Quest

by Richard Ben Sapir

  He was always excited by this. Selling a great stone in some way left a share of it with the seller. He could remember it and remember the look in the buyer’s face. It was almost a sexual sharing of knowing the insides of the ruby.

  Despite his relief, he was as cautious entering his office on Forty-eighth Street as he had been before he had cornered the snake Martins. Before he stepped into the elevator, he knew no one was in his office. No one was waiting outside in the hallway, and no one was waiting in the elevator. The electronics took care of that.

  When he put the key into the first lock of the door, he felt it swing away suddenly, almost drawing him into the room, and before he could get his balance, a hand had his hand and was pulling him down to the floor. The crash chipped a tooth and numbed his nose. Pushing off with a hand to get a kick free, Feldman felt the hand yanked away from him, like a helpless thrashing steer, felt someone tie the hand and whip it across his desk, to his chair.

  He knew enough to bite at the close neck. With life at stake there were no rules, just what you could use. But his teeth met something gummy, and no sounds came out. His mouth was taped. His arms were taped to the chair, and then he noticed that for the first time, no north light fell into the room. The blinds had been drawn down.

  And then the pain began, just under the heart, not a stripping of skin, not a single cut, but a small thrust of a blade, and then wait, and then it went in farther, just a little bit, and then wait, and then just a little bit farther as Feldman writhed in the chair, knowing to his horror he was in the hands of a professional. The tape was going to come off soon. How could he save Artie? Even dying, he had some tricks of his own. Even screaming soundless into tape, he knew he could do something. Eventually, the tape was going to have to come off. That was how it was done. Eventually, he was going to have to talk. When you were in the hands of someone who knew what he was doing, your body was not your own.

  THE VILLAGE OF CHI, A. D. 69

  One day, it would be known as Burma, but in those years it was at the fringe of civilization, the outer garment of the Middle Kingdom, which the world called China. Thus was the Mogok region known, but the girl who found the large ruby did not know it was Mogok. She knew it was home. She knew her father owned her and owned the ruby because she found it. Her highest hopes were to be given extra portions of food for this great discovery that would make her father rich, perhaps even the meat of the duck that important people ate.

  But her father sold her, along with the large ruby, to a merchant who might need sexual company in his travels. The merchant did not take her body, and she thought it was because she was ugly. She had known that a long time. She watched him trim the ruby from the glistening dolomite in which it was found, and still it was an impressive size. If she were allowed to talk to people she would have told everyone she had found it.

  Only when the ruby was trimmed of the white rock in which it was found did she understand why such an ugly girl had been bought. He wanted her to swallow it. She could not do this by herself and he put the large stone in her mouth, tilted up her chin, and with a rounded pole, pushed the stone down her throat. She almost strangled on the sharp hard object, but with a punch into her back, the stone went down.

  “Little one, if you tell anyone about this, they will cut it out of you. Have you ever been cut?”

  She nodded. Her name was Mai.

  “It hurts very much and if they should have to look for it in your belly they will cut a thousand times, and you will die, with your belly cut open. You don’t want that to happen, do you?”

  Mai shook her head.

  He made her wear a thick cloth girdle under her dress, and even though it caused redness and chafed little Mai, he would not let her take it off until she had let waste from her bowels. Then he checked the cloth and poked a small stick through her discharge, and when he was satisfied she had not passed the stone, he let her clean the girdle, and then reattached it with a knot in the back that she could not duplicate if she secretly took off the girdle and tried to replace it.

  Often, as they traveled toward where the sun set, they were stopped by soldiers, or villagers, and once by bandits, and every time they were searched. Once, angered by no passage money, soldiers wanted to take the girl, but the merchant explained she was so ugly, she would cost more to feed than she was worth. They all agreed and let her go as unworthy even of the taking.

  Thus over days and months they passed westward, joining a caravan for safety, and seeing people with round eyes and light skin. Farther west, even stranger people appeared, some with horrible blue eyes, so frightening to the young girl. She heard tales of different gods, of a god of the slaves who died, but conquered death for everyone in so doing.

