Brilliant

by Kellogg, Marne Davis

  This beautiful Buckinghamshire estate, Lady Astor’s magnificent country home with its famous and infamous past—this was where John Profumo and Christine Keeler conduced the affair that toppled the British government—had been converted into an exclusive hotel several years ago, and its kitchen, under the hand of a three-star chef, was renowned.

  A young man in a severe navy suit escorted us into the living room. “Will you have an aperitif?”

  “You bet,” Owen answered. He was still pretty riled up. “We’d each like a Bloody Mary. Extra hot. Extra vodka. No ice.”

  “Excellent choice. Please make yourselves comfortable here by the fire, and I’ll return with your drinks.”

  I excused myself to go to the ladies’ room.

  “Do me a favor,” Owen said. “Come back with a better attitude. Put a goddamn smile on your face.”

  I looked in the powder room mirror. My cheeks were rosy, and my eyes sparkled. I looked like a kid. “Stop it, Kick,” I said out loud. “Stop it.”

  T H I R T Y - F I V E

  “Talk,” I said, once Owen had approved the white burgundy I suggested he order, a 1989 Olivier Leflaive Corton-Charlemagne, and our glasses were poured. We were sitting by a window in the dining room, but, unfortunately, the famous grounds I’d read so much about were scarcely visible through thick fog.

  “I came up with the plan years ago, but the timing wasn’t right until recently, for obvious reasons. For some time now, I’ve collected furniture and paintings at auction, and I’m not an expert on either, but the point is: neither are most of the people who are doing the buying. I don’t mean they’re ignorant, in fact they’re generally pretty savvy, but when it gets down to the extra fine points of confirming what’s authentic and what’s not, most of them don’t have the expertise. I’d never try to trick a dealer, or a museum expert, but face it, if you bought that Louis Quinze chest—and what you examined at the auction itself was the real thing—and if Jean’s reproduction were delivered to your house, would you be able to tell the difference?”

  “No, actually, based on what I saw, I don’t think I could.”

  “And you’re in the business.”

  I resisted saying anything about my “eye,” and how fine it was, because in this case evidently it wasn’t. “So what you plan is, depending on who buys a piece, whether it’s furniture or a painting, you’ll swap it during delivery, then sell the original privately?”

  “You learn fast.”

  “Well, I’m sorry to break this to you, Owen, but it’s not exactly an original plan—our business has always been vulnerable to fraud. But I’m pretty sure the scale you’re contemplating is something new.” The two Bloody Marys had warmed and relaxed me. The soft cashmere of my sweater caressed my skin. I toyed with my pearls. Owen put his hand on mine, and I could feel myself responding, enjoying his touch.

  The waiter and his aide arrived with a gold-rimmed tureen big enough to hold soup for thirty, and we suspended our conversation while he ladled out bowls of steaming lobster bisque, adding a dollop of sherry.

  When they were gone, Owen lifted his glass. Our eyes met. “Bon appétit,” he said. “Here’s to Project Caruso.”

  The wine tasted like ambrosia.

  “Owen, I know you think this is going to generate a huge amount of cash, and it might, but has it occurred to you that you need a financial fix that is not high-risk and labor-intensive? You need something conservative that generates a steady, dependable cash flow. What will you do if you get caught?”

  “First, I’m not going to get caught.” He put down his glass and picked up his spoon. “Do you have any idea how much of a priority this sort of scam is for Scotland Yard? Zero. Plus, what I need is cash. Now. Plus, we can always say our experts’ assessments were wrong. We don’t have any liability. Caveat emptor.”

  “You do have a reputation to protect,” I observed, and took a small sip of soup, but my appetite had vanished. Being in this beautiful spot with this dangerous man had filled me with unfamiliar sensations. Pure animal attraction. All I could think about was going to bed with him.

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s not going to happen.”

  “I hope for your sake, it doesn’t. But I think you’re crazy.”

  “I want to change the subject.”

  “Go ahead,” I said. “You’re buying.”

  “You look particularly beautiful today. I’m glad you agreed to have lunch.”

