Chapter 1: The Promise CHAPTER 1 THE PROMISE GLASTONBURY FESTIVAL JUNE 2009 "My dad made the world's largest jeweled egg," I said, flirting. My sexy new friend smiled back. Be careful , my brain whispered as I took a sip from his silver hip flask. The fiery liquid burned my throat. The world shimmered and tilted. It was early morning and we were sitting on rickety deck chairs near the Stone Circle, watching the sunrise, swapping life stories. His dad was a rock 'n' roll drummer who had played Glastonbury once in the seventies. I was impressed but trying to hide it. We'd been attempting to outdo each other all night, in that competitive way that's code for "I want to rip your clothes off." "What is this? A dad-off?" He smirked, passing me a spliff. Our fingers brushed--and lingered. I found myself staring too long at his lips. Around us lay the colorful detritus of the festival--discarded balloons, empty cider bottles, a glittery tutu, a single muddy wellie. A bicycle-powered sound system pumped out tribal beats. Middle-class hippies fought for a turn on the rope swing. A semi-naked man dressed in a sarong and adorned with UV body paint pummeled a pair of bongos. The campfire's embers flickered and smoked. "It's not a competition," I joked. "But I still win." "We'll see about that," he said in his Scottish accent. "Tell me about this egg." I fell silent. My brain blurred. Fragments of memory danced in the distance. I stared at his face, fixating on the flecks of pink glitter in his beard. I'd said it so flippantly, my tone almost celebratory. But that wasn't how anyone in my family normally spoke about the egg. It was a taboo subject, to be discussed only in solemn tones, imbued with an air of dark regret. It was a cursed object, a bad thing. Follow the first rule of journalism, I thought: Stick to the facts. "Erm. It was big, and golden," I stuttered. "Lots of diamonds. Thousands. Like a giant Fabergé egg. But..." I groped for the right words. My desire for this stranger made me want to preserve the connection between us. He extended the flask in my direction, and I tilted my head back, letting it drip slowly into my mouth, feeling his eyes on me. Electricity surged. A string of words tumbled into semi-coherent sentences. I told him I came from a family of Jewish jewelers that once upon a time had celebrity clients like Elizabeth Taylor and Joan Collins. Dad made watches that tennis players wore at Wimbledon, and once sponsored a polo team that played against Prince Charles (as he was at the time). He caught my eye and smiled. "You didn't tell me you were rich." "I'm not," I protested. "Not anymore, at least." He reached out and held my hand. Act cool. "Anyway, the point is, we had this historic, hundred-year-old business and it was all going smoothly, until my dad decided to make this massive gold-and-diamond egg... and it... smashed everything to bits." I cast a glance in my suitor's direction, conscious that I might be boring him--but to my surprise, he looked spellbound. I hadn't expected this. I'd come to Glastonbury nursing a broken heart. My boyfriend of almost five years had moved to Berlin and, inevitably, met someone else. He broke the news that he had feelings for this other woman in an email to me, which I unfortunately read at work. Then we'd met up at a music festival in Barcelona for a miserable few days of reminiscing, recriminations, and farewell fucking. I spent most of the flight home crying and drinking red wine. Thank God for sunglasses. That had only been the previous weekend. Now I was at Glastonbury, and, it's safe to say, I was not in the mood. I'd been making the musical pilgrimage to Worthy Farm since I was fifteen, but this year I was desperate for some time to process my breakup. And was worried that, for once, escaping reality by dancing in a field might not be the answer. But the friend who'd gotten me a free ticket wasn't taking no for an answer. It will be cathartic, get it out of your system, make you stronger. All the clichés. So, here I was. Newly single, aged almost thirty, with tingly limbs and lack of sleep clouding my senses, sharing my family secrets with this seductive stranger. He was dressed like an extra from a trippy version of Top Gun , his slim frame draped in a brown leather aviator jacket with a fur collar and colorful patches on the arms. A silver sequined sailor's hat balanced jauntily on his head, dark curls bouncing underneath it. His swirling chestnut eyes were filled with mischief. I'd been jokingly calling him Maverick all night. We'd met earlier when our limbs collided on the dance floor. A moment of connection. He was dancing too close and offered to buy me a drink. An apology, or something more? I followed him to the bar, pushing and shoving through the flailing crowd. We downed sticky shots of sambuca and introduced ourselves, shouting into each other's ears. We filed back to our spot, holding hands to tether us, but his friends and mine had vanished. Instead of looking for them, we danced together, his hands snaking around my waist. Then we strolled around, waiting for sunrise, in search of adventure. "What