Margaret’s small smile was followed by a tiny nod. “From horseback to the cockpit,” she pointed out. “Then back to horses.”
“No wonder he could handle them,” Elanore said, remembering the older man who could out-ride half the cowboys in the county even well into his sixties.
“He liked them more than planes,” Margaret said as she smiled at her. “And after all that, you probably want to know what this has to do with our Professor.”
Elanore inhaled deeply and sighed. Her stomach had soured and she looked at the people around the table as if she would find some kind of indefinable help. “The thought crossed my mind,” she said, gathering herself as she caught Kirkland’s eye.
“The professor doesn’t know the whole story,” Margaret announced. “It’s been almost exactly fifty years ... I couldn’t wait any longer. So, a few weeks ago I decided to tell Alex.”
Her son nodded slightly. “I didn’t know what the hell to do, so I made up a cover story and called Barton ... Barton made a call then the Professor called me.” He took a bite of coleslaw and chewed for a moment or two then added, “And here we are.”
Barton Commoner? Elanore thought then concluded that her husband certainly would have called their long-time family attorney, but she sighed in frustration at not being included earlier on. She glared at her husband and asked, “And we are where?”
Alex held up a hand defensively. “I’m new to this, too.”
It dawned on Elanore that something else had been hidden from her. “You told me last night you didn’t know him,” she said accusingly.
Alex shook his head vigorously and waved his fork back and forth for emphasis. “Oh, no – no, no, no. What I said was, I hadn’t known him much longer than you – and that’s the truth. I actually didn’t meet him until you introduced us.”
The look she gave him for that revelation showed less sympathy than she had been feeling minutes earlier.
After wiping barbeque sauce from his mouth and fingers Kirkland made an attempt to rescue his client. “Your husband asked me to come to Houston and give him my opinion of certain pieces in the exhibit.”
“The exhibit?” Elanore asked in further confusion.
Alex nodded. “At the museum ... which he did.”
Elanore looked back and forth between the two men for a few seconds. “You got him the invitation!” She was about to add that he had lied to her again but remembered more precisely what he had said – that ‘someone must have known him’. “You ... you’re the ‘someone’ who must have known him,” she said almost indignantly.
Alex took a drink of iced tea then filled them in on the details of his made-up story for Commoner about some old family jewelry they had found among the myriad of things Cecil Calder had collected and squirreled away over the years. Then he related how he asked the manager of the commercial printing company to prepare an invitation as a surprise for his wife. “I overnighted it to the Professor,” he finished almost conspiratorially.
“Oh ... so you two planned last night.”
Kirkland shook his head along with Calder and said, “Not at all. I was simply enjoying the evening.” When Elanore gave him a look of disbelief he added, “I planned to find Mr. Calder and introduce myself – privately, of course. You,” he said with a disarming smile, “you were gracious enough to have intervened ... you accelerated the process greatly.”
Elanore scowled for a moment and remembered her almost immediate resolve to introduce Kirkland to Catherine Cruz. “So, it ... the meeting with Cath, that was, that was a coincidence,” she offered.
“A fortunate one, but yes, a coincidence,” Kirkland confirmed.
As if ruefully admitting a mistake she said more than asked, “Well ... I guess I did, didn’t I.”
Kirkland’s grin did nothing to conceal his interests. “I think it worked out particularly well.”
Elanore kept looking at him and realized he was thinking at least in some part about Catherine, but she was still confused; there had to be some other kind of connection. “Okay ... okay, so ... what am I missing here?” She turned to her husband and cocked her head to one side. “What does this ... that, I mean, the museum ... what does that have to do with your Dad?”
Alex wiped his hands on a napkin and said casually, “I’ll show you,” then got up and went to the living room. When he returned he was carrying the small, gray velvet bag and before sitting down, he imitated Kirkland’s handling method, untying the bag and manipulating the pendant into view. Grasping the piece delicately as if it were somehow incredibly fragile, he set it on top of the bag on the table in front of his wife.
