by Matthew Hart
Davy appeared just before seven, walking with that slouching gait I knew so well. With his cowboy boots and long white hair he looked like a Jewish Wild Bill Hickok. The toes of his boots curled up like skis. He wore a cashmere coat that fell to his ankles like a cowboy’s duster. The storm had moved on northward into the Netherlands. All that remained was a fitful, soggy wind.
Davy sloshed across the square. The statues of Justice, Prudence, and the Virgin Mary followed his progress from their places high on the ornate facade of the Stadhuis, the old town hall. After he disappeared around the corner of the building, I waited five minutes. No shadows on his tail, so I followed his path across the square.
The last of the clouds blew away and the moon flashed silver light onto the mullioned windows. I made my way around the building to an alley at the back. Davy was already sitting at his favorite table in the window when I came in the front door of the restaurant. The waiter, a sour, doddering Belgian who’d been there for decades, was banging a glass of clear liquid onto the table hard enough to make sure some of it spilled. Davy wrapped his massive workman’s paw around the tiny glass and tossed it back. He caught sight of me as I stepped in.
He shook his massive head slowly and raised one of his calloused hands in a gesture of refusal. I put a hand on his shoulder. He had hoisted me onto that broad shoulder many times when I was a boy.
“Hello, Davy.”
“I told the Russian girl I could not see you,” he said wearily.
I signaled the waiter to bring another glass of Holland gin. I hated the stuff. It tasted like gasoline. But it was Davy’s fuel.
“Can’t a kid come and see his feter?” I said, using the Yiddish word for uncle that I’d used as a child. He waved his hand dismissively.
“That boy has not been around for a long time. That boy used to visit with his lovely papa. Now there is this different boy, the hunter, always hunting, always looking. You want to talk about the big stone.” He shook his head. “I have nothing to say about it. I am bound by confidentiality. I cannot even say whether I have seen this stone.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “Who else would they take it to?”
Davy made a gesture of dismissal, but the compliment struck home. The diamond cutter has not been born who doesn’t think he’s God.
The waiter tottered over with the bottle and another glass, muttering to himself. He slopped some into Davy’s glass. I took the bottle from his hand and gave myself a quarter inch.
“And bring us some hennepot and black bread,” I said as the waiter turned to go.
Davy lifted his glass and drained it. When he thumped the glass back down, I saw that his hand was trembling. Davy had been swimming lengths in Holland gin for a long time. It’s the diamond that decides how it will be cut, Davy liked to say, not the cutter. I don’t know. Ask a dealer how he feels if his stone craps out on the wheel. It’s not the diamond he gets mad at. I’d heard they were getting mad at Davy more often, and maybe the gin had something to do with it.
“This is all under the radar,” I said. “Nothing you say goes anywhere.”
“Bah,” he said. “Nothing is under their radar. You can hide nothing from these people.”
Even with my leg straight out it was sending electric stabs of pain along the nerves.
The waiter arrived with the hennepot and a plate of thickly sliced black bread. He moved the bottle of Holland gin to one side, arranged the food, and left.
I spooned some of the hennepot onto a slice of bread and shoved the plate to Davy. They’ve been making this terrine of chicken, veal, and rabbit in Flanders for six hundred years. It was the specialty that had been bringing Davy to the smoky little restaurant behind the Stadhuis ever since he could pay for his own meals. But he ignored it now.
He finished his glass and filled it again and took a long swallow.
“A stone must have a story,” he said. “Like a person. To understand a person, you must know his story. Where does he come from, who are his parents? But the pink, it had no story.”
“I heard it came from the Chicapa.”
Davy spread his hands. “Where is the frosting? Where in the river did it come from? Who found it, and when, and who else was there?” He leaned forward. “Who attended the birth?”
He studied my face for a moment, as if he had recognized something in it he was trying to identify. The boy I’d been.
“Remember that big white your papa found in Botswana?”
“At Letlhakane.” How could I forget? We had lived there for a year.
