Crown Jewel

by Christopher Reich

“I don’t know. I went by her place in town this morning. She wasn’t there.” Vika shrugged. “She’s from the old country. She sees things differently.”

  “Is there something else?”

  Vika averted her eyes. “I didn’t tell Le Juste about the call from my mother.”

  “Oh?”

  “It wouldn’t have changed his mind.”

  “It would have changed mine,” said Simon, without judgment.

  “It’s beside the point, anyway,” retorted Vika. “Mama did not drive. She couldn’t have been alone in the car, call or not. I don’t care how frightened she may or may not have been.”

  Simon took his time before speaking. He could see that she was distraught, that she needed to get something off her chest. “Why didn’t you tell Le Juste about the voice mail?” he asked gently.

  “The prying. The attention. It’s been hard enough keeping her death quiet.”

  “You think others would be interested?”

  Vika shook her head with exasperation. “Only the press of every country in Europe.”

  “Now there’s something you’re not telling me.”

  Vika twisted her napkin, staring past him. “It just doesn’t make sense. None of it. Why would anyone want to hurt Mama? She was harmless.”

  “They wanted to hurt you, too.”

  “You said possibly.”

  “I was being diplomatic.”

  “I didn’t tell Commissaire Le Juste about the call because…because…” Vika exhaled loudly and smiled briefly, fixing Simon with a forthcoming gaze. “I owe you an apology, Mr. Riske. I lied to you.”

  “Oh?”

  “My name isn’t Brandt. It is Victoria Elizabeth Margaretha Brandenburg von Tiefen und Tassis. And you might as well throw a ‘princess’ in before all of that. If I’d told Le Juste about the call, it would have been on the front page of every tabloid in Germany tomorrow, and everywhere else the day after. ‘Dowager Princess Stefanie Feared for Life Before Fatal Accident.’”

  “For once the headline would have been accurate.”

  Simon’s smile was met with a frown. “You’re American. You don’t know anything about the family.”

  “True. I don’t.”

  “We’re German. From Hesse. Right in the center of the country. The title goes back a thousand years. Silly, I know, but that counts for something. The von Tiefen und Tassis family is the largest private landowner in Germany. Mama is a Schoenberg—nobility to be sure, but penniless. She married my father when she was young and he was middle-aged. She was twenty and wild. She kept her hair dyed pink and practically lived in discotheques. He was nearly sixty and a confirmed bachelor, which, of course, meant he was homosexual. He married Mama because she didn’t care who he slept with and because he wanted to further the line. I believe they loved each other dearly.

  “For a while they were in the press every day. They called Mama ‘Princess TNT.’ She loved it. She fulfilled her part of the bargain and gave my father three children. Over the years, we did our best to maintain the family reputation as crazed, tragic aristocrats. Papa had a heart attack in his lover’s bed. My two older brothers died at a young age. Freddy was killed in a racing accident—now you know why I feel the way I do about cars—and Michael took drugs. My own husband, Christof, died shortly after we were married. Cancer.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “We’ve provided enough fodder for the press all these years. I’ve labored to my wit’s end to erase our family legacy. Perhaps now you’ll understand why I chose to edit the information I provided to the police.”

  “I think I do. I appreciate you trusting me.”

  “I don’t trust you, Mr. Riske, at least not yet. I need your help. That is all.”

  The server arrived to clear their plates, not masking his offense that they had not eaten their salads. “It was not good?” he asked repeatedly. Vika promised him it was delicious and ordered coffee. Simon asked for tea. They commented on the flowers and the unseasonably warm weather. The tea and coffee arrived. She drank hers black. Simon added cream and sugar. He allowed a few minutes to pass in companionable silence.

  He finished his tea and moved the saucer to the side of the table.

  “May I ask you a few questions?” he began.

  “Of course.”

  He smiled knowingly. “I’d prefer truthful answers.”

  Vika responded in kind. “I’ll do my best.”

  “How much is your family worth?”

  “Is that really important?”

  “I’ll know after you answer.”

