About Face by Adam Gittlin

Author:Adam Gittlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oceanview Publishing
Published: 2014-09-25T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 22

AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS

2010

After five years in Amsterdam, my research regarding the eggs had intensified, leading me to unbelievable results. First, let me refresh your memory:

There were fifty Fabergé Imperial Easter Eggs made between 1885 and 1916. Only forty-two of them were believed to have survived the Russian Revolution in 1917. At the House of Fabergé, two men oversaw the creation of these eggs—Mikhail Perkhin and Henrik Wigstrom. Whichever of the two oversaw a particular egg, their initials were on the egg along with assay marks relating to the karats and gold and either crossed anchors for the shop in St. Petersburg or St. George and the Dragon for the shop in Moscow. Not so for the one planted on me in New York City six years earlier or, as I would soon learn, any of the eight that went missing in the Russian Revolution. These had the assay marks as well as the mark denoting the house of origin. But they were all without initials. And all eight were made by a man named Piotr Derbyshev, an expert stone carver at the House of Fabergé.

Piotr Derbyshev was the grandfather of Pavel Derbyshev, the man in Baltimore, Maryland, in possession of the missing Imperial Easter Eggs. He—Piotr—was requested to oversee the creation of these eight eggs in particular by the Empress Maria Feodorovna herself. The woman for whom they were made.

Galina Zhamovsky—or the artist known as Ia—secretly communicated with my father through her artwork. And she wanted these eggs so badly she was willing to sacrifice even her own son, Andreu Zhamovsky, to get them. The reason I could never let any of this go—why I remained obsessed with figuring out the true story behind the missing Fabergé Imperial Easter Eggs—was not simply because they were the undoing of my life and the reason my father was dead. It was because of the message in the last piece she sent Pop.

“I must stay true to my own. Cement my legacy. At all costs.”

This much I knew.

Now, here’s what I have learned.

I scoured every available piece of material on the planet about the eggs. While I didn’t learn anything from this in terms of what Galina could be looking for, I did learn every available detail about the missing eggs. Most notably the materials used in each. We’ll get to this later.

I ultimately decided to learn as much as humanly possible about all the players connected to the story, if you will. I started with Piotr Derbyshev. He was a master stone carver at the House of Fabergé. He studied at the Ekaterinburg School of Art and Industry in Ekaterinburg, Russia. Apparently, the school no longer exists. I’d reached out to the Ekaterinburg City Hall online in search of something, anything, and managed to befriend a clerk. She was a seemingly lonely type looking for a pen pal, and it turned out she liked the challenge of corresponding in the English she’d been studying. She sent me everything she had on record about the school, the bulk consisting of group photos of each graduating class.

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