“Yes, sir.”
“I’m not some dumb podiatrist from Wichita. I’ve been supporting Russian art and culture longer than that little faggot has been alive.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What about the displays? Are they in place?”
“Shall I check, sir?”
“No. Get me Novikov’s assistant.”
“I believe Mr. Gapan went with Mr. Novikov.”
Hudson began cursing with complete disregard for federal regulations regarding profanity, obscenity, and the airwaves.
“I pay the Russians a fortune for the exhibit, and the only cocksucker the Russians will allow to touch their precious art is off buggering some steroid queen on Muscle Beach!”
“Er…”
“Call me the second he gets back.”
“Yes, sir.”
Hudson slammed the phone back in its cradle and glared at the Vargas nude. He knew he had an unreasonable phobia of homosexuals. He suspected that Novikov knew it and was taunting him. Without the Russian, there was no exhibit. And without the exhibit, Hudson was in trouble.
Big trouble.
With a muttered oath, he got up from behind his desk and paced. He’d already promised private previews of the Russian exhibit to the principal culture writers for the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. He’d even sent a private jet to bring the chief art critic for the New York Times to preview the event on Wednesday, two days before the public opening.
The right kind of coverage in those three papers was essential. Without it the American arts community might not acknowledge Hudson Museum’s artistic coup. Then the stockholders would get restless about the cost of what had turned out to be just one more show, rather than the art exhibit of the decade.
Philanthropic work was as political as running for public office. It was entirely a matter of knowing which buttons to push. But Aleksy Novikov had his hand firmly in place above the power buttons, not Damon Hudson.
He doubted that the Russian knew enough to use the power wisely, much less profitably.
“Damn all fairies,” he said loudly. “They’re worse than women.”
He paced a while longer, examining his options. Reluctantly he decided it was time to play his hole card, the interview he’d hoped he wouldn’t need. He picked up the intercom phone.
“Tell Bill Cahill to update Toth’s file one more time and bring it to me ASAP.”
5
Cambria
Monday
“Sammy, are you sure?” Laurel asked. Her voice wasn’t tense, but the hand holding the phone was.
“I couldn’t be more sure if you asked me whether I can fly without drugs,” Adams said.
“But—” she began.
“My dear child,” Adams cut in impatiently. “The raw, unvarnished truth is that you couldn’t buy an imperial Fabergé egg for one million or ten million American dollars. There simply aren’t any eggs of that quality running around loose in the world to be bought.”
“I see.”
But what she saw was a red-and-gold lacquered masterwork on the workbench in front of her. The sunlight flooding through the glass wall of her work area gave the egg a brilliant, unearthly glow.
For a crazy instant she almost laughed out loud. Samuel Adams was chief curator of Eastern European and Central Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He was an old family friend, a protégé of her mother, but he’d decided he was better at acquiring art than creating it.
Most of the time Laurel loved Adams like the elegant, carnivorous little flower he was. Most of the time. But not when he was condescending to her.
“How can you be so certain?” she asked.
“My darling baby girl,” Adams said, sighing. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you the facts of artistic life?”
“You have. Many times.”
“Then you haven’t listened very well, have you?” he retorted. “Your own work is beginning to attract attention from collectors. You’d better learn, really learn, how the acquisition game is played.”
She wanted to groan out loud. He was right, and she knew it. Unfortunately, he knew it too.
“Private collectors and curators are like spiders,” he said. “Each builds his web with great care, trying to catch all the good pieces that come along. My web happens to be the best in the world. Believe me, if a good Fabergé piece—much less an imperial egg—should become available, I would know.”
“Yes, but—”
He talked right over her. “Eastern Europe is hot right now. In fact, there’s a fabulous Russian show, just fabulous, opening in your part of the world.”
“Really? Where?”
“Damon Hudson’s horrid new museum. Everybody who was anybody wanted ‘The Splendors of Russia.’ We bid a pot of gold for it, but Damon bid more.”
“Why?”
“We’d have made three pots of gold, that’s why. People haven’t seen good Russian art since their tedious little revolution. Patrons would have been fighting for a place in line at thirty bucks apiece.”
Laurel made an unconvinced sound.
“Baby girl,” Adams said, “you really should pull your head off your workbench and take a look at the business of museums and art. The crown jewels of England are damned mundane as art goes, but people line up to see them all day, every day, day after day. The same is true of the Mona Lisa. It’s the hold on the popular imagination that brings in the crowds, not the intrinsic quality of the art itself.”
“Does Fabergé have that kind of hold on the popular mind?” she asked.
“You can bet your last machine-cut diamond on it.”
The long-distance line hummed with silence as Laurel thought quickly, trying to reconcile Adams’s blunt truth with the equally blunt truth of the egg on the bench in front of her.
“Hello?” Adams said after a time. “Are you still there?”
“Yes….”
At the other end of the line, Adams felt a tingle down his spine. The aggressive curator’s mind shifted into high gear. When he spoke again, there was no more haughtiness in his voice. “Laurel, sweet baby child, do you know something you’re not sharing with Uncle Sammy?”
