Clancy Martin

The truck’s wheels slipped on the hardpack and I went for a tree, missed it, bounced off the snow bank and spun around to settle against the opposite side of the road. I got out to look at the truck and the front left tyre was flat. Because of the road’s camber I couldn’t jack the truck high enough. A passing truck slowed and the driver, leaning out of his steamy window,...

On 1 January this year, at about 11 o’clock in the evening, my wife found me, feet kicking, dangling from an improvised rope – a twisted yellow sheet – about a metre off the ground in our bedroom closet. Our two-year-old daughter was in the bed, sleeping, just a few feet away . . . I was at the end of a binge. I was also at the end of three years of secret drinking, of hiding bottles and sneaking away to bars while my wife thought I was living as I had promised her, as a sober man.

In 1999, while taking a break from my PhD to try to get rich in the fine jewellery business, I nearly became the world’s largest counterfeiter of Fabergé eggs. It all started in Arlington, Texas, where my brothers and I owned several jewellery stores. Boris, an alcoholic Russian ex-pat who’d been with us for years, came into my office one January morning – we’d just had a lousy Christmas season – and told me something he’d been keeping to himself for a while, that in St Petersburg the remnants of what had once been Fabergé were still in business, using the old equipment to make eggs and other enamelled pieces just as good as the ones in museums around the world. The jewellers hadn’t been paid in months; they were keen to find a home and a regular paycheck in America. Boris’s best friend was the shop-manager.