  Vika made a show of blowing out her breath, all puffed cheeks and pursed lips. She listed her assets as if dogged by a poor memory. There were castles and artworks and bonds and shares, she explained in fits and starts, and a yacht and apartments here and villas there, but in the end, what Vika’s family had most was land, owning over three million acres, primarily wild, uninhabited old-growth forests in the central state of Hesse. When pressed to put a dollar value on it all, Vika grew even more cagey. All the numbers were just pie-in-the-sky estimations. Her accountants couldn’t be trusted. No one really knew what any of it was worth.

  “Approximately,” said Simon.

  “Ten billion dollars.” Vika threw out the number as if it were a guess.

  Simon simply nodded. He understood now why she carried a pistol. If it were him, he would have carried a much larger one with dumdum bullets and a spare magazine.

  “Actually, closer to twelve,” she added, as if disappointed she hadn’t gotten the response she’d wanted.

  “Twelve,” said Simon.

  “But it’s primarily tied up in fixed assets, mind you, not to mention an irrevocable trust. It’s not like there is a pile of money lying around.”

  “I imagine you have at least two percent liquid.” The rule was five percent up to a hundred million, then a declining scale above that.

  “Please,” said Vika, taken aback. “Never less than six.”

  “Six hundred million.”

  She nodded, indicating that it was a prudent figure.

  “Six hundred million is a lot of cash.”

  “I see that look in your eye. Don’t say anything. You’re right. It is a large sum.”

  “Vast,” said Simon.

  “Vast.”

  “Enormous.”

  “Yes, it is enormous.”

  “Incomprehensible.”

  A narrowing of the eyes. “Not even close.”

  Simon laughed.

  “May I continue?” asked Vika, unamused.

  “Please.”

  “After my father died, I was sent away to boarding school in Switzerland. I was ten. It was just then that the scale of his mismanagement of the family estate was coming to light. We learned in short order that we had no cash. And I mean zero, nul, nichts. Nothing. Our accounts were empty or overdrawn. Our properties had been mortgaged and mortgaged again. It’s quite amazing the stupid things that smart people can do.”

  Simon merely nodded, aware that this was not a story that Vika revealed to many others.

  “So, anyway,” she said, drawing a breath, “there I was at boarding school. At first, I was happy to be away from Mother and her antics. I longed for stability. For a chance to be someone other than the daughter of Princess TNT. I thought being on my own was a godsend. I was wrong. The day I arrived I realized something was different. All the other girls were boarding buses to go on a field trip to Milan to see an opera at La Scala. I wasn’t permitted to go. I was informed then, and for the first time, that I was a scholarship student. My tuition would be paid for by public relations work done on behalf of the school…You know, the pretty blond German princess holding her books under one arm…”

  “Not so bad,” said Simon.

  “And,” she added, “by working in the school kitchen. I was to report to the cafeteria thirty minutes before each meal and stay one hour after to help clear and wash the dishes. Weekends, my hours were six a.m. to t
welve noon. Saturday and Sunday.”

  “I worked in a kitchen,” said Simon. “Hard duty.”

  “When you were ten?”

  “Twenty-six,” he conceded.

  Vika exhaled and averted her gaze, looking off into the distance. “Cherries,” she said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Cherries,” she repeated, her gaze coming back to him. “My first Saturday, I arrived to find five garbage pails filled with cherries at my station in the kitchen. The school fund-raiser was to take place that evening. Cherry tarts were on the menu for dessert. There were three hundred guests. Each was to receive two tarts. Four cherries on each. My job was to pit the cherries. Do you know how to pit a cherry, Mr. Riske?”

  Simon said he did not.

  “You take hold of one like so.” Vika picked up an imaginary cherry with her thumb and forefinger. “Then you insert the pitting knife at the bottom, thrust upward, turn, and voilà, the pit comes out with the knife. It’s quite easy once you get the hang of it.”

  Simon could see that it wasn’t easy at all, certainly not for a ten-year-old girl who’d probably never sliced an apple for herself.

