Stone 588

by Gerald A. Browne

  "So why even mention it to me?"

  "You've got to understand. I do business with this guy off and on. For years we've been doing business."

  Springer twisted a sliver of lemon peel above the surface of his espresso, saw the blue oily film it made, stirred it away with a little spoon. He glanced around indifferently as though he'd already dropped the subject. He knew the best way to press Danny was to not press him.

  Danny again heavy-lidded his eyes at Audrey. She winked at him to defuse him. He got back to Springer, told him, "Townsend."

  "You're shitting me."

  "No."

  "The same man by that name that I know?"

  "He goes for swag now and then."

  "The fuck."

  "Just one of many," Danny said. "Actually he goes for swag more often than now and then."

  Springer wouldn't have been nearly as surprised had the goods not been his own. Nor as angry if the buyer had been anyone other than Townsend. He reminded himself that Townsend had no way of knowing the swag he'd bought was from Springer & Springer. Thieves never said, buyers never asked. Townsend wouldn't know. Goods were goods. Swag was swag.

  Except . . .

  Except for that one stone, stone 588. The one Springer so desperately wanted back. Townsend had seen it. That night at Libby's he'd had a good look at it, would recognize it the moment he saw it again. Sure, Townsend would see it and know exactly whose stolen goods he'd bought. He had seen Libby's hands, seen what the stone could do. No matter how much he doubted that part, he couldn't dismiss it entirely. Too much in it for him if the stone wasn't bullshit. Townsend would find a way of proving it out. Then he'd offer it to the highest bidder. Just that afternoon Libby had seriously said she would have paid a hundred million for it. Someone else might make it two hundred million.

  What irony.

  A dirty diamond that wasn't a diamond, a stone The System had forced on Springer's father as punishment, that his father had probably come close to throwing away in disgust, probably would have if there hadn't been a tax advantage in keeping it in the inventory, that his father had drawn hardening caution from each day when it lay in that little silver tray on his dresser top among mere collar stays—now, as it turned out, point for point, carat for carat, it was by far the most precious thing in the world.

  A measure of that. Springer thought, was how much he himself now needed it for Jake.

  Perhaps, Springer wildly suggested to himself, he could go see Townsend. Appeal to him. Come right out and tell him why he had to have stone 588 for a few hours. Promise him whatever it took. Leave a million cash deposit. Even pay him a million just to rent it for that long. Townsend, of course, would simply deny any knowledge of the stone, act offended.

  Then perhaps what he'd do was get in to see Townsend on some pretext.

  Put a gun to his ear. Demand the stone. Tell the fuck to keep all the other goods, just come up with that one stone. Would he kill Townsend if he didn't comply? Springer pictured himself being led away in cuffs and Townsend, indignant and shaken, telling the police his omissive but credible side of the story as he filed charges.

  So what should he do? What other option was open to him? It galled Springer to know at that very moment the stone was in Townsend's vault only a few miles away, just lying there. Like Jake, just lying there. Somehow he had to get the two together.

  Audrey ordered zabaglione and berries.

  Springer another espresso, his third.

  Danny loosened his tie slightly and undid his collar button. He'd said hardly anything for the last couple of minutes, letting Springer ease himself down. He figured from the silence that was what Springer was doing.

  Springer placed his forearms on the table and leaned forward to ask Danny in a hushed tone, "Can Townsend's place be taken?"

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Townsend's."

  "Depends. What's he got, a house, an apartment, or what?"

  "His business place on Fifth."

  "You're out of your fucking mind."

  "I mean it."

  "Nobody takes a place like that right on Fifth. While you're at it why don't you also knock off Tiffany and Cartier and Winston? Shit."

  "Has anyone ever tried?"

  "Who enjoys being in the joint that much? Do yourself a three-to-five-year favor and forget it."

  Audrey stopped eating her zabaglione, that taken with what she was hearing. "I think it's a superb idea," she said.

  Danny smiled. He liked the way she'd said superb. Not great or wonderful but superb. He told her, "Stealing is dangerous."

