Boris Abrahamovich Blatt had started his career as a businessman peddling smuggled American Levi’s at Sunday flea markets along Moscow’s outer ring road. With the profits from jeans he moved into sports shoes and Italian designer suits. His new contacts in Italy, namely the Camorra in Napoli, proposed he look into selling more lucrative merchandise. They sent cocaine his way and Blatt sent unrefined opium theirs. By 1994, he was doing over a hundred million dollars a year in turnover.
It had been a frightening time. Even at a distance of twenty years, Blatt’s palms grew clammy at the memory. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the move to a free-market economy, Russia descended into a state of chaos. Business was conducted at the end of a gun barrel. A successful negotiation was one where you walked away alive. A day didn’t pass without a businessman being assassinated on the streets of Moscow. Blatt made it through by being smarter, stronger, and tougher than the rest. He was loyal to a fault, but woe unto those who betrayed him. His favored punishment involved boiling an enemy to death in a giant vat of hot oil. He did this often enough to know that a man could last between three and four minutes.
Blatt’s timing had been fortuitous. As Russia began to privatize its industries, he stood ready with money, contacts, and ambition. In a series of rigged auctions, he scooped up the gems of his country’s corporate might. Aluminum in the Urals. Timber in Siberia. Oil in the Caucasus. He earned his first billion in 1998. He hadn’t looked back since.
For years he’d traveled to Zurich to call on his bankers. There was no pressing need for the trips. He could have checked his balances from home or simply spoken with his portfolio manager on the phone. Still, he visited as often as six times a year just to ensure his money was where he had deposited it and that no one had stolen it while he wasn’t looking.
Blatt had examined this behavior and decided that it was as inescapable as it was irrational. The fear bred from the centuries of persecution visited upon the Jews of Eastern Europe had embedded itself in his genes, his very DNA. His behavior was no different from that of a merchant living in a shtetl outside Kiev a hundred years ago who constantly checked beneath his straw mattress that his money was safe and sound. This tie to his ancestors pleased him. It reminded him that he came from a race of survivors.
Today, however, he had not come to Zurich to visit his money.
He’d come for a different reason altogether.
Blatt crossed the Paradeplatz and continued along the Bleicherweg to Stockerstrasse. The lake was a few blocks to his left, and on this warm, sunny day he could smell the clean, crisp water. He’d brought a two-man complement with him, both registered with the Swiss government and permitted to carry firearms. They walked a few paces behind him, dressed in casual clothing. Bianca, his blond German girlfriend—decidedly not a Jew—walked at his side. As always, she insisted on holding his hand.
After a few blocks, Blatt turned up a side street and stopped in front of a door marked simply J. GRUBER ET CIE. He rang a buzzer and raised his face to the hidden security camera. He heard the lock disengage and pushed open the door, shooing in Bianca ahead of him.
“Stay here,” he said to the bodyguards. “I won’t be more than an hour.”
The men crossed the street and blended in with a trendy crowd gathered at an outdoor café.
The door closed behind Blatt. He and Bianca stood in a security cage and waited for the second door to open. Strangely, he felt more vulnerable inside the box of bulletproof glass than when he was exposed on the street. Several of his former colleagues had been killed in phone booths and restrooms, and he was wary of confined spaces.
A buzzer sounded and the door opened automatically. Bianca led the way into a large, nicely appointed showroom not dissimilar to what a customer might find at Beyer or Gübelin or any of the other luxury watch and jewelry boutiques lining the Bahnhofstrasse. Maroon carpeting, tasteful leather chairs, antique Louis XV desks, a grandfather clock. There were no display cases, however, no vitrines sparkling with gold watches and diamond rings. There was just Herr Gruber, Europe’s most discreet dealer in stolen goods, a thin, spritely octogenarian wearing an olive sweater vest beneath a black suit, his hair whiter than the last time Blatt had seen him, but the glimmer in the blue eyes as sharp as ever.
“Herr Blatt,” Gruber exclaimed, arms raised in welcome. “So nice to see you. A good trip, I hope.”
“Uneventful,” said Blatt. “That’s the most one can hope for these days.”
“And who is this?” Gruber took both of Bianca’s hands in his.
“Be careful,” said Blatt. “Bianca is not as tame as she looks.”
Gruber made a catlike hissing sound and dropped her hands. “Welcome, Bianca. May I offer some coffee or tea?”
“No,” said Blatt curtly. Niceties bored him. He hadn’t flown five hundred miles for a cup of coffee and a piece of apfelkuchen. “I have something interesting for you.”
“So you said on the phone. I’m brimming with curiosity. Such mystery. Such intrigue. Sit. Sit.” Gruber held a chair for Bianca and waited for Blatt to seat himself before taking his place on the opposite side of the desk. From a drawer, he removed a green baize display tray and set it between them. “And so? What is it today? A ruby necklace perhaps? A Fabergé egg?”
“A watch,” said Blatt. “Swiss, of course.”
“Oh?” Gruber’s shoulders slumped, visions of a wildly lucrative transaction dashed.
“Don’t look so glum. I didn’t fly here to sell you a Swatch.” Blatt unclasped his wristwatch and set it on the tray. Gruber picked it up by its strap and brought it close to his eyes. His effervescent smile returned. “This is not a watch,” he said, once again all alacrity and goodwill. “This is a rarity. A Patek Philippe day date perpetual calendar chronograph with phases of the moon. Also known as Reference 2499. Patek manufactured ten pieces per year beginning in 1951 and ending in 1986. A total of three hundred fifty units. But most were of gold or rose gold.” He paused and shook the watch as if it were a child’s bauble. “This is platinum.”
“So it is.”
“Of which only two were created,” continued Gruber. “One of which was last sold at Christie’s Geneva in 2012 for the sum of 3.6 million dollars. I hadn’t realized it had come on the market again.”
Blatt met the inquiring look head-on. “I obtained it from a private seller.”
“No doubt you have the box, all papers, packing slips.”
“Sadly, no.”
“Aacchhh.” Gruber grimaced, shoulders falling. “In this circumstance, I couldn’t offer you near its value. I’m sure you understand. It would have to go to a discreet party, someone content to keep his purchase confidential.”
Blatt tapped his foot impatiently. He hated this part. The circling of rivals. The staking out of one’s turf. “He can wear it. Isn’t that enough? He doesn’t have to go around advertising the fact.”
“Alas,” said Gruber, “when one spends so much money on an item, one often likes others to share in his victory. It’s the odd man, indeed, who buys such a masterwork only for the pleasure it affords him.”
Blatt shifted uncomfortably. He was certain Gruber had read about his having bought the Ferrari at Sotheby’s two nights earlier. The tabloids in London had pasted his face on the cover with the headline FERRAR-$KI and indicated in no uncertain terms that he had overpaid for the automobile. The American he’d met at the auction—Riske—had cautioned him not to go above twenty million, but once bidding began, Blatt made the decision the car would be his no matter what the price. And so when the bidding reached twenty-five million dollars, there he was with his hand in the air.
He was still smarting from the deduction to his bank account.
Worse, only yesterday he’d been forced to settle an outstanding invoice from a persistent contractor who’d built the underground Olympic-sized swimming pool beneath his new home in Highgate. He was hemorrhaging money. The watch would cover the cost of the pool, with a bit left over to purchase Bianca a small bijou. There was nothing like a large rock to stoke a woman’s performance in the bedroom.
“How much?”
“I can offer one million,” said Gruber.
“Euros?”
“Dollars.”
“Two million,” said Blatt. “And euros.”