Moments later, Kate settled into the rear seat of Novyck’s sumptuous sedan, sipping a warm sherry. Imre would take her to his residence in Moscow—she could recuperate there. She’d connect with Simon later and let him know she was safe. Right now, though, she was exhausted. She sank back into the cushions and closed her eyes.
Chapter 43
Simon Blake picked up the phone message for Kate at the Imperial Hotel. It was from a Lt. MacMahon in Pennslyvania.
He walked over to a house phone and punched in his calling card. The connection with the state police office was amazingly clear—the miracle of satellite communications, Blake assumed.
“Miss Gavrill left a message saying she could be reached at this hotel,” explained an officer who introduced himself as Lt. Donald MacMahon. “I wanted her to know we’ve made some progress in her case.”
“Ms. Gavrill is not here at the moment. May I help?” Blake wondered whether the call was legitimate, but the man’s tone sounded genuine.
“Do you know Ms. Gavrill? May I ask your name?” MacMahon seemed hesitant, almost protective.
“I’ve been traveling with her and she’s disappeared. She told me you were investigating her mother’s death.” Blake quickly explained his professional connection to Kate, leaving out any personal details.
“That’s true, and thanks to a local farmer who spotted the perpetrators getting out of the truck used in the hit and run, we know a little more about what happened,” Lt. MacMahon went on, “They got into a large Mercedes, and a neighboring farmer managed to get most of the license plate, enough for us to trace the car to a rental company in Manhattan. Brooklyn, actually. Anyhow, the company turned out to be a shell. The real owner is a nightclub in Brighton Beach. We have a description of the two men who drove the vehicle. But it won’t do much good.”
“Why not?”
“We’re quite certain they were in the U.S. temporarily—and illegally. They apparently split up, and at least one left the country the same day.”
“Did you learn anything about these men?” Blake was beginning to wonder why MacMahon had called.
“They’re Russian nationals,” Lt. MacMahon replied. “And they’re almost certainly in Moscow right now. Tell Miss Gavrill to be very careful.”
* * *
Kate stepped out of the deep, octagonal-shaped bathtub and walked into the adjoining bedroom.
The heavy drapes and thick Persian carpet sharply contrasted with her most recent surroundings. She shrugged off the terry cloth robe she’d been given and rolled into bed, luxuriating in silk sheets and a down-filled mattress. Weariness washed over her like a soft sea.
She touched the small gold frog that hung from her neck and thought of Simon Blake. For most of their time together, she’d been a bitch. Some of it reflected her own frustration after learning the stone was a fake. But some of her reaction, Kate knew, was self-protective. Fearing her attraction to him, she’d pushed away, repeating her post Jack Nars pattern of choosing to repress signals, however strong, from her own emotions. Kate’s skin tingled against the sheer, slippery bedclothes. She rolled over, languidly scissoring her naked legs.
Through barely open eyes, Kate saw a familiar icon hanging between a set of bookshelves. It was The Holy Face: a copy of an image allegedly made by Christ when he pressed a piece of cloth to his features. The face Kate saw was masculine, with a long nose and surprisingly red lips. The head was surrounded by a gilt halo. Christ’s brown hair fell in even lengths, and his beard cleaved into sharp, Muslim-like points. His eyes seemed infinitely kind.
She wondered: Is this what sustained Irina and Anya through a lifetime of fear?
Apprehension had honed Irina’s maternal instincts. But she’d had another source of strength: her Orthodox faith. As a young woman, Kate remembered feeling embarrassed the few times schoolage friends came to visit. The icons’ heavy metallic lacquering and flat perspectives had seemed foolish and hopelessly irrelevant at the time.
Irina insisted otherwise. “Don’t you see?” she’d asked rhetorically, “The gilding holds the eye just long enough to let God enter the soul. The two-dimensional image does not require interpretation, and therefore doesn’t stand between you and God the way it does in three-dimensional western art.” To Irina, the power of an icon lay not in its self-reflected meaning to a viewer, but rather in the shared understanding of a precise truth, defined and conveyed by a supreme being.
