by Adam Gittlin
The mutual feeling was a strong one. Each of us had done exactly what we had set out to do. We were all focused, intense, buzzing. Our captain had jumped right in with both feet, as always, leading by example. With the skill and balance of a tightrope walker, Tommy was tending to a significant portion of our combined affairs. He was working for us because we were working for him and he was actually enjoying the work load. The energy of such fierce multitasking was making him feel like a young, deal-hungry animal again.
At 10:00 a.m. sharp I was by my phone. Sam Archmont was the punctual type. It didn’t matter that he had had a wedding the night before, his own nonetheless. If he said he’d be in touch at ten, it meant he’d be in touch at ten.
Three minutes later Carolyn informed me Sam was on the phone.
“What’s the deal?” I started. “A sixth marriage doesn’t entitle us to a honeymoon anymore? What’s the world coming to?”
“Please. I was probably asleep before you. Whether it was the booze or the fact I’m a hundred years old, I’m not sure.”
Amazing. The old fella had been partying and boozing all night at his own bash. Now he was up talking shop like he was in his prime. I couldn’t help admiring his old-school, balls-to-the-wall style. At the time, I couldn’t help hoping that someday that would be me.
“You enjoy yourself, kid?” he continued.
“I did, Sam. I did. It was a fantastic party.”
“Good. Then let’s get to it. I spoke with Jack Merrill this morning as promised. And, also as promised, I filled him in on the necessary details. Now, he wouldn’t disclose whether buy-back terms had been previously settled on. But, nonetheless, he’s more than willing to sit down face-to-face with you.”
Ah. Such beautiful words. There are few things as sweet as those ultraimportant, ever-revealing moments in the birth of a deal. One of those moments is knowing that the person who will be sitting across the table is genuinely interested. Their not knowing the deal about to be presented is a thousand times better than they had even hoped is another.
“That’s good to hear, Sam. That’s all I’m looking for, a little of Mr. Merrill’s time.”
“Well, he’s happy to give it to you.”
Of course he was. Whether it was because I was a cash buyer or merely someone who could expose his little cover-up scheme with Murdoch, it didn’t matter either way.
“Is there any chance of my swinging by this afternoon? You know, before—”
“He’s on the golf course,” Sam cut me off. “He’ll be unavailable all weekend.”
“Did he mention how soon we could get together?”
“I explained to him that you were trying to adhere to an atypically fast-paced timeline. That understood, he still wouldn’t commit to anything over the weekend. He has plans to be at his house on Nantucket with his family. He said he could do Monday morning in his office, early as you want.”
Not bad at all. Sam had done great.
“Think about what time for a second,” Sam continued. “I need to grab another line.”
Sam put me on hold. Waiting for him to return, my eyes started wandering around my office. Eventually they stopped at the New York Post Jake had thrown on my chair. It was folded horizontally in half. All I could see was the paper’s logo and the day’s headline: june easter egg hunt.
Again, I looked at the phone. Nothing. Within a millisecond I jumped up, grabbed the paper, and returned to the chair behind my desk. As my ass hit the leather I let the back half of the paper drop down, fully exposing the front page. Underneath the headlines it read: “Prized Fabergé egg, worth reported thirty million, stolen from U.S. Mission to the UN on East Side.” Wow, I remember thinking to myself. Talk about balls.
I decided to read the first few lines of the article, which started on the front page in a column running down the right side. It began by describing the way it went down. It had happened at 5:14 a.m. the previous morning. It was an inside job by the consulate’s chief of security who, seemingly unbeknownst to him, got caught on cameras even he didn’t know existed. They had been installed by our government as their ultimate line of defense even against our own employees and security staff.
