During the Middle Ages, diamonds were reputed to have curative powers, especially when ground and consumed. The proof was obvious: poor people, who didn’t own diamonds, suffered from more diseases than rich people, who did.
Diamonds made their wearers invisible.
Diamonds raised them from the dead.
David checked his stone once again under magnification, then returned it to the lap.
Sarah, still watching from the doorway, whispered a eulogy: “‘Identify that activity, the success or failure of which is irrelevant to your pursuit of it, and you will find your one true passion.’”
“Did you say something?” David asked. He turned, surprised to find her standing there.
“No, David. I’m just now going to bed.” She left, and the only sound in the room was the humming of the lap’s electric motor.
“Good night,” he whispered after her. “And sleep well. Tomorrow’s a big day.”
ELEVEN
THE RELIEF DAVID SAW on Mr. Bowling’s face was unmistakable. The tension the poor man had endured the past week, wondering whether David and Sarah would return to Nineveh & Shimoda on Sunday morning, was enough to make any salesman nauseous.
It was the last day of the month, and David knew it was also the last opportunity for a struggling salesman to pull his numbers up and meet or exceed his monthly quota. That Bowling’s expression went from tortured to peaceful the instant the two stepped into the store was proof enough that one or more of the other employees was ahead of him on the May chart.
David’s suit was different from the one he had worn during their first visit to the store; it was the only other suit he owned. Sarah, likewise, was in her “Phase II” miniskirt, one so provocative she could hardly sit in a chair in public. A trench coat was draped over her arm. She held onto it as though it were a life preserver.
On the way into the store she had whispered to David, “I’m not going to kiss him. The last one tongued me.”
“You’ll do exactly as you’re told,” he had replied.
Now the two leaned over the showcase like children in an ice cream parlor. David asked Bowling if they could see the ring again. After retrieving it from the safe, Bowling louped it quickly before presenting it to David with a flourish. David, his hand shaking ever so slightly, gently eased it onto Sarah’s finger.
“Nothing has ever looked, or felt, so right,” Sarah said. “Oh, dear. I promised myself I wouldn’t cry.”
She returned the ring to David. As she did, she accidentally knocked her purse off the showcase, spilling its contents onto the floor. When she bent over to pick up the articles, she gave the assistant manager an ample view of …
No underwear.
David handed the ring back to Bowling, who had the dazed look of a man who would never, ever recover from what he had just seen.
“Let’s not wait any longer, Delbert,” Sarah said. “Let’s get it right now.”
They quickly agreed on a price. Bowling would continue to hold the ring for the young couple until they returned with Delbert’s “daddy” in tow. They had to pry him off the golf course and bring him to the store personally, so he could pay with his platinum credit card.
“You do accept those, don’t you?”
Sarah kissed David on the cheek. Then she leaned over the showcase and kissed Bowling full on the mouth.
“Oh my,” Bowling said. “Oh my.” He louped the stone again, focusing on the dab of pink nail polish centered low on one of the pavilion mains. Satisfied, he snapped his loupe shut and returned the ring to its hold envelope.
“What’s that book you have there?” he asked David.
“Book?”
“The one under your arm.”
“Oh, this book. It’s about maps.”
“Sounds interesting. I always wanted to learn about maps.”
Go on, patronize me, David thought. You’ll get yours before this day is over. “One hour,” he said. “Two max. Don’t sell it to anyone else before we get back.”
“Oh, no no no, of course not.”
David and Sarah left the store with Sarah clinging to David’s arm, battering his ear with kisses. “Thank you thank you thank you …” On the sidewalk, out of sight, she pushed him away and donned her trench coat. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
“This way,” he said. “Through Independence Park.”
Bowling put the hold envelope containing the biggest sale of his career into the safe and locked it, spinning the combination wheel so hard that Felicity heard the clicks from across the showroom.
“So you got it after all,” she called over to him. “What happened, did the be-back bus get caught in traffic somewhere?”
