The Objects of Her Affection (26 page)

Sergei Kumarin lived in the kind of building where a doorman had to announce you. “He doesn’t know me,” Sophie said, half hoping she’d be turned away. “We have a mutual friend.” But after a quick call the doorman gestured toward the elevator, and in a moment Sophie was standing outside of apartment 7B.

“Hello?” she said, tapping lightly on the door, which stood slightly ajar. Inside, the living room was darkened by thick drapes and a cloud of cigarette smoke. A television flickered, the sound muted.

“Yeah.” A large man entered the room, pulling an undershirt over his head, just clearing the cigarette in his mouth. A few long strands of hair lay across his mottled scalp, and his belly surged over the front of his pants. He was wearing slippers.

“Sorry for barging in,” Sophie said, disoriented by the contrast between the apartment’s address and its occupant. “I’m Marianne.” She’d spent the whole morning trying to come up with a name that didn’t sound fake. Hearing it out loud, she decided she’d failed.

Sergei beckoned, and she entered the apartment and stood uncertainly in front of the TV while he closed the apartment door, then turned and squinted at her. Sophie hugged her middle, wondering if the door was locked from the inside.

“Tea?”

“No. Thank you.”

Sergei shuffled into a small kitchen. “Beer?” he said over his shoulder.

“No.”

He emerged with a can of Budweiser in his hand, then gestured toward a small table with two straight-backed chairs. Sophie sat down, and he lowered himself into the other chair with a groan and popped the top of the can open. “Oh wait,” he muttered, getting up to turn off the TV.

“Harry McGeorge gave me your address. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Who are you looking to talk to?” Sergei sat down, lit another cigarette.

“Um, you?”

“Okay, but then who. I’m just the go-between.”

Right. The go-between. The fence. Or if Harry was the fence, this was the subfence. One of what was probably a long, tangled string of unsavory characters involved in the dispersal of stolen goods. Sophie had seen
Law
and
Order
. “All right,” she began slowly. “Let’s say I have some silver. Sixteenth century, Dutch.” She paused. She had no idea how to ask this. “Can you point me toward someone who might be interested?” Sergei had lifted the beer can toward his mouth, but paused midway. “I need to talk to him. Or her. Well, I’m pretty sure it’s a him.”

Sergei put the can down. “You mean like a former owner?”

“No. Someone who collects. Someone who would want to buy it.”

“In this world?”

Sophie waved smoke away from her face. “What?”

“Did you say Harry McGeorge sent you?”

“Yes.”

“Seems like you should ask him.” Sergei leaned back in his chair, cigarette dangling. “That’s his line of work, ain’t it?”

“But don’t you—don’t you work with Harry?”

“Not like that, I don’t.”

What had Harry’s email said? Something about good news, needing to talk to somebody about it. There hadn’t actually been any mention of the tazza. Sophie felt sheepish and disoriented, like the victim of a practical joke who hadn’t quite come up to speed. “Oh.”

Sergei pointed his cigarette at her. “You’re here for the same reason the FBI was, ain’t ya.”

Okay, so she wasn’t the only one who could hack into a Yahoo account.

“I told them to get lost,” he said. “Goddamned government.”

“I’m not from the government,” she offered.

“I know.” Sergei drained his beer. “You’re Sophie.” He crumpled the can and got up for another. It seemed to take an eternity for him to shuffle to the kitchen, pull out a beer, and shuffle back to the table. Finally, after sitting and taking a long drink, he said, “You’re trying to figure out where Harry fenced your goods.”

“Do you know?”

“I told you, that ain’t my line of work. Harry came here for a different kind of service.”

Sophie wasn’t sure she wanted to know what that was. “All right, well, sorry for wasting your time.”

“They talked a lot about you.”

“Who?”

“Him and his dad.”

“Harry’s dad? No. He died before I met Harry.”

Sergei nodded, drank, then released a sonorous burp. “I put them in touch. I’m the go-between.”

“You put Harry in touch…with his dead dad.”

“Yeah.”

Sophie thought about this a moment, then looked around the shabby, smoke-drenched apartment. No candles. No lamps draped with scarves, no crystal balls. Just a threadbare La-Z-Boy and stacks of newspapers. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“I don’t exactly do it for fun. Harry Senior’s a mean son of a bitch. Makes his kid feel like shit. I keep telling Harry he should talk to some of his nicer relatives, but…” Sergei shrugged. “Fathers. Sons.”

