by Matthew Hart
“No.”
“It’s the responsibility of every human being on this planet!”
“Yes.”
We came down the length of Long Island with Annie sketching out a life designing clothes that helped to heal a sickened planet, and me trying to find a way to fit Lily and Mei into the jigsaw puzzle of events. We were passing LaGuardia Airport by the time I got it. It had been clear since their meeting in the courthouse that Lily was Mei’s essential partner. I should have drawn that connecting line back to the beginning.
If Tabitha had pitched Mei on a plan to take out Fan, Mei would have needed assurances that Tabitha couldn’t give. The main assurance was that a viable diamond target existed. China Hard Asset would not have agreed without it. They wanted Fan erased, but not their foothold in the Arctic. How could Mei find out for sure what Jimmy had? Do a deal with the daughter.
The only problem was—Mitzi might try to deceive her too. Mei needed someone who knew the diamond business. She already knew that person. She and Lily had met before. The fact that Lily had a criminal past, and that Mei had been among her victims, wouldn’t have bothered Mei. Lily’s crooked past, as much as her access to cash, made her the ideal partner for Mei. Moreover, this time it wasn’t Lily who would control the asset. It was Mei. Lily’s job was to make sure that the asset was there. That was why she had shown up with Mitzi and the garnets, to hear what the world’s foremost expert had to say about them.
A plane took off over Long Island Sound, its lights winking into the gathering night. We crossed the Triborough Bridge and got onto the FDR. The reflected lights of the city blazed on the East River. The traffic was slow, so Annie got off at 116th Street and treated me to a bravura demo of how adroitly she could thread the Harlem traffic. It didn’t even interrupt her scathing account of the fashion business.
“You are so evasive, Dad,” she said later, turning onto Central Park West. “You just let me talk and talk. It’s like your secret tradecraft, where you get the other person to talk so you don’t have to say anything.” When I didn’t respond immediately, she said, “See?”
She parked in front of Lily’s building. The doorman started out, but I waved him away.
“I mean, what about Lily, Dad? At first she’s living in Montreal, and now, suddenly, she’s living here.” She snapped her fingers to indicate the speed with which Lily had teleported herself from Montreal to New York. “I mean, if this is a thing now, and Lily is going to be my stepmom, I think I should know.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes what? Yes, Lily is going to be my stepmom?”
“Can you have a stepmom when you still have an actual mom?”
“Dad! Of course you can! Are you trying to duck the question?”
“Yes,” I said. But we didn’t say goodbye until I’d agreed that the three of us would sit down to what Annie called a “family dinner.”
“I’ll email you some dates,” she said when I got out. Then she popped the clutch and shot away.
52
What does she like to eat?” Lily said, padding around the terrace in bare feet, a gardening apron pulled on over shorts and a T-shirt.
Antique carriage lanterns cast an eerie, orange light. The black nighttime sea of Central Park stretched out below, its winding paths picked out by lights that glimmered in the trees. The lake shone like a mirror.
“Barbecue!” Lily said, waving her secateurs. “All Americans love barbecue.”
The apron had special pockets for knives and tiny saws and a pronged, swallowtail instrument for digging weeds. Lily was proud of these tools and used them indiscriminately, seizing one and flailing at the soil, jamming it back into the apron and snatching another. Lumps of dirt lay scattered on the tiles. The secateurs flashed again in the lamplight as she made her way along a row of flower boxes, deadheading the chrysanthemums. She gazed at the flowers with a murderous look, pausing to fish a glass of frothing liquid from where she’d parked it among the blossoms. She took a loud slurp. A pitcher of the tawny mixture stood on a table. I could smell the vodka blended with the coffee. Lily called it café à la Russe.
“Pour yourself one,” she said in her raspy voice as she dug back in with the shears. “Barbecue—that’s the answer!”
I gulped one down and poured another and finished that one too. It didn’t make me feel any better. I put the new list up inside my head:
Tabitha flies to Montreal to meet Mei.
Mei meets Lily.
Then Lily goes to New York to meet Mitzi.
Mitzi and Lily visit Dad with garnets.