He took his jacket off—in violation of store policy—and draped it over the high-school class ring display. He raised his arms in the air and pumped them in jubilation. “Yeeeooow!”
Customers entered the store and Bowling was obliged to wait on one of them, but his heart wasn’t in the mission, and he failed to make a sale. Meanwhile, Felicity sold another gold chain.
No matter. Tomorrow, the manager would open up the store like it was just another Monday morning. He would see the sales ticket from the previous day, and his jaw would drop. The owners would no doubt promote Bowling to manager of the next store they opened, maybe one on Market Street. And he’d be damned if he’d allow Felicity to set so much as one high-heeled foot in it.
An hour passed. Bowling was standing at the front window like a greenhorn, looking for Delbert Farrington III and his fiancée. He could still taste that kiss! He pretended to be checking the weather. No be-back bus in sight.
Another hour passed. What was taking them so fucking long? A thought occurred to him, and he dismissed it. He tried to calm himself by dusting the inside of a case, rearranging the display to make it less symmetrical (Felicity!), and cleaning the glass top with window cleaner.
The thought occurred to him again. Again, he dismissed it. Something had delayed them, that was all. Golf courses were big places.
By the time another hour had passed and the couple still had not returned, a hollow, sickening feeling had lodged in Bowling’s gut. Shaking nervously, because he knew what the consequences would be if his suspicions were correct, he removed the hold envelope from the safe and tested the ring with a thermal conductivity probe.
The stone failed to register as a diamond.
“How about a little celebration?” David cupped Sarah’s breasts from behind and kissed the back of her neck. She was never more appealing than when she appealed to others.
“Don’t.” She wriggled free, kicked her high heels across the bedroom, and flopped down on the bed. “Christ, my feet hurt.” Her eyes narrowed, and David knew what was coming.
“Let me wear it for a couple of days,” she said.
“Not even for a couple of minutes. People who take chances like that pay for them by spending time in a cage. I’ve been there, and I don’t want to go back.”
“So prisons do rehabilitate after all.”
“Well, they make you more cautious. If that’s rehabilitation, then I’m as rehabilitated as I’ll ever get.”
“If it’s so dangerous to hold it, why did you bring it here?”
“I couldn’t get a meeting with Zimmerman until this afternoon. Besides, I wanted to scope it. It’s the one luxury I allow myself. So, if you’ll excuse me …”
He took the ring into his workshop and mounted it under the binocular microscope. Peering through the scope’s eyepieces, he brought the stone into sharp focus at successive depths, from the surface of its table to the tip of its culet.
Sarah followed him into the room and waited quietly.
He searched the stone thoroughly, but at ten power couldn’t find any clarity characteristics. He switched to thirty power, moving the stone around because its diameter now exceeded the field of view. Nothing. Using a long needle, he probed dust particles on the surface to make sure they weren’t inclusions r
eflecting from deep within.
Still nothing.
The stone had been listed as VVS1, so where were the inclusions? At this magnification, David enjoyed the sensation of exploring the interior of a diamond cave, one that glowed a soft bluish-white above the scope’s dark-field illumination. It was art, it was poetry. Sometimes it was even music. He understood the fascination microbiologists had in their subject: private, unlimited access to an otherwise inaccessible world.
He flipped the ring to view it through the pavilion. Nothing. He unmounted the diamond by bending the prongs away with needle-nose pliers, then inserted the loose stone in a clamp; if there were any characteristics, they must have been hiding under the prongs.
Still nothing. The stone was flawless. Ten power was strong enough, but to see nothing at thirty power was a unique experience. He had heard stories of art historians traveling to Europe to view paintings they had studied only in photographs, and dropping impulsively to their knees at first sight of them. And there you had it.
So why did they call it VVS1? It could only be that whoever graded the stone for Nineveh & Shimoda had not been confident of his call. Flawless stones were so rare, if you didn’t find any clarity characteristics, you assumed you missed them.
“David.”