“Can I have one of those?”

“Help yourself.”

Sophie went to the refrigerator and took a Budweiser.

“Why do you—they—talk about me?”

“They talk business. Harry’s dad wants to make sure he’s running things right. It was his idea, grooming you. He loved the idea of a curator’s wife chiseling.”

“Jesus.”

Sergei was becoming more animated. “And anyway, Harry Junior really needed you. After his dad died everybody ditched him. His dad tried to teach him how to keep thieves in his pocket, but Harry was too greedy. He always underpaid. Nobody wanted to work with him.”

“Except me.”

Sergei took a deep drag on his cigarette, then stubbed it out in a beanbag-bottomed ashtray. “Except you. You were supposed to help him make things right with that collector.”

“You know about him? The collector?”

“Seems like Harry Senior was working for him before he died. The guy had a big appetite for stolen art. He paid up front for a job at the Cleveland museum—gave Harry Senior a shopping list. But the thieves fucked it up, didn’t get anything. The collector didn’t want his money back, though—he wanted the goods.” Sergei lit another cigarette. “He still wants the goods.”

“So I gather.”

“Harry Senior died right after. I guess the stress got him. He’s a very tightly wound son of a bitch. He won’t rest until Harry Junior makes things right with this collector. I guess he’s a good customer. Important to the business.”

Sophie drank her beer, mulling it all over. What was Sergei’s angle in all this? Was he working for the collector, pushing Harry to deliver the “goods”?

“Was it Harry Senior’s idea to blackmail me?” she asked.

“To hide the piece in your house?” Sergei gave her a slow smile. “Yeah. That was cute, wadn’t it.”

“Goddamn it,” Sophie cried. “Do you know what I did to my house, looking for that bowl? Couldn’t you have come up with something more…conventional?”

“I told you,” Sergei said loudly. “I’m the go-between.” He crumpled his beer can. “Don’t shoot the goddamned messenger.”

“Please. You’re manipulating Harry. He’s got issues, and you’re taking advantage of it. If you ask me, that’s a shitty way to make a living.”

Sergei reached over and grabbed her hand, squeezing it hard. Sophie tried to pull it away but he wouldn’t let her. “Nobody makes Harry come here,” he said. “He needs time with his dad, I give it to him. I don’t like it—I fuckin’ hate it—but if that’s what he needs, it’s what he needs.” He released her hand.

“Fine,” Sophie said, rubbing her hand and trying to breathe normally. “So can you tell me who the collector is, or not?”

“No. They never use his name.” Sophie got up to leave, but Sergei stayed seated, leaning back in his chair. “What about you?” he said.

“What?”

“You want to talk to your dad?”

Sophie stared at him.

“Anything you wish you’d told him? Anything you want to ask?”

Sophie felt a rush of love for Harry then, with his freckles and his nervous knuckles and his face pressed against the bars of boyhood. Maybe it would do him some good to spend time away from this charlatan. See how it felt to be free from the past.

“It’s too late for that,” she said, walking to the door.

“Randall could have something to say about your mother’s whereabouts. You never know.”

Sophie paused, turned. Sergei had disappeared into the kitchen. She shook her head and left the apartment, plunging into the hallway’s bracing rush of clean air.

***

Sophie strode furiously down Eighty-Fourth Street. When she got to Lexington, instead of turning toward the Eighty-Sixth Street subway entrance, she kept going west, toward the park. She wasn’t ready to go underground. She needed to breathe.

Sergei knew too much—about the business with the collector, about her. Was he engineering the whole operation, and somehow funneling the proceeds into his own pockets? Or was he just milking Harry’s constant need for conversations with his father? Either way, it was sick—Sergei clearly enjoyed playing the role of the abusive authority figure, watching Harry dance like a puppet on a string. Just like that last comment he’d made, about Sophie’s parents. He loved messing with people’s minds.

Sophie stopped at the corner of Fifth Avenue, the Met to her left, the park to her right. She hadn’t been in the museum since that day with Harry, when he’d given her the tour of the Nuremberg gold and silver. It was one of her fondest memories of him, even now that she knew he’d been “grooming” her, per the instructions of some chain-smoking fortune-teller. They’d had a good time, the two of them, wandering the galleries, Harry going on and on about the Habsburgs and their treasuries, Sophie taking it all in.

