“It’s that store,” she said. “You have to be careful of that place. It has a bad effect on people. It makes some things too easy.”
Wait. I was confused. Is she talking about Jim and me?
“Jim says I should go home for Christmas,” I said. Then I wished I hadn’t introduced his name. She hadn’t said “Jim” yet. “My girlfriend Wendy is back there.”
“I know you have a girlfriend,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me that. It is nice to have a girlfriend. I don’t mind your girlfriend.”
She lit the pipe for herself, smoked it, and then quickly handed it to me while the drug was still bubbling in the well of the glass.
“It’s the cash drawer,” Lisa said, releasing the smoke very slowly and talking over it. I couldn’t do that. “Have you ever noticed how no one keeps the cash drawer? They say they reconcile it but they don’t, really. That’s what Jim says. They just add up the receipts. But we take in money a lot of different ways. Plus what if you don’t turn in your receipts? What if you just hide them and take them home? Or what if you tore them up and flushed them down the toilet? Then on a cash sale no one would ever know about the cash at all. It would just be like invisible money. We only do an inventory once a quarter. As long as what you sell isn’t anything big, no one would even notice. No merchandise, no paperwork, no money. Who would know the difference?”
This isn’t about me and Jim at all, I thought. That was a relief. But this was a different problem that I had not even imagined. She knows something, Bobby. I had been taking money from the drawer for several weeks.
I wondered if this was a trick of Jim’s to trip me up. He could have asked Lisa to mention it to me first. It was only lunch money I took. Twenty or fifty dollars, once a day, sometimes twice. Jim might have found my hiding spot in the closet. Seven hundred and sixty dollars, a gold Seiko for Wendy, a rope of pearls, a pair of carat-and-a-half-total-weight diamond studs, an emerald ring for her birthday in May, a half-ounce gold Krugerrand for her father for Christmas, a fourteen-karat cloisonné bangle for her mother, a white gold box chain with a white gold panda pendant for her little sister. If he found that, would he accuse me or observe me? Or seek a confession? Had Lily snooped it out?
“Let’s do it again,” she said. “I like doing it with you more. If you want to know the truth.”
I didn’t want to hear anything about how she had sex with my brother. I said so.
“I wouldn’t say anything about that,” she said. “I wasn’t going to say anything like that. Give me some credit, Bobby.”
I looked at the pipe. There was a bit more to smoke in the bottom, before she reloaded it.
“I love your brother,” Lisa said. “But I like it better this way. I can love him from a distance. It feels natural to love somebody who can’t really love you back the way you might want. We should probably slow down with this stuff. I don’t want to. But I’m talking too much.”
“That makes sense,” I said. I didn’t want to slow down, either. I was in the mood to go faster, in fact. “I understand that. It is the same way for me.”
“That is the crank,” she said. “Crank makes you smarter. Everybody knows it. Even Einstein did crank,” she said. “Not to mention Jack Kerouac.
“Here, let’s do some more,” she said. “Let’s do as much as we want. I always want to do that and I never do. Let’s actually do it. Let’s smoke a big bunch together and then make love for an hour. We can be like whales. They make love for a week in the water.”
She climbed out from under the comforter.
“Come out here with me,” she said. “The cold air feels good. God, listen to the storm.”
She added more crystal to the pipe. We knelt naked together on the bed with our knees rubbing and smoked.
“My ass is like a whale’s,” she said, and laughed.
“Is that right about Einstein?” I said. “I think you are thinking of Freud. And I think it was cocaine. Or Sherlock Holmes, maybe. He was a big cokehead, too.”
“Was there a real Sherlock Holmes? I don’t like cocaine,” Lisa said. “That is your brother’s drug. For me it’s over too soon.” She laughed again. “That’s funny,” she said.
She laughed too often, especially around sex. That was probably the only thing I did not like about her.
