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Stanley pats down Jones and unlocks my cuffs. As soon as they’re off and the duct tape is pulled away, taking skin and stone and ink with it, I rip at my collar, pulling off the amulets and throwing them onto the ground.
All I want is to get out of this body.
For the first time the pain of the blowback feels like a release.
* * *
I wake up on an unfamiliar couch, with a blanket slung over me. I start to sit up, and realize that Zacharov’s sitting on the other side of the room, in a shallow pool of light, reading.
The glare of the bulb is giving his face the hard lines of a sculpture. A study of a crime boss in repose.
He looks up and smiles. “Feeling better?”
“I guess so,” I say, as formally as I can manage from a mostly prone position. My voice creaks. “Yeah.”
I sit upright, smoothing out the wrinkled mess of my suit. It doesn’t fit anymore, my arms and legs too long for the sleeves and pants, the body of it hanging off me like extra skin.
“Lila’s upstairs,” he says. “Helping your mother pack. You can take Shandra home.”
“But I didn’t find the diamond—”
He puts down the book. “I don’t hand out compliments easily, but what you did—it was impressive.” He chuckles. “You single-handedly torpedoed a piece of legislation I’ve been working toward ending for a long while, and you eliminated a political enemy of mine. We’re square, Cassel.”
“Square?” I echo, because I can’t quite believe it. “But I—”
“Of course, if you do find the diamond, I would really appreciate your returning it to me. I can’t believe your mother lost it.”
“That’s because you’ve never been to our house,” I say, which isn’t exactly true. He was in the kitchen once—and maybe he was there other times I didn’t know about. “You and my mother have had quite a history.” After the words come out of my mouth, I realize that whatever he says next isn’t something I want to hear.
He looks faintly amused. “There’s something about her— Cassel, I have met many evil men and women in my life. I have made deals with them, drank with them. I have done things that I myself have difficulty reconciling—terrible things. But I have never known anyone like your mother. She is a person without limits—or if she has any, she hasn’t found them yet. She never needs to reconcile anything.”
He says this thoughtfully, admiringly. I look at the glass on the side table next to him and wonder how much he’s had to drink.
“She fascinated me when we were younger—I met her through your grandfather. We—she and I—never much liked each other, except when we did. But— Whatever she said to you about what was between her and me, I want you to know that I always respected your father. He was as honest as any criminal can hope to be.”
I’m not sure I want to hear this, but suddenly it becomes clear why he’s telling me: He doesn’t want me to be angry on my father’s behalf even though he knows I know he slept with my mother. I clear my throat. “Look, I don’t pretend to understand—I don’t want to understand. That’s your business and her business.”
He nods. “Good.”
“I think my dad took it from her,” I say. “I think that’s why it’s gone. He had it.”
Zacharov looks at me oddly.
“The diamond,” I say, realizing I wasn’t making any sense. “I think my dad took the diamond from my mom and replaced it with a fake. So that she never knew it was gone.”
“Cassel, stealing the Resurrection Diamond is like stealing the Mona Lisa. If you have a buyer lined up, then you might get something close to its real value, but otherwise you steal it because you’re an art lover or just to show the world that you can. You can’t fence it. There would be too much attention. You would have to cut it into pieces, and then it would only fetch a fraction of its worth. For that, you might as well steal a handful of white diamonds at any jewelry store in town.”
“You could ransom it,” I say, thinking of my mother and her crazy plan to get money.
“But your father didn’t,” Zacharov says. “If he had it. Although he would have had it for only a couple of months.”
I give him a long look.
He snorts. “You aren’t seriously asking yourself if I caused your father to have a car accident, are you? I think you know me better than that. If I’d killed a man who I knew had stolen from me, I would have made him an example. No one would have failed to know who was responsible for a death like that. But I never suspected your father. He was a small-time operator, not greedy. Your mother I considered, but dismissed. Wrongly, as it turns out.”
“Maybe he knew he was going to die,” I say. “Maybe he really believed the stone would keep him alive. Like Rasputin. Like you.”
“I can’t think of anyone who didn’t like your father—and if he was really afraid, surely he would have gone to Desi.” Desi, my granddad. It jolts me to hear his first name; I forget he has one.
