Rennes has been tucked into northwestern Brittany for two millennia, yet it only became a city of any real significance after World War II. It was a quiet regional town until 1720, when its largely wooden timbered structures burned to the ground in a fire, and even a century later its population was below 50,000 people. It took World War II to shake Rennes into the 20th century after the Germans occupied Rennes in 1940, and the Allies took it back in 1944. Owing to it being a transport hub in France, the city was bombed by both factions into submission with great destruction. After the war the city fathers were smart to re-cast its future as a cultural center for tourism so that while its architecture appears Gothic, it is mostly new and the destroyed wooden buildings were replaced with other materials.
      Now Rennes is a beautiful river city of about 218,000 people. It is well laid out and tidy, and when you enter the Old City gate called Porte Mordelaise,  a small section of the oldest quarter is still intact around Place Saint-Anne, with old, sometimes leaning, half-timbered houses. The Place des Lices (below), where jousting tournaments once took place, has been a very well-attended Saturday marketplace since 1622 the second largest in France). Under dozens of red tents you’ll find vendors specializing in wild mushrooms, local cheeses and river and sea fish, along with bargain clothes. (There’s a little bistro on one end where you can get coffee and breakfast before the market opens.)
     Also rebuilt with fidelity is the superb 17th century Palais du Parlement de Bretagne, designed with a mansard roof by the architect who did Paris’s Palais du Luxembourg. In 1994 a fast-moving fire damaged the palace, but it is now back to its former majesty. Other buildings of note, done in various styles, are the half-timbered Maison des Carmes on the Rue Vasselot, the splendid Lycée Émile Zola (named after one of France’s greatest authors), the baroque Toussaints Church and the Palace of Commerce. 
       The most spectacular building in Rennes is the 19th century rounded 650-seat Opéra on the Place de la Marie (left), the smallest in France, adapted from Rome’s ancient Theater of Marcellus, and it has a glorious Breton ceiling fresco.  It was praised by Stendhal as being a symbol of restorative culture after the great fire had destroyed so much of the city. Rennes is also home to several music venues and the L’Antipode MJC art center.
       There are three highly regarded universities in the city, two focusing on technology (now the heart of Rennes’s economy), as well as a Catholic University.
       One of the antiquarian pleasures of Rennes is to walk among the city’s remaining ramparts, built from the 3rd to 12th centuries, once providing broad views of the entire territory down to the river, and to the east of the Old Town are the Thabor Gardens (right), once an abbey orchard, now laid out over 24 acres with a classic French garden, an English garden, an aviary, a children’s area and a botanical garden containing 3,000 species of plants.
     Rennes has hotels of every stripe, and even for the best hotels, prices rarely go above $200; others may run for $100 or less. The Balthazar Hotel & Spa is completely modern and as good for tourists as for business travelers. Its restaurant, La Table, is run by Parisian Chef Michel Rostang (main courses run $26-$43). The beautiful, elegantly appointed  fairy tale Château d’Apigne (below), set in a broad, 25-acre park just outside of town, offers access to good fishing and its two dining rooms, Les Tourelles (meals about $46), are among the finest restaurants in the region. A 16th century building houses the Marnie & Mister H BnB, and is very centrally located.
     Breton food is hearty and homey, known  for its many savory and sweet galettes, made from buckwheat flower and various fillings, the best known being King’s Cake, as well as delicate, thin crêpes and the  region’s famous waffles, all to be enjoyed with the local cider.
      There is a good range of bistros and fine dining rooms (and one awful pizzeria downtown to be avoided). Ima, which takes its name from the Japanese for “now,” features cutting-edge cuisine (fixed price meals $60-$115), while Racine (meals $65-$85), with a Michelin star, under Chef Virginie Giboire, draws on the regional provender to create modern cooking within a bright, white open kitchen space. For more traditional Breton fare, try Le Café du Port (meals about $50) and the crêperie La Saint-Georges.
    If you’ve run out of pleasures in Rennes, head on down to the Quai Saint-Cyr on the Embarcadero, where you can rent an electric boat or kayak to sail the Vilaine River and through the Ille-et-Rance Canal that slowly meanders into the bucolic surroundings of Brittany.

       Food pundits these days love nothing more than to snub the idea that fine dining can possibly survive in a world—make that country, as in USA—where nobody wants to eat that way anymore. And by all such myopic criteria the new Le Pavillon, just by virtue of its archaic name, should never have opened at all. Add to that its location in the dead zone around Grand Central Terminal and a menu built largely on French cuisine, and such magpies trill about the odds against such a restaurant, even one opened by the redoubtable chef Daniel Boulud.
