The Apple Orchard

by Susan Wiggs

  They reached the town plaza, where the center strip of the boulevard widened into the big sculpture park in the middle of town. There were a few people around at this hour, but for the most part, the park was deserted.

  She gestured at a concrete table in the shade. Some impulse of chivalry made him stand aside, placing his hand lightly on her waist as she took a seat. The casual touch startled the hell out of him. That subtle feminine curve, the light flowery scent of her hair, reminded him of just how agonizingly long it had been since he’d been close to a woman.

  “Are you all right?” asked Tess.

  “Fine. Why?”

  “You look like you’re in pain.”

  He cleared his throat. “So, what is it you don’t want the bank cameras to record?”

  She leaned toward him, and the breeze played with her hair. “There’s news. We found something.” Her eyes caught the light through the canopy of leaves overhead. He watched the glint of shifting sunlight in her red-gold locks. There was nothing sexier than red hair on a woman, he thought. He was fascinated by her energy, the passion that lit her face as she opened a folder on the table in front of him—copies of an old photograph, a yellowed letter in a foreign language and a diagram showing what appeared to be a family tree. Excitement transformed her from a harried, impatient woman into someone he found more captivating than ever. Not to mention the way her sweater fit. It was hard not to just sit there and stare at her...assets.

  “Hey,” she said, “I need you to pay attention.”

  “I am,” he protested.

  “To what I’m showing you, not to my boobs.”

  “I wasn’t—” He stopped himself. He was a lousy liar. Guilty as charged.

  Her eyes narrowed, and she straightened her top. “I mean it.”

  “Sorry. I’m listening,” he assured her. And this time, he wasn’t kidding. If she had a solution to the dilemma, he sure as hell wanted to hear it.

  “Does—did—Magnus have a safe deposit box at the bank?”

  “No. Not at my bank, anyway. Are you looking for something in particular?”

  “Treasure,” she said simply, as if it were the most common thing in the world. In her world, maybe it was. “That’s what I want to show you. This old photo is from 1940, taken in Copenhagen. It’s a shot of Magnus and his grandfather, Christian Johansen. Isabel and I found it in a box of old photos and memorabilia.”

  He studied the smiling boy in the picture, then looked up at Tess. “The family resemblance is pretty incredible. He looks like he could be your brother, and the grandfather is a twin of Magnus in his later years.”

  “Really?” For a moment, unguarded pleasure lit her eyes, and a blush stained her cheeks. Dominic was kind of crazy about the way she blushed so much. He liked that it made her seem a little vulnerable. Or open, maybe.

  “I’m happy for you, Tess,” Dominic said. “Finding a treasure is all in a day’s work for you. It’s not every day you find yourself a family.”

  At that, she bridled, narrowing her eyes and folding her arms in a self-protective gesture.

  Oops, thought Dominic. Way to put your foot in it.

  “That’s not what I need you to focus on,” she said. “It’s this.” She pointed to an object in the photograph, then took out a digital enlargement showing it bigger. “I enhanced the image so we could see more detail.”

  “Looks like some kind of knickknack or figurine.” If anyone besides Tess were showing it to him, he would dismiss what she was saying. But Tess was in the business of finding treasure. “Judging by the expression on your face, I’m thinking it’s something more than that,” he added. Thinking about Magnus and Eva, about Isabel, and all that had happened, he wanted it to be. “Please tell me this is like one of those rare baseball cards and it’s going to save the day.”

  “I don’t deal with baseball cards. That’s my colleague Jude’s department.” She tapped her hand on the enhanced photo. “This is more like a deck of rare baseball cards. A million decks.”

  “Now you’re talking.”

  She took another document from her seemingly bottomless handbag. “It’s a Fabergé egg,” she said. “You’ve heard of them, right?”

  “Sure. Tell me more.”