“Everyone told your papa that little diamond pipe was barren, but he did not think so. He drilled it and found the little mineral grains that only your papa knew about. They were his secret science.”
“Indicator minerals,” I said.
“And from these tiny minerals,” Davy said, his eyes shining, “your papa knew the pipe was rich with diamonds.”
A pipe is a type of extinct volcano. Diamonds come up from the deep earth in such volcanoes. Most are destroyed by the violent forces of eruption. The trick is to find a pipe where the diamonds survived the journey.
“He invented a technique for analyzing the chemistry of the minerals,” I said. “He knew certain minerals were formed in the same part of the earth where diamonds are formed. He could tell from these minerals what the odds were of recovering large diamonds.”
I was feeling sicker, but the story was helping me keep control. The familiar facts, arranged in the right order.
“And he was right,” said Davy. “He found that 602-carat white. And do you remember how he announced it? The release gave everything: what time of day they found the stone. Who found it. Where it came from in the pipe. The age of the diamond. He called it the Star of Letlhakane. By the time the stone arrived in Antwerp, it was already famous!”
Davy was a great diamond raconteur. He loved the lore of diamonds and his place in it. Davy’s stories often featured the queen of England wowing over some great stone he’d cut. Or maybe it was the former empress of Iran telling Davy how fantastic he was. For a moment I caught sight of the old Davy, the swashbuckling diamond cutter. Buoyed up by the gin, but still Davy.
“The big pink arrived like it had a private shame,” he said. “In Antwerp, we had heard about it. Who had not? We heard the rumors of this fantastic pink, more than a thousand carats. Who can believe such a thing? Surely it is false.” He leaned forward and his eyes glittered through his shaggy eyebrows. “But no! Not false. True!” He slammed his board-like hand on the table. The glasses jumped and I reached out to steady the bottle.
Davy came from an illustrious diamond family. His grandfather, the mathematician André Deich, invented the brilliant cut in 1914 when he published a treatise describing the exact proportions and angles of a fifty-seven-facet, polished diamond that would produce the maximum possible light return, or fire.
“My first sight of the diamond was in Russgem’s building,” Davy said.
They brought him to an empty room on the sorting floor. On a table lay a plain gray metal sorting box. He opened it, and there was the stone.
“I have never seen a stone like this,” he said. “Fragments from the deep earth are still clinging to the diamond.”
“You mean it wasn’t cleaned?”
“It has been cleaned,” he said, “but the earth where it has been born, the mother earth, she does not wish to release her child.”
That’s just how Davy talked.
“It was like a deep lake with a fire burning inside the waters. And the whole appearance—I didn’t dare touch it. It was observing me! When I took it in my hand, I was scared to crush it.”
“Who owned it, Davy, Russgem or Lime or who? Had Nash bought it by then?”
But he was back with the diamond.
“Inside this turbulent stone lies a calm center: the truth of the diamond. An equation lies inside the diamond waiting to be solved. An equation written by God.”
“I’m not writing a newsp
aper feature, Davy,” I said impatiently. I wasn’t sure how long I could stand the pain. “How many polished stones did you get from it?”
“How many?” He stared at me in amazement. “One!”
“One? But I heard the rough weighed something like fifteen hundred carats.”
“It was a monster! I started to put a window in to examine the interior. It shattered! Into pieces! There was the single large stone at the heart of the diamond. An amazing stone! The rest was thin slivers like daggers.”
When a stone is deeply flawed, the heat from the friction of polishing can cause the diamond to blow up on the wheel. Shatter into tiny pieces. Its value destroyed in a second. If the stone Davy had cut from the surviving rough was the 464-carat Russian Pink, a thousand carats had blown into chips.
I got up and waved the waiter over and threw some money on the table. With the rain gone and the skies clearing, more people had wandered down to the old part of the city and the restaurant was filling up.
“Let’s finish this outside, Davy.”
