The Deal (45 page)

No time.

Now in the foyer, adrenaline skyrocketing, I had two choices. I could turn right down the hall toward the kitchen with a good chance of being spotted. Or, even less desirable, I could jump behind the front door and wing it.

As close to the hinge as possible, I hugged the wall with my back like an escaping convict trying to avoid the tower spotlight. Careful not to let any air pass through my nose, I slightly parted my lips as I breathed. The satin-nickel, single-cylinder handle clicked. The door opened. Fusion of streetlights and the moon softly kindled the antechamber. Not two feet from me the officer stepped inside. A five-inch thick piece of mahogany was all that separated us.

The officer, soles snapping against the floor, turned right and walked toward the living room. He took five or six steps before stopping in the entryway. The more I calmed myself, the tighter my muscles wound. Neither of us offered a sound.

After a few more seconds, he flipped the switch to his left. A couple of the living room lights turned on. Faster than he’d previously walked, he headed, I figured, to the fallen lamp. Now was my chance.

Or was it?

I was confident I could slink around the door and disappear. On the other hand, what would happen if he checked the rest of the house? If he stumbled across the drawings laid out in the kitchen?

Fuck!

I couldn’t leave. Unless, I thought, he was immediately pulled from the house once I did. Save myself now, clean up the mess later. I could put a rock through someone’s window. Or set off a car alarm. I could dissolve into my old neighborhood. Then rehang the drawings later.

Fuck!

Bailing was the right decision. I knew this. Still, I couldn’t move. Reminding myself freedom was my most vital ally, I ramped up my determination and got ready to go. Just as I did there were footsteps again. I returned to the wall.

I’d missed my chance.

He was coming back. Without stopping, midstride, he flipped the lights back off. Each step was louder than the previous as he approached. Quickly he reached the front door. Instead of leaving, he stopped.

Did he hear me? Could he see my shadow somewhere? A hint of my sneakers?

I was ready for him to peer around the door. I was ready because I had to be. The plan now was simple. Take him out with the door if even one hair on his head entered eyeshot. Then, using my knowledge of the layout, lose him by jetting out the exact way I came in. Head stationary, eyes anything but, I evaluated the door for what I could best determine as the sweet spot. I braced and prepared for impact.

The officer exited, closing the door behind him. I leaned my head back against the wall. I jump-started my breathing which in the previous seconds had stopped.

Knowing I was short on time, I scrambled back to the kitchen. I wanted to throw the drawings back on the wall and leave but couldn’t. Not yet. One fact was as real as my near hypersonic heart rate. There would be no more returns to the townhouse.

I dove into the last drawing, the zebra. 1980. The writing was deep in the background where the brush met the sky. “DJE + ENE = 2. Return to Homeland? My proper thank you in Sardinia.”

DJE. Danish Jubilee Egg.

ENE. Empire Nephrite Egg, found also in 1979.

I looked again at the date. 1980. The year Danish Jubilee Egg, currently in my possession, was anonymously purchased at auction by an American.

Purchased by my father.

Nothing registered from the phrase “Return to Homeland?” but Galina referring to her “union of necessity” now made sense. As did the phrase “4 of 6 confirmed your way.”

Four of the six remaining missing eggs.

“Confirmed your way”; confirmed — in 1980 when the zebra was drawn — in the United States.

This explained why Pop had kept Danish Jubilee Egg
on American Soil — most of the collection was already here and it didn’t make sense to unnecessarily move individual pieces until the assem
blage was complete. What could possibly serve as a better deterrent to potential pirates than a loan to the U.S. government so they’d watch it 24/7?

In a breath, again, my world changed. The implications were horrifying: from Galina and possibly my father involved in Alexander Zhamovsky’s murder to Galina being the mutual acquaintance who led Andreu to Derbyshev. Arms at my side, a ray of light pointed at the floor, the moment filled me. I was tortured by all of the lies and utter betrayal by so many people on so many fronts. I remembered our family trips. Was my father so lonely, I thought, he’d fall for a woman like this? Was it the excitement? Why did Galina want these eggs so desperately, so recklessly, so heartlessly? What did she mean when she referred to “her own”?

