Brilliant (7 page)

T  W  E  L  V  E

I didn’t move until I heard a door close at the far end of the hall, then I raced through the partially restored bedroom to the small door at the top of the secret stair. I’d been gone way too long—nine minutes had elapsed—and it frightened me. What if Owen was looking for me? What if the meeting was over and they were waiting in the car? I took my phone out of my pocket and turned it on—no calls— pulled off my shoes, and went down the steps as quietly and quickly as I could and peeked out. It was as silent as it had been when I left.

I dashed through the third door in the vestibule which turned out to be, as I’d hoped, the powder room. I locked the door and leaned back to catch my breath and found myself in a surprisingly cheerful, frilly, little confection for such a dour entry. The wallpaper, yellow and green and covered with soaring blue birds, brightened the walls, and instead of a typical bathroom sink and counter, a shallow basin had been carved into a pure white marble slab, supported by white marble dolphins as legs. The antique mirror above was framed by fat, gilt dolphins, as well. The fixtures were golden swans. A delightful series of hand-colored fashion etchings of eighteenth-century ladies’ hats in thin gold frames covered the wall. I wished I had time to study them and decided to do the same thing in my dressing room. Actually, I wished I had time to steal them.

Outside the tiny leaded window, our car sat unattended.

I pulled off my black suit jacket and hung it on the doorknob and unbuttoned and removed my white silk blouse. I glanced at myself in the mirror. As I knew I would, I looked exhilarated. My cheeks were pink and healthy and my eyes glowed with happiness. I took the two pieces of jewelry out of my bra and laid them gently on the counter—this seemed to be an exceptionally nice score. Then I took off my bra and turned it inside out. On the bottom of each cup was a small pouch stitched along the underwire, each with a narrow Velcro closure. I ripped the pockets open and tucked the bracelet in one, and the ring in the other, pressed the Velcro back into place and got quickly re-dressed. I ran cold water over my wrists, powdered my nose and put on fresh lipstick. By the time I got back outside, I looked completely normal.

A couple of minutes later, Michael appeared from around the side of the house. He appeared to be arranging himself and walked with the swagger of a little boy who’d been relieving himself in Lady Melody’s hydrangeas.

“Where have you been?” I asked.

“Nowhere.”

“Go around to the kitchen and tell them you’d like to wash your hands.”

“I don’t work for you.”

“Shall I tell Mr. Brace you’ve been watering Lady Carstairs’s flowers?”

Michael considered for a second, then hung his head and headed toward the other end of the house.

“I didn’t think so,” I said.

Shortly, Bertram emerged. His expression was unreadable. I was in the backseat with the door open, reading a magazine and eating my lunch.

“How did it go?”

“I don’t think we have a snowball’s chance in hell. That looks good.” He indicated my sandwich. “Do you have any more? I’m ravenous.”

I handed him a section. “Tell me, what’s going on in there?”

Bertram took a bite and leaned against the car, tilting his face into the wintry sun. “He doesn’t have the slightest idea what he’s doing, or what would be involved in a sale this big.”

“I don’t think that’s entirely fair,” I said, defensively. “I mean, we’ve been in the auction business for almost three hundred years—we’ve done major estates before, just not recently.”

Bertram regarded me kindly. “Unfortunately, the halcyon days of Sir Cramner are long gone. Everyone in the industry misses him— not just you.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but, for a change, no words would come. “I don’t know what you mean,” I finally blurted.

“Don’t be embarrassed, Kick. It’s well-known you were his muse and inamorata. But times have changed, and the company hasn’t changed with them. You know what I mean—there’s more to it than getting the people to come and banging the gavel. We have no depth, expertise, talent. Do you have any idea how many experts we’d have to hire to appraise and catalog this estate? Dozens. Just because he’s got me doesn’t mean he can turn the place into a world-class competitor overnight.” He took another bite of his sandwich.

“It’s exciting, isn’t it?”

“If you want to know the truth . . .” Bertram squinted down at me, “. . . working for him is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me, even if we are rearranging the deck chairs on the
Titanic
. I feel like I’m twenty-five years old.”

“I know.” I laughed. “Do you see any other big prospects out there?”

“Other than this?” He shook his head. “None on the immediate horizon. I know the Fitzgerald Collection’s already basically committed to Sotheby’s for next spring—that’s several million in Impressionists, if the market holds. And then there’s the Von Bergen’s old masters, but they aren’t going to take a chance on a staggering house. They don’t need to—they can write their own ticket at Christie’s. I think this is the best sandwich I’ve ever eaten. What is it?”

“Just cream cheese, apples, and raisins. Nut bread. Pretty simple.”

“I’m going to tell my wife to make this. Where do you get the bread?”

“You make it.”

“Oh, well that probably won’t work around our house.”

