“Well, the good news is that Faberge’s chief gemologist was indeed Philippe Lukinoff. He died in a Bolshevik prison camp in 1920. Henrik Wigstrom, the designer, was also a real person. He seems to have simply disappeared. Unfortunately, however, the fact they were real people is really quite irrelevant. Basically, I couldn’t find a single piece of hard data that helps authenticate your report.”
“Nothing?”
“Zip. There’s simply no history of this stone, Miss Gavrill. And even if the other historical records and registries had somehow missed it, meticulous diaries of all the Romanov jewels were kept by Empress Alexandra. My Russian history friend had a copy of her inventory and I reviewed it line by line. I found nothing even remotely like the stone you mentioned. I don’t see how a gem of such size and quality could have escaped her attention.”
Kate’s heart fell. Perhaps the whole thing had been Anya’s personal fairytale, a story she’d invented to lend legitimacy to her affair with Nicholas, one she’d passed on to her granddaughter. But then how could she explain the documents at Chase Manhattan?
“Miss Gavrill,” Blake said, leaning toward her, “I must admit I’m quite curious. Why are you so interested?”
Kate’s gaze fell to her hands, then went to the room’s rough-hewn rafters. She toyed with the stem of her wine glass. “Well, it appears this stone has been willed to me.” Even as she uttered them, Kate had a hard time believing her own words.
“By whom? There must be some record of such a piece. Someone would have insured it, surely.”
“Not likely. It’s been lost for many years.”
“Ummm.” His grunt had that patronizing tone she’d picked up the day before. “I wish I knew more about the circumstances.”
Kate stared back in silence. Despite being something of a know-it-all, he did seem to have a strong sense of integrity. Even so, she wasn’t about to reveal all the details about her family’s connection to the stone to someone she’d just met.
The fussy waiter returned, smoothed and resmoothed their tablecloth until Kate glared at him. He then disappeared, flinging a hand in the air in disgust.
“Anyhow,” Blake said, picking up their conversation, “Be careful what you wish for. Do you realize the danger such a stone would pose to its owner?”
“How so?”
“My God, Miss Gavrill, have you any idea what the piece described in that document would be worth? I should hazard $50 million or more. Perhaps much more. And that’s a very conservative guess. Every major collector and museum in the world would be in a bidding war for such a stone. It would have everything—great provenance, great rarity and unmatched quality.”
The waiter brought their food, which they consumed in silence.
After the meal, Kate hunched forward. She smelled the faint spoor of wine on his breath, and detected that he wore no cologne. He still needed a shave. “What if I were to bring this stone to you, actually show it to you in person,” she said, lowering her voice. “Would you be able to confirm its authenticity?”
“Of course. That’s my business. I’ll buy you a better dinner too, as long as you promise not to engage in any more wardrobe malfunctions.” He smiled. Kate did not smile back. “But, seriously, where would you go to find it?”
“Russia.”
“Alone?” There it was again, that supercilious, disempowering tone.
“Yes, alone. Guess what? I’m all grown up. I go places by myself. Unless, of course,” Kate added mockingly, “you’re volunteering to come along as my protector. Given what you’ve just said, however, anyone would be a fool to come with me, don’t you think? Chasing after a non-existent treasure would be a waste of time.”
“Don’t joke with me, Miss Gavrill. I know something about doing business in Russia. It can be a dangerous country, even more so if you are carrying valuables. Do you really believe you could move about with such a jewel and no one would notice? International thieves operate all over the world. Their networks are as close as the nearest Internet café.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said, her voice rising to the determined tone of a classroom declaration. “I have friends there.”
“Oh yes, and when we met you were walking around Manhattan with a $140,000 Faberge brooch, which any teenage purse snatcher could have had in a split second.”
“How would you have suggested I get it to you? In a Brinks truck?” In fact, she’d decided to wear the piece as a talisman. It circled her neck now, if he’d bothered to notice.
