There was, Aurélie noticed with relief, no reference to either her father or the chapel. Hoffmeister seemed to think the pigeons were coming from a deserted boathouse by the lake and was having Kraus keep it under surveillance. Which explained, she supposed, the many fishing expeditions from which Lieutenant Kraus returned thoroughly sloshed, but with no fish.
And then, at the very bottom of the pile, she saw something else entirely. The distinctive paper of a telegraph form. The writing was very dark; there were places where the nib had pierced through the paper.
Erster Generalquartiermeister W.H.F. von Witzleben. Wire soonest. Delicate matters to discuss. Yr loving nephew, M v S.
M v S. Maximilian von Sternburg?
She was frowning at the paper, trying to figure out why it was here, what it meant, when the sound of footsteps and voices made her start. Aurélie shoved the telegram back where she’d found it. Her body was faster than her mind; she was halfway to the passage by the time the footsteps stopped outside the door. A key was inserted into the lock.
Aurélie escaped into the passage, pulling the door softly shut behind her, grateful for those long-ago servants whose movements were meant to be inaudible, the door padded and the floor covered in drugget.
“—another telegram,” Hoffmeister was saying. “He sent it this morning, from the village.”
“Or thinks he has, eh?” Someone giggled unpleasantly. Aurélie recognized the voice as Dreier’s. Putting her eye to the crack in the door, she couldn’t quite see him, just a leg dangling off the edge of her chaise longue. But the voice was unmistakable. “How many does this make?”
“Four,” said Hoffmeister succinctly. “All to his uncle in Berlin. Wire soonest. Delicate matters to discuss.”
“Is that brandy?” said Dreier hopefully, and Aurélie heard the sound of her father’s Napoleon brandy being poured into one of her great-grandmother’s crystal glasses. There was silence for a moment, punctuated by slurping. “Won’t he realize when he doesn’t hear back?”
“Berlin has other matters to attend to,” said Hoffmeister drily. “They sent him to spy on me, you know.”
“Cheek,” said Dreier indistinctly. “More brandy?”
Crystal clinked against crystal. “These Junkers look after one another. Never mind that their world is done. Like all this. The arrogance of them. That Von Sternburg would sell out his country for a girl.”
“Or her, ahem, jewels, eh?” Dreier made a noise that was somewhere between a burp and a laugh.
In the passage, Aurélie stood as still as she could, scarcely daring to breathe, her hands like ice. The telegram she had seen beneath the ledgers. The promised intervention from Berlin . . . Intercepted. Gone. She had never quite believed in it, but it had been comforting to hope it was there, that the old laws of behavior still governed, that there would be recourse. Now, she felt marooned, as surely as Crusoe on his island. There was no law but Hoffmeister’s law, and his law was no law at all.
“Get your mind out of the gutter, lieutenant,” said Hoffmeister without heat. “I don’t care if he’s swiving her six ways from Sunday. But I want that relic.”
“With those jewels,” said Dreier, eager to agree, “you could buy a palace that would make this one look like a hovel!”
“With those jewels,” Hoffmeister corrected him, “I could buy the men who would make me a lieutenant colonel. And then there’s the relic itself . . .”
“I didn’t know you believed in all that,” hiccupped Dreier.
“I don’t,” snapped Hoffmeister. Cutting off Dreier’s hasty apologies, he said, “But they do, those peasants. They think it’s magic. Miracles and hocus-pocus. They say—what is it?—that France cannot fall while the demoiselle holds the talisman.” He made the archaic title a slur. “So we’ll show them who holds that relic. And then we’ll burn it.”
“Not the jewels!”
“No, you cretin. Not the jewels. The relic. That disgusting, decaying scrap of fabric they claim is saturated in the saint’s own holy blood. We’ll show them it will go up in flames as quickly as your grandmother’s kerchief.”
It might not have been grandmother’s kerchief he had said. Aurélie’s German was serviceable, but it didn’t quite run to vulgar colloquialisms.
“And then France will fall?” slurred Dreier.
“What, do you believe in all that rubbish? No. But they’ll think it will. So it will.”
“Perhaps we burn the demoiselle with it,” proposed Dreier. Through the crack in the door, Aurélie could just see his hand holding out his glass to be filled as though he weren’t suggesting her immolation as casually as one might an afternoon picnic.
“And make a martyr? No. But what will the French think when they learn that their prized demoiselle was a German officer’s whore? We tell them, I think, that she gave her lover the talisman. . . . She sold her body and her country. That will take care of the demoiselle.”
“Wait—you’re going to give Von Sternburg the talisman?”
“Von Sternburg,” Hoffmeister said calmly, “won’t be alive to enjoy it. There will be an accident. In an old structure like this, there are often such little accidents.”
“But . . . his uncle . . .”
“Will know only that his nephew perished serving his country. There will be no inconvenient telegrams to say otherwise. There have never been any telegrams to advise him otherwise.”
Murder. He was talking about murder. Max’s murder.
There was a moment of stunned silence, and then, of all things, the sound of applause. Dreier was clapping. “It’s brilliant! You’ve thought of everything!”
“Not quite everything,” said Hoffmeister modestly. “One would have to determine how such an accident might be arranged. You were a pharmacist once, were you not?”
“I, er, yes, but . . .”
“If a man were to dose himself for, oh, sleeplessness, might he not become confused and walk somewhere he ought not?”
“Ye-es,” said Dreier, sounding less than clearheaded himself. “But . . .”
“It is no crime for a man to take a sleeping draught. Or another man to give it.”
“No,” said Dreier, relieved. “No, not at all.”
“But, not, I think,” said Hoffmeister, rising to his feet, “until we have the talisman. Do you understand me, Klaus? Wait for my guidance. And tell me if our friend attempts to send any more letters.”
Aurélie heard the other man rise clumsily to his feet. “But what about the letters to his mother?”
“Bring them to me. If there is nothing of interest, you may replace them in the dispatch bag. We don’t want his mother expressing her concern to her brother.”
“Yes, sir. No, sir.” Dreier made an attempt to click his heels, nearly overbalancing himself in the process. “Will there be anything else, sir?”
“Try not to break your own neck on those stairs,” said Hoffmeister, as Dreier careened off a Louis XIV commode and into the side of the bed, cursing fluently. Hoffmeister took him firmly by the arm, although, through the crack in the paneling, Aurélie didn’t miss the look of distaste he gave the other man. “I’ll see you out.”