And what’s so great is that it really is cursed,” Annie said, gazing at the famous jewel.
“Some of the people who owned it weren’t so lucky,” I agreed.
“They died horrible deaths,” she recited avidly, running her finger down a page of the booklet. “The diamond spread death wherever it went. One man drove off a cliff with his wife. Then Mrs. McLean—she went from being one of the richest women in America to one of the poorest. Her newspaper went broke. Her son died at the age of nine. Her daughter died of an overdose at twenty-five. Her husband ran off with another woman. He died in a mental hospital,” she added with relish.
Calamity was one of Annie’s passions, ranked just below clothes. Her ambition now was to be a designer. Tommy had introduced her to Minnie Ho. Minnie had taken a step back and cocked her head.
“I totally get the boots,” she’d said. “Let’s make something to go with them.”
Today it was a pink buckskin jacket spattered with sequins, black jeans, and the trademark cowboy boots. Her hair spilled over her shoulders in a tawny coil. We turned our backs on the Hope Diamond and made our way out of the Smithsonian Institution into a bright February, Washington day. I hailed a cab.
The dome of the Capitol blazed against the blue sky. We crossed the Anacostia River and headed southwest out of the city. Twenty-five minutes later we arrived at the gate of Joint Base Andrews. The MPs checked my ID and Annie’s carefully against a list, and summoned an Air Force car. It took us out across the runways to the corner of the field where Air Force One sat running up its engines. We climbed a gangway at the rear section of the plane.
A young airman blushed at Annie and led us forward through the empty press section to a small cabin. It was furnished with a pair of sofas and a writing desk. The airman went away, and returned with a tray. I helped myself to coffee and Annie poured a glass of orange juice. Five minutes later, we watched through the windows as a party of high-ranking officers assembled near the forward gangway. Soon the dark green shape of Marine One came clattering into view.
Ten minutes after takeoff the airman poked his head in the door. “The president will see you now, sir.”
I followed him forward, through a large cabin where staff were working at computers or busy on the phone. Flat-screen monitors carried newsfeeds from around the globe. The next compartment was the forward communications room, where air force personnel in headsets sat at a row of monitors, keeping the president in touch with American military commanders at bases around the world.
We climbed the staircase to the upper deck. Two Secret Service agents stood at the door to the executive suite. A marine lieutenant wearing the gold aiguillette of a presidential aide-de-camp rapped sharply on the door and opened it.
Matilda Bolt was sitting at her desk, the presidential seal mounted behind her on the wall. Her chief of staff, looking harried, was tidying a stack of papers.
“Have that done by the time we land, Bill,” she said. “I want to go over it before we get to the school.”
He shot me a glance as he hurried from the cabin. Bolt leaned back and gestured to the empty seat facing her.
Even in the plush cocoon of the president’s cabin, with its thick carpet and oversized chairs and acoustic paneling, the insistent din of the machinery of government never stopped. It clamored just beyond the walls. It hummed in the fabric of the plane. The urgency and might of the greatest office in the world.
“You’ve taken a leave of absence,” she said, pinning me with her yellow eyes. It was only two weeks after her inauguration, and already the burden of office had printed itself on her face. She had gray half-moons beneath her eyes and the lines around her mouth were etched more deeply. Her lips adopted the sardonic smile that was her natural expression. “I could use someone with your talents.”
When I didn’t reply, a ripple of malice twitched across her face. It faded quickly, erased by the relentless pressures of the presidency. In New York that morning, a deranged gunman with an assault rifle had shot his way into a school. She was on her way to the scene to console the parents and the nation for what was inconsolable.
Our own business was simpler: She needed to know that I wasn’t going to be a problem. She was the most powerful person on the planet, and I knew how she’d gotten there.
Others who knew pieces of the story had been swept up into the administration. Tabitha had an office in the West Wing where she prepared the intelligence report called the President’s Daily Brief. The PDB is the most sensitive intelligence digest in America, so Tab’s future was assured.
In addition to running the department, Tommy had the rank of assistant deputy secretary of the Treasury. That gave him some extra weight to throw around. You couldn’t really buy Tommy’s loyalty, but like all lawyers you could rent it.
Chuck left the department and moved to DC, where he joined a high-powered K Street lobbying firm whose partners expected a stream of contracts to follow in his wake. Chuck had promised as much, hinting that it would be his reward for keeping his mouth shut about certain things he knew. But spreading it all over town that you are going to be keeping your mouth shut is sort of the opposite of actually keeping your mouth shut, and the line of Chuck Chandlers came to an abrupt end one afternoon when Chuck walked in the front door of his new house in swanky Chevy Chase and met a bullet coming the other way.
The two-star general got a third star.
As for Patrick, his father’s banking operation got a license. Any quibbles about how they’d amassed their capital had been brushed aside. For now.