When the buy counter was slow or our regular man on the runs—a fellow who called himself the Wizard of Oz—got overbooked, Mr. Popper told Jim to send me out to bat cleanup. I wore a backpack, like a high school kid, full of diamonds, checks, bullion, sometimes cash, Swiss watches, and other precious goods that we ferried back and forth between Fort Worth and Dallas. Much of our business was conducted this way. I kept a pair of blue jeans at the store for when they sent me on the runs because you did not want to attract attention. The regular runs guy, the Wizard, drove a bruised Toyota pickup truck for the same reason. But with all the cars in his collection Popper owned only one that was anonymous, so I usually took Jim’s company Porsche or the big four-door Audi. I enjoyed driving these cars and wished I could wear a suit. That would impress the girls at gas stations when I was filling up the car.
Elie Kizakov was our main memorandum supplier of diamonds ten carats or larger, and most of our fancy stones, especially the rarest fancy colors like red, orange, and green. Jim, Dennis, and Mr. Popper referred to him simply as the Jew. He took a liking to me because the first time we met, at his fifteenth-floor office in the Murray Savings Building on Preston Road in Dallas, where all the serious diamond dealers were—not just the Jews and Israelis but the Indians and South Africans as well—I was reading Spinoza’s Ethics. I always brought a book with me to Murray Savings because they liked to make you wait. Not Mr. Kizakov, though.
“Spinoza. He was a pantheist. You know what a pantheist is?”
I nodded.
“He was the most famous intellectual ever to be excommunicated from our faith,” he said. “Other than Jesus Christ. But then Jesus was not an intellectual. A real mistake the rabbis made. Spinoza, I mean. A great man. But, to be fair, not a religious man. Pantheism, atheism, they are one and the same. What is your name?”
I told him.
“You are not related to Jim Clark?”
I nodded again.
“But you are not selling? Why not?”
I lied and explained that we were short-staffed on the runs.
“Deliveries are not so bad. It is honest work. You perform a useful service. I often tell Idan selling is a dangerous business. Better you should work construction. Do something of use to your fellow man. At least postpone selling for a year or two. Until you see it for what it truly is. This way you avoid selling yourself.”
•
As Kizakov began to trust me he took time with me.
“You want to learn something, Clark? Come here. Look at this.”
He was my favorite stop. Kizakov and another man, an Indian named Namil, whose wife gave me samosas. I hadn’t even known I liked Indian food until I tried those.
“In this business, always trust your eyes,” Mr. Kizakov taught me. “There are always lies in business. That is nothing to complain about. But in some businesses, like this one, you can see what you are buying. There is money in the paper businesses. That is true. My father was in insurance. In Berlin. And Prague. A very successful man, my father. But personally I like to see what I am paying for. I like to show my customer what I am selling him. Now, after he sees everything I can see, it is his responsibility.
“Take a look at this diamond.” He took a diamond from his inside jacket pocket. It was a very unusual place for a wholesaler to secure a diamond. It was not even in a paper. He cleaned it with his shirtsleeve. It was bright pink, and the table of the diamond alone was the size of a quarter, never mind the crown. It must have been twenty carats or more.
“Go on. You have a loupe? No? You carry all these diamonds for Ronnie Popper and you do not even carry a loupe? You going to trust some other man’s loupe for chec
king in the diamonds? Don’t tell me you don’t loupe them when you sign for them? You put your signature there on that memorandum paper on another man’s word? On a contract? Bist du verwirrt? Crazy? Who do you think they are going to blame when you come back to the office with the wrong diamond? They got your signature. Until they make titles for diamonds, Robert Clark, like they do for automobiles and airplanes, there will always be trickery and deception in this business of ours. In diamonds it is too easy to cheat another man, and the money is very large. So you must rely on your eyes. Here, you keep that one, that loupe. It is my gift to you. Put it on a chain so you don’t forget it. You tell Popper I said to give you a gold chain to wear around your neck and hang it on. He can bill me if he wants to. God knows what the man owes me. Inspect the diamond. Use the loupe. Let me see how you look.”
I opened the teardrop-shaped device so that the lens was extended from its cover. I tried to hold it casually, with my forefinger through the case, like Jim did. Then I took the tweezers from Kizakov and lifted the diamond. I pushed the slide forward and locked the tweezers.
