Take Me for a Ride Page 2

  But for once she did have an unusual tale to tell, one that set her apart from all the other worker bees swarming the concrete sidewalks of Manhattan.

  “How can anyone be an accidental thief?” Eric asked. “Seems to me that you either are one or you aren’t.”

  Natalie swirled the ice counterclockwise in her glass, which made a small rumble as its base rubbed against the worn wood of the bar. “Not true. Let’s say that you borrowed something to show it to someone, but she refused to give it back.”

  Eric took a swig of the Guinness and eyed her reflectively. “Well, I personally would insist on its return.”

  “I tried,” said Natalie.

  “Failing that, I’d probably ‘borrow’ it back.”

  “What if the person has hidden it?”

  “Then I’d think about using force.”

  Natalie sighed. “What if the person who won’t give back what you borrowed is seventy years old and fragile?”

  “Hmm,” said Eric. “That does complicate things.”

  “And worse, what if she’s your grandmother and she helped raise you?”

  “I see your point. You’re kind of screwed.”

  Natalie turned to him and spread her hands wide. “I am completely, utterly, totally screwed.”

  Those Newman eyes seemed to deepen in color, and the corner of his mouth quirked. Belatedly, she thought about the literal meaning of her words and had a sudden image of a bedspread pulled back in invitation. Her pulse quickened and she crossed her legs.

  He took note of the movement, his gaze moving to her thighs, outlined under her skirt. A silken shame slid along her spine, and she shifted on the barstool.

  “What am I supposed to do, knock her down?” Natalie continued. “She won’t even open the door to me now.” She took a large swallow of her whiskey.

  “I’m a little confused,” McDougal said. “Why don’t you start from the beginning?”

  Sexual attraction aside, decency and integrity seemed to shine out of his eyes. Deep blue. The color of truth. She wavered. “You have to promise not to tell anyone,” she said, pushing the hair off her forehead.

  “Scout’s honor. Who am I going to tell? And you’ve shared only your first name. You’re practically incognito.”

  That comforted her. In a city of eight million people, his not knowing her last name was like a cloak of invisibility.

  “Talk to me, baby, won’t you talk to me . . . ,” he crooned cheesily, making her laugh.

  “Fine,” she said, and inhaled some more whiskey. “Three days ago, I went in to work, and there it was: the most unusual necklace I’ve ever seen . . .”

  Two

  Three days earlier . . .

  The holidays had come and gone their merry way, leaving behind a lugubrious, definitely insalubrious early March in Manhattan. Luc Ricard Conservation and Restoration Associates, where Natalie worked, was housed in a dignified, if moody, old brownstone that seemed reluctant to suffer the company’s presence inside it.

  Nat wrapped her sweater more tightly around her body as a frigid draft blew under the windowsill at the second-floor landing. The draft seemed to have chosen just the moment when she walked by on her way to the kitchen on the first floor.

  A fresh blast of arctic air assaulted her as she grimaced out at the gray, slushy daylight repressed by cranky, cumbersome clouds.

  Tea. She needed some hot green tea and she needed a new set of eyeballs, since her current ones ached and had gone blurry under the strain of focusing on tiny embroidery stitches for hours on end.

  The piece she was restoring was an eighteenth-century Susani tapestry, which was doing its best to disintegrate after generations of being carelessly draped over console tables and hung on smoky dining room walls. The tapestry was tired and worn. Her job was to rejuvenate it, smack some color back into its cheeks, and then mount it under Plexiglas for future generations to enjoy—or sell it at auction for a tidy profit.

  Natalie yawned and then knelt down near the windowsill so that the next whoosh of freezing air would blow right into her face and wake her up. Below, on the street, a heavyset man in a dark wool coat looked behind him and then to the left as he rounded the corner of the building. Natalie heard the familiar light jangle of the bells at the door.

