So the story was this (at least, this is what he told us. I came to find out that there was more to it than what he let on): It was all about eggs. That's right, eggs. He wouldn't go into any more detail than that, except to say that they were valuable. Someone in Fordlandia (yeah, can you imagine naming a town that?) had some valuable eggs, and Vlad needed help stealing them. Eggs! Were they from a golden chicken or something? To this day I've never seen them, so I have no idea what made them so valuable. Bruce thought they were maybe dinosaur eggs, but Bruce was a little soft in the head. I liked him. He was a good guy. Just a little soft. Like me, I don't think he was cut out for a life of crime.
"Sounds like a Honeycutt," I said.
Anyway, so this guy we were supposed to steal them from was also a Russian. He was some bigwig there, so he lived in one of the big houses. Vlad said he couldn't do it alone. He needed help. He said the guy who hired him would pay us a fortune for them. At first we thought it would be a way for Flanagan to make money on this deal, but then we all thought, "Fuck Flanagan. He doesn't have to know."
So we land at the Island of Innocence and deliver the hooch. The one thing Flanagan never thought about was that they had us over a barrel. That wasn't meant to be funny, but I guess it is. They knew we were stuck. We had to sell it to them because we couldn't very well turn around and take the whole shipment home. So they gave a us a fraction of what it was worth, and we had to take it. Flanagan lost thousands on that deal.
We took the money and put it aside for Flanagan. One thing we all knew: he wasn't going to pay us a dime. He'd accuse us of taking a bad deal, losing the money, or even worse, stealing it from him. However you looked at it, he was losing big and he'd have to pass the loss onto someone. We were the someone.
When the deal—such as it was—was done, we went to Fordlandia and rented a house for a week. They let us do that in the hopes that we'd want to stay and work there. Seems they were always hiring. They especially liked Americans. As it turns out, John did stay. He said he liked it down there, but I'm not so sure that he wasn't just afraid of going back and facing Flanagan. Truth be told, he was like Bruce and me; he was too nice a guy. He was a struggling artist—back then everyone was a struggling something—who just needed a steady job. We all liked John and didn't mind him deserting us. When I think back, the only real criminal in our group was Tony. He was bad. We were all a little afraid of him, I think.
So Vlad gave us the lowdown on the job. He made it sound easy. At least I think he did. I still had trouble understanding him. But Tony seemed to understand him okay, so I went with that. I still didn't know exactly what we were stealing. The rumors were that a lot of the bigwigs there were smuggling gold out of the country, so naturally I assumed that was the treasure. Turns out I was right … and wrong. They were smuggling gold, the whole lot of them, all those guys who lived in the nice houses on the hill. And we got some of the gold, but we got something else too, something that Vlad said was worth ten times what the gold was worth. I assume it was the eggs.
I never saw them myself, so this is all second-hand. You see, we split up to do the jobs. Bruce and I had one house and Tony and Vlad had another. Tony said we should concentrate on the two houses that they had scoped out as having the most gold. To try to break into all of them—there were about six—would be too risky. What Bruce and I didn't know was that the house Tony and Vlad were going in was the one the Russian was living in. And they weren't going after any gold.
Tony spent a few days scoping things out. He talked to people and he watched the men who lived in the big houses. He even broke into a couple on his scouting mission. He said as tempting as it was to steal some of the gold, it was important to wait until the time was right. Finally, two days before we were going to leave, he set the plan into motion. He told us which house had the most gold and where to find it. I have to say, Tony was good. His directions led us right to the horde. And let me tell you, there was a lot of it!
It was the easiest job I'd ever pulled. We did it during the day when everyone was at work. We found the stash in the wall of the bedroom—right where Tony said it would be—and spent an hour getting it out. There were a few bags of gold ore and dust, but mostly it was gold that had been melted into bars. I didn't know how much it was all worth, but I knew it was a fortune.
Bruce and I took it out the back door into the jungle. It took about five trips each—the stuff was damn heavy. We put the boards back exactly the way we found them. If we were lucky, the guy who lived there wouldn't check on his gold until after we were long gone. Once we were in the jungle, we found a small gully just the right size. We piled in the gold and covered it with dirt, leaves, and rocks. No one would find it there. The day we were leaving we would pack it into some of the empty liquor crates and put it on the boat.
We were in heaven. We were rich! All five of us would have enough to last a lifetime. We included John even though he didn't do the actual stealing. We figured we might need him later. As it turns out, we did.
So when Tony and Vlad met with us later and told us that they didn't get any gold, it was a surprise. But then they said that what they got was even better than gold. We were a little dubious, to say the least. Tony said they hid it and would show us the next day. The made a reference again to the eggs and said it was the find of the century. It didn't make any sense to me.
Sadly, it never made any sense, because I never got to see the eggs. To this day I have no idea what they were talking about. The next day all hell broke loose. First, Tony and Vlad got into a big fight. It seems that Vlad needed to bring those eggs to a contact in the states. He was working for someone. Never found out who, because Tony killed Vlad. Just like that. They had an argument about something and Tony stabbed him right through the heart. Tony says he was defending himself, but we all knew better. He didn't want to share the eggs with Vlad. Since he didn’t want to tell us anything about them, he obviously didn't want to share them with the rest of us either.