happened to the egg?" Maverick asked, pushing his neon-orange sunglasses off his face and wriggling around in his deck chair to stare directly at me. "It's lost," I mumbled. "It cost millions to make. Then it didn't sell. The business collapsed; so did my parents' marriage. It was a bit like Pandora's egg..." My voice trailed off. Discomfort seeped into my brain, and weariness invaded my limbs. The magic energy gifted to me by the silver flask was wearing off, as was my ability to detach this extraordinary object from the emotional carnage that followed it. "How do you lose a multimillion-pound egg?" Maverick asked, incredulous. "It's not like losing your phone, or your keys--or even your mind, temporarily. It's a massive golden egg! Your dad must know who has it." He dropped my hand to fumble in his coat pocket and produced a packet of cigarettes. I shook my head, ignoring his crestfallen expression. There were nicotine stains on his fingers, I noticed, and recoiled slightly. We sat in silence as he took a drag. "My dad's dead." I delivered the death knell to our romantic overtures in a whisper, staring out at the distant tent city that was sparking back into life below us. "I'm sorry." "It's okay." I shrugged. "The egg broke him." I felt him scan my face, searching for the right words, fearful he'd shattered the spell. Maybe we weren't soulmates after all. We lapsed into silence. The sun's warmth slid across my neck, melting away the mystery of the night. It revealed that his jacket was missing several buttons, and the dirt under his fingernails. "Do you ever wonder where it is now?" he asked. A final attempt to draw me back. His questions, at first flirty and intriguing, grew increasingly irksome. I didn't have answers. I didn't need answers. I needed sleep. I needed my ex-boyfriend. I didn't need to be stripped naked by this man. Grief jangled at the back of my brain. I pushed back the deck chair and tried to excuse myself. Instead, I tripped and fell straight into Maverick's lap. He laughed awkwardly. "You should be proud of your dad," he said softly, brushing my knotted hair out of my eyes. "Keep telling his story." I kissed him farewell and set off down the hill, resolving to do just that. Growing up, my mother used to refer to the egg as "your father's ego," while to the rest of the world it was known as the Argyle Library Egg by Kutchinsky. I felt a mix of pride and bafflement toward my father's creation. I was thrilled to take its Guinness Book of World Records certificate to school to show my friends, but I didn't understand why anyone would want an egg that big that wasn't made out of chocolate. And I was left frustrated when my repeated requests for a puppy were deflected with the refrain "after the egg." But "after the egg," life was never the same. This breathtaking object caused such devastation that, for a long time, my family decried its existence. Mum raged against it as if it were human. A Maleficent-like villain that stole her livelihood and her husband and robbed her children of a father. I was meant to hate it too. But I couldn't. Just like I couldn't hate Dad when he left. After that sunrise moment at Glastonbury, it became a late-night story I reserved for after-parties, when dawn was breaking and disinhibition was at its peak. It was a way of keeping my father close, of introducing him to friends and lovers. I had my performance nailed: I would keep it light and rattle past the tragedy, focusing on the eccentricity and mystery. At the right moment, I'd pull out the photo of Dad caressing the egg that I kept in a box of keepsakes under my bed, eliciting cries of disbelief. "WTF? It's massive!" "Mate, your dad was a proper legend." "You look so much like him." "Where is it now?" people would inevitably ask. I'd shrug. Dunno. Don't care. Let's have another shot. Like my father, I told myself, it was lost to me forever. Once I confessed to a new fling that I'd give anything to see the egg again, to understand why it had so possessed its creator. Even saying those words aloud felt like a betrayal of my family and what the egg had cost us. "Have you tried therapy? It might be easier than looking for a giant golden egg," the fling suggested, only half teasing. "This is my therapy." I leaned over and swigged from the bottle of lukewarm prosecco on the bedside table. It sounded hollow, but that was how I felt. He stroked my back, working his way down my body in slow, seductive strokes until my longing was focused elsewhere. The fling turned into a boyfriend, and for some time our life resembled a rom-com montage where the starry-eyed couple wanders around Ikea, strolls through parks at sunset, and kisses in doorways. We moved in together and even got a kitten. Beneath the soft filter, it wasn't perfect--but it was enough, for a while. He was captivated by the glamour of the egg story. He would ask questions about the family business, and I would stare blankly back. Holes in my history. For our first anniversary, he found a vintage Kutchinsky advert from a glossy magazine on eBay and hung it in our bedroom. Later, he bought me a tiny replica of a