The Russian Pink

by Matthew Hart

  “Nash and Lime are connected,” I said, getting slowly off the table.

  “What, did he give something up?”

  “I pretended I’d discovered their plan. It hit home.”

  “That’s the takeaway? You faked him and he blinked?” Tommy shook his head and looked at the medic. “You didn’t tell me about the severe brain injury and delusional complications.”

  I paced gingerly around the room. It felt as if an electrified wire ran from my hip to my ankle. Every time I moved, the wire delivered a shock. The medic had left me with ten days’ worth of fentanyl. I pretended to study a notice on the wall and swallowed one of the pills.

  When the medic left, DeLucca closed the door and glanced at Tommy. They both looked glum.

  “Want the bad news first?” Tommy said.

  Washington was taking us apart. The attorney general had found cracks in the legal structure that kept the operations of our unit confidential, and was busy hammering in wedges.

  Nash had been baiting the president, ridiculing his business past. Ridiculing his physical appearance. He played the president’s game, but dirtier, until the president was incoherent with rage. The president was going to use whatever weapon against Nash he could, and he had a big one: the government of the United States.

  “How can we protect the files?” I said.

  “Jesus Christ,” Tommy snapped. “Are you not paying attention? There is nothing we can protect. The president runs the administration. There is no such thing as a file he can’t see once he knows about it.”

  I tried to sit, but the pain shot down my leg again and I leaned against a wall.

  “If that’s the bad news, what’s the good?”

  “Yeah, well, that’s where maybe I misstated,” Tommy said. “There’s bad news, and then there’s worse.”

  I had a hard time concentrating. The sword cuts still burned beneath the fentanyl, just enough to let me know they would be waiting when the drug wore off.

  I bit the inside of my cheek to help focus. Tommy had something important to add, and it would be best to actually hear it.

  “I’m listening.”

  “There’s an order for you to report to DC to be debriefed at the Treasury.”

  “Debriefed? There’s a statutory restriction on who can question me.”

  “I think you’ll find they’ve got that sorted out.”

  What it came down to was this: Chuck was only nominally in charge. The treasurer had started running things. He would send marshals for me if I didn’t come.

  Unless I ran.

  And that’s what we agreed on. I had a legitimate reason to leave the country: to pursue an existing investigation. Anyway, that was going to be the story.

  When Tommy left, DeLucca and I worked out the details. He would be my contact. The NYPD was the largest police force in the country, and the city of New York, the fortress that protected it. Any communications with DeLucca would be safe.

  For the next two hours we talked about what I would have to do. He made some calls and so did I. The pain was giving me trouble. It roamed around inside my body. It chewed at the places where the sword had cut. Fentanyl is a short-acting drug, but the medic had given me some patches too.

  By the time we left the precinct, it was night. We drove downtown and stopped outside a condo tower on Chambers Street. A block away, where the Twin Towers had stood, the spire of the World Financial Center soared above ground zero. An NYPD squad car idled at the curb nearby.

  “Your car’s in the garage,” DeLucca said. “Parking level two. My guys packed the bag exactly as you asked. It’s in the trunk. I’ll give your apartment keys to Tommy.”

  A thin stream of exhaust dribbled out of the tailpipe of the squad car parked ahead of us.

  A stab of pain shot down my leg. I was feeling nauseated.

  “One more thing,” I said. “I know you’ve laid on a lot of protection, and I’m grateful. But I’d like somebody I personally trust at Tuxedo Park. Augie Treacher. You probably know who he is.”

  He shrugged. “Sure I know. He’s a killer.”

  * * *

  I took the Holland Tunnel. No tail that I could see. I picked my way carefully through Jersey City, Paramus, and Ridgewood, doubling back on myself, exiting suddenly, parking. Nothing.

  I got on the I-87 and six hours later crossed into Quebec with a Canadian passport in the name of Alan Ryder. I reached Montreal airport in time for Air Canada’s morning flight to Brussels.

