by Ted Thackrey
But the first glimpse of Suleiman told me I was wrong.
All living things, animal and vegetable, have an identifiable aura—the wa—that is at once their signature and emotional barometer. Sensitivity to this aura can be learned and developed by those who will open their minds to it. But no advantage is without risk, and my own teacher, Yoichi Masuda, had warned repeatedly of the dangers of overload.
“Extreme power, suddenly encountered,” he said, “can be brother to the electric surge that explodes the transformer.”
I believed him—Master Masuda does not speak idly—but I had never personally experienced such a shock.
Until now.
The wa that was Suleiman’s true self filled his office, and it was the overflow of boundless psychic energy and potential that I had felt in the anteroom. This one had power. True mana. And the ease of an ego accustomed to its exercise.
We stood for a moment like adolescent rivals who had just been introduced, testing grips to see who could make the other wince, essences locked in the effort to examine without being examined—to penetrate and perceive without allowing counter-scrutiny. Utter nonsense, unworthy of grown men. But quite sincere.
We did not touch.
Or need to.
And in the end, it was a push. A standoff that left neither dominant. But it had been that by only the very narrowest of margins, and I found myself no little relieved to see that the effort had exacted as high a price from Suleiman as it had from me. The shaven scalp that had presented a kind of matte effect a moment earlier shone now as though oiled.
And then he laughed.
“Beans did not warn me,” he said. “And he did not warn you, either.”
“We both owe him,” I agreed.
“And will repay. When opportunity presents.”
Perdita Soames was standing at the side of the room and she looked at us now with curiosity.
“Something happened just now,” she said, looking back and forth between us, “but I think I missed it. Would one of you care to explain?”
Suleiman’s smile widened. “My sister,” he said with an affectionate nod, “speaks only English and Dutch. A handicap. But she is too decorative to replace—and a certified public accountant besides.”
I don’t think my face framed the question that came immediately to mind. But Suleiman answered it nonetheless with practiced élan.
“Appearances,” he said, “can be deceptive. And so can names. Allow me to reintroduce us both: My sister, Mrs. Perdita Soames, vice president of the firm and wife of my business partner. And myself, Shlomo Halevy VanDamm, alias Suleiman ben Hassan.
“Now—how can we be of service?”
Perdita Soames brought my coffee from the anteroom, handed a similar cup to the man who said he was her brother, and disappeared in silence as we moved to the conversational arrangement of low furniture that occupied the corner of the room.
His manner was easy and confiding.
I wondered if such candor was customary—and reminded myself of Beans’s reservations. But the answer came recommended by impeccable logic.
“Beans Benedict,” Suleiman/Shlomo said, explaining before I had time to frame the question, “is something more than a client. I have sold to him in his times of prosperity—and repurchased when fortune waned—ever since his first year in Las Vegas. An advantage, he tells me, to be able to conduct such transactions out of town . . . ”
I thought about it for a moment and realized that it was so. Any gambler will need stake money from time to time. Most professionals handle it by backing each other, when necessary, against a percentage of the profits. A practical arrangement. But not without drawbacks; any run of bad luck is advertised. No help in the next game.
Beans’s understanding with Suleiman would allow him to keep more secrets than most. I offered him a mental tip of the hat.
“In describing you,” Suleiman went on, “Beans mentioned that you had only one eye, and surely you would never have gotten past ’Dita wearing two. That prosthesis, by the by, is excellent. Lend you a bit on it anytime you feel the need . . . ”
My turn to smile.
“Your sister,” I said, “is a person of exceptional eyesight. And perception.”
He nodded. Emphatically.
“That she is, to be sure. In point of fact, though my own education as a gemologist is excellent—five years in the back rooms of Amsterdam and a like period as buyer for a rather exacting principal in New York’s diamond mart—it is her evaluation I rely upon in most instances. She vouched for Beans’s description of you, and that was enough for me. But she did not prepare me, or you, for the moment when you entered the room.”
No.
And suddenly the wa that had blocked my effort at exploration was open, large and filled with warmth and laughter. And curiosity. His expression did not change, but I knew a real decision had been made.
I did my best to match it.
True contact was followed by final relaxation.
“In answer to the second question that will have come to mind,” Suleiman said, continuing our conversation on an audible level. “No. ’Dita and I are full siblings and not adoptive. Did you ever read a book called Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin?”
I had. In college; required reading for a course in contemporary affairs. But a lot of years had passed.
“The author,” Suleiman said, “was a Caucasian who employed chemicals—a preparation normally used to treat the disease vitiligo—plus ultraviolet to darken the tone of his skin, in order to appreciate the life experiences of black men in America.”
I looked at Suleiman and saw what I had seen in the beginning. This time in different perspective, but still without full understanding.
“When I determined to open my own establishment,” he continued, “I selected San Francisco as offering the greatest opportunity for a man with a sense of showmanship and less than total honesty.
“It was a good choice, but to impress such an environment one required something more than the ordinary business persona. I considered affecting homosexuality . . . ”
The mental picture made me smile again. I couldn’t help it. And I caught a resonating flicker of amusement in Suleiman’s own wa.
