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“Yes. It was in all the papers. His mother said it was ‘cursed’ and had brought nothing but misfortune to the family. His father vowed to lock it away and never let it see the light of day again.”
Claire didn’t believe in curses, but she did believe in what was right. She recalled her grandfather having mentioned the scandal and the necklace. Only he had offered that perhaps Clark hadn’t killed himself but that a killer had rather had his murder made to look like suicide. Her Poppi had said the old man had been livid not only about the affair, but about Clark having given the necklace to Elisabeth. And when the old man had come to his senses, the family had moved to cover it all up.
She tended to believe Poppi as the backstairs staff usually had the inside scoop on what had actually transpired. From the rumors, Claire knew that Elisabeth had downplayed what had followed Clark’s death. The police had been sent to arrest her. They had torn her small flat apart looking for the valuable necklace. It was only after they could find nothing that she was told she could be released with no charges pressed and no record of the incident in exchange for the return of the necklace.
Claire shook her head. There was no way they could have made those charges stick—even if the crown prosecutors had been willing to proceed. Too many staff members and friends of Clark Dumar had known the truth. Elisabeth had never married, preferring to believe Clark had been the one and only great love of her life. Poppycock. Clark Dumar had wanted Elisabeth to have the damn necklace and Claire meant to see that she got it. It would make her remaining years comfortable, but Claire feared Elisabeth would hold it close and leave it to her sister’s family when she passed.
Claire looked around the room; the Dumars might have money, but neither they nor their fancy designer had any taste. The furnishings bordered on—no, check that were, in fact, downright gaudy. It was over-the-top ornate and looked more like a red velvet cordoned off section of some royal apartment rather than a place where people lived and breathed. Claire’s past made it so the thought of living like that made her want to throw up in her mouth.
Within the community of jewel thieves, the Dumar Diamond Necklace was spoken of with reverence, but no one dared to take it. There were many who believed the necklace was cursed. Claire didn’t believe that, not even for a minute.
With Mia’s help, getting in and getting to the necklace had been frightfully easy. It wasn’t arrogance that made Claire believe she could steal the damn thing; she knew she was among the best that ever lived. Her Poppi had told her that and he never lied—well, except about the whole having been a master thief himself, only Poppi hadn’t stolen things to sell or to keep because he found them to be beautiful as any work of art. She smiled, ruefully. No Poppi had been on a mission. He meant to put things right that should never have gone wrong.I guess the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree.
Mia was in her ear. “Claire? Claire? Are you with me? Look alive, girlfriend. We haven’t got all night for this little add-on Robin Hood adventure of yours. You still need to change and get to the Metropolitan Museum of London. This is the last night of the exhibit, and it’s a charity fundraiser. You only have three hours to get there and snatch the damn thing. If you miss, there is no ‘do over.’”
“You’re always so formal. Most people call it the Met. And we could always follow it back to Paris….”
“Oh, hell, no. We are not, I repeat, not, going to take on that cursedChateau des Templiersagain. I’d rather try to rob theLouvreat gunpoint in the middle of the day. Get moving. If they catch you, Elisabeth will never have her pearls to clutch to her chest.”
“They’re diamonds, Mia.”
“Whatever, Claire. Get your ass in gear.”
Claire swung the large Gainsborough landscape away from the wall on its hidden hinge, revealing the safe with its simple keypad lock. She shook her head. The Dumars were idiots—spending all this money on ugly furnishings only to install a safe that a ten-year-old could open. Perhaps not any ten-year-old, but certainly Claire could have done it by that age. The safe’s door slid open, and she scooped the necklace into the black velvet bag. Something at the back of the safe caught her eye and she lifted a pearl necklace out, stifling a gasp as she did so.
“Claire? What is it? Are you all right?”
“Yes. I’m holding the Yamamoto Rope. Holy shit,” she exclaimed as she lifted a bracelet of diamonds, onyx, and gold in the shape of a leopard. “The Kimani Leopard.”
“And you would be rifling through the Dumar’s things because?”
“Because they don’t belong to the Dumars, or at least they shouldn’t.” Claire lifted out four pieces she could easily identify as having been stolen—some of them by the Nazis during World War II. “This bugger has a whole cache of stolen jewels.”
“Let’s not get greedy.”
“I’m not. If he notices, the only one he’d report is the Dumar Diamond. The rest would be easily recognizable as stolen. No way he’s going to report their theft to the cops.”
“Claire!”
“I know, Mia. I’m going; I’ll be in the elevator shaft in a couple of minutes.”
She tried to walk away—she really did, closing and rearming the alarm for the safe and turning her back on it several times, only to turn back around. In the end, she just couldn’t. She scribbled a note on a piece of monogrammed stationery she found in the Louis XIV desk, which read:
I know what you did.
I left you most of your ill-gotten gains.
Shame on you. If the world ever finds out,
you will be ruined.
Realizing Mia was right and that she was running out of time, Claire used a piece of tape she found in the desk drawer and taped it on the face of the safe before swinging the Gainsborough back into place.
Running to the elevator shaft, she slipped through the opening and made a controlled descent back down to the top of the car, back through the escape hatch, landing lightly on her feet, and out into the garage, which had no CCTV cameras either within it or at its entrance. Retrieving her backpack from atop one of the exposed pieces of ductwork in a darkened corner behind a pillar, Claire unzipped her bodysuit and pulled out the pieces of jewelry she’d stuffed down her bra. She made her way up to the street and headed away from the building, keeping her head tucked down to make identifying her from the CCTV footage difficult if not impossible.
She’d need to do some research to find the owners in order to restore the pieces to them. Well, that wasn’t precisely true; she’d have Mia do the research.
“Are you out of the Dumars’ building?” asked Mia through the commlink.
