The Shroud
Page 28
I was still waiting to hear about the advantage to me.
“It specifies that if you violate the agreement, you will wave contesting extradition back to Italy for sentencing.”
“For sentencing. You mean, I’m not going to jail now? Are you telling me that I’m going free?”
“Unfortunately, that is the case.”
“Why?”
The stupid question popped out of my mouth before I realized it.
“The attempt to steal the Shroud involves many complications.”
I let out another “ah.”
I knew exactly what the complication was, although I didn’t say it out loud to her.
In a nutshell, it had to be Patriarch Nevsky.
It wasn’t the attempted theft of the Shroud that was “complicating” matters—it was Nevsky’s bold plan to claim it for the Eastern Church as stolen property. A public trial would put the Shroud’s ownership on trial, too. Even my trial would do it.
Nevsky wasn’t in a good position, either. His daughter had been caught knee-deep in blood of her own partners in crime, all of whom the Russian considered to be Chechen terrorists.
It sounded like some tit for tat was exchanged.
“What happens to Karina?” I asked.
“She is on her way back to Moscow.”
“So a deal has been arranged—”
“Whatever agreements or accommodations have been reached with other parties are none of your business. The agreement you sign binds you to secrecy. It prohibits you from discussing the matter with anyone, even family or friends. If you cause the matter to become public, you will be returned to Italy without further legal process to begin your sentence.”
“What would the sentence be?”
She smiled grimly. Wishfully. “A long one.”
She shoved two sets of papers across the table. “One set is in Italian, the other in English. You are to sign both.”
I signed.
51
New York
My shitty karma followed me home.
Just when I thought it was safe to go back into the water, my past caught up with me again.
Those gestapo bastards at the IRS had attacked my bank account. The twenty thousand dollars I’d been forced to wire from Dubai was gone by the time I got back. The other $183.26 I had in the account was gone, too.
The attachment left me overdrawn twenty-five dollars, the bank’s fee for giving the IRS all my hard-earned money. And I still owed the IRS money. The interest and penalties amounted to more than what I had started out owing.
What kind of medieval torture system of taxation was that?
I don’t know how they found out I had come into a little bit of money.
A clerk at the bank told me that money transfers of five thousand or more are routinely reported to the IRS as part of the battle against antiterrorism and money laundering, so they simply matched my account deposit to their list of people who owed taxes.
Terrorists led by a rich Arab are going around blowing up places, Colombian drug lords are billionaires, and I get zapped by the IRS as if I were a criminal. Where was the justice in this world? The IRS grabbed the money for back taxes before I even had time to figure out a way to cheat on reporting it.
That was only half of the bad news.
I was zeroed out. Really busted. I got back with a few hundred left of my expense money and found the other twenty thousand, the money I’d hid in the freezer compartment of my fridge, gone.
I’d been robbed.
Someone had entered the apartment and began piling on my table what little of value I had—and had left the pathetic pile behind after hitting the jackpot in the freezer compartment.
There wasn’t even a forced entry—it hadn’t been necessary. I had given the thief a key.
Naturally, it was José.
The elderly man who offered to take care of Morty had asked for the key so he could put Morty in my apartment when his children visited. If that rat-bastard had children, they were probably all jailhouse graduates of Rikers Island.
Not only was José gone—moved, no forwarding address—but by the time I got back, he had put poor Morty into the local animal shelter as a stray. It goes without saying that no one would adopt a cat with Morty’s ax murderer personality.
I got to the shelter just hours before they were going to euthanize Morty because nobody wanted him.
Morty had shown his gratitude for saving him from cat hell by biting me the moment the shelter attendant handed him to me.
I couldn’t even call the police and report the burglary. It would have raised too many questions. I hadn’t mentioned to the Turin police the killing of the “death by orgasm” guy in my apartment and the last thing I wanted was to focus a police spotlight on me.
I had told my landlord that José had taken some money I’d had in the refrigerator before he cut out, but not how much. Hairy Lecher—the name I’d dubbed the landlord—howled with laughter.
“Don’t you the know the freezer compartment is the first place every crack addict looks?”
Uh, no, I didn’t. It just sounded like a good place to hide it from the IRS and other disasters.
The only good thing was being back home.
