The Final Fabergé

Table of Contents

 

 

 

“Swan continues his art-crime series featuring Scotland Yard's Detective Inspector Jack Oxby…now hot on the trail of the last Fabergé egg created before the Russian Revolution...The pacing is quick and the action plentiful… Swan's series strikes a comfortable balance between the more hard-boiled Lovejoy antique mysteries and Iain Pears' more literary art-historical crime novels.”

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Booklist

 

“Oxby is charming and disarmingly intelligent.”

—
Publishers Weekly

 

“The excitement of the story is bound to send first-time readers of Thomas Swan in search of his previous books.”

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Sunday Star-Ledger

 

“Swan spins a taut tale.”

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San Antonio Express-News

 

“Plenty of facts about Fabergé [and] Russian architecture, and New Jersey auto export lots…Scotland Yard's art-crimes specialist Jack Oxby's globe-trotting quest for a legendary Fabergé egg leads to a pack of homicidal Russians.”

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Kirkus Reviews

 

“Thomas Swan's research is meticulous.”

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Cleveland Plain Dealer

 

“Thomas Swan…is as knowledgeable as he is inventive.”

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Dallas Morning News

 

“Fans of Iain Pears's art mysteries will enjoy the lavish detail Swan provides on the minutiae of forgery. The captivating premise of
The Da Vinci Deception
will win over those who like their thrillers well decorated with objets d'art.”

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Booklist

 

“A surprisingly sexy and dirty world where nothing is sacred—least of all, art….The beauty is in the technical details about fine art—great tips on conserving it, packing and shipping it, buying and selling it, and destroying it forever.”

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The New York Times Book Review

The events and characters in this book are fictional, except for those persons who were or are genuinely real and who inspired much of the story. Peter Carl Fabergé was a brilliant goldsmith and jeweler. Grigori Rasputin is the stuff of legends; his true role in the government of Nicholas II and relationship with Alexandra will be endlessly studied.

—Grigori Rasputin

PETROGRAD, DECEMBER 16, 1916

O
n the table was a box. Not one made of ordinary pine, but of a fine-grained wood that had been cut and pieced perfectly together. The wood was holly and had been stained a pale brown, brushed with several coats of shellac, then rubbed to a rich luster with a powder made from pumice and cigarette ashes. The box was eight inches high, the same as the cut glass and silver pitcher that was next to it. Beside the pitcher were figurines made of semiprecious stones, jeweled mantel clocks, cigarette cases, snuff boxes, necklaces, jewelry, carved stone sculptures, and other samples of the work produced by a hundred craftsmen in the house of G. Fabergé, 16 Bolshaya Morskaya Street.

Seated at the table was a balding man with a dense white beard, blanched skin, and steel-rimmed glasses that had slipped low on his nose. Dignity showed in an intelligent face lined with the wrinkles of seventy years, and in eyes that held the glint of youthful good humor. In all, there was the appearance of a wise and immensely creative man. He opened the box and took out an object shaped like a large egg. The man was Peter Carl Fabergé, the jeweled object was an Imperial Easter egg for which Fabergé had become world-famous, and which was intended as a gift for Czarina Alexandra Feodorovna.

Fabergé placed the egg on a swatch of deep blue velvet and nudged it toward the man who sat across from him. “In spite of the war, we found nearly all the materials we had planned to use. Except for gold. That we used sparingly.”

The Imperial egg stood upright and was held by a pair of delicately sculptured hands which seemed to reach up from a round, white onyx
base. On top of the egg was a little basket made of delicately woven gold strips. Inside were flowers made from either a diamond or sapphire, their petals individually enameled in pinks and white. The egg had been covered with a thin layer of pure silver that had been hammered, engraved, polished, and finally overlayed with a fusion of glass and metal oxides to produce a translucent enamel surface. The blue color was as intense as a pure summer sky, testimony to the fact that nowhere was the technique of guilloche ground so well executed as in the shops of Peter Fabergé. Two half-inch bands of silver circled the egg and on each were clusters of rubies and emeralds. The onyx base was encircled with a stripe of blue enamel over which gold leaf tips and rosettes had been applied.

