the comparison that didn’t seem sensible or maybe even possible. “And who is this person anyway? I looked through all the receipts in that archive, and I didn’t see one for an Albert Ütz.”
As soon as she said the name out loud she understood. Of course! No wonder they hadn’t been able to fit all the pieces together—they hadn’t had all the pieces. She put the receipt down on the table in front of her and stood still for a moment. She needed her hands to stop shaking before she could call Magda.
Half an hour later the two of them sat in the séjour. Rachel had refused to tell Alan anything until she had told Magda, and he had sulkily sequestered himself in the bedroom to take a jet-lagged nap. As he slept, Magda listened while an excited Rachel gave a frenetic explanation of what she thought had happened, but now she said, “I couldn’t follow that at all. Start again, and do it slowly.”
Rachel took a deep breath. “Okay. Let’s start with Jack Ochs. He was killed second, but he was really the start of everything. Or rather, his grandfather was.”
“That’s just as confusing.” Magda leaned forward. “Be clearer.”
Rachel gathered herself. “All right, let me start with this: you were right. Albert Ochs got on the SS Pennland as someone else. But he didn’t get on as Septime Aubert or Jacques Aubert. He got on as Albert Ütz.” Her computer sat on the coffee table, and she turned it so that Magda could see the passenger manifest for the SS Pennland on its screen. She scrolled down past the Os and the Ps, nearly to the end of the list. Dr. and Mrs. William Thomas, Mrs. Anna Titelbaum, Miss Frederika von Urlaub … and there it was: Mr. Albert Ütz. “Maybe when Ütz said his name, the immigration heard officer heard Ochs and wrote that down instead. Listen.” She said the two names one after the other. “Or maybe Ütz had had so many people on the boat mis-hear him that he just gave his name as Ochs. Don’t forget, he was leaving a Europe where it was dangerous for Albert Ütz, a Jew, to exist at all. Maybe he was relieved to leave that him behind and start over as Mr. Ochs.”
“But Ochs is a Jewish name too.”
Rachel nodded. “I thought about that. Being a Jew in Europe in 1939 was dangerous, but in a sense it was dangerous because it was important. It was an integral part of who you were. Just because he wanted to be safe, that doesn’t mean Ütz wanted to stop being his essential self. So he became an American Jew from Florida instead of a Jew from France. Which explains why he made up that story about being born in Hypoluxo.”
“But how do you know he made it up?” Magda stared at the computer screen. “How do you even know this is the same man? How do you know you aren’t just making it up again?”
“I don’t,” Rachel admitted. “But thanks to the Mormons and their amazing record keeping, in the time it took you to arrive here, I was able to learn from the FamilySearch website that an Albert Ütz was born in Le Hohwald, Alsace, on July 25, 1905. And thanks to the search I did on Wikipedia in the minutes I had left over, I now know that between September 1939 and July 1940 all the Jews in Alsace were expelled.” She sat back. “Which would give a wise Jew just enough time between July and December of 1940 to make his arrangements and get the hell out of France.”
Magda pushed out her breath dismissively, but after a few seconds of consideration, she relented. “All right. It does line up. But I still don’t understand what it has to do with Roland Guipure.”
“It has to do with Roland Guipure because it has to do with Maximilien Sauveterre.” Rachel pointed her chin at the yellowed receipt that lay in front of Magda on the coffee table. “That receipt is for a painting Jack Ochs’s grandfather sold to Maximilien Sauveterre. I think Ochs found it when he started going through his father’s books. Remember, Ellen Ochs said he’d started to do that right before he surprised her with the trip to Paris, and I found it in a book with Paul Ochs’s name on the flyleaf. I think he found it and he did what anyone would do—he tried to use the internet to figure out what it was. It would have taken him very little time to figure out that Sauveterre had wildly underpaid Albert Ütz for a Fernand Leger painting, and I think he contacted Guipure because he found him on the internet connected to the name Sauveterre.” She gestured to two-inch-high letters on the receipt. “There are a lot of Leger Nature Morts around, but not many Galeries Sauveterre. I think Ochs contacted Guipure to tell him about the receipt and ask for help tracking down the painting. He had an excellent case for restitution. And I think that’s when Guipure first began to realize that Maximilien Sauveterre lied about paying Jews fair prices for their art. That he forged those famous receipts and used the money he made from reselling those paintings at huge profits to build the Sauveterre family fortune.”
Magda gasped—as Rachel had hoped she would. Then she said triumphantly, “So it was about Judaism.”
“Well,” Rachel said, tilting her head slightly from side to side, “let’s say it was about Jewishness. It’s a religion and an ethnicity, remember, and we’re dealing with the ethnic aspect.” Magda rolled her eyes. “But it was also about communication.”
Magda made an uncomprehending face. “Which means what?”
“All the dead men had communicated with each other. Or, to be more accurate, the other two had been in communication with Guipure. He’s the fulcrum here.”
Magda frowned. “I can see that for Ochs, but Thieriot? Where does he fit in?”
Rachel wrinkled her nose. “I haven’t figured that out yet. Not completely. But I’m sure about Albert Ochs and Albert Ütz. And I’m sure about the sales. However”—Rachel made a face that said Magda wasn’t going to like what followed—“if Albert Ochs is Albert Ütz, that means he can’t be Jacques Aubert. Which means there’s no connection to Gabrielle.”
“But Gabrielle bought the heroin!”
“I know, I know. I can’t explain that. But I can’t argue with the evidence either.”
“Maybe she bought it for Lellouch.” Magda considered. “So we were right; they’re working together.”
Rachel shook her head. “It can’t be that either. Because if the murders are about Maximilien Sauveterre’s falsifying receipts, Lellouch had nothing to lose or gain from that. He could find another job if the House of Sauveterre crumbled. So could Gabrielle, for that matter. Only one other person would really suffer from the revelation that Maximilien Sauveterre underpaid Jews for their art and then lied to cover it up.”
Magda looked at her, first disbelieving and then, slowly, accepting. She said, “Are you sure this is about Maximilien Sauveterre forging receipts? Are you absolutely sure?”
Rachel held her gaze. “I am absolutely sure.” She swallowed. “But to prove it”—she leaned across the coffee table—“we need to get into the archive. We need to go through the receipts we saw, again. If there isn’t one for Ütz and we can write down a few more of the names and check to see if there are living relatives we can contact, then I’ll be sure.” She closed the computer and started to stand.
Magda put a hand out. “Tomorrow.”
“What?”
“Wait until tomorrow. What are you going to do today, go bursting in there demanding to look at their archive? They’re going to ask you why, and what are you going to say? But tomorrow is the memorial service. Everyone from Sauveterre will be at the Église Saint Roch. The building will be empty. No one will be there, and we’ll have all the time we need. Just you and me, your collection of lock picks, and time to go through the files. Then we can take what we find to Boussicault, and he can question her.”
Alan had come out of the bedroom, his hair standing in spikes on his head. He came into the séjour. “Have you finished? Are you ready to tell your husband, now? Who is ‘her’?”
They looked at him. Together they said, “Antoinette.”