Crown Jewel

by Christopher Reich

  Bingo.

  Had he placed the trackers on four random individuals, he could expect their paths to lead in different directions. Two might intertwine, or even end up at locations near each other, but not all four. The odds were a billion to one that four people with no association with one another would follow the same path, even for a short distance.

  And yet that was precisely what Simon saw when he studied the map. It appeared, prima facie, that the men he’d tagged had shared a common path, at least part of the way. All four colored lines left the casino and went directly to the Café de Paris next door, just twenty meters away. There the lines blended into one as they entered the restaurant and—here was the first giveaway that they were not only associated with one another and thus part of a larger team but professionals—continued out the rear.

  Curious as to their activities inside the café, Simon drilled down by shading a section of the track corresponding with the interior of the café and requesting the corresponding time stamp. Again, he was rewarded. None of the four had spent longer than two minutes inside the café. All stopped at the same location for just under sixty seconds. Either they had all decided to take a nice long leak at exactly the same bathroom at exactly the same restaurant or they were making a drop.

  From the Café de Paris, the men went their separate ways. Two, however, ended up at the same address, where Simon deduced they were sleeping at this moment. The other paths ended abruptly after the men had traveled more than ten kilometers and their transmitters had dropped out of range.

  Simon wrote down the address on the Avenue Georges Guynemer where the two men boarded. He decided it might be interesting to follow them in order to learn more about their daily activities. If, by a stroke of luck, the men wore the same clothing tomorrow, the tracker would do his job for him.

  It was a start.

  Simon closed the laptop. A yawn caught him by surprise and he returned to the bedroom. He dropped into an overstuffed chair beside the bed and watched Vika sleep. She looked peaceful and without worry.

  Yet Simon sensed that she was hiding something from him. Before they left her mother’s apartment, he’d put away the tiara and jewelry and locked the safe. Vika had said she had come to sort through her mother’s things, but it was apparent there was another reason, a reason she had yet to divulge. He’d seen it in the tightness of her mouth when they’d left, the rigidity of her shoulders. Something was compelling her to remain even after all that had happened.

  Gazing at her in repose, Simon knew that when he found the man who’d attacked her and learned the reason behind her mother’s death, she would have to tell him. And it would have to be on her own.

  Chapter 32

  Robby woke at seven sharp, excited about the day to come. Stretching, he sat up and pushed back the covers. The air was frigid. He shivered. He touched his toes to the floor and lifted them right back up again. The wooden floorboards were cold as ice. He turned his head to listen for the groaning of the heating pipes coming to life. Old buildings were like old people. They made all kinds of strange, unexpected noises. The dorm was silent. It was too early in the season to turn on the central heating, though he didn’t know it. He steeled himself to the cold and walked to his sink to brush his teeth. There was a strange stillness in the air, a quiet more than quiet. He put his toothbrush back in its glass and opened the curtains.

  White.

  Everywhere white.

  “It’s snowing!” he shouted.

  The snow fell in fat, feathery billows past his window. A layer two fingers thick covered the rooftops. The courtyard was white as an ice rink. Clouds hovered low over the mountains, the pine forest a pale canopy. He opened the window and thrust out his hand. A pile grew quickly on his palm and he licked it off, tasting nothing, only prickly cold.

  Robby closed the window and made a beeline for his armoire. Yesterday he’d spent ten minutes picking out his clothes for this morning. He had to start all over again. He sorted through his shirts and trousers. There wasn’t much to choose from. Students at Zuoz had to wear a uniform. He had two extra pairs of trousers, a few colorful sweaters, and his father’s Moncler parka, which was far too big for him.

  He grabbed the parka and put it on over his pajamas, trying to disregard how long the sleeves were and the fact that he looked like a Q-tip wrapped up in a purple comforter. A terrifying thought came to him. The storm would worsen. The school would cancel leave. He wouldn’t be allowed to hit town. He’d miss his date with Elisabeth.

  Robby dashed to the nightstand and scooped up his phone. The weather app said the snow would continue until Monday. He left his room and ran down the hall, banging on doors until he discovered someone awake, and demanded to know if he thought leave would be canceled.

  “No,” said Edmond Fang.

  “No,” said Mattias Gross.

  “No,” said Pranay Gupta.

  Robby returned to his room, only partially mollified. One set of nerves replaced another. He was going to see her. It was really going to happen.

  His hands digging into the pockets of the enormous purple parka, he tapped his feet on the ground impatiently. He could think only of her. Of her blond hair and broad smile, of her warm, singsongy voice and the curve of her figure beneath her sweater.

  His heart beat faster.

  He had a half day of school to get through before his life would change forever.

  Chapter 33

  Simon had been working for an hour when he heard the pocket doors open and Vika came out of the bedroom.

  “Guten Morgen,” he said, sliding the chair from the desk, offering a smile.

  Vika walked past him, eyes cast down, a wan, dissatisfied smile on her face, and disappeared into the bathroom. The door closed. The sound of the lock slamming home felt like a slap in the face. His German wasn’t that bad.

