Franck Aubry

Franck Aubry is a gem expert whose assumed name, Patrice Desbois, and planned meeting with Roger Bolduc place him at the junction of a long-running effort to reclaim the missing Castor cameo and the September 11 attacks. He is never encountered directly: his role emerges through the separate investigations and recollections of the D’Anjou family and Charles de C.... The resulting portrait is one of a specialist recruited for a precise deception, whose presence at the World Trade Center complex becomes inseparable from the story’s unanswered questions about the cameo and its disappearance.

Identity and New York Cover

Aubry worked in New York City under the name Patrice Desbois. The identity was not merely a name on a meeting calendar: Desbois was described as an employee or European associate of Berkshire Funds, and he occasionally rented one of the company’s offices for his New York business. The office was on the 99th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center complex. The evidence suggests a professional connection that gave him access to the location, but does not specify the exact nature of his employment or how long he had used the alias.

When the D’Anjous investigated Roger Bolduc’s appointment, they found a meeting listed for September 11, 2001, in New York City, but no venue. The contact name was Desbois, and the telephone number listed beneath it began with France’s country code. Georges D’Anjou inferred that Desbois was probably French; the text does not establish Aubry’s nationality as a certainty. A call to the number reached an automated message saying that service was no longer available. That failed contact deepened the mystery rather than resolving it: it did not reveal whether the number had been disconnected before the attacks, or what had happened to the person using it.

The Cameo-Recovery Assignment

Aubry’s place in the scheme is clarified from Charles de C...'s perspective. Charles had spent five years trying to regain a cameo of exceptional value to his family. He arranged for Roger Bolduc to bring the D’Anjou family’s stone to New York, where Aubry would examine it and determine whether it was authentic. The intended payment to Bolduc, deposited in a Swiss account, depended on Aubry certifying the cameo as genuine. Aubry’s judgment was therefore the hinge between the proposed transaction and its financial consequence.

The plan accounted for the possibility that the D’Anjous’ stone might already be a reproduction. Cameos could be copied by taking a mold and making an impression in glass paste, a technique known since antiquity; the result could be difficult to distinguish from an original without an expert eye. Charles entrusted Aubry with that initial assessment because of his gem expertise. If the stone proved authentic, Aubry was to have an impression made by an artisan Charles knew in New York and arrange for a copy to be delivered to Bolduc within days. The imitation was to reproduce the old patina and, especially, the cameo’s distinctive scratch. Bolduc was not to leave for Quebec without receiving it, allowing the D’Anjous to retain a symbolic stone while the original was recovered and monetized.

September 11 and the Uncompleted Meeting

On the morning of September 11, Charles received word from his associate Pierre de Mirbeau that his man and an assistant in New York were waiting for Bolduc in the World Trade Center office. Charles had chosen the location in part to impress the Quebec visitor. From his château in France, he expected the arrangement to reach its culmination; the office’s position on the 99th floor of the North Tower made the meeting coincide with the first plane’s impact. The narrative thus reveals the appointment’s intended setting while also showing how completely the attacks overwhelmed the transaction.

The precise sequence at the meeting remains unknown. Charles did not know whether Bolduc had managed to meet Aubry before the attacks, and the D’Anjous’ discovery of the appointment likewise establishes a plan rather than a completed encounter. Aubry’s name under the Desbois alias was linked to the office and to the date, but the evidence never confirms that he and Bolduc spoke, that the cameo was examined, or that an impression was made. His fate is also left unconfirmed; the narrative places his work at the tower but does not state directly whether he died in the attacks.

A Specialist Reconstructed from Clues

After the attacks, Charles considered whether the cameo might be found in the ruins and sought to establish a claim to it through New York authorities. That effort was complicated by Aubry’s assumed identity: a formal request would have to pass through the family of Franck Aubry, who worked in New York as Patrice Desbois. Charles understood Aubry to be a widower without children, with a brother as his closest relative, and planned to offer the brother a reward for signing an official request. The proposed recovery therefore depended not only on the lost object but also on tracing a man whose professional identity had been concealed.

The novel later returns to the problem of authenticity without supplying a definitive answer about Aubry’s part in it. Charles receives a cameo from New York in 2003, then examines photographs and notices that the scratch has been imitated recently. He concludes that the D’Anjous and he have received the same counterfeit, leaving open whether the stone once held by the family was the authentic Castor cameo. These developments underscore why Aubry’s examination mattered, but do not establish that he performed it or caused the later substitution. As a character, he functions less as a fully narrated life than as a missing link in a chain of evidence: alias, office, expertise, appointment, and an object whose authenticity remains unsettled.