“Have you heard anything new on Princess Arianna’s estate?” I wasn’t even slightly interested in having a conversation about Bertram’s wife or her culinary abilities.

“You know her sister, Odessa, controls it all, and she’s playing the field. Odessa’s a master strategist, cunning as a fox. She should make up her mind pretty soon, but she won’t choose us. God, if we could just get our hands on one aspect of the princess’s estate. The jewelry alone’s enough to put us in serious contention. But for the moment, Lady Melody’s our only major prospect. Of course, I don’t know what I’ll do if we get it. Nice problem to have, though.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“What’s what?”

“Listen.” The sound of shouting reverberated through the great hall and out the front door.

“My God, it’s Brace.” Bertram started running.

“Hey! Somebody! Help!” Owen stood in the library doors, shouting at the top of his lungs. “Lady Melody’s collapsed.”

I saw the figure of her ancient butler shoot across the hall like an Olympic sprinter.

Melody Carstairs hadn’t exactly collapsed. She was seated comfortably upright in the corner of a sofa, her eyes and mouth wide- open. She didn’t look as though she were breathing. She looked like a doll. Actually, I was sorry to see that up close, her makeup looked a little like Bette Davis’s in
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
and, she’d had her face lifted a few too many times—her skin was as tight and transparent as Saran Wrap.

“Lady Melody. Lady Melody.” The butler repeated her name, then put his hand on her cheek, then on her neck to feel for her pulse. “I believe she’s passed,” he said, and very gently closed her blind eyes.

“Oh, my God,” Owen said quietly. “I can’t believe it.”

“What happened?” Bertram asked.

Owen took a moment to reconnect. “I can’t believe it. We had a great meeting, she’d just signed the contract, and she said, ‘Let’s have a glass of champagne to celebrate.’ My back was to her for only a second to open the bottle and when I turned back around she was like that. Frozen.”

Did he say
signed the contract?
We bit our tongues.

I looked at Lady Melody. I’m sorry to speak ill of the dead, but she had spots on her skirt and blouse and she smelled slightly like her bedroom. Her hands were in her lap, nails polished a bright cherry pink. She wore an emerald-and-diamond ring on one hand and a large single pearl ring on the other. A diamond bow brooch was pinned to her bodice—it was a very good replica of the Queen Victoria bow, four loops of diamond ribbon, a melee of large and small stones, gathered to a central diamond cluster with two ties curving daintily out below. Garrard made three of the bows for Queen Victoria in 1858, two large, one small. The large ones had been in the Queen Mother’s collection and among her all-time favorite pieces. Her daughter, our Queen Elizabeth II, wore one of them to her mother’s funeral with a pearl drop. It was very touching and made me cry.

Lady Melody’s version was good-sized, maybe three and a half or four inches across.

She was just sitting there, mouth open in surprise, cheeks pulled taut by her tight skin, black ribbon tied in her hair, diamond ribbons pinned to her chest, ready to go to a party. We all waited for her to say something.

The butler was the first to break the silence. “Might I suggest we leave milady in peace until the concerned parties arrive. I have standing instructions to call the doctor and funeral home in an occurrence such as this—we are forbidden to call for help. Please.”

He held out his arm to the door as though he were leading a tour of the house. The show in this room was definitely over, and we filed out, looking, no doubt, as stunned as Lady Melody.

For the first ten minutes of our ride home, no one said a word, and then Owen withdrew the signed document from his briefcase and, as if on cue, we all started laughing. Unfortunately, I’m afraid if someone—other than our in-house gorilla (I’m referring to Michael)— had heard us, we might have sounded a little bit like hyenas.

T  H  I  R  T  E  E  N

Our return to the office was jubilant. Owen called all the staff together and gave them the good news. What a tonic it was for all of us, too. Not only did it put some much-needed cash into the company, but once Bertram finished giving a rundown of the goods and a description of their superior quality, our experts—sorry, tattered lot that they were—were euphoric. It had been a long, dry season at Ballantine & Company Auctioneers and the Lady Melody Collection was just what the doctor ordered.

Owen left the office at five-thirty. “Have a good weekend, Kick.”

“Thank you, sir. You, too. And again, congratulations.”

He looked me in the eye, and I could see the relief. “Thanks.”

I waited until the housekeepers had finished cleaning his office, then locked it behind me and caught the bus for home. It was already dark out, but the lights along Piccadilly and throughout Knightsbridge, thousands and thousands of tiny white lights around lampposts, windows, and doors, made everything sparkle and shine gaily. The sidewalks were crowded, and I got off the bus in Sloane Square to join the throng and do some marketing. The evening was sharp and cold, and by the time I got home to Eaton Square, my mood was jovial as could be.

