The World Trade Center site is the crucial point of uncertainty in the story of Roger Bolduc’s disappearance and the D’Anjou family cameo. Roger vanished there during the 2001 attacks, while the jewel Loïc had feared lost beneath the towers’ debris later turned up far away, in Cuba. The book makes the site matter not through a physical portrait of its ruins, but through the unanswered questions that gather around what was found there, whose remains were identified, and how the cameo left New York.

Disappearance and the Missing Cameo

Roger Bolduc disappeared at the World Trade Center site in 2001. For Loïc, the family jewel was also presumed to lie beneath the wreckage, perhaps lost forever. That belief made the later news of the cameo’s return startling: it had passed into the possession of Rodrigo Lerbier, a distant cousin Loïc encountered in Cuba, and Rodrigo offered to hand it over. The sudden promise of recovery was followed by another disappearance, as the jewel vanished again just when Loïc seemed close to reclaiming it.

The route from the site to Cuba remains unknown to Rodrigo. He could tell Loïc only what had happened after the jewel came into the hands of a Cuban émigré who had returned clandestinely to his homeland. The man had spent about twenty years dealing in antiques in Kansas City, which explained how he might have possessed the stone, but not how it had traveled from the World Trade Center site to him. In Cárdenas, his strange death by spontaneous combustion preceded the cameo’s own later ignition in Havana. The sequence extends the site’s mystery across countries without supplying the missing link.

Remains, Evidence, and Speculation

Charles de Castelmont revisits the discovery at the site as a problem of identification. He knows that the remains of Franck Aubry, also known as Desbois, were found, and wonders whether Roger’s remains were found as well. The cameo appeared intact, but Charles had initially assumed there could be only one Castor cameo among the debris and had not asked whose remains lay nearby. He considers several possibilities: that the jewel was found by Aubry’s remains, by Roger’s, or near both men if they had been close to meeting.

These are Charles’s conjectures, not established answers. He reasons that Roger could have passed the jewel to Aubry only if Aubry failed to recognize it as a fake; he also considers that the two men might have been about to meet when the attacks occurred. Charles then tries to explain why the stone was sent to him rather than to the D’Anjou family: perhaps Roger’s remains had not been identified, or perhaps the family did not yet know that Roger had traveled to New York and might have been at the World Trade Center. His repeated confidence in this explanation reveals how little the site’s evidence actually settles.

Aftermath and Public Reverberation

The unresolved disappearance resurfaced years later when a journalist investigating the controversy around Georges D’Anjou’s wife uncovered Roger’s story. The revelation that Roger had vanished at the World Trade Center site during the attacks became a further scandal for the family, widening public attention beyond the immediate case. News, rumor, and accusation accumulated through radio, telephone, television, and the internet, magnifying the affair far beyond what the known facts could support.

The site therefore functions as both a place of loss and an evidentiary gap. It anchors Roger’s disappearance to a historical catastrophe, yet the cameo’s later appearance in Cuba leaves the central chain of custody unresolved. Each attempt to explain what happened—Charles’s theories, Loïc’s astonishment, and the journalist’s public disclosure—adds consequences without producing certainty.