Elanore’s mouth opened and she leaned closer to it. “What is that?” she whispered lowly with a sense of mounting dread then gasped, “That’s—”
“That’s the real one,” Kirkland said. “The one in the exhibit is exquisite, but it’s just an exquisite replica.”
Her eyes widened in shock as she matched what was sitting on her mother in-law’s kitchen table with something she had seen the night before. A horrifying realization came to her and she looked at Kirkland as if he were a dangerous criminal. “You switched them!”
Both of the men shook their heads and her mother in law caught Elanore’s attention by pointing at it. “No, Hon ... that was sent to me back in February—”
“Sent? It was sent to you?”
“Uh huh.”
Elanore looked disbelieving. “Sent to you ... from where? Who the hell could get—?”
“The man who helped us get out of Berlin,” Margaret interrupted. When Elanore didn’t react she continued. “I thought he died years ago.”
Elanore looked as if she was just barely beginning to understand. “Who? Who died? How the hell did he get it?”
Margaret looked both sad and wistful as for a few moments before she answered. “The who part ... well, the who part ... the who part is he was an officer Anton met early in the war. Without him we wouldn’t be here today. He was Obshchiĭ Alexsandr Kovpak.”
“General,” Kirkland offered in translation.
“General?” Elanore whispered flatly after hearing the Russian pronunciation of the name for the first time. He speaks Russian?
Margaret nodded. “As for how he got it, that’s a story nobody would believe ... and I don’t know where he is.”
Elanore had another sudden realization. “Alexsandr?” she asked and looked at her husband. “Alex?”
“He saved our lives. Alex is named in his honor,” Margaret answered.
Alex pointed at the pendant and finally connected the dots for her. “Mom showed it to me and we decided the first thing we wanted to know was if it was real.”
Margaret reached out and touched Elanore’s arm. “But ... but I also told Alex ... well actually, I lied ... I told him we ... I told him it was something we got during the war.” As the room filled with silence she gazed at her daughter-in-law and tried to be reassuring. “I, I made up a story. I said it was something we shouldn’t reveal to anyone until we were sure it was real.”
Alex continued the story. “A few days later I was in the conference room when I saw Cath’s promotional layouts for the Romanov thing – needless to say, that little bauble caught my eye.”
“And, so you know Barton?” Elanore asked looking at Kirkland for confirmation. He nodded and she continued. “So you came to Houston to appraise it and, so ... so Barton knows about—”
Kirkland interrupted with a slight raise of a hand. “Actually, no,” he said then swallowed. “Barton still thinks I’m here to value some of your estate pieces.”
Alex interrupted by saying, “The fewer who know the better.”
“I agree,” Kirkland said with a nod then continued, “Until this morning, all I knew was what your husband told me ... he wanted an assessment done on some pieces in the exhibit.”
“And you didn’t know about this,” Elanore said more than asked as she waved a finger toward the pendant.
&
nbsp; “No,” Kirkland answered. “Nothing but rumors about Russian skullduggery with their Romanov treasure over the years.”
“I showed it to him at the office this morning,” Alex added.
“Your husband’s initial request wasn’t unusual ... this, on the other hand—”
Alex chimed in with a raised hand. “Finding an appraiser for this stuff isn’t easy ... Barton said the Professor has some unique qualifications.” He glanced at his mother and wife and added with a sly smile in his Shakespearean actor’s diction, “With apologies to the Bard, someday ‘a round unvarnished tale’ the professor will have to deliver.”
Kirkland saw the somewhat confused look on the women’s faces and chuckled. “Someday, perhaps, but more importantly there is more than a half-century of intrigue involved behind that pendant – and I should point out that I actually attended the Romanov showing at the Corcoran last month.” He gave Elanore a knowing grin. “That visit was out of professional curiosity ... but there I had no opportunity to get a closer look.” He raised one eyebrow and added pointedly, “At the jewels.”
Ooooh, this one is clever, Elanore thought as she forced herself to not start snickering in embarrassment at her unplanned double-entendre of the prior evening.
