Rex

by Jose Manuel Prieto

  And hold on, wait a second: I hadn’t yet heard your father’s proposal.

  “They’re counterfeit, aren’t they, Vasily, the diamonds?” I said.

  And waited, in the deepest part of my soul, watching through the car window as the steeple began to move, waited for him to answer: No, they’re real.

  “They’re counterfeit,” he answered, as we flew home. “But they’ll sell with absolutely no problem, for thousands. There’s no one else in the world who makes them that way, nothing similar.”

  “Sell them? How? I had to loan you money just now, back in the disco. Out of cash, Vasily? Washed up?”

  “Yes, I noticed that, and allowed you to do it because I love you like a father would,” he lied. “And you’re wrong. I want to show you something.”

  4

  What does it matter what you see with your own eyes if it isn’t there in the Book, Petya? How to believe in any empirical fact, any phenomenon not sustained by the authority of the Book? Such a thing would cast down the whole edifice of your education and damage the key to my method, which is to supplant a reading of its pages with direct observation, only slightly displacing the Book from its well-deserved position as the one source of knowledge and understanding in the world, healthy and beneficial to our hearts, casting its light on all enigmas and offering us a glimmer of the divine inspiration that engendered it and without whose aid its existence cannot be explained. For how could it have been written by a mere mortal, a Frenchman afflicted with asthma, a man who spent his whole life literally gasping for air and yet produced one million words, 3,500 pages, the most magnificent Book ever written?

  I had said to myself, had sagaciously deduced: here’s a man who has invented the phantom menace of a band of gangsters for the benefit of his wife, to make her live in fear of being attacked in a foreign country, ensuring that she won’t dare leave the house unaccompanied, or even accompanied. A city she imagines to be crawling with mafiosi, a nest and refuge of evildoers. All to keep her at home and thus go out with the other woman, a great beauty, Petya, a real pinup. Your mother must never come to understand that the people in the mansion next door are peaceful Jordanians, and the couple in the big empty house at the bottom of the hill are only caretakers, that the same tranquil decency, respectability, and wealth prevails along the entire coast from Algeciras to La Cala. Instead: urban guerillas, low-intensity conflicts, scores to settle—all visions deliberately nourished by your father. It was that simple.

  He read it in my face in the way I leaned against the door and studied him incisively for a second, the false danger I, too, had believed we were living in all these months now deciphered. He didn’t find it necessary to make any counterargument, no need to press the point. He bent toward the glove compartment and waited with marked calm for me to take my hand off the panel marked, in tiny letters: air bag. He held that position a moment as if to say: You see? You see how patient I am with you, young man, despite your being an unbearable know-it-all? His eyes laughing again. And he didn’t say—though I’d been expecting him to come out with it all day—he didn’t say: What were you doing seducing my wife? Dancing with her?

  He took a case made of buttery leather out of the glove compartment, holding it between thumb and forefinger. The panatelas that a cigar aficionado takes along on a two-day trip in its ridged interior? He tossed it onto my lap and returned his gaze to the road, consulting the speedometer and the time, far too busy to occupy himself with a callow youth like me. Leaving me to the task of understanding why the case, what was inside.

  A square of thin fabric that I took out and tugged on, extending its corners: there, rolling around in its depths, were a few small cubes, a few chunks of frozen light, a few diamondlike objects in all colors and forms. More of them and bigger than the ones I’d imagined and even more beautiful and incredible than the ones in your mother’s necklace. Gems, precious stones, their color both intense and diaphanous.

  Their light entering my eyes, the most genuine expression of astonishment on my face, as darkness fell along the coast. Emerald greens, blues like the finest sapphires, tender lilacs, ruby reds. Losing track of whole kilometers of the way as I rolled them back and forth across the cloth, unable to read this correctly, leafing through the pages of this book of stone without understanding what passage to delve into, whether, in this case, a literal exegesis of the danger would be adequate—jewels, beautiful women—or whether a more allegorical, Alexandrian interpretation was required: great danger, jewels, beautiful women.