  She asked if this god also helped ugly slave girls, and she was told by one follower, with tears in his eyes, that Mai was the one dearest to His heart because she was poor and pushed about and considered worthless by others. This glory of the universe loved Mai especially. And it was the first time in Mai’s life she heard anyone loved her. Of course this was too good to be true. Way too good for little Mai whose main ambition was to get the leftovers from the plates of people who mattered. And so she laughed at it.

  She saw jewels on the rich in litters, but none so grand as the one in her belly. Eventually, she came with her master to the largest city in the world, she was told. Rome. They had been traveling months within the empire of this great city.

  And there her master gave her a bag of oil to drink and would not let her wear the girdle anymore but made her wear a tunic that only came down to her waist. And every time she had to move her bowels, which was often now, she had to use a pot, which her master examined by tilting and shaking the bowl because now all her discharge was as loose as the oil he forced her to drink. For two days he made her drink, and for two days he waited for the stone to appear.

  “Girl, if you do not pass the stone by tomorrow, I am going to have to cut it out. I do not wish to do this. You follow orders, and you follow them with heart. I wish to keep you. But I have no choice. That ruby is my fortune. You must pass the stone by morning.”

  Now she knew that if the stone had not succumbed to the oil or all the food she had eaten, certainly it would not pass by morning. So Mai prayed to this god who had died by a shameful execution. He was, after all, the only god for poor slave girls. She prayed all night and forced herself to drink more and more oil, and just before dawn, amidst a great trembling in her body, Mai felt something tear at her rectum. The ruby had passed.

  Her master washed the stone, and so overjoyed was he at seeing it just as it was back in the hem of the center of the world, as China was known, here in the center of the world, as Rome was known, he offered the girl her freedom.

  He sold the ruby to a newly rich Greek who ordered the head of Jupiter carved into it, Jupiter looking suspiciously like the Greek. It was a stone worthy of the pommel of any sword, its redness showing an ability to draw blood and thereby kill.

  Little Mai was burned a few years later for refusing to worship the gods of Rome, choosing instead death for her God, now the center of a despised cult among the civilized. But by the time Mai chose death, she had learned much. She had learned that life was precious, that she was precious, and that what she felt and thought and did was important. That life was more than the scraps from the tables, more even than the greatest bounty on the tables themselves. She knew even in her fear that all they could take from her was a body that had been beaten too much and days that had become too long waiting for her God who loved her. With all their legions and all their roads and weapons, all they could do was send Mai to the God who loved her, the God who cherished ugly slave girls more than empresses and the most beautiful courtesan, a God who saw the hearts, not flesh, a God who died for her, just as she chose to die for him, Jesus, the Christ.

  The Jupiter carving had an easier time making a religious transition. As Christianity became the state religion three centuries later, another la
pidary changed the crown of Jupiter to thorns, and the face to that of Jesus merely by carving in a beard.

  Thus with Christ’s head in the ruby, it could now be set into the pommel of a sword that would slay Christ’s enemies, who happened to be the enemies of every owner of the sword through generations. It slew Visigoth and Gaul, Parsi, and Jew, but mostly it slew Christians because they were the most about. It marched on Jerusalem after the Muslims, tiring of momentary tolerance, leveled Golgotha, where Christ was crucified, cut away the limestone sepulchre where He had lain, and slaughtered every Christian in the city.

  And in recapturing Jerusalem, it slew Muslim and Jew before it was lost to the armies of Sal A Din, whereupon it slew Christians and Jews, but mostly Muslims in ensuing generations because they were the most about.

  It did not protect an owner from Shiite killers stoked on Islam and hashish who would terrorize the Middle East and give the world the name assassin, until Hulagu, grandson of Genghis Khan, found the one way to stop these assassins. It was the Mongol way. He took Baghdad, the home of the Shiite assassins, and slaughtered every Muslim in the city, bringing a rare century of peace to the area.