      But what a restaurant it is! Located on the second floor of a new midtown skyscraper, Le Pavillon has the light, airiness of a first-class airline lounge. Owing to its greenery, an indoor garden, a wall of Brazilian slatting and a soaring expanse of glass above it all, the dining room seems to be outside without being closed in by the city.
     Oddly, it bears some resemblance to the second incarnation of The Four Seasons restaurant that failed so miserably in less than a year, giving ammo to those who said such places were dinosaurs. The restaurant is currently open only for dinner five nights a week, and  reservations are already tough to get on short notice.
     Le Pavillon takes its name from the legendary French restaurant originally opened at France’s Pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair, whose manager, Henri Soulé (right), after the war transplanted it to 5 East 55th Street, where he and his staff quite literally set the standard for fine dining in America for decades to come. Every French restaurant in New York copied Le Pavillon (and often stole away its staff). Upon Soulé’s death, Le Pavillon foundered and closed in 1971.
      So Boulud’s resurrecting the name was a signal that French cuisine was alive and well in New York, though in décor and menu, totally different from the stuffy and staid original Le Pavillon. Those who accuse French cuisine of being stuck in the classical past of Escoffier (as at La Grenouille) have obviously never dined at modern French restaurants in New York like Le Bernardin, Gabriel Kreuther and Boulud’s own Restaurant Daniel, where the food is as contemporary, inventive and inspiring as any in American gastronomy.
      That Le Pavillon’s menu differs so completely from all those others is testament to the solid base of French technique that allows for so much invention without the ridiculous contortions of molecular cuisine. This being 2021, Boulud, with co-executive chefs Michael Balboni and William Nacev, happily incorporates ideas from other cuisines, too, as in his torchetti pasta with Maryland jumbo lump crab, fennel confit and fruity Jimmy Nardello peppers. He will also make a chilled soup called corn velouté with grilled cactus and Serrano cornbread and serve it with a luscious soft foie gras parfait.
         Guests receive an amuse of caramelized turnip puree with peaches.   Among the appetizer there is yellowfin tuna with film pollen and Niçoise socca crisp with a creamy tonnato (tuna) sauce. The oysters come from the Chesapeake Bay and are called huitres Vanderbilt with crunchy hazelnuts and a gratinéed parsley seaweed crust.
     Very fine sea scallops are dusted with buckwheat and served with Cinco jotas Iberian ham and colorful piperade just to give it a little bite. Lotte, whose pulpy texture has never thrilled me, took very well to a red wine glaze with king trumpet mushrooms that gave it a woodsy flavor and carrots and chewy black rice with a butter-and-red wine sauce matelote. Lobster is impeccably cooked to stay tender and briny, with lovage, purple potatoes and a watercress velouté. I eat a good deal of lamb, especially if it’s from Colorado, and Le Pavillon’s most certainly is and comes as a fat, well seared double chop with sweet garlic, polenta, Swiss chard and a touch of oregano jus.
     There is a welcome cheese selection, and the night we dined they included Coupole,  Comté, Alma from Vermont and bleu d’Auvergne, served with muscat grapes, glazed apricots and sourdough.
     Executive pastry chef Sebastien Rouxel, born in the Loire Valley, creates beautiful desserts like a tart lemon curd with strawberries and almonds, sable and the scent of verbena; milk chocolate cremeux with praline croustillant and hazelnut nougatine; and a grapefruit and fennel vacherin with Campari lokum, a confection of fruits and nuts more familiarly called “Turkish delight.”
       Head sommelier Blake Bernal stocks a wine list 35 pages long, strong in every category. There are 25 very well selected wines by the glass, with several under $20, but cocktails, at $21, are high. Prices are quite fairly marked up: An excellent 2018 Domaine Barat 1er Cru Vaillons Chablis goes for $115, while at a wineshop it can run  $50. Even at the high end, a Domaine le Flaive Chevalier Montrachet 2018 is on the list at $2500, in stores up to $1400. There are six half-bottles and a good number of large format bottles.
     I have not given dish prices because Le Pavillon has a fixed price menu (mercifully with very few supplements) of $125 for three courses, which is remarkable simply because a côte de boeuf at the raucous Minetta Tavern (without vegetables) will run you $81 per person and at the wheezing Babbo, pasta with Australian truffles goes for $85. There is, however, an à la carte Bar Menu at Le Pavillon with a few dishes from the dinner menu. There is also a six-course seafood tasting at $195 and of vegetables at $155.
     Le Pavillon is the kind of restaurant where all women dress up, but the lack of even a suggested dress guideline results in sightings of slovenly men who look better fitted for Walmart than Le Pavillon.
      Ignore that and Le Pavillon emerges as a restaurant of importance, in one sense as a welcome back to fine dining and as a completely new style of menu done with a youthful panache you can sense comes from its young kitchen staff overseen by Papa Daniel. Anyone who loves fine cuisine and civilized dining cannot afford to miss Le Pavillon, and, since it is so reasonably priced, you can certainly afford a fine meal here. 