Kirkland took another swallow of iced tea and continued. “My General Manager convinced me this, even on short notice, this, because of Alex’s position with the museum, might be a chance to get to examine the Romanov treasure and validate a theory. But I had no idea you were in possession of the real one.”
Elanore couldn’t resist a dig at her husband. “La necesidad carece de ley,” (necessity knows no law) she said slyly.
Alex shrugged and avoided looking at his wife while she tried to bore holes through him with her eyes. She rested her elbow on the table and fiddled unconsciously with the edge of her placemat then looked at Kirkland as she thought about Catherine’s dilemma at the museum that morning. “But ... but you are a professor at UCONN?”
Kirkland nodded reassuringly. “Econ statistics, one semester a year, in Stamford.”
“And you really are an appraiser,” she said for her own confirmation.
Kirkland smiled quickly then took out a small leather case, slid a heavy, gold-embossed business card out of it and handed it to her. “And no, that’s not my secret identity.”
Elanore began to nod slightly as she examined the impressive card then scowled and looked at the pendant with her lips pursed for a few seconds. “So ... this one,” she began and pointed, turning to Margaret for the answer, “this one is real and the one in the exhibit is a fake.”
Three heads nodded and Kirkland confirmed her conclusion. “Almost certainly. On this one I don’t see any of the tell-tale indications of something made in the last century.”
Unable to completely understand what that meant she was still uncertain. He’s pretty damn sure of himself, she thought, then began ruminating over his wide-ranging discussion with Catherine during the previous evening. And by all accounts he knows what the hell he’s talking about.
Kirkland decided to ask a question about a subject no one had raised. “Mrs. Calder ... I’ve been meaning to ask ... where did it come from?”
Margaret set her fork down on her plate delicately and appeared to be examining something across the kitchen for a long moment. After a relieved sigh she said, “Chelmsford, England ... and please, Professor, folks who know me call me ‘Mrs. C.’.”
Kirkland pointed in her direction and then around to the others with a now almost-bare pork back-rib and nodded vigorously in agreement. “As long as you will please, please just call me Michael – I get more than enough ‘Professor’ and ‘Doctor’ treatment in Stamford.”
Margaret smiled back at him as she rose out of her chair then turned and walked across the kitchen. “I’ll be back in a minute,” she said just before disappearing through an archway into a room that led to an outside rear door.
In a mixture of confusion and anticipation they heard a door close as she left the house.
“The garage?” Elanore asked then turned to her husband. “What’s in the garage?”
Alex shrugged. “Don’t look at me.”
Elanore wasn’t buying it. “I am.” Elanore she said insistently. “What did your dad hide out in the garage?”
“Hey, this is new to me. I haven’t been in the garage much since we went through it before Christmas.”
Elanore’s mind slipped back to the trailer full of odd things Margaret had insisted on selling off some months after Cecil’s funeral – most of them duplicates of tools along with a hoard of nails, screws, fasteners and miscellaneous bits and pieces of hardware that would have supplied a small retail hardware store for weeks, if not months.
Almost two minutes later Margaret came back into the kitchen carrying a small FedEx box and a piece of paper. Before taking her chair she set them on the table in front of Kirkland.
Instead of touching them immediately, he rose and stepped over to the sink and washed and dried his hands carefully. When he sat down again he gingerly picked up and read the note and then closely examined the box and its label, being careful to handle it by the corners and edges. After reading it he took out his loupe and reexamined the handwritten note more closely. “It’s handwritten, recent ... no more than a few months old at the most,” he said then passed the page to Elanore. “Careful – by the edges.”
As he began scrutinizing the printed eBay seller’s page he asked without looking up, “Does Chelmsford mean anything to any of you?”
The Calders shook their heads then Margaret answered, “No, no, I don’t think so ... the only towns I can remember in England are Crawley and Liverpool. We were only in Crawley a few weeks and we were taken to Liverpool ... we boarded a ship the same day.”
