I place them along the wall of the strong room and fish out the next items, a trio of cardboard cylinders, each a meter long. They feel empty, nearly weightless, but when I pry the cap off the first, I find a roll of old and fragile paper. I unfurl it carefully and see a charcoal drawing of a man’s anguished face, just the shadows, though, no highlights, not even an outline for the rest—a face rendered entirely by the unseen parts. In the second tube, another drawing, this one of a domestic scene: a well-off family in sixteenth-century dress at a table, Papa laughing at something his daughter is saying, Mama setting a loaf of bread on the table, smiling slyly. In the third tube is a small collection of more modern drawings: Cubist fish swimming in a Cubist sea. A nude woman with a tiny head and rectangle arms.
In the crate beneath the cylinders, I find a set of flat cardboard sleeves. I run my finger through the seam of the first one and peel it open. Inside, the top of a gold frame, and when I pull it free, I see a still life, a bowl of fruit and a dead pheasant, rendered as sharp-edged pixelated blocks of color. In the second sleeve, something older and more traditional, a woman in a Victorian dress, turning her head away from whoever’s making her portrait, but eyes looking back, daring the artist to continue. And in the third, a riot of color exploding from beneath a protective sheet of glass. Greens and yellows and blues and oranges distinct and separate, then melding together into an abstracted seascape. Along the right edge, Chinese characters, large, then small.
I recognize none of the art, none of the few signatures written on the bottom. Each piece is different, and there’s no unity to the works until I step back and take in the entirety of the collection all at once. When there are faces, they are never ordinary, never merely satisfied or glum, but faces bursting with love or sadness or joy, the outer limits of what a human can feel. When there is color, it is blinding, forceful, insisting it be seen and heard. Someone, maybe Lila, brought these together under the same roof because she loved them.
When I’m done, I find myself standing, fingers trembling as they touch my lips. I’ve never seen such beauty before, and certainly never collected together in the same place. I find myself thinking it’s like a family reunion of all the good things that ever existed in this world.
Then I find myself wondering how much it’s all worth.
* * *
I sit with my back against the gold filigreed headboard, bare feet on a duvet cover made of pink satin. Beyond the translucent curtains, Geneva glimmers the way Zurich glimmers, modestly, lights like carefully stacked gold coins, but not too many, lest the city be seen as too showy. Naz has shed her suit jacket and paces in front of the bed in just her skirt and sleeveless blouse, somehow the exact same pink as the duvet cover. She nods as she says, ja, ja, ferstehe into her phone; I understand, Agatha, of course, morning is fine.
She clicks off, pinches her face in happiness, and jumps in place excitedly. “Full report by morning, Agatha says, but it looks good. Really good.”
I try to smile.
“Honestly, a once-in-a-lifetime thing, what happened today,” Naz says. “And here you are, looking like I do when I my scotch is gone. Speaking of…” Naz points to the minibar.
“Sure,” I say. My eyes follow her as she almost skips across the room, radiating an undiluted happiness, lawyers’ happiness: You got yours, I got mine, what else matters?
“It’s just—last time I was in a hotel like this…”
“Last time was last time,” she says. “This time is this time. The important thing is, we move quickly.”
“Naz, listen…”
“I started the paperwork already. A new company in the Canary Islands.” She empties a tiny bottle of brown liquor into her glass. “Don’t worry. I have a new e-mail and the best encryption money can buy.”
I cross the room, take her glass from her, and set it down on a table. “This, what we’re doing. It isn’t right.”
“You’re a rich woman,” Naz says. “You can do whatever you want.”
“Lila Kereti is a rich woman.”
“According to your passport, you are Lila Kereti.”
“Legally.”
“Is there any other way that matters?” She snatches back her glass and eyes me as she sips. “God bless her, wherever she is, but Lila Kereti 1.0 is gone. Now here’s Lila 2.0. Younger, faster, smarter.”
She finishes the rest, sets down her glass, and gives me a tender smile.
“Get some sleep,” she says. “I’ll be in my room, setting up Lila’s empire.”
