The phone gave its querulous demand for attention. “Excuse me.” Jeffrey picked up the receiver, was greeted with distant hissings and pops. “Priceless Limited.” There were a couple of crackling connections. “Hello?”
“To whom am I speaking, please?” The voice was cheerful and heavily accented, the words fairly shouted.
Jeffrey raised his voice in reply. “This is the Priceless antique shop. Can I help you?”
“Jeffrey?” The gentleman’s unspoken laughter called above the line’s crackling. “Do I have the pleasure of speaking to Jeffrey Allen Sinclair?”
“Yes.” Jeffrey tried to place the voice, came up blank. “Who is this?”
“Ah, an excellent question. Who is this indeed?” The laughter broke through, a most appealing sound. “I fear you will have to ask that of our friend Alexander. How are you, my dear boy?”
“I’m all right,” he said, giving Betty an eloquent shrug.
“Splendid. That is absolutely splendid. Alexander has spoken so much about you I feel we are already the best of friends.”
“He has?”
“Indeed, yes. Has Alexander arrived?”
“Not yet.” Jeffrey was almost shouting the words. “He’s supposed to be here the day after tomorrow.”
“No matter. Please, Jeffrey, do me the kindness of passing on a message to Alexander. Would you do that?”
“Of course.”
“Splendid. Splendid. Tell him the shipment is ready. Do you have that?”
“Got it.”
“Excellent. And now, my dear boy, I bid you farewell. I do so hope that we shall have an opportunity to meet very soon. Until then, may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you always.”
Betty watched him hang up the phone, said, “That sounded curious.”
Jeffrey scribbled busily, replied, “I get all kinds of weird calls a week or so before Alexander arrives. I’ve stopped worrying about them.”
“Or wondering?”
He stripped out the page and stuffed it in an already bulging folder. “I don’t think I’ll ever get that casual.”
She handed back her cup and motioned toward the lead-paned bookshelves. “Do you mind?”
“Not at all.” He opened the desk drawer, fished out his key ring, inserted the miniature skeleton key and opened the top set of doors. “These are my most recent purchases.”
She slipped on a pair of gold-rimmed reading glasses and began examining the titles. “Is Alexander bringing in a lot of jewelry these days?”
“Just five pieces, but they were all Russian, and all really special, and I didn’t know the first thing about them. I’ve been playing catch-up.”
“So I see.”
All the books were of the tall, oversized variety favored by publishers of high-priced, richly photographed volumes. The titles made an impressive list: The Twilight of the Tsars; Russian Art at the Turn of the Century. Von Solodkoff’s Russian Gold and Silver. Bennett and Mascetti’s Understanding Jewelry. Abrams’ Treasures From the Kremlin. Von Habsburg’s Fabergé.
She pointed to the book entitled Das Gold Aus Dem Kreml. “Do you read German?”
“No, a little French, that’s all. But the pictures in that book are the best of the lot, and I can sort of figure out what they are talking about in some of the captions.”
“Can you really.” She peered over the top of her glasses. “You really must tell me the next time Alexander comes up with one of his little surprises, Jeffrey.”
“I thought you dealt only in furniture and paintings.”
“I do not intend it for the market.” She waved a hand at the other shelves. “Open up and let me see, please.”
The books represented an awkward dipping into various wells, spanning centuries and styles and markets with breathtaking speed. There were beginner’s guides to identifying the otherwise unseen, such as the well-known A Fortune in Your Attic. The remainder were fairly indicative of what Jeffrey faced within Alexander’s shop—a need to catch whatever was thrown at him, and speak of it with relative authority.
“Do you mean to tell me you’ve read all of these?” Betty asked.
“There are a lot of slow days in this business. You ought to know that.” Jeffrey found it difficult to describe, even to Betty, how fascinating his study had become. “It gives me something to do while I wait for the bell to ring.”
Without turning around, she asked, “Do you ever come across the really singular piece, Jeffrey?”