  12

  The plane landed in heavy rain. It was still coming down in sheets when I cleared immigration and emerged from the terminal. She was waiting in a lemon-colored Porsche. It was all I could do to toss my bag in the back seat and climb in.

  “You look terrible,” Lily said as the rain drummed on the roof. She put her hand against my forehead. “You have a fever.”

  “It’s only some cuts.”

  As she drove out of the airport and took the fast route into Brussels, I told her about Lime. She shook her head.

  “He’s very expert. He could have killed you.”

  I swallowed some antibiotics. The medic included those too. He’d said there was a chance of infection. Maybe that’s what was making me feel nauseated.

  Lily got off the expressway and took a winding route, checking for a tail. The rain had strengthened into a monsoon by the time we circled the park in front of the royal palace for the sixth time and Lily decided there was no one following us. Even so, she didn’t head for either of the two main highways that go north from Brussels. She picked her way through the scrapheap of suburbs that ring the administrative capital of the European Union. Finally, we cleared the city and drove out onto the central plain of Flanders.

  My body felt as if it were running some special software to destroy itself. My vision blurred and cleared and blurred again. A tiny arsonist patrolled my arms and legs, setting fires.

  Out among the farms, Lily visibly relaxed. She no longer drove with one eye on the rearview. In her cream-colored sweater and black jeans she could have been any stylish young woman who liked to accessorize with bandages. One covered the back of her right hand. She must have injured it when the motorcycle slid out from under her at Sheepshead Bay. Another dressing bulged beneath the tight denim of her jeans, and I remembered the limp as she hurried onto the footbridge. But the bruise on her face?

  I hadn’t seen Lily since she’d blown a load of splinters into my face three days before. We’d kept our communications to the bare minimum. There had always been the likelihood she’d be suspected of betrayal after Brighton Beach.

  “Lime?” I said, eyeing the bruise.

  “Not the worst thing he ever did to me.”

  I let that go. There was a blade buried deep in Lily, and Lime had put it there.

  * * *

  Lily started stealing diamonds in her teens. She was working as a sorter at the huge facility in Mirny run by Russgem, Russia’s state diamond company. Russian oligarchs with friends in the Kremlin were stealing about 15 million carats a year from Russgem’s 40-million-carat production. Lily’s scheme was modest by comparison, but it managed to extract 150,000 carats a year.

  The goods she stole were at the lower end, but even at $125 a carat, she was grossing almost $20 million. She had to pay some people off. She could afford to.

  Here’s how it worked.

  Russgem’s diamond scales expressed weights to five decimal places. Because rough diamonds poured through Mirny in such high volumes, recording every parcel to such a fine degree wasn’t practical, and they set the machines to report to only two decimal places. The scales still weighed to five, but only reported to two. Lily took a cut from the unreported weight.

  Say a parcel weighed 100.22314 carats. The system reported a weight of 100.22. The .00314 unreported carats still existed. The weight had disappeared only from the books. Lily inserted a program that kept track of the actual weight as opposed to the reported weight and helped herself accordingly.
Because the volumes were so high, even such a tiny cut quickly ballooned.

  Russgem understood that rounding off the decimal places left unreported diamonds in the production stream. They ran a quarterly check designed to pick up the unreported rough. Lily’s genius lay in designing her theft so that it left behind enough loose weight to satisfy her bosses.

  There was something elegant to this colossal theft and, as Lily saw it, fair. She made regular cash gifts to the Orthodox cathedral in Mirny. That covered God. Unfortunately, the local Orthodox patriarch was in the pocket of one of the oligarchs already robbing Russgem. When the patriarch realized that Lily’s generosity had reached a level beyond her apparent means, he informed his patron.

  Mirny was a brutal place. Lily had no protectors. She was nineteen and beautiful. Lime had just arrived in the city, humiliated, bruised, seething with hate. The oligarch who owned the priest was one of the investors who’d ripped off most of Lime’s shares in First Partners. To recoup that loss, Lime had been offered a chance to help the oligarch find a new way to launder the rough diamonds he was stealing.

