Curse of the Jade Lily: A McKenzie Novel

by David Housewright

  “I’m not wired, and I don’t have a tracking device,” I said. “I don’t have your money, either, so what the hell, guys?”

  “I’m not interested in money, McKenzie,” the woman said. “I’m interested in the Jade Lily.”

  A pair of hands pulled me off the floor and sat me upright so my back was resting against the wall of the van. Someone yanked off the hood. I blinked against the light. When my eyes focused, I found myself staring into the face of one of the loveliest women I had ever known—and the most treacherous.

  “Heavenly Petryk,” I said.

  She smiled her dazzling smile, opened her arms, the palms of her hands facing upward, and said, “Ta da.”

  * * *

  The door was closed and the van’s heater was working. Heavenly pulled off a knit hat, allowing her golden hair to flow over her neck and shoulders, and opened her coat to reveal a black turtleneck sweater that seemed awfully tight and not because she had put on weight recently. Her shimmering blue eyes reminded me of a half-wild feline; the kind that was well fed by doting owners who nevertheless allowed it to roam unrestricted at night. She knelt next to me on the floor of the van.

  “Kidnapping, Heavenly?” I said. “Really? You couldn’t just pick up a phone and call?”

  “I need you to know that I mean business,” she said. “The last time our paths crossed, I don’t think you took me seriously.”

  “I took you very seriously, especially after your friends threatened to shoot me.”

  “Oh, they were just fooling.”

  I glanced at the three men in the van with us. None of them were holdovers from Heavenly’s previous band of miscreants, yet they all matched her criteria—they were young, good-looking, and well-muscled and watched her every move as if she were Aphrodite in earthly form. I doubted that the three of them together could have removed the childproof cap from a bottle of aspirin.

  “Are you fooling now?” I asked.

  Heavenly smiled and patted my knee. “It’s good to see you again, McKenzie,” she said.

  “Gosh, Heavenly. It’s good to see you, too. How long has it been?”

  I already knew the answer—twenty-six months. I reminded her that she and I and a fairly motley group of scoundrels had rummaged through much of St. Paul in search of gold bullion hidden decades earlier by the notorious bank robber Frank “Jelly” Nash.

  “That was fun,” Heavenly said. “We made a lot of money. Not as much as we were hoping, but still…”

  “What are you doing?” I asked. “Why am I here?”

  “To hear my pitch.”

  “Pitch?”

  “I know the thieves want to sell the Jade Lily back to the museum. I knew they would pick a go-between to handle the transaction. I honestly didn’t know it would be you until early this morning.”

  Early this morning? my inner voice said. She knew before I did.

  “Are you saying you didn’t steal the Lily?” I asked.

  “Of course not.”

  “You’re not the one who sent me around Lake Calhoun with a red rose in my hand?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  Why, indeed? Heavenly wouldn’t need a rose to identify me. She already knew what I looked like, knew where I lived; she probably still had my cell phone number.

  “Besides,” Heavenly said, “if I had stolen the Jade Lily, I sure as hell wouldn’t have involved you. You’re a dangerous man, McKenzie.”

  I didn’t know if that was a compliment or not.

  “Since we’re all friends here, why don’t you uncuff me?” I said.

  Heavenly laughed at the suggestion. “Oh, you,” she said and patted my knee again. She gestured at her three thugs. “This is the famous Rushmore McKenzie I told you about. Do you think we should take off his handcuffs?”

  The one nearest her said, “Yeah, go ’head. He doesn’t look like much.”

  “Tommy, Tommy.” Heavenly shook her head at the insult and gave him a maternal smile; the kind mothers give their children when they say something foolish. “I think we’ll keep the cuffs on.”

  “So, Hep, are you going to talk to me, what?” I said.

  “You remembered my nickname.”

  “Heavenly Elizabeth Petryk. Who could forget?”

  She gave my knee another playful pat. “You’re sweet,” she said. “Okay, where should we begin? What do you know about the Lily?”

