by Adam Gittlin
My eyes move back to Andreu.
“The little one, the guy who got it in the knee,” I say, “He deserves to die.”
Andreu, through the searing pain he’s experiencing, looks up at me. His eyes are filled with forced courage yet rich with defeat. His eyes are still challenging me yet pleading with me to show mercy.
“But, I’m no murderer,” I go on. “I just want to leave him with a reminder that if I ever hear from or see him again, he won’t be so lucky. Something that will remind him every day. I’m thinking cutting off the middle finger on each hand.”
“Ah, Jonah, wait. Please,” Andreu pleads while trying to mentally manage the pain he’s in. “Please. If—”
The guy working on me wheels around, steel-toe-boots him dead center in the face, laying him out, then returns his attention to me. Working with some kind of sharp, thin utensil, he unlocks the cuffs around my wrists. The metal eases away from, out of the wounds it’s been sitting in.
“Then,” Cobus goes on, “where are we going?”
This is a kind gesture from my boss—whoever he is. He knows Perry should be with her son. I look at her. It breaks my heart to know what I’ve put her through. It would kill me to now have to let her go again. But she needs to be with Max. Whether that’s in Amsterdam or New York City.
I think about Morante. God, I hope he’s going to search for the truth, not me. In my heart, I believe I’ve laid the foundation for clearing my name. But until that time comes—until Morante constructs the walls and roof that sit on that foundation—can I even consider going back and reclaiming my life?
Our life is now in Amsterdam.
Our life will always be in New York City.
“Home,” I say. “It’s time to go home.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
SPOILER ALERT: THIS AUTHOR’S NOTE CONTAINS INFORMATION THAT WILL GIVE AWAY KEY ELEMENTS OF THE PLOT OF THE DEAL: ABOUT FACE.
In The Deal: About Face, contemporary fiction collides with historical fact.
It has given me great pleasure to weave day-to-day past experiences in the commercial real estate arena into this fictional drama. That these experiences might please and enrich others makes this journey even more rewarding. Yet while The Deal: About Face is contemporary, occurring in today’s world just as we know it, there is also a historical element that commemorates rare treasure. The fabled Fabergé Imperial Easter Eggs stand among the world’s most celebrated artistic achievements. If not for others and their diligent research and writings, a bevy of which I found online as well as in books and articles, it would have been impossible for me to incorporate these mesmerizing antiques into the story.
The eggs populating this novel are historically true to form in everything from name to description. As described in the book, fifty bejeweled Fabergé eggs were commissioned by the Russian royal family between the years of 1885 and 1916, as gifts from the czar to the czarina and other family members. It is also a fact that after the Russian Revolution, only forty-two of these prized antiques ever resurfaced.
This is where fact ends and fiction begins. While in The Deal: About Face the errant eggs are discovered, in reality the eight missing since the early twentieth century are still unaccounted for. They were neither found underneath a home in eastern Russia, as the book suggests, nor anywhere else for that matter. Rather, everything surrounding the lost imperial eggs in The Deal: About Face and all the other events described were created purely for entertainment value—including any and all material that suggests the history surrounding Czar Alexander III, Maria Feodorovna, or anyone else associated with the Russian royal family is anything other than history describes. If any names, situations, or sequences of events that mirror true life have arisen as a result of my approach to telling this story, this is truly a circumstance born of coincidence.