“ . . . but decided the pose might be more than I could sustain. And so I determined to become Suleiman—and to spread the rumor that I was the renegade son of an African chieftain.”
Suleiman laughed and sipped his coffee.
“No one,” he said, “was more astounded than I when the tale was accepted at face value. But San Francisco has always been a city of wonders.”
Hell of a story. Whether it was true or not.
“But you’ve come to buy, not to sell,” Suleiman said, shifting gears so easily that I hardly felt the bump. “Beans said you had some questions. I don’t promise to answer them—and I don’t guarantee veracity if I do. But feel free to ask.”
Fair enough.
“For openers,” I said, “are you still in the business of buying stolen property?”
If I’d been looking for a shock reaction—or even indignation—I’d have been disappointed.
Suleiman laughed. And shook his head in mock astonishment.
“Good God Almighty, man,” he said, “of course I am . . . and so is every other jeweler on the face of the earth. No exceptions! Heart and soul of the trade, sir. Couldn’t possibly survive without it. Show me an honest jeweler and I’ll show you a man who fixes watches for a living.”
He looked at me narrowly and sighed.
“No,” he said when I was about to protest. “No—please! That was discourteous of me. I see that you are truly surprised and I beg you to accept my apologies. But . . . ”
I felt a sudden renewed probing of the psyche. Friendly. But intensely curious. His privilege, I suppose; sometimes I’m a real rube.
“ . . . this would appear to be one of my less perceptive days. One tends to group individuals by profession or associati
on. Idiotic, of course. Beans did warn me to expect something quite unusual.”
Which got a laugh from me.
And demanded an explanation that seemed to delight the pseudo-African.
“Marvelous!” he declared. “Perfect! No wonder Beans does well at the profession of poker. But he should have taken up chess; here is the classic two-moves-ahead kind of mind at work. He gives you an assessment of me that I will recognize—and makes it axiomatic that I accept his evaluation of you.
“Mutual acceptance! And confidence—the optimum basis for exchange. Which is, I think, sufficient self-congratulation for us both. Very well. To your first question, then, a resounding affirmative. And to the second, another yes. I do, indeed, buy diamonds that have no history. What specifics did you wish to know?”
Helpful friends are beyond price, especially when they are also intelligent. Beans’s clear-headed arrangements for the meeting with Suleiman had eliminated hours, perhaps days, of sparring and strategic maneuvering. Just describing Gideon Goode and the kind of merchandise I thought he might have wanted to sell could have presented considerable difficulty. But Suleiman’s wa was open and his head nodding before I had time to finish my second sentence.
“Uncut stones,” he said. “Seven items, offered one at a time by a tall man with the eyes of a cobra.”
“I’ve never met him.”
“Avoid the experience if you can. I made the capital error of allowing myself to look beyond the eyes, into the man himself. It was only a moment. But it renewed my belief in God. There must be one . . . else how can one explain the existence of hell?”
I wanted to explore that, perhaps nail down my own as yet unfocused suspicions concerning the sometime child evangelist who had battened upon the Palermo family. But one subject at a time.
“The stones . . . ” I said.
“ . . . were a surprise. Not merely because of their value—though that was considerable—but because you don’t see such things as often nowadays as you did in the early seventies.” Suleiman’s eyes brightened and his wa warmed to the subject. “So much malfeasance in that war. Particularly toward the end. Never mind the official lawlessness—manufacturing incidents such at the Tonkin Gulf attack, a whole invasion launched in secrecy, or even the mindless grotesquerie of falsified body counts. That, it would seem, is par for the course in modern war.
“Boys will be boys. Right?
“But when an agency of the government actually goes so far as to finance itself by dealing in illicit narcotics—and I see that my allusion needs no clarifying—who can blame those further removed from the seats of power if they engage in a little private-enterprise thievery of their own? Certainly not Suleiman. And not Shlomo VanDamm, either. Indeed, if I had some criticism to make, it would be of those minions of government who tried to interfere. Surely the workman is worthy of his keep.”
“Of his meat.”
“According to the King James text, yes. Or his food, if you prefer the Revised Standard. Matthew, ten, ten. I happen to like the New International. But who reads the Bible nowadays?”
“Especially the New Testament.”
“Especially if his mother’s name was Halevy.”
“Especially then . . . ”
Suleiman’s wry smile faded and I felt the cooling of his wa.
“Most of the uncut stones we saw in those long-gone days,” he said, “were from Hong Kong. Only a few from Singapore.”
“You could tell the difference?”
“Oh, assuredly. The Hong Kong variety were largely South African; big market there for the Kimberly mines. Not many from China, though contrary to popular legend, that nation does in fact possess some deposits of the peculiar blue mud that seems always to accompany major diamond strikes.”
“And the ones from Singapore?”
Suleiman’s smile returned. Momentarily.
“I thought you might be more interested in those,” he said. “The Singapore stones—the uncut ones used for transport of illicit funds—were almost exclusively Russian in origin.”