He thought of the item that had first taken him to Christie’s, replied, “Sometimes.”
“I was not restricting my question to furniture.”
“I know. I wasn’t either.”
“I’d very much like you to remember me the next time something comes up.” Betty reached over and traced her finger along one Moroccan-leather binding that bore the title Russian Embroidery and Lace. She kept her voice casual as she said, “I have a number of very rich customers. Very discreet. They would be most willing to pick up a truly singular item and effectively make it disappear.” She turned to him. “Do you understand?”
“I’m not sure.”
She patted his arm. “How utterly precious. Just promise me that if something comes in that takes your breath away, you won’t forget to call me, all right?”
CHAPTER 2
Jeffrey’s arrival in London had marked the beginning of changes on every level of his being. From an emotional perspective, it was the first time since a brief fling with faith at an early age that Jeffrey really felt anything besides a rising frustration. Before his departure from America, he had recognized his lukewarm attitude toward life and accepted it as the price paid for playing the part. Now, there was an emotional dimension to his life. Everything that registered in his consciousness registered in his heart as well.
His father was the quintessential mild-mannered, soft-spoken man, an electronics engineer turned production administrator and corporate vice-president. Jeffrey had inherited a full dosage of both the emotionless demeanor and the quiet ambition that lurked beneath his father’s bland surface. Yet a young life spent witnessing the price his father paid during his corporate rise left Jeffrey wondering what on earth to be ambitious for.
Jeffrey adored his parents. It was more than just a bonding of filial love; he truly liked them. They were good, genuine people who had struggled through a life of hard knocks, and finally achieved a success they fully deserved. They set about enjoying their definition of the good life with hard-earned determination and their elder son’s blessings.
Jeffrey had seldom complained as their lives’ course wound through seven states and eleven homes in as many years. He had not felt a need to complain. He was happy with his family. He loved his parents and he trusted them. Early in life he developed a skill at building new friendships and growing new roots deep in strange soils. He fashioned a detachment and a maturity long before most young people were even aware of what the words meant.
As he entered high school, he looked around at his fellow students and saw people who were simply not up to dealing with the torments that life threw their way. They sank into throes of boredom or empty cliques or drugs or casual sex or fanatical devotion to sports. They tried as hard as they could to escape from the fears and pains that kept boiling up inside them.
Jeffrey felt comfortable with himself, and marveled at how seldom that appeared to be the case with others. If his ability to float through turbulent times was a product of being uprooted and replanted every dozen months, so be it. He knew the constant shifting of his life had helped him tap some unseen, ill-defined well inside himself. For this he was truly grateful. He also knew that his father’s path was not for him, yet he admired the man for knowing so clearly what he wanted.
Jeffrey was proud of the fact that the furious cross-currents of a life lived without a settled family and familiar surroundings had forged unbreakable bonds between his parents. It
had also drawn the three of them more closely together. In the dismal early days of a new home full of boxes and vague smells and other people’s histories, they huddled together for warmth and love and comfort.
They learned to laugh at the repetitiveness of problems that drew a sameness into every new city—streets that took them away from where they wanted to go, doctors and electricians and plumbers and bankers who had no time for newcomers, impersonal name-takers who tried to chill their very bones with a total lack of friendliness as they adjusted to new schools and new rules and new lives. The warmth and healing of close friends they found among themselves, and with each move became more intimate, more reliant upon each other.
But not Jeffrey’s younger brother. With every move, his brother had fallen a little further away from the safety of their tightly bound trio. And with each new year, his brother had also fallen a little more apart. His increasingly demented behavior tore at the fabric of Jeffrey’s life in ways that no move, no transition, no earlier trauma had ever prepared him. He found himself faced with the specter of hating his brother, hating him for the pain he caused to himself and to their parents. He was unable to respond with the compassion shown by his parents, terrified of having his protective bland exterior pried away; so he took the only other alternative he found open to himself. He decided that he no longer had a brother. He wiped the slate clean. And in doing so, he lost the need to hate.
