The Russian Pink

by Matthew Hart

  * * *

  After Annie and Pierrette had left, Tommy stood peering into my fridge, holding the door open with one hand and sliding mostly empty cartons of Vietnamese food around with the other. He grabbed a plate and dumped some spring rolls onto it, and added what was left of the vermicelli noodles with pork and sweet-and-sour sauce. He sniffed at a Styrofoam container of pho, shoved it back, and slammed the door. He found chopsticks in the cutlery drawer and stood there at the counter keeping a steady flow of cold Vietnamese food going from plate to mouth without so much as a single strand of vermicelli slithering to the counter.

  “I don’t want to make you feel any more like a washout than you already are,” he said. A noodle swayed back and forth as he waggled the chopsticks at me. “But just for the record, where do you think you rank on the scale of coping dad in tune with the needs of active, growing child?”

  It was better to just let him get it over with. I hoped it wouldn’t take too long. The sooner he got it out of his system, the sooner I’d find out what he really had to say.

  “One of these days you’re going to wake up and that girl will be a woman,” he said, turning to rummage in the fridge again. He found the foil container with the chicken satay and the little tub of peanut sauce. “She’ll be grown and you’ll have missed the whole thing,” he said through a mouthful.

  This theme occupied Tommy as long as the satay. When he’d cleaned out the container, he put it back in the fridge and assumed the expression that meant he was going to demonstrate how much more he knew than I did.

  “There’s something I need to tell you,” he said. “I didn’t think it was that urgent, but I’m changing my mind.”

  He’d been at a meeting in DC, a regular meeting of lawyers from the Treasury and the Department of Justice. There was a man at the meeting Tommy hadn’t seen before. He sat beside the deputy secretary, who chaired the meeting. The deputy didn’t introduce him.

  “Deputy starts pressing me about the Lime investigation. I clammed up. Said I couldn’t discuss it in an open meeting. The deputy looked pretty steamed, but what could he do? I had him in a corner.”

  I recognized my cue. “How’s that?”

  “If the deputy challenged me on calling it an open meeting, I could insist he identify the guy, which clearly he didn’t want to do. So he gave me a dirty look and moved to the next item on the agenda.”

  Tommy leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. He was enjoying himself, but I didn’t want to wait all night.

  “Can we get to where this is going?”

  “I kicked it around after the meeting with FinCEN’s senior counsel. She used to work at the FBI. I asked her who she thought it was. She said she didn’t know, but that a unit of MI had been sniffing around FinCEN asking about Russia investigations.”

  “Military Intelligence? MI’s job is battlefield preparation,” I said. “They develop intelligence for tactical commanders in the field.”

  “So I learned. But according to the FinCEN lawyer, and she’s been around the block, MI has a National Security Agency connection too. Their responsibility is what they decide it is.”

  Military Intelligence. If that were right, we had fallen through the wormhole and come out in a different universe. In this new universe the most powerful organization in the world, the United States military, had a sudden interest in our case.

  We sat in silence for a while, until Tommy said, “If you think that’s bad, read this.”

  He handed me a note. I recognized the thick paper embossed with his title that Chuck liked to use to show off his elegant handwriting. It was only a few lines. I read it quickly, then read it again in disbelief.

  “I have an appointment with Honey Li.”

  “In the morning.”

  I stared at the note for a moment.

  “This stinks, Tommy.”

  “Watch out for those fuckers, Alex. Chuck is serving you to them on a plate, but they’re the ones who placed the order.”

  6

  At five o’clock I gave up trying to sleep. I pulled on my old shorts and walked to Central Park and hit the Bridle Path for a run. When I got home I climbed into the shower and stood under full cold for three minutes. I put on my best summer suit, dark blue, and a Turnbull & Asser shirt Pierrette had bought me back when she still thought I could be improved.

  The calls I needed to make took half an hour. I still had an hour before my appointment, so I cut into the park at Eighty-Sixth and walked around the Great Lawn a couple of times.