After Tony killed Vlad, all hell broke loose and we knew it was time to go. Three of the Fordlandia guys had Tony cornered, and Bruce—who didn't even like Tony—shot one of them. I don't think he meant to, but Bruce wasn't so great with guns and I think it went off accidently. I figured that because Bruce dropped the gun and ran into the woods. He spent half the trip home crying like a baby about how he had killed a guy.
"Definitely a Honeycutt," I said.
Well, we hightailed it to the boat—the same boat we had hired to get there. They hung around because Tony had promised them a big payoff if they'd wait. In the end, he stiffed them, but that was Tony.
We made it back to New York a few weeks later, broke and tired. I thought Flanagan was going to kill us all, and he almost did, but somehow Tony talked him out of it. But we were done with Flanagan and he was done with us. We all got legit jobs, but with the knowledge that as soon as we got the word from Tony, we'd be involved in the biggest score anyone had ever seen.
Which brings me back to John. Tony put John in charge of hiding the treasure. We had to get out of there so fast, Tony didn't have time to do it. The plan was, when things quieted down, John was going to send Tony word of where it was hidden. And that's just what he did. A few months later Tony called us together with a plan. We had to rob a piece of art from the Brooklyn Museum. Tony and I did the heist, while Bruce acted as lookout. We were supposed to get one specific painting, but I said, "What the hell?" and took a whole pile of them.
John sent us instructions to where the treasure was hidden. Did he send us a letter with clear directions? No. Instead, he sent us a clue. A painting. The painting we were after in the museum. It was a clue, but really it was a "fuck you" message to Tony. Turns out John hated Tony (big surprise, everyone hated him). I saw the painting. There was nothing in it Tony didn't already know. Fordlandia, a rubber tree, a house that looked like all the others, and a headstone.
Anyway, things were hot for a while after the heist, so Tony gave the painting
to Bruce and told him to hide it. Right after that, Bruce left town for a while; I think he found a good hiding place. As for me, I skipped town. I heard later that everyone assumed I was dead.
As for the others, Tony was killed a short time later. Bruce lasted a little while longer, but was killed in an accident. Last I heard about John, he left Fordlandia when Ford abandoned it. He developed some sort of fever and died before he could even leave Brazil.
Me? I took the name Preston and settled in the sticks, doing odd jobs. I never made it back down to Fordlandia.
Chapter 27
That was it, at least for us. The rest of the book went into his life in Vermont, his failed attempts at writing, and his regret that he never got to bring home the gold. Other than that, no further mention was made of Fordlandia, the heist, or the eggs.
"What do you think?" I asked. We had somehow ended up curled in each other's arms … and legs. Kind of like a giant pretzel. Extracting ourselves from that position was going to be interesting.
"Terrible novel. He had no imagination. He was only able to write about what he had experienced. He could have made up a story of going down to find the treasure. Gun battles. Intrigue. Anything. There was none of that."
"Other than that," she continued, "I think the location of the treasure died with John. Unless someone discovered it by accident, I think it is still there."
"Are you suggesting that it's time to go to Brazil?"
"I do."
"So what about the eggs?" I asked. "Any thoughts?"
"No, but I can try to find out. I need to go online."
I looked at her, then down at our entangled limbs.
"Really?"
"Uh, I'll look it up on my phone."
She ended up at the computer. We were both beginning to cramp up. Untangling ourselves seemed prudent.
Sabrina typed in "Russians" and "Eggs" and almost immediately we knew what we were looking for.
"Oh my God, of course. Faberge Eggs." She said it in a quiet voice, almost one of reverence. "It has to be. I can't believe I didn't make that connection before."
I didn't say anything. For a different reason than Sabrina's awe, though. It didn't really mean anything to me. I mean, sure, I had heard of Faberge Eggs. Just some ornate eggs, right? Yawn. Well, I guess it was a little more than that. As she read about them out loud to me and showed me the pictures, I gained a little more respect for them. Actually, I gained a lot of respect for them. This Faberge guy was a master craftsman. They weren't just ornate, they were truly treasures. Most of them were now in museums or private collections.
It was when Sabrina came across a reference to some "lost" eggs, that we perked up. It seems that Faberge had created a collection of fifty or so "Imperial Eggs" for the Russian Royal Family. When the Romanovs fell in 1918, the House of Faberge was ransacked and the fifty Imperial eggs were taken by the Bolsheviks. But of the fifty, eight mysteriously disappeared and were never found.
"Want to bet some of those eight found their way to Fordlandia?" Sabrina asked.
"I can see why Tony was so excited," I answered. "Even back then they were pretty valuable. Eighty-five years later, they are priceless." Then I added, "Yeah, I think it's time to go to Brazil.
*****
Traveling to Brazil wasn't like traveling to Iowa. It took us a couple of days to plan, pack, and let the important people in our lives know where we were going. For me that meant my mother, Mo, and Seymour. It was a bit more complicated for Sabrina, who had to deal with her agent and publisher. Now that she had cancelled all of her signings, at least she didn't have to deal with the publicity troll.