  I was about to say something to him, object to something and resist him, but just then his cell phone rang to let me know my time was up, my turn was over, and it was over to the next contestant now. I didn’t know the answer and had no exegetical weapon at the ready, no passage of holy writ to cite or apologetic stab to make at addressing the question satisfactorily, understanding it. He raised the phone to his ear and his eyes stared into the air at something that had been said to him, panic transfiguring his face, reordering his expression from the eyes down, lowering the corners of his mouth, draining him of blood.

  “I’m almost there,” he whispered. “Hang up.”

  The Writer’s monsters catching up with us, emerging in myriads from between the pages of the Book, lifting the immense machinery of their bodies into the air over the highway, their wobbling, spidery legs moving at top speed, the suckers of their grape-shaped mouths projecting in our direction. At the very beginning of the invasion, just arrived from Phobos, ready to snatch us up and crunch our bones. The viruses that eventually kill them in the Book not appearing yet, no trace of them.

  5

  If you receive nothing more from me than some knowledge of the details of the Book, if in all your adult life you don’t manage to retain any more than a few passages, a few scattered phrases of the Book, that would be enough to give you a distinct advantage as you go out into the world. Only through the Book can you learn to judge men sensibly, plumb their depths, detect and comprehend their obscurest motives, sound the abyss of their souls.

  Why am I not startled? Why did it not surprise me in the least that Batyk should turn out to be the author of so immense a con job? That it was Batyk—as he proudly told the story, taking a step forward—who’d first conceived of the deception that would force them to flee, alter the course of their lives forever? That he was the one to whom the monstrous plan of passing them off, Vasily’s diamonds, as a set of real diamonds from Yakutia (in Siberia) had occurred? That it was Batyk who came up with, planned, and carried out the sale of those diamonds to a pair of mafiosi come to E* for the express purpose—openly declared in every bar and café in the city so that word would get out among the emerald prospectors and the thieves working in the gem factories—of buying emeralds and topazes?

  Why didn’t I find any of this strange? Not even the next bit of news, for which I was entirely unprepared, and which struck me as the craziest, wackiest, most delirious thing yet. What a pack of madmen, I thought. The truly impossible part of the story, which began with a conversation Batyk and Vasily had with the two strangers, the mafiosi (real ones this time), the four of them in a bar, sitting around a minuscule table with nowhere to put their elbows. We have—they were addressing Kirpich, the only one of the four to have put his profusely tattooed forearms on the table, their eyes drilling into him—we have (they maintained) a set of diamonds of the first water that we’re looking for a way to sell.

  Which was followed by the story, highly improbable in its fantastic absurdity, as if discovered in the work of the Commentator, of how they’d come by those stones, stumbled upon them by chance: a kimberlite pipe, a whole field.

  Something had caught his eye, a spark in the underbrush, he told the mafiosi who were listening with gaping mouths; from among the pebbles he’d picked up a stone, a bit of glass, a bluish crystal, and the sun’s rays, streaming through the treetops, broke into a million shards against it and made him realize what he had in his hand, what he’d found
, and that he was presumably (presumably? that was the word he used? presumably, yes) standing on top of a whole pipe of kimberlite, and that this was a diamond.

  He walked around it, measured it with great strides of his reindeer-skin boots (in fact there were never any reindeer-skin boots!—though they do wear that type of boot in Buryatia, too). He gathered that it was a large field, not previously exploited, the top of a pipe that trees had shielded from the satellites’ sharp eyes. He’d jumped for joy, wept for joy—he lied to Kirpich and Raketa—and then immediately grown frightened, his pupils darting back and forth in the slits of his almond-shaped eyes, understanding that he’d need the help of a white man: this man, Vasily, a professor, a scientist, a white man.