  Lime sent for Lily. He demanded to know how she stole the rough and, as importantly, how she sold it. Lily wouldn’t tell him. She still had a few million dollars in rough in the pipeline. She knew she might not get out of Mirny alive, but if she did, it was going to be with her money.

  What Lime performed on Lily was a kind of surgery. He raped her, and with care and deliberation, he damaged her. At the end of three days there was little left of her but a core of hatred. By then Lime understood that he would have to either kill her and learn nothing, or compromise.

  In the split they worked out, Lily got the diamonds still in the pipeline and the job she specified at Russgem’s St. Petersburg office. Lime got the information he needed to move rough through Lily’s contacts, plus a few tips on how to cheat the oligarchs.

  * * *

  The rain intensified. The road turned into a frothing stream of brown water. The Porsche’s windshield wipers flailed back and forth. We could barely see. Lily pulled to the side of the road.

  “I take it Lime doesn’t know you have the pink,” I said.

  “I told him you must have it,” she said, unsnapping her seatbelt and digging her hand into a pocket of her jeans. She handed me the neatly folded rectangle of paper.

  I flicked it open with my thumbs. The pink dagger-shaped stone flared against the crisp white paper. In the aqueous interior of the car, the diamond flowed with crimson light. The rain thrashed against the window and a heavy gust buffeted the car. The stone shone with unearthly power. The only other pink I’d seen with that knockout punch was Nash’s.

  “Where do you think the Brazilian got this, Lily?”

  “He was one of the Sousa brothers from Minas Gerais. Some very good fancy colors come out of the rivers there, and the Sousa brothers get them all.”

  “If it’s a river stone, why no frosting?”

  Lily had dealt in river stones. The trade calls them alluvials. They have a frosted appearance. Rolled along in the gravel for millions of years, the surfaces get scratched and pitted until the skin of the diamond is opaque.

  “Alex, let’s speak plainly. You’re not up to playing games. Neither of us thinks the stone is Brazilian. It’s a fragment of the Russian Pink. Lime wanted to conceal that from me. Using the Brazilian was the way he tried to do it. So I would tell our buyers the source was Brazilian. He wants to see what the market is without saying where it really came from.”

  I folded the diamond back into the paper. The torrent thundered on the roof. It had been raining the night I’d turned Slav Lily at Brussels airport. Later, when I came out of the airport, she was waiting in the Porsche. You bet I got in. It rained all the way to Paris. We holed up in a crooked little house in Montmartre that Lily owned.

  The rain let up and we drove on. Soon we were entering the Antwerp suburbs. An idea was struggling to form in my head but I couldn’t hold onto it. Why would Lime want to smuggle a piece of the pink into the United States? There was an answer to that question. I could almost see it.

  The pain from my cuts returned in a sudden rush. I fumbled in my pocket for the plastic bottle, but I couldn’t get the top off. I wrenched at it until Lily took it from me and tapped a pill into my open palm. I made an impatient gesture and she tipped out another. I swallowed them and put my head back and waited for the drug to unhook the talons from my brain.

  The diamond city of Antwerp lies on the river Scheldt. In the old quarters of the town ancient mansions glower at the present. In the sixteenth century Antwerp was the richest city on the continent. Its main cathedral has four works by Rubens, the Flemish master whose commissions from the kings and queens of Europe paid for his own palace in the city. The swaggering civic buildings that line Antwerp’s main square show how highly the Flemish burghers thought of themselves.

  The rain had swept the tourists away. We turned onto the quay beside the river and drove to a shabby hotel. It faced the water with a look of hopelessness. Faded green paint peeled from the stuccoed walls.

  We left the car in a shed at the back and pushed through a door into a dim interior that smelled of damp carpet and sausages. The front desk was abandoned. Rain drove against the dirty windows. Through the glass, the blurry shapes of dockside cranes loomed across the river. A threadbare gray cardigan hung on a nail beside the row of empty mailboxes. I dinged the bell. The slap of footsteps approached and a fat young woman in a dirty tank top appeared, stared at us, snatched the cardigan from the nail, and dragged it on over her bulging breasts.