But it still wasn't easy. Sabrina was one of the hottest commodities in the country at that moment. There were Sabrina sightings all over the place—including one by an elderly couple named Simpson in Fairfield, Iowa. Her greatest fear had been realized. She was on the cover of magazines; she was in the news; she was exactly where she never wanted to be.
"So much for the J.D. Salinger life," she said during a quiet moment on the couch after turning off the news.
I felt guilty … massively guilty. After all, I was the one who suggested she go public. I said as much to her.
She turned toward me, cupped her hands around my ears and pulled me to her with a sudden strength. Good thing she liked me. Looking me in the eyes she said, "Del, you have no idea how much you've saved me. This was all going to come out eventually. I knew it, my editor knew it, and my agent knew it. Heck, even my therapist mentioned it. You know my … um … eccentricities, my distrust of people. No, more like my fear of people. Imagine me trying to deal with all this on my own. And that's exactly what would have happened. All of those people—my supposed support—would have been no help at all. I would have retreated. I probably would have quit writing. There is only one person in the world who truly understands me—with all my baggage—and only one person I can truly lean on for support.
"Me?" I asked innocently with a slight smile. Actually, it wasn't a smile. She was holding my head so firmly my lips were being pushed together. I imagined it looked like a smile, but it probably just gave me fish lips. She was latched onto my head the way she had latched onto my body when we first made love—like she didn't want to let go.
"Yes, you idiot. You." And then she jumped me. Oh my God. It was like nothing I'd ever experienced. The complete opposite of our earlier sexual forays, she was totally in charge. I let her. Hell, if I hadn't let her, she might have hurt me. It wasn't rough, just forceful. More inner demons—or inner somethings—were being released. I certainly didn't mind being the recipient. As we lay there afterward and I caught my breath, I kind of expected her to talk about it. But she didn't. Not a word. Another mysterious side to her. Well, she certainly wasn't boring anyway.
*****
We were about to leave for Boston the next morning so I could say my official goodbyes to Mo and Seymour, when Sabrina's cell phone rang. Not an uncommon occurrence, but in this case, it was Detective Marsh from Boston. Sabrina put it on speaker and let him know that I was listening too.
He got right to it. "Do you know two thugs named Freccetti and Danza?"
What, were we suddenly the expert on thugs?
"Should we?" asked Sabrina.
"Considering you almost put both of them in the hospital, I thought you might."
We looked at each other. "Fairfield?" she asked.
"Your attackers." He said it with an edge. Was he trying to scare us? Probably. Cops seemed to live for that.
"You are bringing this up for a reason?" Sabrina's demeanor had changed. Someone was stepping into her space. Whoa. Big mistake. If he thought he was going to intimidate her, he was sadly mistaken.
"I'm bringing it up because they are dead."
"They were in a dangerous business," she responded with a marked coolness. She was going to give back exactly what she was getting. I just stayed silent. I figured I'd know when—or if—I was needed.
"Where were you yesterday?"
The second time we were asked that question by a cop.
"You seriously think we had something to do with it?"
"Not you, Ms. Spencer. Mr. Honeycutt."
Moi?
"A witness described someone who looked suspiciously like you, Mr. Honeycutt."
My turn. "Well, I have a dozen witnesses putting me at the Westin yesterday."
"What time?"
"C'mon Marsh, you know better than that. To get from here to Iowa, kill two people, and back in the same day? It's a little ludicrous."
"Who said anything about Iowa? They were killed here in Boston."
That shut me up.
Sabrina took over … thank God. "You're pissing me off. What reason in the world would Del have to kill those guys? That incident began and ended for us in Iowa. We had no reason to pursue it further. Why don't you talk to Mario Guidry? He was their employer."
He hesitated just slightly, but I caught it. "He's disappeared. His known associates ha
ven't seen or heard from him in days. The word on the street in Chicago is that people are worried about his disappearance."
"And you believe them?
"We do."
"So because you people can't do your job, you are picking on Del. He was with me all day yesterday. Are you going to suggest now that I had something to do with their deaths?"
I loved it when she got into this mode.
Marsh hesitated again, this time a little longer. "I don't like your tone," he said finally. "Remember who you're talking to."
"Are we done?" she asked.
"For now. Honeycutt, don't leave town."
"We are leaving town," said Sabrina. She was all business now. Maybe because she knew exactly who she was dealing with. This was her territory and there was no fear. She lived in an environment for six years that saw no gray areas. Everything was black or white. Her conversation with Marsh was just as clear. "We are leaving the country tomorrow on business. If you try to stop us, I will have so many lawyers on your ass, you won't be able to sit down."
Silence. He could sense the change in her. He'd have to be a moron not to. He also knew I had nothing to do with their deaths. He knew that even before he called. He was probably trying to see if we knew anything that we were withholding from him. His tone suddenly changed.
"Sorry, this has been a stressful time. A double homicide is a big deal. And when we factor in your sister's death and the Chicago connection, it becomes complicated. I apologize if I went about it the wrong way."
All Lies Page 16