  I thought about Honey Li. The file Tabitha had couriered over was pretty thin. Mostly newspaper and magazine profiles, stories that got longer and more frequent as the odds of winning the presidency began to tilt to Harry Nash.

  Honey’s father was Li Wenjun, the Harvard mathematician whose work in number theory had won him a Fields Medal, the Nobel Prize of mathematics. Li had met his Finnish wife while in Helsinki for a conference.

  Honey Li took after both of them. She had her father’s ivory skin and her mother’s blonde hair and sky-blue eyes. Not only beautiful but smart too. While still an undergraduate she wrote a ninety-page book called The Social History of Zero that made the best-seller list.

  All the articles had the same story of how she’d met Nash. So either they had good message discipline or it was really true that Harry had fallen for her at a Roaring Twenties party when Honey, in a fringed dress and with strings of beads wound through her golden hair, gave the cheering mob a perfect demonstration of the Charleston, tossing her heels and stretching her arms above her head.

  The scent of money rises from the pavement as you leave the park, cross Fifth Avenue, and enter the Upper East Side. The streets are cleaner and the people slimmer. Hermès scarves bloom like weeds. Even the professional dog walkers wear Burberry sneakers.

  The apparatus of power was already reaching out to Harry Nash. Manned police checkpoints closed off the block where the Nashes lived. Police in full tac stood in clumps at the Madison Avenue and Park Avenue corners, and Secret Service agents checked IDs and directed visitors through a scanner.

  The limestone crawled with carvings of serpents and creatures with scaly wings. According to my file, the house had been built in the 1800s by the Stuyvesants, an old New York family, and ridiculed by Edith Wharton as “a medieval nightmare from which poor Mr. Stuyvesant can never wake.”

  “Ugliest house in New York City,” Nash had cheerfully agreed when reporters quoted the line to him. “We’re nuts about it.”

  I mounted the steps to the gleaming black door. Before I could touch the buzzer, the door swung inward. A young woman with a crewcut and a silver stud in her nose said, “Sir?”

  “Turner for Ms. Li,” I said. She was wearing full-dress tails and a white tie. She opened the door and stood aside as I stepped into a black marble foyer with facing mirrors. A white earpiece perched on her ear, and I guess she had a mike too, because she said, “Mr. Turner, ma’am.”

  A few minutes later battered tennis shoes squeaking across marble announced the arrival of Honey Li.

  She was wearing jeans and a man’s dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a thick swipe of dirt across the front. She wore gardening gloves and held a trowel in one hand. “Mr. Turner, please come in. Nicky,” she said to the butler, “can you bring some coffee to the garden?”

  I followed Honey through an anteroom and into a long gallery. The walls were painted a creamy yellow and the lighting showed off the Nashes’ collection of art and furniture.

  Honey stopped in front of a throne-like armchair covered in brocade.

  “French, late seventeenth century.” She waved her trowel at the chair. A clod of mud flew off and splatted on the floor. She fixed me with her eyes. They were extravagantly slanted, beautiful and calculating.

  “Louis XIV, the Sun King, used this chair,” she said. Then she leaned toward me, close enough for me to smell her perfume—gardenias—and said in a conspiratorial tone, “Upstairs it’s
all IKEA.” She put her head back and laughed. I already knew she liked that line. Every magazine profile of her had it.

  We reached a set of tall French doors that opened to a courtyard. A yellow marble fountain splashed in the sun. Water spouted from the mouths of fish clutched by cherubs who stared around with wild expressions, as if they had been snorting coke and had only just managed to scramble back into place and grab the fish before we came through the door.

  Nash had created the courtyard by tearing down a glass conservatory and putting in the fountain. Balconies opened from the bedrooms onto the little plaza. A marble Venus held a swag of drapery across her body.

  Honey led the way to a wrought-iron table. The butler came out with a silver tray. China coffee pot, matching cups, basket heaped with croissants.

  “First of all,” Honey said, leaning forward with a grave expression, “I want to tell you how upset Harry and I were to hear about your daughter. I gather there was some awful security mix-up last night.”

