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I hold up my hand. “That’s okay. Let’s skip that part.”
She takes a deep drag from her cigarette and blows three perfect rings of smoke. When I was a kid, I loved those. I would try to pass my hand through them without the breeze from the movement blowing them apart, but it never worked. “So, Ivan—he was angry. Well, but he knows me, so he didn’t want to kill me right out. We have history. He told me I had to do a job for him.”
“A job?”
“The Patton job,” she says. “Ivan has always been interested in the government. He said that it was important to stop Proposition 2 from passing in New Jersey, because if it passed in one state then it could pass elsewhere. All I had to do was make Patton renounce it, and Ivan thought the whole thing would just collapse.…”
I put a hand to my forehead. “Stop. Wait. It doesn’t make any sense! When did all this happen? Before Philip died?”
The kettle starts to wail.
“Oh, yes,” Mom says. “But you see, I blew it. The job. I didn’t manage to discredit Patton at all. In fact, I think I made the chance of Proposition 2 passing better than ever. But you know, sweetie, it’s never really been my thing—politics. I know how to make men give me things, and I know how to get away before things get too hot. Patton’s nosy aides were always asking questions and looking up things about me. That’s just not the way I work.”
I nod numbly.
“So now Ivan says I have to get the stone back. Only, I have no idea where it is! And he says he won’t let me leave until I give it back—but how can I give it back when I can’t even look for it?”
“So that’s why I’m here.”
She laughs, and for a moment she’s almost like herself. “Exactly, sweetheart. You’ll find the stone for Mommy, and then I’ll be able to come home.”
Sure. She’ll be able to waltz right out of Zacharov’s apartment and into the waiting arms of every cop in New Jersey. But I nod again, trying to work through everything she’s said. “Wait. When I met you and Barron for sushi—the last time I saw you—you were wearing the ring. Had Zacharov already put you on the Patton job?”
“Yes. I already told you. But I figured that since the diamond was a fake, I might as well wear it.”
“Mom!” I groan.
Zacharov appears in the doorway, a silver-haired shadow. He walks past both of us to the stove, where he clicks off the burner. Only when the kettle stops its screaming do I realize how loud it had became.
“Are you two finished?” he asks. “Lila says it’s time for her to go back to Wallingford. If you’d like to go with her, I suggest you go now.”
“One more minute,” I say. My palms are sweating inside my gloves. I have no idea where to even start looking for the real Resurrection Diamond. And if I don’t find it before Zacharov runs out of patience, my mother could wind up dead.
Zacharov takes a long look at my mother and then me. “Quickly,” he tells us, heading back down the hallway.
“Okay,” I say to my mother. “Where was the stone last? Where did you keep it?”
She nods. “I hid it wrapped up in a slip in the back of a drawer of my dresser.”
“Was it still there when you got out of prison? In the same exact place?”
She nods again.
My mother has two dressers, both of them blocked by huge piles of shoes and coats and dresses, many rotted through, most moth-eaten. The idea that someone went through all that and then her drawers seems unlikely—especially if they didn’t know to target the bedroom.
“And no one else knew it was there? You didn’t tell anyone? Not in prison, not at any time? No one?”
She shakes her head. The ash on her cigarette is burning long. It’s going to fall on her glove. “No one.”
I think for a long moment. “You said you switched the stone with a fake. Who made the fake?”
“A forger your father knew up in Paterson. Still in business, with a reputation for discretion.”
“Maybe the guy made two forgeries and kept the real one for himself,” I say.
She doesn’t look convinced.
“Can you just write down his address?” I say, looking toward the hall. “I’ll go talk to him.”
