A Man of Lies, page 7
As Vic crumples, Jonny Boy, always a half second late on the draw, clears the pistol from his waistband. While he fumbles with it, Barrett grabs a glass of water from the table and throws it across the room. It doesn’t break, but does catch him in the neck with a wet thud.
Jonny Boy drops the pistol as he gasps for air, and Barrett closes the gap. Kicking the gun aside, he lays a roiling combination into Jonny Boy’s gut, finishing with a blow to his chin. Cass can hear Jonny Boy’s teeth slam shut.
Across the room, Vic struggles to get his feet beneath him. He must have knocked his head into the wall. This is getting out of hand.
With Barrett distracted, Cass comes up behind him. She isn’t much of a fighter, but she’s gotten into a few scrapes in her time. She doesn’t have Jonny Boy’s weight or Vic’s strength, so when she hits, she has to hit smart. Barrett’s height puts his kidneys right below her shoulder. Right in line for a straight jab. She lines up the punch and sends it home.
It’s like punching a brick wall, but the giant arches his back around the blow. It has clearly hurt. She ducks aside as Barrett turns, swinging his arms out blindly to sweep her away.
Which is all the separation that Jonny Boy needs to fall forward. It is a guileless, though effective, move as his prodigious weight collides with Barrett’s side. Barrett is already off balance from his quick turn to find Cass, and his knee buckles beneath Jonny Boy’s collapse. The two men tumble to the ground, and Jonny Boy only needs to make himself still to trap Barrett beneath his mass.
Cass spots the Hellcat and grabs it. “That’s e-fucking-nough,” she says, pointing the gun at Barrett. She wishes it had a hammer she could ratchet back to drive home the threat.
Barrett looks up at her. He’s stopped fighting, but there is still defiance in his eyes. Big guys don’t like losing. They sometimes need to be taught a lesson more than once for it to make it through their thick skulls. Fine. She can do that.
She presses the muzzle of the gun to his forehead. His eyes cross, tracking the weapon, and the thrill of victory courses through her. This is the part she loves. The part where they realize that they’ve been beaten and that she was the fucker who did it to them.
“Want to reconsider?” she asks, smiling down at him. The smile tugs at the tough tissue that bifurcates her lip.
A slimy drop of pink, blood and saliva mixed, rolls from Barrett’s mouth.
“Fuck you,” he says.
She steps back and looks to Vic. His eyes seem to be focusing again, and he glares at Barrett. She gives him a nod, and he kicks Barrett squarely in the side.
“Where’s the fucking key?” she asks.
Barrett can’t look away from the gun. He’s about to break.
“Get up, Jonny Boy,” she says. “No need to get brains on you.”
Jonny Boy never likes to see people get hurt. As he stands, he takes one last, sad look at Barrett. “This isn’t worth dying over, man,” he says.
And Cass watches the last bit of resistance bleed out of the giant’s eyes.
“It’s in the wall,” Barrett says, gesturing toward his bedroom. “Behind Clay/Liston.”
Vic rips the poster down to reveal a small alcove carved into the wall. From there he pulls out a little ball of silvery metal. He tosses it to Cass. It’s a strange little thing for all the trouble it has inspired. But it’s hers now.
“This could have been so much easier for all of us, but you had to go and make it fucking difficult,” she says, shaking her head with theatrical sadness. “Now I’m willing to put this unpleasantness behind us, but I think that an apology is in order. Perhaps a small offering”—she grabs the envelope of cash from his table—“as a gesture of goodwill.”
If the fucker had just given her the key when she asked, he wouldn’t have had to get kicked. But she does have to admit, it always feels better when they fight.
CHAPTER 15 Cass Mullen, 12:12 P.M.
Things are quiet in the van. Vic drives—she made sure his eyes were working right before letting him get behind the wheel—Jonny Boy eats his sandwich, and Cass studies the silver ball. It has a nice heft to it. Clearly it is a well-constructed object, whatever it is. It doesn’t look like a key or the car fob that Richard had described. It’s more like a tiny metallic bird egg, the progeny of some futuristic space pigeon.
She stares at herself, reflected in the fun-house mirror of the little egg’s convex surface. She can’t get Barrett’s words out of her head. Richard offered them five thousand for the key, but Holzmann was paying Barrett fifty. Even that wouldn’t be enough for Richard to risk his job, though. A job that had earned both of them quite a bit of money as he got prime intelligence on the worst-secured houses in the city.
Which means Holzmann must be paying more than that for this little ball, and Holzmann never overpays for anything. Which leads again to that same question: What’s in the safe?
And the inevitable follow-up: How can Cass get it for herself?
“I didn’t want to hurt anyone,” Jonny Boy whines from the back of the van, pulling Cass out of her plans.
“He made us do it,” Vic says, slowing down for the turn onto their street. The big van doesn’t corner too well.
“I know,” says Jonny Boy. “I just don’t like it.”
Fuck this. Cass deserves a real crew, some real fucking workers who don’t need to be coddled back together every time they get in a fight. With that, she could rule the whole fucking city. To do that, though, to get out from under these two albatrosses that she’s been dragging around her whole fucking life, she needs money.