That left me. I’d been expecting the summons. The problem, as Bolt would see it, was that she had nothing I wanted. This made me the i that didn’t have a dot. When she’d sent for me I’d already planned the trip to DC with Annie, so a pass arrived for her too.
It was a no-press flight to New York City. Air Force One takes off when the president boards and lands when it reaches its destination. The pale-blue 747 doesn’t circle waiting for a landing slot. It’s cleared before it gets there. A commercial flight from Washington to New York takes fifty-five minutes. On Air Force One you’re there in half an hour.
“We won’t waste time,” she said. “Harry Nash very nearly became president.” Her face tightened with distaste. “Fortunately he was destroyed by his own greed.”
We both knew that wasn’t true. Nash didn’t suddenly become greedy. Greed was his profession. In a world foundering in lies, the stark simplicity of Nash’s greed had seemed like a kind of truth. Guys, who doesn’t like to make a buck? Greed was the founding motive of Bolt’s deal with Nash. He provided the glitter of his name, the throat of Honey Li, and the diamond to hang against it. Bolt supplied political credibility; Nash was the glowing bubble of magnificence that would float them to the nomination.
“Nash was the package you picked yourself,” I said.
“Elections aren’t about ideas. I’d never even have got through the primaries,” she said. “Just look at me.”
It was as if her weariness had peeled off the armor and revealed the girl she’d been: a bony kid with serpent’s eyes and a cleaver for a nose. A life of playground jeers and, later, eviscerating editorial cartoons. She glanced out the window. A few hundred yards away, a pair of F-16s kept station on the plane.
“I didn’t know what Harry was planning. That’s why I reached out to you. My sources told me you were the only one who could figure out what he had in mind.”
“No,” I said, “that wasn’t why you contacted me. You didn’t care what the scam was. You only needed me because you suspected Nash was going to double-cross you.”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Nash was never supposed to be president. That was always going to be you. Nash’s job was to get you as far as the nomination. He would pull out on a pretext at the last minute. Your party would have no choice but to hand you the nomination. Nash’s reward was whatever he made from the Pink. Yours was the presidency. You thought Nash had decided to take both. That’s the reason you wanted me to penetrate the bank in Jersey. It wasn’t to protect Nash. It was to give you the proof you needed to threaten him.”
I think in a way she was relieved to hear the truth plainly stated. For just that moment, she was not alone with it.
“It was my turn,” she said, looking out again at the F-16s. Her fingers curled into fists. “My turn. Time for the power to come to me. No one lets you have that power. You take it.”
Matilda Bolt would spend the rest of her life wrapped in a capsule of deference—protected, courted, privy to the world’s secrets. She’d paid a heavy price for it, but she’d made the first down payment long ago.
“So you threatened Nash with exposure and he came to heel.”
The plane shuddered slightly as the undercarriage went down.
“Where you’re going to have a problem,” I said, “is the murder of Lime. You’ve seen the stories. They can’t leave it alone. The reporters on the story—they’ll find out eventually how he died—his throat slashed so your running mate could cheat investors.”
We sat for a minute with our own thoughts. Nash had come out in front of the mansion to face the press, Honey beside him. He’d said how sorry he was investors had lost money. He blamed himself, didn’t think it was right to continue his campaign. And guys, I lost my best friend and partner, so I think I’ll leave it there for now. And he disappeared inside the house.
“Harry’s a cold-blooded man,” Bolt said, “but not a monster. He told me his plan had been for the police to be called to an illegal entry. The local TV channel would be tipped. Once they got onto the story, they’d discover the radiation chamber, and the stock price would fall. But the murder? That wasn’t Harry.”
She glanced at her watch.
“Let’s finish our business. You seized the Russian Pink as part of your investigation. I understand you’ve finished whatever tests you wanted, so please, give the man his bauble.”
“That’s part of the deal? He gets the diamond and the pardon?”
“The pardon is for the people. It clears away investigations that would have consumed the country. Now the nation can move on.”
“I’m glad there’s a happy ending.”
There was a knock on the door, and the chief of staff put his head into the cabin. “Madam President, we land in fifteen minutes.”
“Bill,” she said, “Mr. Turner’s daughter might like to come up for a look.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, closing the door behind him.
“I’m told you have a report but have refused to file it. I’m going to guess it’s one of those if-anything-should-happen-to-me-or-my-family situations?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You understand there’s a flip side to that.”
“I do.”
They must have brought Annie up earlier, because when the door opened this time she was right there, her eyes popping out of her head.
“Wow,” Bolt said, “that’s what I call color.” She came around the desk and fingered the western-style fringe of Annie’s jacket. “What do you call it?”
“Prairie Blush,” Annie whispered.
“Got a phone?” Bolt said, and she put out a skinny arm and hauled Annie in for a selfie.