  The Christ’s head left the sword because only fools believed it could draw blood, when every Mongol knew its real purpose was to prevent bleeding. If worn around the neck, it could stop the bleeding from the stomach. It fell into the hands of a Mongol Shaman, whose great-grandson traded it to a Persian merchant, who traded it to a Christian knight, where it found itself at the end of a sword again. And knowing it was envied by a baron who would eventually somehow get it, the knight gave this great red stone to a local abbey for the indulgence of not only past sins, but, as the good abbot promised, any sin the knight might commit now or in the future. He gave it away for a guarantee of heaven.

  Now this abbey, like many in England, untaxed like subjects of the Crown, became rich in land and jewels. And Henry VIII, who saw the Spanish emperor grow rich from the gold of the Americas, and the Portuguese grow rich from the trade of the Far East, found himself with precious few returns from the leftover colonies of the world, mainly a place called Virginia.

  And he was a spendthrift. It did not hurt that he had profound theological differences with Rome. And there were the abbeys, always suspect for allegiances to Rome. In less time than incense rose to the ceilings of Canterbury, royal commissions were sent to the abbeys to assure they practiced true Christianity, to root out such things as homosexuality, licentiousness, gluttony, and Popery. Almost every wealthy abbey and convent, as it turned out, suffered from one of the above, and the great Christ’s head ruby quickly found its way into the hands of the King, and shortly thereafter onto the neck of Anne Boleyn, and then back again to Henry’s hand before the executioner’s sword, and then to his son Edward, who left it to his stepsister Elizabeth, Anne’s daughter, for whom it represented an aching memory, only relieved at Tilbury where she found a suitable place for it, forever out of public sight and memory until a janitor in a Forty-eighth Street office building in New York City, smelling something sweetly foul coming from one of the offices, called the police.

  NEW YORK CITY, THE PRESENT

  With a warrant, they broke in to find a gems dealer, Norman Feldman, sixty-seven, of West Eighty-seventh Street, dead in his office chair, his dark eyes open and cloudy with that stupid look of the dead.

  Inside one of the common unlocked drawers was a large red stone labeled and seized by the NYPD, and identified by Frauds/Jewels as an eighty-seven-karat pigeon’s blood ruby with enough power in it to set off an industry.

  The body was gone when Artie got to the office, but the stench remained, and it was so strong, his clothes would have to be cleaned to get it out. Marino and McKiernan were there. They had in a white lacquered wood box a large red stone big as a jumbo egg with Christ’s head engraved on it.

  Artie pulled up the blinds, to let in the north light.

  “What’re you doin’?” asked McKiernan. “People can look in.”

  “It’s the right way to do it,” said Artie and his voice cracked. “It’s got to be the north light. That’s how you see these stones.”

  As Feldman had showed him so many years before, he put the jeweler’s loupe to his eye and looked into the belly of the Christ’s head ruby. Now he understood what Norman had been talking about all these years.

  There was not just light in that ruby, there was a great energy. It was set ablaze. It danced. It roared big and wild, with all the strength of inner earth. It was not five times the power of a smaller ruby; it was awesomely more powerful.

  Suddenly the jeweler’s loupe clouded. Artie clasped the ruby in the center of his left palm and removed the loupe with his right. It was wet. What a crazy stupid way to look through a jeweler’s loupe, with tears coming out of your eyes.

  Artie handed the ruby to Marino.

  “It’s real,” he said. “It’s very real.”

  Marino opened the top of the small wood box.

  “Don’t put a ruby in a wood box. Don’t ever put it there,” said Artie. “Rubies are fragile. A drop on wood can crack them. You got to be careful with a ruby.” Artie did not look at the black-stained chair of poor Norman Feldman, his friend who obviously never did the killings with the tape, who may have never lied ever to Artie, Artie was realizing now, too late now with Norman’s body bloated, swollen, taped, and violated, according to the police pictures Artie had been forced to look at. Norman, whom he never understood. Norman, who hadn’t been lying.

  “Hey, don’t get so hot about a ruby, Modelstein,” said McKiernan.