My apartment has an extremely elaborate and sophisticated security system—five freestanding lines of defense, actually. Inside the front door is the keypad for the general burglar alarm, which beeps normally like everyone else’s and notifies the alarm company it’s been set off until it’s disarmed. Like many homeowners, I also have motion detectors throughout the place, the difference being that mine are independent of the general system, are invisible, and make no noise in the apartment but go directly to the alarm company and police department. There’s a charming little oval-shaped entrance foyer outside my bedroom—beneath the whole area of its rug, as well as beneath my bedroom windows, are pressure-sensitive pads. If any of these pads is activated, a deafening, mind-rattling alarm bell starts ringing, and does not stop until the police arrive—the sound is so excruciating, it is unbearable. There are undetectable miniature video cameras embedded in the walls throughout the apartment and on the front landing. Finally, on the back wall of my closet, on the shelves where I keep shoes and handbags, inside a shoe box that’s glued to the shelf, is another alarm keypad.

I can arm and disarm any and all of them either manually, or by using a remote which looks like a cell phone and sits innocuously on my entry hall table when it’s not in my pocket or purse. I never disarm them all at the same time, only each as it needs to be done. Every night, I review the day’s videotapes, and I’m pleased to say I’ve never seen anything to indicate someone may be on to me. My housekeeper comes Wednesdays and Thursdays, and on those days, I leave off the motion detectors and pressure pads when I leave for work, and she lets herself in and out with the basic system.

Tonight I was especially glad to be home, especially glad it was Friday. I felt like celebrating. I turned on my favorite Schumann concerto, dropped the bag of groceries in the kitchen, and went into my dressing room, where I hung up my suit and blouse and pulled on a fairly smart-looking, cozy, cashmere warm-up suit I’d bought on the chance I might start actually exercising, over and above an occasional stroll around the square.

Then I went to the back of the closet and entered the alarm code, pushed on the spring latch, and the wall swung forward to reveal my pride and joy: my workroom, with its jeweler’s bench and tools, crucibles, molds and rollers, high-powered halogen lights, sound system, and series of video camera screens. Beneath the rug, is a three-foot-by-four-foot floor safe, ten inches deep. It is meticulously organized with metal drawers—similar to safety-deposit boxes—all filled with stones, divided not only by type but also by quality, carat, and cut. At any given time, the safe holds between 3 and 30 million dollars’ worth of gems.

I stepped inside, pulled the door closed behind me, and laid Lady Melody’s bracelet and ring, each on its own velvet pad, on top of the bench. When the halogen lights hit them, I saw they were very special pieces indeed.

I set them aside for later examination and took out the tray holding my newest project. It was a necklace, designed in the sixties by Cartier. It belonged to the estate of the late Mrs. Baker of Galveston, Texas, who shot up her injured Preakness winner with buterol so he could run in the Belmont Stakes, during which he collapsed and ended up having to be destroyed. Her necklace had eleven cushion-shaped Kashmir sapphires, each between seven and eleven carats, free-floating in pairs of curved rows of baguettes, each frame connected by a cluster of perfect round diamonds. When the necklace lay flat, the sapphires were almost flush with their surrounds, but as the piece curved around the neck, the sapphires emerged, thrusting themselves forward like powerful blue, blue eyes.

Kashmir sapphires, the most rare, beautiful, and precious on earth, have a distinctive and hypnotic electric color, and when you’ve seen one, you never forget it. They can never be confused with the brilliant, paler blue of Ceylon sapphires, the second most precious of these stones, which themselves are extremely rare, valuable, and expensive, but still are only worth about one-tenth of a Kashmir; or the haunting dark, inky blue of their poorer Burmese sisters.

There are only two ways a Kashmir can even begin to be duplicated. One way is by heat-treating a Ceylon. When this process is properly done, it is almost impossible, unless you are a true expert, to tell them apart, but it’s very time-consuming, and the cutting and faceting have to be identical to the stone you’re trying to replicate.

The other way is to call your supplier in Zurich who manufactures synthetic stones and order exactly what you need, which is the route I chose. The synthetic Kashmirs in my copy would be indistinguishable from the original stones in carat, color, and cut.

The necklace was scheduled to be auctioned in two weeks, and this was one of those pieces I was confident would be bought by an individual, not a dealer, because it was so exceptional. It would go for between 5 and 6 million pounds. I had eight color picture blowups of the real thing, each taken from a different angle by our in-house photographer for the sale catalogue, pasted above the bench. The photographic detail was minute.

My copy, which I would swap for the original the second Bertram’s gavel fell on its sale, was progressing well. I planned to finish all eleven of the curved pairs by the end of the weekend. Their connecting diamond clusters were already complete.

I considered sitting down, putting on my light visor and going right to work, but it was dinnertime, and the day’s excitement had made me hungry. Actually, I was starving to death.

