Requiem For a Glass Heart (11 page)

“The tragedy began when Krupatin decided he couldn’t live without her and followed her everywhere she went, all over Europe. She loved him, but she loved her career as well, and Krupatin could not tolerate her divided attention. Sometime in 1989 he must have made a conscious decision to change that. She was a passionate woman, very romantic, and he played up to this. Somehow—God knows how, I can’t imagine it was voluntary, but it was never clear—he introduced her to cocaine … and heroin.”

Ometov sighed hugely again and stared at the palms, which were turning black against the dying light.

“Everything she and her parents had worked for since she was fifteen unraveled slowly and painfully. The drugs, you know, finally took over her life. As Krupatin followed her from one assignment to the next, always feeding her drugs, demanding more and more of her time, enticing her with a corrupt and luxurious life, she became unreliable. Her work suffered. Sometimes she wouldn’t show up at the museum workshops at all, and sometimes when she did she was unable to work. The word got around that she was in trouble. Finally the Hermitage called her back, but she didn’t go. By then she
was just something Krupatin owned. He had used the drugs to make her useless to anyone but himself.

“Eventually she even lost touch with her parents, who were anguished to the point of insanity. For a long time no one heard from her. She traveled with Krupatin, trailing along after him like a creature, living increasingly in his world, which was alien to her, and separated from her own by a drug-induced nightmare. There were rumors about her, but her old friends saw her only rarely, and the stories they had to tell were frightening. She had become a ghost.

“In late 1991 I discovered that the girl was no longer with Krupatin. Not only that, he was frantically looking for her. Somehow she had escaped. I don’t know if it was with the help of friends or … I don’t know, but she was gone. I eventually found where she had been, but she had already left there as well. It was a private clinic in Zurich. According to their records, she had arrived there alone, using fake identification papers. She was seeking a cure from the drugs—rehabilitation. She was also pregnant. As far as I could discover, she had never been visited by anyone even remotely resembling Krupatin.

“After nearly five months, she left. Alone. The baby was due within a month. The director of the clinic said she had been a remarkably determined patient, that she was strong-willed, and he had every reason to believe that she might be one of the few people who could conquer her addiction.

“Following that, I made an extraordinary effort to keep in regular touch with her old friends, the ones from her art-school days. Eventually I began to hear rumors again. These old friends were fiercely protective. She had had the child, a little girl. She was living in Paris. She was living in Zurich. She was working in an art gallery in Berlin. She was working in an art gallery in Brussels. Again she was in Zurich. Then, late in 1992, the rumors stopped. Every time I talked to one of her friends, they would begin their response by saying, ‘The last time I saw Irina …’ She simply vanished.”

Ometov had finished his story. The room was silent. He appeared weary and drained, and though Cate knew it had been a long day for him, she knew also that this girl’s story, and his role in it, had required a price of him.

“I’m sorry,” Cate said. “You … It seems personal for you.”

“They were old friends,” Ometov said with a dismissive shrug that was not entirely convincing. “Her parents, I mean. Krupatin has been my preoccupation for many years. It’s been my job. But when the girl got involved, it became personal. You know, Krupatin destroyed their lives. They were already in middle age when the girl was born, and she meant everything to them. When Krupatin came into the picture and began to dominate the girl’s life, he made them count for nothing in their own minds, made life unsavory to them. He created a vacuum where once there had been a family full of love and intelligence. They both died, the parents. They never saw their daughter again. That’s a terrible thing to do to people. And what he did to the girl—how do you account for something like that? And they are just three people. There are hundreds of other stories like theirs. Sergei Krupatin has a lot to answer for.”

S
HE SAT IN THE GARDEN LONG AFTER HE WAS GONE, THE DEW
gathering about her on the roses along the paths, the damp distilling on the garden chair in which she sat, her feet still pulled up under her and covered by her gown.

Krupatin’s plan was complex, too complex. It was not that the other assignments had not required careful planning. They had. But she had been on her own. Krupatin had briefed her privately about the target and had provided her with the nameless faces for backup if she needed them. But the plan and its timing had been hers alone. Now Krupatin had interjected her into the middle of a complex operation, one that seemed to exceed a reasonable expectation of success. It seemed to go out of its way to invite risk, to flirt with failure. How could she, a new figure in an equation that had worked perfectly well without her for a year, be totally accepted by these two shrewd men? And even if she was, could she be accepted to the point that she would have both the opportunity and the privacy with them to do what she had to do … and escape? They would have to be killed within half an hour—or less—of each other. Even then, the timing would have to be calculated by moments. She would have to rely heavily on Krupatin’s faces. And all of this in an American city with which no one was familiar.

Staring across the small garden, her preoccupied gaze catching whatever was visible in the pale thread of light from the kitchen door, she wondered if she had indeed reached her limit. Was her suspicion a result of paranoia or legitimate caution? How much of this could she endure, even for the sake of the only thing dear to her?

