To Lisa Sciambra, Hillary Tisman, Ben Lee, Daniella Wexler, Andrea Smith, and everyone at Atria whose hands this book passed through—your hard work and creative thinking does not go unnoticed. And to Alan Dingman, whose artistry graces my covers and always takes my breath away.
To my agent, Dan Conaway, my forever knight in shining armor, whose insight and caring shore me up and make me a better writer. And to the team at Writers House, whose help is invaluable. A special thank-you to my first reader, Marjorie Braman, who is more than worth her weight in gold, and to my last, Nancy MacDonald, for her precision and thoughtfulness.
To the amazing Meryl Moss and Deb Zipf—the best publicists in the biz.
To my friends who make me laugh, make me think, keep me sane, and give me invaluable advice—Liz and Steve Berry, Douglas Clegg, Randy Susan Meyers, Lee Child, C. W. Gortner, Alyson Richman, Jenn Risko, Linda Francis Lee, and Pauline Hubert. And a special thank-you to everyone at ITW and the Fiction and Historical Fiction Writers Co-opers for all your support and camaraderie.
I also want to thank readers everywhere who make all the work worthwhile (please visit MJEmail.me for a signed bookplate). And to all the wonderful booksellers and librarians without whom the world would be a sadder place.
And as always, I’m very grateful to my family, especially my father and Ellie, the Kulicks, Mara Gleckel. And most of all, Doug.
ATRIA BOOKS PROUDLY PRESENTS
The Jeweler of Stolen Dreams
M. J. ROSE
Coming soon from Atria Books
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The Jeweler of Stolen Dreams . . .
“You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.”
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
JULY 20, 1918
PARIS, FRANCE
Every morning the pavement in front of our store in the Palais-Royal is washed clean by the tears of the mothers of dead soldiers, widowed wives, and heartsick lovers. Look to the right and left. There is grit and grime in front of Giselle’s Glove Emporium and the family Thibaut’s umbrella store, but in front of La Fantasie Russie, the walkway is sparkling.
Here inside the mythic Palais-Royal arcade, the stores are not all as busy as they were before the war. Except for ours. In fact, it is the war that’s responsible for our steady stream of clients.
There is nothing to identify what we offer in advertisements.
Visitez Le Palais-Royal, invites the dark haired seductress in the pre-war poster painted by a friend of my mother’s, who signs his work simply PAL. The posters, first made more than a dozen years ago, have been reprinted many times. You can often see them, a bit worn and faded, plastered onto kiosks on Rue de Rivoli. Unlike the women who come to see me, the beautiful lady in the poster is untouched by war. Swathed in pearls around her neck and wrists and crowned with an elaborate bejeweled headdress, she smiles at potential shoppers. Her low cut, jewel-studded teal gown shows off her creamy skin and ample breasts. Her delicate fingers, decorated with the loveliest diamonds rings, beckon and point to the arcade, showing clients the way.
In through the main entrance, a stone archway stained with centuries of soot, down the pathway, past the fountain, through the Palais’s gardens, halfway to the end . . . but wait . . . before you turn right toward the shops, stop and admire the magic of the garden that was first planted more than two hundred years ago.
Some of the most glorious roses in all of Paris grow here, and even now, even in the midst of all our strife and sadness, the air is fragrant with their perfume. The flowers don’t care that their blood red petals and razor sharp thorns remind mothers and wives of their loved ones’ lives cut short, stolen by the war. The bees don’t either. They are plentiful. On some afternoons their buzzing is the loudest noise you hear. During others, it is just an accompaniment to the drone of the air raid sirens that frighten us all.
In PAL’s advertisement, in the left corner, is a list of the shops in this oasis hidden away from the bustle of Paris.
Under Maisons Notables & Recommandèes, jewelers are the highest category. We are listed first. After all, Pavel Orloff was trained by the famous Fabergé, who is a legend even here in the land of Cartier, Boucheron, and Van Cleef and Arples.
La Fantasie Russie is tucked in at number 130. There are a total of six jewelry stores in the arcades beneath what were once royal apartments built in the mid-1600s by Cardinal Richelieu so he could be close to the King. It wasn’t until the late 1700s that Philippe Egalité’s theatre was built and elite stores moved into the arcades facing the glorious inner courtyard.
Royalty no longer resides here. Now it’s the bourgeoisie, including the well-to-do shopkeepers who live above their stores, as well as many famous writers and poets, established actors, dancers, directors, and choreographers. The theatre in the east wing of the complex draws the creative here despite the darkness that inhabits this ancient square. For the Palais has not without its tragedy. Philippe Egalité himself was beheaded here and some say his ghost still roams his apartments late at night.
Pavel’s wife, Anna, whose lavender gray eyes see more than most, has warned me about the spirits haunting this great and complicated warren of stores, residences, basements, and deep underground tunnels. But it’s not just the dead who contribute to the sense of foreboding that sometimes falls on the Palais. The miasma of dread that seems to issue forth from the ancient stones themselves is perpetuated by the living as well.
Behind the closed doors and lowered window shades, in the shadowy stairwells and dusty attic rooms, scandals are enacted and secrets told. Some of the elegant quarters are sullied by brothels and others by gambling dens.
There are rumors that German spies crisscross under the Palais as they move around the tunnels and catacombs beneath the city’s wide boulevards and grand architecture.
But for all its shadows, with so much tragedy in Paris, in France, in Europe, in all the world, our strange oasis is all the more precious. Physically untouched by the war, the Palais’s fountain and gardens offer a respite from the day, from the year, from any sense of time. Her stores are a distraction. All of them, that is, until you reach La Fantasie Russie. The doorway to the unknown, the dangerous, the illegal, the occult, and the manifest. Number 130, the portal to the necromancer, to me.