by Matthew Hart
“Let me tell you how this works,” I said. “Let’s say you decide to sell the diamond. You take it to one of the big auction houses. They don’t laugh in your face, because you’re Harry Nash.”
Nash tried on a lazy grin, but it wouldn’t stick, so he screwed around with his phone as if he wasn’t really paying attention. Honey, though—she was watching me fearfully.
“The auction house will stall for time. They’ll say that for a stone like this they need at least three independent labs to certify it. You waste another couple of months getting the extra certificates, but guess what? When you come back the auction guys say the market’s not good at the moment. They don’t advise selling. Demand is soft. So you wait a year and try again. But you’ll get the same answer. They’ll never try to sell your diamond. They’re afraid of it.”
He wasn’t looking at his phone now, and Honey was clutching the diamond to her breast as if to give it life.
“Bullshit,” Nash said. “The certificates prove the value of the stone.”
“They don’t. A certificate is a piece of paper. It describes a physical object. Nothing more. Only a dealer can say what the diamond is worth. Anyone likely to think of buying a jewel like the Pink would never do so without the guidance of one of the two or three dealers in the world competent to judge it. Ask yourself what they’re likely to say to their clients. They’ll say don’t touch it. It’s tainted. You took what could have been the most valuable jewel in history and slimed it. You made it part of a stock play. An essential part of the scheme was raising doubts about whether the diamond was even what it was supposed to be. You’ll never get back from that.”
In the diamond game a buyer’s fear of being taken for a fool is the single biggest hurdle a dealer has to clear before he makes a sale. That’s the same whether it’s an inexpensive engagement ring or a ninety-carat, top-color white. Diamonds have a secret language, and the buyer knows he will never learn to speak it. The dealer has to get the client to trust him. Who would trust Nash?
Honey’s knuckles were white as she clutched the diamond. God help her, I think she loved it.
Nash stood up and looked at her. There can’t have been many times in his life when something he’d planned had come apart. He looked bewildered, and for just a second, fearful for his wife. But when he turned his eyes to me, he’d got back to a place where he was comfortable. Scorn.
“You’ve got everything figured out, is that it?” he said. “You nailed the short, and Bolt used that information to force me out?”
Contempt radiated from him. Honey reached out a warning hand.
“Harry. No.”
“Play it out,” he said. “How does Bolt shame me off the ticket? By revealing I was behind the short? She can’t do that without blowing herself up too.”
He shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his coat and looked around at the mansion, as if annoyed to find himself still there.
“If she carried out such a threat, it would wreck her. I’d say it had been her idea, and let’s face it, it was.”
“Harry,” Honey pleaded again. “It’s enough.”
But he kept his eyes fixed on me.
“So she doesn’t reveal it to the public, does she? Who does she talk to?”
You think nothing can surprise you. But I hadn’t seen this.
“Your partners,” I said. “The Russians.” I thought it through. “She told them you were permanently crippled. That if the details of your deal with them came out, the deal that let you control the fund, you’d never be able to help them. She convinced the Russians, and they convinced you.”
He forced a smile onto his face. An expression hacked out by a blade.
“Next time you’re in the office,” he said, “see if there are any orders to unfreeze Russian bank accounts.”
“Maybe she set you up from the beginning,” I said, getting up to leave. “You were always her Trojan horse to get to the nomination. She must have suspected you’d try to take the presidency for yourself. If she had a deal with your Russian partners, who knows when she made it?”
He made a gun out of his hand, pointed it at me, and pulled the trigger.
“Now you’re getting somewhere.”
* * *
Tommy was waiting outside to drive me to LaGuardia. He still had the Impala. Minnie liked it.
I reviewed my conversation with Nash. He waved his hand.
“The bad guy speech at the end of the movie.”
“Cut the bullshit, Tommy. Bolt screwed everybody. You helped her. You got your reward.”
He shrugged. “You can’t play the game if you’re not on the field.”