Kate stood and offered him her hand. He took it with his own palm up; in the way men had a generation earlier. There was something courtly in the gesture, and for an instant she found herself warming to him. But then, he probably had clients in Old Europe, where such mannerisms were part of business etiquette.
Kate rotated her fingers into a sideways grip. “Thank you very much for dinner, Mr. Blake.” She forced a smile. “I’ll call when I return.”
Blake’s expression changed to one of serious concern. “If you really are thinking about going to Russia alone, Miss Gavrill, please reconsider. I didn’t make it up. There are criminal gangs all over Russia and they prey on people in the jewelry business. You may not be safe.”
But the young woman hadn’t heard him; she’d already headed for the exit.
* * *
AFTER SHE left, Blake crossed the street to a parking garage and sat silently in his car, an ancient Bentley Continental coupe. His striking dinner guest had made a greater impact than she knew, personally and professionally.
He thought of her frost blue eyes, pale as the arctic, and her rose petal skin. No question Kate Gavrill was attractive, beautiful even. Their shared humor the day before made her more so. He could still recall the scent Manhattan’s heat had baked into her bra. It was an athlete’s smell: fresh, scrubbed by chlorine and strong soap, without the masquerade of perfume.
But she also seemed wary, tightly wound and, in a brittle way, vulnerable. He doubted she was married. Blake’s own brief marriage had broken apart over his obsession with work. He gauged Kate Gavrill’s genetic imprint to be not unlike his own. A chief attribute—as his ex-wife never failed to reminded him—was an inability to open up about one’s inner feelings.
Adrienne, of course, had no trouble at all getting inside him, whether he felt like being open or not. She read him like a book. Blake’s current companion and occasional bedmate was, at forty-eight, seven years older than he, but looked five years younger. Theirs was a quasi-platonic relationship or, as Adrienne tartly put it, tugging on his ear, “sometimes we’re just friends and sometimes we’re friends with benefits.” When she was in a raunchier mood, Adrienne said they were “fuck buddies.”
They made an odd pair—he in his carelessly creased trousers, rustic sweaters and worn loafers, and she, a fashion editor and former model, always impeccably turned out. Perhaps, Adrienne had suggested, the arrangement worked because each was too separately committed professionally to be jointly committed personally. In any case, Adrienne would be on his arm at the theater tonight.
* * *
It’s a film clip that for years will replay in her head.
At first everything seems to go exactly as planned.
It’s the opening event of the season, the women’s 10-meter board, and Kate appears at the examination room about an hour before competing. The scene is pure, pre-competition hubbub: divers mill about; sign forms; traipse in and out with paper cups; giggle to hide their jitters.
“Hand me your purse and fill these out,” a heavyset monitor says curtly. Nearly six feet tall, with tightly bound hair, a broad, pink face and wire-framed glasses, the woman looks like a prison guard. Heart pounding, Kate signs and returns the papers. No turning back now, girl.
The woman hands her a paper cup and crooks her finger. Kate follows her to a restroom about 30 feet down the hall.
The monitor takes a widespread stance near the bathroom door. Kate slips into the stall at the far end.
In the past, these same tests seemed as routine as pulling on her swim cap. Now, however, Kate’s fingers tremble as she sits on the toilet seat and unbuttons her blouse. Beneath the stall’s partition, a reflection from the room’s single overhead light gleams up from the shiny concrete floor. She hears the muffled shouts and laughter of athletes passing in the hall.
Kate places the paper cup atop the toilet, and slides a flattened palm inside the padded, underwire bra. The plastic bottle feels warm against the outside of her right breast.
Abruptly, Kate hears the shuffle of rubber-treaded soles. The monitor’s lace-up brown leather shoes pass in sight under the partition. And stop. The woman stands less than a dozen feet away.
Fingers still shaking, Kate undoes the clasp at the front of her bra. Her fingers close around the plastic container. Holding the bottle tightly—if dropped, it will be in clear view—she reads the thermometer: 98.6. Perfect.