  “Full,” she said, wiping something from her mustached lip.

  The hotel had not been full in fifty years, so I guess that was the recognition word.

  “Room five,” Lily told her, stepping up to the counter. She slid a brown envelope across the scarred surface.

  The woman sniffed and wiped her moustache again. The smell of cooking was stronger now. She dropped the keys on the counter, wiped her fingers on the sweater, plucked up the envelope, and disappeared in the direction of the sausages.

  We climbed the narrow stairs. The top step had a strange, high-pitched double squeak, like a bow drawn back and forth on the string of a violin. The room was painted a color that had long ago given up the fight against the damp and joined the general spirit of despair. The worn, candlewick bedspread had once been white. On the desk stood a yellowing card with the name Hoge Raad voor Diamant—Diamond High Council—emblazoned at the top. Below was a list of telephone numbers dealers could call to get the latest details of the London diamond sales.

  It had been a long time since any diamond dealer had stayed in this hotel, and the London sales had dried up like the company that ran them, slowly gnawed to bits by the increasing cut taken by the countries where the diamonds came from. While London withered as a diamond center, Antwerp boomed. The horde of Gujaratis, Israelis, Russians, and European Ashkenazim who made Antwerp the world capital of diamonds were still here, haggling their way through $16 billion worth of rough every year. But not at this hotel.

  The back room overlooked a cluttered courtyard. Directly below the window, the rusty tin roof of the parking shed shuddered in the gusts. A storm of paper and loose dirt eddied in the narrow space.

  “You told Davy I wanted to see him?” I said.

  “He refused.”

  I looked out the front window. The line of cranes stretched down the river. The wind moaned and shrieked in the steel lattices. The water thrashed in a tormented chop. A stubby, orange pilot boat with a rounded bow pitched and rolled as it made for the harbormaster’s pier.

  “Does Davy still get to the restaurant at the same time?”

  “Seven.”

  I put my forehead against the cold windowpane. The rain struck the glass in a steady hail. I hadn’t slept since leaving New York.

  The gale clattered against the front of the hotel. Everything shook and shuddered in the wind. I heard the squeal of ships yankin
g at their moorings and the tormented cries of seabirds flung downwind.

  I sat down on the hard bed. The sound of the storm receded. The dirty gray light at the windows formed into a serpent and crawled down the wall and across the floor toward me. My head felt huge. My right leg stuck out straight in front of me. It wouldn’t bend.

  “Alex,” said a distant voice, “I think you need a doctor.”

  She knelt in front of me and took my hand.

  “Just tired,” someone mumbled.

  She pushed me gently back onto the bed and took off my shirt. She unbuckled my belt and tugged off my pants and sucked in her breath in dismay.

  “Where did this happen?”

  “Lime.”

  I managed to raise my head. The leg was swollen and had a grayish tinge.

  I let my head drop back onto the cheap foam pillow. The room rolled and lifted as it met the tossing sea. I heard Lily unzip her jeans and the bed sagged as she slid beneath the covers. Her body was cold. I breathed the scent of her soap. She pushed one leg between my knees and the bandage on her leg rubbed against the inside of my thigh. It reminded me the leg was sore, but I didn’t care. I searched my mind for something I needed to ask her. My head was whirling with fragments of images.

  “I need to see Piet Louw, Lily.”

  “Yes, darling,” she murmured in my ear. “You’ve been raving about it.”

  “The stone, Lily,” I mumbled.

  She poured her gray gaze over me.

  “Go to sleep,” she said.

  “Davy,” I protested.

  “I set your alarm.”

  She was gone when the alarm went off. I felt as if someone was scrubbing the inside of my skin with sandpaper. I needed to be alert, so the fentanyl would have to wait. I found a drugstore and got some Tylenol and swallowed four.

  * * *

  I stood in the shadows in an arcade on the east side of the Grote Markt and watched the corner of Blauwmoezelstraat. The leg that I’d managed to calm for a while started to claw its way through the Tylenol. If I kept it straight it wasn’t so bad.