When she heard his words, a faint flush spread across her face. She didn’t know how she’d given the game away, but somehow she had. Probably because she was a lousy liar, especially when it came to friends and family. Though Adams wasn’t a blood relation, he’d shared much of her childhood. He’d loved Ariel Swann as much as Laurel had.
But he’d hated Jamie Swann.
That was why Laurel was being cautious about the egg. Adams would enjoy skewering the man who had made Ariel cry. It was a familiar problem to Laurel, so familiar that she picked her way through the minefield of conflicting loyalties without even being conscious of what she was doing.
As always, Jamie Swann won.
Deep down inside, buried far beneath the sophisticated jewelry designer, lived a little girl who believed that if she was just good enough, long enough, Daddy would approve of her and come home to stay.
“What would I know about Fabergé that you don’t?” Laurel asked. “I didn’t even know there was a show coming. I’m stuck out here in the tules trying to make a living. I haven’t been in the city for weeks.”
“Spare me the shit-kicking hick act,” Adams said. “You have a telephone, don’t you? The one in your hand right now, for instance.”
“I’ll spare you my act if you’ll spare me yours.”
“What act?”
“Bitch queen, Manhattan-style.”
He gave a hoot of delight. She was one of the few people in the world who could stand up to his sarcasm.
“Ah, baby girl,” he said. “What a pity you weren’t born a baby boy. We’d have been fabulous together.”
Laughing, Laurel shook her head. Adams’s razor intellect and equally slicing honesty were two of the reasons she loved him. The other reasons were more complex, linked with her childhood and her mot
her, the woman both Laurel and Adams had loved.
And lost.
“So tell Uncle Sammy what you’ve heard about a loose imperial egg,” Adams coaxed.
“That’s easy. Nothing.”
“Think. Maybe it’s something that somebody else picked up from the people around the Hudson show. Last year when I toured the Hermitage, I met the curator, a truly fabulous beauty called Novikov. Now, there is a work of art. Nasty piece of business too, I understand.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Just as well. He’s out of your league. But there’s always the possibility that the Russians are willing to put art like that on the block.”
“Sell Novikov?” she asked in disbelief.
“No. Fabergé eggs. Though I’d certainly bid my bank account if they did auction him off.”
Laurel blinked, trying to follow the zigzag thread of Adams’s conversation.
“Yessss,” he said, dragging out the word. “It’s quite possible. Quite, quite possible. The whole Eastern Bloc is absolutely desperate for cash. Everything is for sale. Even Siberia, if the price is right, though why anyone would want a freezer five times the size of Texas is beyond me.”
She made a sound that said she was listening. She could sense his mind picking up speed as he speculated aloud.
“A few weeks ago there was a rumor that a Japanese collector had picked up a Fabergé of some sort,” Adams said. “Of course, it was of very dubious provenance.”
“An imperial egg?”
“Bite your tongue. If it was an imperial egg, I’d have known. It could have been one of the smaller ones, though. There are hundreds of them,” he said almost dismissively.
Making small sounds from time to time, Laurel let Adams think aloud, grateful that he was no longer pursuing her for information she didn’t want to give. Not until she knew what, if anything, her father had to do with the mysterious appearance of the egg on her doorstep.
As Laurel listened, she slid off the high work stool and stretched her back, trying to drive out the tension that had gathered in her shoulders. Lifting the long phone cord so it didn’t knock over any of the jeweled, oversized chess pieces she’d been testing for loose stones, she went closer to the window and watched the brilliant western sky.
Yet when she closed her eyes, it was the mysterious scarlet egg she saw, not the sun.
She stretched again. She’d been on the phone too long, calling everyone she could think of, trying to discover if there was any buzz in the art and collecting world about a missing, previously unknown imperial Fabergé egg.
Adams had been her first call, but he hadn’t been available right away. While she waited for him to call back, she’d talked to several dealers and to a cultural historian. Actually, they’d done the talking. She’d listened.
And she’d said not one word about the jeweled egg sitting on her worktable.
All the experts she’d talked to agreed that imperial Fabergé eggs were very, very valuable. They were also exceedingly rare.
The cultural historian from Laurel’s alma mater, Pratt Institute, had been more precise. And more unsettling. It was his voice ringing in her ears right now, not Adams’s.
Miss Swann, if someone is offering an imperial Fabergé egg for sale, the piece is counterfeit or stolen. Either way, I would keep my distance. Art is like every other human endeavor. It can be beautiful, but it can also be very, very dangerous.
Calling Adams had reinforced the warning. He’d come to quivering alert at the very mention of an imperial egg. The truth, much less the egg on the workbench, would bring out every bit of the predator in Adams.
Even so, Laurel wished she could tell him about the egg. But if knowledge was truly dangerous—and if her father was involved, so was danger—everyone would be better off if she didn’t draw Adams into the mess.
Swann returned Adams’s hatred, with interest.
In any case, Laurel felt she owed her father the silence he’d always expected and received from her.