Kate squeezes the warm yellow liquid into the cup. It even sounds like real pee.
Later, Kate will be unable to decide if jumpy nerves cause her to squeeze the bottle too tightly or whether some of the phony urine has spilled onto its sides, making it slippery.
Either way, Kate freezes in horror as, spewing yellow fluid, the vessel pops from her fingers, shooting under the stall wall and across the slick concrete floor. It skids, spins, and stops.
Between a pair of lace-up brown leather shoes.
* * *
HE TREATED you like a little girl.
While her thoughts swirled around Simon Blake, Kate slouched in her seat, waiting for the train to pull out of Penn Station.
Oh, hell, I deserved it. Besides, I’ll make him eat every word. I’ve already bought the plane tickets.
Could he have a thing for me?
Nonsense. All he did was put me down. And how about that Eisenhower era handshake? Those sloppy, circa sixties Ivy League clothes? That cocky George Clooney eyebrow thing. He’s so . . . so . . . archaic!
The train lurched forward. Kate pulled her curtain closed. Her feisty confidence dissolved.
Blake didn’t need to convince her that danger might lie ahead. Her entire life had been turned upside down and her mother was dead—claimed by an accident that may well have been no accident at all.
Moreover, how could she be sure Blake’s skepticism about the alexandrite wasn’t justified? After all, what real proof did she have that the egg, stone and bank account even existed? Or ever had? A few measly scraps of easily forged paper?
She didn’t really know anything about the note-writer Imre Novyck, or his relationship with her mother. Could he shed any light on what she’d learned? Had Irina intended to tell her anything else about him?
She’d had another cell phone message from Lt. MacMahon. No news, he said, and still no suspects. When would she learn what really happened to her mother?
Yet Blake’s skepticism had also focused her determination. As a diver, Kate had learned to use her rivals’ competitiveness to rev up her own. The more her opponents wanted to win, the more she strove to best them. His condescending manner seemed to release those same juices. No matter her doubts, this lady wasn’t for turning. This Gavrill was moving forward.
Nothing Blake had said could dilute the potency of her mother’s words, or the power of the obligation Kate felt to make things right between them. Was her Romanov fortune real? What could she lose by finding out? She knew this much: It was worth a trip to Russia, no matter how risky.
* * *
morning sunlight streamed through the high windows above Blake’s desk, warming his back. He rustled through some papers and thought again about what he should have said the night before.
He should have told Kate about Bret Steiner, his former assistant and protégé. Correction, his late assistant and protégé. Bret had died in Russia, slain by jewel thieves.
Why hadn’t he told her? She’d left before he could. But he’d seen the look in her eyes. She wouldn’t have listened. Still, he could have been more forceful. Perhaps, Blake thought, he didn’t want to risk driving her away.
He stewed for three days, then dialed the Pennsylvania number on her card. The phone rang four times before her answering machine picked up. Kate Gavrill, it announced, was on leave for the summer, beginning Monday, July 24. She would be traveling abroad on family business, and wouldn’t be checking her messages. So that was the end of it. She’d left two days before, and there was nothing he could do. Blake wondered if he would ever again look into those mysterious eyes, or hear of the Romanov Stone.
Chapter 14
Kate’s heaving chest sucked Moscow’s oppressive heat—and its admixture of unburned diesel fuel—to the depths of her lungs. People might think of Russia’s capital as cold and snowy, but during the summer the city boasted the highest temperatures in northern Europe.
Kate’s thighs shook as her feet pounded into the cinder path alongside the Yauza River. Shoving up the sleeve of her loose popover jacket, she glanced at her wrist. Out for her first two-mile run in a week, she was making good time. Fresh legs.
Writers often compared Moscow’s circular layout to a sawn tree trunk. As Kate crossed the Garden Ring, she could see why. In its 850 years, the city had grown relentlessly and concentrically, radiating out from the Moskva River Fortress that later became The Kremlin.
