The plane landed in heavy rain. It was still coming down in sheets when I cleared immigration and emerged from the terminal. She was waiting in a lemon-colored Porsche. It was all I could do to toss my bag in the back seat and climb in.
“You look terrible,” Lily said as the rain drummed on the roof. She put her hand against my forehead. “You have a fever.”
“It’s only some cuts.”
As she drove out of the airport and took the fast route into Brussels, I told her about Lime. She shook her head.
“He’s very expert. He could have killed you.”
I swallowed some antibiotics. The medic included those too. He’d said there was a chance of infection. Maybe that’s what was making me feel nauseated.
Lily got off the expressway and took a winding route, checking for a tail. The rain had strengthened into a monsoon by the time we circled the park in front of the royal palace for the sixth time and Lily decided there was no one following us. Even so, she didn’t head for either of the two main highways that go north from Brussels. She picked her way through the scrapheap of suburbs that ring the administrative capital of the European Union. Finally, we cleared the city and drove out onto the central plain of Flanders.
My body felt as if it were running some special software to destroy itself. My vision blurred and cleared and blurred again. A tiny arsonist patrolled my arms and legs, setting fires.
Out among the farms, Lily visibly relaxed. She no longer drove with one eye on the rearview. In her cream-colored sweater and black jeans she could have been any stylish young woman who liked to accessorize with bandages. One covered the back of her right hand. She must have injured it when the motorcycle slid out from under her at Sheepshead Bay. Another dressing bulged beneath the tight denim of her jeans, and I remembered the limp as she hurried onto the footbridge. But the bruise on her face?
I hadn’t seen Lily since she’d blown a load of splinters into my face three days before. We’d kept our communications to the bare minimum. There had always been the likelihood she’d be suspected of betrayal after Brighton Beach.
“Lime?” I said, eyeing the bruise.
“Not the worst thing he ever did to me.”
I let that go. There was a blade buried deep in Lily, and Lime had put it there.
Lily started stealing diamonds in her teens. She was working as a sorter at the huge facility in Mirny run by Russgem, Russia’s state diamond company. Russian oligarchs with friends in the Kremlin were stealing about 15 million carats a year from Russgem’s 40-million-carat production. Lily’s scheme was modest by comparison, but it managed to extract 150,000 carats a year.
The goods she stole were at the lower end, but even at $125 a carat, she was grossing almost $20 million. She had to pay some people off. She could afford to.
Here’s how it worked.
Russgem’s diamond scales expressed weights to five decimal places. Because rough diamonds poured through Mirny in such high volumes, recording every parcel to such a fine degree wasn’t practical, and they set the machines to report to only two decimal places. The scales still weighed to five, but only reported to two. Lily took a cut from the unreported weight.
Say a parcel weighed 100.22314 carats. The system reported a weight of 100.22. The .00314 unreported carats still existed. The weight had disappeared only from the books. Lily inserted a program that kept track of the actual weight as opposed to the reported weight and helped herself accordingly. Because the volumes were so high, even such a tiny cut quickly ballooned.
Russgem understood that rounding off the decimal places left unreported diamonds in the production stream. They ran a quarterly check designed to pick up the unreported rough. Lily’s genius lay in designing her theft so that it left behind enough loose weight to satisfy her bosses.
There was something elegant to this colossal theft and, as Lily saw it, fair. She made regular cash gifts to the Orthodox cathedral in Mirny. That covered God. Unfortunately, the local Orthodox patriarch was in the pocket of one of the oligarchs already robbing Russgem. When the patriarch realized that Lily’s generosity had reached a level beyond her apparent means, he informed his patron.
Mirny was a brutal place. Lily had no protectors. She was nineteen and beautiful. Lime had just arrived in the city, humiliated, bruised, seething with hate. The oligarch who owned the priest was one of the investors who’d ripped off most of Lime’s shares in First Partners. To recoup that loss, Lime had been offered a chance to help the oligarch find a new way to launder the rough diamonds he was stealing.
Lime sent for Lily. He demanded to know how she stole the rough and, as importantly, how she sold it. Lily wouldn’t tell him. She still had a few million dollars in rough in the pipeline. She knew she might not get out of Mirny alive, but if she did, it was going to be with her money.
What Lime performed on Lily was a kind of surgery. He raped her, and with care and deliberation, he damaged her. At the end of three days there was little left of her but a core of hatred. By then Lime understood that he would have to either kill her and learn nothing, or compromise.