  “There was something last night,” I said.

  I didn’t mean to make my voice as hard as it came out. But it made me mad, the way she tossed off her sympathy, as if what happened to Annie was some minor glitch in the Nashes’ smooth operation. She picked up on my tone and sat back in her chair.

  “Well, I’m sure it will all get straightened out.”

  “It certainly will,” I said, and maybe that was a little icy too. “But this is your meeting, Ms. Li. I’m here because I was told to be here. If I had to take a guess, I’d say it’s because of a case I’m working on. You could only know about that if somebody committed the crime of telling you, but I’m all ears.”

  A flash of something glinted in her eyes, quickly suppressed. She wasn’t used to being spoken to that way, but it wasn’t going to rattle her. She gave herself a moment to think, pouring us each a cup of coffee and putting a croissant on a plate and sliding it in my direction.

  “You’re not happy. I get it. But Harry already gets top-secret security briefings every day, to prepare him for the presidency, if we win. So please, don’t start breathing fire. The fact that the Treasury is investigating Sergei Lime and that pink diamonds have come into the picture is not the closest-held secret in Washington. You’ll be reading about it in the Post soon, served up with a good helping of slime from the president’s friends.”

  She plucked a croissant from the basket and tore it in half, spraying the table with pastry flakes.

  “We expect that,” she said, waving a chunk of pastry before she popped it in her mouth and washed it down with coffee. “Slime is the plat du jour in politics. I’m not complaining. What I hope you’ll understand is how remote a jewel like the Russian Pink is from whatever seedy machinations Sergei Lime is involved in.”

  The butler came out with a light gray leather box and put it on the table. Honey waited for a moment, her fingers on the box. She drew a deep breath, her expression tense, then opened it. A pink mist gushed onto her face. The soft light of the diamond seemed to saturate the air. A rosy haze enveloped us.

  The cut diamond was the size of a small plum. It smoldered and pulsed in its satin nest. She placed a loupe beside the box. “I thought you would want to look.”

  I lifted it out and held it in the fingers of my left hand and brought it to the loupe. I knew it weighed 464 carats. That had been in every story. So I expected the weight. But until my eye accustomed to it, the color overwhelmed me. Colored diamonds are called fancies in the trade. They’re graded according to a strict assessment of the depth of color. This one was the highest grade, Fancy Vivid Pink, sometimes called a Fancy Deep.

  When my eye got used to the color, I saw what a risky stone it was. A single fracture plane slashed diagonally through it. Not all the way, or the stone couldn’t have been polished. The fault seemed to lie deep in the center of the jewel. And when I turned it in front of the loupe, something else appeared: tiny cloudlike flaws, like threads, along the fault. They looked like microscopic jellyfish frozen in a crystal sea.

  I placed the diamond carefully on the table.

  It was cut simply. At a glance, maybe sixty facets. Unlike white diamonds, where cutters aim for brilliance, or “fire,” colored diamonds call for restraint. The cutter’s object with a stone like the pink wouldn’t be to make it blaze but to calm it, to preserve the depth of color.

  “I find it profoundly moving,” Honey said. “It’s quite sad, really, that some sordid little crime could touch the reputation of such an object.”

  “The only reputation it has is that Harry Nash bought it and you wear it.”

  Her face lit up in a dazzling smile. She leaned toward me. “Exactly,” she enunciated, delivering each syllable in its own tiny case, as if they too were jewels she’d discovered. “The secret sauce of a famous name!”

  She shoved the coffee things aside and parked her elbows on the table.

  “Last year a Hong Kong billionaire paid almost $30 million at auction in Geneva for a sixteen-carat pink. Sixteen goes into 464 twenty-nine times, so by simple arithmetic this stone should be worth $870 million.” She caressed the diamond with her fingertips. “But large diamonds don’t progress in value arithmetically. They grow exponentially, because the larger they are, the rarer. Not only that, but the fame of their owners makes them more valuable still, like the diamond Richard Burton gave to Elizabeth Taylor. I wrote an algorithm that takes all that into consideration,” she said, leaning back in her chair and spreading her fingers. “The price came out at well over a billion dollars.”

