Take Me for a Ride (32 page)

He poked his tongue into his cheek, got up, and stood looking down at her, his hands fisted on his hips.

“Sorry,” she said. “I guess fear makes me flip.”

He shook his head, ran a hand through his hair, and rubbed the back of his neck. “Nat,” he said quietly. “Look, if anything goes wrong . . . if anything happens to me . . . contact Avy Hunt. She’ll have information that you need. And don’t check out of the hotel until you’ve talked to her, okay?”

Under the covers, her body began to tremble. Unbelievable schmuck that Eric McDougal was, she couldn’t think of him truly hurt or dead, despite her brief highway fantasy. “You can’t let anything happen to you, Eric.” God, her voice was shaking.

“Yeah, I won’t. But just in case . . . Natalie, I love you.”

She threw off the covers and ran to him, pressing her naked body against his, the cashmere of his sweater soft against her breasts. She wrapped her arms around him—this was good-bye.
Good-bye, fantasy man. End of story.
Finito
, you idiot. Kick his ass on his way straight to hell.

She lifted her face for a last kiss, which was gentle and masterful and achingly erotic.

“I love you, too, Eric,” she whispered. Once again, she wasn’t lying.

But Natalie dove for the phone as soon as the door closed behind Eric. She dialed the number of her grandmother’s hotel and asked for Mrs. Ciccoli’s room.

“Nonnie? It’s me. I have St. George . . .”

 

They all made an effort to disguise themselves this time, just as a precaution. Nonnie wrapped herself to the eyebrows in a cobalt blue scarf with a red floral design on it. Natalie jammed her hair up underneath a stretchy wool cap of Eric’s, also swiping a pair of his sunglasses and a jacket. Without too close an inspection, she could pass for a teenage boy wearing his older brother’s clothes.

While she guided Nonnie, the colonel stayed out of sight on his own, alert for any sign of trouble.

They arrived at the Cathedral of the Assumption without any trouble, and Natalie located a priest in the sacristy. Nonnie spoke quietly to him in Russian while he pursed his lips and stroked his beard. At first he shook his head.

Nonnie spoke further to him, her tone earnest and insistent. His expression went from negative to skeptical.

Finally, Nonnie gestured to Natalie and told her to show him the St. George necklace. Natalie had brought it wrapped in her sock, and she pulled it from her pocket. She upended the sock, and the piece slid out and into her hand.

The priest stared at it, his eyes wide. He nodded, raised a hand as if to ask them to wait, and hurried off. He disappeared into a hallway and they waited, Nonnie taking a seat in the pews.

Natalie wandered, gazing at the scenes from the life of Metropolitan Peter on the south wall, taking in the white stone Patriarch’s Seat and the gilded czarina’s throne adorned with its double-headed eagle. The cathedral was a historical, religious, and architectural marvel and had been the most important in Moscow from the early fourteenth century.

She could imagine Catherine the Great in this place, sweeping through in her grand brocade coronation gown and her crown with its five thousand gems, wielding the magnificent Orlov Diamond at the top of her scepter.

Slow, deliberate footsteps claimed her attention from the image. Natalie turned to find an archbishop with a long gray beard in full vestments approaching. She quickly went to Nonnie and helped her to her feet, guiding her out of the pew.

The archbishop spoke in Russian. Nonnie bowed her head, and Natalie did the same out of courtesy.

Then Nonnie murmured words to him, tears welling in her old eyes.

He nodded and asked a question.

“Give him St. George, my dear,” Nonnie told Natalie.

So she did.

The archbishop took the necklace into his hands and traced the outline of the little sculpted saint on his horse. He closed his eyes and said a prayer over the piece. Then he turned and gestured for them to follow him.

They descended deep into the belly of the church, the air growing cooler as they went. The damp got increasingly pervasive, and the whole atmosphere supported a cloying melancholy.

After the third set of stone steps, they turned down a dark passageway that was little more than a tunnel. Small chambers lined it on either side, and in the chambers were tombs much smaller than the ones that lined the nave of the church on the ground level.

The archbishop counted as they went along, stopping at the ninth chamber. He gestured them inside, and while Nonnie could stand at her full height, he and Natalie had to bend and bow their heads.