  “The House of Fabergé was founded by Gustav Fabergé in Russia in the 1800s. He married a Danish woman, and their son Carl’s work caught the attention of the Tsar, who commissioned an Easter egg from him each year to present as a gift to the Empress, or to commemorate an event—like marriages, coronations, births, that sort of thing. The artist had complete creative freedom. The only stipulation was that the egg contain a surprise inside.” She took out a small figurine. “So far, we have this.”

  He studied the small angel. “This is the surprise?”

  “I believe so, yes. The eggs were made of solid gold and precious stones. This is alabaster. We found it among Magnus’s things.” She showed him some printouts of more recent photos of insanely elaborate eggs. They looked like clocks, like Cinderella’s coach, like the Kremlin itself. They looked like stuff old ladies ordered from the back of Parade Magazine.

  “I have to admit, I’m not an aficionado.”

  “The originals are rare and worth a fortune,” Tess said. “The rarest of all are the Imperial Eggs, created for the Romanovs—the Russian Imperial family. Only fifty-four were ever produced, and of those, only forty-two have survived. After the 1917 revolution, a lot of the treasures were confiscated and stored in the Hermitage. Some of them went missing from there. An undiscovered Imperial Egg is like the Holy Grail to collectors.”

  “What do you mean, undiscovered? Were they stolen or hidden?”

  “During the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, most of the Imperial Eggs were confiscated and moved to the Kremlin Armory to be cataloged and stored. By the time Joseph Stalin began selling them in 1927, some had disappeared from the inventory. Others were sold to private collectors, who usually insisted upon anonymity. In all, eight of the Imperial Eggs are currently considered lost.”

  She regarded him with those fiery eyes and smiled briefly. “Sorry. I get wonky about this stuff.”

  “Go on. I’m intrigued.”

  “If this is what I think it is, it’s known as the Angel.” She indicated the figurine, small and smooth and exquisite as he held it in his hand. “It was designed to commemorate the birth of a daughter of Nikolai and Maria Romanov. Since she was their only child, born when her mother was forty, the assumption is that her birth was considered something of a miracle.”

  “No kidding.” Every birth was a miracle, thought Dominic. He still remembered the incredible feeling of holding a newborn in his arms, studying the tiny limbs and features. He’d wanted more than two kids, but Lourdes, perhaps with a prescience he didn’t possess, had her tubes tied after Trini. “So how did it end up with Magnus and his grandfather?”

  She handed him another piece of paper, this one a color copy of what appeared to be a receipt of some sort. “This letter—it’s in Russian—explains it. Magnus’s grandfather was a physician. Nikolai was living in exile in Copenhagen, and his daughter was ill. According to this letter, Dr. Johansen saved her life, and Nikolai gave him the egg as a token of gratitude, and because he lacked the cash to pay him. I need for you to understand what this means. Ninety percent of my job involves tracing the provenance of an object. In this case, I have the clear chain of ownership right in front of me. This almost never happens. There are no ambiguities in its lineage. None. Curators would kill for this kind of provenance. It’s perfect. You almost never get such a concise letter and a receipt, so obviously Nikolai knew what he was doing. He gave Dr. Johansen proof that the egg wasn’t stolen or transferred illegally. A find like this...it could be exactly what’s needed to bail out Magnus and Isabel.”

  He noticed she didn’t include herself in the bailout plan.

  “So what’s the value of this egg?” He couldn’t imagine how a knickknack could cover Magnus’s debts.

 
“At this point I can only estimate. Just for a point of reference, in 2007, a Fabergé egg once owned by the Rothschilds sold for £8.9 million. There was another, called the Winter Egg, which sold for $9.6 million. And these two eggs hadn’t been missing for ninety years. The publicity alone for finding one of the lost Imperial Eggs would elevate the final price to...an impressive level. To say the least. The record amount paid for an egg—and it wasn’t even an Imperial Egg—was $17.7 million, by a Russian collector named Ivanov.”

  He stared at her. “You’re kidding. You’re not kidding.”

  “It’s my job to know these things.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “To most people, yes. But based on a piece’s uniqueness and rarity, the value can go off the charts. This particular piece has something more. It’s been lost for generations. A new discovery can amp up the excitement that builds around an item. There was a lost van Gogh that resurfaced in Amsterdam last year that went for a hundred million.”