Fabergé placed a finger against the largest of the rubies in the silver band. The pressure released a spring lock and the upper third of the egg opened to reveal a pocket lined in silk the color of cream. In the pocket was the “surprise.” The surprises found in Fabergé's other Imperial eggs ranged from a precise model of the royal yacht to a chirping rubyencrusted cockerel. The surprise that rested on the silk was an enameled portrait of the Czar and Czarina, and a tiny easel on which to show it off.

The design of this Imperial egg was especially different from the previous Easter gifts commissioned by Czar Alexander III and his son Nicholas II. Instead of just one surprise compartment, there were two. The second compartment in the egg held by Fabergé was so cleverly concealed it was likely to be discovered only by cutting apart the egg.

And this Imperial egg was also different in that it had not been commissioned by Czar Nicholas as an Easter gift to his wife, but by a man of dark intrigue and power, a man who many conjectured was as powerful as the Czar himself, and who now sat across from Fabergé. The hands that held the egg, turning it over slowly with long, bony fingers, belonged to the peasant monk Grigori Efimovich Rasputin, forty-five years old, heavily bearded, with long, curling black hair and eyes set deep under thick brows. His voice was thin, nearly inaudible.

He glanced up at Fabergé, his head tilted. “You have made a very beautiful gift for my friends.” Rasputin closed the egg and ran his finger over the silver and stones, searching for a way to open the second surprise compartment.

“How do you open it?”

Fabergé took the egg. “Here, on the inside, is a circle of twelve pearls.
All, that is, except for one.” He pointed to a perfectly round sapphire. “If you think of it as the face of a clock, then the sapphire would be twelve o'clock. When I push three of the pearls, in a specific order, the second compartment will open. Just so—”

Fabergé carefully pressed against three of the pearls, he knew the ones. Each was minutely different from the others. He twisted the lower half of the egg at the silver band, separating the egg. With his fingernail he pried up a tiny door revealing a hollowed-out compartment the size of a walnut.

Fabergé smiled. “Good enough?”

“It's like a toy,” Rasputin said with a grin. “And I have a name for it. I will call it
The Egg of Eternal Blessing
.” From a pocket in his voluminous pants he took out a leather pouch. He opened it and took two stones and placed them in Fabergé's outstretched hand. One was blue, the other a pale yellow. “These will make it a true surprise.”

Fabergé put a loupe to his eye and studied the stones. First the blue stone, a cut cabochon star sapphire. He pronounced that it had excellent color and that the star was nearly perfectly formed. He set it aside and put the diamond under the glass and studied it for several minutes, murmuring his fascination aloud.

“Most strange color . . . rare cut . . . over fifteen carats. Where did you—”

Rasputin had come around and stood behind the jeweler, beyond the bright light in a pool of his own darkness. “It was a gift from Madame Alikina,” he said. “She was the grand-niece of Count Orlov and it had been handed down from her father, who had been given a box of precious stones when his father died. I helped the old lady over her sickness, but she was eighty-five and before she died, she gave me the diamond. Is it valuable?”

It seemed incredible to Fabergé that the wily and reputedly clever Rasputin could not know how valuable the diamond actually was. He weighed it: 18.7 carats. “It has the yellow of pure sunlight,” he said slowly, with reverence. “Never have I seen one like it.” He peered at the monk's dark face, into the black sockets where thin rims of fire glowed.

“Valuable?” he finally answered. “In normal times it would easily sell for a hundred thousand rubles.”

The two stones were put into the second surprise compartment, but only after Rasputin asked Fabergé to show him the pearls and the order they must be pressed to open it.

Rasputin said, “I must write down the numbers in the correct sequence.”

Fabergé gave him pen and paper. Carefully, Rasputin wrote the numbers and folded the paper, slipping it into the leather pouch. At Rasputin's urging, Fabergé returned the egg to its box and wrapped it with brown paper.

“I am going directly to Prince Yusupov's home and there's no need to raise suspicions.”

“To a soiree?” Fabergé asked, knowing of the monk's proclivity for carousing and his notoriously insatiable appetite for women. “The prince will show you a good time.”