“Come on, Tommy. I’d be surprised if you even know who the teams are.”
Tommy wasn’t taking me to the airport as a favor. That’s not where things stood with us. Our friendship had been punched too many times to be getting off the canvas anytime soon. But Tommy was my boss now, and extended leave or not he needed to make sure I understood what the consequences would be if I revealed what I knew. I’d thought Bolt and I understood each other, but I guess she thought I needed the message driven home by a hammer like Tommy.
I listened to his heavy-handed message as we went up the FDR. Traffic was snarled at the toll gates on the Triborough Bridge and slow through the tangle of construction around the airport. I waited until we got to the departures drop-off. We sat there for a few minutes, both of us staring straight ahead.
“I thought you knew me better,” I said. “Nobody has anything to fear from me. But that’s a two-way street. So make it clear when you report this conversation that if somebody gets nervous about me, and so much as a shadow of a threat falls across my family, I’ll come back. You will never see me coming. And so help me God, I will pull the house down.”
We still hadn’t looked at each other, and he didn’t look at me when he replied.
“Everybody knows you’re a serious guy, Alex.”
“I sure hope so, Tommy.”
* * *
The flight to Montreal arrived late in the afternoon, the sky already shading to purple. My car had been sitting in long-term parking at the airport since I’d left it there on my way to Brussels. A truck came out from a garage to boost the battery, and I followed him back for an oil change. Another $250 got it detailed at a carwash. A 1978 BMW 530i. Metallic blue. Four-speed manual, like pushing a knife through butter.
I drove onto the expressway that led into the city. The first flakes of an early snowstorm slanted through the headlights.
Half an hour later I tossed the keys to the valet at a downtown hotel and checked into a room on the top floor. I changed into a bathing suit, grabbed the bathrobe, and walked the short distance to the pool. I dropped the robe and slipped into the heated water and swam through the narrow tunnel that led outside into the gathering snow. Wisps of vapor rose from the bright-blue water. The lights climbing up the side of Mount Royal glimmered through the gauze curtain of the snow. The pool was empty except for a lone swimmer slowly doing lengths.
I stood with the water to my waist. The snow fell more thickly now, and the lights of the city filled the sky with a soft glow. The traffic streaming across the St. Lawrence River bridges melted into a magical tableau of drifting lights and rising steam and the white cascading sky.
The swimmer turned at the end of the pool and came crawling back: strong, thin arms pulling through the turquoise water and the falling snow. As she passed, I sank to my chest and swam beside her.
The snow danced around her elvish ears. The wind shifted into the north and came rushing down the mountain with a howl, erasing the city. We sank to our chins in the water and watched the blizzard stream through the sky.
Later, in the room, as she watched me with her speculative Russian eyes, I reached under a pillow and pulled out the little package I’d hidden there. Lily sat up and unwrapped it eagerly, flinging the paper aside until she got to the dark-green velvet of the innermost layer. Her eyes shone as she ra
n her fingers over the rectangular shape. She folded back the fabric reverently. The Virgin and child emerged in a blaze of gold leaf. He didn’t look so irritable this time. Lily sighed and pressed the icon against her naked breast.
“Alex, that is so adorable.” She held the icon out at arm’s length and tilted her head. “Did you steal it from poor, dead Sergei?”
“At the time, he wasn’t dead.”
“That makes it so much better,” Lily beamed.
We’d left the curtains open to watch the snow fill up the city. I was wondering what we would do in the morning. Drive further into the snow.
She lay back in the pillows and cradled the icon in her arms.
I told her about Nash and Honey Li.
“Yes,” she said dreamily, holding the icon out again to ravish it with her eyes, “they destroyed the reputation of the jewel. Call it moral closure.”
“Well, the bad guy’s still a billionaire and his Russian partners got away with murder, so maybe not.”