  “Very little, I’m afraid,” I said. “Truth is, I haven’t even seen what it looks like.”

  “It’s beautiful, McKenzie. Exquisite. It’s fourteen inches long, nine inches wide, six inches deep, and it’s carved from a single block of imperial jade mined in Burma, or whatever they call that country these days. That’s the good stuff, imperial jade—intense emerald green color and semitransparent. It was stolen from a Burmese artisan by a Chinese warlord around 1800. Now I admit that part of the story is a little murky. However, we do know for historic fact that the Lily was presented to Jaiqing Emperor, the sixth emperor of the Qing Dynasty, in China in August of 1820, although we don’t know who gave it to him or why. On September second of that year, Jaiqing was struck by lightning and died. They say that’s when the curse began—the curse of the Jade Lily.”

  I had to smile, not at the curse but at the obvious joy it gave Heavenly to tell me about it. The first time I met Heavenly, she was in the Minnesota History Center Research Library investigating everything she could find about Jelly Nash and the gangsters that resided in St. Paul when it was an “open city.” She lived for this sort of thing.

  “Eventually, the Lily became the property of Empress Dowager Cixi,” Heavenly said. “It didn’t do her any good, either. The Empress Dowager ruled China during the Boxer Rebellion. The Boxers were simple peasants who resisted the Western powers that wanted to carve China into colonies—France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Spain, Belgium, Russia, Japan, the Netherlands. The only countries that didn’t want to colonize China were the United States and Great Britain, although the British were intent on milking her for everything they could get.

  “At first the Empress Dowager attempted to suppress the Boxers in order to appease the Europeans. When the German envoy was murdered on June 20, 1900, she realized that there was going to be hell to pay anyway, so she went all in. She committed the imperial troops to battle and declared war on all the Western powers. The foreign delegations that were in Beijing at the time—back then it was called Peking—took refuge in a fortified compound. They held out for fifty-five days under relentless assault and artillery bombardment until an army consisting of troops from eight different nations relieved them.

  “That’s when things got really ugly. The Europeans literally raped China. Stole everything that wasn’t nailed down and a lot that was. Great Britain held loot auctions every afternoon because it wanted to make sure that ‘looting on the part of British troops be carried out in the most orderly manner.’ That’s an actual quote. It was through a loot auction that the Jade Lily fell into the hands of Colonel G. Nicholas Chaffee, a British serving officer.

  “Chaffee was one of those ‘Take up the White Man’s burden’ kind of guys. Once the Chinese were subjugated, he volunteered for duty in India—apparently he wanted to help keep the natives in check following the Indian Famine. But while on his way to Bombay, Chaffee’s ship sank—no one has ever been able to figure out how or why—and Chaffee drowned. Chaffee’s widow quickly sold the Lily to the ninth Earl of Huntington for the princely sum of one hundred and fifty pounds. He was killed when the British captured Baghdad from the Ottoman Turks in March 1917 during the First World War. He was run over by General Sir Frederick Stanley Maude’s command car—I am not making this up. The Lily then became the property of his brother, the tenth Earl of Huntington, who was military attaché to the British Embassy in what was then called the State of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes but we know as Yugoslavia. His wife prominently displayed the Lily at social functions and delighted in telling guests about the curse until she
died of an undiagnosed ailment. Soon after, the earl gave the Lily to his daughter Lady Julia as a wedding present when she married a Serb politician. A week later, Yugoslavia was invaded by the Nazis. Are you following me?”

  “You make the Lily sound like one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” I said.

  “I’m just saying, bad luck follows the Lily,” Heavenly said. “For example, Lady Julia and her husband fought with Tito’s partisans against the Nazis—apparently she was one helluva girl. However, they protested when Tito took control of the country after the war and established a constitution patterned after the Soviet Union’s. They were both shot. The Lily then fell into the hands of the politician’s sister, who had no idea what it was. She packed it up in a box and stored it in a bank vault in Sarajevo, where it was forgotten until her daughter, Tatjana Durakovic, rediscovered it following her mother’s death in 1992. Unfortunately, before Tatjana had a chance to cash in on her find, the Yugoslav Wars broke out, and what a happy little bloodbath that was.”