In the split they worked out, Lily got the diamonds still in the pipeline and the job she specified at Russgem’s St. Petersburg office. Lime got the information he needed to move rough through Lily’s contacts, plus a few tips on how to cheat the oligarchs.
The rain intensified. The road turned into a frothing stream of brown water. The Porsche’s windshield wipers flailed back and forth. We could barely see. Lily pulled to the side of the road.
“I take it Lime doesn’t know you have the pink,” I said.
“I told him you must have it,” she said, unsnapping her seatbelt and digging her hand into a pocket of her jeans. She handed me the neatly folded rectangle of paper.
I flicked it open with my thumbs. The pink dagger-shaped stone flared against the crisp white paper. In the aqueous interior of the car, the diamond flowed with crimson light. The rain thrashed against the window and a heavy gust buffeted the car. The stone shone with unearthly power. The only other pink I’d seen with that knockout punch was Nash’s.
“Where do you think the Brazilian got this, Lily?”
“He was one of the Sousa brothers from Minas Gerais. Some very good fancy colors come out of the rivers there, and the Sousa brothers get them all.”
“If it’s a river stone, why no frosting?”
Lily had dealt in river stones. The trade calls them alluvials. They have a frosted appearance. Rolled along in the gravel for millions of years, the surfaces get scratched and pitted until the skin of the diamond is opaque.
“Alex, let’s speak plainly. You’re not up to playing games. Neither of us thinks the stone is Brazilian. It’s a fragment of the Russian Pink. Lime wanted to conceal that from me. Using the Brazilian was the way he tried to do it. So I would tell our buyers the source was Brazilian. He wants to see what the market is without saying where it really came from.”
I folded the diamond back into the paper. The torrent thundered on the roof. It had been raining the night I’d turned Slav Lily at Brussels airport. Later, when I came out of the airport, she was waiting in the Porsche. You bet I got in. It rained all the way to Paris. We holed up in a crooked little house in Montmartre that Lily owned.
The rain let up and we drove on. Soon we were entering the Antwerp suburbs. An idea was struggling to form in my head but I couldn’t hold onto it. Why would Lime want to smuggle a piece of the pink into the United States? There was an answer to that question. I could almost see it.
The pain from my cuts returned in a sudden rush. I fumbled in my pocket for the plastic bottle, but I couldn’t get the top off. I wrenched at it until Lily took it from me and tapped a pill into my open palm. I made an impatient gesture and she tipped out another. I swallowed them and put my head back and waited for the drug to unhook the talons from my brain.
The diamond city of Antwerp lies on the river Scheldt. In the old quarters of the town ancient mansions glower at the present. In the sixteenth century Antwerp was the richest city on the continent. Its main cathedral has four works by Rubens, the Flemish master whose commissions from the kings and queens of Europe paid for his own palace in the city. The swaggering civic buildings that line Antwerp’s main square show how highly the Flemish burghers thought of themselves.
The rain had swept the tourists away. We turned onto the quay beside the river and drove to a shabby hotel. It faced the water with a look of hopelessness. Faded green paint peeled from the stuccoed walls.
We left the car in a shed at the back and pushed through a door into a dim interior that smelled of damp carpet and sausages. The front desk was abandoned. Rain drove against the dirty windows. Through the glass, the blurry shapes of dockside cranes loomed across the river. A threadbare gray cardigan hung on a nail beside the row of empty mailboxes. I dinged the bell. The slap of footsteps approached and a fat young woman in a dirty tank top appeared, stared at us, snatched the cardigan from the nail, and dragged it on over her bulging breasts.
“Full,” she said, wiping something from her mustached lip.
The hotel had not been full in fifty years, so I guess that was the recognition word.
“Room five,” Lily told her, stepping up to the counter. She slid a brown envelope across the scarred surface.
The woman sniffed and wiped her moustache again. The smell of cooking was stronger now. She dropped the keys on the counter, wiped her fingers on the sweater, plucked up the envelope, and disappeared in the direction of the sausages.
We climbed the narrow stairs. The top step had a strange, high-pitched double squeak, like a bow drawn back and forth on the string of a violin. The room was painted a color that had long ago given up the fight against the damp and joined the general spirit of despair. The worn, candlewick bedspread had once been white. On the desk stood a yellowing card with the name Hoge Raad voor Diamant—Diamond High Council—emblazoned at the top. Below was a list of telephone numbers dealers could call to get the latest details of the London diamond sales.