Fabergé Easter eggs. Many consider these little masterpieces some of the finest works of art on the planet; I know this because a girl I used to date was infatuated with them. Any time we passed a Barnes and Noble she’d drag me inside to thumb through the big, colorful coffee-table books about them. She even gave me the book as part of my birthday present one year so she could look through it when over at my apartment. They were designed by, and named after, Peter Carl Fabergé. In 1885, as Easter was to mark the twentieth wedding anniversary of Czar Alexander III and Czarina Maria Feodorovna, Alexander wanted a one-of-a-kind gift for his wife. At the time the work of a young jeweler, Peter Carl Fabergé, had recently caught Maria’s eye. Therefore Alexander deemed young Fabergé the perfect man to be commissioned for such a special gift.
I should tell you right now that simply calling these things “eggs” doesn’t do them justice. These little wonders are some of the finest, most masterful examples of transcendent art in all of Russian history. The shells are decorated on the outside with diamonds, pearls, and rubies. Opening the shells reveals their innermost secrets: miniature rings and crowns, picture frames and platinum swans; golden rosebuds and miniature ruby eggs. But it isn’t just the precious gems and metals that account for the eggs’ astronomical prices, it’s the craftsmanship. One of the eggs even holds within it a small train, perfect down to the last detail. Or consider the Orange Tree Egg. When a key is pressed, a tiny, feathered, gold nightingale appears from the top of the tree, to sing and flap its wings. Each egg is its own story that plays out in some wondrous carnival for
the senses. Some of the eggs are so complicated they took years to complete.
The article went on to say only forty-two of the original fifty eggs Fabergé designed for the czars had been accounted for by 1979. That was when two of the missing eight were found in the basement of an old, turn-of-the-century home in eastern Russia that was about to be torn down. But because there is such little information available on the eight missing eggs, at the time of the article they were still pretty much in the dark. Aside from a general description—it was made mostly of gold and colored with blue and white enamel, as well as a rainbow array of diamonds and gems—and the fact that the egg was a gift from Czar Nicholas II to his mother, Empress Maria Feodorovna.
In 1980 the two recovered eggs were sold at auction. Danish Jubilee Egg went for fifteen million dollars, but today the value is said to have gone up to somewhere between thirty and thirty-five million. The anonymous buyer loaned the tiny work of art to the U.S. mission to the United Nations in New York City for display indefinitely.
The article explained that a guy named Lawrence Hart, still at-large, had been the moron who actually thought he could have gotten away with something like this. As I chuckled to myself Sam’s voice came through the phone.
“Sorry about that, Jonah. Had to take that. The missus wants me out on the boat by noon.”
“It’s fine, Sam,” I responded.
“Now, where were we?”
As Sam continued to speak I couldn’t help wanting to just see Lawrence Hart before dropping the paper. I felt I owed it to myself since I had read the first portion of the article. And it was at that moment, when I looked at the front page photo of the guy caught on camera leaving the scene of the crime, the rest of the world around me simply melted away. It was almost as if everyone I had ever wronged in my life had just lined up and each taken a free kick at my balls. The moron, known to the world as Lawrence Hart, was someone I knew. And not as Lawrence Hart.
“Jonah? What do you think about that?”
Sam’s words were falling on flabbergasted ears. I dropped the paper on my desk. Feeling seriously uneasy, I found myself making a conscious effort to maintain my composure. With everything that su
rrounded me at that given moment, I had to remain steady. I had Sam on the line talking a serious multimillion-dollar real estate deal. I had people walking by my office at a steady rate, able to see inside because of the glass doors. And I had hundreds of scattered memory fragments from the previous evening stabbing at my brain.
“Jonah?”
Finally Sam’s voice tugged me from my stupor.
“I’m sorry?”
“What time should I tell Merrill?”
My eyes began furiously surveying my office. I needed to get through this conversation unscathed, while at the same time beginning to address what was happening.
“Tell him, uh...�tell him nine a.m. in his office,” I pushed out.
“Done. Meanwhile, it’s Friday in the summer, wonder boy. I imagine even you give yourself an afternoon off here and there. What are—”
I was done with the conversation. I had gotten what I needed, but more importantly my whole life had possibly just changed. I needed to keep Sam happy, but I also needed an immediate out.
