The Collector

by Nora Roberts

  her class, and in college altogether.”

  “Well, that’s a bitch, and a jealous one.”

  “A bitch, no question, but she believed it. Anything written in the last hundred years was dreck to her. In any case, I took what she said to heart. Walked out of her class, walked out of college. Much to my parents’ consternation. So . . .”

  She started to shrug again, but he laid a hand over hers. “You showed them all.”

  “I don’t know about that. How did you—”

  “No, don’t ask me how I spent my college years. What did you do when you walked out?”

  “I took some courses in popular fiction and started blogging. Since my father started making noises about how the army would give me direction and discipline, I waited tables so I didn’t have to feel guilty for taking his money when I absolutely wasn’t going to take his advice. He’s proud of me now. He keeps thinking I’ll write something brilliant, if not tragic, but he’s good with what I do. Mostly.”

  He tucked her father away for now. He knew all about fathers who weren’t quite satisfied with their child’s career direction.

  “I bought your book.”

  “You did not.” Flustered, delighted, she studied him. “Did you?”

  “And read it. It’s fun, and it’s clever—and it’s incredibly visual. You know how to paint a picture with words.”

  “A huge compliment from someone who actually paints pictures. On top of the compliment of actually reading a young adult novel.”

  “I’m not a teenager, but it hooked me in. I can see why Rylee’s jonesing for the second book. And I didn’t mention it before,” he added, “because I thought you’d figure I was saying it so you’d sleep with me. Too late for that now.”

  “That’s . . . nice. I probably would’ve thought that—you’d still have gotten points. But you get more this way. This is nice,” she said, with a gesture that swept over the skyline. “Uptown, but normal. It makes Imperial eggs and ruthless collectors thereof seem like the fiction.”

  “Kaylee could find one.”

  Thinking of her fictional heroine, Lila shook her head. “No, not Fabergé, but some mystical egg of legend. A dragon’s egg, or a magic crystal egg. Hmm. That could be interesting. And if I’m going to have her do anything, I better get back to her.”

  He rose with her. “I want to stay again tonight.”

  “Oh. Because you want to sleep with me or because you don’t want me here alone?”

  “Both.”

  “I like the first reason. But you can’t set yourself up as my co-house-sitter, Ash.”

  He touched her arm as she began to load the tray. “Let’s just leave it, for now, at tonight.”

  Short-term plans worked smoother, to her mind. “All right.”

  “And tomorrow you can give me a couple hours in the studio. You can bring the dog.”

  “Can I?”

  “We can take a walk by Luke’s bakery.”

  “Cupcake bribery. My favorite. All right. We’ll see how it goes today. We’ve got Kerinov first on the list.”

  He liked lists, and long-term plans, and all the steps it took to get from here to there. He liked being here, with Lila. But he was starting to consider what it might be like—and what it might take—to get there.

  Lila returned with Earl Grey from his afternoon walk to find the doorman speaking with a spindly little man with a soccer ball paunch and a long, graying braid. He wore faded jeans, a Grateful Dead T-shirt, and he carried a battered shoulder-strap satchel.

  She took him for a messenger, would have walked by with a smile for the doorman, but heard him say, with the faintest of accents:

  “Alexi Kerinov.”

  “Mr. Kerinov?” She’d expected someone older than what she gauged as mid-fifties—someone in a suit with white hair and maybe a natty little goatee.

  He gave her a wary look from behind tinted glasses. “Yes.”

  “I’m Lila Emerson. I’m with Ashton Archer.”

  “Ah yes.” He offered her a hand, soft as a baby’s butt. “It’s good to meet you.”

  “Would you mind showing me some ID?”

  “No, of course.” He pulled out a wallet, offered her his driver’s license. Approved, she noted, for operating motorcycles.

  No, she thought, he was nothing like she’d imagined.

  “I’ll take you up. Thanks, Dwayne.”

  “You got it, Ms. Emerson.”

  “Can I leave my case?” He gestured to the wheeled suitcase beside him.

  “Sure,” Dwayne told him. “I’ll put it away for you.”

  “Thank you. I was in D.C.,” he told Lila as he followed her to the elevator. “A quick business trip. A teacup poodle?” He held out the back of his hand for Earl Grey to sniff. “My mother-in-law has one she calls Kiwi.”

  “This is Earl Grey.”

  “Distinguished.”

  “So. Deadhead?” She nodded at his shirt, watched him grin.

  “The first concert I went to after coming to America. I was transformed.”

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “I was eight when we left what was the Soviet Union.”

  “Before the wall came down.”

  “Yes, before. My mother was a dancer for the Bolshoi, my father a teacher of history, and a very clever man who kept his political leanings so close, even his children weren’t aware.”

  “How did you get out?”