My refrigerator is a work of art—always filled with fresh ingredients, a selection of well-roasted meats, cheeses, and delicacies, ranging from Beluga caviar to white Italian truffles. A double-wide, under-the-counter wine cabinet holds an outstanding selection of red and white wines and champagnes. I love wine and spend what some might consider an inordinate amount of time and money selecting vintages for myself. I don’t care. It brings me great pleasure. This evening, I picked out a beautiful Chablis, a 1998 Grand Cru “Blanchot” Domaine Vocoret, poured myself a hefty glass, turned on the lights in the garden, switched on the TV set to hear the evening news, opened my favorite Delia Smith cookbook to Fillets of Sole Véronique—poached sole with cream sauce and grapes—and went to work.

I stirred a third of a cup of rice into a cup of water to leach out some of the extra starch. Although many cooks disagree, I think in the long run, if you soak your rice and change the water at least twice before cooking, it ends up being much fluffier (certainly less starchy, but probably not enough to make any big difference). While the rice soaked, I peeled the outer leaves off a handful of Brussels sprouts and scored their bottoms.

“It’s a sad day for all Britons,” the reporter said. “But particularly all
romantic
Britons. Eighty-seven-year-old Lady Melody Carstairs died at her home, Carstairs Manor, this afternoon. She leaves a legacy of literary romance unequalled in the history of British letters—668 novels, translated into a dozen languages, almost a billion copies of her books in print.”

I put the rice and vegetables on to cook and unwrapped the two small Dover sole fillets, which I cut in half, salted and peppered, rolled up into one-inch-tall pinwheels, skin-side out, and placed in a buttered skillet.

Pictures of a younger Lady Melody flashed across the screen, but she looked the same in all of them, no matter her age. I wished I didn’t know what I knew about her.

I poured in a half cup of vermouth, added a little tarragon, turned on the heat, and assembled the ingredients for a roux. Unfortunately, I was so concentrated on making the roux—you can’t take your eyes off a roux, or the butter and flour will burn and ruin the whole affair—I wasn’t paying any attention to the news, so when I looked up, I only saw a split second of Tina Romero, Owen’s soon-to-be ex-Mrs. Brace, holding her three eeny-weeny Chihuahuas and crying, then the timer for the rice went off and when I turned back, she was gone and the anchor girl was on to football.

I’d completely forgotten about Tina’s press conference. I checked all the other stations and never saw her again and in the meantime, of course, the roux burned and I had to scrub out the pan and start over.

Finally, at about eight, I sat down to dinner with the evening paper. The fish was sweet and tender and the grapes were pleasingly tart. The buttered rice with the cream sauce and delicate fish were comforting and mouth-wateringly delicious. The Brussels sprouts were okay. I ate them at any rate. The wine was excellent, crisp and fresh and just right with the sole, as I knew it would be.

I was about to start the crossword puzzle when a blurb caught my eye: PRICELESS PAINTING TURNS UP AT BAYSWATER POLICE STATION. The story went on to say that a very rare and valuable self-portrait of Rembrandt had been discovered at the Bayswater police station at approximately three-thirty in the morning leaning against the duty officer’s high desk. Most probably the work of the Samaritan Burglar.

Whoever the Samaritan Burglar was (and I had my suspicions as to his identity), I admired his style enormously. He stole extremely valuable works from residences and offices and in their place left a calling card that read: “If you are going to own a work of this importance responsibly, you’d best improve your security system.” And then, usually before the owner even knew it was missing, it would turn up at a police station in perfect condition.

There was a man who attended many of our fine art auctions, a very dapper fellow I called “David Niven” because he affected the late actor’s pencil-thin mustache and jaunty step. He never bought anything, but of the Ballantine-auctioned works that had been stolen by the Samaritan Burglar, this fellow had been at their sales and made a point of congratulating the buyers in a very familiar way if they were present. I got the impression that the buyers never knew who he was but felt they should, he had that familiar kind of look that put them on the spot. He probably said something to the effect of, “Don’t you remember we met at that beautiful brunch at Lady Pilfley’s last week? So fine to see you again.” Or some such thing. Information he could get out of a column. I had no basis in fact to think he was the Samaritan but something in his appearance and manner didn’t jibe. He had a wiry, athletic body, lithe and agile as though he were possibly a long-distance runner, but he seemed to take pains to conceal his athleticism with racetrack-clubhouse-style clothing. He was attempting to pass himself off as an aristocrat.

In my opinion, the Samaritan Burglar, whoever he was, should not be considered a burglar at all because he was performing a valuable public service with a great deal of class, style, and panache. I knew and appreciated a master when I saw one, and he was a master. Takes one to know one.

“Nicely done,” I said, and turned to the crossword.