Vivian gave the mixing bowl a spin. The diamonds responded with increased blaze and scintillation. “Hot stuff from such a cold place,” she reflected.
Nikolai thought about the odd number of stones in the lot. He believed the lot was actually five thousand carats, an even kilo, and that they had overlooked nine pieces. Those nine were now somewhere in the used vacuum-cleaner bags. They were worth, give or take, a hundred and sixty thousand dollars.
But to hell with them.
CHAPTER
21
MANY IN THE BUSINESS OF DIAMONDS BELIEVE IT MORE than coincidence that the diamond district of Antwerp is located directly across from the zoo. Their point is made when at certain times a lull in the traffic noise allows the cries of the animals to be heard by the diamond dealers, brokers, and such who keep offices in the melancholy older buildings along Pelikaanstraat. Undeniably, just as much clawing, bleating, and screaming occurs daily on the diamond side of the street. Recent legend has it that a rather vicious and perhaps facetious laugh by a hyena heard through an open window changed the mind of a prominent dealer who was only a word away from buying a large lot of Australian rough that looked much better than it was. As it turned out that timely laugh saved the man a fortune. Now, rarely is a deal consummated that the buyer doesn’t first cock an ear in anticipation of such worthy guidance.
For no apparent reason the zoo was unusually quiet that Wednesday afternoon when Nikolai and Vivian came to Pelikaanstraat. Vivian was at the wheel of the rented red BMW 735i. Nikolai watched the street address numbers descend from 212. When they got to the sixties he had Vivian pull over. She stopped where the curb was painted yellow to signify that standing was prohibited. A uniformed traffic policeman was right there. Vivian shot him such a dazzling smile it made the BMW invisible.
“How long do you think you’ll be?” she asked Nikolai.
“No more than a couple of hours.” Nikolai felt speeded up inside. For sure his heart was going over a hundred. “What will you do?”
“Park someplace legal and find some chocolate.” The pamphlet she’d read in the hotel room had raved about Belgian chocolate and lace. Vivian had no interest in lace, hadn’t since her antique-shop days when she’d learned that some Belgium women were so venal they went blind weaving it. “I’ll get you some chocolate,” she promised. “You still prefer that sweet, sissy kind?”
Nikolai nodded absently. Chocolate was one of the farthest things from his mind. He leaned across to Vivian, presented his face for a routine see-you-later kiss. Her lips grazed the corner of his and his cheek on the way to his ear. She gave the lobe a nip that would last awhile. He got out of the car and corrected the set and fall of his suit jacket. He was wearing his best dark blue three-piece business suit. Vivian had remarked about it earlier when he was putting it on, had said it was sincere, as warm and sincere as a pee down the leg. He tugged the points of his vest and tested the knot of his tie. Vivian thought he looked too good. “Loosen your tie a little,” she told him, “just enough so you can almost see the top button of your shirt. And I think the white square in the breast pocket is a bit too sharp. You should look a telltale degree nyekulturnyi. As distasteful as that may be to you, it’ll give you an edge. Perfect would be a pair of wire-framed glasses. I wish we’d thought of it.”
Nikolai took her suggestions, loosened his tie and eliminated the pocket square. He reached in the backseat for his attaché case.
“Don’t forget your hat,” she said, handing it out to him, a black felt with a grosgrain band. They’d bought it yesterday in Geneva.
“I veto the hat,” Nikolai said.
“I thought we’d agreed on it. Anyway, try it on.”
He did to please her.
“I like you in a hat. I really do. You ought to wear it to bed sometime soon.” She did her wicked grin, which she thought was the most heartening way to send him off. She slipped the gear into drive and swerved out into traffic.
Nikolai entered number 62, the Diamond Club of Antwerp. Immediately inside was a guard with a passive manner and scrutinizing eyes. The lump on his right hip was undoubtedly a pistol. Nikolai went up three steps to the landing of the spacious foyer. There was considerable coming and going, and he had to wait in line to present his credentials. His membership in the Diamond Club of London was supposed to be honored here. The attendant on duty double-checked his Soviet passport and club identification card and examined the interior of his attaché case. He signed the registry and passed through the arch of a metal detector to show he wasn’t carrying a gun, bomb, or whatever.
That put him in the club’s main room. It was a place to do business rather than escape from it. A huge, tall room about one hundred by fifty with a twenty-five-foot ceiling. One entire side was windows from the floor all the way up. Beneath the windows, at a right angle to them, were twenty identical long tables. These were situated to make the most of the natural north light. Nikolai had more than once heard it said that the daylight of Antwerp was the best in the world for viewing the truth of a diamond. It had something to do with the diffusing high haze that normally hung over the city.
Nikolai stepped aside and paused to observe the activity in the room. The five tables on the left nearest the entrance were crowded. Every chair was occupied, and there were men standing close around. Nikolai recognized those as the regulars. His London club had a similar group, a clique of small to medium-size dealers whose profits and ego satisfaction were derived mainly from outsmarting one another. Practically every day they gathered and haggled, and although diamonds and money changed hands, that was only the serious part of it. At the next several tables were not nearly so many dealers. They sat gossiping or conducting transactions head to head. They were each dressed in some sort of business suit, a good hard worsted or an ill-fitting wash-and-wear. Here and there was a garish tie, a shirt serving its third day, and on every head something, be it a second-generation black homburg, a felt fedora, or an embroidered yarmulke held in place by a bobby pin.
