Helena returned to the Gresham a few minutes after 10 p.m. She went into the Ladies Room off the lobby to take off her wig and shake out the jacket and the umbrella. She didn’t remove all her makeup, thinking the lights were soft in the lobby at this time of night and no one was likely to look at her closely as she passed through to the elevators. Had she taken the stairs, someone might have wondered, and the doors at her floor might also have been locked. Good hotels don’t like having strangers wandering around, bothering the guests.
As she rounded the last bushy palm, she saw the man in the tracksuit. He was lounging in a different leather chair from the one he had slumped in the last time she saw him, and now he made no pretense of reading a newspaper. He stood when he saw her and said, “Zdrastvuyte, ghevoshka” — hello, little girl. “You have had a busy day,” he added, still in Russian.
“What do you want?” she asked, also in Russian.
He smiled. His two front teeth were missing. Someone’s fist must have connected with his mouth at least once. “Piotr Denisovich Grigoriev would like to meet you.”
Helena had learned early in her martial arts training never to be intimidated. Another early lesson taught her that being large was no advantage. The bigger they are, the harder they fall, and all that. The Albanian instructor her father had hired had never met a man he could not fell in less than one minute, and he was shorter than Helena and weighed about the same. Helena had studied with him for seven years and learned that practice and split-second decisions were the key ingredients of success. You had to know every move so well, no thought was necessary, only instinct. But she had been too busy the past few days to find time to train. Other than her run up to Krestin’s house and marching along sidewalks, she had not been able to exercise. The man who faced her now looked as if he hadn’t ever missed a day in the gym.
On the other hand, this was the Gresham lobby and not even a Russian oligarch would want someone in his entourage to attack another guest in full view of the front desk and the concièrge.
“Please come with me to Mr. Grigoriev’s suite,” the man said.
“After you,” she said. Her whole body tensed then relaxed as she balanced on the balls of her feet, her arms tight at her side, her hands flat in their strike position.
When he reached out to usher her into the waiting elevator, she hit his hand with just enough force to make him drop it. It was comforting to know that, had she decided to do so, she could have broken it.
“You can stand at the back, if you wish,” he growled, holding his hand and wincing. “He told me you may not wish to come with me.”
“You go in first,” she said. A young couple, dressed for a formal occasion swept past them into the elevator. They were smirking at Helena and the tracksuit, as if they had witnessed a lovers’ spat. “It’s been a long day,” Helena said, smiling at them. Tracksuit entered the elevator and stood with his legs apart, his hands in front of his genitals.
He got off at the fourth floor and held the elevator door for her, as a polite man would do, although Helena didn’t like his arm at her side as she exited. And she didn’t much like the burly man with the pockmarked face who stood next to the elevator, or the man with the buzz cut and crumpled brown suit who said he was Mr. Grigoriev’s secretary and that Mr. Grigoriev was waiting inside.
When the secretary tried to follow her in, Tracksuit grabbed his arm. “Ms. Marsh,” he said in Russian, “hates anyone behind her.” He attempted another toothless smile.
How the hell did he know she was Helena, let alone that she didn’t like anyone at her back? It was definitely time to find another alter ego. She would have to stop in Bratislava before this trip was over. The best document thief and forger in Europe, perhaps in the world, lived there, on Michalská Street.
The room was softly lit by a standing lamp near the entrance. A woman in a long dark dress with a loose open back was playing a Chopin nocturne on a grand piano by the window. Grigoriev was sitting on a brocade-covered sofa, ignoring the view of the lit-up Széchenyi Chain Bridge and the Buda Castle beyond. But as Helena entered, he looked at her and then out the window, holding his hands palm up in a theatrical gesture that said, look, isn’t that lovely, and he smiled. “Such a fantastic city, so much like something out of the nineteenth century, don’t you think,” he said. “It’s easy to be fooled by its charms. Not so easy to keep in mind that it was once a Nazi stronghold, that here they shoved Jews into boxcars or dumped them into that picturesque river. No better than the Ukrainians.”
Or the Russians, she thought. She didn’t move from the entrance.
“Please,” he said, “sit.”
She didn’t.
“A glass of wine, perhaps?”
She stayed where she was.
