The Deal (54 page)

Perry is lying on the lounge chair to my right. She’s wearing a purple bikini. Her bronze, oiled skin is glistening. Her body is as fine as I always imagined. It goes beautifully with her mind.

We both know running together doubles the danger. Perry, arms around me, had one question outside Acappella that night.

“Are you prepared to enter a life where even the fantasy of ending up together can never become a reality?”

I wasn’t. So much, in fact, that the mere mention of it put so eloquently deflated my heart. The decision to go forward together, in life, was made right there. But, in order to do so, we both understood that getting out of the country separately was our best bet. It was at this point I uttered one last word to her. My destination. We didn’t see each other again until she arrived.

Max is playing in the surf. I delivered his passport, crafted with his cut down wallet-sized class photo, in the same envelope with Perry’s. Neo just jumped up on the lounge chair to my left. He’s sitting upright, facing me, exposing his little pink belly. It’s the only part of his body not covered with thick, white fur. The sun is bathing his face. Have you ever seen a Chihuahua squint in the sun? I’m holding a chunk of pineapple. He looks at it. His eyes return to mine and he licks his chops.

I throw Neo a taste of the sweet, yellow fruit. He eats it then jumps up on Perry. Max is running toward them from the water. I’m thankfully gazing at all three.

Like I already told you, I have gained and lost in a matter of weeks more than most people will in a lifetime. I have learned things about myself I never expected to learn. I now know one can both honor and disgrace their name with the same exact set of choices.

I will find Galina Zhamovsky. Tomorrow or ten years from now, I will find her. When I do, the truth won’t be far behind. What that truth reveals or whether any of us can handle it is an entirely different story.

Author’s Note

Spoiler Alert:
This author’s note contains information that
will give away a key element of the plot of The Deal.

In The Deal, contemporary fiction collides with historical fact.

As one who makes his living, i.e., my day job, in the commercial real estate business, it has given me great pleasure to weave day-to-day experience into this fictional drama. That the experiences cited here might please and enrich others makes this journey even more rewarding.

Yet while The Deal is contemporary, occurring in today’s world just as we know it, there is also a historical element that commemorates rare treasure. The fabled Fabergé imperial Easter eggs stand among the world’s most celebrated artistic achievements. If not for others and their diligent research and writings, a bevy of which I found online as well as in books and articles, it would have been impossible for me to incorporate these mesmerizing antiques into the story.

The eggs populating this novel are historically true-to-form in everything from name to description. As described in the book, fifty bejeweled Fabergé eggs were commissioned by the Russian royal family between the years of 1885 and 1916, as gifts from the czar to the czarina and other family members. It is also a fact that after the Russian Revolution, only forty-two of these prized antiques ever resurfaced.

This is where fact ends and fiction begins. While in The Deal the errant eggs are discovered, in reality the eight missing since the early twentieth century are still unaccounted for. They were neither found underneath a home in eastern Russia, as the book suggests, nor anywhere else for that matter. Rather, everything surrounding the lost imperial eggs in The Deal and all the other events described were created purely for entertainment value. If any names, situations, or sequences of events that mirror true life have arisen as a result of my approach to telling this story, this is truly a circumstance born of coincidence.