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“I’m torn between giving you my best stony silence, throwing myself into your arms and begging for your forgiveness, or trying to explain in my own jumbled, screwed-up manner why I felt I needed to make the choice I did.”
“You chose me, Claire. At least, that’s what you told me in Naples.”
“I do,” she said, nodding. “I do choose you, but my granda spent most of his life searching for the Clarion Necklace…”
“Holy shit,” whistled Fletch.
“Indeed. Holy Grail is more like it, at least for my grandfather. He was obsessed with it.”
“They say it’s cursed.”
“Neither Poppi nor I ever believed in curses.”
“They say both Goebbels and Hitler actually held the thing in their hands…”
“There is a lot of evidence to support that. But being held by them doesn’t make it cursed. They were evil, and so it has been tainted with that. But I and granda believed that the taint would fade away if it made it back to the real owner.”
“You know, Emil Franklin thinks it belongs to him.”
“Mia did some research, and he is one of the claimants, but I think there’s a stronger one—in fact several stronger ones.”
“I’m curious, how were you going to decide?”
“I planned to give it to the International Court of Justice at the Hague. I don’t trust the commission with something this important. They haven’t, in my opinion, proven to be all that helpful in ensuring pieces are returned to their rightful owners.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “Why England?”
“It’s the last place anyone was going to look for us, and besides, we believe the Clarion will be in England within the next week.”
“And if I ask you to give it up?”
She closed her eyes. “Please don’t. You think you’re asking me to choose between you and one last heist—and it would be my last. But I see it as asking me to break my vow to my granda. If it had stayed hidden or where I couldn’t get at it, I would have walked away completely. But Mia got word of where it was going to be and I knew I could get it—not only to get a kind of closure for my granda, but to get a little bit of revenge on an old nemesis.”
“You need to walk away Claire. I have been negotiating a deal between the authorities, the owners from whom you took the pieces, the insurance companies, and those you gave them back to. Even those involved with the Grenadine Necklace have agreed to let the matter drop. The provenance you provided for those pieces Mia showed us sent a lot of cockroaches scurrying from the light. There’s a lot of finger-pointing, but I made sure none of them were pointed in your or Mia’s direction. The authorities haven’t looked at the big picture, so they don’t know of Sir Godfrey’s father’s connection to the original appropriations, but they’re starting to ask a lot of the right questions.”
“According to my granda, Sir Godfrey’s father had my parents killed in a misguided attempt to keep Poppi quiet and make him walk the straight and narrow. It didn’t work.”
“No, he just got better at hiding that it was him and then turned over the family mission to you. As I said, I’ve got things worked out so you and Mia walk away clean, but you have got to give up this quest of yours.”
She could feel the tears welling in her eyes. “I’m not sure I can.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
“There’s always a choice, Fletch. It’s living with the consequences that becomes difficult. What if this is the last one and what if we take it to the Hague like I said?”
Fletch shook his head and sighed. “I’m not sure that will work.”
“Does this work for you?” she asked.
“Does what work for me?”
“Us. Don’t I represent a conflict of interest with your employers?”
He looked at her with confusion all over his face. “Where is this coming from?”
“I guess I’m a little worried about what this will do to you and your career.”
He took hold of her hand and pulled her toward him, ignoring her pull-back when she didn’t want to go. “My career and I are just fine. I don’t have employers; I have employees. Silver Arrow Security is my company. I founded it, and I run it. There are no partners or shareholders. If somebody doesn’t like the woman I love, fuck ‘em.”