“The last time we spoke, you said there may be another time we would do business,” he said in Russian, “and this could be that time. The Titian —”
“Is a fake,” she said. “Unlike Mr. Dalchev, who was the real thing.”
Grigoriev laughed. “You have kept your sense of humour after all these years.” He got up from the sofa and walked over to the silver drinks trolley. He had less hair on top now, but although he was trying to seem friendly his black button eyes still looked calculating. He was shorter than she remembered, or he had gained some weight and his proportions had changed. Still the overlong arms, the hairy hands, the flashy white shirt with the high custom collar, the long double cuffs, the striped suit with overly wide shoulders, the slightly pointed shoes — crocodile, as before? The years he had spent in the vicinity of the Savile Row’s bespoke tailors so beloved by his compatriots had not changed his style.
“I have promised Olga a new painting for her suite of rooms. She had her heart set on the Titian — she is quite religious you know — but I think I could placate her with something else. Another painting.” He poured himself a couple of inches of vodka and filled up the crystal glass with crushed ice from the bucket. “Stoli Elit,” he said. “They bring it in for people who know what the real thing is — vodka that shouldn’t be adulterated with cheap mixes, but drunk pristine as it was intended. Sure you won’t change your mind?”
Helena shook her head. She walked over to a straight-backed chair near the piano and sat down, Marcia’s switchblade digging into her vertebrae, her feet planted firmly in case she needed to spring up quickly.
“How did your man identify me?” she asked.
“How? Or when? I’ve had you followed since the day you arrived. These childish disguises? Come now, Helena, they are period pieces. From a different period of your life, don’t you think? Seriously?”
“In Nice?” she asked.
“And in Cluj.”
Vladimir said he had hired the driver through an agency. He had denied knowledge of the driver’s attempt to take the painting without pay. Had he been telling the truth?
“You have other paintings for sale,” Grigoriev said. “They may not be as impressive as this one, but Olga would prefer the genuine article to a forgery, if it is a forgery. I have my doubts about your friend from the Accademia, and I suspect his motives. But at this price, I am not going to chance it. I have always preferred to play it safe.”
“I didn’t say it was a forgery. It is a fake. An imitation of Titian’s style.”
“Is there a difference? In St. Petersburg you were talking about fakes and authenticity and provenance. Frankly, I don’t care which. But if this Titian is not the real thing, I am not going to fork over eighty million.”
Helena shrugged. “What do you want from me?” she asked.
“I could settle for a Degas, or a Matisse, maybe a Renoir, something with a bit of colour, and I would prefer it not to have an overtly religious subject. I am reluctant to go home without a gift from this trip.” He gazed at the pianist’s naked back and smiled again.
“She would not have liked the Titian, then,” she said.
“Perhaps not, but she would have liked its value. You know about women. The ones with refined tastes.”
“You know I don’t do the Impressionists,” she said.
Olga would be his fourth wife. Helena remembered seeing her in Vanity Fair only a few years ago. She was blond and willowy, much like his previous three wives. The first one, naturally, was the stolid Russian who had lived with Grigoriev in the years when he made his first million, the one who gave birth to all the little Grigorievs, at least one of whom had been at the Hermitage negotiating the purchase of Old Masters when Helena was there. She had noted after the first year that at least a hundred works in the museum were fakes or forgeries. The fact that so many of them had been acquired from scions of the old Russian nobility was no guarantee of their provenance. Back then, Grigoriev could get excited about a Giorgione and a Raphael, but even then, he had admitted to a particular fondness for Impressionists. Bearing in mind Grigoriev’s inability to tell the difference between a work of genius and a forgery, she was sure she could find him a suitable painting to take home.
Elmyr de Hory had painted some very fine Picassos, a few excellent Degases, and some Matisses so like Matisse’s own that perhaps the master (or his mistress) might have thought he had done them himself. Chances were that Grigoriev wouldn’t check. He would imagine that Helena had been sufficiently cowed she wouldn’t play a trick on him. And it would be lovely to present him with a de Hory, after her warning about de Hory’s work. Then there was that perfectly awful fake that Gertrude had wanted to sell.
She was still smarting from their confrontation in St. Petersberg, and now there was the matter of Dalchev and Grigoriev’s penchant for having her followed.
She would make that trip to Bratislava sooner than expected.