AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Mom,” I say. “I’m so glad that you—but how come you didn’t call us or—”
“I made a big mistake,” Mom says. “Huge.” She takes a cigarette from a silver case, but instead of lighting it she sets it down on the counter. I’ve never seen her so agitated before. “I need your help, sweetheart.”
I am uncomfortably reminded of Mina Lange. “We were really worried,” I say. “We didn’t hear from you for weeks, and you’re all over the news, you know? Patton wants your head.”
“We?” she asks, smiling.
“Me. Barron. Grandad.”
“It’s nice to see you and your brother so close again,” she says. “My boys.”
“Mom, you are on every news channel. Seriously. The cops are looking everywhere for you.”
She shakes her head, waving away my words. “When I got out of prison, I wanted to make some quick money. It was hard, sweetheart, inside. I spent all the time when I wasn’t planning that appeal planning what I would do when I got out. I had a few favors to call in and a few things put away for a rainy day.”
“Like?” I say.
Her voice goes low. “The Resurrection Diamond.”
I saw it on her finger. She wore it once, out to lunch, after Philip died. The stone’s a pretty distinctive color, like a drop of blood spilled into a pool of water. But even when I saw it, I thought I must have been mistaken, because even though I knew Zacharov wore a fake diamond on his tie pin, that didn’t mean he’d lost the original. And it certainly didn’t mean my mother had taken it.
“You stole it?” I mouth, pointing to the other room. “From him?”
“A long time ago,” she says.
I can’t believe that she’s treating this so lightly. I keep my voice low. “Back when you were screwing him?”
After all these years I think I’ve finally shocked her. “I—,” she starts.
“I found a photo,” I say. “When I was cleaning out the house. The guy who took it was wearing the same ring that I saw Zacharov wearing in a picture at Grandad’s place. I wasn’t sure, but now I am.”
Her gaze goes toward the other room, then back to me. She bites her lower lip, smearing lipstick on her teeth. “Yes, fine, back then,” she says. “One of those times. Anyway, I stole it and got a copy made of it—but I knew he would want the real one back, even after all this time. It doesn’t make him look good not to have the real one.”
The understatement of the year. If you’re the head of a crime family, then, no, you don’t want people to find out that your most valuable possession was stolen. You certainly don’t want people to know that it was stolen years ago and you’ve been wearing a fake ever since. Especially if your most valuable possession is the Resurrection Diamond, which, according to legend, makes its wearer invulnerable; the loss of it is going to make you seem suddenly vulnerable. “Yeah,” I say.
“So I thought I would sell it back to him,” Mom says.
I forget to keep my voice down. “You what? Are you crazy?”
“It was all going to be fine.” Now she puts the cigarette to her lips and leans into the burner on the stove to catch the edge of the flame. She inhales deeply, and embers flare. She blows smoke.
The tea water is starting to boil. Her hand is shaking.
“He doesn’t care if you smoke in the house?”
She goes on without answering me. “I had a good plan. Worked through a middleman, everything. But it turned out that I didn’t have the real thing. The stone’s gone.”
I just stare at her for a long moment. “So someone found yours and switched it out?”
She nods quickly. “That must have been it.”
This is turning into one of those stories where each new piece of information is so much worse than the thing before that I don’t want to ask for more details, but I am pretty sure there’s no way around it. “And?”
“Well, Ivan might not have minded paying a little bit to get his property back, especially since he’d probably given up on getting the real thing returned to him. I think he would have just made the exchange. But when he found out the stone was a fake, well, he killed the middleman and found out I was behind it.”
“How’d he find that out?”
“Well, the way he killed the middleman was—”