  "I'd be disillusioned if it wasn't," she said archly.

  "Amateur hour," Danny said. "You just don't know."

  "But we're more than willing to learn." Audrey, wide-eyed, hung on Springer's shoulder conspiratorially, not about to be left out of this.

  Shades of Gillian, Springer thought. His teeth were on edge and he couldn't keep his hands or arms still. He blamed the espresso. Eyes to eyes, unequivocally, he told Danny, "It's what I've got to do."

  Danny's face soured. "I never realized you were such a bad loser. Tell the truth, I'm ashamed of you."

  "Not for the goods. I've got to do it for Jake."

  "I don't get it."

  Springer was reluctant to tell Danny about stone 588. He was sure he knew how he'd react to it. Danny's perspective had always been street level, where not much was ever left to the imagination. People like Danny believed only what they saw and, even then, only after their hands were on it.

  Springer told him as briefly and credibly as he could.

  Danny got up and went to the men's room.

  Couldn't blame him, Springer thought. It wasn't easy to tell a longtime friend he'd jumped the tracks.

  Danny took his time coming back to the table. He picked up his anisette glass, shook the coffee bean from it into his mouth, ground the bean with his back teeth. His expression was blank. He could do that to his face whenever he wanted or had to, make it absolutely unreadable.

  "There's an old lady," he said, "lives a couple of blocks from here. Named Mrs. Perella. She pours salt on a black Formica table, just salt, ordinary salt. Makes circles and lines in it and then tells you what's going to happen. Half the guys in this room go to see her, wanting to know if they should make this move or that move, but mainly wanting to know whether or not they're going to live another month."

  "You ever go to see her?"

  Danny smiled. "Some months twice." He went on about Mrs. Perella, said she also had jettatura, the evil eye.

  Springer patiently listened to how a certain capo hired Mrs. Perella to sit in the courtroom every day of his trial so she could hex the federal prosecutors with her black glance. Everyone on Arthur Avenue swore that was how the capo got acquitted.

  Finally, Springer put it to Danny. "What do you think, is there any chance at all that Townsend's can be taken?"

  For whatever reason, Danny's attitude was considerably changed. "Maybe not," he said, "but like we always say, anything is possible when you've got the right people."

  Also at the Vesuvio Restaurant that night were Fred Pugh and Jack Blayney, the two State Department spooks. Blayney liked spaghetti but he wasn't very good at winding it and getting it to his mouth without dripping red sauce on his rie or fly or somewhere. Pugh was more sensible. He had veal piccata. Their table was about twenty feet from Springer, Audrey, and Danny, so they weren't able to overhear anything. That didn't matter with the angle Pugh had.

  He saw every word they said.

  Chapter 27

  Walter Strand.

  Sat on the concrete bench and enjoyed the gusts of the wakes of the cars that sped past on Connecticut Route 37. He could have taken the bus into Danbury. They had provided a bus, and Strand now wasn't sure he shouldn't have taken it. Not that he was impatient. He'd always been long on patience; it was one of the things that had helped see him through.

  He was too warm just sitting there. Nothing,
not a leaf or a cloud, was between him and the sun, and the white shirt he'd put on fresh less than an hour ago was wilting on him. The suit Patricia had brought up for this day when she'd last visited in March was the wrong suit. Right weight for then, wrong for now. A hard wool, gray. It probably hadn't occurred to her it would be wrong. Strand didn't want to believe she hadn't cared enough to have it occur to her. Anyway, the tie she'd chosen went well. Felt good to have a tie on again.

  He wished he was going to be with Patricia rather than be picked up by these people. It was too soon for these people, no matter what. That had almost been his answer to Danny Rags, would have been if Patricia had waited. He didn't blame her, though. Didn't like it but didn't blame her.

  Strand looked across the road to the Texaco station. Clean, well-kept station with a modest white frame house in back. Someone in business for himself and doing well enough to be satisfied with that illusion. Strand thought, aware of his own bitter-edged perspective. He heard the sharp, compressive shots of a grease gun, saw the station owner in the repair port servicing a car that was up on the hoist.

