The Collector

  “I have no idea. I’m having a hard enough time following the maze of your brain.”

  “You’re upset.” She rubbed a hand up and down his arm. “I can see it. Is it bad? What you found?”

  “He died for it. That’s bad enough.”

  No more trying to lighten the mood, she ordered herself, even if it helped calm her own nerves. She took out her keys as the elevator opened, said nothing more as they walked to the apartment door.

  She took a moment for Thomas, who rushed over to greet her as if she’d been gone for weeks. “I know, I know, I was longer than I thought. But I’m back now. They should get a kitten for him,” she said as she carried her bag to the kitchen. “He hates being alone.”

  To make it up to Thomas, she dug out the cat treats, cooed to him as she offered them. “Can you tell me now?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  In the dining room, he set the bag on the table, took out the tissue, set it aside. Then took out the leather box.

  “It’s beautiful,” she murmured. “Special. That means what’s inside is beautiful and special.”

  She held her breath while Ash lifted the lid. “Oh! It is beautiful. Old—anything that ornate must be. Is that gold—real gold, I mean? All that gold. And are those real diamonds? A sapphire?”

  “We’ll find out. I need your computer.”

  “Go ahead.” She waved a hand toward it. “Can I take it out?”

  “Yeah, take it out.” While she did, Ash keyed angel chariot egg into a search.

  “The workmanship’s incredible.” She lifted it out, held it up as she might a small bomb—with intense care. “It’s so ornate, even a little gaudy to my eye, but beautiful—exquisite when you look at the craftsmanship. The gold angel pulls the gold wagon, and the wagon holds the egg. And the egg—God, look at the sparkle. Those have to be real jewels, don’t they? If they are . . .”

  It struck her all at once. “Is it Fabergé? Didn’t he—they—I don’t know much about it—they’re the Russian egg designers. I never realized they were so elaborate—so much more than a fancy egg.”

  “Fabergé’s he and they,” Ash said absently, as he braced his hands on the table on either side of the laptop and read.

  “People collect them, right? Or they’re in museums. The old ones, anyway. This must be worth thousands—hundreds of thousands, I guess.”

  “More.”

  “A million?”

  He shook his head, continued to read.

  “Come on, who’d pay over a million for an egg—even one like this? It’s— Oh, it opens, there’s a . . . Ash, look!”

  Her how-things-work sensibility simply danced in delight. “There’s a little clock inside the egg. An angel clock! It’s fabulous. Now, that’s fabulous. Okay, I’ll go for a million considering the clock.”

  “A surprise. They call what’s inside the egg the surprise.”

  “It’s a really great one. I just want to play with it.” Her fingers actually tingled at the thought of figuring out how it had been made. “Which I’m not, considering if it’s real it could be worth a million.”

  “Probably twenty times that.”

  “What?” Instantly, she whipped her hands behind her back.

  “Easily. Gold egg with clock,” he read, “decorated with brilliants and a sapphire, in a gold two-wheeled wagon pulled by a gold cherub. It was made under the supervision of Peter Carl Fabergé for Tsar Alexander the Third in 1888. One of the Imperial eggs. One of the eight lost Imperial eggs.”

  “Lost?”

  “According to what I’m reading, there were approximately fifty Imperial eggs, made by Fabergé for the tsars—Alexander and Nicholas. Forty-two are known to be in museums or held in private collections. Eight are missing. The Cherub with Chariot is one of the eight.”

  “If this is authentic . . .”

  “That’s the first thing we have to verify.” He tapped the manila envelope. “There are documents in there—some in what must be Russian. But again, what I read verifies this as one of the Imperial eggs. Unless both it and the documents are forgeries.”

  “It’s too exquisite to be a forgery. If anyone had this talent, could take all this time, why forge? And people do just that,” she said before Ash could. “I just don’t understand it.”

  She sat, leaned down until she was eye level with the egg. “If it’s a forgery, whoever agreed to buy it would have it tested. I know it’s possible for a really exceptional forgery to pass those tests, but it’s just unlikely. If it’s real . . . Did you really mean twenty million dollars?”

  “Probably more, from what I’m reading. It’s easy enough to find out.”

  “How?”

  “Oliver’s uncle—his boss. Owner and proprietor of Old World Antiques. If Vinnie doesn’t know, he’d know people who do.”

  It sat sparkling, reflecting an era of opulence. Not just great art, Lila thought, but history. “Ash, you need to take it to a museum.”