She’s gone a moment later, and I hear her whistling, actually whistling, in the hallway. I fasten the chain on the door, draw a bath, and lie at the bottom of the tub as it fills. Warm, plush, rich people’s water creeps up a millimeter at a time, encasing my ears and making the world go dumb.
Lila, where have you gone? Where’s your son? Dead, the both of you, or just one of you?
The water covers my nose, makes the world go airless.
Why haven’t you come for your treasures, Lila? No need for worldly things where you are? A Buddhist monastery. A convent. Under the dirt.
I open my mouth, let the bubbles rise to the surface and pop.
* * *
Agatha Lupo wears silver cowboy boots and a yellow cape and a pink skirt that’s almost a ballerina’s tutu, permanently floating as if she’d been spinning and the skirt just stuck there. Asian, from her appearance, and the same age as Naz, she strides around the strong room at the Freeport as if it were a dance floor, then hands down her verdict: “You have, Ms. Kereti, excellent taste.”
“Thank you.”
“The rug alone,” Agatha says. “The rug alone.” She slips on a pair of white cotton gloves and examines the rug’s fringe. “Persian. Kerman province. Let’s say, hm, circa 1700. One never sees a sickle motif with vine scroll and palmette anymore. Not in this condition.”
I shake my head, no, one certainly doesn’t.
“Conservatively,” she says. “Conservatively, at a good auction, the rug will fetch twenty. Twenty-five on a good day. How does that sound?”
“Good,” I say, nearly laughing at the absurdity of a rug going for so much. “I mean, great. Twenty thousand sounds great.”
A look between Agatha and Naz that contains a whole wordless conversation.
Naz places a hand on my forearm, leans in close to my ear. “Twenty million,” she whispers.
I turn my head, blink at her, twenty million what? “I don’t understand.”
Now it’s Agatha’s turn. She pulls a stack of papers from a briefcase leaning against the wall and motions for me to come over. It’s a long list: item numbers, estimated values, final sales price. “Textile and rug auctions from the last seven years,” Agatha says. “Look at these numbers, and none of these are as good as yours. Most buyers are anonymous, but we know they’re almost certainly from Gulf countries, usually royalty.”
“Twenty million,” I say. “Dollars?”
“Conservatively,” Agatha says.
The air seems to shimmer, and suddenly I’m leaning against the wall, grateful for cold concrete. I close my eyes and am back in the cell at Dr. Simon’s lab. My veins stretch.
“Get her a wastebasket,” I hear Dr. Simon shout. “Goddammit, hurry.”
Rossi and LaBelle are holding me by the arms, Dr. Simon is patting my face.
“Take some water,” Dr. Simon says. “Here, some water.”
My eyes flutter open to see Naz crouching before me, a bottle of water held out like an offering. Agatha sits next to me on the floor, holding one arm, while the attendant, Thérèse, is holding the other. Naz pours a little water in my mouth and I swallow.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Don’t be sorry,” Naz says. “You’re in shock. It happens.”
“No,” I say. “I mean, I’m sorry, I don’t believe you. This is bullshit. Twenty million for a rug. That’s not real.”
“Bullshit in your world.” Agatha smiles gently. “But not in mine.
”
* * *
The mask is Etruscan bronze, the goddess is Cycladic marble. The seascape is a late-period Zhang Daqian, and the still life an early and underappreciated Braque. As for the painting of the woman in Victorian dress turning away, eyes looking back at the artist, it’s unsigned, but Agatha has theories.
The drawings include a study by Modigliani and a rare Ferdinand Bol, a student of Rembrandt. As for the charcoal of the anguished face, Agatha presses her fingers together and tells me in a voice like a solemn prayer that it’s by Raffaello Sanzio, and has been missing since 1916. Who’s that? I ask. Mostly he’s known just as Raphael, she says.
Although the best prices are to be had at a public auction, Naz and I, to Agatha’s disappointment, rule it out. All transactions are to be done discreetly and—Naz is adamant on this point—here in the Geneva Freeport, where no government need be informed and no taxes paid. This, I learn, is the very point of the Freeport: a secret world hidden inside a nondescript building next to the railroad tracks where the rich can conduct their business beyond the eyes of any authority.