From there it all made sense. Everybody was lined up for a payoff. Only one key thing they had to do. Get rid of Jimmy. Fan would take care of that. All he had to do was find him. That’s where the bad feeling inside me was coming from. And maybe I should have let it go. I didn’t.
“Have you ever wondered how Fan’s hit men found Jimmy Angel?” I said.
Lily stopped what she was doing. She stared at the carnage of decapitated blooms. Petals clung to her hair, and a sprig of leaves perched on her shoulder. Her hair shivered in the warm breeze. Her eyes darted quick glances at me. In the orange light she looked like a forest sprite. Her lips tightened, and she squinted as if in pain.
“Why, Alex?” she said, jabbing her secateurs into the dirt. “Why are you doing this? Can you never let go? It’s all over. Haven’t we been through enough?” She gave me a pleading look. “Can’t you just love me? Must everything be an interrogation?”
She picked up her glass, like someone grasping for relief. The liquid slopped on her hand, and the slippery glass fell from her fingers, smashing on the tiles. With a sob she yanked the swallowtail weeder from the apron and brandished it in the lurid light.
“Why don’t you just stab me in the heart,” she shouted, beating her chest with the fist that clenched the weeder. Her eyes filled with tears. “I give you my passionate love, and this is how you respond! The very second you are in the door,” she cried, as if that were the really bad part of my behavior and not my question about Jimmy Angel, “the very instant you appear, the suspicions, the probing—it all begins again!”
She plunged the blade into the earth and, with a surprisingly graceful golf-stroke kind of swipe, scooped a chrysanthemum from the flowerbox and sent it flying against the penthouse wall. The clod of earth still caught in the roots exploded on impact, and the heady aroma of rich soil and café à la Russe filled the warm night air.
She seemed to feel better after that. We leaned on the smooth stone that formed the top of the parapet and stared out at the dark gulf of Central Park. Half a mile away, on the other side of the park, the facades of the apartment buildings on Fifth Avenue rose from the trees. The breeze picked at Lily’s hair, and the pointy tips of her ears poked through. An ugly scrawl of red scar marked her cheek, and the tiny nicks from spraying Plexi hadn’t completely healed. But I reminded myself that this was Lily. She had come out of everything that happened with a $100 million triplex on the Gold Coast, as this part of Central Park West was known. She had come out of everything that happened with an exclusive sales deal for the production of a fabulously rich diamond mine. And part of everything that happened was the murder of Jimmy Angel, who was guilty of crimes himself, for sure, but none for which the penalty was death.
She leaned against me, and we stood there for a while. The spectacle of New York City washed over us—the scent of trees from the park, the sounds that clamored through the streets in a kind of wind. The heartlessness. Just beyond the bottom of the park a phalanx of new, super-slim towers, like the sabers of a charging cavalry, stabbed the sky above Manhattan until only a handful of stars were left alive, bleeding their feeble light into the viscous luminescence of the city.
“You spoke to your father,” she said.
“I knew you were involved with Mitzi. All that interest in garnets. What I didn’t know was how far back it went.”
Lily leaned on her elbows and laced her fingers
together. Her skin had an ashy pallor. The weeder-brandishing and the chest-smiting—I put that down to the café à la Russe. She was running on the fumes. The physical injuries, the hypothermia, her mutilation at the hands of Fan. It had drained her dry.
“Fan had Jimmy followed with that special radar in that black plane,” she said.
“Oh, stop it, Lily. The Caravan hadn’t even got to Yellowknife when Jimmy flew out to Clip Bay. Mei knew that Fan had to find something important to make him want to move fast. That’s what would expose him. Mitzi tipped them about Clip Bay. The problem was, Jimmy was still there.”
It wasn’t a carefully executed operation. It was an operation that was off the rails from the start. Even Mei had underestimated how quickly Fan would act.
“I don’t know why the Chinese didn’t just kill him,” Lily said. “That’s what Russians would have done.”
“He was too famous. The hip new face of China. They don’t get a lot of good press. So the magic twins on the front page with the world’s golden people—that part they liked. But Fan just got too unpredictable. They wanted him gone.”
Solution: tee him up for the Americans. The only real bad break they caught was that Fan survived. At Lewis-McChord we tapped him like a sugar maple.