  A Ford pickup pulled in for gas.

  Strand observed the transaction.

  After the truck was gone the station owner wiped up some oil droppings. He glanced across to Strand, greeted him with a raise of his hand. Decent of him. Strand thought. No doubt, being right there across the road, he knew what Strand was. Strand vetoed the notion of going over and talking with the guy. His wrist watch told him eleven thirty-four. He was early. He was early, and probably these people would be late. The wrist watch was an 18K vintage Vacheron & Constantin that required winding. Strand could never look it in the face without being reminded that it had come from the hit of some house out on Long Island. Part of the first package, right after he'd bought the team. He'd never been able to convince himself that the watch was his, and numerous times he'd considered going into one of those Madison Avenue stores and overpaying for a watch just so he would feel he really owned it. He never got around to doing that. Even when he was looking in the shop window and the shop was open, he never got around to it. An infectious point of view, takers keepers.

  Strand smoothed his hair in back, an unconscious habit triggered early and still going off because of the cowlick he'd always had. That tuft contributed to the impression that Strand was younger than forty-five. So did the shade of his hair, a variegated sandy brown with blond in it rather than gray. The natural tendency of his hair in front was to grow forward, also a bit boyishly, concealing his hairline and cutting down on his ample, nearly perpendicular forehead.

  The right half of Strand's face was the dominant half, although anyone would have to be interested to notice. His nose, well indented at its root between his brow ridges, was straight and narrow enough, but it had a ball at its tip. His left eye was smaller than his right. The irises of his eyes were a blue-gray, so striated it was as if baguettes were set around his pupils. He had wide-open, alert-looking eyes, but there was deliberation and caution in the unhurried way they shifted from one thing to another. It seemed he was always anticipating what he would be seeing next, was never surprised. The most telling barometer of Strand's temperament was his chin. When he was angry or passionate the cleft in it deepened; when calm or pleased it was hardly perceptible.

  Starlings were perched on one of the telephone wires that ran overhead.

  Strand counted the birds. Eleven identical black shapes against the sky. Why were they just sitting up there? Gossiping about which and which had spent the night together, or were they making arrangements for the night to come? Where, Strand wondered, would he be spending tonight? He had to stop thinking about Patricia. Distance and circumstances that excluded were also penitentiaries.

  Strand got up.

  He walked down the roadside, crunching pebbles beneath him. It took him only a couple of minutes to reach the vegetable stand, an outside-inside place selling from tilted bushel baskets. He bought one large tomato and asked the woman minding the place if there was anywhere he might wash it. She washed it for him. Gave him a bit of salt and a section of paper towel. He appreciated how thoughtful it was of her.

  It was going to take time for him to get used to extra things like that.

  On his way back to the bench he walked alongside the native stone retaining wall that bordered the grassy slope of the prison grounds. It was a steep, expansive slope and the prison structures were situated over its shoulder, out of sight except for the shiny peaks of a couple of roofs and a water tower. A concrete plaque inset into the wall was the only way of knowing a prison was up there, federal correctional institution the plaque read.

  Strand hadn't known anyone in there who was being corrected.

  The three years he had done inside were part of a five-year possibility. Two off for good behavior. Neutral behavior was more like it. From the first day in. Strand had socialized as little as he could, and once the other inmates realized that was how he was going to be, that was what he needed to be to make it, they didn't get on him about it.

  He was quiet. He didn't laugh much. He didn't work. He could have made a dime an hour just going through the motions of stabbing up litter around the grounds or a dollar fifty an hour painting cell blocks or whatever, but he hadn't needed the money or the therapy. He kept his body up by jogging a few miles three times a week and in between doing no-strain workouts with weights. Each week, without fail, he solved the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle. Did a part of it each night, rationed it to himself so he'd still have twenty downs and twenty acrosses yet to do come Saturday night.

  Thus Strand put himself in limbo, a sort of animate cryogenic state.

  He hadn't appealed his three-to-five-year sentence. He knew he was going to have to do the time, so he figured he might as well do it and get it over with. They had him cold. Receiving stolen goods and transporting them across state lines. The state lines part made it a federal offense.