  “What, walk into the Met, say, ‘Hey, look what I found’?”

  “The police.”

  “Not yet. I want some answers, and they’re not going to give them to me. Oliver had this—I need to know how he got it. Was it a deal? Did he steal it or acquire it?”

  “You think he might’ve stolen it?”

  “Not breaking-into-a-house stealing.” He raked his fingers through his hair. “But cheat someone out of it? Lie? Manipulate? He’d do all of that. He said he had a client. Did he get this from the client, or was he to deliver it to the client?”

  “Did you read all the documents in here? Maybe there’s a bill of sale, some sort of receipt.”

  “Nothing like that—but I haven’t gone through all his papers from the apartment. He had about six hundred thousand, in cash, in the box.”

  “Hundred thousand?”

  “Give or take,” Ash said so absently Lila just goggled.

  “For Oliver to hold on to that much means he didn’t have it very long, and had plans. He probably meant he didn’t want to, or couldn’t, report the money. Maybe he was paid to acquire this, then figured it wasn’t enough and tried to squeeze the client for a bigger fee.”

  “If it’s worth as much as you think, why not pay more? Why kill two people?”

  He didn’t bother to point out people killed for pocket change. Or simply because they wanted to kill.

  “Maybe they planned to kill him all along, or maybe he just pissed off the wrong client. What I know is I need to have this authenticated. I need to find out where Oliver got it, and who wanted it.”

  “And then?”

  Those green eyes went sharp as a blade. “Then they pay for killing my brother and pushing a woman out the window.”

  “Because when you find out what you need to find out, you’ll go to the police.”

  He hesitated a beat because fury made him imagine, and revel in that image, exacting payment himself. But he looked into Lila’s eyes, knew he couldn’t—and she’d think less of him if he could.

  It surprised him how much that mattered.

  “Yeah, I’ll go to the cops.”

  “Okay. I’m going to fix some lunch.”

  “You’re going to fix lunch?”

  “Because we need to think, and we need to eat.” She lifted the egg, set it carefully in its padded form. “You’re doing this because you loved him. He was a pain in your ass, sometimes an embarrassment, often a disappointment, but you loved him, so you’re going to do what you can to find out why this happened.”

  She looked over at him now. “You’re grieving, and there’s a violence in the grief. It’s not wrong to feel that.” To reach that grief, she laid a hand over his. “It’s natural to feel that, even to want to punish whoever did this yourself. But you won’t. You have too much honor for that. So I’m going to help you, starting with lunch.”

  She walked into the kitchen, dug into the groceries she’d yet to put away.

  “Why aren’t you telling me to get out, get awa
y, stay away?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because I brought into your house—”

  “Not mine.”

  “Into your work,” he corrected, “an object potentially worth millions which was certainly obtained by unethical means, if not illegal ones. Whatever my brother was involved with prompted someone to break into your friend’s apartment—looking for you or information about you, and it’s likely that as long as you associate with me that person, probably a murderer, is keeping tabs on you.”

  “You forgot the tragic loss of my friend’s shoes.”

  “Lila—”

  “They shouldn’t be discounted,” she said as she put a small pot on to boil pasta. A quick pasta salad seemed like just the thing. “And the answer to all that is, you’re not your brother.”

  “That’s the answer.”

  “The first part,” she qualified. “Maybe I’d have liked him. I think maybe I would have. I think, too, he’d have frustrated me because it seems like he wasted so much potential, so many opportunities. You don’t, and that’s another part of the answer. You don’t waste anything, and that’s important to me—not wasting things, or time, or people, or opportunity. You’re going to stand up for him, even though you believe he did something not just stupid, not just dangerous, but wrong. But you’ll stand up for him anyway. Loyalty. Love, respect, trust? All essential, but none of them hold strong without loyalty—and that’s the rest of it.”

  She looked at him, dark eyes open, so full of feeling. “Why would I tell you to go?”

  “Because you didn’t know him, and all this complicates your life.”

  “I know you, and complications are life. Besides, if I kick you out, you won’t paint me.”

  “You don’t want me to paint you.”

  “I didn’t. I’m still not sure I do, but now I’m curious.”

  “I already have a second painting in mind.”

  “See, nothing wasted. What’s this one?”

  “You, lying in a bower, lush, green, at sunset. Just waking up, your hair spilling everywhere.”

  “I wake up at sunset?”

  “Like a faerie might, before the night’s work.”

  “I’d be a faerie.” Her face lit up at the thought. “I like it. What’s the wardrobe?”