She jogged to Leftortovo Park. The afternoon sun draped a sparkling tiara over tiny, breeze-blown minarets that danced on the surface of the park’s ponds and streams. Couples sat on benches and kissed. Lefortovo’s Dutch canals had been a favorite trysting place for three centuries, ever since the district first swelled with West European expatriates, mostly Swiss and Germans, who served the tsars. Catherine the Great built a majestic palace here, then promptly died. Her son Peter, who hated his mother, turned the spectacular structure into an army barracks.
But neither her route’s history nor its unique architecture could explain Kate’s presence in this Moscow district. That could only be attributed to a much more ominous edifice, the notorious Lefortovo Prison. Located just a few blocks from her hotel, it was there she would meet the next morning with one Imre Novyck, the man to whom her mother had written before her death.
* * *
Three things struck Kate about the person she’d come to see. First, contrary to Irina’s belief and her own assumption, he was not a “corrections official” or “judicial officer” at Lefortovo. Imre Novyck was an inmate.
Second, he wore a white surgical mask, even during conversation, and a wireless headset that crawled around his ear and cheekbone like an annelid worm. “Tuberculosis,” Novyck explained, pointing to the white material that covered his face. His hand brushed the air in a rapid gesture of dismissal. “I don’t have it, but many others here do. TB pervades this hell-hole.”
Kate covered her mouth with a handkerchief.
Third, was Novyck’s unexpected charm. Despite the muffling mask and ever-present earpiece, his voice was soft and oddly Western European, a mix of Moscow and Oxford-BBC. Peering out from an overhang of thick, untamed eyebrows, his dark eyes glowed like embers in a cave.
Kate quickly sensed their ability to hold her attention. After a few minutes, she began to notice an odd and unsettling contradiction. Juxtaposed with Novyck’s well-modulated voice, his smouldering gaze left an observer feeling peculiarly off balance, as if teetering between a sense of soothing calm and an imminent fear of being devoured.
Novyck stood near a small recessed window.
The morning sun skimmed his wiry body like a stage light. Beneath his thin prison T-shirt, lean muscles rippled across a hardpan stomach. Kate took the fact they could meet alone—in an unattended guard’s room—as clear evidence of his special status at the prison. In addition, the headset indicated he also possessed a smart phone, a seemingly unusual perk for the inhabitant of one of the world’s most notorious dungeons.
“Please accept my apologies for the circumstances of our meeting,” he said, sensing her question. “Despite what you see, I am not a criminal.”
“Why are you here?” Kate remembered the cautious tone of Irina’s note. How would her mother have reacted if she learned she’d been either mistaken or misled about Novyck’s status at Lefortovo?
Sensing her skepticism, Novyck’s voice rose behind the paper mask. “I am not a criminal,” he insisted again. “I am being illegally detained for political reasons. There are many in my situation. A remnant of old Russia, I’m afraid.”
“I wouldn’t know one way or another,” Kate replied. For some reason—jet lag, perhaps—she felt slightly woozy. “I’m here because my mother thought you could help me find some, uh, family belongings.”
The eyes trained steadily on her. Obviously, he knew precisely why she’d visited and what she was talking about. “I know,” he said. “I wrote your mother to offer my humble assistance. After all, my family has served yours for what amounts to a century.”
Now his low voice trembled with barely contained passion. “You are the great-granddaughter of the last tsar. The closest living link to our sainted Romanovs.”
Abruptly, he dropped to his knees, taking her hands in his. “From the beginning, my family recognized the Romanov’s divine right to rule. We suffered, but we never wavered. It is no different now.”
Astonished, Kate pulled back. Suddenly dizzy, she sought her footing on the uneven concrete floor. She sat down on one of the small room’s two hardwood chairs. Kate judged Novyck to be some years older than she. He was slender-framed and stood only an inch or so taller. Yet despite his momentary kneeling position, he exuded an aura of power, mastery and dominance.
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