The night air had softened. Davy stamped across the square and we came out at the cathedral. Couples with selfie sticks posed in front of the Gothic stonework, crowding their heads together in the frame to make sure that whoever was checking out their Instagram would not have to waste time looking at the most beautiful mediaeval tracery in Flanders.
“I miss your beautiful papa,” Davy said with a sigh. “He was a great diamond person. I loved him. He was very badly treated in America. He should never have gone back.”
That’s what he thought too. They’d had to extradite him.
A string of white trolleys came rumbling along the brightly lit ring road. We crossed the tracks and strolled up past the smart shopfronts toward the glass dome of the central railway station. Waves of dizziness washed over me. My legs were so swollen they hit each other as I walked.
“It was not your papa’s fault. That other pipe he found—investors always take a risk. Nothing is guaranteed.”
“He cheated them.”
We loitered at a dealer’s window near the diamond quarter. Davy examined the jewels on display.
I could hardly stand. I put my hand on the plate glass window and waited for the nausea to pass.
“The pink blew up on the wheel, Davy. What happened to all the pieces?”
“She took all the pieces.”
“Who?”
“The Chinese one with the blue eyes.”
“Honey Li? She was here?”
He kept staring into the window, his face bathed in light from the display.
“That woman will be more famous than Cleopatra.”
* * *
Somehow I made it back to the river. My head was screaming. Near the hotel I stepped into a shabby bar and drank two double gins.
The front door was locked at the hotel and no one came when I rang the bell. I pounded on the door with my fist. I stood back and would have kicked it off its hinges if the fat woman hadn’t finally come.
When I got to the room I shut the door behind me, found the fentanyl, and swallowed two. I got under the covers and lay there shivering. Slowly the fentanyl pried the fingers from my nerves. I lay there in a state of exhaustion, wanting sleep but unable to escape the hyper-alertness of my mind. I heard every sound on the river, the squeal of a hull against a dock, the long, drawn-out sound of a mooring cable stretching taut as a ship strained against it. I heard the other sound too. The high-pitched double squeak, like a bow drawn back and forth on the string of a violin. Someone had put a foot on the top step—someone who had otherwise climbed silently.
I struggled out of bed. What felt like a load of mud shifted in my brain. I almost passed out. As I made it to my feet, pain flooded up my leg. The right leg of my pants looked ready to burst at the seams. I lost my balance, stumbled hard against the wall and somehow got myself behind the door. A key went in. The door eased open. I summoned the last of my strength, stepped around, and threw the hardest punch I could. An enormous Hassid with red earlocks caught my punch in his hairy paw. Then I passed out.
13
I swam up to the surface of a tepid sea to find myself lying flat on my back on a bed. A room came into focus. Through a window in the opposite wall I could see the branches of a tree, fringed with tiny leaves that shivered in the breeze. Then a thick mist floated in and concealed the tree. When the mist blew past, as if a magician had snapped his cape to complete a magic trick, a lilac-breasted bird with an iridescent turquoise belly sat on the highest branch. It tilted back its head and opened a jet-black beak and delivered a harsh noise—raak raak raak—into the wooly air. Then the magician passed his cape across the window again, and when it snapped away the bird had gone.
Now I heard the distant boom of surf. Then, much closer, the sound of a machine that made a steady whir-thunk, whir-thunk. I turned my head to see an IV bag on a shiny metal stand release a drop of red liquid into a tube that led somewhere out of sight behind my head. I tried to reach for the tube but my hands wouldn’t move. Something was holding my wrists against the bed. By curling my fingers, I could feel the leather manacles. They were lined with a soft material. Identical restraints held my ankles in place.
I struggled. My limbs felt leaden. Sounds drifted into the room—the cries of seabirds and, somewhere closer, a closing door. Human voices exchanged muffled sentences. When I tried to shout, an animal whimpered in my ear, as if it were being tortured by the same fingers that were rummaging inside my head. They could not find what they wanted and began to scratch more fitfully, in bursts of panic. The animal whimpered on my pillow.