  “We were allowed, my sister and I, to attend a performance in London, of Swan Lake. My father had friends in London, contacts. He and my mother planned for months, not telling Tallia or me. One night after a performance, we got in a cab—a late supper, my sister and I thought, but it wasn’t a cabdriver. This friend of my father’s drove us—like a madman—through the streets of London and to the embassy, and we were given asylum. And from there, we went to New York. It was very exciting.”

  “I bet. As exciting for an eight-year-old boy as it must’ve been terrifying for your parents.”

  “I didn’t understand the risk they took until it was all done. We had a good life in Moscow, you see, even a privileged one.”

  “But they wanted freedom.”

  “Yes. More for their children than themselves, and they gave us that gift.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “They live in Brooklyn. My father is now retired, but my mother has a little school of dance.”

  “They left everything behind,” she said as they stepped out of the elevator. “To give their children a life in America. They’re heroes.”

  “Yes, you understand. I owe them . . . Jerry Garcia, and everything else. Were you, too, a friend of Vinnie’s?”

  “No, not really. But you were.” She unlocked the penthouse door. “I’m sorry.”

  “He was a good man. His funeral is tomorrow. I never thought . . . We talked only days ago. When I read the documents, I thought, Vinnie will go crazy. I couldn’t wait to talk to him, to come back and meet with him and plan what to do. And now . . .”

  “You have to bury your friend.” She touched a hand to his arm, led him inside.

  “This is wonderful. Such a view! This is George the Third.” He moved straight in and to a gilded cabinet. “Beautiful, perfect. Circa 1790. I see you collect snuff bottles. This opal is particularly fine. And this . . . I’m sorry.”

  He turned back to her, shook his hands in the air. “I forgot myself in my interest.”

  “One you shared with Vinnie.”

  “Yes. We met competing at auction for a bergère chair—caned satinwood.”

  She heard it in his voice, the affection, the regret. “Who won?”

  “He did. He was fierce. You have exquisite taste, Ms. Emerson, and a brilliant eye.”

  “It’s Lila, and it’s not actually—”

  Ash stepped out of the elevator. With one quick glance at Kerinov, he moved quickly to Lila, angled her behind him.

  “Ash, this is Alexi Kerinov. I met him i
n the lobby when I came back with Earl Grey.”

  “You’re early.”

  “Yes, the train came early, and I was lucky with a cab. I came straight here, as you asked.” Kerinov held his hands up, as if in surrender. “You’re right to be cautious.”

  “He showed me his driver’s license before we came up. You have a motorcycle.”

  “I do, a Harley, a V-Rod. My wife wishes otherwise.” He smiled a little, but kept his gaze warily on Ash. “There’s a picture of you,” Kerinov told him, “with Oliver and your sister Giselle, among pictures of Vinnie’s children, on the William and Mary marquetry table in the first-floor sitting room of his home. He thought of you as his.”

  “I felt the same. I appreciate you coming.” Now Ash extended a hand.

  “I’m nervous,” he confessed. “I barely slept since we spoke. The information in the documents is important. There’s often some talk, some buzzing in my world, about information on the lost Imperial eggs. In London, in Prague, in New York. But nothing that leads to any of them. But this? You have a kind of map here, an itinerary. I’ve never come across anything as definitive.”

  “We should sit,” Lila said. “I can make tea? Coffee? Something cold?”

  “Something cold would be welcome.”

  “We’ll use the dining room,” Ash decided. “It should be easier to see what you have.”

  “Can you tell me what the police know? About Vinnie. And Oliver. I should have said I’m sorry for your brother. I met him at Vinnie’s shop. So young,” he said with real regret. “He was very charming.”

  “Yes, he was.”

  “The documents were his? Oliver’s?”

  “He had them.” Ash gestured Kerinov to a chair at the long table.

  “And died for them, like Vinnie. Died for what they may lead to. These eggs are worth almost countless millions of dollars. Historically? Their recovery is priceless. For a collector, their worth is beyond the telling. There are some who would kill to get them, without question. Historically again, they already have the blood of the tsars on them.”

  Seated, Kerinov opened his satchel, took out a manila envelope. “These are the documents Vinnie gave to me. You should keep them safe.”

  “I will.”

  “And my translations.” He took out two more envelopes. “One for each egg. These should also be kept safe. The documents were primarily in Russian, as Vinnie—and you, I think—believe. Some were Czech. It took longer to translate those portions. May I?” he asked before opening an envelope.

  “You see here the description—this we already know from Fabergé’s invoice, from the inventory documented of the seized Imperial treasures in 1917, the revolution.”

  Ash read the typed translation of the Cherub with Chariot.