All night, prior to reaching the townhouse, I kept coming back to the same thing. Five letters, four drawings. When Pop mentioned Ia signed her work with a date he mentioned something else. She didn’t just draw.

A fifth letter. 2003. An Asiatic Black Bear on its hind legs, belly and fangs exposed. I turned off the flashlight. In the same order I took the drawings down, I returned them to the wall. I checked the window. The officer, still writing with one hand, sipped coffee with the other.

There had to be a fifth piece. I wasn’t leaving until I found it. For time’s sake I started with the closest rooms and stealthily, the officer back writing in his squad car, checked the dining room then the parlor. I checked the entire ground floor. I found nothing I hadn’t seen.

Blending with the night I made my way upstairs. Something of interest appeared in the study. On one of the bookshelves was a small, ivory sculpture that in the dark could have been a bear as easily as a dog. The study faced the street so the flashlight was turned off. I moved in close. I didn’t see any marks, dates or otherwise. I turned the animal over with my left hand. There was a year, 1989, followed by the signature of the famous Chinese sculptress Xie Jiang Ling.

A bathroom off the hallway produced a print that seemed to be new, but on first sight it was an abstract limited edition Barnett Newman. The guest bedrooms, my bedroom, and Pop’s bedroom all proved fruitless. Pop’s bathroom. Nothing. When I got to Pop’s walk-in closet something grabbed my eye. I pulled the door closed behind me. I turned on the flashlight.

Hung high on a narrow stretch of wall between two suit racks was a small oil painting. It was a Black Bear on its hind legs, belly exposed and fangs poised. I approached for a closer look. I checked the bottom right-hand corner. 2003. It was at least six inches above my eye level, too high for a detailed scan. I removed it from the wall. I turned to place it on a dresser. When I did, I heard and felt something move. Something light. Something inside the painting. I turned it over. I gently shook the picture. Again, something inside shifted. In the brown papery backing, hugging the frame, was a five-inch slit. I angled the painting and slid the mystery item toward the opening. I gingerly inserted my pointer and index fingers. I pulled out a Russian stock certificate. It was exactly like the seven I found in the safe.

There was no English translation. Russian or not, I knew I was looking at shares for Prevkos subsidiary Alex Com II Exploration. It didn’t take long for Galina’s letters to reenter my mind. More precisely, how each ended.

“Enjoy the gifts (so much in a name).”

Gifts. A word, at first, I figured referred only to both the drawings and hidden messages.

“So much in a name.” As in the names of Prevkos’s subsidiaries, further illustrating her manipulation of Alexander, and not the titles of her artwork.

I turned the painting over. Like the drawings, the piece was done with uncanny precision and use of shading. The fine strokes meshed together as one everlasting image. Unlike the other pieces there were colors. The sky was a rich blue. The few soaring vultures were dark brown and black. The bear was predictably the focal point of the scene. He was face-forward, as described, standing on his hind legs in a grassy clearing. The surrounding green foliage faded evenly into the background, as did a distant military jeep that looked stolen from the show Mash.

I honed in on the jeep. It was heading in the opposite direction. I moved the magnifying glass closer still. On the side of the vehicle were two flags. One, dissected horizontally by a thick, diagonal white stripe, was red on the top and blue on the bottom. In the top left-hand corner was a small tiger. The other I had seen often growing up. It had a gold hammer and sickle, along with a five-point star, in a sea of red. It was the flag of the former USSR.

Like a brick to the head, the secrecy finally meant something. Communism. The Cold War. The classified seminar when my father met the Zhamovskys. Not too long ago the world was a different place. History spoke for itself. Galina Zhamovsky was the wife of a top-tier Soviet natural resource official. She was smart enough to understand to what extent she was being monitored.

As I scoured the painting, my mind kept going. Pop and Galina always found time to get together. Family trips, Pop’s international business trips, maybe the words in the artworks were the answers to bigger questions, bigger discussions that went on when they met up. Maybe they were afterthoughts on things that happened as they parted.

What about the letter my father was writing to me? Was he apologizing? Was he trying to explain the situation? Did it matter anymore?

Of course it did. Sometimes, whether wrong or right, human nature is all about truth. Other times it’s all about revenge.

