The Collector
Page 33

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?”