Collection (24 page)

“Mr. Sykes, while it's true that I once gave up a child for adoption, it was over 40 years ago. I also know that he perished a few years after he was born. I don't know who told you otherwise, but I am not your mother.”

The young man took a decorative knife off the wall. He withdrew the blade.

“I'm sorry for your circumstances, but hurting me won't help you.” She wasn't afraid, but at that moment a deluge of grief that had sat dormant for many years worked to the surface of her perception. Franka realized then that if this man stabbed her, she would probably welcome death. Regret, sharp and brilliant, dissolved any notions of running. Whatever happened, happened.

“I have no intention of hurting you, mother. I have searched for you a long time, and I don't have the patience to play games now.”

He took the blade and plunged it into the palm of his hand. He tried to stifle an anguished cry, but his grunt betrayed the pain he was inflicting on himself. Blood flowed freely from the wound as he pulled it back out.

Franka gasped and looked away.

“You need help, please stop.”

“Look. You need to look at what I am.” He held his hand out towards her, as though reaching for a lifeline.

Franka turned toward the tortured young man and tried to think what she could say to him, but what she saw only stunned her. His hand had stopped bleeding. He held the palm toward her so that she could clearly see the wound. The flesh was knitting itself together. In several seconds, the gash was closed and the topmost layer of skin was smooth and shiny. Finally, the palm was the same as it had been before he stabbed himself.

“That's not possible.” Franka couldn't pull her eyes away from his hand, and then his face.

“Really? That's all you have to say to me? You're the only one who can explain it and you're going to stand there and act surprised?” He smiled, but his eyes were cold. His eyes shined with pain, and Franka knew it wasn't just a result of his wound.

“I'm…no that's not what I mean. I mean that you can't possibly be alive. It's never…” Franka trailed off in an effort to collect her thoughts. How could this be? Lucien and Cicero were the only surviving men the family had. What she saw was not possible unless there was now one more. Yet, there was no other explanation for his ability to heal. No one on earth besides Lucien and Cicero could do what he just did. But if they existed, there had to be a possibility that another son could be born with the same genetic anomaly or whatever they were calling it. She looked at his face with wondering eyes.

Her voice trembled as she explored the possibility that this truly was her child. “How old are you?”

He smiled genuinely now, as if pleased that she was finally asking the correct questions, and relieved that he was able to convince her with his demonstration. “I'm forty years old. You placed me with an adoption agency in London, and I was adopted by a very affluent couple who weren't able to have children. They wanted a son, and were pleased to procure me at such an early age. I was quite a handsome child.” Sykes twisted his words with irony. Perhaps his adopted family had not had a kindness to match their material wealth.

Franka looked at him more closely to evaluate his features. He certainly resembled herself and her mother. He was tall and muscled
like Cicero and Lucien. He even had their dark hair, but instead of brown eyes, his were a bright electric blue. It was possible that this was her son, but overwhelmingly improbable. Franka thought about the fatal countdown that clouded the mind of every potential mother in the family. This child, if he was her son, should have died when he was three years old. Why didn't he?

“Why didn't you die?'

Sykes grew impatient. “I can't die. I don't know who told you that I was dead, but I was never sick a day in my life until I was twenty-four. I got a fever. The doctors thought it was meningitis. I recovered, but after that, I was able to heal myself. I stopped aging.” Then he slowed his words down, glad to finally divulge his odd history to someone who must understand it better than he.

“You must know, why am I like this?” He was pleading now. A son asking his mother the eternal question, ‘Why?'

Franka wasn't sure where to start or how much she could tell him. His eyes were half-crazed. She had to tell him that he wasn't alone. She was the one who had given him away to people who were the least prepared to help him. Now that he had found her, she had to help him. “It's a family characteristic. Except for two men, there are no live male children over the age of three in our family. It has been that way for hundreds of years.”

He looked shocked. Whatever he had been expecting, her story was far more unexpected. “I've never heard of anything like that.”

“We keep hidden. When it first happened, people suspected us of being evil. We were slaughtered out of fear that we would bring our curse upon others. Now, it's just easier to stay hidden. People aren't ready to hear about Lucien and Cicero.”

“The other men?”

“Yes.”

“Are they like me?”

Franka nodded. “Yes. They can't be hurt.”

“How old are they?”

This was the tricky part. She didn't want to scare him, but it was an answer he needed to hear. “They are over seven hundred years old.”

Sykes sat down in the nearest chair and covered his face with his hands. Franka stared at him dumbly. Her son. He had survived when
no others had. Why? The only difference was that she had given him up. He was raised outside of the family's influence. Was that the critical detail?

He lowered his arms and flexed the hand he had stabbed.

“I was never sure about whether I could keep healing. I didn't know how long I would live. You're saying that I'm going to live forever?”

“I don't know for sure, but if you're the same as them, you will live a very long time.” Franka felt it was necessary to temper this news, “I'm afraid you won't remember it all though.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we think that there is a limit to how many memories one's brain retains. As the years go by, you will forget certain things to make room for new memories and skills. Lucien and Cicero have forgotten much of what their lives were like in previous centuries.”

“But I'll still know who I am?”

“Yes. You'll never lose so much at once that you won't know who you are. But over the longer stretches of time, there will be marked differences.”

“How do you know this? You're not seven hundred years old, are you?”

“No. The women in our family live normal life spans and we can't stab ourselves in the hand without considerable injury. I know about the memory loss because we've been keeping a record of Lucien and Cicero's life for about six hundred years. We realized that they would be the only ones to survive from one generation to the next. If we were going to find a cure or an explanation for our children dying and Lucien and Cicero living, we needed to record what happened in their lives and ours. We didn't want to repeat our mistakes, and we didn't know what detail might be important in the future. We record our history so that our children will have a chance to solve a puzzle that we cannot, and lead a normal life.”