It had been a long time since any diamond dealer had stayed in this hotel, and the London sales had dried up like the company that ran them, slowly gnawed to bits by the increasing cut taken by the countries where the diamonds came from. While London withered as a diamond center, Antwerp boomed. The horde of Gujaratis, Israelis, Russians, and European Ashkenazim who made Antwerp the world capital of diamonds were still here, haggling their way through $16 billion worth of rough every year. But not at this hotel.
The back room overlooked a cluttered courtyard. Directly below the window, the rusty tin roof of the parking shed shuddered in the gusts. A storm of paper and loose dirt eddied in the narrow space.
“You told Davy I wanted to see him?” I said.
“He refused.”
I looked out the front window. The line of cranes stretched down the river. The wind moaned and shrieked in the steel lattices. The water thrashed in a tormented chop. A stubby, orange pilot boat with a rounded bow pitched and rolled as it made for the harbormaster’s pier.
“Does Davy still get to the restaurant at the same time?”
“Seven.”
I put my forehead against the cold windowpane. The rain struck the glass in a steady hail. I hadn’t slept since leaving New York.
The gale clattered against the front of the hotel. Everything shook and shuddered in the wind. I heard the squeal of ships yanking at their moorings and the tormented cries of seabirds flung downwind.
I sat down on the hard bed. The sound of the storm receded. The dirty gray light at the windows formed into a serpent and crawled down the wall and across the floor toward me. My head felt huge. My right leg stuck out straight in front of me. It wouldn’t bend.
“Alex,” said a distant voice, “I think you need a doctor.”
She knelt in front of me and took my hand.
“Just tired,” someone mumbled.
She pushed me gently back onto the bed and took off my shirt. She unbuckled my belt and tugged off my pants and sucked in her breath in dismay.
“Where did this happen?”
“Lime.”
I managed to raise my head. The leg was swollen and had a grayish tinge.
I let my head drop back onto the cheap foam pillow. The room rolled and lifted as it met the tossing sea. I heard Lily unzip her jeans and the bed sagged as she slid beneath the covers. Her body was cold. I breathed the scent of her soap. She pushed one leg between my knees and the bandage on her leg rubbed against the inside of my thigh. It reminded me the leg was sore, but I didn’t care. I searched my mind for something I needed to ask her. My head was whirling with fragments of images.
“I need to see Piet Louw, Lily.”
“Yes, darling,” she murmured in my ear. “You’ve been raving about it.”
“The stone, Lily,” I mumbled.
She poured her gray gaze over me.
“Go to sleep,” she said.
“Davy,” I protested.
“I set your alarm.”
She was gone when the alarm went off. I felt as if someone was scrubbing the inside of my skin with sandpaper. I needed to be alert, so the fentanyl would have to wait. I found a drugstore and got some Tylenol and swallowed four.
I stood in the shadows in an arcade on the east side of the Grote Markt and watched the corner of Blauwmoezelstraat. The leg that I’d managed to calm for a while started to claw its way through the Tylenol. If I kept it straight it wasn’t so bad.
Davy appeared just before seven, walking with that slouching gait I knew so well. With his cowboy boots and long white hair he looked like a Jewish Wild Bill Hickok. The toes of his boots curled up like skis. He wore a cashmere coat that fell to his ankles like a cowboy’s duster. The storm had moved on northward into the Netherlands. All that remained was a fitful, soggy wind.
Davy sloshed across the square. The statues of Justice, Prudence, and the Virgin Mary followed his progress from their places high on the ornate facade of the Stadhuis, the old town hall. After he disappeared around the corner of the building, I waited five minutes. No shadows on his tail, so I followed his path across the square.
The last of the clouds blew away and the moon flashed silver light onto the mullioned windows. I made my way around the building to an alley at the back. Davy was already sitting at his favorite table in the window when I came in the front door of the restaurant. The waiter, a sour, doddering Belgian who’d been there for decades, was banging a glass of clear liquid onto the table hard enough to make sure some of it spilled. Davy wrapped his massive workman’s paw around the tiny glass and tossed it back. He caught sight of me as I stepped in.
He shook his massive head slowly and raised one of his calloused hands in a gesture of refusal. I put a hand on his shoulder. He had hoisted me onto that broad shoulder many times when I was a boy.
“Hello, Davy.”
“I told the Russian girl I could not see you,” he said wearily.
I signaled the waiter to bring another glass of Holland gin. I hated the stuff. It tasted like gasoline. But it was Davy’s fuel.