“Think of icons as sacred doors,” her mother said, “between this world and a world of spiritual perfection—a place of peace, love, and holiness.”
Privately, Kate scoffed at her mother’s provincial religiosity. An Old World relic, she said to herself. She’d always been an atheist, at least since college. She could not deny, however, that religion had served her mother well. She hoped it was giving her peace now.
Kate rolled over. Another icon hung on the opposite wall. A hooved jet-black figure with leathery wings sat on a throne fashioned from a seven-headed serpent. Behind it rose a wall of flames. Rarely depicted in Eastern Orthodoxy, the icon portrayed an eleventh century rendering of The Last Judgment. The figure was that of Beelzebub, the Great Satan.
* * *
Before returning to his hotel room, Blake detoured to an increasingly familiar haunt: the Imperial’s atrium-style fern bar. He’d spent the day running back and forth between the Moscow Police department and the airport. An interview with an inspector from the city’s missing persons bureau had taken hours. People disappeared every day in Moscow, he was told—women especially. Most were surreptitiously leaving the country for prospective husbands they’d found on the Internet. Or they were going to Italy to work as whores. In any case, so far, Blake had learned nothing; it was as if Kate had dematerialized. Now Lt. MacMahon warned she was in grave danger.
Is that why she’d left so suddenly? Her empty hotel room was his only clue. It suggested an angry woman turning a page. She’d swept up her belongings and—like the old show tune—washed that man right out of her hair.
One thing was certain: Kate had shaken his life. His stable existence, his predictable relationship with Adrienne, his secure professional standing—all trembled on their foundations in the wake of Hurricane Kate.
But she’d also brought something that had been missing in his life, a heady mix of passion and excitement he hadn’t known since his twenties. Sweetness too. On a warm evening a week ago, the woman who now apparently hated him, had slipped her arm through his as they strolled along Park Avenue. He could still recall the soft nudge of her breast above his elbow.
Damn! Where was she?
Blake saw his own reflection in the long mirror behind the bar. The gray streaks in his brown hair seemed more pronounced, the ravine between his eyebrows deeper, than a few days ago. His dog-tired bones seemed every bit as old as the man who stared back at him.
Chapter 44
On Christoprudny Bulvar, the eighth of ten consecutive avenues that make up Moscow’s horseshoe-shaped Boulevard Ring, two men—one large and pale, the other small and dark—sat on a bench. They stared across the wide tree-lined street at a large late nineteenth-century mansion. The home’s pillared, brick-and-plaster edifice extended to the edge of the sidewalk.
Hector Molina sipped coffee. Vulcan Krasky turned a rolled copy of the Moscow Times in his hands.
“She’s been in there for six hours,” Molina said, twirling a miniature plastic spoon in the dark liquid. “In the home of a priest who also happens to be one of the biggest capos in Eastern Europe. What do you suppose is going on?”
Krasky frowned, stroking his heavy jaw. “Follow the money,” he grunted. “They abducted her from the Imperial. Then they took her to that dump. Now here. They must think she knows where to find the real stone.”
“That priest cannot be taken lightly,” Molina said. “We must proceed with extreme caution.” Standing
, he walked to the curb, poured his cup’s dregs onto the pavement, then crushed the stiff paper container in his fist. He stared at the spreading stain of liquid. Even in the heat, steam rose from the concrete.
“Our plan is still valid,” Molina declared. “Together or separately, the woman and Blake will lead us to the stone. In the end, if we have to steal it from this Novyck, so be it. I doubt his vaults are more secure than those at Harry Winston’s or Harrods—and I’ve been inside both.”
He turned back, lowering his head to look at Krasky, still seated on the bench. “In any case, we need to track both Blake and Novyck and his entourage.”
Vulcan Krasky did not reply. He gripped the newspaper in both hands, twisting the ends into a tight tourniquet. His dark, unblinking eyes focused straight ahead. He thought of what Boris Lada would say. To Krasky, the woman across the street had become an ogress. One who had tormented his life long enough.