  “I’m not fuckin’ mad. It’s a ruby, asshole. You treat it right. You do things right. Do something right, once. You don’t keep a ruby in a wood box where it can rattle around.”

  “That’s how we found it, asshole,” said McKiernan.

  “Not here, you didn’t,” said Artie.

  “Here,” said McKiernan.

  “He’s right, Artie,” said Marino softly, Marino, who understood that human beings were allowed to cry and grieve and that Feldman had been Modelstein’s friend and also that Modelstein was ready to tear things apart.

  “Couldn’t be,” said Artie. He did not look at McKiernan. If he did, he might swing.

  “It was hidden. Here,” said Marino, pulling out a drawer in the desk. “In the box in this drawer.”

  Artie recognized the box now. It was Feldman’s paper clip box. And that was the drawer he kept it in.

  Inside the drawer were some letters, an old bottle of Scripps ink, but no paper clips.

  “Any paper clips on the floor?” asked Artie.

  “What?” asked Marino.

  “Paper clips. Paper clips. You see any?”

  McKiernan spotted a couple under a radiator. Another paper clip lay against the bookcase, and one lay on one of the shelves of the bookcase.

  “I know what happened. The killer opened this drawer. Maybe he sat on the desk as he did the job on Norman,” said Artie.

  “No,” said McKiernan. “He had to stand.”

  “Why?” asked Artie.

  Marino took an envelope out of his pocket and on the back of it drew a staircase.

  “Feldman’s knife wound wasn’t just a knife wound,” said Marino. “Sometimes to identify a knife that killed someone, they’ll pour liquid metal into the wound. It hardens. Gives the exact shape of the blade.”

  “That’s a strange blade,” said Artie.

  “That’s not the blade,” said McKiernan. “That’s the imprint the pathologist made.”

  “So?” said Artie.

  McKiernan, pretending he had a knife in his hand, faced it toward Artie and pushed. He pushed the invisible knife, paused, pushed upward again, paused, and pushed upward.

  “Somebody walked the knife into Feldman’s heart. Push, raise, pause, push again,” said McKiernan. “He had to stand in front of him to do it.”

  Artie felt the room darkening around the edges.

  “How far was t
he desk from the chair?”

  “You can’t read the chair marks?” said McKiernan, pointing to the floor, where the chair was outlined. It had been next to the desk. “Feldman was taped to the chair. Broke a bone trying to wrench free.”

  “Close to the desk, huh?” asked Artie.

  “You don’t look too good,” said Marino.

  “Better get some fresh air,” said McKiernan.

  “Okay, the killer is close to the desk, gets the ruby, and looks for a quick place to dispose of it. Finds the box, throws the clips away, and then leaves it for us to believe he never found it.”

  “You can’t prove that in court,” said Marino. “Feldman could have put it there.”

  “I am telling you, Norman Feldman would hide a ruby, that ruby especially. Norman Feldman would swallow it and cut the stone out later. I know the man. I knew the man. I knew a little bit,” said Artie, closing his fingers together, “about rubies. You don’t put them in wood boxes to rattle around.”

  “Who in God’s name would leave a ruby like that?” asked Sebastiano Marino, who had hit the point square on.

  “Somebody who’s after revenge,” said McKiernan.

  “You don’t just leave a stone like this,” said Artie, taking it back from Marino and holding the red egg-size stone engraved with Jesus in thorns up to eye level, where it seemed to radiate in his hands. “You could cut this baby four ways and retire with four fortunes. Four ways, there’s no trace on this thing, and even if there were a trace, in most of the world it wouldn’t matter. Whoever has it, owns it.”

  “That,” said Marino, “is scary.”

  Detective Marino understood what Modelstein had been explaining—that whoever had done the killings was not someone lured by the jewels, but something greater than even this ruby, which Modelstein had described as awesome, more like an event than even a piece of property. He understood that in the killer’s scheme of things to be found with that ruby was not worth endangering what he was after. That was why the ruby was left.