“Can’t a kid come and see his feter?” I said, using the Yiddish word for uncle that I’d used as a child. He waved his hand dismissively.
“That boy has not been around for a long time. That boy used to visit with his lovely papa. Now there is this different boy, the hunter, always hunting, always looking. You want to talk about the big stone.” He shook his head. “I have nothing to say about it. I am bound by confidentiality. I cannot even say whether I have seen this stone.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “Who else would they take it to?”
Davy made a gesture of dismissal, but the compliment struck home. The diamond cutter has not been born who doesn’t think he’s God.
The waiter tottered over with the bottle and another glass, muttering to himself. He slopped some into Davy’s glass. I took the bottle from his hand and gave myself a quarter inch.
“And bring us some hennepot and black bread,” I said as the waiter turned to go.
Davy lifted his glass and drained it. When he thumped the glass back down, I saw that his hand was trembling. Davy had been swimming lengths in Holland gin for a long time. It’s the diamond that decides how it will be cut, Davy liked to say, not the cutter. I don’t know. Ask a dealer how he feels if his stone craps out on the wheel. It’s not the diamond he gets mad at. I’d heard they were getting mad at Davy more often, and maybe the gin had something to do with it.
“This is all under the radar,” I said. “Nothing you say goes anywhere.”
“Bah,” he said. “Nothing is under their radar. You can hide nothing from these people.”
Even with my leg straight out it was sending electric stabs of pain along the nerves.
The waiter arrived with the hennepot and a plate of thickly sliced black bread. He moved the bottle of Holland gin to one side, arranged the food, and left.
I spooned some of the hennepot onto a slice of bread and shoved the plate to Davy. They’ve been making this terrine of chicken, veal, and rabbit in Flanders for six hundred years. It was the specialty that had been bringing Davy to the smoky little restaurant behind the Stadhuis ever since he could pay for his own meals. But he ignored it now.
He finished his glass and filled it again and took a long swallow.
“A stone must have a story,” he said. “Like a person. To understand a person, you must know his story. Where does he come from, who are his parents? But the pink, it had no story.”
“I heard it came from the Chicapa.”
Davy spread his hands. “Where is the frosting? Where in the river did it come from? Who found it, and when, and who else was there?” He leaned forward. “Who attended the birth?”
He studied my face for a moment, as if he had recognized something in it he was trying to identify. The boy I’d been.
“Remember that big white your papa found in Botswana?”
“At Letlhakane.” How could I forget? We had lived there for a year.
“Everyone told your papa that little diamond pipe was barren, but he did not think so. He drilled it and found the little mineral grains that only your papa knew about. They were his secret science.”
“Indicator minerals,” I said.
“And from these tiny minerals,” Davy said, his eyes shining, “your papa knew the pipe was rich with diamonds.”
A pipe is a type of extinct volcano. Diamonds come up from the deep earth in such volcanoes. Most are destroyed by the violent forces of eruption. The trick is to find a pipe where the diamonds survived the journey.
“He invented a technique for analyzing the chemistry of the minerals,” I said. “He knew certain minerals were formed in the same part of the earth where diamonds are formed. He could tell from these minerals what the odds were of recovering large diamonds.”
I was feeling sicker, but the story was helping me keep control. The familiar facts, arranged in the right order.
“And he was right,” said Davy. “He found that 602-carat white. And do you remember how he announced it? The release gave everything: what time of day they found the stone. Who found it. Where it came from in the pipe. The age of the diamond. He called it the Star of Letlhakane. By the time the stone arrived in Antwerp, it was already famous!”
Davy was a great diamond raconteur. He loved the lore of diamonds and his place in it. Davy’s stories often featured the queen of England wowing over some great stone he’d cut. Or maybe it was the former empress of Iran telling Davy how fantastic he was. For a moment I caught sight of the old Davy, the swashbuckling diamond cutter. Buoyed up by the gin, but still Davy.
“The big pink arrived like it had a private shame,” he said. “In Antwerp, we had heard about it. Who had not? We heard the rumors of this fantastic pink, more than a thousand carats. Who can believe such a thing? Surely it is false.” He leaned forward and his eyes glittered through his shaggy eyebrows. “But no! Not false. True!” He slammed his board-like hand on the table. The glasses jumped and I reached out to steady the bottle.
Davy came from an illustrious diamond family. His grandfather, the mathematician André Deich, invented the brilliant cut in 1914 when he published a treatise describing the exact proportions and angles of a fifty-seven-facet, polished diamond that would produce the maximum possible light return, or fire.