“On the whole, any rumors of eggs must have come from ‘The Splendors of Russia,’” Adams concluded.
“Mmm,” she said.
“So is it something to do with the Hudson show?”
She turned her back on the worktable. The sight of the egg made it more difficult for her to lie, even by omission.
“I haven’t had a single contact with the show,” she said honestly. “I was just playing with a lacquer design in my head. I wanted a jeweled effect without the jewels. Everyone is trying to be less ostentatious—”
“Cheaper,” Adams interrupted dryly.
“—now, so I’m trying to do a vanity case that looks completely jeweled but isn’t.”
That, at least, was the truth.
“The Chinese lacquers I saw weren’t quite the effect I wanted,” she added. “Then I remembered the Fabergé eggs. I thought maybe you knew where there was one I could examine firsthand. But if the Hudson Museum has one, I’ll just trot on down to LA and have a look.”
Adams’s laughter had a cutting edge.
“Baby girl, you never were much of a liar,” he said. “Remember when you tried to convince me that you didn’t want to sleep with that actor? I knew right away you were lying, mainly because he really was fabulous. Sometimes switch-hitters are the best.”
Laurel’s mouth flattened. “You always had a taste for the personal and poisonous. This is purely professional.”
Adams sighed. “I’m sorry. I only seduced him because I didn’t want you to catch something fatal from him. You were far too green to protect yourself.”
“Not anymore.”
“I hope so. The world needs more people like you. People with integrity. Most of us have lost it along the way, and a lot of other things as well.”
“Sammy…” Her voice died. She didn’t know what to say. There was a sadness in his tone that made her throat ache.
“Yeah,” Adams said. “I know. Life’s a bitch and then you die. So call me if you have something you want to share. There would be a fabulous finder’s fee for an imperial egg.”
“Take care of yourself,” she said softly.
“Too late for me, baby girl. But not for you.”
6
Cambria
Monday
Laurel hung up and turned back to the egg, halfway hoping it had disappeared.
It hadn’t.
The silence was so complete that she could hear seagulls crying in the pauses between the waves rolling over and dissolving on the beach. Then she heard the sound of a car turning into her driveway and stopping. A door slammed.
Without realizing it, she held her breath.
Three firm raps, evenly spaced and delivered with strength. The faint noise of the front door opening. A familiar voice calling her name.
“Laurie?”
That solves the mystery of the egg, she thought with faint bitterness. Why am I not surprised?
“Down here,” was all she said aloud.
She settled onto her tall work stool to inspect the egg once more. And to wait for an explanation of how the exquisite objet d’art had come into Jamie Swann’s hands. He was always good at explanations.
Even for her silver-tongued father, this explanation should be a real imperial gem.
Swann came down the stairs from the upper level in a well-coordinated rush that suggested a man much younger than his fifty-two years. He was a physical man who’d been genetically blessed with a strong body and had worked out regularly to keep fit. Vanity was part of it.
Survival was most of it.
He stood just under six feet one inch tall and weighed five pounds more than he had at the age of twenty-one. He still had a full head of dark hair that showed only a few streaks of gray. His dense, closely clipped beard was a good deal more silver. The beard, his tan, and his faint outdoorsman’s squint gave him the look of a pirate.
Her father was the most physically confident man Laurel had ever known. He strode straight ahe
ad without fear and seemingly without thought. Yet she knew that in many ways he was shrewd to the point of being scary, a handsome puppet master pulling everyone’s strings.
In the seven years since her mother had died, Laurel had come to understand that her parents had parted not from lack of passion but from too much of it. Years after their divorce, they had still longed for each other.
Yet Swann had hungered for his own life and freedom even more.
The past seven years had taught Laurel that her father’s visits made his absences all the more demoralizing. It wasn’t like he was dead. Dead was finished. Dead could be confronted and accepted.
She’d learned that when her mother died.
But with Swann it was never finished. He was always alive, always dropping by just when Laurel had given up hope of seeing him again. Her father’s sudden, unexpected appearances—and disappearances—kept her subtly off balance, never able really to trust him, and never able to stop looking for him.
There were times when she wondered if her uneasy relationship with her father had ruined her ability to love any man. Certainly she hadn’t found a man who was worth the anguish.
She loved her father, but the older she got, the less certain she was that she liked him.
Yet when she saw him striding toward her, grinning in his vivid, masculine way, her heart lifted. If she had many unhappy memories of being left behind, she also had happy memories of laughter and homecoming.
“How’d you know it was me, kid?” Swann asked.
“I just did. Good thing, too. When did you decide to grow a beard?”
“Your mother used to recognize me a mile away, but I didn’t know the ability was inherited.”
Laurel didn’t ask again about her father’s beard. She’d learned that a question he ignored was a signal that she was being too nosy.
“Come here and give the old man a hug,” Swann said, holding his arms wide.
She hesitated.
Suddenly he looked hurt, like a little boy who had been scolded for having too much energy.
“A little hug isn’t a problem, is it?” her father asked quietly.
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