The Third Stone

He stands in a château outside Amiens, north of Paris. The big old house moans in the dark. The home belongs to a retired paleontologist and von Rumpel believes it is here that the chief of security at the museum in Paris fled during the chaos following the invasion of France three years ago. A peaceful place, insulated by fields, enwombed in hedges. He climbs a staircase to a library. A bookshelf has been peeled open; the strongbox is behind it. The Gestapo safecracker is good: wears a stethoscope, does not bother with a flashlight. In a few minutes, he has it open.

An old handgun, a box of certificates, a stack of tarnished silver coins. And inside a velvet box, a blue pear-cut diamond.

The red heart inside the stone shows itself one second, becomes completely inaccessible the next. Inside von Rumpel, hope braids with desperation; he is almost there. The odds are in his favor, aren’t they? But he knows before he sets it under the lamp. That same elation crashing out of him. The diamond is not real; it too is the work of Dupont.

He has found all three fakes. All his luck is spent. The doctor says the tumor is growing again. The prospects of the war are nosediving—Germany retreats across Russia, across the Ukraine, up the ankle of Italy. Before long, everyone in the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg—the men out there scouring the continent for hidden libraries, concealed prayer scrolls, closeted impressionist paintings—will be handed rifles and sent into the fire. Including von Rumpel.

So long as he keeps it, the keeper of the stone will live forever.

He cannot give up. And yet his hands grow so heavy. His head is a boulder.

One at the museum, one to the home of a museum supporter, one sent with a chief of security. What sort of man would they choose for a third courier? The Gestapo man watches him, his attention on the stone, his left hand on the door of the strongbox. Not for the first time, von Rumpel thinks of the extraordinary jewel safe at the museum. Like a puzzle box. In all his travels, he has seen nothing else like it. Who could have conceived of it?

The Bridge

In a French village far to the south of Saint-Malo, a German truck crossing a bridge is blown up. Six German soldiers die. Terrorists are blamed. Night and fog, whisper the women who come by to check on Marie-Laure. For every Kraut lost, they’ll kill ten of us. Police go door-to-door demanding any able-bodied man come out for a day’s work. Dig trenches, unload railway wagons, push barrows of cement bags, construct invasion obstacles in a field or on a beach. Everyone who can must work to strengthen the Atlantic Wall. Etienne stands squinting in the doorway with his doctor’s notes in his hand. Cold air blowing over him and fear billowing backward into the hall.

Madame Ruelle whispers that occupation authorities are blaming the attack on an elaborate network of anti-occupation radio broadcasts. She says that crews are busy locking away the beaches behind a network of concertina wire and huge wooden jacks called chevaux de frise. Already they have restricted access to the walkways atop the ramparts.

She hands over a loaf and Marie-Laure carries it home. When Etienne breaks it open, there is yet another piece of paper inside. Nine more numbers. “I thought they might take a break,” he says.

Marie-Laure is thinking of her father. “Maybe,” she says, “it is even more important now?”

He waits until dark. Marie-Laure sits in the mouth of the wardrobe, the false back open, and listens to her uncle switch on the microphone and transmitter in the attic. His mild voice speaks numbers into the garret. Then music plays, soft and low, full of cellos tonight, and it cuts out midstream.

“Uncle?”

It takes him a long time to come down the ladder. He takes her hand. He says, “The war that killed your grandfather killed sixteen million others. One and a half million French boys alone, most of them younger than I was. Two million on the German side. March the dead in a single-file line, and for eleven days and eleven nights, they’d walk past our door. This is not rearranging street signs, what we’re doing, Marie. This is not misplacing a letter at the post office. These numbers, they’re more than numbers. Do you understand?”

“But we are the good guys. Aren’t we, Uncle?”

“I hope so. I hope we are.”

Rue des Patriarches

Von Rumpel enters an apartment house in the 5th arrondissement. The simpering landlady on the first floor takes the sheaf of ration tickets he offers and buries them in her housecoat. Cats swarm her ankles. Behind her, an overdecorated flat reeks of dead apple blossoms, confusion, old age.

“When did they leave, Madame?”

“Summer of 1940.” She looks as if she might hiss.

“Who pays the rent?”

“I don’t know, Monsieur.”

“Do the checks come from the Natural History Museum?”

“I can’t say.”

“When was the last time someone came?”

“No one comes. The checks are mailed.”

“From where?”

“I don’t know.”

“And no one leaves or enters the flat?”

“Not since that summer,” she says, and retreats with her vulture face and vulture fingernails into the redolent dark.

Up he goes. A single dead bolt on the fourth floor marks the locksmith’s flat. Inside, the windows are boarded over with wood veneer, and an airless, pearly light seeps through the knotholes. As though he has climbed into a dark box hung inside a column of pure light. Cabinets hang open, sofa cushions sit slightly cockeyed, a kitchen chair is toppled on its side. Everything speaks of a hasty departure or a rigorous search or both. A black rim of algae rings the toilet bowl where the water has slipped away. He inspects the bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, some fiendish and immitigable hope flaring within him: What if—?

Along the top of a workbench stand tiny benches, tiny lampposts, tiny trapezoids of polished wood. Little vise, little box of nails, little bottles of glue long since hardened. Beside the bench, beneath a dropcloth, a surprise: a complicated model of the 5th arrondissement. The buildings are unpainted but otherwise beautifully detailed. Shutters, doors, windows, storm drains. No people. A toy?

In the closet hang a few moth-eaten girl’s dresses and a sweater on which embroidered goats chew flowers. Dusty pinecones line the windowsill, arranged large to small. On the floor of the kitchen, friction strips have been nailed into the wood. A place of quiet discipline. Calm. Order. A single line of twine runs between the table and the bathroom. A clock stands dead without glass on its face. It’s not until he finds three huge spiral-bound folios of Jules Verne in Braille that he solves it.




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