“My first sight of the diamond was in Russgem’s building,” Davy said.
They brought him to an empty room on the sorting floor. On a table lay a plain gray metal sorting box. He opened it, and there was the stone.
“I have never seen a stone like this,” he said. “Fragments from the deep earth are still clinging to the diamond.”
“You mean it wasn’t cleaned?”
“It has been cleaned,” he said, “but the earth where it has been born, the mother earth, she does not wish to release her child.”
That’s just how Davy talked.
“It was like a deep lake with a fire burning inside the waters. And the whole appearance—I didn’t dare touch it. It was observing me! When I took it in my hand, I was scared to crush it.”
“Who owned it, Davy, Russgem or Lime or who? Had Nash bought it by then?”
But he was back with the diamond.
“Inside this turbulent stone lies a calm center: the truth of the diamond. An equation lies inside the diamond waiting to be solved. An equation written by God.”
“I’m not writing a newspaper feature, Davy,” I said impatiently. I wasn’t sure how long I could stand the pain. “How many polished stones did you get from it?”
“How many?” He stared at me in amazement. “One!”
“One? But I heard the rough weighed something like fifteen hundred carats.”
“It was a monster! I started to put a window in to examine the interior. It shattered! Into pieces! There was the single large stone at the heart of the diamond. An amazing stone! The rest was thin slivers like daggers.”
When a stone is deeply flawed, the heat from the friction of polishing can cause the diamond to blow up on the wheel. Shatter into tiny pieces. Its value destroyed in a second. If the stone Davy had cut from the surviving rough was the 464-carat Russian Pink, a thousand carats had blown into chips.
I got up and waved the waiter over and threw some money on the table. With the rain gone and the skies clearing, more people had wandered down to the old part of the city and the restaurant was filling up.
“Let’s finish this outside, Davy.”
The night air had softened. Davy stamped across the square and we came out at the cathedral. Couples with selfie sticks posed in front of the Gothic stonework, crowding their heads together in the frame to make sure that whoever was checking out their Instagram would not have to waste time looking at the most beautiful mediaeval tracery in Flanders.
“I miss your beautiful papa,” Davy said with a sigh. “He was a great diamond person. I loved him. He was very badly treated in America. He should never have gone back.”
That’s what he thought too. They’d had to extradite him.
A string of white trolleys came rumbling along the brightly lit ring road. We crossed the tracks and strolled up past the smart shopfronts toward the glass dome of the central railway station. Waves of dizziness washed over me. My legs were so swollen they hit each other as I walked.
“It was not your papa’s fault. That other pipe he found—investors always take a risk. Nothing is guaranteed.”
“He cheated them.”
We loitered at a dealer’s window near the diamond quarter. Davy examined the jewels on display.
I could hardly stand. I put my hand on the plate glass window and waited for the nausea to pass.
“The pink blew up on the wheel, Davy. What happened to all the pieces?”
“She took all the pieces.”
“Who?”
“The Chinese one with the blue eyes.”
“Honey Li? She was here?”
He kept staring into the window, his face bathed in light from the display.
“That woman will be more famous than Cleopatra.”
Somehow I made it back to the river. My head was screaming. Near the hotel I stepped into a shabby bar and drank two double gins.
The front door was locked at the hotel and no one came when I rang the bell. I pounded on the door with my fist. I stood back and would have kicked it off its hinges if the fat woman hadn’t finally come.
When I got to the room I shut the door behind me, found the fentanyl, and swallowed two. I got under the covers and lay there shivering. Slowly the fentanyl pried the fingers from my nerves. I lay there in a state of exhaustion, wanting sleep but unable to escape the hyper-alertness of my mind. I heard every sound on the river, the squeal of a hull against a dock, the long, drawn-out sound of a mooring cable stretching taut as a ship strained against it. I heard the other sound too. The high-pitched double squeak, like a bow drawn back and forth on the string of a violin. Someone had put a foot on the top step—someone who had otherwise climbed silently.
I struggled out of bed. What felt like a load of mud shifted in my brain. I almost passed out. As I made it to my feet, pain flooded up my leg. The right leg of my pants looked ready to burst at the seams. I lost my balance, stumbled hard against the wall and somehow got myself behind the door. A key went in. The door eased open. I summoned the last of my strength, stepped around, and threw the hardest punch I could. An enormous Hassid with red earlocks caught my punch in his hairy paw. Then I passed out.