I nodded. “Russian traders would have been kept out of Hong Kong by the Chinese,” I said.
“And the USSR had its own war to finance, or at any rate its own belligerent client—North Vietnam. Oh, yes. It made sense for them to engage in that trade. A clandestine traffic that would not become general knowledge or even gossip except in rather proscribed circles. Such as my own.”
“And there would be a kind of poetic balance about getting the money through the criminal society of a major world competitor.”
“Just so.”
I thought about it for a moment.
“You were in business—here—at the time?”
“Indeed, yes. And bought a great many such stones. Enough to be able to recognize variety and source almost on sight, though of course I would want an appraisal by my sister before making any firm offer.
“Mrs. Soames also met Gideon, then, when he came to sell?”
A hesitation.
“She did.”
The coldness of the phrase and the lack of further comment were a full-stop warning. I braked and changed course without delay.
“One might suppose,” I said, “that such an influx of uncut diamonds would have a depressing effect on the market price.”
Suleiman nodded slowly.
“For a brief time, yes,” he said. “And I won’t deny that I took full advantage of the fact. As I did of the equivocal position of the sellers. All part of the game, you know. But the effect was by no means lasting. The world price of all gems is on the rise, a direct result of increased apparent affluence in both the East and West.”
“Inflation?”
“Had its own effect, to be sure. But this was, again, to my personal advantage, since I had held some of the better stones instead of shipping them to Amsterdam with the rest.”
Well, anyway, I understood that much. Holland has had a virtual monopoly on the diamond-cutting trade for centuries. Smaller, lower-quality gems might be shaped and faceted in the United States, but high-grade stones from whatever source would have to make the excursion to Europe.
There was another question I wanted to ask, and the phrasing had to be just right in order to avoid a loaded answer. But Suleiman solved the problem with an urbane smoothness that rattled my bones.
“Why,” he said, “don’t we talk, now, about the late Peter Palermo?”
I blinked. And he smiled again but did not laugh.
“No mind reading, I assure you,” he said. “And no magic, either—unless you count the little carnival cold-reading trick. For which perhaps I ought to apologize.”
“Not at all. You do it well.”
“Thank you. But as in so many things, the finesse is more apparent than real. The name is naturally grouped in my mind with that of the Reverend Mr. Gideon Goode.”
I shook my head, still in the dark.
“Because of the stones?”
“In a sense, yes. But not merely because of their probable similarity of source and history. As you might imagine, far too many uncut Russian stones pass through Singapore to offer any firm connection between one customer and another. No. It was the dirt.”
“Dirt?”
“Well—dust, traces of a fine gray powder imbedded in the stones offered by Goode. I noticed it myself, and ’Dita identified the substance as limestone.”
“But surely, uncut stones . . . ”
Suleiman smiled. “Uncut,” he said, “does not mean uncleaned. The limestone powder was easy to remove; water washing will do it or there are a number of effective commercial solvents that will serve. No mine on earth would offer stones for sale in such condition—and no dealer, licit or otherwise, would permit them out of his hands with even a trace of it. And besides . . . diamonds do not occur in limestone soils.”
“Then the powder—”
“ . . . must have been picked up somewhere between Singapore and San Francisco. Yes. ’Dita and I could not help wo
ndering where. And how.”
“But of course, you couldn’t ask.”
“Not if we wanted to stay in business. No. We could, however, file the information under Interesting Phenomena. Right next to the only other such instance either of us had ever encountered at the time.”
Oh.
“Pete Palermo’s stones,” I said.
“Just so. They, too, bore traces of limestone dust—which made the connection obvious.”
I thought it over and wondered how much cross-checking the diamond dealer and his sister had done on me after Beans’s call. And on Angela Palermo, too. Not that it mattered.
“Palermo sold all his stones to you?”
Suleiman hesitated for a moment, and then shook his head.
“The answer to that,” he said, “would have to be a double no—but equivocal, for all that. No, I don’t think I was the only one he approached when he returned from the war. He was not a fool and he would not have confined himself to a single buyer. And no again, I do not think he sold all the stones that he had.”
“Why not?”
“Because the stones were of very high quality. Someone—a person in the business, I should think—had steered him to a reasonably reliable dealer in Singapore, and that would seem to argue against the proposition that he was some poor little pusher trying to fence the proceeds of a small-time operation. The stones he offered were the kind reserved for big-money buyers. And besides . . . ”
Suleiman’s words stopped momentarily and I felt a new flickering of the wa; something was bothering him.
“And besides, his manner was simply not that of a man offering items from a sharply limited stock.”
I decided to play a little mind-reading game of my own.
“All the same,” I said, “it must have been something of a surprise when Goode walked in with stones that had the same kind of dust on them.”
Suleiman nodded.
“Passage of time,” he said. “I had assumed that the remainder of the Palermo shipment must have been sold elsewhere. A pity, but hardly a major setback. To discover that the man had died in prison, apparently without having had the opportunity to market the remainder, might be gratifying in the sense that I need not reproach myself for having missed a good bit of business. But hardly cause for celebration. I did not like the man who had come into possession of them.”