My postage-stamp-sized, walk-up apartment felt like a suite at the Ritz when I got back home. Actually, I should say my new apartment. I stayed in a hotel for three days after returning because I refused to stay even one night in a place where someone had tried to kill me in a grotesque way—or in any way, for that matter.
Calling my apartment “new” wasn’t entirely accurate.
I set out to move entirely out of the building—and away from those rude and lewd stares of the landlord—but soon discovered that not only couldn’t I afford anything better, but a new place came with first and last month’s rent, a security deposit equal to a month’s rent, and a new credit application.
The real killer was the credit application. I had gotten by the application for my cusp-of-SoHo–Little Italy–Chinatown studio because I rented it before an avalanche of defaults on my bills piled into the reporting agencies. If I had to fill out an application now, one look at my current rating—Class A Deadbeat—and my next residence would be in a crack house.
An apartment upstairs was available—yes, José’s apartment—and the landlord graciously let me have it so he wouldn’t miss a beat collecting rent—after he examined my apartment with the proverbial fine-tooth comb. You would have thought he was a CSI investigator looking for trace evidence the way he went through the place looking for damages, especially for signs of claw marks by Morty.
I could have pointed out that the only “claw marks” were the ones on the wall behind the bed—left there by the last tenant, a woman whose screams of ecstasy were heard whenever she had had her lovers over.
Home. In one piece—but broke again, thanks to José the Bandido and the white-collar thieves at the IRS.
I felt like every time I took a step up, my other foot got kicked out from under me. I really thought I had a chance to make a fresh start this time. What’s that saying about the best-laid plans of mice and men going to hell?
I still mourned Yuri and still felt the loss. I’m not even sure I know who and what he was—a Chechen freedom fighter? Or a Russian agent working undercover?
I knew deep down he had felt a connection with me.
On the way to the Turin airport for my flight out, prosecuter Palma told me that the blow to the head I gave Karina put her into a coma.
Karina could die soon, as far as I cared. I was not the forgiving type. I didn’t want her to suffer, but hoped she burned in hell.
I never found out how Lipton managed to disappear into thin air as the police rushed around worrying about the Shroud. But it didn’t surprise me that Lipton would do a disappearing act. He was someone I hoped would accompany Karina to hell.
The only bright spot was that I had a check in the mail for a thousand dollars from Mrs. Winthrop�
��s attorney. A statement on the back side of the check said that if I cashed it, I gave up all claims against her.
The generosity of the Bitch with a capital B surprised me until I made a call to a dealer and found out that Mrs. Winthrop had indeed gone through with the purchase of the Roman vase, and at the price I had negotiated for her.
The only thing was that she didn’t pay me the $10,000 fee I had coming. Instead, she threw me a bone, offering me ten cents on the dollar, cheating me out of 90 percent of my commission.
That left me in the position of either fighting the Bitch for what she really owed me or eating crow.
I cashed the check.
I needed the thousand dollars just to survive and didn’t have the money to sue her. I made a mistake in working for the woman, a lack of judgment on my part. The minute she started being erratic, I should have dumped her but didn’t because I needed the money too badly. I had to suffer the humiliation and financial loss of her screwing me because she had money and I didn’t.
The only saving grace was my firm belief that what goes around, comes around … and that woman will someday be on her deathbed and the ghosts of Christmas past will be paying her a visit.
Opening the mail had brought another surprise.
I don’t know why these things pop up when I’m broke and desperate and will grab at anything to keep afloat.
You’d think I would have learned my lesson.
I did.
The past year of struggling had made me older and wiser.
But it had done nothing for the fact that I still had to eat.
And here was another golden opportunity to make money—the hard way.
52
My mail included the usual, right-to-the-point “pay up” letters from bill collectors. I was long past the polite “please remit” format and my “deceased—return to sender” ploy was to no avail—the computers that cranked out these endless missives didn’t care if I was alive or dead; they just wanted money. I wished I could turn off the flow—besides making me feel like a deadbeat, a lot of trees were dying for my sins.
In the pile of collection letters was a plain white envelope with my name handwritten in pencil on it.
A couple things struck me at once: no return address … and who used pencils anymore? People still wrote with pens, but addressing an envelope with pencil?