  “You’re throwing a lot of numbers around,” Dominic pointed out. “Best guess.”

  She eyed him with something like admiration. “Twenty million. Just remember, this isn’t an exact science.”

  He said nothing but felt an inner leap of hope. He couldn’t show this to her, though. Not yet.

  His silence must have made her nervous. She placed a hand on his arm. “It’s not a lie. I’m not saying this to get you to put a stop to the foreclosure.”

  He liked the feel of her hand resting on his arm. He liked her. She was a prickly, impatient woman, still a relative stranger, but there was something about her that completely challenged and intrigued him.

  As if sensing his thoughts, she took her hand away.

  “Why wouldn’t Magnus have told me about this?” Dominic asked.

  A shadow flickered across her face. “Maybe he didn’t understand its value.”

  Sensing the deeper meaning of her remark, he wished he knew of a way to comfort her. There were some things, he reminded himself, that hurt more than financial distress.

  “How soon can you come up with the money?” he asked. “Because, believe me, that’s the first thing I’m going to be asked.”

  “Okay, yes. That.” She clasped her hands around one knee and drew it up to her chest. “It might take some time. That’s why I came to you. Because we need more time.”

  Great, he thought, remembering how hard he’d already pushed, going on years now, to protect Magnus from the proceedings. With the new bank in place, being put off was no longer an option.

  “How long?” he asked again.

  “I can’t give you an exact date. But look, this is worth taking our time with. It’s real, it’s a fortune, and it could change everything.”

  “Excellent,” Dominic said.

  “There’s only one issue,” she added.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s kind of major. See, this piece—the egg—is missing. No one knows where it is.”

  Part Eight

  There is nothing like a plate or a bowl of hot soup, its wisp of aromatic steam making the nostrils quiver with anticipation, to dispel the depressing effects of a grueling day...rain or snow in the streets, or bad news in the papers.

  —Louis P. De Gouy, The Soup Book (1949)

  MULLIGATAWNY SOUP

  Mulligatawny is a comforting curried soup of Indian origin; the name is a corruption of the Tamil phrase “Milagu thanni,” which means “pepper water.”

  1 whole boneless chicken breast, cut into bite-size pieces

  salt and pepper

  4 tablespoons butter

  diced fruits and vegetables, including a whole onion, a whole apple, a stick of celery, a carrot, a tomato and a bell pepper

  1 clove of garlic, minced

  ¼ cup flour

  1 tablespoon curry powder

  1 teaspoon garam masala

  4 cups chicken stock

  1 cup cream or plain yogurt

  cayenne pepper to taste

  Season diced chicken with salt and pepper. Warm 2 tablespoons butter over medium-high heat in a wide, deep pot. Add chicken and sauté until golden; remove the chicken and keep warm. Add the rest of the butter to the pot and reduce heat to medium. Add diced vegetables and garlic and sauté until the mixture starts to brown. Sprinkle in flour and curry powder.

  Add the chicken stock and stir to combine, then simmer until vegetables and apple are soft. Puree in batches or with an immersion blender; the soup doesn’t need to be perfectly smooth. Add the cream or yogurt and the chicken, and warm through. Season with salt and cayenne. Soup may be thickened with rice and topped with unsweetened coconut.

  (Source: Adapted from The Encyclopedia of Creative Cooking)

  Sixteen

  Copenhagen 1941

  “Have you ever worked with dynamite before, boy?” the Teacher asked Magnus. Mysterious and vaguely dangerous, the man known only as the Teacher led the ragtag band of saboteurs. He had a grizzled beard, thick black-rimmed spectacles and scarred hands, and he worked for the Resistance. He ran a gang of schoolboys known as the Lost Boys, a group of unruly orphans like the ones in that English adventure novel, Peter Pan. Only this was no tropical island called Neverland; it was the heart of Denmark’s capital city. And these days, it was more dangerous than a swamp filled with alligators. “Have

  No one in the organization knew much about anyone else, so that if someone got caught he wouldn’t have any information to hand over to the enemy.

