PART 2
NEW YORK
2
Win Liberte, Long Island, 1971
When I was a kid, there was this quirky thing about the JFK assassination. People always knew exactly where they had been when they heard the news that Kennedy was killed. My father told me he was bending over a diamond at his office at West Forty-seventh and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, studying it with a jeweler’s loupe, when one of his associates ran into the room and told him Kennedy had been shot. Uncle Bernie claimed he was on the pot reading good news on the racing page—Last Chance had come in the money in the third at Belmont—when his secretary threw open the door and screamed that the president was dead.
I had the easiest recollection of all. On November 22, 1963, I was in a taxicab on Broadway being born. My mother had taken the cab from the family apartment on the Lower East Side, to tell my father it was time to take her to the hospital. I had bad timing in arriving late, with the meter running, a trait I’d maintained all my life.
The death of Kennedy stuck with me throughout my childhood. It seemed like no other president could live up to him, could instill the confidence that he created in people. I must have heard my father say a hundred times during the Johnson and Nixon administrations, “If Kennedy was alive . . .”
I’ve never had an interest in politics, so I don’t know if Kennedy was a great president or a Great Hope for people. But like people whose dreams of a great America died with him, dreams died hard for me, too.
When I was eight years old my father took me out of the crowded living room—by now we’d moved to Long Island—and into the small office he kept at home. He was a diamantaire. That’s what people in the industry called a diamond dealer, those international close-to-the-chest backroomers, who buy and sell diamonds in the half-dozen great diamond exchanges of the world.
Most of the diamonds my father traded were roughs—uncut stones from the mines with dirt literally still on them. It was a hard business, one of the toughest in the world, a white-knuckle trade in which a bad call on a big stone could put you out on the ledge of your office building, ten stories up, looking down at the street, wondering what it was going to feel like kissing the pavement at a hundred miles an hour.
My father handled the business well, with quiet strength. He wasn’t the type to get excited or angry during negotiations—he was more cerebral than most of the dealers I’ve seen in action. You could almost see the gears moving in his head when he was evaluating a deal. He told me that his father taught him to watch a buyer’s eyes, that when they saw something they really liked, the pupils would get a little bigger. That kind of explains my father, a subtle man who could make a major decision based on an almost infinitesimal change in an eye.
As I followed my father through the living room, the conversations around us were subdued, not the laughter and loud talk you usually got when my parents had people over. My mother was Portuguese, while my father, Victoir, called himself a Gypsy because he was living in America after being born in Warsaw, raised in Marseilles, and married in Lisbon. The name Liberté was one my grandfather adopted in France after leaving the Warsaw ghettos behind, his Jewish-Polish name being a foot long. My own father dropped the accent over the “e” when he came to America. Assimilating, it was called. But he still pronounced the name “Lib-er-tay.”
My mother was beautiful, with soft red hair, warm brown eyes, and pearl skin. I inherited her eyes and a red tint to my own brownish hair. I remember her as quiet and delicate. She never raised her voice but she commanded the household with the velvet iron of her will. My father never disagreed with her, at least never in my presence, and I never heard him raise his voice to her.
Kids don’t really understand the love their parents have for each other. It wasn’t until I grew up and loved a woman myself that I understood how much my mother meant to my father. In those days, I really only understood how much she meant to me.
My father always treated my mother with an old-fashioned gentleness and respect, almost as if she was something more than a wife to him. Maybe he treated her a little different because he was quite a bit older than she. In many ways, he handled her with the gentleness of a fragile flower that blooms for only a short time. They didn’t know she had a heart condition until she became pregnant with me and was told by her doctor never to risk another pregnancy. But she had always been fragile. In his quiet, analytical way, I think he intuitively knew that some day he would lose her.
Inside his home office, my father opened an old safe that had ACME SAFE COMPANY written on the door and removed a cigar box. From the box he took a piece of white paper folded seven times to create a pocket for a gem. He turned on the desk light and had me sit on his knee as he unfolded the paper to reveal a two-carat diamond. It glistened and sparkled, fifty-eight facets turning “white” light into sparkling brilliance. Diamonds had the power to gather, bend, and throw off brilliant colors. A well-cut, clear diamond is so alive with light and color, it appears to be a blaze of glittering fire. I guess that’s why diamonds are called the “flame of love.” And yeah, if you’re the cynical type, maybe they call it that because so many men figure they have something coming in return for dropping a rock on a woman.
“I met your mother in Lisbon in fifty-seven,” my father said. “She was sitting at a sidewalk café on the Rossio, the main square in the heart of the city. I hadn’t been back to the city since the war ended. It had been an exciting place during the war, a time when Portugal was neutral and there were thousands of refugees like me, men and women who had fled the Nazis, jumping off at places like Lisbon, Istanbul, and Tangiers, in the hopes of buying false travel papers that would get them to America.
“Someday I’ll show you an old movie called Casabanca. It’ll give you an idea of what it was like in Lisbon during the war, what a desperate feeling it was to be without money or travel documents in wartime Europe. We expected at any moment that Salazar, the country’s strongman, was going to side with the Nazis and turn us over to Himmler’s gang of goose-steppers.