My first instinct was that a bill collector had come up with a clever attention-getter.
I torn it open to find only a newspaper clipping with a phone number scribbled in pencil at the top.
I didn’t recognize the phone number. It wasn’t a Manhattan area code, nor was it written in Lipton’s dramatic scrawl—the bastard was still around … somewhere.
The clipping was one of those society page photos of people in evening dress chatting at a charity ball. The photo had been trimmed down to just show several women standing together. It didn’t include the written description of the scene shown, but I recognized the woman in the center, a dowager of London society, Lady Candace Berkshire Vanderbilt.
Anyone involved in Mediterranean-region antiquities would recognize her name. As a museum curator with a particular interest in Egyptian antiquities, I knew quite a bit about her because her grandfather, Gordon Nelson Vanderbilt, had been one of the wealthy backers of Howard Carter of King Tut fame.
Grandfather Vanderbilt, along with Lord Carnarvon and others, had financed Carter’s search for a pharaoh’s tomb back in the 1920s. Carter had found King Tutankhamen … and the rest was history.
Of course, part of that history had to do with the mummy’s revenge: Lord Carnarvon died soon afterward from what was thought to be an infected mosquito bite, Vanderbilt croaked the following year from food poisoning, and the curse of the mummy was off and running.
Vanderbilt also incurred considerable controversy because his wife was seen at a society gathering wearing an ancient Egyptian necklace, raising suspicion that it belonged in the Tut collection.
His wife drowned when she fell and bumped her head in the bathtub and the newspapers had a field day about the curse.
The current Mrs. Berkshire Vanderbilt had the necklace on in the picture. Somewhere along the line she had married a British lord and become a lady. I was surprised she was wearing it because I’d read she donated it to the Smithsonian, but the picture could have been taken before she gave it to the museum.
Nothing about the picture, other than it had been sent to me with a mysterious phone number, piqued my interest. There was nothing new or sensational about Mrs. Vanderbilt or the necklace. The curse stories were decades old.
I studied the picture, wondering why it was sent to me.
Who, of course, was another question.
Then, was there any money in it for me. And Morty. The damn cat had gone green and he ate only fish not on the mercury or endangered-species list and had biodegradable cat litter.
Studying the picture, I realized that the woman Lady Candace was talking to was also wearing a necklace that looked familiar to me.
I got out my magnifying glass and took a closer look. I recognized it because I’d seen it before.
The Isis necklace.
The last time I’d seen it was at the Cairo Museum five or six years ago, where it should be. It had been part of the Tut exhibit.
How it got from the museum to this woman’s neck was a mystery.
I picked up my phone and hesitated for a moment, staring at the phone number.
Did I really want to get involved in a mystery in which a museum piece was stolen—again?
I looked at the picture again.
The necklace belonged in a museum, not on some rich woman’s neck at a party.
Sighing, I dialed the number.
Someone obviously knew my weakness for protecting antiquities.
BOOKS BY HAROLD ROBBINS
from Tom Doherty Associates
The Betrayers (with Junius Podrug)
Blood Royal (with Junius Podrug)
The Carpetbaggers
The Deceivers (with Junius Podrug)
The Devil to Pay (with Junius Podrug)
Heat of Passion
The Looters (with Junius Podrug)
Never Enough
Never Leave Me
The Piranhas
The Predators
The Secret
The Shroud (with Junius Podrug)
Sin City
Praise for Harold Robbins
“Robbins has the ability to hold his readers absorbed.”
—Chicago Tribune
“His characters are compelling, his dialogue is dramatic, and his style is simple and straightforward.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Harold Robbins is one of the world’s bestselling authors.… Each week, an estimated 280,000 people purchase a Harold Robbins novel.”
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“A sprawling, sparkling international romp … Robbins’s literary legacy remains very much alive and fans should experience a pleasant sense of déjà vu as they race through this latest installment.”
—Publishers Weekly on Heat of Passion
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE SHROUD
Copyright © 2009 by Jann Robbins
All rights reserved.
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
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Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
ISBN 978-0-7653-5790-8
First Edition: October 2009
First Mass Market Edition: October 2010
eISBN 9781429985772
First eBook edition: November 2012