A door opened and I heard the sound of rubber flip-flops slapping on the floor. Lily came into the room with a young black man who bent over me. He took out a pencil light and shone it in my eyes, then checked my pulse.
“I’m a doctor,” he said. “Can you hear me?” He had a strong accent that was familiar but which I couldn’t place.
“Head,” I said.
“You have pain in your head?” He touched my forehead with his fingers. They were long and delicate and cool.
“Scratching,” I said.
He nodded.
“You went through a week’s fentanyl supply in two days, so you’re having withdrawal symptoms. I’ll give you something. It won’t be an opioid but it will help you sleep.”
He sat on the edge of the bed.
“We had to restrain you because you were violent and we needed to get started right away on filtering your blood. You had thallium poisoning. Those cuts you received, the blade that made them must have been dipped in the poison. Are you following me?”
I opened my mouth and made a croaking sound.
“I’m cleaning your blood by means of a process called hemoperfusion. There’s a pump behind you. It contains a filter made of artificial cells that are filled with activated carbon. Thallium is a metal, and the thallium molecules get trapped in the carbon.”
Suddenly he gave me a radiant smile, and I could see how young he was. He patted my hand.
“Got all that?”
I recognized the accent. South African.
He gave me the shot. Before I drifted off, Lily took his place on the bed. She studied me with her grave eyes. An errant breeze came in the window and stirred the black coils around the tips of her ears.
She twitched a corner of the blanket into place and left.
I woke to sunlight beating on my face and the lilac-breasted bird with the turquoise belly practicing his lyrics in the tree. A thorn tree. I recognized it now—acacia. I moved a hand to shield my eyes and the bird flew off with a harsh cry—raak raak raak.
They had taken off the restraints while I slept. The pump was gone. My body felt as if everything in it had been taken out and scrubbed with a brush, put back roughly, and stapled into place. Pain nibbled here and there like tiny mice. I felt drenched in chemicals.
Clothes hung neatly over a chair. I crawled out of bed, pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-
shirt. At a sink in the corner I splashed water on my face. It failed to improve the puffy, patched-up mug that stared back from the mirror—dark bags under my eyes and a three-day beard.
A pot of cold coffee sat on the stove in the kitchen down the hall. I poured a cup and walked outside, sat on the sagging porch, and watched the Atlantic Ocean roll onto the beach. Judging by the sun it was midmorning. I thought I knew where Lily might be. We both knew this place well.
Port Nolloth is a biscuit-colored town in Namaqualand, the slab of desert that forms the northwestern corner of South Africa. The frigid Benguela Current scrapes along the coast. Every morning the cold sea rolls a dense band of fog onto the land. It had burned off by the time I set out along the seafront.
The diamond fleet tugged and jingled at its moorings in the anchorage. Fierce riptides battled at the harbor entrance. The ocean boiled in a fury around the offshore reefs. Every now and then a towering sheet of spray exploded from the breakwater as a huge Atlantic comber smashed itself to bits.
The sea was too rough for the tubby little diamond boats that locals call tupperwares. Usually they put to sea at dawn, trailing their suction hoses behind them. When they reached the inshore diamond ground the divers would go over the side. They vacuumed the diamond gravels for hours at a time in the freezing water. Today the wind was up. The surge would turn the shallow seabed where the divers worked into a storm of rocks and sand. The fleet stayed bottled up in port while the crews languished in the bars or headed north for a few days to steal diamonds in Namibia.
I found Lily in the front pew of the Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Morning Mass had just finished. Other than Lily only a few elderly parishioners remained behind, gossiping in whispers in the pews. An old woman with a bright length of calico wrapped around her head and her nylons rolled around her ankles padded up to the altar and began to rearrange a vase of gladioli. I slipped in behind Lily. She knelt with her hands joined in front of her and her eyes closed, her head bent forward so it rested on her hands. I breathed in the faint scent of incense. Under the pale blue vault of the ceiling, a deep silence reigned. The boom of surf crashing on the beach only made the church more peaceful.