  Simon went back to work. The laptop was open. The Apache software showed no change in the trackers’ location from last night. Two of the transmitters remained at the address on the Avenue Georges Guynemer. A check of the street view on Google Maps showed the home to be a run-down salmon-colored villa located in a hilly part of the city, a stone’s throw from the Italian border.

  Simon’s attention, however, was not on the laptop. It was on the leather wallet he’d lifted the previous evening from the man he’d identified as using a hidden camera to film the shoe. The wallet contained no means of identification, no bank or credit cards, no photographs, no love notes, or any of the other doodads one tends to collect in the course of daily life. The wallet held two thousand euros. That was all.

  Simon opened the fold and ran a finger inside it. Out of habit, he searched every nook and cranny. In his old life, he did it to find drugs—a spindle of coke or something better—not information. His reward was a wrinkled piece of paper—some kind of ticket, at first look. Printed on one side were several groupings of letters and a time stamp: “19:17 16.6.18” (7:17 p.m., June 16, 2018). The other side was blank except for a watermark of an eagle’s head and a stylized abbreviation: “BTA.”

  Simon put down the slip of paper and opened a new window on the laptop. In the search bar he typed the letter groupings as well as the abbreviation: “ZTW RSR BTA.”

  He hit SEND and the gods of the Internet delivered unto him an answer. The slip of paper was indeed a ticket. A twenty-four-hour urban transit pass purchased at the Žarkovo station in New Belgrade and issued by the Belgrade Transit Authority.

  Simon picked up the paper again. By rights, it should mean nothing. Yet his heart was beating more quickly than it had been a minute before, and there was no mistaking the surge of adrenaline that had him rising from his chair. During his drive from London, he’d been pursued by men whose driver’s licenses had identified them as residents of Croatia, part of the former Yugoslavia. They’d followed him to get revenge for the breaking up of their scam at Les Ambassadeurs.

  Belgrade was the capital of Serbia, also part of the former Yugoslavia.
>
  Simon drew the only natural conclusion.

  There was a gang of Slavic criminals hitting casinos all across Europe.

  Before he could give his thesis further consideration, Vika emerged from the bathroom. She was dressed in her clothing from the night before. Her face was scrubbed and she gave him an officious smile as she passed by.

  “How are you feeling?” Simon followed her into the bedroom.

  “Better.”

  She picked up the phone and called room service, her back to him as she ordered breakfast for one. Simon put his hands around her waist and she peeled them off, holding them limply. “About last night.”

  “Yes?”

  “I owe you an apology,” she said. “I took advantage of you.”

  “Of me?” Already Simon did not like the direction in which the conversation was headed.

  “I needed to feel whole. Clean. I needed to erase the memory. Please, let’s not make anything more out of it.”

  Simon flinched. “Oh?”

  Vika gave his hands a squeeze and released them. “Again, I’m sorry.”

  “Of course,” he said. “I mean, yes, you’re right. It was the moment. We got carried away.”

  “Exactly. I’m glad you agree.” She smiled too kindly. “Of course, it was very nice. You were wonderful. I just don’t want you to get any ideas.”

  “Ideas?”

  “About us. About, well, you know. We’re two adults. These things happen.”

  Simon nodded. Vika was speaking as if she were describing a lively game of charades. Infuriated, fighting to keep his anger and embarrassment in check, he excused himself, saying it was time for a shower.

  He closed the bathroom door and turned the lock every bit as forcefully as she had. His head was spinning. How had his emotions betrayed him? Was he so desperate for connection that he mistook sex for love? He knew too much about the first and very little about the second. Despair fell over him like a cloud blocking the sun. His world had suddenly grown colder, darker.

  He faced himself in the mirror and stood up straighter, trying to find the old Simon, “old” meaning prior to meeting Victoria Brandenburg. She of the direct gaze and patronizing tone. He tried the well-worn admonition “Snap out of it, man!,” but the words carried no heft.

  Instead, he fell back on logic. An objective review of the facts. He reminded himself that he’d met her thirty-six hours ago. He barely knew her. She was a princess. A real princess. And a billionaire to boot. Not to mention an MBA who’d graduated with high honors from Europe’s top business school.

  Simon was a hood working to make amends for a past as black as ever there was. He was a car thief, a bank robber, and a convicted felon who’d spent four years in a French prison where he’d murdered a man, a fellow inmate he’d killed with malice, forethought, and premeditation. Yes, he’d graduated from the London School of Economics and earned a graduate degree at the Sorbonne, but it was window dressing. He looked at the tattoo inked on his forearm, the symbol for the gang of Corsican criminals who’d made him one of their own. That was the real Simon Riske and it always would be.

  The fact was that he had no business assuming she had feelings for him.

  He had no parents, no relatives, and had never bothered to trace his heritage past his grandparents. She traced her lineage back a thousand years.

  No business at all.

  He met his eyes in the mirror. Was there anything more ridiculous than a fool?

  He took a shower, then dressed quickly, throwing on tan chinos and a navy polo shirt. He left the bathroom, barely in control of himself. “We need to go to your mother’s apartment.”

  “But why?”