She climbed the steps, zigzagging around encampments of students, lovers, and exhausted tourists, and found her way through the entrance hall and into the Renaissance galleries. Browsing the cases again—seeing the cups and plates, the tankards and ewers—brought memories of that day into sharper focus. Harry had been so inspired, holding forth on the fluidity of the forms, the lyrical expressiveness of the motifs, the chasing, the etching. She remembered how he’d explained fire gilding, which involved mixing mercury and gold, then evaporating the mercury into the air. “Every last one of ’em got mercury poisoning,” he’d said darkly. “They turned all twitchy and mad.” Then he launched into a flailing, yelping imitation of a poisoned goldsmith, lurching across the floor, Sophie laughing and begging him to stop; it was awful, people were staring, but he’d kept going, dragging his left leg into the period rooms.

Harry. This was where he belonged—among the art, immersed in beauty. Not in the shadows of his father’s murky, rotten world. Maybe she could persuade him to go straight, turn the shop into a real business. He had the connections and the know-how; he just needed a little help with the business side. Maybe a website.

Sophie found herself standing in front of the case with the silver ginger jars. “Anonymous Loan,” the label said. A number of thoughts snapped together in her mind. Didn’t Harry say he knew the donor who gave these? A client of his father’s—someone with terrible manners? She frowned, pulled out her phone, and took a photo of the label. Here, at least, was a piece of information the FBI didn’t have. She’d look up the accession number on the museum website later, see if it led anywhere. After the day she’d had, anything seemed possible.

***

Marjorie looked almost comical sitting on the tall stool at the coffee shop, her feet barely reaching the footrest, her square bag standing pertly on the tabletop. “I don’t know why you feel like you have to explain yourself to me, of all people,” she grumbled. “What I think doesn’t matter.”

“I know. Well—I mean, of course it matters.” Sophie batted some stray hairs away from her eyes. “But I’m actually not here to explain myself. I need your help.”

“You need
my
help?”

“I think I can figure out where the objects are. You know, the missing objects.” Sophie locked eyes with Marjorie for a moment, then dropped her gaze.

“Shouldn’t you be talking to the police instead of me?”

“The FBI? Maybe.” She’d already picked up the phone a dozen times, then put it back down, feeling silly about playing detective, realizing she didn’t have anything substantive to report. Yet. “I just want to make sure I’m right about this before I talk to anyone.”

“I really think you should go to the police. I don’t want to have anything to do with this.”

“The FBI. I know. But, Marjorie…” Sophie placed a hand on her chest. “I need to do this myself. I’ve done something terrible—unforgivable. But I think I’ve been given a chance to, you know, redeem myself. At least, to the extent that redemption is, uh, possible.”

“Ha!” Marjorie rolled her eyes.

“You can help me,” Sophie said, reaching for Marjorie’s hand, which was quickly withdrawn. “You have connections, you know how things work. Your registrar experience is…indispensable. I know the museum doesn’t appreciate that.”

Marjorie blinked at her.

“And you have connections with the Met. That’s key.”

“I do?”

“Your friend Helen? I met her at the One Big Family party.”

“Oh, Helen. Right.”

“You said she volunteers for the Met registrar.”

“Yes. She doesn’t have actual staff experience, like I do, but yes, she’s been there, I don’t know, ten years now.” Marjorie sniffed. “Sort of a junior volunteer.”

“I was hoping you could ask her to find out some information about a Met donor. An anonymous donor. I would just need a name and home address.”

“Oh, no, I don’t—” Marjorie squinted her eyes as if trying to read a faraway vision chart. “Why would you need that?”

Sophie leaned forward. “I know I don’t need to tell you how these things work—the world of collectors, their egos, their insurance schemes.”

“Oh, the insurance schemes.” Marjorie rolled her eyes.

“It’s all connected,” Sophie continued in a low voice, circling her forefingers around each other, mysteriously. “And there’s a chance it could lead me to the guy who’s been buying our museum’s treasures.”

“Oh, you definitely need to go to the police.”

“FBI.” Sophie sighed deeply. “Let me tell you something about the FBI, Marjorie.”

“What?”

“They do not appreciate art.”