“It is all arranged. He is expecting you.”
“Thank you, Antoine. I will come back and wait for you. À tout à l’heure.”
“ À tout à l’heure. ”
Simon walked to the address which was only a few blocks away. The doctor, a taciturn man with an old-fashioned spade beard, showed him directly into a small laboratory and left him there, asking no questions except whether the Saint knew how to operate the microscope and whether he required anything else.
The Saint placed the Saint Christopher medal face down on the platform, centered the square indentation on the back under the objective, and aimed the light on it.
As he adjusted the focus, the pattern of almost invisible scratches sprang to his eye as legibly as a page of print.
He read the words so painstakingly engraved there, and then he lighted a cigarette and sat back on the stool, and knew the answers to many questions, while pictures formed for him in the drifting smoke.
He saw old Eli Rosepierre in his workshop, knowing that the Germans were coming, and too proud or too disheartened to run away, it didn’t matter what his reason was, but wanting to save his children. And knowing that it was hopeless to trust them with such jewels and gold as he could lay his hands on, even though they would be lost to him anyway, but wanting to give them something that the invaders could not touch, for the future. And knowing that the children were too young to be relied upon to understand or to remember anything he might tell them about the modest wealth that was still secure. And faced with the problem of giving them the key to it in a form which they might understand someday, but which would be least likely for a child to destroy.
Anything on paper, of course, was out of the question. It was too easy to mutilate or deface, or lose, or a finder could read and take advantage of it. A tattoo might have done, but Rosepierre was not a tattooer. He was a jeweler.
And he had found a jeweler’s solution.