The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [77]
Ferdie’s wife had accused him of being inhuman. Arlette was French and when he first met her she was frivolous and pretty in a cute doll-like way. She had black boot-button eyes, a cloud of dark curling hair, large breasts, and a very tiny waist. Of course there had always been girls available to young men as rich as Ferdie Arnhaldt, and he had never lacked for a glamorous companion on his arm, but wily Arlette had wooed him with all her sensual Parisian charm and before he knew it they were married. He had realized too late that she had married him for his money, but by then she was pregnant and he would never divorce the mother of his child. The fact that the child was a girl had at first been a great disappointment, but he had soon grown to love her. His little daughter had a combination of her mother’s looks and the Arnhaldts’ powerful will. Her picture still dominated his desk though she had been dead ten years now, killed in a horseback riding accident when she was only fourteen. Time had healed the wounds but never the bitterness of her loss.
Afterward he had decided it was expedient not to divorce Arlette, because she served as a good excuse to keep other wily women away from his fortune. Of course, should the need or desire arise he would divorce her in a minute. Meanwhile, he kept her in luxury in an enormous apartment in Monaco.
Ferdie walked across to the painting on the wall beside the fireplace. For a house of such richness and grandeur, filled with objects of such solid value, the painting was a nonentity: a mediocre woodland scene signed by an unknown artist. His great-grandfather had hung it there a century ago to conceal the wall safe behind it, in the belief that if he put a valuable masterpiece there it might get stolen and lead the thieves to even greater treasures behind.
After pressing the concealed button, Ferdie waited until the painting slid slowly to one side, and then he dialed the combination and opened up the safe. There was nothing in there of any value to common thieves, only to his enemies. It was stacked with papers and documents. He pulled out a brown manila envelope and carried it back to the desk. He sat for a long time looking at the photographs it contained.
The first picture was of his grandfather on the occasion of his second marriage. He had been fifty-two years old and looked the way all the Arnhaldt men did: tall, hard, and upright in his gray morning suit, his silk top hat held firmly against his chest. His bride was young and very beautiful, soft-faced with love in yards of bridal satin and lace. The second photograph was of the same woman, this time seated on a chair. She was holding up a hand to touch the smiling little blond girl leaning against her shoulder. The third photograph was faded and worn from much handling. It was of Princess Anouska Ivanoff wearing the famous tiara with the emerald.
For the umpteenth time Ferdie compared Anouska’s face with the blond child’s, examining them minutely, feature for feature. The resemblance was undeniable.
After pushing the photographs to one side, he took some documents from the envelope. They were a series of expired leases from the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic dating from 1920, giving the Arnhaldt Company the rights to mine lands on Rajasthan, previously the property of the Ivanoff family. Those mines contained the valuable tungsten necessary for hardening steel, without which the Arnhaldt factories would have been worthless. For over seventy years the Arnhaldts had been shelling out a fortune to the Soviets, knowing that their claim to ownership was invalid. Now the mines were even more valuable to an armaments business moving into new systems of warfare, and Arnhaldt would be held to ransom no longer. Ferdie intended to make sure this time that the mines were legally his. Just as his grandfather had tried to do, all those years before. And this time, nothing would stop him.
He glanced impatiently at his watch. It was one minute to three.