Once Naz has my company set up—LK Marketing Services—and Agatha has phoned her buyers, I sit through three days of meetings in the Freeport’s own viewing room. A platinum blond, eighty years young, strokes a tiny dog with jeweled fingers as she squints at piece after piece, then whispers a price to her gallery boy when the Braque is presented. A Russian man with a shaved head and a shiny suit buttoned over a ballooning chest growls into a mobile phone as his stick-figure girlfriend says yes, the Modigliani will be perfect for the Chamonix ski lodge. A chinless aristocrat from London wearing a brass-buttoned blazer and an actual ascot—the first I’ve seen in real life—harrumphs and wheezes as he runs a yellow fingernail over the marble goddess and grins with yellow teeth.
The Ferdinand Bol drawing goes to a Chinese businesswoman, the rug to a Qatari prince, who at the last second glances at the Etruscan warrior mask and announces he’ll take that, too. There seems to be a rule that no one speak to me directly. Instead, prices are conveyed first to a member of the buyer’s entourage, then to Agatha, then to Naz, who presents me with a number written in pencil, underlined if Agatha thinks it’s acceptable.
The sense of unreality, of total disbelief that all this is not only possible, but legal, never leaves me. The things, which are not mine, are turned into money, which is mine. From time to time I excuse myself, go to a stall in the bathroom, and cry. The dreams and memories and chimeric combinations of both that had tormented me in Dr. Simon’s lab seem more real than what’s happening now.
Frau Schürr, a woman of sixty in leather pants and oversized sweater, eyes the charcoal drawing of the anguished face by Raphael, her head cocked, weight on the heel of a boot. Her husband sits impatiently on a steel-and-leather chair, reminding her every two minutes of his lunch appointment.
The other man Frau Schürr has brought with her, a child of thirty with a head of wispy blond hair who wears jeans and pink eyeglasses, mirrors her pose.
“I don’t want to live with sadness on my wall,” Frau Schürr says in German.
“It’s a Raphael,” pink eyeglasses says. “So hot right now. You can resell the damn thing in a year for thirty percent more.”
Agatha takes a step closer, shows the man a catalog.
“See,” he says. “It’s not about sadness, my love. It’s about your return.”
Frau Schürr consults with him for a moment, and a number is passed along to me. It’s underlined three times, and Naz is giving me a look. I shake my head.
Naz leans in close. “You’re an idiot to pass on this,” she whispers.
I rise from my seat, brush my hands over my pants as if wiping dust off my thighs. “The Raphael is no longer for sale,” I say flatly.
Frau Schürr, pink eyeglasses, and even her husband look at me.
“I’m keeping it,” I say. “Danke für deine Zeit.”
Naz follows me out of the room and when she catches up, I see she’s wrestling with how to play this, firm or compassionate. She goes with the latter.
“What’s wrong? That was an excellent offer. Better than excellent.”
I stop in the hallway, wait for someone to pass. “I want it put back in the strong room. Wrapped up, just like it was.”
Naz blinks at me, mouth open. “We have other buyers interested…”
“Just like it was,” I repeat. “You work for me, remember that.”
* * *
Naz is pissed but is doing her best not to show it. A forced sense of celebration as she insists on ordering champagne. But Agatha demurs, then reminds me with a steely smile it’s perfectly understandable to have seller’s remorse. “If you ever, ever, want to liquidate the Raphael, just give me a call,” she says, kissing me on each cheek before bouncing away.
“Liquidate the Raphael,” Naz says, signaling the waiter. “It’s her business, so we can’t really blame her, but liquidate. It’s just crass.”
Playing the ally now, but that’s all right. It’s what I’m paying her for.
“Everything will be cleared in a day, maybe two. I’ve set up a separate account, all cash, here in Switzerland. Which reminds me, it came in this morning.” She pulls a manila envelope from her briefcase and slides it across the table. “My secretary drove it down here himself. Your—delivery.”
My new identity. I don’t even know my new name yet, but the envelope is pleasingly thick with a passport and paperwork. I slide it onto the seat beside me.