Nikolai took a seat at one of the vacant tables on the far right. He placed his attaché case on the chair next to him and drew it close. To occupy his eyes he studied a discarded briefke in the nearby ashtray. It had seen its day. Its edges were frayed and soiled from having been taken out, opened, and put back so many times. Nikolai read the faint penciled scribble “5ctsMQ” on one corner of it, and on another corner was the code “XXXB0T4.” Why did dealers bother with such shorthand and codes? he thought. Why didn’t they come right out and say what sort of diamond they had, what its color rating was, its faults and merits, instead of going through the ritual of making a buyer find out for himself? Which he’d no doubt do if he was any kind of buyer.
Nikolai gave the room two full minutes of indifferent gaze, then looked out the window. The view was the rear of other three- and four-story buildings and some old shrubbery that had been harshly trimmed back. At that moment a city bird, a mature sparrow, lighted on one of the upper twigs of the shrub. He cocked his head so all his left eye could take in Nikolai, and then, as though not trusting his left, he turned his head abruptly to get Nikolai with his right. Nikolai had the feeling that if the window had been open the bird would have flown in, hopped over, and chirped a few words of good advice. Probably he’d witnessed a great many diamond deals, this sparrow with the jerky head and jittery feet. The bird fanned open its wings and flew off.
Twenty minutes went by.
Nikolai pushed his hat back and drummed on the edge of the table with his fingers. He wanted to be noticed, taken as a dealer from out of town, one feeling displaced and wary. He looked the part, didn’t he? Why hadn’t anyone yet approached him? Was it because he was Russian? How would they know? He didn’t look typical, had always been told that. However, the attendant to whom he’d shown his passport might have an ax to grind and have spread the word about his nationality. Probably very few Russians who were still Russians came here. He could have passed himself off as an American if he’d h
ad a U.S. passport. Then he would have been immediately descended upon. Those various passports he’d accidentally discovered in Lev’s cowboy boot came to mind. He now had to admit their convenience.
He’d just decided to give the place another twenty minutes when a man came over and stood at the end of his table. A middle-aged man with such a prominent paunch he had no choice but to leave his suit jacket open. His shirt front gaped from button to button and his wide, twenty-year old tie was so carelessly knotted its narrow end hung down longer by four inches. He stood there, his eyes fixed hard on Nikolai.
Nikolai acknowledged him cordially with a single nod, but the man just continued to glare. “Do we know each other?” Nikolai asked.
The man stuck out his lower lip. He had an ugly mouth, unfortunately large and dry except at the corners, where a little seepage glistened. His eyes looked chronically tired. He grumbled something.
“What?”
“You are sitting there,” the man said.
“And you’re standing there.”
“That is my place.”
“Yours?”
“I have been waiting almost half an hour for you to move.”
“What’s the difference between sitting here or there?” Nikolai indicated the next vacant table.
“It is mine, that is the difference.”
Nikolai thought it too unimportant to be an issue. He started to get up.
The man gestured tolerantly for Nikolai to stay put. He half turned away to leave, then changed his mind and took the chair opposite. It was the same sort of chair as the one in which Nikolai was seated; however, the man seemed to find it uncomfortable, something he would temporarily endure. “I do business every day from that chair,” he said. “There is a certain amount of profit in people knowing where I will be, not having to search about.”
Nikolai thought the man’s accent was Dutch. Each word seemed to catch slightly on something viscous before coming out. Ever since his student days at the Institute of Foreign Languages Nikolai had taken pride in how correct he could be when it came to placing a man by his accent. To be more exact he guessed this fellow was from somewhere in eastern Holland along the German border, Enschede perhaps, or Winterswijk.
The man gave his name as Jacob Loodsen, and as though to prove that he took a business card from his shirt pocket and handed it across. Nikolai noticed the card was cheap, printed rather than engraved on rather soft stock. It bore no address or telephone number, just the name JACOB LOODSEN above the words FINE DIAMONDS.
Nikolai introduced himself. He didn’t reciprocate with his business card because it would reveal that he was associated with Almazjuvelirexport.
“Where are you from?”
“London,” Nikolai replied.
“You do not sound British.”
“You don’t sound Chinese.”
Loodsen laughed. His eyes nearly disappeared when he laughed. “This your first time in Antwerp?”
“No,” Nikolai fibbed.
“Then maybe your second time. What is your opinion of Antwerp? Is it the diamond heaven you expected?”
“Yes,” Nikolai said conclusively and turned his attention once again to the activity in the room. The regulars were still at it. Two dealers four tables away were arguing emphatically, temporary enemies over what not long ago had been a mere pebble on a beach of Namibia. The atmosphere was layered with guttural grumble and chatter and the sibilance of near-whispers. Nikolai translated those into griping, bickering, conspiring. He decided he disliked this place as much as he’d ever disliked anywhere.