  “Emeralds.”

  She stopped stirring the pasta she’d just added to the boiling water to stare at him. “Emeralds?”

  “Emeralds, like drops of a magic sea, looped between your breasts, dripping from your ears. I was going to wait awhile before telling you about that one, but now I figure it’s cards on the table while you still have time to change your mind.”

  “I can change my mind anytime.”

  He smiled, stepped closer. “I don’t think so. Now’s the time to cut and run.”

  “I’m not running. I’m making lunch.”

  He took the pasta fork from her, gave the pot a quick stir. “Now or never.”

  She took a step back. “I need the colander.”

  He closed a hand around her arm, pulled her back. “Now.”

  It wasn’t like on the sidewalk—that light and casual brush of lips. It was a long, luscious, lingering possession with electric jolts of demand, shocking the system even as it seduced.

  Had her legs gone weak in his studio when he’d looked at her? Now they simply dissolved, left her uprooted, untethered.

  It was hold on or fall away.

  She held on.

  He’d seen it in her, the first time he’d looked in her eyes. Even through his shock, even through the layers of raw grief, he’d seen this. Her power to give. That glow inside her she could offer or withhold. He took it now, that dark, dreamy center inside the light, and let it cloak over him like life.

  “You’ll look like this,” he murmured, watching her eyes again. “When you wake in the bower. Because you know what you can do in the dark.”

  “Is that why you kissed me? For the painting?”

  “Is this—knowing this was here—the reason you didn’t tell me to go?”

  “Maybe it’s one of them. Not the main one, but one of them.”

  He brushed her hair back behind her shoulders. “Exactly.”

  “I need to . . .” She eased away, stepped back to take the pot off the heat before it boiled over. “Do you sleep with all the women you paint?”

  “No. There’s intimacy in the work, and usually sexuality in the work. But it’s work. I wanted to paint you when you sat across from me at that coffee shop. I wanted to sleep with you . . . You hugged me. The first time I came here, you hugged me before I left. It wasn’t the physical contact—I’m not that easy.”

  He caught the quick smile as she dumped the pasta in the colander.

  “It was the generosity of it, the simplicity. I wanted that, and wanted you. Maybe that was for comfort. This isn’t.”

  No, not comfort, she thought. For either of them. “I’ve always been attracted to strong men. To complicated men. And it’s always ended badly.”

  “Why?”

  “Why badly?” She lifted a shoulder as she turned the pasta in a bowl. “They’d get tired of me.” She tossed in the pretty little tomatoes, some glossy black olives, chopped a couple of leaves of fresh basil, added some rosemary, pepper. “I’m not exciting, not especially willing to stay home and, well, cook and keep the home fires burning or go out and party every night. A little of both is just fine, but it always seemed not enough of one or too much of the other.

  “It’s lunch. I’m going to cheat and use bottled dressing.”

  “Why is that cheating?”

  “Forget I mentioned it.”

  “I’m not looking for a cook or a fire tender, or nightly parties. And right at the moment? You’re the most exciting woman I know.”

  Exciting? No one, herself included, had ever considered her exciting. “It’s the situation. Intense situations breed excitement—anxiety, too. Probably ulcers, though they poo-poo that now. Still, it would be a shame to waste the excitement and intensity.”

  After tossing the salad, she opened the bread drawer. “I’ve got one left.” She held up a sourdough roll. “We share.”

  “Deal.”

  “I’m going to ask you for another deal. A little breathing space to think this through before the plunge. Because I’m usually a plunger, and usually end up going in too deep. Add the situation, because we have one. Your brother, that spectacular egg and what to do about both. So, I’d like to try inching instead of plunging.”

  “How far in are you now?”

  “I was already past my knees when you started sketching me. About hip-deep now.”

  “Okay.” Her response—fresh, simple, straightforward—struck him as sexier than black silk. He needed to touch, settled for toying with the ends of her hair, pleased she’d left it down. “Do you want to eat this on the terrace? Leave the situation inside for a little?”

  “That’s an excellent idea. Let’s do just that.”

  They couldn’t leave it for long, she thought, because the situation had weight. But she appreciated the sun, the easy food and the puzzle of the man who wanted her.

  Other men had, for short sprints, even for a lap or two. But she’d never experienced a marathon. Then again, her life was a series of short spurts. Any sort of permanence had eluded her for so long she’d decided the desire for it was self-defeating.

  She believed she’d crafted her life around the temporary in a very productive, interesting way.