  “Owen, I’m not one of your models. You don’t need to use your lines on me. I’m happy to be here. Let’s leave it at that.”

  “Why can’t I just give you a simple compliment? Why do you turn everything into a federal case? It’s not a line. You do look beautiful.”

  “Thank you.” The fact is, his comments flooded me with happiness. However attracted I might have been to Owen in the car that morning had multiplied itself times a thousand. The car was a turn-on, but nothing compared to grand larceny and fraud! It was just unbelievably sexy. Oh my, I thought, the things we could share. Of course, I never would, but the idea of it made the butterflies in my stomach churn up a storm.

  “How are you going to work the money?”

  We’d finished the soup and white wine, and started on grilled veal chops with perfectly prepared carrots, broccoli, gratinéed potatoes, and a perfectly selected burgundy—a 1989 Bouchard Beaune Grèves Vigne de l’Enfant Jésus—one of the most hard-to-find, sensual, beguiling wines on the planet, which could not have complemented the food more perfectly. I spotted it immediately on the wine list and told Owen to order it. The sommelier almost fainted with joy at Mr. Brace’s connoisseurship. And me? I was feeling perfectly relaxed.

  “I set up a dummy corporation that will become a major investor in Panther. That’s what’s hemorrhaging the most at the moment.”

  “Amazing.” I didn’t seem to be able to take my eyes off Owen’s lips. He seemed to be having the same struggle with mine.

  It started to snow.

  We had orange marmalade bread pudding for dessert. And cognac. We were both warm and comfortable, satiated. Owen reached over And put his hand on my cheek and stroked it along my jaw, and the touch ran through me like an electrical current. I held his fingers to my lips and kissed them. I touched them with my tongue.

  “My car won’t go in the snow,” he said.

  “I know.” I kissed his fingers again.

  “Do you want to?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  Okay. I guess there’s something wrong with me. I don’t know. I suppose I could blame it on the Bloody Marys. The bottle of Corton-Charlemagne. The bottle of Beaune. The cognac. The fact that it started snowing during lunch and we all know the Panther Madrigan couldn’t make it out of the parking lot, much less down the drive and back to London. For that matter, with all the drinking we’d done, even if it were a summer’s day I don’t think Owen would have been capable of making the drive.

  I could blame it on the laughter. Or the scheme. Or the passion that had been mounting all day. What difference does it make?

  “Excuse me for a minute,” he said, and left me at the table.

  I knew I was about to do something like I’d never done before, with a man I had no business doing it with. So what. I was a grown woman. I felt happy and excited. Everything would be all right.

  Minutes later, Owen returned. “Come with me.” He put his hand on the small of my back and guided me out of the dining room. It was a familiar, intimate gesture, and it made me feel special, close to him. We went up the stairs and Owen put the key into the doors at the top of the landing. LADY ASTOR SUITE, a small plaque read. The room was spectacular. A fire blazed in the fireplace, and outside the wind whipped the snow into a frenzy. He locked the door and very slowly turned me around to face him and kissed me. His lips were warm and sweet, almost tentative, and then he kissed me more hungrily. I felt him hard against me and his tongue on mine.

  “Oh, my God,” he whispered, pressing his l
ips to my neck. “You are so magnificent.”

  He kissed me again. His strong fingers stroked me gently through the cashmere, just the way I’d imagined. My knees weakened. My breath ran out.

  From that first touch, Owen brought me to a new world. I can safely say I’d never been made love to before.

  I melted like platinum.

  T H I R T Y - S I X

  The snowstorm wasn’t a blizzard. In fact, it had stopped and was melted, for all intents and purposes, by six o’clock that evening. But it was dark and might have been icy, and so we stayed all day Sunday, too. We stayed until five o’clock Monday morning, just to be safe.

  “See you at the office,” Owen said, when he dropped me off at home. His mind was back at work, and mine, I’m sorry to say, was filled with complications. And exhaustion. Plus, I had a huge, red, bruiselike sore on my neck. I had a hickey.