With his move from university into corporate life, Jeffrey found a new reason to drown in negative emotions. The corporate world clutched at his very existence, calling him to give his all to some nameless company that offered vague promises of reward somewhere further down the line. Jeffrey responded by becoming a consummate actor, playing the ambitious go-getter to all the outside world.
If anyone had ever bothered to ask Jeffrey Allen Sinclair what it was he wanted most out of life, he probably would have replied, a calling. But no one ever did. He wore the yuppie mask far too well for anyone to think he sought more than just to be on top.
Four years with McKinsey in Atlanta had left him bereft not of ambition, but of goals. He burned with a desire to succeed, to achieve, yet he had no idea what to aim for.
The senior partners had one common thread running through all their lives: they were grimly, determinedly, daily dissatisfied. He searched their faces with anxiety, just as he searched his own heart. Why had they spent their lives struggling for the title and the income and the five-acre colonial spread if all it gained them was ulcers, bad backs, divorces, kids who hated them, and eyes that lit up only at the thought of yet another big deal?
Jeffrey was too aggressive and too full of energy to quit when he saw behind the charade. He would have gone crazy without some channel, some direction, even if the direction made no sense. Instead, his life simply became a theater. He knew the lines and spoke the part well, but in his heart of hearts there bloomed a yearning desire to be elsewhere. To do more. To live life with more gusto than was offered by a padded chair in a carpeted glass-lined cell.
Jeffrey was of slender build. Just over six feet tall, he had a supple strength without appearing overly muscular, and played a number of sports with disinterested ease. He found little on the playing fields that tempted him to give his all, so he played whatever his group played, and only so well as to not draw attention to himself.
Jeffrey’s features helped enormously in making the theatrics a success. It was a strong face, full of the sharp angles and long lines of a determined success story. His hair was turning prematurely gray, but only in the most dignified manner. There were brushstrokes of silver at each temple, and faint pewter threads woven through a full and virile crop. To everyone except Jeffrey, it lent him an enviably distinguished note. For him it was the makings of his worst nightmares.
He had dreams of standing in front of his mirror and watching the aging process carry him through all the stages of decrepit decline. He would wake up in an empty-hearted sweat—not because he feared growing old, but because he feared a growing void where life’s purpose was supposed to reside.
In his walks to and from the McKinsey offices in downtown high-rise Atlanta, Jeffrey would catch himself staring at the men and women who were barely visible to his fellow high-fliers. He watched their faces, this cadre of underlings, the hordes who trod their way daily through jobs that held little interest and less hope. The older faces chilled him to the bone, their empty exhausted gazes foreshadowing what might befall him if his act were ever uncovered.
Then, fourteen months ago, the invitation to lunch with Alexander Kantor had arrived like a lifeline tossed into a dark and stormy sea. Jeffrey had not seen it as such at first, however; in fact, he had almost avoided the meeting entirely.
* * *
They met for lunch at his father’s insistence, during one of his infrequent visits back to Jacksonville. A lunch with an unknown relative was positively the last thing he wanted to do on a sunny Saturday afternoon, especially when his friends were headed for the beach. But when he told his father that he was going to skip the meeting, his father shook his head, said, I’m not sure that’s a good idea. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that he wanted to talk with you about your future. Jeffrey snorted, said, you mean a job? I’ve never even met the man before. His father replied, Alexander has his own way of doing things, and he’s always seemed to know more about our lives than we have ever known about his.
So Jeffrey went. Angry that he was not at the beach, but he went.
He arrived at the restaurant hoping to find some way of shaking the man’s hand and making polite conversation and then leaving. Jeffrey figured a five-minute meeting would be enough to satisfy his father. But Alexander wasn’t there. Jeffrey sat in the nicest restaurant in all of north Florida, and smoldered.
