The Final Fabergé (7 page)

Mike shook his head.

“That night your father drank heavily. I have said it was not unusual for him, but in addition to being drunk, he had a poor run of cards. He lost all of his money including a wristwatch that he sold for less than it was worth. But he wouldn't give up, and kept playing. In the last hand he was certain he could win and get back what he had lost. Only one other player stayed in the betting. He was an officer like your father. Your father bet all he had and began to borrow until he was challenged to prove he could pay all the rubles he owed. Your father put a box on the table and took out of it a jeweled egg that he claimed had been made by Fabergé for Czar Nicholas. Your grandfather had given it to your father, and your father had planned to give it to you. While none of us knew what it was worth, we knew it was worth far more than all the money bet on that last hand. Your father was stubborn and foolish, and he lost.”

“And so you've come to tell me my father lost an egg with jewels on it—that he drank too much and was stubborn?”

“Patience, Mikhail.” Akimov continued: “I remained in the navy, always able to stretch my active status until I was past fifty and then forced to retire. But for eight years I had no employment, then, four
years ago, I was introduced once again to the same person who won the Fabergé egg from your father. He had started businesses under the new freedom of Perestroika. He owned an import and export business, very profitable when the timing was right and the correct products were traded. A very clever man, but with a single fault, he had no feeling for money. He would spend it quicker than he could earn it. But at the time it was a good match for both of us, as I had experience in truck and ocean transportation. And, also, I was bored with a pension that was buying very little comfort.

“I was paid with dollars, as much as twenty thousand dollars when the business was good.” Akimov paused. “In Petersburg, that was a fortune.”

“I'm sure that it was, Sasha.” Mike glanced at his watch, showing clearly that he wanted the unplanned interruption to end quickly. “They'll be expecting me any moment.”

“A few minutes longer, Mikhail.” Akimov again went to the glass panels, where he studied the crowds both inside and outside the showroom, then came back to his position at the table. “Ten days ago, I was told that I was no longer needed, that it was time I enjoyed retirement. I was invited to the private office of this man I had known for so long. It was an office with leather chairs and a television and a rug from India. It was late in the afternoon and we were alone. On his desk was a bottle of vodka. This is the man who rarely will have vodka, but on that day he had more than two glasses. He wanted to talk and he asked if I remembered that night in your father's apartment when we played cards and if I remembered how your father had had too much to drink, and how he promised he would cover his bets with the Fabergé egg. I said I remembered, that—”

“But you've told me this, Sasha,” Mike said, his patience approaching its limit. “Please—”

Akimov put up a hand. “You must listen, Mikhail. There are two things you must know.”

Mike held up two fingers. “Only two?”

“
Dah
. One is about the Fabergé egg, the other is the truth about your father's trial for murder.”

Mike sighed. “I want to hear what you've come to tell me, Sasha, but later, when there will be time to talk.”

Akimov refilled his glass yet again. “
Vahsheh zdahroveh!
” He drank it all. Mike smiled, able to understand that Akimov had toasted to their good health. He took the bottle, poured a tiny amount, and
drank it. Then he sat back, resigned to hear what the little man had come to tell him.

“I was asked if I remembered what cards your father held and what cards won the game. I remembered that your father had four jacks, but he lost to four queens. Imagine! I said that the odds of two hands out of five receiving four jacks and four queens were one in a million.”

“Very interesting, Sasha, but please hurry.”

Akimov continued. “Then I was asked if there had been anything else I remembered about the evening, especially, he asked about that last hand of cards. I said again that I would never forget the four jacks and four queens. Then he gave me an envelope. I opened it. I thought he had given me a lot of money, but it was in dollars and deutsche marks and Swiss francs and only later did I discover he had given me less than two thousand dollars. For all I had done for him, it was very little.

“As I was about to leave, he asked me if I recalled any of the details that surrounded the murder charge against your father. I said I did not, and he asked me a second time and I said no again, then I took my envelope and went home to my apartment. I packed a small suitcase and went to the rail station where I waited for the morning train to Moscow. I found a hotel near the air terminal and I stayed there for three days, putting the little bits of my personal affairs in order. I made telephone calls to London and New York. And I bought a ticket on Aeroflot to Copenhagen. From there I came here.”