“Want to do some business?” Loodsen asked, as though that signified a measure of acceptance.
Loodsen was so obviously small-time, Nikolai thought. Any dealing with him would be inconsequential. But, on second thought, perhaps anything would be better than sitting here trying to look like the ideal victim.
“Do you want to sell me or me to sell you?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Nikolai told him.
“You sell me,” Loodsen decided accommodatingly.
Nikolai went along with it. He removed a briefke from his attaché case and placed it on the table. Loodsen picked it up. There were no markings, no codes or anything on the briefke, and Loodsen thought that strange. “What is it, a mystery?” he remarked as he was unfolding it. His eyes intensified when the diamonds were revealed. Six one-carat stones. Loodsen took out his ten-power magnifying loupe and examined each of the diamonds, gave them more than a cursory look. “Nice goods,” he said. “Where do you get such goods?”
“Hong Kong.”
“Do you know what they are?”
“D-flawless.”
“My eyes rate them F, maybe E.”
“They’re Ds.”
“And I saw a few inclusions.”
“Your loupe must have lint on it.”
“Okay, to you they’re D-flawless. When I asked you if you know what they are, what I meant was do you know where they were born.”
“Of course.”
“They are river whites. I have not seen rivers like these in many years. They must have been hiding in the dark in Hong Kong.”
Nikolai knew Loodsen was referring to the type of alluvial diamonds once found in and along the Orange River in southwestern Africa, distinguished by their superior brilliance and pure colorless quality. If these Aikhal diamonds could pass for rivers, so much the better.
“How much you asking for these?”
“What are they worth?”
“Less now than a moment ago.”
“Why is that?”
“Because I am trying to buy them.” Loodsen grinned.
“Make an offer,” Nikolai said, not seriously, just practicing for when it would be serious.
“For the lot? How many carats in the lot?”
“Each piece is a carat.”
“Exactly?”
“Yes.”
“Not a point or two less?”
“Precisely a carat.”
The open briefke was on the table between them. Their words were like a substance passing over it. Loodsen louped the diamonds again. “Nice make,” he said, commenting on how well they were cut. He jiggled the briefke ever so slightly. The diamonds danced a bit in the crease of a fold. “These all you got, six?”
“Why do you ask?”
“To be honest, I cannot afford to buy this nice. It hurts to admit, but that is the way things are for me at the moment.” Loodsen did a sigh with a little wail of self-pity in it. “However,” he went on, “I know somebody who could afford. Do you have others? You would have to have more than merely six.”
“Who is this somebody?”
“How many more do you have?”
“I didn’t say I had more.”
“I hope you do. You are a pleasant young fellow. I wish you riches.”
“Thanks.”
“My brother-in-law, my only sister’s husband, is an important broker. I do not care for him, but once in a while I use him to do myself a favor.” Loodsen folded up the briefke and extended it between his fingers. “How many of these do you have?”
“A few.”
“What does that mean? Another six, another ten, what?”
“Let’s just say more.”
“On you?”
“No.”
“Where you can quickly put your hands on them?”
“What difference does it make?”
“My brother-in-law will ridicule me if I take you to him and all you have is a few. He thinks he is such a big shit.”
“I don’t think I would like your brother-in-law.”
“Money is money.”
Loodsen was right about that, Nikolai thought. He wondered where Vivian was at that moment. He pictured her with a jawful of bitter chocolate.
“You ever dream?” Loodsen asked out of context.
“Sometimes.”
“Would that I never did. I get enough of diamonds during the day without having them in my
sleep. The dream I have almost every night is not about a diamond so big I cannot get it into my pocket. It is about nice polite stones such as these. That is why I mention it. In my dream I own a few. I feel good that they are mine. Then I blink or something and I look again and the few have become twice as many and so it goes until I have a handful. I am so excited I wake up and all I really have is a handful of putz, which, with me,” he admitted wryly, “is not much.”
Nikolai wasn’t genuinely amused. Something told him to look to tomorrow. He could try a different tack tomorrow, randomly choose a few brokers out of the directory and make appointments with them. They took advantage when they sensed you were aching to sell. He’d tried to avoid that. No matter; he’d be tough and get his price. Today hadn’t been a total waste. He’d gotten a feel of Antwerp. In that regard Loodsen had been a bit of a help. He studied Loodsen again. The man was totally oblivious to being such a mess. Couldn’t he see the hairs growing out of his ears, that spot under one of his chins where he’d missed the last three or four times he’d shaved? He was pathetic, a grub in a field of plenty.
“If you do a deal with my brother-in-law,” Loodsen said, “I can middle. Nothing from you, just from him. That is why I want to know how much of these nice goods you have. The bigger the deal the more I stand to make, but if I do not know what the deal is I will not know what my cut is and my brother-in-law will be able to lie to me.”
Nikolai didn’t doubt that. He tried to imagine the looks of Loodsen’s sister. If there was a family resemblance, how had she gotten someone to marry her? Maybe she had compensating talents. As Vivian often said, in some way everyone is blessed.
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