The longer he sat there, the more grotesque his picture of the man became. Alexander Kantor. What a name. He probably fit in perfectly with all the interior decorator types an antique dealer had to work with. Jeffrey toyed with the ice in his empty water glass, saw the man take form before his eyes—slender as a beanpole, dressed in skin-tight canvas pants with buttons, liked deck-shoes without socks even though he got seasick at the sight of a boat rocking at anchor. Poorly fitting toupee and a mechanical sunlamp tan that left him looking like an underdone lobster. Yeah, Jeffrey could see him, all right. The black sheep of the family, the one nobody’d even heard from in ten years, the one who’d never married. All they knew was that he had a fancy antique shop in London. Right. That wasn’t so easy to check up on from five thousand miles away. The guy probably dealt out of the back of an old van, a battered white one with bald tires—
“My dear boy, I’m terribly sorry to have kept you waiting.” A deep, heavily accented voice boomed from beside him, making Jeffrey jerk upright. “I do hope you haven’t been here long.”
Jeffrey banged both knees in his scramble out of the booth. The gentleman extended a hand, said in his cultured voice, “Alexander Kantor. At your service.”
“Ah, nice, that is, Jeffrey Sinclair.” His hand was taken in by well-tanned fingers covered with the loose skin of an older man, then squeezed with a strength that made Jeffrey wince.
“You most certainly are. You would not know it, I am sure, but you are the mirror image of your maternal grandfather as a lad. Piotr was my father’s brother; you might have heard that from your family. When I was a young boy I positively worshiped the gentleman.” He gave a polished, even-toothed smile. “This lunch has already started off well, wouldn’t you say?”
He was every inch an aristocrat. His hair was a burnished silver, cut to perfection. His eyebrows bushed upward at an angle that on a lesser man would have looked ridiculous; on him they simply fit. Beneath their jutting arrogance, gray eyes peered at him with frank inspection. His face was fleshy, but held from looking overweight by a ponderous jaw. His nose was a veritable eagle’s beak. His dark suit was double-breasted and clearly hand-tailored. His tie was a mellow silk that matched his p
ocket kerchief, his shirt a crisp gray pin-stripe with white collar and cuffs. His watch, ring, and cufflinks were a matching design of woven white and yellow gold.
The waiter appeared at their elbow, beating the maitre d’ by half a stride. The two of them hovered about Alexander Kantor and played the roles of imperious restaurant manager and bustling server. The old gentleman paid them no mind, clearly accustomed to this sort of attention. All around the restaurant heads turned, brows furrowing in concentrated effort to remember where they had seen him before. There was no question about it, Alexander Kantor exuded a magnetic presence.
“So.” He waved aside the waiter’s ministrations, snapped open his napkin. “What is the family saying about me these days?”
“Ah, I don’t believe—”
“Come, come. I used to be their favorite topic of gossip; don’t tell me I’ve been forgotten. It never ceased to amaze me how they came up with some of the notions they did.”
“All I know is that you have an antiques business in London and live, ah . . .”
“Yes, go on, my boy. This is where it tends to become interesting.” At last he deigned to notice the maitre d’. “I’ll have what my young guest is having.”
“Sir, thus far your young guest has made do with six glasses of water and a dozen breadsticks.”
“Is that so? Well then, in that case I should compliment the young gentleman on his graceful manners, don’t you agree?” He settled the maitre d’ with one frosty glare. “It was most kind of you to wait like this, Jeffrey. It really was.”
Jeffrey watched his plans for a quick getaway fade into the distance. “My pleasure.”
“We have quite a bit of business to discuss. Perhaps we should dispense with the head-fogging ritual of aperitifs, don’t you think?”
“Fine with me.”
“Excellent. Now tell me,” he said, turning back to the maitre d’. “Does your wine menu extend as far as the fair fields of France?”
“It does indeed, sir.”
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