The Final Fabergé (5 page)

It was Deryabin's deal. Vasily was dealt five high cards that caused his spirits to soar and his hands to shake. He drew two cards, making four jacks. All five remained for the first round of betting, Prekhner dropped out on the second, and Baletsky on the third. Vasily's money was gone, but he continued, taking rubles from the pot and piling them up in front of him, accounting for all of his wagers. Akimov dropped out, leaving Deryabin and Vasily. They continued to raise each other, until, finally, Deryabin said Vasily could no longer continue to bet unless he proved he could settle his debt to the pot in the event he lost. It was a challenge that Vasily took as an affront to his honor.

“
If
I lose, do you doubt I'll pay up?”

The usual little smile was on Deryabin's lips, but there was no humor in his voice. “You may be ordered out of here tomorrow and we'll never see each other again. Gambling debts are paid with rubles, not with words.”

“First, you have to win.”

“Are you calling for my hand?”

“One more raise. Twenty rubles.”

Deryabin's smile vanished. “I'll bet the twenty . . . after I see your twenty.”

Vasily looked into the eyes of the others; his asking for help, theirs refusing. He stood and stared down at Deryabin. “You'll see the twenty, and twenty more.” He disappeared into an adjoining, tiny bedroom. Baletsky stared at the others, muttering that it was time to go home. Then he staggered from the room, saying he was going to take a piss. Akimov began to sort the money in preparation for counting it. Prekhner lowered his head and shook it sadly. Deryabin stood, fidgeting nervously. Then he sat again. He swept all of the discards into a pile, shuffled them, then stacked the cards neatly. Prekhner watched. Vasily returned with a package wrapped in old newspaper.

“My father gave me this, it was owned by—” He stopped abruptly, then went on. “Two men have died because of it.” He tore away the paper and put the box on the table. He opened it and took out the Imperial egg and set it in front of Deryabin.

“What is it?” Deryabin asked.

“An Imperial Easter egg,” he said, the words slurred, “made by Fabergé for Czarina Alexandra Feodorovna.”

Deryabin cradled the egg in his hands, eyeing it skeptically. “If it was made for the Czar, how did your father get hold of it?”

“That's not important. It belongs to me now.”

“What's it worth?”

“Hundreds . . . thousands. You can see there are diamonds and two rows of rubies and emeralds, and inside there are pearls.” Vasily took the egg and opened it. “Two dozen pearls, and this—” He took out the enameled portrait of Nicholas and Alexandra. “The frame and easel are made of gold.”

“Remember to count the rubles in front of Vasily,” Deryabin reminded Akimov.

The others watched as Akimov separated and sorted the notes by their amount, recording numbers on a piece of paper. “Two hundred and eighty-six rubles,” he announced.

“That's three months' wages,” Baletsky said.

Vasily placed the egg squarely in front of Deryabin. “There are my damned twenty rubles. Where are yours?”

Deryabin had been the only winner, but now all of his winnings and nearly all the money he had brought with him was on the table. To lose meant he would live frugally for the next month. He studied the Imperial egg for several minutes, then, holding his cards inches away, looked at them once more with the careful concern of a banker. Two ten-ruble notes came from a pocket.

“Let me see your cards,” he said crisply.

Not since he picked up his hand ten minutes before had Vasily Karsalov smiled. Now a grin broke and widened as he put his cards on the table, first a king, then four jacks. The others, except Deryabin, seemed to relax, the tension broken.

“Very good,” Deryabin said. “But—” He flipped the three of diamonds to the side, then lay four queens next to Vasily's four jacks.

There was utter silence, as palpable as the tension had been seconds before. It was broken when the chairs scratched over the wood floor as Baletsky and Akimov pushed back from the table. Prekhner got on his feet, sobered by what he had seen, his eyes wide. He looked at Vasily, held out his hand and tried to speak. But nothing came. He put on his coat. So did the others and they left without a further word.

Deryabin took the stack of ruble notes and divided it equally. He put a half in each of his coat pockets. Next he put the Imperial egg back in its box, closed it, then cradled it in his left arm. He reached the door,
paused, then turned and went back to the table. Vasily had not moved, his eyes still staring blankly at the cards that lay face up on the table.

Deryabin said, “It was a good bet, Vasily Nikolaiyvich, but you went too far.” He took fifty rubles from his pocket and dropped them on top of the four jacks.

“For your son.” His little smile had never faded. “For Mikhail.”

“M
ike's a lucky bastard,” the driver of the polo green Cadillac said to the man beside her, pushing away strands of hair of an indefinable color though red might come first to mind. Under the hair were eyes that contact lenses made bulge slightly, eyes that were alert and moved quickly, that were highlighted by a skillfully applied razor-thin line of dark brown. She was attractive, not pretty, but might have been, now forty-something.

“The weather's perfect,” she said as if it were a fact she didn't want to admit, “and the radio said it would stay that way all weekend.”

The man, even in the big car, seemed squeezed into the passenger seat. He was long, nearly six and a half feet long. He was also in his early forties and beginning to lose hair on the very top of his head. As if to compensate, he was cultivating a new mustache that he constantly rubbed as if it itched. He wore glasses but they were usually dangling from a gold chain around his neck. He said, “Is he always lucky about picking opening dates?”

“Always,” the driver said, her voice a two-pack-a-day Marlboro kind, husky and filled with the sounds of New York, of Brooklyn leavened with a tincture of the Bronx. “Mike picks dates out of his scrotum for grand openings and never fails to have great weather. Never!”

The driver of the brand-new Seville STS knew about this because she had planned the PR and advertising strategy for seventeen grand openings in seven Eastern states over a four-year period and in that time it had sprinkled once, on a Saturday afternoon when the food, soft drinks, and customers were about to run out at the same time.