Before Fan got on the down elevator with the waif, he’d been a real player. Mei ran the money, but Fan had the mugger’s instinct that makes a great entrepreneur. He picked a target, Mei scoped the finances, the generals wrote the check. At Lewis-McChord, Carstairs built up a good picture of how the twins invested their way into strategic businesses in the West, with Beijing on board all the way. He wouldn’t let me talk to Fan myself, but he put a few questions for me. That’s how I knew how they’d found Jimmy.
Diamonds are supposed to stand for the permanence of human love. The forever stone. But love can wear away. A diamond doesn’t. If a diamond represents any human quality, that quality is solitariness. The quality of being alone, as every person is.
A diamond is a xenocryst—literally, a stranger crystal. Formed in a violent sea, captured from the molten depths by a volcano and brought to the surface.
Not every diamond survives that journey. Most are changed back into graphite from the turbulence of the ascent. But some of them make it all the way—stranger crystals, not formed the way the rocks around them were. Eternally apart from the world. And that was Lily.
“I feel closer to you now,” she murmured as we watched the city murdering the night. “I feel as if we are returning to the love we had.”
But we were not returning to the love we had. We’d never left it. It was the love we’d always had. The love that everybody gets. The love of a stranger.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The translation of Li Po’s “The Long War” appeared in the August 1926 edition of Poetry magazine, and I am grateful to the translator, Cheng Yu San.
Thanks to Kathy and John Cormack for a close reading of the plane-chase scenes. John was a bush pilot who flew Twin Otters in the Arctic before becoming a long-haul captain for Air Canada; and Kathy, my niece, grew up in Yellowknife, and was no stranger to flying in the Barrens. The gas-contamination twist came from Stephanie Wright, who flies everything from 727s to helicopters, and her father, Greg McDougall, a former bush pilot in the north, who went on to found Harbour Air Seaplanes in Vancouver, BC, and later (still not satisfied!) invented an all-electric version of the iconic Beaver bush plane.
For the account of G10 garnets and the nature of the Arctic diamond pipes, I relied on the many friends I made reporting on the original diamond rush, in particular Eira Thomas, who was twenty-five when she drilled through dangerous, melting, Spring ice on Lac de Gras and made the discovery that became the Diavik mine.
For advice on indicator minerals, claim-staking, and the change to the GPS navigating system—many thanks to my friend the great diamond explorer Chris Jennings, and to geologist Ken Armstrong, CEO of North Arrow Minerals, whose targets include a cluster of pipes on Hudson Bay (where exploration drilling has produced tantalizing orange microdiamonds!)
Thanks to my nephew Peter Reardon, an ICU physician, and his wife, Aisling Fitzpatrick, a plastic surgeon, for how to repair a fractured zygomatic arch, and with other medical mayhem.
My dear friend Mary Lou Finlay read the galley and offered valuable feedback. To my implacable editor Leslie Wells, to Jessica Case at Pegasus, and to my agent Michael Carlisle—my enduring gratitude.
As always, I owe most to my wife, Heather Abbott, who has mastered of the art of making reassuring noises while never losing her place in the Times.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MATTHEW HART is the award-winning author of the nonfiction book Diamond: The History of a Cold-Blooded Love Affair, translated into six languages and adapted into a dramatic miniseries for ABC starring Sir Derek Jacobi and Judy Davis. He has written about diamonds for Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, Air Mail, the London Times, and many other newspapers and magazines. He was a contributing editor of the New York trade journal Rapaport Diamond Report, and his expertise has been showcased on 60 Minutes and CNN. A trip into the heart of Angola’s wartorn diamond rivers inspired his first thriller, The Russian Pink, also available from Pegasus Crime. He lives in New York City.
ALSO BY MATTHEW HART
Diamond: The History of a Cold-Blooded Love Affair
The Irish Game: A True Story of Crime and Art
Gold: The Race for the World’s Most Seductive Metal
The Russian Pink
ICE ANGEL
Pegasus Crime is an imprint of
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Copyright © 2021 by Matthew Hart
First Pegasus Books cloth edition September 2021
Interior design by Maria Fernandez
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ISBN: 978-1-64313-811-4
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-64313-812-1
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