For the first time, I found the correspondence at the bottom of a piece. It was systematically worked into the thick grass that got higher toward the sides. Four strung-together bullet points.

The most compelling message yet.

Chapter 46

It was eight thirty
on Tuesday morning. I was standing at the side of my father’s coffin in the funeral home. There was no one else around. It was just the two of us having our final one on one. The funeral wasn’t to start for another two hours, but I didn’t feel it was safe for me to be there. At this point I wasn’t comfortable with anyone knowing where I was going to be at any certain time. There was too much going on, too many situations, too much I still didn’t know or understand. The last thing I needed was to have to pretend to throngs of people that I was simply an innocent, mourning secondary victim to all of this while I constantly looked over my shoulder. From business associates to clients to Pop’s friends to my partners to the egg to Detective Morante to Krissy Lockhart to God knows what else after what I had seen on the news the previous night, there were simply way too many chances for surprises, exposure. Besides, I was on a very tight schedule especially now that Pangaea-Man resurfaced.

“How the fuck could you do this? I was...there was...”

I was fumbling for the right words. I was talking to a dead man, but never had a conversation been more important to me.

“I know everything, Pop. Galina, Andreu, the artwork, the eggs, I know it all.”

Pop was in the outfit I had picked out for him. Navy, wide pin-striped Brioni suit with a white shirt and silver necktie. The colors were a nice contrast to the burgundy velvet he was surrounded by. I carefully scanned the topography of his face. I was amazed at the job the funeral home had done putting his features back together.

“How could you betray us like this? All you’ve told me my whole life is what an angel my mother was. So why? Why would you willingly betray an angel?”

I sucked in a breath and shook my head. So many thoughts. So many things I wanted to say.

“Justice is a funny thing. Seeing you lying on the ground, bullet holes in your head, I went numb when I realized it was Murdoch. I thought I had done this to you. Now it’s painfully clear you did this to yourself and fucked me pretty good in the process. I was actually beating myself up about not being able to speak about you at the funeral. Now I can’t even be sure how well I knew you. I don’t even know what I would have said.”

I dropped my eyes from my father’s face to his necktie’s perfect knot. Then, for myself, for my mother, I shifted it ever so slightly off center so he’d be annoyed for eternity.

“You always said it was a cruel world. I had no idea just how cruel it could be.”

An image of my half-brother ripped through my mind. Then I saw Murdoch at The Four Seasons standing over me smoking a Monte Cristo #2.

As I looked at my father for the last time I couldn’t ignore the irony. The lessons he taught me, the instincts he forced on me, were now all I had to save myself.

Soon I was in a cab heading south on Fifth Avenue. I took my cell phone from my pocket and dialed an international number that I read from a document in my briefcase. I took a deep breath then hit “send.”

“Privyet?”

“Igor, Jonah Gray.”

It was Andreu Zhamovsky’s banker in Russia. Because Andreu needed everything to be on the level, until his mission was complete, this meant his financial institutions had to be abreast of what was happening in New York. International wire transfers of escrow, due diligence contractor payments, etc., still needed to be handled without incident as Andreu had been doing thus far. Larionov, like everyone else who had been dragged into this sordid mess, was oblivious to the fact it was all horseshit.

“Good day, Jonah,” Larionov said with a heavy Baltic accent. “What can I assist you with today?”

By this point, thankfully, Larionov and I had become comfortable with one another.

“Have you by any chance heard from Andreu about the transfer of some funds?”

“No sir, I have not.”

Action.

“Fuck!” I said, pretending as if I had been trying to hold it in.

“What?”

“I’m sorry. It’s just that Andreu has us all running around over here like chickens with our heads cut off to get this deal closed for him. We’ve absolutely dropped everything for him. And—and—”

“And what?”

“And all I asked him to do was take care of one fucking thing.”

“Please Jonah, calm down. Perhaps there is some way I can be of assistance.”

“I don’t think you can. Andreu was supposed to make you aware of this a few days ago so you could prepare the proper funds. When they didn’t come in this morning, I figured he had waited too long. I told him you’d need more time than just a few hours, but he wouldn’t listen to me,” I carried on, pretending as if I had shifted the conversation to me talking to myself. “Fuck it. He’ll just have to live with the disappointment.”