“No. Please. You are hurting me with handling the stone like that. Give me the tweezers. Never use that slide to close them up. You should not even use such tweezers. And keep both eyes open. You never close one eye when using a loupe. What is your brother teaching you?”
I did not remind him that they were his tweezers.
“Let me show you. This is how it is done. You never start from the top of the stone. If you were buying the diamond, already the man you are buying from knows he can cheat you. Start from the bottom. Then the side, the profile, all around the diamond, like this. Then you look through the crown. Finally the table, but there you will learn very little. The diamond is designed to hide everything one might otherwise see. That is the specific virtue of the cutter. That is the function of the diamond. Like a woman’s beauty. To hide its own flaws. Now look again. In the manner I have shown you.”
The diamond was flawless. There was nothing but facets, angles, and light. But then, looking through the pavilion from the bottom, I caught a kind of S-shaped glitter near the center of the stone. I looked for it again from the side, again seeing into the pavilion, and turned the diamond by rotating the tweezers in my fingers as Elie Kizakov had shown me, and I went around twice very slowly before it appeared again, a different shape, but tracing from it was another line that branched off in a kind of X. If you looked for it turning it at an odd angle to the light it flashed illumination at you like a bright red figure for an instant and then vanished. You blinked at it when it appeared. I could only make the diamond do it twice and then somehow it evaded me. There may have been a change in the light of the room, a cloud outside could make that difference, or a shadow interfering, from Kizakov perhaps.
“You see her!”
I looked for the minute inclusion again through the crown and the table but it was gone.
“I named the diamond the pink ballerina. For that inclusion. If you see her thoroughly, looking many times, you will see she has a figure like a dancer.”
“What does it look like under a microscope? Under thirty power?”
“The microscope? Don’t be ridiculous. In the microscope it is gone. Ten power is the correct magnification for inspecting the brilliant cut. That is the reason we use the ten power. Not because they did not have microscopes in the nineteenth century or some other GIA nonsense. Anyone can make a stronger lens if he can make a lens at all.”
The buzzer rang in the outside office. Kizakov looked at his video monitor. He took the diamond from me and put it back in his pocket.
“Now you learn something else,” he said. “Idan!” he shouted down the back hallway. “Your appointment is here.”
Idan was Elie’s son. He was a dark-haired, dark-skinned man about ten years older than me who had once taken me for a ride around Highland Park and down Lovers’ Lane in his Corvette convertible. “Let’s stop in at Gucci,” he had said, and bought a shirt, a tie, and two pairs of gray socks. “You want anything, Bobby?” he had said. “I’m buying.” I knew better than to take him up on it. Plus I was shy to ask. When he came to the store, all the saleswomen talked about him after he left. “His eyes,” they said. “Have you ever seen such eyes on a man?” It was true that he had unusually large, pale gray eyes, like the color of platinum, in fact. But much prettier. I believed it was his eyelashes they were actually thinking of.
It could not have been easy to be Idan, I thought. His father was part of the generation that founded modern Israel. Kizakov had even known the great Ben-Gurion, and worked under Berl Katznelson in the Labor movement. But I never saw Idan show any resentment toward his father.
Kizakov waited until Idan had pushed the button to open the electronic door for the two men waiting outside. They came into the large Plexiglas mantrap in the outer office and then waited while Idan buzzed them into the main office. We watched them on the monitor. They were young men and one carried a briefcase. The other one wore a baseball cap. They did not look like the sort of men I associated with Kizakov’s office. If I had seen them in this building at all I would have expected to see them in the gold and colored-stone showrooms of the newer Pakistani and Chinese wholesalers on the second and third floors. Kizakov watched his son greet them and shake their hands. Then he took me by the arm and we walked up front.
“This is my father, Elie Kizakov,” Idan said. Kizakov nodded to them both but he did not offer his hand. One of them held out his hand for a moment and then dropped it. But he did not seem dismayed.