“What’s that, Carolyn?” I blurted out to no one. “You have him on line three?”
I refocused the direction of my voice toward the phone.
“I need to take this, Sam, but, as always, I can’t thank you enough. Enjoy the weekend with your new bride.”
“I will, Jonah. Promise me one more thing, will you? I want you to—”
“Thanks again, Sam. I really need to run, but I’ll talk to you next week.”
Finally I was able to hang up. Immediately I hit the intercom and told Carolyn I’d be down the hall for a minute, “down the hall” being the team’s code for “in the bathroom.” I grabbed my briefcase and took off.
Chapter 15
I closed the stall’s thin, gray metal door behind me, but didn’t sit down. I placed the briefcase on the floor and stood motionless. I decided that in order to move forward in the fashion I was going to need to, I first had to let go. To just force the shock out of my system in order to make way for the clarity, the acute sense of reason, I was sure to need.
While staring at the wall behind the toilet, I reached out with my arms and braced myself between the thin aluminum barriers as if I were being swallowed by a black hole. My body was trembling. I could feel all of my blood rushing toward my head. Just when it felt as if it might explode, I gulped down some air and adjusted my breathing to match my heart rate.
I sat down on the toilet, still with my pants buckled, and returned my mind to the newspaper that remained in my office. Like I said, I had previously seen Lawrence Hart. Only to me, he was John Robie, the putz who had almost stolen my cigar case the night before.
Now this was definitely fucked up. Unfortunately, it was the smaller issue of a larger problem. My greater concern was that of a certain image that was gnawing at me, haunting me more than all of the rest. Me letting Robie, the night before, place my cigar case back in my briefcase as I turned back to the bar for one last swallow of vodka. Still on the ground in front of me I opened my briefcase. My eyes caught the cigar case. My mind was telling me “no shot” because of the egg’s dimensions and fragility.
I picked it up anyway. I held it in my palm, and gently moved my arm up and down like it was an actual scale. My findings seemed to confirm my initial notion, but I couldn’t yet let it go. Remembering that there is room between the tops of the cigars and the top of the slide-off case, and that Robie had started to remove the one in the center, I squeezed the bottom of the chamber. The leather gave. I took off the case’s top, pushed the cigar in the center all the way back down, replaced the top and tossed the complete case back in my briefcase.
I began to shift, rearrange the rest of the briefcase’s contents. Then just like that I got the surprise of my life. It was a black leather rectangular box. It looked like one used for eyeglasses, only longer and a bit fatter, closer to a square. I started to open it. The first thing I saw was gray, spongy foam. I kept opening it. My heart began thumping. I started to silently beg, plead with no one in particular to show mercy and let the bloated jewelry box be empty. And just as I did, there it was, slap in the face confirmation of what I believed I already knew.
Given my surroundings, I realized the most unsafe thing I could do was start examining the thing. I closed the box in a rush and buried it as deep as I could in the briefcase.
I took a deep, calming breath, as I refocused. I needed to be myself. I needed to walk out of that bathroom as if everything was the same as before I had seen the newspaper.
I quickly splashed some water on my face. As I exited the bathroom, I did so with so many questions. Why me? Was it supposed to be me? Was it me because I was by chance at the same party as Robie? Was Robie really his name? Was Hart? Was I being watched? Did anyone else know what I had? Would people be looking for me? Was it safe to speak on my phone? Any phone, meaning my office, home, or cell?
I couldn’t make sense of any of it. Thinking back now, my biggest concern was definitely one of circumstance. Had I been brought into this because of improvisation on Robie’s—Hart’s—whoever’s part? Or had I been part of some bigger plan from the beginning?
Chapter 16
I popped into Jake’s office. He was on the phone.
“Can I borrow your cell for five minutes?” I mouthed to him.
Without answering or breaking stride in his conversation, he scooped it from his desk and flipped it to me. I quickly turned and headed for my office.