At three-thirty she started awake, surprised that somehow she had slipped seamlessly from lucid thinking into abstraction. Moving stiffly, she unfolded her legs, cringing as her warm feet touched the cold, wet bricks. She took the cups and saucers and went inside, where she left them on the kitchen table. In the bedroom she stripped the sheets off the bed, and after throwing them on the floor in another bedroom she went to sleep on the bare mattress, covering herself with a blanket she found in the closet.

She woke shortly before noon, threw off the blanket, and went straight to the front room, where she found the airline ticket inside the front: door; it had been pushed through the mail slot. Quickly opening the packet, she looked at the departure time: Gatwick, British Airways, five-forty in the afternoon. There was a handwritten note on a piece of paper stapled to the ticket that said Wei had arranged for her to be met at the airport. She would be taken to his home in the city.

She packed first, everything except her cosmetics and the dress she was going to wear on the flight. Then she made coffee and sat down at the dining table to go over the files of the two men again. But it was difficult to concentrate. Her mind kept gravitating to the thought that without a doubt, both Wei and Bontate had similar files of their own. Their intelligence sources were at least as good as Krupatin’s, and she was suddenly gripped with the fear that “Olya Serova” would be identified as an imposter almost from the beginning. She could not shake the idea that she was walking into a trap.

When she walked through the gate at Charles de Gaulle Airport, she was surprised to be met not by the usual escort of suited men but by an Asian woman, who introduced herself as Mr. Wei’s assistant. She was accompanied by an Asian man who was clearly a bodyguard and who stood back deferentially and without introduction.

The woman had impeccable manners, and during the drive into the city in Wei’s ash-gray Bentley she managed to
carry on an intelligent dialogue without touching on anything of substance regarding Irina’s visit. Irina guessed that she was connected to Wei’s legitimate world and probably had no idea of her employer’s darker involvements. She felt sure that the same was not true of the bodyguard, who was also the chauffeur. He wore small headphones and a tiny microphone bent round in front of his mouth, into which he spoke from time to time. Irina caught his glance only once in the rearview mirror as they glided silently deeper into the city, at an hour when the lights were just coming on in the failing light.

Wei Tsing lived in the heart of the sixth arrondissement, an exorbitantly expensive piece of real estate on a narrow cobblestone street that was like a private passageway between the Place St.-Sulpice and the Luxembourg Gardens. The houses that lined the street were of the
ancien régime
, shaded by chestnut trees that seemed nearly as old as the houses. He lived in a seventeenth-century
hotel particulier
, its cut stone walls softened by vines that climbed its full three stories. It was the blue time of the evening, and as the Bentley pulled smoothly through the iron gates and into the drive, Irina noted the warm glow of soft lights in the tall ground-floor windows. As they stopped under the arched portico of the front door, she was surprised to see Wei himself coming down the steps to greet her. He was alone. He opened the door of the Bentley and helped her out.

“Welcome to my home, Madame Serova,” he said in English. “I hope you had a pleasant trip?”

He closed the door of the Bentley, which purred away, taking the prim assistant with it. A maid in black uniform appeared and whisked away Irina’s bag as they ascended the few steps to the entry.

“Would you like to go upstairs to your suite for a while?” he asked as they entered a cavernous hall punctuated with marble columns that led to what appeared to be a ballroom at its far end.

“No, not at all,” she said, “as you know, it is a short flight.”

Wei was exactly Irina’s height, with thick black hair that he combed straight back and that was so precisely barbered as to draw attention. He was wearing a white dinner jacket and black tie, a formality seldom seen in a private home, and blue velvet opera slippers. His facial features, like his hair, were
sculpted and precise, his skin flawless. There was no sign whatsoever of a beard beneath the smooth flesh of his face.

“I thought we might have a little wine before dinner,” he said. “It’s in the library.”

The floors were quadrate white marble with black diamond insets. Interspersed between the columns was a series of stone pedestals, each holding a small sculpted female figure, every one carved of red stone, none more than a foot in height. Lighting from an obscure source washed the figures in a soft illumination that heightened their translucence, causing them to stand out almost as if they were scarlet holograms burning in the dusk of the great hallway. The effect was so unusual, so stunning, that Irina could not help but pause before one of the pedestals.

“Do you like my seraphim?” Wei asked, obviously pleased that she had stopped.

“They are exquisite, but I doubt they are seraphim,” she said, seeing now the autoerotic postures of the naked women. These could not be ancient. She was not aware of a single example of female masturbation in Greek or Roman visual art.

Wei laughed. “They are carved of what the ancients called carnelian—red chalcedony. The detail is remarkable, isn’t it?”

Irina could feel his eyes on her as she moved along, examining each of the sensuous images.

“I bought them from a dealer in Bern who claims to have acquired them from a well-known collector in Istanbul. No one has been willing to assign a provenance to them, but I hardly care at this point. I have never seen women more candid about such pleasures, have you?”