Something in Akimov's ramblings stirred Mike's interest and it showed. He had leaned forward and was listening to every word, every Russian word that was no longer strange to him.

Akimov went on. “The Fabergé egg belongs to you. It is worth many millions of dollars. Mikhail, you must reclaim it.”

Mike was genuinely perplexed. He got up from his chair and looked across the table to Akimov. “You say the Fabergé egg belongs to me, but you also say that my father lost it in a poker game. So, it is not mine.”

“I will explain. This person I have been telling you about has become a powerful man in Petersburg. He brings medical supplies from Switzerland into Petersburg, where they are put in new packages and sold in Kiev and Moscow. He was the first to bring videotapes to Petersburg, then in his factories he made copies and sold them for the original. He has a chemical laboratory that can duplicate the expensive perfumes and they are sold in packages exactly like the genuine products. The laws don't stop him. He says he is a trader, a businessman.”
Akimov laughed. “He used his connections with the Party and built a syndicate. He was the
vor
. You know what that is?”

Mike said he didn't know.

“It is the
vor v zakonye
and means Godfather of a crime gang.”

Mike rubbed his face thoughtfully. “You've told me everything but his name. So, tell me that, Sasha. Who is the son of a bitch?”

Akimov put down his glass and moved to the edge of the table. “I will tell you, but first—”

The door opened, and the music and noise from the throng below surged into the room. Mike and Akimov turned to see a young woman in her maroon Carson blazer close the door and take one step toward them. She was pretty, though overly made up, with short blond hair and a figure that scored a perfect ten. Her eyes made a fast inventory of the room then settled on Akimov.

Mike said, “Hi . . . I'm sorry I don't know your name, but we're nearly finished.” He stood. “Tell the others I'll be with them in a minute.”

Then, as if it had happened with mirrors, there was a gun in her hand pointed at Akimov. Mike reacted by throwing the nearest object he could get his hands on, the vodka bottle. It hit her arm just as the gun fired. Akimov spun and fell, and Mike lunged toward the woman, but she fired again toward Akimov, then pulled open the door and ran. Mike chased, yelling for help, “Stop her, Dennis. That one . . . coming at you!”

Mike's shout was barely audible above the music, but the former Giant saw the woman pushing her way past the others on the escalator, and he saw Mike struggling to catch her. Lenny Sulzberger heard the commotion and watched the blond woman run off the escalator into the arms of the huge football player. Dennis clamped a powerful hand on her shoulder and as he did, his head jerked up and his eyes widened in disbelieving pain and surprise. He groped at his right side, several inches above his belt, where his fingers found the fat, knurled handle of a knife. Then he lurched and fell.

Little children saw the blood leaking from him and screamed, and when their parents saw the side of the giant turn crimson, they backed away in horror. Then bedlam. In the confusion, two figures made their way to a car in customer parking and drove away.

B
oulevard Plaza Motel wasn't much. A two-story red-brick affair that probably had looked out of date the instant it was built. Location was its strong suit; twenty minutes from Kennedy Airport on Rockaway Boulevard in the heart of what was known euphemistically as South Ozone Park. Its commercial rate, half that of a room in Manhattan, made it popular with commission salesmen, good, too, for anyone catching an early morning flight.

Boulevard Plaza was also a motel listed by New World Travel, a Western style travel agency, part of a growing conglomerate that had recently moved to an office on Nevsky Prospekt near the Gostinyg Dvor metro station in St. Petersburg, Russia. The manager was Feodor Puserov, an ash-white man of fifty-two with early symptoms of emphysema and an abhorrence of the sun; a man who had spent twenty-seven years with Intourist, and who had capped off his government career by being named director of the Leningrad office precisely fourteen weeks before the Government Travel Authority was consigned to permanent obscurity. Puserov had reserved a twin-bedded room for three nights, and had prepaid in dollars through the National Bank of Finland. Reservations were in the name of Viktor and Galina Lysenko from Kiev. The couple were in room 12, their rented car, its hood still warm, parked outside their room.