 
Le Pavillon is open for dinner Tues.-Sat.

      “How’d you sleep?” asked Katie, pouring the coffee.
      “Very, very well,” said David. “I let my subconscious do all the work.”
      “And what did your subconscious tell you?”
     “That we should look further into Capone’s boats, his yachts and his rumrunners.  You know about rumrunners?”
      “I know what they are,” said Katie, “but that’s all.”
      David filled Katie in on what he knew, noting that during Prohibition Capone had his own boats and contracted others’ as well.  He told her about what the term the “Real McCoy” referred to and how the Coast Guard was always at a disadvantage in numbers and reliable info to inflict much damage on the trade.  After Prohibition ended, bootlegging and rum running took a lower rung on their priorities, and during World War II a lot of the old Coast Guard boats were refitted as sub-chasers and patrol boats.
      “That’s right,” said Katie. “Ernest Hemingway was a sub-chaser for a while in his boat named the Pilar (left).  He wrote about it in one of his novels, Islands in the Stream.”
      “Really? Never read that one. Anyway, Capone owned at least two yachts, Spickler told us, but he was referring to those tied up at the Palm Island docks after the war.  I’d like to know where they came from and if Capone had them built with special compartments and additions. Spickler said one of the boats was a retired rumrunner, which makes sense.  And he also said Capone like to sail to Bimini and Havana after the war. So what I’m wondering is . . .”
      “Was he shipping the gold to one of those places after the war?”
      “Or before it, soon after he made the heist. Y’know, I think we might have made a mistake in thinking Capone couldn’t get the money out of the country.” said David.
      “How so?”
      “Well, it’s not like we’ve exhausted the possibilities for the gold being somewhere in the U.S.  Hell, it could be anywhere.”
      David believed that the longer it stayed hidden in the U.S., the more likely it would have been found, either by the feds or by Capone’s enemies.  Or, if it hung around too long, it was probably stolen by one of the few henchmen Capone would have allowed to know its whereabouts. The fact that it was supposedly just sitting there all those years, with that reward money being offered, just didn’t make any sense to David. 
      Barring any evidence that Capone had all his henchmen knocked off to keep them quiet, one of them had to turn, especially after Capone died in 1947.  By then, all any one of them had to do was to contact the feds, tell them where the gold was and collect easy money without any further fear of Capone.
      Katie cocked her head and said, “So, you’re saying Capone somehow shipped all that bullion out of the country?”
      “Yes, and probably as quickly as he could.”
      “But I remember you said it would be impossible by plane, and loading it onto a ship without being inspected by the feds would have been very risky.”
      “I know. Risky but not impossible.  What bothers me is that Capone obviously had access to some of the stash from one of the original three sites because he had that tableware made for his family.  But that wouldn’t have amounted to very much.  We’re talking about robbing hundreds of ingots.  And if he could get those out of the country, they’d be stored somewhere abroad where the feds couldn’t get to it, maybe Europe.  And when World War Two started, it would be years before the Allies set foot on the continent to even start looking for it. So, Capone wouldn’t bother to tell them where it was until after the war ended.”
         “What about South America or Cuba?” asked Katie.
         “I thought about that,” said David, “and Capone certainly had connections there.  And there were a lot of Italians who’d emigrated to Argentina around the same time his own people emigrated to the States. But I know next to nothing about Argentina’s history. You’re the history scholar.”
      Katie made a face. “What I do recall was that by the 1930s the political system in Argentina was a mess and very unstable.  One military coup after another. Capone wouldn’t have risked sending such a huge amount of gold to a country whose next dictator might just claim the stuff as his own.”
         “And Cuba?”
         “That I know more about. As a matter of fact, I did a term paper on Cuban history in college.”
         “Really? Get a high mark?”
         “An A-plus,” said Katie, brushing her nails on her chest. “I think the professor had the hots for me.”
         “So what about Cuba?”
      Katie explained that in the 1920s Cuba was run by a totally corrupt president named Machado (left) under the sponsorship of the American government. “There was a lot of money to be made in hotels, restaurants, and, of course, gambling and prostitution,” she said, “but when the worldwide Depression hit in 1929, the price of sugar, which had always been the backbone of the Cuban economy, dropped drastically and the citizens’ unrest led to a general strike.”  
      She explained that the American puppet Machado had the local Communist Party on his side but the military, seeing their own opportunity for power and money, sided with the people and overthrew Machado in 1933. Then, after infighting among the generals, Batista (below) took over and was a major figure in Cuba for the next 25 years before being thrown out by Fidel Castro.