  As she descended the stairs from the second floor to the first, she saw the heavyset man in conversation with her boss, Luc, and Selia Markovic, an associate who specialized in fine jewelry repair. Luc laughed a little too hard at something the bulky man said, and then nodded like a bobble-head. The bobble-head thing was very uncharacteristic, since Luc usually glided around in abstraction as if he were part of an alternate universe. He moved slowly, as if he were underwater.

  Pinch-lipped Selia, who wore standard-issue white cotton gloves that protected valuable items from the oils and acids in the human hand, examined a piece lying on a bed of black velvet.

  Natalie couldn’t make out much about the piece except that it was gold in color. She kept going toward the kitchen, rounding the base of the stairs and walking under them in search of her green tea and, if she was lucky, an oatmeal cookie.

  She set the old copper kettle to boil, ignoring the brand-new white plastic hot pot that Drake, their receptionist, had brought in. Nat refused to use it on the grounds that hot plastic was poison. She didn’t like microwave ovens, either.

  So she stood and tapped her foot for a good five minutes before the water even showed an inclination to steam, much less boil. Then she rooted around in the cabinet for the two oatmeal cookies she’d cleverly hidden between pieces of stale low-carb bread in the bread’s original bag. Surely the food bandit wouldn’t have found them there?

  But the bag was suspiciously light. Natalie narrowed her eyes and untwisted the tie that sealed the mouth of it from the air. She looked inside, lifted the top piece of camouflage bread.

  Gone.

  Her cookies were gone.

  How on earth had the food bandit thought to look in her bread bag? Natalie’s stomach growled, adding insult to injury. Though they held little appeal, she removed the two slices of dry bread and tossed them into the toaster, not that there’d be any butter in the refrigerator.

  She double-checked that, but her prediction was accurate. All she found was a lonely packet of duck sauce lurking behind someone’s miraculously unfilched yogurt. Natalie grabbed the packet and squirted the contents onto one of the pieces of toast when it popped up. She sandwiched the other one on top of it and took a bite, just as the kettle whistled.

  She poured boiling water into an oversize mug, added a tea bag, and kept munching, though as far as snacks went, this one was highly unsatisfactory. If she hadn’t been the daughter of two professors who discouraged such language, she would have said it sucked. But she was, and she remembered all too well her mother’s reaction when she’d used the word at age ten.

  First they’d had to define the subject of the sentence, this, which Nat had used in reference to homemade sugar-free peanut butter. Then her mother had forced her to contemplate the missing object of the sentence. The peanut butter sucked what, exactly?

  Well, gee, ten-year-old Natalie didn’t know.

  So they had to examine the origins of the verb and its missing object, follow the trail of the obscene slang. Once Nat had found out what, in actuality, got sucked, she’d made the mistake of saying she was completely “grossed out.”

  And by the time she’d closed the dictionary on the etymology of that term, Nat had resolved to just go mute for life—at least around her parents. The alternative was to speak nothing but Latin.

  Luc wandered in with a faraway look on his broad face, his white hair sticking up at the back of his head in an alfalfa sprout. He was dressed in a navy cashmere sweater that had visible moth holes in it, and a dark green scarf that had shed a little tuft onto one of the bristles under his chin. Natalie resisted the urge to pick it off.

  Luc either cut himself by shaving too closely or left longi
sh stubble here and there. He was meticulous when it came to the restoration of paintings, but not so fussy when it came to his own personal grooming. He was the sort of man who’d spend ten minutes looking for his glasses when they were perched on top of his head—abstracted in a sort of benign, mad-scientist way.

  “Hi, Luc. Who was that Mafioso-looking guy in there?”

  “Eh? Ah, hello, Natalie. Nobody important. Just a man with a repair.”

  A man who makes you laugh like a nervous donkey. But she didn’t say it aloud.

  “What do you have there?” He squinted at her homely sandwich.

  “Two pieces of low-carb toast with duck sauce.”

  He looked revolted.

  “I’m hungry, and the food bandit stole my oatmeal-raisin cookies.” She knew her voice sounded plaintive, the closest thing to a whine she’d allow, but honestly . . . did she have to get a safe just for lunch and bolt it to the floor of her office?