“What.”
Sarah was standing directly behind him. “I think we should discuss a change in our business relationship.”
“Do you.”
“Yes. I think until now the profit sharing has been a little lopsided. I suggest we adjust my share to better reflect the important—the indispensable—role I play.”
He turned off the scope, folded the diamond carefully into a stone paper, and tossed the naked shank into a jar of old gold. “I agree completely,” he replied, deadpan.
“You do?” His back was still to her, so she couldn’t judge his expression.
“Indeed, I do. Profit sharing has been lopsided. You’re getting more than you deserve.”
“We’re a team. You can’t do it alone. We should split the take fifty-fifty.”
“Bullshit. We don’t split the work fifty-fifty. I do almost all of it.”
“You didn’t have to kiss the bastard. Did you get a whiff of his breath?”
He swiveled his chair around to face her. “Come here. I’ll make it up to you. Give me a kiss.”
“Keep your hands off. I’ve earned fifty percent, and I want it.”
“Don’t you realize how replaceable you are? All you bring to the job is your pretty legs. This town’s full of pretty legs. But how many guys do you know who can cut a decoy like yours truly? If you don’t like the money, go back to modeling underwear. I’m sure somebody, somewhere, hasn’t heard of you—maybe in Pittsburgh. Go out to the sticks, where they don’t know you. Go back to Zimmerman, where you belong.”
She swung her hand in a wide arc to slap him, but he blocked the blow with his forearm. Tears of pain came to her eyes. “I bring a lot more than a pair of legs,” she cried.
“How dare you spoil this moment for me with your talk of ‘profit sharing’?”
“I also bring knowledge of the operation—and your past.”
He stood up and grabbed her shoulders. “You want a bigger cut? I’ll give you a really big one.” He manhandled her toward the bedroom. She tried to wrench her shoulders free but was no match for his upper body strength. So she dropped to the floor and kicked.
He caught her legs in mid-kick and dragged her, squirming and jerking, into the bedroom. There he hooked his right arm under her knees and swung her up onto the bed.
“I’ve got an idea,” David said. “Let’s invite one of your girl-friends over and have a threesome.”
“I have a better idea,” Sarah responded, gasping for breath. “Let’s invite her over, have a twosome, and leave you out.”
He stepped into a pair of shoes and starting tying them. “I’m tired of breaking up with you,” he said. “This is the last time. I’m going to attend my meeting now, then go to Tien Chau’s for lunch. Maybe I’ll even get laid. When I come back, I expect you to be gone.”
“I’ll go. Believe me, I’m happy to shake this shit hole. But I’m broke, you know that. I need my cut before I can leave.”
He turned his back on her. “Sue me for it.”
Barclay Zimmerman was already waiting at the corner of Fifth and Arch, next to the Christ Church burial ground where Benjamin Franklin and his wife, Deborah, slept the everlasting sleep. Their plain marble slab, sprinkled with coins, lay immediately on the other side of the bronze spiked fence where Zimmerman stood. Any tourist who wanted to pay respects to one of America’s founding fathers only had to pause on the sidewalk and dig some loose change out of his pocket.
David watched from a block away. He wanted to make sure Zimmerman was alone: if he had company and knew it, he would glance occasionally at the observation post, even if only inadvertently. But Zimmerman, a wiry, nervous man in his thirties, with unkempt hair that often spilled into his eyes, just stamped his feet impatiently, his hands buried deep in his pockets.
That satisfied David; if something were about to go down, Zimmerman would be waiting with the patience of a statue.
Their stories were remarkably similar: Zimmerman had been working on a graduate degree in medieval European history when something happened to alter his course. The “something” was different for everyone who ended up working the street; rumor was, Zimmerman had come to blows with his advisor. That would end an academic career awfully fast.
He was sharp—and mean as a cornered dog.
When Zimmerman looked at his watch and kicked the fence, David finally approached him.
“How’s the X-rated theater business?” he asked.