  “Seven hours,” she said. “That’s how long it took. No break. There wasn’t time. When I finished, the pastry chef told me I’d gone through three thousand cherries to get the twenty-four-hundred intact ones needed for the tarts.” Vika held out her hand across the table. Simon took it. It was a beautiful hand—long tapered fingers, no rings, nail polish a rich shade of caramel. “My fingers were dyed crimson for a month. Sometimes I still think I can see a bit deep under the skin. Did I mention it was an all-girls school? They had very imaginative nicknames for me.” She made a fist and angled it to one side. “See there…that knot?”

  Simon looked closely. “A knot?”

  “I didn’t like some of the nicknames. I let the others know.”

  “With your fist?”

  “Both of them.” She nodded solemnly, then pulled her hand back. “So you see, Mr. Riske, after four years of serving as a kitchen maid, and many more years of work after that, until I was able to sort out the family’s affairs myself, I learned the value of having money in the bank.”

  Simon met her eyes but said nothing. The server arrived once again and noted with pleasure that they’d enjoyed their coffee and tea. He asked if they desired something to enliven their palates before they left. A Calvados, perhaps? Or a Williams? Vika thanked him, but no. The server cleared away their dishes and promised to return with the bill.

  Simon wiped his mouth and set the napkin in his lap. “I have one more question,” he said.

  “I’ve talked far too much about the family for one day.”

  “It isn’t about the family.”

  “I’m waiting.”

  “What did you find on the hillside?”

  Vika sat back, surprised. “I suppose I should be pleased you’re so observant.” She removed a trinket from her clutch and set it on the table. It was a cuff link, though half of the face was chipped off.

  “I’d say you’re the observant one. How did you spot this?”

  “Good eyes.”

  “I take it this isn’t your mother’s.”

  “Not unless she began wearing men’s cuff links in the past year. Oh, and she was wearing a dress when she died.”

  Simon picked it up. An oval face, or half of one, a white enamel background with a sword or a star and symbols that looked like ancient runes. It was difficult to tell anything further.

  “My mother did not drive off the cliff, Mr. Riske. Someone killed her. Someone abominable.”

  “I believe you,” said Simon. “The question is, why?”

  Chapter 23

  Ratka was watching soccer.

  He sat on the recliner in the main salon of the Lady S, eyes trained on the wall-mounted screen. It was the 2006 Serbian Cup final. Belgrade in black was playing Novi Sad in red. Regulation time had ended with the score tied one to one. It had come to a penalty shoot-out. The score was tied three to three. Each team had one try remaining.

  Ratka had viewed the match over a hundred times, the very first time as the owner of FK Novi Sad and standing on the sidelines inside the stadium. He’d purchased the team in 2005, when it was a third-division club whose roster consisted of hard-playing amateurs, most of whom held down blue-collar jobs forty hours a week. He’d known from the start that it was hopeless to expect them to compete with teams in the higher divisions, in which all the players were professionals.

  And so Ratka had proposed his own unique solution to the problem. If his players couldn’t win on their own, he would give them a hand. People often referred to the fans as the twelfth player. The fans in Novi Sad didn’t count for spit, so he introduced a twelfth player, and a thirteenth and a fourteenth. Their names were blackmail, extortion, bribery, and, if necessary, outright assault. That was fifteen players, but so what? The only math he’d ever learned was how to count stolen money.

  Ratka, born Zoltan Alexander Mikhailovic, was chief of the Silver Tigers crime syndicate, originally formed in Belgrade, the capital of the former Yugoslavia, in the 1980s. The Silver Tigers had made their name carrying out bank robberies, jewelry thefts, and kidnappings. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, the gang expanded its zone of activity across all of Europe. Good times. At least for a while. After a few setbacks, including his stint in prison, Ratka brought the gang to the South of France, a newly rich hunting ground after the resurgence of Russia. Antibes, Cannes, Saint-Tropez, and Monaco were favored haunts of the megarich oligarch class.

  That was almost ten years ago. It felt like one hundred since he’d been on that sideline.

  Ratka sat up, driving away his laments. Now he had a chance to get back to where he’d been. Not just as the owner of a soccer club. That was small potatoes. He had his eye on something bigger. Far bigger.