  “Ah, ze food bandit.” He looked furtively at her bread bag. “Why do you not lock the cookies in your desk drawer?”

  Wait a minute . . .

  “I don’t have a desk, remember?” Natalie said, carefully removing the edge from her voice. “You haven’t authorized the expenditure.”

  Luc looked uncomfortable for a moment. “Yes, yes,” he said, patting her arm. “Next month, perhaps. When revenues rise.”

  He’d been saying the same thing every couple of months for the past year, even though revenues had risen enough for him to buy a new Mercedes and garage it in the city. And revenues had risen enough for him to park a rock the size of a robin’s egg on the fourth finger of his Russian lingerie-model fiancée’s hand. Nat was quite sure he’d find a way to write that off as a business expense, too.

  Meanwhile, she was stuck doing restoration work on the top floor at a “desk” that consisted of two white melamine shelves laid over a pair of old sawhorses.

  So for Luc to have eyeballed her bread bag so oddly got her ire up. Could Luc be the . . . ? No, surely not. Luc owned the place. He could afford to buy great gourmet food. He wouldn’t stoop to swiping his employees’ snacks, would he?

  Natalie told herself she was being silly. And paranoid. After all, Luc took Giraffe—her real name was Giselle, but Nat thought of her as Giraffe—out to a late dinner on the town three to four times a week. She knew this because all the employees had overheard him recently as he complained bitterly about paying $200 for the future Mme. Ricard to eat a stalk of asparagus and three peas, however sumptuously steamed by a five-star chef of Cordon Bleu fame.

  Natalie frowned. That, too, was out of character for Luc. He never used to complain. He had always just floated around beatifically on his own foggy planet . . . until Giraffe had galloped into his life—bony butt, cloven hooves, and all.

  Nat sipped at her tea and told herself to try to be a nicer person. But it was hard, what with the nasty weather and the duck-sauce sandwich. She tossed the rest of it into the trash, grabbed her mug, and left Luc gazing fixedly into space with the green fuzz ball still stuck under his chin. Really, Giraffe should buy him a new sweater without holes in it instead of eating peas at $50 per . . . but it wasn’t Natalie’s business, now, was it?

  She wandered back toward the staircase and had set her foot on the bottom step when she saw a flash out of the corner of her eye. She turned toward Selia’s desk. Her coworker was holding a necklace up to the light—and what a necklace.

  She wasn’t a jewelry expert by any means, but the piece had to be crafted of at least twenty-two-karat gold, and it was almost more sculpture than necklace. Natalie approached Selia’s desk, opened her mouth to speak, and then closed it again.

  A solid gold dragon with claws, scales, long tail, and fangs turned its head to breathe fire at a knight in full battle regalia on a rearing horse. Unfortunately for the dragon, the knight’s spear penetrated its gaping, toothy maw. Bad day for the dragon.

  “St. George,” Selia said.

  Natalie nodded, every hair on the back of her neck standing at attention. How many times had she heard Nonnie, her grandmother, speak of a necklace like this one? A necklace confiscated by Nazi officers when her great-grandparents fled Russia during World War II. One that they’d never seen again.

  What were the odds of it surfacing right here, at Natalie’s workplace? Astronomical. But what if . . . ?

  How many necklaces like this one could there be?

  St. George slaying the dragon was a popular subject for painters and sculptors—Raphael, Uccello, and Do natello had all depicted the legend. But for jewelers, no.

  Natalie worked some moisture into her dry mouth. “How old is it?”

  Selia drew her sparse, salt-and-pepper brows together and traced the knight’s outline with her gloved finger. “Mid-eighteenth century, I’d say. Russian.”

  A hard pulse kicked up in Natalie’s ears. “Why Russian? St. George is the patron saint of England, isn’t he?”

  Selia removed her glasses and rubbed at her eyes. “St. George has been everyone’s patron saint, it seems. Yes, England claims him—and specifically the Scouting movement, which I believe is the origin of our own Boy Scouts here in America. But so do many other sects and countries. The legend is so old that its origins are obscure.