“If it were doing well, I wouldn’t be out here fencing stolen rocks.”
“I suppose if the fencing business were good, you wouldn’t be showing porno films, either.”
“I did fine until you took Sarah away from me.” Zimmerman took his hands out of his pockets. One of them was holding a pair of locking tweezers, the other a triplet. “Do you have it?”
David produced the stone paper. Zimmerman quickly unfolded it, maneuvered the diamond into the tweezers, and louped it critically.
“It’s flawless,” David said.
Zimmerman snickered. “Yeah, they all are, you know.”
“No, I mean it. This one really is.”
“Whatever you say, Feinstein.”
“Listen, Zim. You know me. You know if I say it’s clean, it’s clean.”
Zimmerman removed an envelope from his back pocket and handed it to David. David counted the money inside. It didn’t add up. He counted it again, to make sure.
“This is a little light, Zim.”
“It’s exactly right, Feinstein.”
David closed his eyes. One more mention of that name and he’d belt the man. “The stone is worth three times as much wholesale!”
“Supply and demand. Take it or leave it.”
“Screw supply and demand. You know I have to unload the piece. You’re taking advantage of me.”
“If you don’t like the price, sell it to someone else.”
“I can’t shop around for another fence this late in the game. Everyone in Nineveh & Shimoda knows my face.”
“Everyone in this town knows your face, Feinstein. You’ve been working this corner of the world too long. Pretty soon the Jeweler’s Circular Keystone is going to post your ugly puss on its front cover.”
“The name is Freeman. How many times do I have to tell you?”
“Fuck you, Feinstein, you sniveling Jew.”
David dropped the envelope on the sidewalk and pinned Zimmerman’s shoulders against the spiked fence.
“You asshole,” Zimmerman said. “Take a look over there.” He pointed across the street. Three unfriendly looking derelicts were sitting on a park bench between Arch and Race. One of them grinned. He was missing most of his teeth.
“What are t
hey going to do,” David asked, “strangle me with dental floss?”
“They have your address, and now they, too, know your face. Lay another finger on me and they’ll do things to you that—trust me—you do not want done.”
David glanced back at the three derelicts. Smiley was gesturing the act of masturbation.
“Take it or leave it, Jew boy.”
David released Zimmerman, picked up the cash-filled envelope from the sidewalk, and dusted it off.
Zimmerman unfolded the stone paper and admired the diamond again. “Well,” he said, “it’s not the Prairie, but I never did kick a rock out of bed for eating crackers.”
“What’s the Prairie?”
“Don’t insult me by feigning ignorance. And unless you want to walk funny for the rest of your life, stay out of my way in the search for you-know-what.”
As soon as David was out of sight, Zimmerman crossed the street and handed the three drunks five dollars apiece.
Smiley said, “You still haven’t told us why you wanted us to sit here and act like that.”
“Warm the bench for me, gentlemen. Someday I’ll be sleeping on it myself.”
He returned to his theater in Kensington. The theater was unsupervised and the projector was still running, but it didn’t matter; no one had bought a ticket. He sat in one of the empty seats and inspected David’s diamond once again.
You had to hand it to Feinstein, he thought. It sure did look clean.
He felt a twinge of guilt for having stiffed David. He felt it, then it went away. They had once been friends. Even, on occasion, partners—until Sarah changed allegiance. And they were both obsessed with the lost Tavernier stones.
Zimmerman’s Grail was one of the stones in particular, the Ahmadabad diamond, a 94-carat stone “of perfect water.” That wasn’t unusual; gem aficionados often fixed on a single specimen or group—for example, the Hope diamond or the Three Brethren. The Ahmadabad wasn’t the largest or most famous diamond in history, but it was the most controversial. A 78-carat pear-shaped stone currently in circulation purported to be a recut of the legendary diamond. But Zimmerman was convinced the genuine article was still intact, still missing, still waiting for him to find it.
The Tavernier Stones: A Novel Page 8