  “I can’t believe you did this,” I said. I was angry and embarrassed, and embarrassingly thrilled. “I haven’t had this happen since tenth grade.”

  “Yeah. Well, there it is. It’s like a sexual badge of honor.”

  Just what I needed.

  I took the morning papers in and, while I waited for the coffee to brew, searched for news of the theft. There it was, a tiny article in the city news section:

  THEFT IN MAYFAIR. Mrs. Cavanaugh Fullerton, daughter of Lord Ishmael Winthrop, reported that Renoir’s priceless painting, Polonaise Blanche, as well as some of her jewels, have been stolen. The theft was apparently suffered during a break-in at her Stanhope Gate home Friday night while she attended her father’s ninetieth birthday gala. Further extent of the theft has not been revealed nor has any information been made available on how the thief gained entry. Police would not confirm or deny whether it was the work of the Shamrock Burglar, who has taken credit for a number of Mayfair jewelry burglaries in the last year but is not known to steal works of art.

  WHAT? I could not believe my eyes. Had the Samaritan taken back his card and kept the painting and let me take the blame? Where was the Samaritan-ness in that? I guess he was sore, literally and figuratively, that I’d whacked him on the head, and this was his way to get even. What a mess. That was definitely the end of Mayfair for a while—I’d have to move down the park to Kensington. Oops. I just remembered, I’m not doing this anymore. Old habits are hard to break.

  I left a message for Commander Curtis apologizing for not returning his call earlier. “I was away for the weekend,” I said. It was the truth. The other part of the truth was that, until I checked my messages, I’d completely forgotten he’d called.

  Later, as I sat on the bus on my way to work—an animal-print chiffon scarf wrapped high around my neck to conceal the hickey—eating my warm cruller, and watching the city creep past, I reflected on what had happened to me over the last two days. I was filled with self-recrimination. What a terrible mistake I’d made falling into Owen’s trap and bed. It was the stupidest thing I’d ever done in my life, not just because it put me on the same level as all the other silly girls who panted after him, but because I’d had such a good time, and now I was sorry. More than anything, I felt ashamed. And embarrassed. And I was getting angry about the hickey. You can make up all the lies, stories, and explanations about something like that you want, and you can’t fool anyone. If I’d had any idea what he was doing, sucking on my neck like that, I would have stopped him. And by the time I figured it out, it was too late. At the time, I’d laughed and laughed, like a love-struck teenager. What a fool I am. A hickey is a hickey and there’s only one way to get them and everyone knows what that is. And FYI: Miss Kathleen Day Keswick of Ballantine & Company Auctioneers does not get hickeys. Oh, hell.

  I adjusted the scarf higher.

  Also, while I’m not a total sophisticate about men, I do know a few things about them and I knew as well as I knew my own name that, in spite of his declarations of affection for me: Men will say anything to get into your pants. Okay, so he’s had his little conquest, and now he’s over it, no doubt fed up at his lack of self-control, his inability to keep it zipped, and trying to figure out a way to extricate himself and not jeopardize his business, because he knew as well as I did, I now knew as much about his business as he did.

  I got myself so stirred up, for a second, I thought my brain was going to blow a gasket—that I’d keel over of an aneurysm right there on the bus.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Kick, get ahold of yourself,” I said out loud making my busmates lift their heads from their papers and look at me. “Sorry,” I mumbled, and returned to my cruller and window. But the fact of the matter was, in a forty-eight-hour whirlwind of an orgy, our business relationship, which had been so ideal, was now ruined by a few expeditious (and exhilarating—oh, my God, just the thought of him made me tingle) collisions. Our world had flipped: We’d gone from friendly friends, boss and secretary, not only to being lovers, but also partners in a major confidence scheme.

  We’d gone from sailing along the surface to twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea.

  I pulled my little book out of my purse and made a note to pick up some boxes and start shipping a few things to France. The idea seemed to calm me down.

  T H I R T Y - S E V E N

  Owen was on the phone, behind closed doors. I stuck my head in and he gave me a big smile and blew me a kiss. I gave him a tight smile in return. Nope. This will not continue. Period. The end. Was I going to let a little attention make me lose years, decades, a lifetime of equilibrium? No! Then it dawned on me that my problem was I needed some sleep. I was a completely exhausted wreck.