  That he'd been caught by accident was something he sometimes found amusing. It had been on a Saturday night. He was driving his purposely modest Chevette up to Stamford to show swag to one of his regular buyers, a private. About five miles beyond the Greenwich toll station there was a tie-up: cars inching along as far as Strand could see. An accident, he thought, and resigned himself to the delay.

  Actually it was a roadblock by the Gonnecticut State Police, checking for drunk drivers. They would stop Strand, not even ask him to get out of the car, just prompt him to say a few words to get a whiff of his breath and detect any drunken slurring. He hadn't even had a beer, so there wasn't going to be a problem.

  The problem was the unhappy woman in the Honda Prelude behind him. She'd been crying into bourbon-Sevens since afternoon. She stalled her car and had some trouble restarting it. When she finally did get it going she stomped down on the accelerator, smashed into the rear end of Strand's Chevette, knocked out its taillights, and sprang open its trunk.

  A state trooper came. He surveyed the situation and the damage. He also got a look into Strand's trunk. Part of the swag was a pair of six-arm Georgian silver candelabras that the buyer had expressed interest in. Really large, heavy ones. And some other silver pieces. Over a thousand ounces altogether. Strand had them wrapped in newspaper and packed well in cardboard cartons, but the impact of the Honda had scattered them.

  The trooper spotted the silver but didn't say anything to Strand. He radioed. Two other troopers arrived. They put a few roundabout questions to Strand and then some straighter, to the point, and although he gave plausible replies, it all soon became quite obvious.

  He was promised he'd only do a year if he gave up his people. Scoot and the others, but he didn't go for that. He liked to think Scoot wouldn't have gone for it either. The thing about it that pissed Strand was that none of the fences he knew had ever done a day of time and some had been dealing for twenty-five years. And here he'd been into it for only four years.

  Before then he'd been straight.

 
Well on his way to being a master jeweler.

  He had apprenticed in Chicago and New York and also in Paris with the old, prestigious firm of Chaumet. It was his Chaumet experience that landed him the position with Townsend. A prize of a job, the Townsend job. Only a rung from the top, and Strand was already professionally capable of taking that step.

  He knew every phase of fine jewelry making. Given the materials, the chunks of gold or platinum and the precious stones, he could fashion a piece entirely by hand no matter how complicated: every detail graceful, every mounting snug. It got to a point where some of the custom pieces he'd made were known for having been done by him. The owner of a magnificent ruby and diamond suite, for example, was proud to be able to say it had been executed by Strand. That fact was mentioned as an attribute for a number of pieces that appeared in the catalogues of important jewelry auctions at both Sotheby's and Cristie's.

  In 1979 Strand had every reason to feel secure and sanguine about his future.

  On a midmorning in the autumn of that year a well-known actress and prodigal customer huffed into Townsend's. Townsend met with her in his office behind closed doors. After about a half hour Strand was summoned. He was shown a diamond bracelet and asked if recently he'd been responsible for seeing that it was cleaned and all its settings checked—something Townsend advised all his customers have done periodically with their important pieces.

  Strand remembered the bracelet well. It was made up entirely of pear-shaped one-carat diamonds. He also recalled, as they were shown to him, two diamond necklaces, another channel-set bracelet, and several brooches and clips belonging to the actress that had been in for service at that same time a few months previous.

  Townsend brusquely requested that Strand examine each piece closely. Did he see any discrepancies?

  Strand couldn't say that he did. He was, naturally, looking more at the structure of the pieces than their stones. And the trouble was with the stones. Someone, the actress claimed, someone at Townsend's—it couldn't have been elsewhere because the only other places the pieces had been were in her bank strongbox and on her body—had replaced many of the stones with synthetics. She had discovered the fact quite by chance when a personal acquaintance who happened to be a wholesale diamond dealer remarked about them and, as a favor, checked them out. She'd never in her life been so taken aback as when she learned many of the stones were fakes. She'd never been so taken period, she said. She was furious, genuinely, not playing a scene.