  Simon brushed past her, stuffing his wallet and phone into his pockets, popping a Fisherman’s Friend into his mouth. Damn the memories. “Bring your mother’s pistol. And this time load it.”

  “What for?”

  “You want to find out what happened to your mother? The answer’s there.”

  Chapter 34

  It was nicer to enter through the lobby, thought Simon as he held the door to the Château Perigord for Vika. There was no doorman, but a desk manned by a real estate agent eager to sell them an apartment in the developer’s new building on Portier Cove, the man-made spit of land being dredged up from the seafloor, enlarging the city’s beach. Studios started at nine million. It was pleasing to learn that there was a place more expensive than London. Simon made a note to come back in the next life as a developer.

  The elevator was slow but had what was once called character. They rode without speaking, an invisible wall between them, no doubt of his making. Vika’s marching rhythm lost its vigor as they approached her mother’s apartment. Simon offered no bluff words of encouragement. Some things a person needed to reckon for themselves.

  At the door, Vika took the pistol from her purse and gave it to Simon. He checked that a bullet was chambered and thumbed off the safety. He stood by as she searched for the proper key. He counted ten or more on her key chain, each coded with a different colored fob. She caught him observing her. “A master key for each house,” she stated.

  “How many do you own?”

  “Own or visit?”

  This was a twist Simon hadn’t heard before. “Visit.”

  “Five regularly. Marbella, Como, Manhattan…” She shrugged. “Paris and Pontresina.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “Schloss Brandenburg.”

  “Sounds cozy.”

  “Actually, it is rather—” She looked at him. “You’re poking fun at me.”

  Her hand steadied and she slid the key home. Simon opened the door and stepped inside. The foyer was pitch-dark. He listened and knew the place was deserted.

  “Come in,” he said. “No one’s here.”

  Vika crossed the room to draw the curtains. Daylight robbed the place of its violent history. It was no longer the scene of a crime but a large, beautifully decorated flat that looked as though a gang of teenagers had thrown a rager in it the night before.

  She gave the room a look, hands on her hips, like a general inspecting her troops. “What are we looking for?”

  “Something that shouldn’t be here,” said Simon.

  Vika led the way to the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator and handed Simon an ice-cold bottle of spirits. “We can start with this. Mama did not drink grappa.”

  Grappa di Brancaia. The price tag was still affixed to the base: 249 euros. The good stuff. Someone else, then, had polished off half the bottle.

  “Boyfriend?” Simon reasoned that a woman wouldn’t bring a bottle of grappa as a present, not if she knew her host hated the stuff. That was a man, all right. Ditto forgetting to take off the price tag.

  “It must be the person she mentioned on the voice mail.”

  “The one she thought was trying to hurt her.”

  “Yes.”

  “I think it’s time you played me the message.”

  Vika hesitated, looking as if he’d suggested she have a root canal. The fact that she did not trust him twisted the knife a little further.

  “Now,” he said, and she drew the phone from her purse and accessed the voice mail message left by her mother.

  “Vika, are you there? Can you hear me? I’m in trouble. You’ve got to come down and help me. There’s a man. He wants to know about the family. I didn’t tell him anything. Of course, you know I’d never. But he keeps asking. I’m worried for you. For Fritz. I didn’t say a word. Please, darling. I thought he was my friend, but now I’m worried. He scares me.”

  Vika stopped the message. “That’s all you need to hear. She goes a little crazy. It’s personal.”

  Simon took the phone and replayed the message several times, listening for nuances, memorizing it verbatim. He zeroed in on the fact that Vika had forgotten to mention. “Who is Fritz?”

  “My son.”

  “Is he here?”

  “God, no. He’s away at boarding school.”
r />   “Where?”

  “Switzerland. In the mountains. There’s a teacher who looks after him. A man who used to be in the military. Fritz doesn’t know, of course.”

  “Any other children?” Simon demanded.

  “No.”

  “So why would your mother be worried about him?”

  “I told you yesterday. She was paranoid. Everyone was out to get her. The shopgirl selling her gloves gave her dirty looks. The waiter was eyeing her purse. She even claimed that people broke into the apartment and searched her closet while she was out.”

  “Maybe they did.”

  Vika’s expression darkened. She was not a woman who encountered much resistance in her daily life.

  “Let’s assume she had her friend over,” Simon went on. “You said she didn’t get out much. Where might she have met him?”

  “She ate lunch three or four days a week at an Italian place down the street.”

  “By herself?”

  “With Elena.”

  “Still no word?”

  Vika shook her head, indicating that she hadn’t had any luck.

  “Call her. Please.”

  Vika placed the call. No one answered. Instead of rolling to voice mail, a disembodied voice stated that the mailbox was full.

  “Is that like her?”

  Vika shook her head.

  “When we’re done here, we’ll see about checking the security cameras downstairs.”

  “Commissaire Le Juste said that we needed a—”

  “I know what he said.”

  “But—”

  Simon raised a hand. “This is the kind of problem I solve.”

  Vika nodded, and he was pleased to see that she was getting used to the fact that he would be the one calling the shots.