Chapter 45
Bound in blue leather and about the size of a catechism, the small ledger contained columns of financial data. Its tables, which reported the annual interest rates paid by leading European banks during the Twentieth Century, would be of little interest to anyone other than an economist. At this moment however, to Simon Blake the little book was as precious as a Gutenberg Bible.
“Where did you find this?” he asked. He turned the small volume over in his hand, staring at the bookplate on its inside cover: “From the Library of Professor Kate Gavrill, Marion State University.” Blake’s tone was sharp. He’d played the “Where’s Kate” game long enough.
“Actually, it was turned in this morning,” replied the same Imperial Hotel manager who’d helped him enter Kate’s room. Moments before, the man had called Blake’s room to announce the find. “An employee of—shall we say—a lesser hotel brought it by. Apparently, Miss Gavrill used one of our business cards as a bookmark. They found this under her bed. Miss Gavrill, I’m sorry to say, had already checked out.”
Blake’s irritation gave way to muted elation. Kate must have taken the ledger with her on their trip, apparently to estimate the cumulative value of her account at the Bank of England. At least she might still be in Moscow. But why would she seek out a second-rate hotel? Was she that determined he not find her?
A short cab ride later, he stood at the desk of The Khrushchev Arms, which appeared to have gone unpainted since its eponymously honored government.
The hotel’s manager, a small bald man with a thick black mustache, had no memory of a female American guest. When Blake pressed a few rubles into his palm, however, his recall powers improved markedly. Two days before, he had registered a sleepy “Russian Princess” with short black hair and snow-white skin.
“Her eyes were like Siberian ice,” the man said in surprisingly clear English. Momentarily turning away, he picked at a piece of curling wallpaper. “They made a mess I’m afraid.”
He led Blake to a room where workmen had just finishing rehanging a battered-looking door on rusty hinges. They stood in the corridor and peered inside. The air smelled of stale bedclothes and sweat; the furnishings were sparse and worn. On the floor lay a long piece of telephone cord and an upturned chair.
What had gone on here? Blake wondered. He’d spent most of the previous night without sleep. His eyelids seemed to burn whenever he shifted his gaze.
“She arrived in a party of five men, but then all of the men left but one,” the manager said. He pulled at his moustache as if adjusting it. “The little book apparently fell out of either a suitcase or garment bag.”
Blake shook his head, more puzzled than ever. He looked at the dark unpainted floors and imagined Kate’s smooth feet against their splinter-riddled surface. Other than the little book, there was no evidence she had ever been here.
One thing was certain. It wasn’t a place Kate would choose freely, unless she was trying to conceal her location.
His concern was rapidly deepening into fear. Blake glanced again at the room’s door. Kate was physically strong, amazingly so for her size. But she was no match for five men.
At least he knew where to look next. The first place, assuming she was free, that Kate herself would go: Lefortovo Prison. And her only reason for going there would have been to see a man he had never met or trusted: Imre Novyck.
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Chapter 46
Lefortovo’s rim of coiled barbed wire underscored its official description as a “prison and investigation complex.” Blake remembered seeing a list of some of its past occupants, nearly all arrested on false political charges. They included Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish businessman and savior of Jews during the Holocaust; Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the writer; Larissa Shiptsova, an environmental activist; and Rusian Alikhadzhiyev, speaker of the separatist Chechen parliament.
Indeed, it was entirely possible, Blake thought, that, just as he’d claimed, Novyck had also been jailed on trumped-up charges. After all, the former Communist regime had been expert at applying a veneer of legality to cases against its political foes. Sometimes a dubious psychiatric diagnosis would be excuse enough to confine political prisoners. Any of these could explain Novyck’s incarceration. Or he could just be a crook.
A black Volga taxi took Blake to the prison. At the main visitors’ entrance, he was met by a guard who ushered him through a narrow, low-ceilinged passage into a small office on the first floor.