Fabergé egg. Both gifts made me cry, in a good way. It was the first time in decades that anyone had wanted to talk about, let alone celebrate, that part of my life. When I mentioned the anniversary gift to Mum, her reaction surprised me. It irked her. As if I were prizing open a past that didn't belong to me. Dragging her back into an emotional abyss. I started secretly collecting House of Kutchinsky memorabilia: adverts, photos, newspaper clippings. The jewelry was easy to find. It was all over the internet, with rare pieces from the seventies fetching tens of thousands of pounds at auction. Occasionally, I recognized some of my grandparents' favorite pieces in catalogs or on social media. Was that Grandma's gold tiger brooch with its emerald eyes? Had that oversize diamond once graced her hand? Was that Grandpa's pocket watch? I became fascinated by the idea that jewels have an immortality that eludes their creator. The world changes but jewels endure, holding up a mirror to society at the moment of its creation. Sometimes they decorate flesh, sometimes they gather dust for decades, sometimes they are lost. They travel through time and space. But they are rarely destroyed. The thought that Dad's egg was out there somewhere gnawed at me. If I could see it again, then I might finally understand why he risked so much to make it. My work as a journalist suffered. I stopped researching other stories and devoted all my free time to delving into my family's past. The boyfriend, understandably, got fed up with my obsession intruding into our weekends. I canceled plans, spent mornings buried under a pile of books, and joined a throng of American tourists on a walking tour of London's Jewish East End. The latter in an attempt to connect with the world my Polish immigrant ancestors inhabited when they first arrived in London fleeing persecution in the nineteenth century. But I still hadn't shared the story with anyone else while sober. Until, one day, I blurted it out in a packed room of newspaper colleagues. It was the day of our regular ideas meeting--an agonizing, stilted affair where everyone, regardless of rank, was expected to present their best pitches. Our ash-blond editor, whose icy stare terrified me, would note them down, asking questions when her interest was piqued. A blank look was bad news, especially if accompanied by an awkward half smile. "My dad made the world's largest jeweled egg," I stuttered when it was my turn, "like a Fabergé egg but bigger and with lots of pink diamonds." I scanned my editor's face for a reaction. Stony silence. But after I told her about the egg's prime-time TV debut and how it traveled the world by plane, occupying three first-class seats, with my parents forming part of its entourage, she broke into a smile. "It's perfect for our Father's Day edition," she said. "How fast can you write it?" I was elated. All those years I'd spent scrabbling for ideas, and I'd been sitting on the best story of all. I called Mum as soon as I got out of the meeting. Normally my biggest supporter, she balked at the idea of canonizing my father and his egg. "It's not your story to tell," she rebuked down the phone. "You were only a child, what do you know?" Nobody would talk to me, she warned. There was a code of silence around the egg and the collapse of the business that I would never be able to break. Hoping she was wrong, I plucked up the courage to call the House of Kutchinsky's unofficial archivist, David O'Connor, who had been close to my parents. When the business was sold to a rival jeweler in 1991, he had stayed on as a head of sales. My nerves evaporated as soon as David answered the phone. Greeting me warmly, he suggested I meet him for lunch at the Kutchinsky showroom that coming Saturday. My stomach clenched. I hadn't set foot in the shop since the egg. I knew it was still there, a few doors down from Harrods. It was the West End theater where my family had once worked their magic, persuading shoppers to adorn their bodies with precious jewels. Our name still hung above the door, but my family had long since departed, and without their driving force, the brand had lost its luster. It used to make me so proud, driving past it as a child. But now it felt like a cruel taunt. I dressed up in a navy blue polka-dot dress, a blazer, and heels that squeezed my feet painfully. I felt absurd hobbling through the streets of Hackney on the weekend at an hour when I was more accustomed to heading home from a party. Repetitive beats blasted through my headphones as I sat on the tube, feeling the same nervous energy as I did before a big night out. When I reached the shop and its grand gilded doors swung open, I halted, frozen to the spot. Inside, it was as if someone had pressed pause the day the business was sold. The sapphire-blue-and-gold carpet with its pattern of interlocking K 's, in which my grandfather had taken so much pride, was still there, as were the crystal chandeliers. Jewels sat marooned on soft leather pedestals in glass cabinets. Taking a breath, I imagined myself as a returning character in a TV drama, stepping onto the set, ready