  She’d been shopping that algorithm pitch all over New York, but nobody was buying. That’s what I’d learned on the phone. She’d also been testing the waters with the imperial-Russian-treasure theory, confirming the suspicion in dealers’ minds that the Nashes were the ones who planted the rumor in the first place. Because, please. A 464-carat pink diamond owned by the Romanovs? It’s not like they kept their jewels secret. How come nobody’s heard about it?

  No, the dealers had their own thoughts about where the diamond came from. They suspected it had been polished from a fifteen-hundred-carat pink that came out of the Chicapa River, and then disappeared from view. Until they knew for sure, and could examine the stone with scanners and microscopes and learn what had happened to the rest of it, they wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole.

  Honey tilted her head and arched an eyebrow and let me have a few seconds with her bewitching eyes before she shaped her lips into a siren smile and said,

  “I’ve run the algorithm on previous known outcomes, and it’s bang on every time. Still, I’d like to be sure I’m right.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Yes what?”

  “Yes you’d like to be sure.”

  Her eyes flashed daggers at me. She was one of the people who inherit the earth—brilliant, beautiful, powerful, and rich. She’d thought the pink would be like any other thing she and her husband owned and ran. Now she was learning that no one ran a diamond. It ran you.

  She put it in the box and closed the lid and scraped back her chair. The butler appeared and Honey thrust the box into her hands.

  “Do you mind staying for a moment?” she said, standing up. “I’m afraid you have another appointment.”

  I thought it might be Nash himself, but it was Matilda Bolt.

  * * *

  Tall and spare, she had lank black hair and chalk-white skin and eyes the color of straw. A harelip corrected in childhood had left a faint scar above her cruel mouth. She wore a plain white sleeveless shirt and black jeans and thin gold sandals on her narrow feet. She took a hungry drag on a vape and blew out a stream of smoke.

  “You’re the Treasury dick,” she said. “Don’t blame Honey for this. I’m the one who told that Chandler moron to send you over.”

  She gave me an arid smile and sat down at the table.

  “I know all about your secret little black-ops outfit, Commander Bond,” she said, waving the vape. “I helped write the legis
lation that split it off from FinCEN, and I OK’d the recruitment from the CIA when we decided to put a few people like you in with the accountants. I know your history. You’re a devious person, Mr. Turner. That’s what makes you so useful to those of us who love and cherish the deep state.”

  At least now I didn’t have to wonder who Chuck had pulled my 906 for.

  A two-way radio crackled as her Secret Service detail positioned itself just inside the door. Her yellow eyes bored into me.

  “I’m saying this so we don’t waste each other’s time. Our nominating convention is thirteen days away. That convention must nominate Harry Nash. If it doesn’t, you and I may not have a country left to work for. It can’t have escaped your notice that the president is dismantling our republic. Harry Nash has the best chance of beating him. You know the country we’re turning into, because that’s the country you met last night at Lincoln Center.”

  Editorial cartoonists always made Matilda Bolt look haughty. She wasn’t. She was menacing.

  She took another pull at her vape and let the smoke float from her mouth. She studied me carefully through the haze.

  “You reading me?”

  “You mean the message that my kid’s in danger? How long did you think it would take me to figure that out?”

  She nodded coldly.

  “Fine. Cards on the table, then. We have a problem with Harry’s diamond and Sergei Lime. Your idiot boss has been feeding searches into his Wizard of Oz machine. He may try to sit on the results, but they’re already leaking. I heard last night that the software actually recommended an investigation of Harry, and if I heard, so has the White House. They are determined to find something to compromise Harry.”

  “It probably won’t be that hard,” I said. “And try to understand how concerned I am about Harry Nash when I tell you that last night I identified the body of a twenty-two-year-old murder victim who was investigating your candidate’s former business associate.”