  That was what Batyk said, and Kirpich and Raketa believed him! Two lumpen proletarians, two big-city gangsters who’d never once, whose parents had never once in their whole childhoods taken them to visit Yakutia or Buryatia or anything that wasn’t Saint Petersburg, or even to the Russian Ethnographic Museum where they might have learned how intelligent and crafty the Nenets, Yakuts, and Buryats can be and are most of the time—six months of daylight, six months of night. Fully capable of exploiting any pipe all the way down, extracting its diamonds and then traveling to New York City, dressed as they always are, in the reindeer-skin boots that were false in Batyk’s story but are indeed worn by actual Yakuts, who would call ahead to arrange an appointment with Ronald Winston, licking their fingers in the Russian Tea Room, and Ronald not caring in the slightest; he, too, eating with his hands, sampling chicken fajitas off the plates of his dear Yakut friends Urutai and Bodonchor.

  Such bumpkins, the Buryats, Batyk made them believe: incapable of taking an airplane, he lied to them, or of selling diamonds on their own. Vasily had forced him to raise the price, he lamented bitterly, but what did it matter? A big field, lots of money!

  (Six and a half million dollars in cash? I gave a start and stared at them with question marks in my eyes. Six and a half million dollars in cash? I stifled a cry and didn’t say “and my money? my salary?” Already up to my armpits in the nerve-racking quest for those diamonds.)

  They told them their story in the bar, and a month later, without having loosened their hold on the swindle’s reins for a second, took them to a spot fifty kilometers from E*.

  To a forest that opened out before them like a realm of enchantment: the evening stars in the sky, the March frost still glittering gemlike on the tree trunks, the white snow they trekked across to reach a cabin. Once inside and seated around a rough wooden table, Kirpich dropped a leather case in front of them and took out a small hammer, ready to put the diamonds to the test.

  And that was when Vasily began to be afraid, understanding how dangerous these two were and the real risks involved: when he got a clear look at the sun clumsily tattooed on the back of Kirpich’s hand (this detail had escaped him in the bar), a northern sun casting its rays across the pink skin. Not a drop of regret in those eyes, full of hatred and dark schemes: Kirpich, eight times sentenced for rape and bloody crimes.

  When your father pushed the diamonds across the table toward him, he chose one, picked it up, and started tapping on it slowly with the hammer. Each little tap unleashed a smug grin of satisfaction that ran across his entire face, which dimpled up like a child’s as he perversely tapped his way through each and every one of the diamonds with the perversity of an ex-convict who for years and years, immobile in his cell, has dreamed of hitting, hitting anything. Faces? Fine. Diamonds? Better. Much better. He was satisfied (Vasily had created them in habits that prevented direct blows to any plane of exfoliation, where they were fragile) and raised his gap-toothed criminal face, laughing until the gold of his teeth illuminated the farthest corners of the isba. He said, “Tap, tap, just like that”—and gave the hammer a good bang against the plank—“just like that, if they turn out to be fake” (which was precisely the case). “Wherever you try to hide!” Then, his threat deeply imprinted in Vasily’s and Batyk’s minds, he got up to leave, went to open the cabin door. But a storm had broken out in those few short hours and dumped down vast quantities of snow. The door was blocked.

  6

  Had they really gone down into the cave where the forty thieves store their gold, into its deepest depths? I looked at them, not wanting to believe any of it. Were they sick in the head? Didn’t they know that the gold was guarded by dwarves who would spring out at them, race after them the instant they saw them come out with the ingots? Nelly read the questions in my face and nodded ruefully, with a quick inclination of the head toward Batyk, the genius and mastermind behind so brilliant a plan (jeeringly). She picked up the story now and continued it in a voice of scorn, indignant over how bad an idea it had been and also because the story didn’t end there, as you will see.