for a showdown with the usurper of my family seat. Then David, smartly dressed in a navy suit and silk tie, appeared and enveloped me in a hug. A chameleonic salesman, he inhabited the persona of his clients, dressing, talking, and acting like them--except at parties when he would burst into either song or tears, or sometimes both. Sliding his slender frame behind one of the shop's gilt-edged mahogany desks, he motioned me to sit down. I'd explained on the phone that this was a sleuthing mission to piece together the clues that led to my father's self-destruction, but at first we swapped idle pleasantries, skirting the subject. It was so strange being back here. The fleshy creases on David's face and the deafening emptiness of the shop, on what should have been a busy Saturday, were the only signs that time had moved on. Twenty-five years ago, the shop's main attraction, in the eyes of my younger self, had been its proximity to Harrods' amazing toy shop. I would skulk in the back office eating biscuits until it was time to visit this treasure trove of unobtainable items like toy Ferraris, giant teddies, and creepy porcelain dolls. The designer's office was another favorite retreat due to its enticing selection of coloring pencils in every shade imaginable, each pencil perfectly sharp. At least they were until I got near them. But my most cherished memory was the time we were allowed to stay up late for a cocktail party. These soirees were designed to woo clients, create a media buzz, and reward staff. The first time I was allowed to attend, I must have been about eight years old. I loved everything about that evening, except my outfit. Mum insisted on dressing my younger sister Katrina and me in ruffled white shirts with huge lace collars, black velvet jackets, and silk tartan skirts. I remember sitting atop this same mahogany desk, my long curly hair frizzing over my shoulders, sipping apple juice from a champagne flute. Mum hovered behind me, keeping a watchful eye. She looked the embodiment of eighties glamour--with big, blow-dried hair, red nail varnish, and a black velvet dress, adorned with a hedgehog-shaped jeweled brooch. Dad flitted around the room, moving between family and clients, stopping occasionally to ruffle my hair. The canapés were the source of much excitement: mini burgers and fish-and-chips wrapped in tiny paper cones and served on silver trays. But what stuck in my mind most of all was seeing my family all happy and smiling together in this room. My laughing parents, my glamorous, if sometimes ferocious, grandparents--even my aunt and uncle were smiling. All the various cousins and hangers-on were also there, downing champagne and celebrating our shared success. A mood of togetherness filled the air. Before the egg. As David and I shared memories, my gaze kept flicking over his shoulder, as if I expected to see Dad bounding down the steps toward us. I blinked. Tears throbbed behind my eyelids, and my jaw tightened. Perhaps sensing the direction of my thoughts, David's voice pulled me back to the present. Did I want to try on some jewelry? he asked, with a mischievous grin. Before I could answer, a diamond necklace was shimmering on a velvet tray in front of me. I gasped--shaped like a string of icicles held together by swirling snowflakes, it was wildly extravagant. Twisting my hair up, I let David clasp it around my neck. My heart thudded in my chest. Its beauty was undeniable but, priced at £90,000, it cost more than twice my annual salary. I could imagine it gracing the neck of a leading actor on Oscar night, but I was a thirty-three-year-old journalist who was more comfortable in a gold chain and hoops. I stared in the mirror, the weight of it constricting my throat, and ran my fingers over the platinum claws constraining the gems. Maybe in another life. Then it was gone. Sphinxlike, David had slunk up behind me and whisked it away. "Didn't want you to run off with it, darling," he tittered. The clasp had left a small imprint. I rubbed my neck, fleetingly sad to lose this glittering link to my past. After riffling through old House of Kutchinsky catalogs, scrapbooks of glossy magazine adverts and dog-eared press cuttings, some pertaining to the egg, David announced that it was time for lunch. But there was still one place left to look for clues--Dad's old office. It, too, was eerily familiar, with its teetering stacks of papers. Framed photos of nineties celebrities in Kutchinsky jewels lined the walls. There was Prince Charles with our polo team, Mum at a charity ball attended by Princess Diana. But there was no trace of the egg. In fact, nowhere in the shop was there any mention of the House of Kutchinsky's greatest and most catastrophic creation. "Why?" I asked David as he guided me to a nearby Italian café, where he seemed to know everyone. He shrugged and avoided the question, bantering with the waiters to get us a good table. Over a bottle of wine, he reminisced about the adventures he had shared with Dad, traveling the world selling jewels and extravagant objets d'art for hundreds of thousands of pounds to the superrich. "It was a