“There's the LIE,” the man said.

The car turned smoothly onto the ramp, circled around, and merged with trailers headed east on the Long Island Expressway.

“What's this Mike guy all about?” The man exuded an air of superciliousness, as if whoever he talked to or about was a couple of degrees
beneath him. He fished out a small tape recorder from his shirt pocket. “Mind if I use this, Patsy?”

“Go ahead.”

Patsy was Patricia Mulcahy Abromowitz, product of a fiery Irish mother and a staid Jewish father who claimed the blood of a thousand accountants in his ancestry. Patsy was blessed with the best of both, particularly the same pretty skin of her mother, the same feistiness, yet tempered by her father's calm.

“First off, you call him Mr. Carson when you meet him, even though he's younger. And, Lenny, if he likes you, he'll ask you to call him Mike.”

Leonard Sulzberger, no relation to the famous
Times
family, had been with the
Bridgeport Post Telegram,
then the
New York Post
and now was freelance, commissioned by Patsy to write a profile on the man who pulled the dates for his grand openings from deep inside him, and who had become one of the most successful automobile retailers in the United States at an incredibly young age. He was an all-American success story: hardworking, good-looking, even celebrated his birthday on November 22 when much of the country commemorated the tragic death of JFK. He was nearly too good to be true, but it was true that Mike Carson was a Russian who had emigrated to London when he was fourteen years old armed with a vocabulary of exactly seven English words. There were other bits of information about Mike Carson in the three closely printed pages Sulzberger scanned.

“ This says his name is Mike Carson. That it? Just plain old Mike . . . not Michael?”

“He was born Mikhail Vasilyovich Karsalov. Ran off to London when he was fourteen, and after he had learned to speak English without a trace of a Russian accent he changed his name. Someone told him that Mike had an all-American ring to it, so Mikhail became Mike and Karsalov became Carson. Vasilyovich means ‘son of Vasily,' but Mike will have nothing to do with his father. He once told me he thinks his father was in the navy, was booted out, and sent off to some dreadful place near Mongolia. Doesn't know if he's alive or dead.”

“His mother?”

She shook her head. “Mike's mother was sick when he was a kid. I don't know if it was physical or mental. Both, maybe. Whatever it was, she wasn't well, and then she was gone. Just like that . . . out of his life. He's never told me much more than that.”

“A little weird, right?” Lenny said.

“Hm, yeah. But Mike's a normal guy. You'd never guess his background. He has an uncle, mother's side, in London who he likes, and that's all I know about his family, and more than you need to know.” Patsy gave Lenny Sulzberger a stern glance. “Don't ask about family, it's not part of the Mike Carson story.”

“Brothers, sisters?”

“You're not paying attention, Lenny. No family.”

“I'm asking you, not him,” Lenny said testily. “The better I know him, the better I can write about him.”

Patsy Abromowitz accelerated into the fast lane. “Okay, he's an only kid. That better?”

“You said he speaks perfect English. You don't mean that, do you?”

“I do mean it and I think you should make something out of it. I've got eighteen years of school but talk like a sixth grader in the Bronx. Mike Carson sounds like he grew up in the middle of Oxford University. And he's not the first to do it. Robert Maxwell, the English publisher, did the same. I heard one of his speeches, couldn't believe he'd been born and raised in Czechoslovakia. He had a voice like Laurence Olivier.”

Lenny considered what he had heard. “Mike Carson was sixteen when he arrived in Brighton Beach . . . the late 1970s. How come Brighton Beach?”

“That's where the Russians went. He had been brought up Orthodox if he had been brought up anything, but here he was in America in a Jewish community. Actually he went to a Catholic church when he first arrived. To meet people, not for the religion. I'm not sure he has any religion, though he seems ethical enough.” She paused, then added, “He's damned ethical.”

Carson Cadillac & Oldsmobile occupied a glass-enclosed building that, from a distance, resembled a luxury greenhouse not quite the size of the Pontiac Silverdome, and was situated in a row of automobile dealers on Northern Boulevard near Roslyn, and convenient to the upscale communities that lined that part of northern Long Island. It was dealership Number 24, a number Mike Carson considered lucky, but then Mike had learned when he opened his first used-car lot on Coney
Island Avenue consisting of a half-acre lot, six bare bulbs, and a handpainted sign that the number he assigned each of his dealerships was a lucky number. Now, Carson Motors Inc. had showrooms in Boston, Washington, Atlanta, Jacksonville, and St. Petersburg, Florida, selling Ford, Dodge, Jeep, Chrysler, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac. There were six car-rental franchises and three truck-leasing operations to round out the privately held company that in the previous year had grossed slightly less than a half billion dollars. Not bad for a man about to be thirty-five who didn't go to school in this country until he was sixteen, who finished high school two years later, then got a bachelor's from Long Island University in three years, and all the while holding down two jobs.

Banners and metalized streamers glistened in the late-May afternoon sun, creating the kind of loud, glitzy show that had somehow been institutionalized by American car dealers, as if a display in quiet, good taste might fail to attract attention, or heaven forbid, send the wrong message to potential buyers. And so there was hype and bright lights, with pigs-in-a-blanket and Swedish meatballs next to a bar where the strongest drink was Coke Classic. It was American all right, that fabled love affair with the automobile continuing, but an anachronism nonetheless. In the showroom were Cadillacs and full-sized Oldsmobiles with prices beginning at twenty thousand and going up to sixty-five-thousand-plus for the Cadillac Fleetwood that weighed in at nearly two tons and could be propelled from 0 to 60 in 7.8 seconds by a 295 horsepower Northstar engine.