  “It may have started with the Greek myth of Perseus, who rescued the maiden Andromeda from a sea monster. But eventually it’s come to represent the triumph of Christianity over paganism and even the triumph in general of good over evil.” Selia settled her glasses back onto her nose and pushed them as high as they’d go. “Why do I think this piece is Russian? Well, because it’s similar to the image on the state emblem of the Russian Empire, which has evolved over many years to become the seal of Moscow.”

  Natalie nodded and tried to slow her pulse. Was this her family’s heirloom necklace? It was an incredible long shot, but if it was, she didn’t kid herself that it would be easy to prove that it had been stolen and should rightfully be restored to her grandmother.

  The legal issues were torturous. One had to prove the onetime ownership, then the theft, and finally trace the piece through a possible maze of owners since the theft had occurred. Often the process crossed international boundaries, muddying the legal waters even further, because different countries had different precedents and burdens of proof. Then there was the question of whether the current owner had purchased the item with the knowledge that it was “hot.”

  Natalie knew she should just walk away from Selia’s desk and forget she’d ever seen the St. George necklace. But she stood rooted to the spot. “So why is the necklace here? Is it broken?”

  “The clasp needs repairs and the whole thing needs to be cleaned,” Selia told her.

  Nat wanted to hold it in her hands, but Selia’s tone directed her to go away. She never had been chatty. So Nat took her tea and went back upstairs, deep in thought.

  The only person who could tell her for sure whether that St. George necklace was the St. George necklace was Nonnie, who lived in suburban Connecticut. And her chances of getting Nonnie onto a train and into the city were about the same as those of a gnat surviving a swim across New York Harbor.

  Still, she had to try. Out of breath by the time she got to her third-floor office, Natalie located her cell phone in the depths of her knockoff Prada messenger bag and hit the speed dial for her grandmother’s number.

  Three

  Reif’s was getting crowded, and Natalie’s voice could no longer compete with the music, the buzz of thirty other conversations, and the bustle behind the bar.

  McDougal leaned into her space, propping his chin on a loosely clasped fist. Natalie blinked at his close proximity, and her cheeks pinkened a bit, but she didn’t move away.

  The lady appeared to enjoy his company. He figured it wouldn’t be long before he could have her horizontal.

  As soon as he had the thought, though, something disturbing—like guilt—rapped him on the knuckles.

  Leave her alone. Y
ou’re getting the information you need. It was clearly just a matter of tracking down Granny now.

  And what, you’re going to mug a little old lady? Even for you, that’s low.

  Eric took a swig of his Guinness. “So you got your grandmother to come into the city to look at the necklace,” he prompted.

  Natalie shook her head. “No. She’s housebound these days. I’m afraid she’s becoming agoraphobic. She won’t even go to the grocery store anymore—she pays a kid to deliver stuff. I had to take the necklace to her in Connecticut.”

  “Why not just a snapshot of it?”

  Natalie wrapped both hands around her whiskey glass. “Because Nonnie’s now legally blind.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” Fan-frickin’-tastic, McDougal. You’re going to mug a blind little old lady. Aren’t you just the hero?

  “She deals with it pretty well. But anyway, in order to tell anything about the necklace, she had to be able to touch it. She knew the weight and the contours from handling it as a child.”

  “You’re telling me that she identified it by feel alone?”

  Natalie nodded. “And then,” she said somewhat bitterly, “she started to cry for joy and wouldn’t give it back, even when I told her how much trouble I’ll be in. I’m going to get fired if I tell my boss. Fired. But she says that’s insignificant in comparison with having our heritage returned to us.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “You have to understand—my grandmother actually prays to St. George. She has a shrine to him in her home. She communicates with . . . ah . . . dead family members through him.”

  His lips twitched; he couldn’t help it.

  “Yes, I know how strange that sounds, but it’s something to do with the Order of St. George, a centuries-old military organization that my ancestors were a big part of . . . Anyway, this necklace has an almost mystical, religious significance to Nonnie.”