“I finally managed to get out of the country, getting into England with forged papers and then to the States. After that, I only went back to Lisbon once, to attend the funeral of an old friend, a man who had helped me during the war when I was broke and hungry, a jeweler who gave me stones on credit so I could make my first deals in Lisbon when I was a refugee with holes in my pockets. Pocket peddlers, they called us, gem sellers without an office or store, carrying out merchandise in our pockets, ready to make a deal in a bar, café, or on a street corner.
“After his funeral, I was wandering around the city, visiting old memories, when I saw her.”
He fingered his jeweler’s loupe as he spoke. He always had it with him, no matter where we went. He was like a doctor with his medical bag—he never knew when someone would ask him for an opinion on a gem. Diamantaires made deals at bar mitzvahs, weddings, funerals, and when the ship was sinking.
“Your mother had been to a recital, she was a music student, a violinist, and she had just finished a performance with other students.” He gave me the loupe and a pair of tweezers. “Look at this diamond, tell me what you see.”
I caught the diamond between the claws of the tweezers and used the loupe to examine it against the background of the white paper. I had done it before. Some kids grew up with a baseball mitt, I had a jeweler’s loupe.
“It’s flawless,” I said.
“Yes, it’s flawless, no cracks, blemishes, nothing to diminish its beauty. It’s like looking into a star. That’s what I saw the first time I saw your mother. I was walking on the street when Eléna looked up, smiling at something a friend had said. I looked into her eyes and I saw her heart and knew that she was the woman I would love for the rest of my life.
“Win, we Jews give our wives a flawless diamond when we marry so that the marriage will be perfect. But my marriage was perfect because the woman I married was a gem without equal.” His eyes became watery and he lo
oked down.
I left my father hunched over the table, staring down at the diamond, looking back to that night in Lisbon when he had first seen my mother. I quietly opened the door and went into the living room. I kept along the wall, not wanting to be hugged or pampered by relatives. There was a priest talking to my mother’s Portuguese relatives and a rabbi talking to my father’s friends. I saw two of his business acquaintances in a corner examining a diamond. It wasn’t considered impolite any more than talking about baseball would have been. It was just a business to us, it was a way of life.
I slipped into the drawing room where my mother lay. When she came home from the hospital, my father had her bed put into the room because she liked the view of the street better than the one from their bedroom in the back of the house. She had refused to stay in the hospital when her heart began to fail.
I stood beside the bed.
She was white, paler than I had ever seen her, so white her red hair looked afire. I took her hand and stared at the diamond on her finger, the ring my father gave her when they were married.
I cried when I touched her cold hand.
3
Manhattan, 1974
“What’s your weight, Win?” Uncle Bernie asked me.
Bernie was my father’s second cousin, but because he was so much older than me, I always referred to him as my uncle. He was a good guy, kind of loud, a little bottom heavy—he claimed it was because of gravity from sitting all day, rather than what he ate.
We were in my father’s offices on West Forty-seventh Street, New York’s Diamond District. The House of Liberte and a couple thousand other dealers had their offices on the one block of Forty-seventh Street running from Fifth Avenue to Avenue of the Americas. That’s how the diamond industry worked, everyone clustered together, making deals in the hallway, out on the street, walking to the subway, or gnawing on a sandwich.
There was no business like it in the world—it was based upon absolute trust. A dealer’s stock in trade was his word. Gems worth a small fortune were passed hand to hand by dealers who hardly knew each other—and the only thing the selling dealer got was a marker saying he’d be paid. But there was also a world of caveat emptor—you buy at your own risk whether it was dealer to dealer or retail. You could buy a diamond on West Forty-seventh Street for half the price of the prestigious stores up Fifth Avenue—Tiffany’s, Bvlgari’s, Harry Winston’s, Cartier. Yeah, and you got what you paid for—you had to count your fingers after shaking on a deal in the Diamond District. There were plenty of dealers who “bumped” up the gem’s rating a notch or two or had “gem certifications” with as much credibility as those preacher’s licenses they sold back in the sixties as tax dodges.
It was also the most unpretentious business on the planet. Dealers dressed down, offices were frugal—sometimes I wondered if there wasn’t a contest to see who could look the poorest. Maybe it had something to do with getting robbed and murdered. Men in black suits and fedoras or skullcaps walked from building to building, carrying black briefcases, often empty except for their lunch, but with a million dollars worth of gems in their coat pocket.
The buildings were as unpretentious as the people. My father’s offices weren’t luxurious; to the contrary, their looks were so dull and plain, they might have been the small office suite of an accountant—except that the front door was steel and the safe was six feet tall. Although there was an occasional sell to a heavyweight retail client, most of the business was wholesale, bringing in diamonds from around the world and marketing them to other middlemen who sold them down the chain until they finally reached a woman’s hand in Palm Beach or Palm Springs. The way the world diamond pipeline worked, the rough stones hauled out of the mines in places like Africa and Brazil were sold and cut into gems in Antwerp, Tel Aviv, Bombay, and to a lesser extent in New York. The diamonds often passed through a number of hands before they went across the counter at a retail store and onto the ring finger of a woman.