“You worry too much. There were rules Sergei lived by. He should have told them about the pipe from the beginning. They were Russians, darling,” she said, running her finger down the edge of the gold frame. “There were worse ways he could have died.”
The snow brushed by the window like tufts of cotton wool. A soft blue light fell on Lily’s face and on her breasts.
She’d never looked more beautiful. Maybe that’s why I searched so desperately for an explanation other than the one right there in front of me. How would Lily know there were worse ways to die if she didn’t know how Lime had died? It was the detail we’d never released.
I reached up and pushed a lock of hair away from the tip of her ear.
I went through the short list of people who knew the manner of Lime’s death, and discarded each one as a possible source for Lily. I pulled each name aside, one by one, like veils, until I could see Lily clearly, as I suppose, at the end, so had Lime, his last sight on earth her calm gray eyes.
I had no illusions about Lily. Nor Lily about me. The five million we stole from Nash had become $62 million, thanks to Great Pipe. Lily had got in early and bailed when the price hit eighty dollars. She’d seen the short coming a mile away. Naturally she’d tried to get the money out of her Luxembourg account before I twigged.
We left in the morning and drove north into the mountains, into the snow.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to the many friends who read drafts: Ellen Vanstone, Cathrin Bradbury, Jefferson Lewis, Stephanie Wood, Douh Knight, Carlos Pitella Leite, Clair Lamb, Alex Beam, and my longtime agent, Michael Carlisle. Special thanks to Susan Walker and Paul Maloney for their meticulous reading of the galleys. I’m grateful to my friend, the editor and agent Trena Keating, for early advice and for pointing me to Leslie Wells, a veteran editor with an unerring eye for pace; and to my editor at Pegasus, Jessica Case, for her enthusiasm. My greatest thanks as always are to my wife, Heather Abbott, a merciless reader of drafts.
Those who’ve shared their diamond expertise over the years are too numerous to list, but I must thank my friend Richard Wake-Walker, the distinguished diamond valuator; Donald Palmieri, whose Gem Certification & Assurance Lab in New York has certified such staggering diamonds as the 1,111-carat Lesedi la Rona; and Chris Jennings, one of the great diamond explorers, with whom I’ve spent many happy hours discussing our mutual obsession and the outlandish characters who populate it. Any errors are mine, never theirs.
My account of the market in junior exploration stocks comes from knowledge gained writing books about two colossal contests: the 1983 Hemlo gold rush on the north shore of Lake Superior, and the 1991 Arctic diamond rush, which began when explorers drilled through the ice of a frozen lake and hit a diamond pipe—a discovery that made Canada the world’s third largest diamond producer. The market that makes such discoveries possible is a hair-raising casino—if anything, even crazier than the version depicted here, as the author, sadly, can attest.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Matthew Hart has reported on gold and diamonds for Vanity Fair, the Atlantic Monthly, the Wall Street Journal, the London Times, and many other newspapers and magazines. He was a contributing editor of the New York trade journal Rapaport Diamond Report. His award-winning book Diamond: The History of a Cold Blooded Love Affair, was translated into six languages and made into a four-hour dramatic miniseries starring Sir Derek Jacobi and Judy Davis. His book Gold: The Race for the World’s Most Seductive Metal was adapted into a National Geographic television special. He has travelled from the Arctic to Angola in pursuit of diamond stories, and The Russian Pink is his first thriller. He lives in New York City.
NON-FICTION BY MATTHEW HART
Diamond: the History of a Cold-Blooded Love Affair
The Irish Game: a True Story of Crime and Art
Gold: the Race for the World’s Most Seductive Metal
THE RUSSIAN PINK
Pegasus Crime is an imprint of
Pegasus Books, Ltd.
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Copyright © 2020 by Matthew Hart
First Pegasus Books cloth edition November 2020
Interior design by Maria Fernandez
Jacket design by Faceout Studio, Molly Von Borstel
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN: 978-1-64313-550-2
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-64313-551-9
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