With This ring

by Le Carre, Georgia

  “Miss Fedorov, the most expensive grilled cheese sandwich is from Serendipity 3. It costs $214 dollars.”

  It took my next question for me to understand that I didn’t want to leave just yet. “Why is it so expensive?” I asked.

  He referred to his notepad. “The bread itself is baked with Dom Perignon champagne. The filling is caciocavallo podolico, which is a special cheese imported from southern Italy. The rare breed of cows that produce this cheese are bred on the Apennines where they feed on upland grasses and mountain plants like wild fennel, nettles, blueberries, liquorice and myrtle.

  Apparently, this causes the cheese to carry vegetal notes of smoke, herbs, toast, and barnyard that are balanced by an intense fruitiness and lactic tang.” He bobbed his head comically and shrugged as if he had no idea what he had just said, but it didn’t matter anyway because it was all just a bit of pompous nonsense.

  I couldn’t stop my smile. I liked Gary. How strange that he would work with a cold, heartless monster like Maxim.

  “There is more…” he added with deliberately widened eyes. “The… uh… bread is brushed with a mixture of white truffle oil and twenty-three karat gold flakes, which adds extra crisp, Then the sides are encrusted with sheets of edible 23-karat gold and it is served with a tomato sauce, which is basically a luxe version of tomato bisque filled with juicy chunks of lobster.”

  He lifted his head and looked at me inquiringly. “Does it sound like something you would like to consume?”

  “Get it for me. I’ll take it to go.”

  Betraying no emotion at my request for take away, he exited the office. I turned around to face Maxim. His focus was still completely on the document he was reading almost as though I didn’t even exist. I knew the document was not all that absorbing. He was deliberately trying to make me feel insignificant.

  “Do you ever feel bad? For what happened?”

  His reply was curt and instantaneous. “No.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I said.

  He raised his gaze to mine. “Why?”

  “You’re a horrible person,” I said truthfully, “but you’re also human. You can’t not have felt any remorse. That was a whole family you wiped out and for what?”

  He stared into my eyes for the longest time and I waited, praying that he would say something that would redeem him. For those few seconds it seemed as if there had never been anything I wanted more than for him to show me he was not the monster I thought he was.

  “What do you recall about my mother’s death?” he asked.

  My brain was temporarily scrambled. The question had popped out of nowhere. “Uh…” I decided to play it safe. “Not much.”

  “Well, she was my family, and Anna’s father wiped her out.”

  I was even more confused. “What?”

  “I didn’t go after Anna, or her mom. They were collateral damage as much as I was when they killed my mother. I went after her dad because I wanted to ruin him. His case with our company at the time was minor, but I took it for the chance to ruin him. My only regret is that Anna’s mother came in just as I was about to pull the trigger…”

  He paused and I stared at him in amazement.

  “Do you want to know what that good man did in the face of death?” he asked quietly.

  “What?” I gasped, suddenly breathless.

  “He used his wife, and the mother of his own child, as a fucking shield.” His mouth curled with the disgust he felt for the man.

  “You’re lying,” I whispered automatically, even as I knew in my gut he was telling the truth.

  He shrugged carelessly. “Believe what you want. I am not here to convince you.”

  “So you shot them both?” I asked incredulous.

  “What choice did I have?”

  “Why did you want him dead so badly?”

  He leaned back in his chair and looked away from me, his eyes on some distant point in the sky. “It takes a very strong woman to be an Ivankov and my mother was not strong. She couldn’t cope with being the wife of a man who sat and supped with death every day. When I was ten, her deep unhappiness made her turn to drink … and eventually into a desperate affair with Anna’s father.”

  He swung his gaze back towards me. “But he had a different agenda. He wanted to hurt my father. At first he tried to turn her against my father, but she refused, so he sent some compromising pictures of her to my father. I think he expected him to turn on her, but my father is an unusual man. He can watch a man being flayed to death without flinching, but he could not harm a hair on my mother’s head. He remembered her as she had been… when he first found her in a little village in Russia, carrying firewood, her golden hair wild, her cheeks red with cold. Even after he lost her to confusion, sorrow and drink that was how she remained in his heart. He was about to burn the pictures in the fireplace when my mother came into the room and saw them. Seeing the pictures of her own betrayal in his hands completely destroyed her. Her guilt was the straw that broke the camel’s back. In less than a month she was dead from an overdose. Levan found her body. He was only seven at the time.”

  “But you got involved with Anna at nineteen. How was he able to get away with it until then?”

  “Because he made sure that he remained in the dark. Even in the photos he sent my father he never showed his face. I only found out about him because she left a two by two photo of him in one of my books and a note asking for forgiveness. I never told anyone, not even my father, until I had put the bullet into his head.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Why did you want to handle it yourself?”

  “Because she left the note for me. It was not forgiveness she wanted. It was revenge.”

  “But Anna,” I breathed. “She didn’t deserve this.”

  He watched me. “What about Levan?” Did he deserve to lose his mother in such a gruesome and humiliating way? Levan and my father and I were forced to live with our loss, Anna chose to take the easy way out. I’m sorry she took her life but this was never about her.”