  “This egg was commissioned by Alexander the Third, for his wife Maria Feodorovna. Its cost at the time was twenty-three hundred rubles. A princely sum in those days, and some would say more than frivolous given the condition of the country, its people. Still, this is nothing compared to its value now.

  “Thank you,” he said when Lila came in, set down a tray with a pitcher of lemonade and tall glasses of ice. “Lemonade is a favorite of mine.”

  “Mine, too.”

  He lifted the glass as soon as she poured, drank deep. “My throat’s dry. This is both terrible and exciting.”

  “Like fleeing the USSR after the ballet.”

  “Yes.” He took a slow breath. “Yes. Nicholas, who was tsar after his father, sent millions of peasants into the Great War. There was a terrible toll on the people, the country, and the revolution brewed. The workers united to overthrow the government. The provisional government—bankers and the like—was opposed by the Soviets. Lenin took power with a bloodbath in the fall of 1917, and confiscated the Imperial treasure, the property, and the royal family was slaughtered. Some of the treasure he sold—this is documented. He wanted foreign currency in his coffers, and wanted to end the war. This is history, I know, but the background is important.”

  “You learned to value history from your father.” Lila glanced at Ash. “His father was a professor of history in the USSR before they escaped.”

  It didn’t surprise Ash in the least she’d already learned Kerinov’s family background.

  “My father, yes. We learned the history of our country—others as well, but the country of our birth.” Kerinov took another drink. “So the war continued, and the attempts by Lenin to negotiate a peace with Germany failed. He lost Kiev, and the enemy was only miles from Petrograd when the treaty was signed and the Eastern Front was no longer a war zone.”

  “A terrible time,” Lila murmured. “Why don’t we learn from it?”

  “My father would say those in power too often crave more. Two wars, the civil and the world, cost Russia blood and treasure, and the peace had a price as well. Some of the treasure of the tsars was sold outright, some in a quieter fashion. And some remained in Russia. Of the fifty Imperial eggs, all but eight found their way into museums or private collections. That we know,” he added.

  He tapped a finger on the printout he’d made. “Here we see the Cherub with Chariot sold in 1924. This is after Lenin’s death, and during the power struggle with the troika collective, just before Stalin gained power. War and politics. It would appear one of the troika gained access to some of the treasury, and perhaps simply for personal gain sold the egg to Vladimir Starski for two thousand rubles. Less than its worth, but a huge sum for a Soviet. This states that Starski transported the egg to his home in Czechoslovakia, as a gift for his wife.”

  “And this wasn’t officially documented because, essentially, the egg was stolen?”

  Kerinov nodded at Lila. “Yes. Under the rule of law and culture of that time, the treasure belonged to the Soviets. But the egg traveled to Prague, and resided there until it was again sold in 1938. In that year, the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, and Hitler’s goal was to assimilate the country and its people, to rid it of its intellectual class. It was sold to an American, Jonas Martin, of New York, for the amount of five thousand U.S. dollars, by the son of Starski.”

  “This Starski may have been desperate,” Lila considered. “To get himself and his family out of Czechoslovakia, away from the war, he might have sold as many of his valuables as he could. Travel light, but with deep pockets, and get the hell out of Hitler’s way.”

  “This is what I think.” Kerinov punctuated his agreement with a fist tapped on the table. “War again, more blood. A wealthy American banker, from what I can find on this Jonas Martin. And the money would be nothing to Martin. I think the egg would be a kind of trinket, an ornate souvenir. The son sells it, perhaps not knowing its full origin. It comes then to New York, to a fine house in Sutton Place.”

  “Where Oliver tracks it to the Martin heir, Miranda Swanson.”

  “The granddaughter of Jonas Martin. The record ends with the sale to Martin. But . . .”

  Kerinov opened the second envelope. “The Nécessaire. The description as with the Cherub with Chariot. And its history much the same. War, revolution, a change of power. Confiscated, with its last official entry in 1922, and its transfer to the Sovnarkom. From there it traveled with the first egg—a pair, you could say—from Russia to Czechoslovakia, from there to New York. Alexander to Maria, to Lenin, to the troika thief, to Starski, his son, to Martin.”

  “Both in New York.” Ash glanced at Lila. “We had that wrong.”

  “Both,” Kerinov confirmed, “until the twelfth of June, 1946, when the Nécessaire took another journey. This . . . excuse me.”

  He opened the envelope holding the Russian documents. “Here, here.” And tapped a section. “This is Russian again, but incorrect. Grammatically, and some of the spelling. This was written by someone who isn’t fluent, but has a working knowledge. It has the egg not by name but by description. It calls it an egg box with jewels. Lady’s manicure set with thirteen pieces. Won by Antonio Bastone from Jonas Martin Junior in five-card dra
w.”

  “In a poker game,” Lila murmured.