“Danny Johnson says you guys are the man,” the fellow with the briefcase said. I could not see his feet but I thought, I bet he is wearing tennis shoes. He had yellow teeth. He kept pulling his lips back. His yellow teeth looked frightening against his white skin.
“Who is this?” the one in the baseball cap said, and shook his thumb at me.
“Daniel Johnson is a very good customer of ours,” Kizakov said, ignoring the question. “Idan tells me you have a diamond to sell.”
“Damn right we got a diamond to sell,” the man in the baseball cap said. His partner gave him a look. “I mean, yes sir. Danny says you are the man for it. I mean, he says you guys can pay. Cash. We ain’t interested in no check.”
“Why don’t we have a look at your diamond?” Kizakov said. “Idan?”
Idan unfolded a diamond cloth on the showcase and placed a set of tweezers and a brass hexagonal loupe beside it. He carefully turned the small, portable diamond scale on the showcase to face the two men. He quickly recalibrated the scale. The one man put the briefcase on the showcase and opened it. He took a bulging, oddly cardboardy diamond paper from the briefcase and opened it on the showcase. He turned the paper and spilled the diamond out onto the diamond cloth. It was an oval. It looked like five or six carats to me.
Elie Kizakov pulled his lips between his teeth and opened his eyes in that way he had. It was an impatient expression.
“What does it weigh?” Idan said.
“Six carats,” the man in the baseball cap said. “Six on the money.”
Idan cleaned it with the white cloth and then placed it in the diamond scale. “Five sixty-two,” he said. He looked at his father.
“Why did you ask me what it weighed if you was just going to weigh it? Don’t you take our word? Don’t a man’s word count for something with you? I don’t like that. In America we take a man’s word as his promise. I think you ought to take a man’s word for something,” the one in the baseball cap said.
Idan started to reply. His father raised his hand to silence him. The diamond lay there on the scale and watched us. The man in the baseball cap rubbed his hands on his sides, on the hips of his jeans. A second or two ticked by. Then, without any flinch or change of demeanor that might have warned us, the other man, the one not in a baseball cap, shouted, “I am sick of this shit! Up with your hands, Jew-boy!” and pulled a black handgun from the briefcase. We could not see into the briefcase beca
use he had kept the lid turned toward us. To hide the handgun, I realized. He waved the handgun in the air oddly and loosely, like a flyswatter, and then pointed it at Idan. Idan reached for something—I never learned what he was going for—and the man with the weapon grabbed him by the side of the head and slammed his face down onto the showcase. It was glass but it did not break. Baseball Cap shouted, “The cash! Where’s the safe, old man? He’ll kill him! He’ll blow his brains out!” I saw that the other man had pulled Idan over the showcase and onto the floor and, kneeling with one knee on top of him, like a hunter kneels on a deer he has killed, had the barrel of the gun pressed into the socket of his eye. Idan was silent and lying there, still.
Then a totally unexpected thing happened. Kizakov, who was seventy years old and perhaps five feet tall, five feet tall in his boots, and who had a white beard halfway down his chest, vaulted the showcase we were standing behind, grabbed the gun from the man who was holding it in his son’s eye, and pistol-whipped him to the floor. He continued pistol-whipping him as his buddy Baseball Cap looked on in astonishment. For a moment Baseball Cap looked at me and in our eyes we briefly shared a kind of recognition that, had the circumstances been different, might have made us friends, or at least would have started us laughing. Then he turned away and ran for the door.
“Stop!” Elie Kizakov commanded.
But he didn’t stop. He made it into the mantrap and that stopped him.
His partner was unconscious or dead. His face, his neck, and his T-shirt were covered in blood. Kizakov was bloody also and had blood on his glasses. I looked for blood on Idan but did not see any. There was a surprising amount of blood all around, however. Later I saw it in odd places, like the magazines on the table next to the sofa on the back wall and in the candy dish on the coffee table.
Kizakov stood up. He put the gun on the showcase. He cleaned his glasses with a handkerchief from his pocket.
“I’ll call the cops,” Idan said.
How to Sell: A Novel Page 6