“Turn around, Vic,” she says. “We’re not going home.”
“We’re not?” he asks, but he does as he’s told.
“What about Richard?” calls Jonny Boy from the back.
“Fuck Richard,” she says. “That fucker let us walk in there blind, he can wait a little bit longer. I need somewhere quiet. Somewhere I can think.”
“What about my abuela’s house?” Vic suggests. “Out by Saddle Creek.”
“That place still have a pool?” Jonny Boy asks. “I could go for a float.”
Cass looks at him, incredulous. “Why wouldn’t it still have the pool? The fuck you think is gonna happen to a fucking pool?”
“I dunno,” he says. “Maybe they filled it in when she died or something.”
Cass had started the morning with a plan to become Holzmann’s personal fixer. Now she has the seed of a new idea. Fuck working for the boss. She should be the boss herself.
CHAPTER 16 1951
Maxwell Novak received two things of note on his seventeenth birthday. The first was a letter from the army informing him that his father had perished while serving honorably in Korea. The second was a two-thirds stake in his father’s steel mill. The letter did not inform him, though subsequent conversations did, that his father had been killed by friendly fire, taking seventeen rounds from a confused sentry team after his patrol had gotten turned around and approached their base from the wrong direction. Maxwell thought it meaningful that his father had been shot seventeen times, it being his seventeenth birthday. He did not believe that there was such a thing as a coincidence.
This is, of course, complete bullshit. Coincidences are real. The world is full of random chance, and if you smash enough numbers together, patterns will emerge. They have no meaning. They are not the universe trying to communicate with you. They are just the infinite monkeys at their typewriters. But Maxwell was a believer.
His older sister and two younger brothers, each having received a one-ninth stake in the steel mill, attempted to contest the will which so unequally divided their father’s estate, but the elder Novak’s preference for his eldest son was well-documented, and the will had been duly signed, witnessed, and filed with the necessary authorities prior to his death.
Maxwell’s relationship with his family never recovered, but the steel mill flourished. In 1955 he bought out his siblings and began expanding. As the postwar boom waned, and the hippies and the communists destroyed the American economy, Maxwell shuttered the mill in Gary, Indiana, and moved the company’s operations south. First, he opened a plant in Texas to provide specialized parts to Boeing, and then another that worked with Texas Instruments to create the bodies that would hold their revolutionary integrated circuit chips.
He frequently visited Korea, searching for the meaning behind his father’s death. What he found instead was an underutilized workforce. He opened his first factory in Gwangju in 1975, and while there were rumors that he had stolen manufacturing techniques, the Korean legal system was willing to look the other way so long as he was bringing in money. By the turn of the twenty-first century, Maxwell Novak had quietly become one of the wealthiest men in the country on the back of a distributed manufacturing network that nobody had ever heard of.
He moved his headquarters from Texas to Omaha, hoping that the wealth that had followed Warren Buffett there would surround him with a higher class of people. Those who might appreciate his genius. Instead, he found only those looking to take ever more advantage of him.
As death approached, his paranoia grew. Everyone near him was only there to live off his leavings. He was a miserable man with nothing to recommend his company beyond his exorbitant wealth.
He had learned from the exhaustive probate of his father’s estate the importance of a carefully managed death plan. His will was meticulously constructed to lay out exactly what his intentions were. Upon his death the company was to continue operating as before, and most of his money would be poured back into it, ensuring that it would carry on as a testament to his siblings’ failures.
He had put together an extensive collection of art, surrounding himself with the greatness lacking in the world around him. He carefully guarded this collection, having purchased it for his enjoyment alone, and his will was clear that this was to continue upon his death. The entirety was to be preserved and stored, out of sight of the world. Its very existence was to be kept secret, with only the occasional sale to fund its continued maintenance.
After his death, the firm he had retained to execute his will determined that the collection would need to be appraised.
In 1885, Tsar Alexander III of Russia needed an Easter present for his wife. Wealth was of no value to her, but she treasured novelty deeply, so he hired a jeweler to construct a surprise for her. Fabergé delivered to the tsar an enameled gold egg that split open to reveal a gold yolk. That yolk opened further, hiding a multicolored hen, that itself contained the final surprises: a ruby pendant and a diamond crown. The tsarina was delighted with the gift, and Alexander commissioned eggs from the Fabergé house annually, a tradition carried on by his son, Nicholas II, until the Bolsheviks executed him.
The exact number of eggs created is a point of some dispute, though it is generally agreed that fifty-two Easter gifts were commissioned by the tsars. The locations of forty-six are known. It had only been forty-five until 2012, when a scrap dealer bought what he thought was a replica at a flea market. He intended to flip it to a gold merchant to be melted down, until he realized the truth of what he had. It was only just saved from the crucible, and later sold at auction for thirty-three million dollars. If one of the six still-missing eggs were to be found today, it could sell for twice that.
Novak’s collection was housed in an unassuming storage facility, spread across dozens of units. His estate paid for the building to be under constant guard by the local police force. The appraiser they hired had a reputation for both accuracy and confidentiality.