Galina Lysenko stood in front of a mirror, looking intently at her reflection, her stunning face expressionless. Fingers tipped with a discreet red polish brushed over the embroidered Carson Cars logo on the breast pocket of the slightly oversized blazer which she now took off and dropped onto the bed. She removed a scarf tied to resemble a necktie, then her blouse. After she let the skirt fall to the floor, and still staring at herself in the mirror, a small smile of approval began to show. She was wearing black bra, panties, and stockings, and heeled shoes that increased her height to three inches less than six feet. Her
shoulders were broad, her waist nipped in naturally, her breasts full and firm, as was proven quite magnificently as she unhooked the bra and let it fall away. She began breathing heavily, then her body quivered as her smile disappeared and her eyes closed. In front of her, on the dresser, was a neat little Semmerling pistol, four inches of deceptive firepower that held five rounds of 124 grain 9mm Luger cartridges. Her fingers wrapped around it and she lifted it, holding it high in both hands as if it were an offering. She inhaled its faint odor of oil and burnt powder, then put the gun back on the table. She ran her hands vigorously through her tightly combed hair, loosening it, letting it fall softly so it touched her shoulders.

The little smile returned as she saw, reflected in the mirror, the door to the bathroom open and a man come into the room, rubbing a towel over his naked body. She watched him come toward her and felt his presence immediately behind her. Viktor Lysenko's eyes were on a level with Galina's, his slim body only slightly heavier than hers. There was an incredible similarity between them, their hair and eyes the same color, their features so alike it might be they were brother and sister. Twins, perhaps. Both had high foreheads, full arched eyebrows, large, brown eyes, small noses, expressive mouths with full, sensuous lips, strong chins, and long, slender necks. For a minute they continued to look at each other in the mirror, then Galina turned and put her arms around Viktor, and they pulled each other tightly together. They kissed. A long, passionate kiss.

Abruptly she pulled away. She spoke in Russian. “Twice I fired at him, but the other one, Karsalov, threw a bottle. I . . .” She stared into Viktor's eyes. “I am not positive Akimov is dead.”

He put a finger on her lips. “You told me all this. You saw blood on his neck, you saw him fall.” He shook his head slowly. “You don't miss.”

Her expression did not change. “I always know when the hit is . . . right. This time, I do not know.”

“Tomorrow, Galina. Tomorrow we will know.”

T
here was something about hospitals that held a strange fascination for Mike Carson, and the North Shore University Hospital was no exception. Perhaps it was an elusive childhood memory of a time when he fantasized that he might someday become a doctor. He looked at his watch and saw that it was merely four minutes since he had last looked at it. Two after midnight. It had become Saturday.

“It's taking too long,” Mike said.

“It's a good sign,” Patsy Abromowitz replied. She was sitting on a hard plastic chair that she was certain had been contoured for a hunchback, but all the chairs in the stuffy waiting room were that way, so she curled her legs under her unsatisfactorily. “If they had come right out, they would have said he was dead. It would have been all over.”

Mike grunted his agreement and went to the doors, a pair of swinging doors with large windows in them. He stood motionless, staring down the length of the long corridor, at the green and yellow signs above the doors and at the red exit sign a hundred feet away.

“You said you hardly knew him, that you were a kid when you last saw him,” Patsy said, watching him carefully. “You care what happens to him, don't you?”

“I want him to live, of course.” He looked at his watch again, turned and went over to where Patsy was sitting. “I tried to rush him along but he insisted there were two things he wanted to tell me. I was trying to get away, but I said go ahead. But then I began to hear things about my mother and about a Fabergé egg my father once owned. And something about my father . . .” His voice trailed off. “He was going to tell me about my parents and suddenly I wanted to hear more. Then this woman came into the room. She was wearing one of our uniforms. I'd never seen her before, but I'd know her in a second if I saw her again.”
He stared at Patsy. “She shot Akimov. What the hell was that all about?”