  It ends months later, when those mafiosi (real ones, Petya, real ones!) went to sell the stones—having spent the intervening period taking them to Amsterdam in three lots—and learned the truth and realized that this man, a scientist, a weak man in appearance (without glasses, that’s true, with excellent vision, the eyes of a gemologist, let me tell you): this man had swindled them! Right there in the jeweler’s they let out a howl of pain, furiously twisting and turning and craning their necks high like young wolves as the Dutch policemen’s arms encircled them. As if those arms were braided out of the same cords that in 1795 would have tied Kirpich and Raketa to the galleys to row their way across the seven seas (as happened to the Writer’s Jean Valjean) but now, only a year and a half ago, had them assembling traffic lights in Bijlmerbajes. At least this was healthier work, their huge stumpy fingers battling with the tiny, fleeing screws. Dreaming throughout their prison sentence of throwing Vasily to the ground and jumping up and down on his legs with that false joy of criminals who seem to take all jobs as a joke, even the task of delivering a beating to someone, jamming the steel-reinforced toes of their boots into Vasily’s ribs. They hadn’t seen it coming (the traffic signal’s red light blinking on and off during the final test sequence), they hadn’t understood, and they’d fallen prey to that swindling scientist.

  Top quality synthetic gems, though, it must be said, for they did succeed in selling a first lot in London’s diamond quarter, and not a single one of the gentlemen with Victorian sideburns and knit vests took them for fakes. Quite the contrary: their accomplice, Senka, an amateur jeweler, collected the money and sent it to them along with the good news, and they used those dollars to buy themselves the fine aluminum briefcases and luxurious Italian shoes that must have been waiting for them in some storage locker at Bijlmerbajes.

  During those same months Vasily (but not Batyk, whose strange preference was for kilims and Persian rugs and who had no eye for Italian clothing) was putting the first wrinkles in his first 100 percent cashmere suit, bending down to see if he could detect any new fold not foreseen by its designer and going out the next morning to buy himself another one, and more clothes for Nelly, and expensive little sneakers for the boy. Or inviting, as he told me he’d done, a whole table of relatives to E*’s top Chinese restaurant. The datable, isolatable moment when he acquired the bad habit of tipping 100 percent. Almost all the money spent in the same place as the swindle, at the very entrance to the forty thieves’ cave, in E*.

  But how, I asked Nelly at that point, how could they have imagined they could stay there in the city all that time after pulling off so massive a double cross?

  They’d been frightened, quite naturally; they’d gone much too far, what doubt could there be? Trembling and sweating the whole night they’d had to spend in the cabin, Vasily afraid and Batyk terrified that with a scale model of a natural diamond continually revolving in their minds the two lumpen proletarians would suddenly figure out they were being swindled. But in the end they managed to get out of there, finally emerging the next morning across the same embankment of dirty gray ice, following the chrome fenders of the thugs’ jeep.

  “Friends?”

  “
Friends!”

  Until the jeep went around the corner and they watched in relief as it turned and disappeared behind a wall of pine trees, and then said to each other: That’s all folks.

  But not shouting with glee, as in the silly movies where they throw money in each other’s faces. Tense and keeping a tight grip on the steering wheel, a heavy feeling in the stomach that only diminished with the passage of days. Until your father stopped keeping an eye on the door they might come through at any moment, Kirpich and Raketa, the men he’d watched as they slept fitfully on the table’s unvarnished planks, the four of them trapped by the snow storm, with millions stowed away under the table. And the two mafiosi had behaved themselves, they’d slept peacefully and hadn’t swerved into another possible ending for the story that would have had them going out into the snow as day began to break, softly closing the cabin door behind them, the money back in their possession and two corpses left sprawling on the wooden floor behind them.

  7

  Larissa had already told me about it while we were out on the dance floor. I wanted to find out what all the talk of disaster was about (failure! bankruptcy! as your father had cried out that time, inadvertently confessing) and was about to ask her when she herself, during Vasily’s momentary departure for the men’s room, grabbed me by the arm and we made our way, continually moving to the beat, to the very center of the floor beneath the music’s fullest blast. She told me everything, shouting in my ear, and my astonishment at what I heard was such that I stopped dancing and stood there petrified, at the mercy of the other dancers’ momentum and the thrusts of their elbows. Seeking her ear wherever the movement of her dancing took it. When she told me, I stepped back and looked into her eyes, wanting visual confirmation for what I’d heard. And grabbed her by the shoulders and again and again yelled: It can’t be! Impossible!