“Not in stone,” she said dryly. The figures were incredible pieces, their lubricious self-absorption as fascinating in the detail of its portrayal as in the inventiveness of their acts. She had never seen anything quite like them, inspired arrangements of execution, subject, and color.

“Please,” he said, touching her arm gently, “I have other things I want you to see,” and he led her farther along, past two more of his ember-red ecstatics. “You see, I knew two things about you in advance, Olya. Is that all right, may I call you by your first name?”

“Of course.”

“I knew that you were beautiful—Sergei was specific about that—and I knew that sometime in your past you were an expert in pigments, the restoration of paintings. That’s all he told me.” Wei smiled. “It was a shameless enticement. I would like to hear more about it.”

Irina’s skin prickled with a warm flush of adrenaline, and she suddenly found it difficult to breathe. She needed to take a few deep breaths, but to do so would be unthinkable. Sergei was insane to have mentioned her background to this man. It was only blind luck that Wei had mentioned it in the very first moments of their meeting. Her mind was scrambling to discard the ideas she had put together during the flight, the fabrications she had assembled about herself that she was prepared to give to Wei and Bontate. Now she would have to improvise on this bit of truth Krupatin had passed along without her knowing. Now she would have to demonstrate her knowledge—and it had been so long ago—and keep in mind all the while that she could not afford to dip too deeply into her own reality. Anything she said would give him clues for a background search. And yet she could not afford to stumble now, not at the very beginning.

Now they were at the doors of the library and Wei led her inside, where rich rosewood bookcases lined the rectangular room. The cases were no higher than five feet, and above them, reaching to the fifteen-foot ceiling, the walls were crowded with paintings and drawings. The books on the shelves were all dedicated to one subject, art: art histories, biographies of artists and collectors, scholarly monographs, catalogues of special collections.

“This is my passion,” he said. “At least, one of them.”

A silver urn of chilling white wine and two long-stemmed glasses sat on a baroque gueridon just inside the doors of the library. Wei poured each of them a portion of wine.

“Would you like to take a little tour?” he asked, gesturing with his glass toward his collection. “I would be delighted to have your opinions.”

“It’s been a long time,” she said vaguely. “I’m no authority on taste. As I’m sure you know, Sergei knows so little about such things that anyone who knows a modest amount becomes an expert in his eyes.”

Wei looked at her with an expression of amused surprise.
He had not expected to find this kind of irreverence in Krupatin’s most trusted emissary.

“I am sure,” he said with a hint of admiration in his voice, “that yours is an opinion I would value regardless of your credentials.”

He placed his hand gently at the small of her back and guided her toward the long row of pictures on the right side of the generous room. There were the requisite French Impressionists, which Wei admitted he had bought early on in his collecting career, along with a few exquisite Italian Quattro-cento panels. Even better was a small collection of fifteenth-century Venetian and Florentine drawings that any major museum would have coveted. Surprisingly, there was a significant representation of
fin de siècle
—Klimt, Schiele, Czeschka, Khnopff, von Stuck, and a smattering of the French Symbolists as well.

Irina’s slow and isolated footsteps marked their progress on the marble floor as Wei moved silently on slippered feet beside her, talking softly about his collection, stopping here and there to examine an artwork or to relate an anecdote connected to the acquisition of another. They rounded the far end of the library and started up the other side, eventually coming to his growing collection of icons. Apparently Krupatin was not the only dealer in stolen art who had been supplying Wei’s appetite for contraband sanctity. There were scores of invaluable icons that were most surely undocumented, ivory diptychs from Turkey, chased silver and gold from Georgia, mosaics from Greece, frescoes from the Balkans, tempera on wood from Russia—a collection of smuggled art that could have put him in prison for the rest of his life.

And then they came to Wei’s most recent enthusiasm, for Irina a life-saving stroke of luck: Asian painting on paper and wood and silk. Some of Irina’s research on pigments had been done with these very artists when she had worked with the Freer Gallery in Washington. She knew the materials intimately.

When they came to the doors of the library again, Wei paused and turned back to face the length of the room.

“I have reached the point in my life when these works mean more to me than just about anything else,” he said. “I don’t know why, and I don’t even bother to analyze it anymore.”

He took the wine from the urn and offered her another glass, which she accepted, waiting as he poured more for himself as well. Not once had he asked her anything specific regarding the works in his collection, anything that would have allowed her to demonstrate her reputed knowledge. She knew that it was up to her to provide the confirmation he was looking for.

As he shoved the wine bottle down into the ice again, she walked a little way toward the center of the library and stood in front of one of the Asian pieces.

“I was a color restorationist,” she said without introduction, looking at the painting. “My training was academic, and during the time I was studying I worked with some of the very best scholars in my field. I studied internationally. If I hadn’t, I would never have seen the work of this man.” She gestured toward the picture she had been admiring, on which her eyes were $till fixed. “Chao Yung, fourteenth century.” She turned to Wei and was delighted to see him looking at her with an expression of stunned surprise. “Am I right? This is a Chao Yung?”