Within a few minutes a prison officer appeared. From the three stripes on his sleeve Blake judged him to be a sergeant. The officer was noncommittal when asked to name Novyck’s offense. “A political transgression,” he replied, cocking an eyebrow. “Like everyone else here.”
Inside, Lefortovo seemed as hostile and remorseless as it did on the outside. It took 200,000 rubles—better than a month’s pay for a prison guard—for Blake to learn that Novyck had been abruptly released much earlier than expected. Fifty thousand more yielded his address.
His meeting with the prison officer ended abruptly at 5:00 p.m., when the guards began dispensing teapots through the small access doors in each of Lefortovo’s cells. Even through the prison’s thick walls, Blake could hear clanging sounds as he made his way outside.
He left the facility in a state of depressed confusion. Why had Novyck really been imprisoned? Was he innocent, as he insisted and Kate apparently believed? Had the former Soviets regarded him as an enemy of the state, perhaps for good reason? Why had he put himself at risk to help Kate in what—at least to official eyes—could have been considered a crime? Was the true reason old family ties? And why was he suddenly and unexpectedly released?
He couldn’t answer even one of these questions. But he did know what to do next.
* * *
Blake entered Boulevard Ring at Old Arbat Road, once home to the country’s most revered writers and artists. Strolling through the tree-lined park at the boulevard’s center, he joined a stream of humanity—mothers with baby carriages, couples strolling arm in arm, boys chasing each other around benches and shinnying up lamp posts. He passed squares and playgrounds, leafy clearings where old men sat at tables playing chess, and street sellers hawked ice cream and kvas, a Russian wine made from bread.
For generations, Moscow’s illuminati populated the city’s “rings” and their “crookedly” side streets. The signature pink, green and yellow pastels, the high, airy windows and delicate friezes—all the characteristic features of the city’s most treasured eighteenth and nineteenth century buildings—were found, distilled, within these former fortifications.
Blake’s walk canted down at Rozhdestvensky Bulvar, sloping off one of the city’s few hills. To his right and a mile away, crowds were already lining up outside the Bolshoi for tickets to that evening’s performance. He quickly strolled the length of Stretensky, the shortest of the ring’s boulevards.
Blake pulled a square linen handkerchief from his pocket, shaking it out as he brought the c
loth to his forehead. The sun had dropped, but the July humidity was at its stifling worst, rising up from the Moskva River like a suffocating blanket.
A glossy-black, fortress-like wooden door, opening directly onto the sidewalk, served as entry to Novyck’s mansion on Christoprudny. Two stories above the street and supported by white pillars as tall as three men, the facing wall extended sixty feet. A small, colonnaded balcony jutted out to the curb.
Blake lifted and dropped the large iron knocker. On the sidewalk, a woman in a red jacket dragged a small dog with sad eyes at the end of a leash.
A heavy-shouldered man wearing a black Armani suit opened the door, which swung soundlessly on its massive hinges. Moments later, Blake sat in Imre Novyck’s study.
* * *
“So!” Novyck clapped his hands as he entered the room from a side door. “You are searching for our mutual friend, Miss Gavrill?”
Despite Blake’s earlier suspicions, in person Novyck seemed gracious and concerned. Yet his opening gambit, which implied their equal standing in Kate’s eyes, triggered a flash of jealousy. About his own age, the man moved with assurance. And although Blake found his electronic earpiece disconcerting, he dressed simply but elegantly, much like his subordinate at the door, in Armani black.
Novyck offered him a cognac, which Blake accepted. His host poured himself a glass of Pellegrino, shifted his weight to one leg, and braced an elbow against the bookcase. As Novyck leaned forward, a gap opened in his silk shirt. From a thin silver necklace, swung a small, finely made Eastern Orthodox crucifix. It included two additional crossbars, a shorter nameplate above the head position and, below, an angled bar for the feet.
Blake let the slithery liquid heat his throat. “I had reason to believe,” he began, “that she would contact you.”
The Romanov Stone Page 20