  “How many dead?” I asked. “One hundred thousand?”

  “Twice that. Most of Tatjana’s family was among them. Eventually, the war ended, Yugoslavia was divvied up along ethnic lines, and Tatjana’s little part of the world became Bosnia and Herzegovina. Unfortunately, by then the bank in Sarajevo had been looted and the Lily stolen. Tatjana immigrated to the United States, met a nice guy, married, became a U.S. citizen, and now is running a resort on the south shore of Lake Superior in Ontonagon, a small village in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. But the story doesn’t end there.”

  “I didn’t think it would.”

  “Somehow—I don’t have the details—the Lily fell into the hands of Dr. Arnaud Fornier, a French oncologist who dabbled in Asian art. Dr. Fornier sold the Lily at auction to Leo Gillard, an American. The publicity and money the good doctor earned from the sale convinced him to retire from medicine and open a gallery specializing in jade. However, he didn’t have the resources necessary to acquire true jade artifacts for his many newfound customers, so he resorted to forgery. Dr. Fornier is now doing time in La Santé Prison in Paris for art fraud. He represented himself at trial, never a good idea.”

  “No, never,” I agreed.

  “Meanwhile, the man who bought the Lily from him, who lived in Chicago, by the way—”

  “Lived?” I said.

  “Leo Gillard died last summer,” Heavenly said. “He took part in a yacht race that starts at Navy Pier in downtown Chicago and ends at Mackinac Island. The race had been run for over a hundred years without a single fatality until he fell off his boat and drowned. The weather was perfect, too. People were so shocked, they thought his crew must have mutinied and made him walk the plank, but there was no evidence of such.”

  “And so,” I said.

  “And so the Lily became the property of Gillard’s son, Jeremy, who apparently believed enough of the curse that he loaned the Jade Lily to the City of Lakes Art Museum. The museum is using the Lily to promote its anniversary. There was also talk of making it part of a traveling exhibit that could be displayed by other museums, for a price of course.”

  “Until it was stolen.”

  “Until it was stolen,” Heavenly repeated.

  “Which you had nothing to do with.”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “Then why are you here? Better yet, why am I here?”

  “Because you’re going after the Lily. It is your intention to buy it back from the artnappers and return it to the museum.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do say so, but here’s the thing, McKenzie—the Lily belongs to Tatjana Durakovic. She had pretty much forgotten about it until she saw all the publicity that the City of Lakes generated. Now she wants it back.”

  “Ahh,” I said. Suddenly it all made sense to me. “You represent Tatjana.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she come to you or did you contact her?”

  Heavenly shrugged. “Does it matter?” she said.

  “How much is Tatjana paying you?”

  “Twenty-five percent of whatever the Lily realizes at auction. We believe it will sell for a lot more than the insured value. The other day a two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old jade water buffalo sold for over four million pounds.”

  “How much is that in real money?”

  “Six-point-six million dollars.”

  “A tidy sum,” I said. “What do you want from me?”

  “You understand that the Jade Lily is Tatjana’s property. It was stolen from her.”

  “That’s not my concern.”

  “McKenzie, I’m asking you to do the right thing.”

  “What’s the right thing?”

  “After you make the exchange, after you buy the Lily from the artnappers, bring it to me. I’ll give it to Tatjana.”

  “No.”

  “No? Just like that, no?”

  “If Tatjana wants the Lily, tell her to hire a lawyer.”

  “C’mon, McKenzie. Think about it.”

  “Nothing to think about. I’m not going to break my word to the museum.”

  “I’ll give you ten percent of my end.”

  Instead of answering, I just smiled at the suggestion.

  “That’s what I thought you’d say.” Heavenly’s lovely face became very sad, very serious. “But I had to ask.”

  “Where does that leave us?”