“The lease on the Freeport strong room was, what, twenty years?” I say.
“Paid in advance,” Naz says. “You left a lot of money back there.”
“The Raphael stays where it is. That’s the way I want it.”
The waiter arrives with the bottle of champagne. As he fusses through the business of opening it and filling our glasses, I watch the other people in the restaurant, couples and families, business partners, all of them prosperous-looking, swallowing foie gras and Wagyu beef so casually I wonder if they even taste it.
“I’m not—indifferent,” says Naz when the waiter is gone. “I want you to know that.”
I look at her.
“To her. Lila. Or anyone.” She takes another sip of champagne. “My father came here when I was two. Worked as a cabdriver and was lucky to get that. ‘Be a cork,’ he told me.”
“A cork?”
She picks up the cork from the champagne bottle. “You take this to the bottom of the ocean and let go, what happens?”
“It—goes up,” I say. “To the top.”
She drops it back onto the tablecloth. “The Raphael. Why do we say it belonged to Lila Kereti? Because it was there wrapped up in her things? If she earned it, then how? If it was a gift, then who gave it to her?”
I shrug. “It doesn’t matter.”
“My point exactly. So why can’t it belong to you, the real Lila Kereti, the legal Lila Kereti?” she says.
A solo toast, her glass to mine, which I leave on the table, untouched.
“You’re on the top now, darling,” Naz says. “Where corks belong.”
Thirty-Five
From the window over her IKEA couch, Marike Saar can see the river and, beyond, the hills of the Buda side. She takes coffee on the couch in the mornings, and in the evenings, tea. On the mantel of the fireplace, filled with candles, is a photo of Nick and Imre, the kind boys from whom Marike has leased the apartment while Imre works a three-month film-editing gig in Berlin. On the IKEA coffee table is a book of Nick’s poems, Budapest by Night, published by a small local press.
Marike ventures out twice daily into her neighborhood on the Pesht side, pronounced just that way, Pesht, the way the locals pronounce it. In the mornings, she does her shopping at a grocery on the pedestrian street a block away. When Henri is standing outside his salon smoking, she stops for a chat, inquires about his two corgis, Trinidad and Tobago. Her first week in Budapest, Henri had colored her hair to get rid of the prema
ture gray (Tragique, he’d said) and scissored the stringy mess on her head into a chin-length bob, no bangs.
At night, Marike visits one of three cafés for dinner and seeks out a bar with live music, usually jazz, which is easy to find here. In between the twice-daily outings, she reads, takes many naps, and studies Hungarian with a university student who comes by the apartment to tutor her. It is a quiet existence that does not change much from day to day. The routine of it is her joy.
Marike finds it easy not to think about her father too much. The anonymous package to the local bureau desk of the New York Times or Guardian is always a project for next week. Nothing would be the same after that, and as noted, Marike’s joy is in her routine.
She stops by a café on an evening during her third week in Budapest and finds Henri and his boyfriend, Jan, at a table in the corner. They motion for Marike to join them, and she does. Marike is tired of the paprikash, which is fantastic, but since she eats it every time she’s here, she lets them suggest something unpronounceable and off the menu. It might be veal, which Marike is against, in principle, but which she eats and enjoys just the same.
On the TV over the bar is a news program in German. After the weather (unusually sunny), and the fútbol scores (Dusseldorf lost), a story comes on about which the newscaster seems to care very little, but there’s a minute of airtime to kill, so here it is: A methane gas explosion in the Ore Mountains incinerated an abandoned subterranean laboratory once operated by the East German government. No injuries, says the newscaster, and because of its remote location and links to a dark chapter in the country’s history, the government has decided to seal it up with concrete, and let it burn beneath the ground.
Jan asks Marike if she’s bringing a date to Trinidad’s birthday party Saturday, but she doesn’t answer at first. He has to ask a second time before she says no, she’s coming alone. Her face is like that of a person in shock, Henri notes as he reaches for the check, but good shock, happy shock. Like she’s just won the lottery. Marike takes the check from Henri’s hand and pays the bill. On the way out, she gives them hugs and kisses, tells them she’ll see them Saturday.
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