  On the screen, his team’s best player set the ball on the spot, made his approach, and fired. The goalie jumped right. The ball went right. Too far right and missed the goal entirely.

  “Govno!” Ratka shouted, jumping toward the television, fist balled. It was Serbian for “shit.”

  If Belgrade made the next penalty, they would win the championship.

  Ratka stifled a bitter smile. Having foreseen this very possibility all those years ago, he’d kidnapped number 23’s mother and sister and let the player know that they would be released only if Belgrade lost. Otherwise, they would be killed. He’d made the call to the player himself.

  Number 23 placed the ball on the spot. The crowd, already deafening, grew louder still. One hundred thousand crazed Serbs—seventy thousand for Belgrade, thirty thousand for Novi Sad—shouted at the top of their lungs.

  Ratka watched himself on the screen, standing there on the sidelines with his arms crossed, his future hanging in the balance. In contrast to the opposing team’s owner, Ratka was the picture of calm. Handsome, composed, confident that his side would prevail.

  The referee blew the whistle.

  Number 23 lined up his shot. He began his approach. As was his habit, he stutter-stepped, nearly halting his advance before accelerating and striking the ball with his left foot.

  The goalie dove to one side. The ball went to the other, a rocket that disappeared into the corner of the net.

  Belgrade four, Novi Sad three.

  Game over.

  Ratka covered his eyes, the pain of defeat as excruciating as on that day long ago. He rewound the tape and stopped it as number 23 prepared his approach. Using the remote, Ratka zoomed in on the player’s face, laboring to see if he could spot the pending betrayal.

  He saw only determination, the will to win.

  Number 23 had not considered missing for one second.

  A month after the game, Ratka was arrested for the kidnapping. For his crimes, he served five years and forfeited ownership of the team. Belgrade wasn’t the same afterward. A new boss had taken his place. The police refused to be bought. He was a target a
nd a target couldn’t do business. All that was about to change.

  Taking a beer from the refrigerator, Ratka left the lounge and passed through the sliding door onto the afterdeck. Two women sunbathed on the chaise longues. Seeing him, they sat up and greeted him. The boat was for sale and they were meant to lure buyers. Ratka ignored them. If he wasn’t going to screw them, he couldn’t be bothered. He put a hand on the railing, appraising the yacht in the adjacent slip. The Czarina, a 226-foot Feadship superyacht that looked like his hard-on if he’d made it into a boat. It was for sale, too. Priced at a hundred and forty-five million dollars. He just might be able to afford it after all was said and done.

  But he had no interest in yachts. He was tired of Monaco. Tired of the Côte d’Azur. He wanted to go home. To Belgrade.

  Two figures turned the corner of the dock and approached the boat. Ratka’s temper flared at the sight of them. He retreated to the salon. A few moments later, two sets of feet pounded up the gangway. Tommy and Pavel entered the salon. Tommy was tall and lean, maybe twenty-five, his black hair combed back over his forehead with greasy kid stuff. Pavel was short and stocky, forty, hair shorn to the scalp, as hard and unfeeling as a rod of pig iron.

  Ratka regarded them, then stepped toward Tommy. Tommy, who had been driving the car. “Well?” Ratka said.

  Tommy stared at the floor hard enough to drill a hole in it.

  “Well?” Ratka repeated, delivering an openhanded blow to the side of his head. “What do you think you were doing?”

  Tommy winced, then cast a sidelong glance at Pavel, who was smart enough to keep his eyes on Ratka. “I was—”

  “Don’t talk,” said Ratka. “That wasn’t a question. Did you think I wasn’t going to see it? Did you forget that the picture goes to the television? You nearly killed her.”

  “No, it was an—”

  Ratka placed a finger an inch from Tommy’s nose.

  Tommy shut up.

  “I said to follow her and to scare her if you had a chance. You tried to run her over. I saw it. What could you have been thinking?” Ratka balled his fists. “And then what? What would we do if she were dead? Did you think about what would happen next?”