It was a tough business. Bernie claimed to succeed at it, you needed the ability to talk a dog off a meat wagon.
We’d moved back into the city after my mother died. I came by the office most days after school and often got a lesson from my father or Bernie about the diamond business. My father said he didn’t want me raised in a fishbowl because someday I’d have to swim with sharks, so he made me go to a multiracial, multicultural public school, the kind of place where you didn’t let the other kids know your old man was in the diamond business because they’d figure out a way to shake you down.
“I don’t know, maybe a hundred pounds, maybe a little more.”
“Wrong! You weigh two hundred twenty-five thousand carats. Remember that, my friend, not pounds, but carats.”
“People would think I’m weird if I told them my weight in diamonds.”
“Yada! Yada! Yada! You wouldn’t be the first, you know. There was an Indian prince who got his weight in diamonds each year for his birthday . . . or was it gold?”
I left Bernie pondering the question of gold versus diamonds, wondering if the prince went on an eating binge before being weighed, and went into my father’s office. His hair had turned prematurely gray after my mother died and his face took on a thin, haggard appearance as he threw off weight, making him look older than his fifty-four years. He’d been in his late thirties when he married my mother. He claimed he had waited so long to marry because he was looking for a perfect gem. He had found it and lost it. Now he seemed to be withering into an old man.
Two years after my mother died he remarried, not out of love but a sense of responsibility. He had a son to raise, was busy with his business, and felt I needed a mother. My stepmother, Rebecca, also had a son five years older than me and light years different. I would come by the Diamond District when commanded by my father, but I liked girls and my wind surfer better than cold stones. Leo’s passions were diamonds and money. Some kids wanted to grow up to be a fireman or doctor, Leo wanted to be a sight holder. One of the quirks about the diamond industry was that “the Syndicate,” the De Beers African diamond cartel, dictated so much of it, worldwide, controlling supply and demand to keep prices up. And they sold diamonds only to a select few, less than two hundred in the world had the privilege of getting an invitation to buy diamonds from the cartel. The sights were held in London and couldn’t be done in the States because the Justice Department considered De Beers to be a monopoly. The rest of the unwashed mass of diamond traders bought and sold the leftovers.
My father took a rough stone from its wrapping and set it on his desk. “Tell me what you think.”
Most parents worry about their kids learning the ABC’s. With my father, I also had to learn the Four C’s: clarity, color, cut and carat-weight, when evaluating a finished gem. The Four C’s also applied as you tried to see the gem-within-the-stone when you dealt in roughs. And dealing in roughs was my father’s stock-in-trade. He bought roughs, had them cut into gems, and sold them to dealers who worked the retail trade.
The best way to examine a diamond was under good light and against a white background. If it was a cut diamond, it had to be loose from its setting when examined because the gold or silver setting made it difficult to evaluate.
I started with clarity to determine how “clean” the stone was, checking it with the naked eye to see how free it was from surface blemishes and inclusions inside. “Flawless” is a magic word in the business, and that’s where the scale started. From there it went a slide downward, from flaws too minute for an untrained person to pick up on, to ones so bad you could see them without the 10× magnification of a jeweler’s loupe.
There were blemishes and inclusions visible with my naked eye. More popped up when I examined it under the loupe. No matter how the stone was cut, because there would be so many defects it would be rated down the scale, with defects visible to the naked eye when closely examined.
Next I checked its color, letting the light pass through it and onto the white paper. Some trade
rs pull a white business card out of their pocket, fold it, and put a diamond in the fold to check its color.
With most gems—rubies, sapphires, emeralds—the more color there is, the better. Diamonds were just the opposite. The rarer and more expensive diamonds are colorless, which means they will glitter more because there’s nothing blocking the light that enters. The chart starts at colorless and from there goes down the scale to various shades of yellow due to nitrogen content and ultimately to industrial diamonds. As the yellow increases, the value of the gem goes down.
A completely colorless gem was rated “D”, no A, B, or C. Going down the scale, a one-carat “D” (colorless) could be worth four or five times what a one-carat “M” (light yellow) was worth—but diamonds were so expensive, that a carat-sized “M” could still cost you thousands!
The one I was examining was down toward the bottom of the color scale, a dingy yellow and cloudy.
“Tell me more about colors,” my father said.
“There’s a funny thing about color—a little yellow takes the value down, but a lot of it sends it up.”
If the gem was really saturated with color, its value shot up. True canary yellows, greens, blues, and pinks were called “fancy” diamonds, I told him. They were rare and valuable. Big fancy diamonds could sell at Christie’s and Sotheby’s for millions, just as paintings by the masters did.
“What about a red diamond, are they valuable?” my father asked.
“I’ve never seen a red diamond.”
“Most people haven’t. They say there are no true ruby-reds, only red browns and dark pinks. But I had a ruby-red once, the most fiery red diamond ever found, it was like holding a piece of fire, holding a star in your hand. But that was a long time ago, before you were born, before I met your mother.”
“What happened to it?”
“It was stolen in Lisbon. But I’ll never forget it. Like your mother, it was incomparable. Now, what’s your evaluation of the diamond you’re examining?”
Heat of Passion Page 2