  Magnus had been one of the Lost Boys ever since German soldiers had blown his world apart, one night not long after Christmas.

  “No, sir,” he said. “I’ve never even held a stick of dynamite.” Though eager to take on the challenge, he knew better than to lie to a fellow like the Teacher.

  “Here you go.” The Teacher had tossed him one.

  Magnus had caught it gingerly, half expecting it to blow up in his face.

  The Teacher chuckled. “Don’t worry, it can’t do anything without fire.”

  The thing looked and felt pretty innocuous, actually. It was shorter and fatter than a candlestick, and not colored red like it was in the comic books or the new Technicolor cartoons that still ran at the cinema every Saturday afternoon. Magnus had no money for such things anymore, but sometimes he and Kiki—another boy who worked for the Resistance—sneaked into the theater through an unlocked window.

  “I’m listening,” he said to the Teacher.

  “Good, because we can’t have any mistakes.” The Teacher made him go over the plan until he could practically recite the steps backward.

  In the game of cat and mouse the Underground played with the German soldiers, Magnus’s weakness—the fact that he was a skinny, pale boy—became his greatest strength. He looked exactly like the kid he used to be—an ordinary schoolboy in his winter woolens, ice-skating on Byendam, a traditional winter recreational area in the center of town. The difference between the boy he once was and the orphan he’d become was that now, his bulky winter overcoat was lined with sticks of dynamite, spools of fuse cord and a big box of kitchen matches.

  His target was an arsenal a short distance up the frozen stream that fed the lake. The building hadn’t always been an arsenal, of course. It was simply an old pump house made of cut stone. The Germans used it for storing ordnance because its thick walls and the lack of windows protected the contents from the weather, and from intruders—so they thought.

  But the Teacher liked it as a target. Those same thick walls could contain the blasts they intended to set off, thereby minimizing the damage done by the explosions.

  On the appointed day, Magnus went to Byendam, stopping in the skating house to put on his skates. He left his rucksack with his shabby winter boots under a bench and glided onto the ice amid the others for a turn around the lake. Skating in seemingly aimless circles, he mulled over the plan.

  Despite the bone-drilling cold of the winter day, he felt hot and sweaty with nerves. It was a strange
feeling—fear mixed with rage. These soldiers had come uninvited to Denmark, bringing their threats and their war machine and doing whatever they pleased. The Teacher advised Magnus and the other boys to channel their fear and anger into determination. Magnus vowed to do whatever it took to disrupt the Germans’ mission.

  Feeling the heaviness of the concealed dynamite, he felt reckless and wild. He didn’t care about himself. He didn’t care what happened to him. He had already lost everything in the world that mattered. If something went wrong and he was wiped out in the explosion, no one would miss him. They might notice his empty place in the school room and quietly put his things away, but with his parents and Farfar gone, there would be no one to mourn him.

  Magnus had heard the expression “living by one’s wits.” He might have read it in a book somewhere. But he’d never really understood what it meant until he had to do it. In the aftermath of his family’s disappearance and the near destruction of his home by the German soldiers, he was completely on his own. He didn’t know whom to trust or how to protect himself.

  In all the ways that mattered, he had died the night they’d taken his parents away. He was still breathing, his heart was still beating in his chest, but he was dead because his life had been taken from him. In his place, another boy was reborn. In the middle of that terrible winter, right when everything had been destroyed while he cowered in the backyard, he had discovered within himself an inner fire of determination. He was going to survive. More than that, he was going to fight back.

  That night, which seemed so long ago, he had gathered what he could from the ruined house. The soldiers took all the items of value they’d been able to get their hands on, but they had overlooked a few important items. Mother’s good jewelry, for one thing, had stayed safely hidden away in the hollow pedestal of the stone birdbath in the garden. Papa’s coin collection resided in the false back of a drawer Magnus had once carved.