The tomb inside looked small to Nat, but then, the date on it was 1798, only two years after Catherine the Great herself had died. People had grown much larger in the two centuries since then.

Natalie was half afraid that the archbishop would unseal the actual tomb, but instead he went to the head of it, where there was a stone structure that looked a lot like the headboard of a bed. He tugged hard at the double-headed eagle that adorned the apex, and to her surprise the top section of it moved, groaning with the scrape of stone on stone. It slid off like the lid of a box.

The archbishop reached inside the body of the box and lifted out a bundle wrapped carefully in layers of hide. This he presented to Nonnie before moving the heavy stone lid back into place.

Nonnie clutched it to herself and murmured a prayer. Then she turned to Natalie. “Open it, Natalya. Please.”

The archbishop had brought with him an old-fashioned oil lamp, and she used the light from it to see.

There were three layers of soft suede leather. As she unwrapped them, Natalie could barely breathe.

Under the final layer were several items. “A Bible, the Old Testament,” Natalie said aloud for her grandmother’s benefit. “A handwritten journal.”

“Both my mother’s,” Nonnie said. “Go on.”

“There’s a book of recipes.”

Nonnie smiled. “My grandmother’s. Glory be.”

“A manuscript? Something like that . . .” Natalie leafed through it carefully. The signature on the last page made her heart stop. “Signed Natalya Goncharova, 1832,” she said faintly.

“Ah. I wondered if that still existed. You know who she was?”

“Alexander Pushkin’s wife. He’s Russia’s most famous poet!”

“Yes. Unfortunately, he died in a duel over her. She was a cousin of ours. Of course no one suspected she was a writer herself.”

“Is this manuscript any good?”

“I don’t have the foggiest notion,” Nonnie said. “I was five when we left, remember? But even if it isn’t, I should think it has great historical value. Now, what else is there?”

“Three packets of letters. An embroidered cloth with military medals pinned to it. A lace collar . . . no jewels, though, Nonnie. Not the treasure you were expecting.” Natalie looked up at her grandmother’s face, afraid she’d be upset.

Instead, she wore an expression of utter nostalgia and content. She smiled gently. “No treasure? Why, what do you call this? These things are the keys to our family history, and what could possibly be more valuable than that?”

Nonnie reached out, took Natalie’s hands, and stood on tiptoe to kiss her cheek. “Gold, emeralds, diamonds—they’re like peacock feathers. They merely show us who we
want
to be: perhaps more important, more glamorous than we deserve.

“The tokens of our ancestry: letters, journals, portraits, recipes—these show us where we came from and who we really
are
. Now, I ask you, which is more precious?”

“Hi,” said McDougal as he walked right up to the scowling man posted outside the Savoy. In disbelief, the Russian actually dropped his crackberry onto the sidewalk.

But not all his reactions were slow. Within half a second, something ominous tented his coat pocket, and it was aimed way too close to McDougal’s heart.

“Well, golly jeepers,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “Is that a gun, or are you just happy to see me?”

When the man just stared at him, nonplussed, McD switched to Russian. “Take me to your boss, Suzdal. I have a business proposition to discuss with him.”

“I have business proposition, American pig. I shoot you and throw you in the Moskva.”

“That’s not business,” McDougal explained kindly. “That’s just a mundane, garden-variety assassination. You get no ROI in that maneuver. Understand?”

The man just squinted his pouchy little eyes.

“ROI. Return on investment. I can offer your boss some great terms, I’m telling you.”

“Necklace?”

“This does concern the necklace, yes.”

“You have?”

“I have,” McDougal assured him. “But not with me.”

“You get.”

“All in good time.”

“You get now, or I shoot.”

McDougal sighed and shook his head. “I can see that the art of the deal is lost on you. Now, let me explain something: You kill me now, you will never get the necklace. You take me to your boss and you just might. So where are you parked, you ugly waste of oxygen?” He said the last words in English with an I’m-your-best-buddy grin.

The man had picked up his crackberry, and he now hit a button and spoke into it, explaining what McDougal wanted to the man on the other end. Evidently Suzdal was curious enough to see him, because his lackey ended the call and said, “You have gun? Knife? Bomb?”