         David was nodding. “So, Batista was dictator throughout Capone’s incarceration?” 
         “To make a long story short, Battista was voted out of office in the mid-forties, beaten by another bum named Grau.  Battista didn’t come back to power until the 1950s, by which time Capone was in the grave.  So through all that time, like you said about Argentina, putting all that gold in the care of government officials who were as corrupt as they were power seekers would have been very risky for Big Al.  Plus the fact that, if Capone eventually told the feds the gold was in Cuba, good luck on them getting it out of there by the late 1940s and ‘50s. I can’t imagine it was just sitting in the central bank of Havana.”
         “True,” said David, “but all along you’ve contended that Capone was really only trying to embarrass the feds and collect the reward money. If he just told them, `Hey, the gold’s in a vault in Havana,’ he’d still get the reward money.”
         “Yes, but he didn’t, did he? Unless he was so bonkers by the end of the war that he literally forgot where he stashed the gold, he most certainly would have told the feds where it was by then.”
         “Makes sense,” said David, leaning back on his chair. “So now all we have to do is figure out where the hell else in the world Capone might have shipped the gold and how he did it.”
         “Well, there’s still Bimini and the Bahamas.  That’s where the rumrunner boats might come in.  Otherwise, I’d say we concentrate on either Canada or Europe.  Remember by the late 1930s the Europeans were trying to ship their gold to the U.S. for safekeeping.”
         “Meaning, if Capone shipped his the other way, back to Europe, it would be worth a helluva lot more.”
         “Exactly,” said Katie.  “Plus I don’t think shipping it to Canada would have been any different than keeping it in the U.S.  Someone in the Canadian bootleg mobs knowing its whereabouts would have talked.”
         “Katie,” said David. “I’ve got to hand it to you: you’ve narrowed our search down to, what, about thirty countries!”
         “Well, if you count the post-war Soviet Union, probably more.”
         “I’d eliminate them right off the bat.”
         “Why?”
          David explained that mobsters hated and feared communists as much as they did the feds.  It was one of the reasons the Mafia worked with the C.I.A. to oust Castro (left).  Commies are not good for business.  Capone always thought of himself as a man whose success was due entirely to good old American capitalism, and communism would have prevented that. He probably also figured communists weren’t easy to bribe.
         “I don’t know how he felt about Joe Stalin,” said David, “but if he’d heard anything about the mass slaughters in Russia in the ‘20s and ‘30s, Capone could only have believed he’d be first in line for execution if the communists took over the U.S.”
      “My God, we’re narrowing this down fast!” said Katie.
      “You have an atlas around here?” David asked.
         Katie said she thought she did and with a little rummaging found one. “It’s not up to date but . . .”
         “It only needs to be up to date as of the 1940s.”
         They opened the book, copyrighted 1970, to a general map of  nations bordering the Atlantic Ocean, the countries in a wide variety of faded colors.  There were a lot of them.
         “Sheesh!” said David, “That’s a lot of territory.”
         “Let’s see if they have any historical maps of earlier periods,” said Katie, flipping to the table of contents.  “Bingo! Look, there’s a map of Europe after World War I and another during World War II. Just the periods we’re looking for.”
         They perused both maps carefully, discarding Scandinavia and eastern Europe as beyond Capone’s consideration.  Certainly not Great Britain or France. Greece too far. Spain was going through a civil war with communists until 1939.
         “We have to think which countries Capone would have had connections with at the time,” said David.  “He was a bootlegger first and foremost, and he smuggled in booze mostly from Canada, which we’ve eliminated. I assume he brought in wine, too.”
         “I’m sure he did,” said Katie, “but, if they were French wines,  they probably came through their territories in the Caribbean, maybe Martinique or St. Bart’s.  I suggest we do some more research on Al’s rum running operations and boats.  Who keeps records on boats?”
         “You mean, assuming they’re registered?”
         “Yes, or if they were not, there must be records of the boats the Coast Guard confiscated, auctioned and sank.”
         “Let me call a guy I know at Port Authority,” said David.  “He may know.”
         A half hour later David had what he’d asked for: the New York Yacht Club keeps records of all American yachts and most foreign ones;  Mystic Seaport in the Connecticut town of the same name has a renowned collection of historic boat plans and photos; and the U.S. Naval Institute in Annapolis, Maryland, has extraordinary resources on anything having to do with naval and maritime history, including hundreds of thousands of photos.
         “So how do we split these up?” asked David.
         “Well, the New York Yacht Club is right down on West 44th Street,” said Katie.  “Both of us can visit that.  Mystic is closer to you, and I can shoot down to Annapolis on Amtrak.  Okay with you?”
         “Sure, you want to go to the Yacht Club together?”
         “No time like the present. Let’s go.”