I closed the door behind me and settled behind my desk. I had received five e-mails just since I had been in the bathroom. As I began answering them, I entered the front desk number at my apartment building into Jake’s phone. Considering I had absolutely no idea who or what was responsible for what was now surrounding me, I had immediately become security conscious. I decided I couldn’t risk talking on any of my normal phones for anything other than what was, well, normal. I hit the send button. Clarence picked up on the other end.
“The Wellington.”
“Clarence, Jonah.”
“Good morning, Jonah. How may I help you?”
I needed to be subtle.
“Clarence, I need you to take care of something for me. A certain female flight attendant friend of mine may be coming to town tonight, depending on her schedule.”
“Miss Tracy, Sir?”
Clarence and Parker knew all of my girls.
“That’s right. Anyway, being that she’s a Midwesterner from a small town, she gets a bit nervous by the fact that I only have one lock on my front door. I wanted to surprise her, so I—”
“Say no more, Jonah. I’ll have it taken care of immediately.”
As I was hanging up, the glass door to my office opened. In came Jake.
“Why did you need my cell?”
“I, uh, was about to go downstairs to Starbucks and I had a call to make. Mine’s dead.”
I needed to forge ahead.
“No matter,” I began, throwing him back his phone, “I decided against it. What’s the story with—”
At 3 p.m., after dealing for as long as I could, I decided it was time to get serious about two things. Examining Danish Jubilee Egg and figuring out how to safely hide it until I had some idea of what I was going to do. As I was packing up my office, deep in concentration, Perry came sauntering in.
“Taking off?”
“I am,” I started. “I want to get a few errands out of the way before settling into my apartment for the weekend. Got a million calls to make. I need to get my due diligence team in place.”
The three of us had been planning that whole week to use the upcoming weekend for nothing other than deal orchestration. Because of the time constraints we were under for Andreu, it was essential to have everyone ready to move on the drop of a dime. Roof inspectors, system inspectors, structural engineers, environmental inspectors, elevator system consultants, attorneys, just to name a few, all needed to be in place. About an hour be
fore this conversation, when I was prepping to leave for the weekend, we had all shared our lists of who we planned on using. Contractors tend to be a great source for market information, so we did so to avoid overlap. We needed to be as careful as possible not to leak the fact that we, as a team, were in the market for other deals, when in each instance we had made it clear to ownership we weren’t. Keeping inspection teams separate minimized our chances of anyone leaking another deal to any given owner.
“Don’t forget about tonight.”
Her words stopped me cold.
“Tonight?”
“Jonah! You promised me.”
Fuck. Auerbach, along with his wife and some friends, at Pangaea’s farewell party. I had promised Perry I’d go with her, and now she was even more fired up because she realized meeting Auerbach there could mean getting a jump start on what was to follow the week after. She wanted to see if he had any more preliminary information and wanted to further whet his appetite. I had promised. I couldn’t let her down. I wouldn’t let my attention to the deal slip. For all too many reasons.
Chapter 17
Outside the weather was for shit. Humid, gray, and sticky, although it had stopped raining. Even though I lived close, I was paranoid that by being on foot I could more easily be followed. I jumped in a cab.
I immediately acted snotty and affected to the cab driver. This way they leave you alone. I placed my briefcase on the seat next to me, opened it, and removed the black leather box. I had surveyed my situation carefully. I lowered myself, hunching forward like I was tying my shoe, in order to disappear from the views of both the driver as well as people on the streets. My hands, along with the box, were almost at my feet.
I carefully flipped the top open. As we moved through the city my eyes, shocked and locked, took in the most exquisite sight they had ever seen. Nestled into the gray foam, which had been cut precisely to hold the egg’s form steadily, was Danish Jubilee Egg in all of its enigmatic glory. The antique seemed smaller than the paper stated it had been catalogued for auction, but was beyond magnificent. It looked like something you might see on an end table in one of the rooms of Louis XIV’s castle at Versailles, something fitting since Fabergé’s heritage, as well as much of his artistic influence, came from France.
