“An expert says it almost certainly is,” Stone said. “What’s more, her fingerprints were on the note.”

Barker forgot about his food. “Her fingerprints?”

“I kid you not.”

“Well, if Sasha is alive, and if you are having dinner with her on Saturday night, then you’ll soon have her testimony about Harkness.”

“If she’s alive, and if the dinner isn’t some sort of elaborate hoax perpetrated by some demented Sasha fan. I can’t depend on that to nail Harkness. I need your help.”

“I would be absolutely delighted,” Barker said, grinning. “Barron has never been one of my favorite people. What is it you want me to do?”

“I want you to invite him to be your first guest on your new television show.”

“And?”

Stone told him.

Barker chuckled as he listened. “I love it,” he said.

“That’s even better than writing about it in Vanity Fair, isn’t it?” Stone asked.

“Oh, I could do that, too,” Barker said, laughing. “Print all the details.” He laughed again. “You know, I’m going to see Barron this afternoon at a social event. I’ll corner him there and get him to agree to do the show. He’s never given personal interviews, you know.”

“I’d heard that. Now, Hi, it’s your turn. I want to know what you didn’t tell me about Sasha.”

Barker looked at Stone appraisingly. “I’ve underestimated you,” he said. “I wouldn’t have told anybody in a million years, but now you’ve trapped me.”

Stone sat back and waited.

“There is one promise I must extract from you,” Barker said.

“What’s that?”

“If Sasha is alive, you will never tell a living soul what I am about to tell you. If you find out she’s dead, then I’ll tell the world.”

“All right, I agree.” Suddenly, Stone knew what he was about to hear.

“This really has no relevance to your investigation, at least I can’t imagine how it could be relevant, but who knows?”

“Come on, Hi, tell me.”

“It came out in my research. I do a great deal more research for my profiles than anybody imagines. I use only a fraction of what I learn, but I learn everything.” Barker leaned forward and wagged a finger. “You must never let me do a profile of you, if you have anything to hide.”

Stone sat back and relaxed. Barker was going to stretch it out.

“At the time I was researching the Sasha piece, I knew a fellow in the American embassy in Moscow. I asked him to get me a copy of Sasha’s birth announcement and fax it to me, along with a translation. Her father was a member of the academy and a very famous writer in the USSR, so I knew there would be an announcement in Pravda or Izvestia. And there was.” He paused for effect.

“Go on,” Stone said.

“And what do you think the baby was named?”

Stone let Barker have his moment. “I can’t imagine.”

“The baby was named Vladimir Georgivich Nijinsky.” Barker rested his chin on his folded hands, looking pleased with himself.

“A boy’s name? But when her family came to America six years later, all the pictures showed a little girl. What about the passport?”

“They had no passports. They were thrown out of the Soviet Union and given asylum here. They had no records of any kind, not even birth certificates. The Soviets refused to supply them. The State Department, as was usual at the time, issued them documents based on sworn statements from the parents.”

“And Georgi Nijinsky swore that little Vladimir was a girl named Sasha?”

“Precisely. I never got the whole story – God knows, I would never have asked Sasha – but I surmise that, from birth, the little boy exhibited female traits, and the parents accepted that and raised him as a girl. I did find out that they took her to Morocco on a six-week vacation when she was twelve, and I believe she must have had hormone treatments and a sex-change operation at that time. After all, the onset of puberty was at hand, and people would have begun to notice if little Vladimir wasn’t developing breasts, et cetera.” Barker looked at Stone closely. “You don’t seem particularly surprised. I thought I would knock you right out of your chair with this story.”

“I figured it out when you began to tell me, but I had the advantage of an important clue.”

“What was that?”

“The handwriting expert who compared this note to a sample of Sasha’s writing said that both letters were written by a man.”

“Oh, that’s a wonderful touch for my Vanity Fair piece!” Barker crowed. Then he became serious. “But tell me, Stone, what happens if neither of these things works – if Sasha isn’t alive, and if Barron refuses to do my show?”

“Well, I have an ace up my sleeve – my source for the information about the flight and the money. This would be a reluctant witness, but a subpoena can work wonders, especially if the witness may be an accessory to the crime because of withholding information.”

Barker looked down at the table. “Stone, I know you were seeing Cary Hilliard – you brought her to my house, remember? Might Cary be your source?”

Stone played cagey. “Why do you ask?”

“I didn’t want to bring this up; I got the impression at that time that you and Cary were close.”

“You could say that.”

Barker’s voice was sympathetic. “Stone, I have to tell you that Barron Harkness and Cary Hilliard are being married this afternoon, at three. I was invited to the wedding.”

Stone took a quick breath. “I wasn’t,” he said.

“And, Stone, after they’re married, Cary can’t be subpoenaed to testify against her husband, can she?”

“No,” he said.

Chapter 46

The carpet layers took up much of Stone’s time on the afternoon of Cary Hilliard’s wedding, but his mind was not on the work. He walked through the house looking for the thrill that usually came when he thought about its completion, but it did not come.

He mustered his defenses and thrust the thought of Cary into a corner of his mind from which he was determined not to let it escape. Instead, he thought about Barron Harkness, of his every contact with the man, their every conversation, trying to remember something that would help connect him with Sasha’s fall.

He told himself that his desire to nail Harkness had nothing to do with the loss of Cary, but, when he looked at his watch and saw that it was a little after three, he fantasized that he was interrupting the ceremony at the point where the minister asks for reasons why the marriage should not take place. “Reverend,” he would say loudly from the back of the congregation, “I am here to arrest the groom for murder. I should think that sufficient cause for the wedding not to take place.” For some reason, in his fantasy, he spoke these words with an English accent.

He used an old technique for when he was stumped on a case – go back to the beginning and review possible suspects. But in his attempt to incriminate Barron Harkness, he came up dry. There was only one other conceivable suspect, now that Hank Morgan had removed herself from the scene: Herbert Van Fleet. But, in spite of his obsession with Sasha, Van Fleet had come up clean. Dino didn’t think so, he remembered, and Dino’s instincts were often good; but, for that matter, so were his own, and he could not bring himself even to dislike Van Fleet, strange as he was.

Then, he remembered something else odd about Van Fleet, though it did not seem connected to Sasha. Van Fleet had finished medical school but had been rejected during his internship as “unsuited for a medical career.” That was the statement Dino had read to him, something one of the investigative teams had turned up, a statement from somebody at Physicians amp; Surgeons Hospital, where Van Fleet had served his abortive internship.

When the carpet layers had finished, Stone retrieved his badge from a dresser drawer and caught a cab uptown. Dino was still on his honeymoon, he reasoned, and there was nobody he could turn to for the original record of the investigation, so he would have to do this himself. Anyway, it kept his mind off Cary.