  “You used her.”

  “I saw my chance and took it.”

  I didn’t know how I felt. Part of me was numb. I still hated him, of course, but I also didn’t feel I had the right to. What he did was wrong, but at the same time, to a certain extent, I could now understand why he did what he did. Anna wasn’t faultless either for taking her life in that way. Neither was her father for destroying his mother and hurting his family the way he did. While I was staring at him, there was a knock on the door and Gary came in. He had my sandwich to go.

  “I’m not hungry. You have it, Gary,” I said, wheeling myself quickly out of Maxim’s office in the sky.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Freya

  “You left without the gold sandwich?” Britney asked in disbelief.

  I looked up from my computer screen. “Yeah, so?”

  “Hell, Freya! Where’s your mind? The bread was baked with 23-karat gold. You know how much I love gold. You could have brought the sandwich back for me. Now I will have to wonder about it for the rest of my life.”

  “Daylight is dying and we need to send those photos first thing tomorrow morning,” I reminded.

  “I know, I know,” she said, and went back to snapping photos of our range of white gold rings, and half-moon charm bracelets inside the makeshift studio she had set up on her table with a cardboard box, rolls of white paper, and some spotlights.”

  “When are you resuming at the bar?” she asked strategically placing one of the rings on a strawberry that she had misted with a spray bottle.

  “Today,” I sighed. “We need the money and pronto.”

  She looked back, her face concerned. “We don’t need it that badly. Your wound …”

  “I’ll be fine,”

  “Just don’t get into any fights,” she cautioned.

  I laughed. “I’m Igor Fedorov’s daughter. It’s going to take more than a one week old stab wound to stop me from defending myself.”
<
br />   “I meant don’t start one.” She rolled her eyes and went back to clicking away on her camera.

  “I’ll be as good as gold.”

  “Don’t remind me of that sandwich.”

  I laughed.

  “Anyway, you still haven’t told me why you got so mad and stormed out of Maxim’s office.”

  “He told me that he went after Anna because her father was responsible for his mother committing suicide.”

  The camera almost fell from her hands. “Good God! You guys seem very casual about taking your own lives, or killing other people. Is it a Russian thing?”

  “Not a Russian thing,” I said. “But it’s our reality, my family’s and Maxim’s.”

  My phone began to ring then, so I quickly searched for it under the clutter of files and photos on my desk.

  “Hold on,” I said to her when I found the phone and saw that it was my father.

  “Papa,” I answered, my stomach in knots.

  His cool voice came through. “How do you feel Printsessa?”

  I immediately weakened my voice. “Still very weak, but I’m getting better.”

  “Yes, I heard you went to see Maxim in a wheelchair.” There was amusement in his voice.

  “I was feeling particularly bad that day.”

  “Well, come home then. So you can recuperate in a nice house instead of that flea infested place you live in.”

  “Uh…” The strength came back into my voice. “I’m a little busy right now, papa, so I can’t. But don’t worry, I’ll be fine here, and—”

  “There’ll be a plane waiting for you this evening. You can return next week.”

  He ended the call and I was left staring ahead and seeing nothing. There was so much to do, but nothing was more important than somehow getting him to change his mind.

  “You alright?” Britney asked.

  I blinked and turned to her. “Want to go to Russia for a week?”

  * * *

  Britney wanted to come, but of course, she couldn’t. It was bad enough I had to leave.

  That evening I was picked up in a town car in front of my apartment building and driven to the private charter grounds of Teterboro airport.

  I didn’t recognize the jet but what I did recognize was Nikita, my father’s secretary of fifteen years. She greeted me with her gorgeously fruity voice. I embraced her. It had been too long.

  “Doing okay love?” she asked, her blonde curls bobbing around her cheeks.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “Dad wants to ruin it, though.”

  She laughed out loud and it was contagious and I joined her.

  After a while I settled into a truly wonderful menu of steaming cabbage soup and beef stroganoff that my father’s cook used to cook from the time of my childhood. I had to admit her food still tasted the best. With my stomach full, I dozed off for the remaining eight-and-a-half hours until we landed in Moscow.

  For the sake of caution, my father always sent me what I could recognize truly came from him, be it a person like Nikita, or his familiar Soviet limo Gaz-13 with his special number plate that was waiting for me a little distance away from the plane. I got in and didn’t recognize the driver or the guard in front but I did instantly recognize my father’s scent of Ghurka Black dragon cigars.

  When I was a young girl I could remember wishing he would stop smoking because I was worried about what something that smelt that foul would do internally to him. How silly I was. I should have worried about what he could do to the poor cigars.

  When we arrived at the house, I got out and took in the white mansion I had called home for most of my life. Now my home was a cramped two-bedroom in a neighborhood that Britney called the ass end of the big apple. Nevertheless, I knew which one I preferred.