  Heavenly patted my knee again. “Don’t worry, McKenzie. We’re still friends.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “If you won’t help me, I’ll get the Lily from the thieves myself.” Heavenly’s smile suddenly became as luminous as ever. “Failing that, I’ll just have to steal it from you.”

  “Do you know who has the Lily?”

  Heavenly leaned in close. “Do you know the secret to a successful relationship?” she asked. “Secrets.”

  Heavenly kissed me full on the mouth. I might have resisted except, well, my hands were cuffed behind me.

  “See you around, McKenzie,” she said. Heavenly slid open the door to the van and stepped out. “Tommy, take McKenzie back to Lake Calhoun. Don’t be foolish enough to give him the keys to the handcuffs until you’re safely driving out of the parking lot.”

  * * *

  Heavenly’s thugs—they were far too pretty to be called that, but still—did exactly as she told them, the one named Tommy handing me the key through the window of the van before driving off. I unwound the cuffs and dropped them into the pocket of my coat—you never know when they might come in handy. I walked through the cold toward the South Beach. It was nearly 5:00 P.M. and already dark; the lights of the city’s skyline glistened like stars against the snow and ice. My cell phone played the Ella Fitzgerald–Louis Armstrong cover of “Summertime” just as I reached the Jeep Cherokee. I answered the way I always did.

  “McKenzie,” I said.

  “What the hell is going on?” a voice asked. It was a young man’s voice—he made no attempt to disguise it electronically or otherwise.

  “Did you get a good look at me walking around the lake with the rose?”

  “We got a good look at the people who jumped you and dragged you off. What was that about?”

  We, my inner voice said.

  “It would seem someone else wants the Jade Lily,” I said.

  The caller paused. While he thought it over, I climbed inside the Cherokee and fired it up.

  “Who?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Names were not exchanged.”

  I can’t say why I lied, but the caller seemed to believe me. After another pause, he said, “It doesn’t matter. Once you pay for the Lily, we don’t care what happens to it. Just don’t fuck with us.”

  “Who? Me?”

  “You think this is funny? You think this is a game?”

  I pivoted in a slow circle in my seat, looking through the SUV’s windows, trying to take in everyone around me, looking for someone, anyone, who was speaking into a ce
ll phone. I saw nothing to arouse my suspicion.

  “No,” I said. “I really don’t.”

  “We’ll call again when the money is ready. Make sure they get it right. One million two hundred and seventy thousand dollars, half in twenties, half in fifties. Nonsequential bills.”

  “Do you have any idea how much cash that is?” I said. “Do you know how much it weighs? Ninety-five pounds give or take.”

  “Exactly ninety-seven pounds fourteen-point-four ounces,” he said. “Have them divide the money into three bags, the same amount and the same weight in each bag.”

  “You’ve done this before,” I said.

  “Have you?”

  “No.”

  That caused him to pause.

  “Yes, yes you have,” he insisted. “Otherwise how would you have known about the money?”

  “Just a lucky guess.”

  He paused again.

  “I told you, McKenzie,” he said. “This isn’t a game. You know what will happen if you try to play us.”

  “No. What?”

  He hung up without responding.

  * * *

  As soon as the conversation ended, I called Mr. Donatucci.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  I told him that the artnappers made contact. I didn’t speak of Heavenly. I wanted to see if Donatucci mentioned her first, see if he had kept me under surveillance despite his promise not to. At least that’s what I told myself.

  I explained about the money.

  “Three bags suggest three partners,” Donatucci said.

  “These guys seem to know what they’re doing,” I said. “But…”

  “But what?”

  “They don’t know who I am.”

  “We guessed that when they demanded you walk around the lake with a rose in your hand.”

  “I don’t mean they don’t know what I look like,” I said. “I mean they have no idea who I am. They know nothing about my background. To them I’m just a name.”

  “I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”

  “Me neither.”

  “What next?” Donatucci asked.

  “Follow their instructions, I guess. Also, I need to speak with someone who can give me a crash course in analyzing ancient jade artifacts so I can identify the Lily, make sure it’s not a fake before I give up the money.”