time of unbelievable excess," he said sentimentally. "We were all young. We partied. We had fun. We were naughty, darling," he said, winking. "The eighties were amazing, everyone was making money." The waiter briefly interrupted us, setting down our plates. Then David went on spinning tales of exotic adventures in far-flung places like Dubai and Brunei, where he'd once found himself perched on the end of a Middle Eastern queen's bed, trying to persuade her to buy his jeweled wares. "That was unheard of back then," he exclaimed, flapping his arms for emphasis. "For Western gentlemen to enter a queen's bedroom. Outrageous!" Between mouthfuls of club sandwich, he spoke warmly of my dad, framing the egg as the pinnacle of the jewelry firm's success. "Your dad was a bit crazy, but he had great creative flair. He didn't give a fuck what people thought of him," David exclaimed as mayonnaise seeped out the side of thin white bread and plopped onto the tablecloth. "He took risks. Your grandfather just let him get on with it, especially after the first few big sales." I listened, entranced, as David explained that Kutchinsky's egg wasn't made in isolation. In the late eighties, Dad successfully made and sold a string of jeweled objects to private clients for hundreds of thousands of pounds apiece. These buyers were often sultans and sheikhs in search of ostentatious ornaments to decorate their palaces and private jets. Huge sums were lavished on everything from emerald-encrusted golden pistols (which the House of Kutchinsky wasn't initially licensed to sell) to toy drums made from mother-of-pearl, hand-carved jade desk sets, and even a pair of gold-and-ruby handcuffs for one of the firm's kinkier clients. David roared with laughter at that particular anecdote, transported back to a more carefree time. I must have flinched slightly, which he mistook for upset. He reached over and patted my arm. "Your dad dreamt of making his family name world-famous. The egg would have been a huge success if the timing hadn't been so terrible." It was nice to think it was the mercurialness of fate that had brought down Dad, and turned his family against my mum and, by extension, my sisters and me. But I sensed there was something more sinister at play. An image of my Glastonbury liaison, Maverick, in his neon sunglasses popped into my head. Emboldened by the wine, I asked the same question he had at the Stone Circle. "What happened to it? Surely, it's hard to lose a multimillion-pound egg?" David swirled the wine slowly around his glass. "The thing is, darling, discretion is everything in our business." Trying to find it would be like searching for a giant golden needle in a haystack, he warned. After the family business was so dramatically sold, Dad's Australian business partners assumed ownership of the egg. Then the trail went cold. Amid the emotional and financial upheaval, Kutchinsky's egg had simply vanished. But I wasn't giving up. "I bet you I can find it," I mused, twirling my hair around my fingers. "How much?" David asked, playing along. "Seven million quid?" I laughed, echoing the egg's original price tag. "Call it one hundred and you've got yourself a deal." Suddenly serious, David extended an arm across the table, his hand wriggling out of the sleeve of his starched white shirt. Heavy gold cuff links--Kutchinsky, of course--protruded from the cuffs. I grasped his thin fingers. We shook. The hunt was on. That was ten years ago. Since then, my egg hunt has led me across continents and time zones and into a web of conflicting rumors. Did it fall into the hands of organized crime? Did a greedy owner prize out the precious stones, then melt the egg's golden shell for cash? Or was it still intact, locked away in a safe on the other side of the world? In the hunt for the egg, I would spend money I didn't have on private detectives, consult countless experts, and fire off emotional emails to jewelers and diamond firms around the world. I would go through periods of presuming it lost forever and grieving that my dad's story would never be told. But despite repeated dead ends and Mum's initial opposition, something inside me wouldn't give up. "It's my life, not yours," Mum would say as I picked at emotional sores. That was true, of course, but this isn't just her story. Neither is it just Paul Kutchinsky's story, although his life is woven throughout the egg's rich tapestry. It is the story of my quest to find this mysterious, destructive object, one of the most valuable artworks made in the British Isles in the twentieth century, and to understand what it was that drove my father to risk everything--his livelihood, his marriage, and his family--to make it. It is a story of our family: of love, betrayal, and obsession. Unable to find answers in the present, I traveled back in time. The seed that eventually led to my father's golden egg was sown over a century ago, by those who laid the foundation for the rise of the House of Kutchinsky. Excerpted from Kutchinsky's Egg: A Family's Story of Obsession, Love, and Loss by Serena Kutchinsky All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
