About Face (46 page)

The pain radiating from my chest is hitting every cell in my body. It's the only pain I feel. The beatings I just took are a distant memory.

My teeth are gnashing uncontrollably. My restrained arms and legs are contorting from stiff unnatural position to stiff unnatural position. My eyes are rolling back in my head. I'm seeing black and light alternating as fast as my heart rate. I'm fading.

“Jonah!”

Perry.

Like God has decided enough, my flailing starts to subside. I'm able to breathe again. I suck in air as if I've just nearly drowned. I can feel, taste the blood and saliva filling my mouth. My body's insane thrashing is morphing into a slow writhing. I hear the rustling of the popped plastic bag necklace I'm wearing—a plastic bag that nearly helped end me.

“Leave him alone, you sick fuck!” Perry screams. “What's wrong with you? He needs help!”

Still on my back, Andreu's face appears above me.

“Good thing you didn't die. If you had, I'd have no use for her.”

I hear the chair I was sitting in propped back up. Mr. Mountain grabs me under my armpits and picks me up fast, hard, then drops me back in the chair.

Finally. After all this time, after all the questions and heartache, I lay my eyes on Perry. She's sitting across from me, about twenty feet away, in the same kind of metal folding chair I'm in. Her wrists are cuffed in front of her. Her ankles are cuffed as well.

She's crying. There's terror in her eyes. She's in jeans, a plain white t-shirt, and Nike running sneakers—the same ones she was wearing the day she was taken from me. Thankfully, she looks unharmed. And, as always, she's the model of simple, pure beauty.

My left eye's field of vision, vertically, is much less than my right, meaning it must nearly be swollen shut.

“Did he hurt you?” I ask. “Did he lay a hand on you?”

“What do you think I am?” Andreu snaps. “Some kind of animal?”

I ignore him. My eyes are squarely on Perry.

“Jonah,” she says to me tenderly, shaking her head “no.” “Holy shit, Jonah—”

“Did he hurt you?” I ask again.

My words are barely audible. It's like a grenade went off in my mouth. My altered tongue, teeth, and cheeks are figuring out how to work together.

“No. Physically—no.”

In this answer I also hear yes. Emotionally—yes. For taking her son away.

“Max is okay,” I tell her. “I saw him. He's fine.”

Perry drops her chin to her chest. Tears of gratitude start flowing.

“Now let's get on with it,” Andreu breaks in. “I believe you have something for me.”

I move my eyes to Andreu.

“I do.”

“Well? Where is it? Because until I have what I want you may think you and your little—”

“I have a message for your mother,” I cut him off. “She lost.”

“What did you say?”

“You heard me. She lost. The message contained in the eggs? The truth she wanted to keep from the world? Not going to happen. In fact—history is probably being rewritten at this very fucking moment.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Jonah?”

“You and your mother—you fucking assholes lost. And I fucking won.”

Battered, exhausted, I can't keep from starting to laugh.

“Still want those fucking eggs—Brother?”

Andreu pulls a gun out and charges.

“No!” Perry screams. “Stop!”

Just as he reaches me, the basement window glass behind him, in the far corner, shatters. Both he and Mountain Man drop in an instant.

Andreu is faceup while Mountain Man is facedown. Both are screaming, squirming in pain. The back of Mountain Man's bare right shoulder is a shredded mess of blood and flesh. Andreu is gingerly clutching his right knee. Blood is soaking through his pants. Mountain Man starts to get up. Another bullet tags him in the back of his other shoulder, inflicting equal if not more devastation. Mountain Man, primal noises pouring from him, is down for the count.

A door behind me blasts open. Three men, all huge and dressed casually in jeans and such, come around me where I can see them. One immediately tends to freeing Perry. Another picks up the gun Andreu was holding then gets to work freeing me. The last guy puts an iPhone up to my ear.

“Hello?” I manage.

“Do you want them left alive or dead?”

It's Cobus.

I look at Andreu. He's struggling, suffering. He doesn't deserve to live. And his mother deserves the anguish of knowing she got her own son put down like a lame racehorse.

I look at Perry. Through tears and chokes, she's focused on working with the guy assisting her to get free. She's being so brave, doing everything she can to hold her shit together. I have no idea what these last years have been like for her. What she's endured. What it must feel like to be kept from your own son, the beautiful boy she brought into this world she only wanted to be there for and protect every day.

My eyes move back to Andreu.

“The little one, the guy who got it in the knee,” I say, “He deserves to die.”

Andreu, through the searing pain he's experiencing, looks up at me. His eyes are filled with forced courage yet rich with defeat. His eyes are still challenging me yet pleading with me to show mercy.

“But, I'm no murderer,” I go on. “I just want to leave him with a reminder that if I ever hear from or see him again, he won't be so lucky. Something that will remind him every day. I'm thinking cutting off the middle finger on each hand.”

“Ah, Jonah, wait. Please,” Andreu pleads while trying to mentally manage the pain he's in. “Please. If—”

The guy working on me wheels around, steel-toe-boots him dead center in the face, laying him out, then returns his attention to me. Working with some kind of sharp, thin utensil, he unlocks the cuffs around my wrists. The metal eases away from, out of the wounds it's been sitting in.

“Then,” Cobus goes on, “where are we going?”

This is a kind gesture from my boss—whoever he is. He knows Perry should be with her son. I look at her. It breaks my heart to know what I've put her through. It would kill me to now have to let her go again. But she needs to be with Max. Whether that's in Amsterdam or New York City.

I think about Morante. God, I hope he's going to search for the truth, not me. In my heart, I believe I've laid the foundation for clearing my name. But until that time comes—until Morante constructs the walls and roof that sit on that foundation—can I even consider going back and reclaiming my life?

Our life is now in Amsterdam.

Our life will always be in New York City.

“Home,” I say. “It's time to go home.”

SPOILER ALERT: T
HIS AUTHOR'S NOTE CONTAINS INFORMATION THAT WILL GIVE AWAY KEY ELEMENTS OF THE PLOT OF
T
HE
D
EAL:
A
BOUT
F
ACE
.

In
The Deal: About Face
, contemporary fiction collides with historical fact.

It has given me great pleasure to weave day-to-day past experiences in the commercial real estate arena into this fictional drama. That these experiences might please and enrich others makes this journey even more rewarding. Yet while
The Deal: About Face
is contemporary, occurring in today's world just as we know it, there is also a historical element that commemorates rare treasure. The fabled Fabergé Imperial Easter Eggs stand among the world's most celebrated artistic achievements. If not for others and their diligent research and writings, a bevy of which I found online as well as in books and articles, it would have been impossible for me to incorporate these mesmerizing antiques into the story.

The eggs populating this novel are historically true to form in everything from name to description. As described in the book, fifty bejeweled Fabergé eggs were commissioned by the Russian royal family between the years of 1885 and 1916, as gifts from the czar to the czarina and other family members. It is also a fact that after the Russian Revolution, only forty-two of these prized antiques ever resurfaced.

This is where fact ends and fiction begins. While in
The Deal:
About Face
the errant eggs are discovered, in reality the eight missing since the early twentieth century are still unaccounted for. They were neither found underneath a home in eastern Russia, as the book suggests, nor anywhere else for that matter. Rather, everything surrounding the lost imperial eggs in
The Deal: About Face
and all the other events described were created purely for entertainment value—including any and all material that suggests the history surrounding Czar Alexander III, Maria Feodorovna, or anyone else associated with the Russian royal family is anything other than history describes. If any names, situations, or sequences of events that mirror true life have arisen as a result of my approach to telling this story, this is truly a circumstance born of coincidence.