When the appraiser opened the safe inside the other safe in the back of storage unit 327, he didn’t believe what he was looking at. But after dedicating a week to it alone, he was forced to conclude it was the Nécessaire, a Fabergé egg last seen in 1952 when it disappeared into the private collection of someone identified only as “A Stranger.” The appraiser held one of the great lost treasures of the world. And then he resealed it inside two safes under a dusty drop cloth behind a corrugated steel door, to sit, unknown, for decades to come.
He tried to stay quiet. That was the job, after all. Through conversations with colleagues and loved ones, he said nothing. When asked directly once, a few drinks in at a lively cocktail party, what the most exciting appraisal he had ever done was, he lied.
However, later that night, he was talking with one of the servers, an attractive young woman with an amateur’s enthusiasm for fine jewels, and the words came spilling out. She smiled and chucked him on the shoulder, feigning disbelief. She would have heard about something like that. He pitched his voice low and leaned in close as she held her ear to his lips. He told her that he had been sworn to secrecy, but that, on his honor, in a storage facility just off the river there was a Fabergé egg.
She did what the girls who worked for Holzmann always did when they came across a piece of particularly juicy intelligence during their duties, and her boss began to plot. His entire career he had been denied the legitimacy and respect that should have been his by right. But no more.
If the appraiser’s reputation for secrecy was stellar, though, and even he was not able to keep this under wraps, then the criminal network of informants and contractors that supported Holzmann’s operations had no chance of containing it. He needed to act quickly. And he did. But he needed help, and one of the specialists he reached out to happened to have known Mickey and let slip about the egg, which is how I came to be in Omaha, looking for enough money to buy Scarpello off my back.
I failed Mickey once, and I might never come to terms with that, but he died trying to get us both out. He saw what I never could, which is that there was more that I could offer the world than pain.
I just need to dole out a tiny bit more, and I can be free of it forever.
I’m telling you all of this for a reason. I want you to understand the amount of money at stake here. Holzmann is looking at an eight-figure windfall, and not only do I need more than the fifty thousand he offered me, but he can easily afford to pay it and still come away from this a staggeringly wealthy man.
I’m not too big to admit my faults. I don’t want you to think that I’m callous or greedy. I am vain, but I am not those other things. They say you can’t put a price on human life, but that’s not true, is it?
John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism argues for the greatest good for the greatest number. The needs of the many, so says Spock, outweigh the needs of the few. Surely it is defensible to sow a little bit of suffering now to avoid a far greater amount later. That’s what I tell myself, at least.
My plan is simple. Cause chaos. Holzmann wants the key, and he wants it quickly. Every moment he doesn’t have it is a moment his plans might fall apart. When some other player might learn of the egg’s existence and swoop in to take it.
So every moment that I don’t give him the key might be the critical moment when things turn against him. That threat of someone snatching away his prize hangs above him in terrible suspension. The longer I can delay, the more desperate he will become. The more desperate he becomes, the more he will be willing to pay to end that desperation and remove the sword from above his head. This is why I sent Cass and her crew after him.
He could decide to use force, but Holzmann is a man of rationality. The cost of attacking me and the fallout from that violence would be more than the cost of simply paying me. With sixty million dollars on the line, he’ll take the simpler path and pay me the couple hundred thousand that I need.
I want to make one other thing clear as well. I know you think you’ve heard this story before. You think you know how it’s all going to end. You’re wrong. This doesn’t end with me having the egg. Even if I could hang on to the key, get my hands on the safe, and somehow get it open, I would still need to find a buyer for it. Priceless Russian artifacts aren’t the sort of thing that you can take to your friendly neighborhood fence. And I’d need to convince Holzmann not to kill me over the whole thing.
So no, I’m not going to walk away from this with a Fabergé egg. It’d be a hell of an ending, and I’ll be the first one to admit my fondness for such, but it is not my ending. All I’m looking for is enough money to let me be the man Mickey saw when he looked at me.
CHAPTER 17 Jim Pickens, 12:33 P.M.
The sun is brutal. The whole city has been boiling. At least, Jim Pickens thinks to himself, watching the heavy black clouds growing in the west, some relief might be coming.
Pickens is usually brought in for a single task—which he performs quickly and expertly, and for which he is compensated at a rate commensurate with his skills—and then released again for that favorite pastime of the freelancer: searching for his next gig. But Holzmann is keeping Pickens close by at all times. As soon as he gets the key, he wants Pickens to be there to open the safe.
Currently, Pickens sits on a bench near a sweeping footbridge that spans the Missouri River, waiting for the man who is supposed to sell them the key. Holzmann is next to him, holding a paper bag with fifty thousand dollars. Benny is nearby with his favorite goon. Pickens thinks the man’s name is Wade. At one P.M., with a glance at his watch, Holzmann gestures for Benny to join them and lend him his cell.
“I wish to speak with him directly,” Holzmann says. “I want him to understand the scope of the error he has made.”
Pickens tries to stand and give them privacy. He shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t know Holzmann’s business, nor does he want to. He is only on this bench to verify that the key is genuine. The fewer other details he knows, the happier he will be. But Holzmann waves for him to stay, and Benny lays a hand on his shoulder.