  I was greeted by Elena, my father’s housekeeper. She was a good woman and I had great affection for her, but she only nodded formally. After rejecting her offer of a meal or a drink I headed straight up the golden balustrade and red-carpeted flight of stairs to my room. I crossed the massive gilded space and jumped into my old king size bed with its silk sheets and goose down pillows. Compared to the bed I had in my apartment it was like falling into clouds.

  I was asleep in minutes.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Freya

  I came awake to the sense of a presence by my side. It was my father and he was seated comfortably on my bed as he watched me sleep.

  “Papa,” I mumbled sleepily.

  He chuckled affectionately. “Why did you not eat?” he asked in Russian.

  “I wasn’t hungry. I had a massive meal on the plane,” I replied.

  He placed a palm against my cheek. I didn’t move. This hand that could caress so gently could just as easily slap so hard I would feel the vibration in the bones of my neck. This time his fingers moved to caress. At that moment I felt an old tug in my heart. This was my father. All said and done he had fed, clothed, sheltered, and protected me for most of my life. I felt sad at the reminder of his insistence that I marry Maxim. That was the only thing right now that threatened to pull us apart. I looked into his eyes. If I was ever going to reason with him now was the moment.

  But as if he understood what I was about to say, he placed a kiss on my forehead and rose to his feet. “We are going out to dinner. Put on a dress and maybe,” he leaned forward and brushed his fingers through my crazy hair, “tie your hair back? There are four new dresses for you to try.”

  I nodded dumbly and looked past him to the coffee table in my lounge area. There were four large boxes tied with peach ribbons awaiting me.

  “Take your pick tonight and keep the rest,” he threw over his shoulder as he exited my room.

  I unboxed the dresses, at first without interest, but they were so extraordinarily beautiful I couldn’t help but be seduced by how gorgeous they all were. I chose a white silk dress with spaghetti straps and a slit that shot all the way to the middle of my thighs. It was one of those dresses that was so simple and classic you knew the moment you saw it, it must have cost the earth itself. A stylist would have recommended peach or apricot lipstick, but I went for bold red. I pulled my hair back into a high ponytail on my head and finished off the look with an emerald choker that had been my mother’s. Then I closed my safe, and quickly slipped into a pair of white strappy sandals.

  As I came down the stairs I knew I looked the part, but when I saw Elena’s eyes widen with surprise, I realized I must look better than what I thought.

  “You look like your mother,” she whispered.

  “Thank you,” I whispered back. Tears threatened to choke me. Elena couldn’t have paid me a higher compliment. My mother was a great beauty queen. She had been crowned Miss America in her time.

  “Your father is in his study.” I went to his door and knocked softly. He called me to come. I opened the door and I entered.

  “Beautiful,” he declared with a nod of satisfaction. Then he moved forward and took my arm.

  “How severe is the pain?”

  “It’s much better now. It can be ignored, so no need to worry,” I said as we slipped into the back of his limo.

  As the car slid smoothly out of the tall black and gold gates our conversation moved to his last trip to Peru. Cocooned in the comfortable interior of the car I began to relax. When my father decided to charm someone, there was no way they were not going to be charmed. I was charmed. I listened eagerly to his adventures and laughed at his stories until the car came to a stop and my father said, “Ah, we are here.”

  I thought we would be going to one of my father’s usual super expensive haunts in the heart of Moscow, but we had pulled up in front of a set of iron cast gates I was all too familiar with. I turned to my father with a look of betrayal.

  “What are we doing here?”

  “Having dinner.”

  I turned my face away. “I’m taking a taxi home.”

  He didn’t say a word and that was worse than if he had bothered to tell me off. I sat stiffly,
fuming inwardly, my face turned away from him until we arrived at the front of the splendid Ivankov mansion. The door was pulled open for me, but it was not by the Ivankov’s butler, but Bianca herself. She was grinning widely and seemed filled with a child-like excitement to see me.

  “Freya,” she called out merrily, and for a moment I was so stumped to see her I forgot I was meant to be furious at my father’s deception. The next thing I knew, I was being pulled into the house by the hand. Bianca pulled me through the house right into the kitchen where there was a flurry of activity. She pulled me through it all towards a long table filled with too much food. She picked up a tiny square of toast with caviar on it.

  “Do you love caviar?” she asked excitedly.

  I was too bemused to tell her caviar was not special to me. I could have eaten it for breakfast every day of my childhood and I had always chosen cereal instead. I took the tiny toast offering and popped it into my mouth. Bianca snagged two flutes of champagne from the tray of a passing manservant and held one out to me.

  Her eyes were sparkling almost as much as the golden liquid in our glasses when she clinked her glass with mine and said, “To us.”

  I echoed her words and took a sip of cold bubbles.

  “You look really beautiful,” she said.

  “So do you,” I said sincerely. Her hair was pulled back just like mine, with golden stray strands framing her lovely face. Her silver dress was superbly cut, sleeveless, and hugged her body exquisitely.

  “What’s the occasion?” I asked.

  “Maxim’s father is in town, which apparently hardly ever happens so they wanted this to be a sort of introductory dinner between the two families.”

  “Hmm…” I mused sarcastically. “An introductory dinner, for a marriage I have countless times said I am not interested in.”