“Fresh out,” McD said in sorrowful tones as he shook his head. “Left ’em in the rented dacha along with your naked, willing wife.”

Oblivious to the insult in the English words, the man said, “Walk.” They went several blocks before they came to—no kidding—a late-model Saab that looked all too familiar. While Eric bit his lip hard to keep from laughing, he submitted to a full pat-down so the guy could be sure he had no weapons.

“You want to look in my shorts, too?” he asked.

Again, no reaction. The man unlocked the doors of the Saab, they both climbed in, and they headed northeast, out of the city. In about half an hour, they pulled up to a grand country house in the classical style with a circular porch delineated with Ionic columns.

As the car doors slammed, a well-dressed, dark-haired man with a cigar came walking forward and studied McDougal casually. Judging by his driver’s deference, this was Suzdal.

Adrenaline skated down Eric’s spine, but he remained cool outwardly—even knowing that the man probably didn’t intend to let him live. He didn’t look like a vicious mob boss—he had large, liquid brown eyes that gave the illusion of warmth and humor. And that was just plain creepy.

“Mr. McDougal?”

He nodded.

“I have bad habit of smoking,” Suzdal said, waving his cigar in a self-deprecating manner.

“My son, he is allergic. So. You object to walking outside on the grounds?”

“Not at all.”
Easier to scrape my body off the snow than off an expensive rug, is it?

“How are you enjoying your stay in Moscow, Mr. McDougal?” Unbelievably, there was not a trace of irony in his voice. He could have been a cultural attaché making small talk at an embassy party, which was even creepier than his luminous, kindly eyes.

McDougal raised an eyebrow. “Aside from the surveillance, the kidnappers, and the brutal assault on my girlfriend in our hotel room, we’ve had a grand old time.”

Suzdal said nothing. He slanted a quick, dark glance at his guest and produced a creditable imitation of a welcoming smile, a cobra offering a bunny an aperitif.

“Other than that, Moscow is a beautiful city with a great sense of history.”

“Yes,” Suzdal said. “You have been to the Kremlin? The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts? The Tolstoy house?”

“Oddly enough, we’ve had very little time for sightseeing,” Eric said. “You know, because of fearing for our lives. That can suck a lot of the joy out of a vacation.”

Suzdal ashed his cigar into an urn and evaluated him. His fleshy lips clamped around the cigar again and he drew in on it until the tip glowed red. “You do not seem to fear for your life at this moment, Mr. McDougal. Perhaps you should.”

“Oh, please call me Eric. And no, I’m not afraid for my life right now.” A lie, but it rolled easily off his tongue even as unease spiraled through his gut.

He was alone here. No backup. Nothing to protect himself but his mouth and his powers of persuasion.

“I’m not afraid, because once you’ve heard me out I think you’ll be happy to chauffeur me back to the Savoy and perhaps even pick up my dinner tab.”

“Indeed?”

“Indeed.”

“I must say that I am intrigued. What is this business proposal you have for me, Eric?” Suzdal’s tone was avuncular, almost fatherly.

This was it. This was the moment where McDougal took his life into his hands and waved it, like a tasty little mammal, inches away from the mouth of the unpredictable cobra. Had the reptile eaten his fill just this morning? Or did he have a raging and vindictive appetite?

McD swallowed. “The proposal, as you call it, is all about information. There are certain documents filed at the ARTemis offices and with my lawyer, documents which attest to the fact that in 2005, you may not have had your friend and mentor Vasily Somov’s best interests at heart.”

Suzdal stopped in his tracks and took a deep drag on his cigar. “Go on,” he said, his voice suddenly frostbitten.

“Now, I’m as sure as you are that these documents contain only the most vicious and unfounded lies . . .”

Suzdal exhaled the smoke slowly, as if it were poisoned gas, into Eric’s face. “Of course.”

“But we all know that rumor and innuendo can easily ruin a man, especially if his friends are given to paranoia and violence. I would hate to see such a long and . . . er . . . productive friendship ruined. I’m sure that Somov’s companionship and trust mean everything to you.”