Alex’s curiosity about this new detail made him ask his mother, “Do you remember the ship or the date?”
Margaret had to think for several moments. “It was ... I think it was June, on the Mauritania ... it was new ... you can’t imagine what it was like for us to travel on a ship like that.” Her eyes twinkled and she smiled, clearly pleased she was able to share the memory and the secret after so many years. “It was like being in a palace ... I’d never seen anything like it. It was much more elegant than the ships Ceece and I have been on, but it wasn’t as smooth ... I had never been on a ship and I didn’t do well the first two days or so.”
“Did they just put you on board alone?” Elanore asked.
“Oh, no,” Margaret said with a laugh. “There were three men and a woman escorting us ... and at least one was with us everywhere we went but our little cabin.” A wistfully sad look came over her as she added, “I’d never seen Anton in a suit and tie ... and you had to be nicely dressed for meals, especially dinner. And I’d never seen, let alone worn clothes that, that elegant ... Anton could hardly recognize me,” She began to laugh and closed her eyes. “They gave me this hat, this, this just incredible hat, out to here,” she said with her hands almost out to her shoulders. “I’d die before I’d be seen in it today but it made me feel like one of them.”
“You travelled as Americans?” Kirkland asked.
Margaret shook her head. “No ... we had Finnish passports ... and we weren’t the Calders then. That came much later. We weren’t allowed to talk to anyone – I, well truth be told, I couldn’t have – I couldn’t say much more than ‘good morning’, ‘good evening’, ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ ... oh, and I remember now, ‘we’re in cabin one-twelve’,” she added with a nod and a grin. “English was very hard for me. Anton could carry on a conversation with the agents but he still sounded very Russian.”
Elanore was more than just curious about that entire adventure but instead of pursuing the subject she glanced down again at the fabulous jewelry piece. “And ... until you got this, you thought the general ... General what?”
“Kovpak,” Margaret said to help Elanore’s memory.
“He’s t
he general that got you out of Berlin ... you thought he was dead?”
Margaret nodded soberly. “We were told he got out safely but we weren’t allowed to meet him – or even know where he was taken – at least I wasn’t. Maybe Ceece did. We always thought it was somewhere in England.”
Kirkland pointed at the pendant. “And this is the only thing you’ve ever received from him?”
Margaret took a deep breath and sighed heavily. “Actually, no,” she admitted then rose again. “There’s been a few things.” She exited again through the doorway toward the garage as her three guests exchanged surprised looks around the table.
“They must have gotten some letters over the years,” Alex remarked quietly.
Kirkland looked doubtful. “I would have thought that was strictly forbidden.”
Alex looked at his wife in shared understanding and said, “What was it you said about necessity and the law?”
Elanore raised an eyebrow momentarily then asked, “Wouldn’t the safe be a better place than the garage?”
Alex shrugged then tipped his chin toward the hallway leading to his father’s office. “We had the combination. I was in and out of it all the time.”
“That’s the first place anyone would look,” Kirkland suggested.
Another minute later Margaret came back into the kitchen with three similar boxes. All of them had been opened and as they moved things around on the table to make room she set the stack in the center.
Alex gave his mother an uneasy look, now confirming his suspicion that she hadn’t revealed everything to him. “When did you get these?”
“The last three months – they came one each month.”
The first thing Kirkland did was set them apart and compare their labels with the first one. “Same printer I think it’s safe to say ... it’s dot matrix ... and after that one in February, one more per month, almost like clockwork, the first week of March, April and May.”
He paused in thought and tried to recall a map of England. “Chelmsford, Swindon, Northhampton ... Horsham ... cities some distance around London. If memory serves ... quite literally all around it.”
He passed Elanore and Alex each a box and reached into the one from March, finding a quite typical old British tobacco tin wrapped in bubble wrap that the tape had been pulled off of along with another eBay printout. Looking steadily at Margaret he caught a knowing smile forming as he pulled the lid from the tin and removed what he recognized as a black velvet loose gemstone bag.