  My interoffice phone rang. “Miss Keswick speaking.”

  “Miss Keswick,” the guard said. “There’s a gentleman here asking for Sir Cramner. And he said if Sir Cramner wasn’t here, he’d like to see you.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “He prefers not to say.”

  It’s not especially unusual that a client prefers to keep his identity to himself. After all, Privacy and Trust, with a capital “P” and capital “T,” are cornerstones of our business. “Ask Alcott to bring him to the first-floor conference room.”

  “Right.”

  Poor old soul, I thought as I touched up my makeup, added concealer over the stupid hickey, and smoothed my hair, happy to see that even though I was dead tired, I didn’t look it. I looked like a damn rose. I started to giggle. I was turning into a complete idiot.

  Poor old soul, I started again. Although Sir Cramner died over three years ago, every now and then one of his few surviving, old regimental buddies shows up, having forgotten.

  Who I found in the conference room was not an ancient regimental relic but a well-dressed man in his thirties. Black hair and blue eyes, a bladelike nose in a taut face. He stood up when I entered, and we shook hands. His grip was firm.

  “Miss Keswick?” His accent was unidentifiable—maybe a little Eton mixed with something mid-Atlantic. “My name’s Dimitri Rush.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Rush. Please have a seat. Tell me, how can Ballantine & Company be of service to you?”

  “Is Sir Cramner available?”

  “I’m sorry, he’s been gone for quite a while now.”

  “You mean gone as in . . . ”

  “Dead.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I was given his name as well as yours. Well, that’s neither here nor there, is it?” He smiled briefly. His lips were well- defined, and his teeth were white and straight. He had a winning, well-exercised air about him.

  “How can I help you, Mr. Rush?”

  “I’m here about a matter of the utmost secrecy, and I’ve been given to understand that I can trust you.”

  “Of course you can. As long as you aren’t bringing us stolen goods or asking us to do anything illegal.” I am such a hypocrite, sometimes I amaze myself.

  “Most assuredly not. It’s family property. But if news of our conversation were to reach the public before we’ve come to terms, it could cause an internationa
l incident.”

  “Mr. Rush, Ballantine & Company has not been in business for almost 250 years by betraying confidences.” Oh, God, may lightning strike me dead. “Whatever you divulge will stay here within these walls. You have my guarantee.”

  “That’s what I needed to hear. Do you mind if I smoke?”

  “Please.” I slid an ashtray across the table. He fiddled around with his lighter, sipped his coffee. I checked my watch. “Mr. Rush?” I smiled at him with what I hoped looked like encouragement and not impatience. “I’m ready when you are.”

  Based on my experience, I was pretty sure all this fiddling around would turn out to be over another set of hunting prints. He looked the type. Here to sell great-great-great-grandfather’s etchings—maybe there’d even turn out to be a small Rembrandt pencil sketch or a Holbein miniature among the lot—he was dying of guilt. “But,” he would tell me any minute, “it simply has to be done, they have to be sold, because the manor house needs a new roof.” Heaven forbid he, or any member of his elbow-patched, broken-down family, should actually get a job.

  He gave another quick, slightly apologetic, smile. “I’m sorry, this is such a momentous occasion for me and my family. The responsibility is somewhat awesome.”

  “I understand, sir. But if you don’t tell me what it is, we can’t help you.” We’d been at this for about five minutes. I stifled a yawn.

  “Tell me, Miss Keswick, did Sir Cramner ever mention to you any- thing about the missing Romanov Treasury? The jewels that disappeared during the Russian Revolution?”

  Well, that got my attention quicker than a cold shower. The mist in my head evaporated like fog. I sat straight up and shivered. Goose bumps covered my arms. “Yes, as a matter of fact, he did. A number of times.”

  “Good. Good. What did he tell you?”

  “He said one day we’d hear from someone about selling them. Are you saying you’re that someone?”