Betrayals. Carla Neggers
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especially, to take chances—with the roulette wheel, with her treks along the rocky coastline, with men. She had never made an enemy. Or, conversely, a true friend.
She had talked about the Jupiter Stones for years, but had never shown them to anyone—not that anyone had ever asked to see them. Why embarrass her? She couldn’t possibly own anything so valuable. The Jupiter Stones were her good luck charm, she liked to tell people. They were the source of her boundless energy and enthusiasm for life. She rubbed them over her body every night, she told friends and strangers alike, and the stones restored her spirit.
Who could believe such talk?
The Jupiter Stones had existed. They had been a gift from Franz Josef, emperor of Austria, king of Hungary, to his beautiful, haunted wife, Empress Elisabeth. The exacting monarch, who ruled the troubled Hapsburg empire for sixty-eight years until his death at eighty-six in 1916, had had his court jewelers search the world for ten exquisite corundum gems, not just the coveted cornflower-blue sapphire or pigeon’s-blood ruby, but in the other colors in which corundum was found: white, yellow, orange-yellow, green, pink, plum, pale blue and near-black. Each stone was perfectly cut, each given a name by Franz Josef himself. Four were named for the planets with a variety of corundum as their stone: the yellow sapphire was called the Star of Venus, the orange-yellow sapphire the Mercury Stone, the beautiful pigeon’s-blood ruby star-stone the Red Moon of Mars and the velvety cornflower Kashmir sapphire the Star of Jupiter. Individually the ruby and the cornflower-blue sapphire—each flawless, each cut into a perfect six-sided star—were the most valuable. But as a whole, the unique collection was worth a fortune.
In tribute to his wife’s unusually simple tastes, Franz Josef left the remarkable stones unmounted. He presented them to her in a ruby-red velvet bag embossed with the imperial seal. Elisabeth, it was said, took them with her everywhere. She was an incurable wanderer, and it was on one of these wanderings that she seemed to have “misplaced” the Jupiter Stones. Unlike her husband—and cousin—Franz Josef, Elisabeth, “Sisi” as she was known affectionately, wasn’t an orderly person. A lover of riding and endless walks, she was generous and careless with her possessions; she could have lost the unique gems or simply given them away—as she did so often with her things—on a whim. She never said. Whatever their fate, the fabled stones weren’t discovered among her countless jewels after her assassination in 1898, when, while boarding a steamer in Geneva, she was stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist who wanted to kill someone important enough that his name would get into the papers. He succeeded.
Almost sixty years later, Baroness Gisela Majlath claimed the unpredictable empress had given the stones to Gisela’s mother after she, as just a girl of eight or nine, had endangered her own life to help Elisabeth after a riding accident. Gisela had inherited the extraordinary bag of gems when her mother and most of her family were killed in the two World Wars that decimated Hungary. She herself had narrowly escaped death when fleeing Budapest after the Communist takeover in 1948. All she managed to take with her were the clothes on her back and, tucked into her bra, the Jupiter Stones.
It was the sort of tale that everyone loved to hear, though no one believed it.
If Gisela had fled to the west dispossessed and penniless, why hadn’t she cashed in the stones to reestablish herself? They were a family heirloom, Gisela had explained. And of course, they were enchanted; they had saved her from poverty and despair and even death. She couldn’t just sell them as she might ordinary gems.
Everything changed the night she tearfully reported to the police she’d been robbed and described her ten corundum stones in detail, estimating their value into the millions of francs and admitting she had no photographs, no insurance, no proof she had ever seen the Jupiter Stones, much less owned them.
Why didn’t she? The understandably skeptical police had asked what everyone but Gisela considered a reasonable question. She was insulted. Did the police doubt her word?
They did. So did all her friends and virtually everyone in France.
The gossips supplied their own answers. If the stones were in Gisela’s possession—through whatever means—they would have been too valuable for her to afford to keep in any open, honest way. Insurance costs alone would have been phenomenal. She must have come to her senses, capitalized on Le Chat’s prowling about the Côte d’ Azur, and hocked them, saving face by reporting them stolen. In which case, good for her.
But that scenario was far-fetched.
Far more likely she’d made up the stones altogether and had an ulterior motive for claiming she was Le Chat’s latest victim. A craving for attention? For notoriety? Had Gisela, too, yearned for romance and adventure?
Gisela, however, stuck to her story: the Jupiter Stones were hers, Le Chat had stolen them and she wanted him caught and her gems returned to her.
The gossips redoubled their efforts to come up with an explanation for what to them was decidedly unexplainable. What if there were a germ of truth to her story and some manner of stones had been stolen? The idea of flighty Gisela rubbing herself with pretty rocks every night wasn’t altogether implausible. She did have her idiosyncrasies. But did these stones of hers have to be the Jupiter Stones? Of course not. They could have been simple quartz or paste.
And if Le Chat had snatched a bag of worthless rocks…how délicieux.
Enjoying their own fantasies, no one noticed Gisela’s growing despondency. The police didn’t believe her. Her friends were enthralled with the criminal who’d robbed her of her most precious possession. The gossips were having fun at her expense. All these years, she suddenly realized, people had simply been indulging her. Not a soul had believed she had ever had the Jupiter Stones, much less been robbed of them!
Humiliated and despairing of ever seeing her corundum gems again, Gisela had flung herself off a cliff into the Mediterranean.
And everyone suddenly cursed Le Chat and demanded his immediate capture.
Enter Annette Winston Reed, the woman who had led the police to the true identity of Le Chat.
Word had spread rapidly that Jean-Paul Gerard was the culprit, and there was a collective gasp, a suspension of anger and grief, as people realized that if Le Chat wasn’t Cary Grant, he was awfully close. The notion of the handsome, sexy Grand Prix driver amusing himself—he couldn’t need the money—by stealing jewels went a long, long way toward renewing the romance of Le Chat.
But the police had their evidence, and there was precious little romance in their souls. The search was on for their missing suspect.
If they had believed Gisela…
Jean-Paul felt the tears spill down his cheeks, and he watched Thomas Blackburn lay a pink rose on the coffin. If others wondered about his presence at Gisela’s funeral, Jean-Paul did not. “Thomas is a good man,” she would say. “A true friend.”
While the Bostonian closed his eyes in silent farewell, Jean-Paul turned away, whispering, “Adieu, Maman.”
Tam curled up in the middle of Tante Annette’s bed and sobbed quietly so that the other children wouldn’t hear her. They would only tease her for crying. Even Papa had said she needed to be brave. France wasn’t their home, he had told her. But to Tam it was. She didn’t remember Saigon at all.
“Hi, Tam.”
“Go away,” Tam said, looking up at Rebecca Blackburn. She was only four and as big as Tam was at six. It wasn’t fair. Nothing was fair. “I don’t want you here.”
Rebecca climbed onto the bed. “Why not?”
“Because I hate your grandfather!”
“You shouldn’t hate my grandfather,” the younger girl said. “He likes worms.”
Tam sniffled and wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands. “He’s making Papa and me leave.”
“Where are you going?”
“Home.”
“But