He smiled ruefully. “You haven't made much progress.”

“We've done the best we could. It is not a simple problem.”

Sykes reacted with sudden enthusiasm. “It's not a problem at all!” He stopped himself as he remembered the other half of his longevity was sure death for his male cousins. “Well, not to me.” He
paced a few steps and turned toward her quickly. “Listen, I still need your help. I need money. I've made some bad investments, and with my inheritance in question, I have to come up with a sizable payoff very soon. I may be able to heal myself, but the men I'm dealing with might not wait to find that out. I don't want to be damaged beyond repair. But, I can't disappear without losing everything I know. No matter how many lifetimes I have to look forward to, I'm not ready to leave this one behind. You know who I am, what I am. Please, help me.”

Franka was stunned. “I have no personal wealth. My home in Geneva, my car, my retirement is all guaranteed by the family. I'm sorry, but I don't have much ready cash.”

“Well, ask them, the family, to help me then. I'm their long lost son too, right? Won't they be glad to help me?”

Franka felt her stomach roll. This was her greatest hope, and her worst nightmare. Her son was alive, but he was a genetic aberration on a grand scale. More than that, he was an outsider and the instinct honed by generations of skittish ancestors told her to be cautious. “I think I need some time to figure that part out. I'd like to keep this reunion between us for the time being.”

He scowled. “I need the money soon. I'm sorry, but I have no one else to turn to. I am desperate.”

“How much do you owe?”

“Two million dollars. I'm not a very skilled gambler, it would seem.” He vacillated between panic and cultivated charm. Franka didn't know what to tell him, or if he would listen to her. He was already on edge. Two million dollars. She was deterred by the figure. It was far more than she could acquire from the family coffers without being noticed. Electronic transfers that exceeded certain amounts or occurred outside expected timeframes would be flagged. Cicero and Lucien were careful with the family money. They knew that an opportunistic criminal with knowledge of their bank accounts could attempt to steal what they had accrued over the years, and the family would have nobody to turn to. To track down the perpetrators, the police would need more information than they were prepared to give. They would ask questions that exposed their illegal activities. For example, how might a series of conservation houses generate many millions of dollars that hadn't been reported to tax authorities?

The only way she could get that kind of money was to do what she was best at: sell forgeries. She had everything she needed in her studio to produce the paintings, and all the connections and knowledge from her years as a runner to sell it quickly and quietly. It was obviously against house rules to sell paintings for personal gain, but Franka was certain they would forgive her when she finally found the courage to tell them the truth. Sykes being alive and well would certainly overshadow her efforts to conceal her pregnancy and subsequent abandonment of her child.

Over the next few months, Franka worked on several small paintings. She gave the money from their sale to Sykes so that he could keep his brutish creditors at bay. She also tried to get to know her son better, but he was cagey. He asked far more questions than he answered, and seemed to know just how to manipulate Franka. The information she gave him was not returned in kind, but this only drove her harder to win his trust. She realized what he was doing, but she couldn't help herself.

Every time they spoke, she would recognize a facial expression from her mother, or notice that his laugh sounded like her own. He was the only link she had to the family she had lost. Franka wanted desperately to be a part of his life after missing so much of it. She wanted to help him through the realization that he would outlive everyone he ever knew or would know.

The more they spoke, the more Franka realized that despite his chronological age and mature demeanor, there were moments that Lionel Sykes seemed almost childish. He was impatient and emotional. He was desperate to pay off his debt, and finally Franka proposed to sell a larger, more notable canvas. Several years prior, Lucien had sold a painting that commanded a high price and Franka had been the primary artist. She could easily replicate the effort. Since it had been a specialty request, one that only Lucien and his client knew about, she was certain that she could sell it to another collector without garnering attention. It was the Vermeer. Sam Sullivan was the intermediary. He would sell the painting and get the money with the guarantee that there would be more commissions. Franka had a good reputation, and although Sam Sullivan did not, he knew that Franka would be good for much more if she'd decided to turn her back on a respectable career.

This was the last installment, and Franka was desperate to complete the delivery and start again with Sykes. There was a risk that when he didn't need her for money, he would disappear. Franka believed he would stay and they could start over again, without this ugliness hanging over his head. She could learn more about him and be certain of his intentions and character. Then, she could introduce him to the rest of the family. All that changed when Lucien arrived in Geneva with Jane in tow. She had to flee without the money expected from her last sale.

The last few lines of Franka's letter explained that she was ashamed. She was a failure to the family for concealing her secrets, and she was a failure to Lionel Sykes for not delivering on her only promise as his mother. She intended to make things right, but until she did, she didn't want the family interfering. It was her life, and for the first time in decades, she was going to fight through the suffocating lies of her past.

Cicero and Lucien were understandably hesitant to believe the story Franka told, but she had no reason to lie. There was always the possibility that she was suffering from a mental disease, but her words did not deviate from the rational surety with which she had always spoken. Until they could speak to her, they had to believe that what she wrote was the truth, as far as she knew it.

Cicero finally filled the silence with the only question he could think to ask.

“What are we going to do now?”

“How the hell should I know?!” Lucien was more angry than he had been in a long time.

“You're not usually this easily flustered.”

“You think this doesn't rank as something that should make me flustered?”

“Worse things have happened, right?” Cicero looked at his brother questioningly. Even they sometimes got lost in a moment of crisis. They, who could outlive all moments of crisis.

“Yes!” Lucien yelled, and then realized that yelling wasn't going to help anything. “It just never seems to get easier.” Cicero waited to let his brother regain his composure. He shifted his legs and finally decided to lean forward.