All That Lives Must Die - Eric Nylund [108]
“Are you going to open it?” Fiona asked.
Audrey picked it up, shook it gently, and turned it over and over. “I believe so.” She went inside.
Eliot and Fiona followed her upstairs.
Audrey set it on the dining table, took out a pair of scissors, and sliced through tape and paper.
Inside were Styrofoam peanuts and a tiny egg.
It was a Fabergé. Eliot had seen pictures of them in encyclopedias. This one was the size of a hen’s egg. It had to be authentic, because it glimmered with inlaid diamonds and flowing sinews of sapphires, which gave the impression of water flowing over its surface.
Audrey inhaled and her eyes widened. “Lovely . . . ,” she whispered.
Fiona, also apparently touched by its beauty, reached for it.
Audrey moved it away.
“Sorry,” Fiona whispered. “It’s just so . . .”
“Yes,” Audrey replied. “Too entrancing, I’m afraid.” She frowned and removed the manifest from the box, scanning it.
“Who’s it from?” Eliot asked.
“A private collection in Bangkok,” Audrey relayed, reading the manifest, “the director of antiquities in Moscow, and then to an art house in Paris . . . but these are just half truths.”
She returned to the egg and touched a sapphire on its equator. There was a click, and the top portion hinged into seven slices that opened like the petals of a lotus.
Within was a minutely crafted scene of a gondola sailing down a canal—the entire thing made of gold and silver, lapis lazuli and aquamarine, and sparkling diamonds everywhere, so it looked like moonlight and stars reflecting on nighttime waters, tiny fish frolicking alongside the boat, a boatman with pole in one hand, his passengers a man and woman embracing.
There was a tiny whir, and music tinkled from within the egg.
Audrey stared somewhere else, far away and long ago. Emotion trembled upon her lips. She whispered, “Quasi una fantasia.”29
She looked on the verge of tears, but she blinked and was back in the present.
Audrey snapped the egg shut. “It is from your father,” she said, her tone frigid.
Uncle Henry had once told them how their mother and father met at the Carnival in Venice. Both masked, they had fallen in love before they knew each other’s true identities.
Audrey tore through the pages of the invoice. “How did he find us?” Her finger traced through shipping codes and credit card information—halting at a phone number. She slammed the pages onto the table.
Eliot jumped, startled by the sudden violence.
“This . . . ,” Audrey said in a deliberately calm voice, “is our phone number. Our very unlisted phone number. Only those in the League have it.” She cocked her head, thinking, then turned to Fiona and Eliot. “May I see your phones?”
A peculiar numbness tingled through Eliot’s extremities, and it felt like the floor dropped from under him. He hadn’t done anything wrong, had he?
“Uh, sure,” he said.
He and Fiona got their phones and set them on the table.
Audrey glanced at Fiona’s, then nodded, and made a little take it away gesture.
She stared at Eliot’s twice as long, then picked it up with two fingers as if it were a stinging insect. After looking at it, this way and that, she set it on the table and grasped her scissors.
Faster than Eliot could follow, she snipped at the phone—cutting it in half.
He felt something pass through him as well, a sensation of lightning from his throat to the base of his spine, followed by a nerve-jangling shudder. His heart pounded in his chest, and he found himself unable to take a breath.
And his phone . . . it wasn’t his.
The two halves on the table were from a smaller, older phone. The beige plastic was well-worn, dirty, and missing half its number buttons.
“Your phone was stolen,” Audrey explained. “This is a cloned copy, from, I’m almost certain, Louis.” She spat out his name and turned her glare fully upon Eliot. “Where and when did you see him?”
Eliot had seen Audrey serious, maybe even angry before, but not like this. The world closed in around him. There was a gravity to her words that he seemed to fall into. But he managed to take up a breath and