“I hear you’re a designer,” she said, reminding me, in case it might slip my mind, even for a second, how easily she could find out whatever she wanted to find out. “Can you make me one?”
“Totally,” said Annie.
“Then I guess we’re cool,” she said. But it was me she was looking at.
The girl with the blonde crew cut had the front door open about one nanosecond before my hand touched the bell.
“Is that something they teach at butler school?” I said as I stepped into the marble vestibule.
“Yes, sir,” she said. “It’s right after the part where we learn how to deal with serious household emergencies, such as how to use the new remote.”
“You’re worth every penny right there.”
“You might not think so when I tell you they found the bug I put in it.”
We were passing through the long corridor that led to the back of the mansion. The pictures had all been packed away. The Nashes were moving to Singapore and selling the house.
“Do they suspect you?”
“Probably. They’re not stupid. They have the place swept for devices every month or so. It was only a matter of time.”
The butler agency had been Tab’s idea. She’d recruited the woman in charge of assignments and we’d put in our own agent.
“Any discussion of what happened to Lime?”
“Not in front of me. She was pretty upset when she got back to Bridgehampton after the drive to the lab.”
“She knew she’d be followed.”
“But not what she’d find when she got there.”
Nash and Honey Li were waiting on the patio. It was a clear day, and the enclosure made a suntrap so that even in February they could sit outside in coats and have their coffee in the sunshine.
Honey was draped in an ankle-length mink. Nash wore jeans and a camel hair coat. His Converse sneakers were parked on the wrought-iron table.
I put the brown parcel beside them.
Nicky floated in with a silver tray and placed a pair of scissors in front of Honey. She snipped through the Treasury seals, folded back the paper, and took out the box. She opened it, and the diamond splashed her face with rosy light.
She gazed at it with a desperate expression. “We think it’s worth even more now.”
“Even more than what?” I said.
“Oh, come on,” Nash said in his upper-class Boston drawl. “More than what it was worth before that nonsense that it was a fake.”
“And how much is that? You paid First Partners $40 million for it, which is what they paid Barry Stern. That’s supposed to be you getting the fabulous deal on a priceless diamond. But half the world thinks you got suckered by a fake and the other half thinks it’s you who faked it.”
“Don’t be an ass,” Nash said. “We have a certificate.”
He didn’t really look like Kennedy. His eyes never stopped darting. He was like a pickpocket with good teeth and hair who’d stumbled on Kennedy’s barber.
“The certificate is from one of the most respected diamond labs in the country,” he said. “It certifies that the Pink is a genuine pink, not artificially enhanced.”
“Let me tell you how this works,” I said. “Let’s say you decide to sell the diamond. You take it to one of the big auction houses. They don’t laugh in your face, because you’re Harry Nash.”
Nash tried on a lazy grin, but it wouldn’t stick, so he screwed around with his phone as if he wasn’t really paying attention. Honey, though—she was watching me fearfully.
“The auction house will stall for time. They’ll say that for a stone like this they need at least three independent labs to certify it. You waste another couple of months getting the extra certificates, but guess what? When you come back the auction guys say the market’s not good at the moment. They don’t advise selling. Demand is soft. So you wait a year and try again. But you’ll get the same answer. They’ll never try to sell your diamond. They’re afraid of it.”
He wasn’t looking at his phone now, and Honey was clutching the diamond to her breast as if to give it life.
“Bullshit,” Nash said. “The certificates prove the value of the stone.”
“They don’t. A certificate is a piece of paper. It describes a physical object. Nothing more. Only a dealer can say what the diamond is worth. Anyone likely to think of buying a jewel like the Pink would never do so without the guidance of one of the two or three dealers in the world competent to judge it. Ask yourself what they’re likely to say to their clients. They’ll say don’t touch it. It’s tainted. You took what could have been the most valuable jewel in history and slimed it. You made it part of a stock play. An essential part of the scheme was raising doubts about whether the diamond was even what it was supposed to be. You’ll never get back from that.”
In the diamond game a buyer’s fear of being taken for a fool is the single biggest hurdle a dealer has to clear before he makes a sale. That’s the same whether it’s an inexpensive engagement ring or a ninety-carat, top-color white. Diamonds have a secret language, and the buyer knows he will never learn to speak it. The dealer has to get the client to trust him. Who would trust Nash?
Honey’s knuckles were white as she clutched the diamond. God help her, I think she loved it.
Nash stood up and looked at her. There can’t have been many times in his life when something he’d planned had come apart. He looked bewildered, and for just a second, fearful for his wife. But when he turned his eyes to me, he’d got back to a place where he was comfortable. Scorn.
“You’ve got everything figured out, is that it?” he said. “You nailed the short, and Bolt used that information to force me out?”
Contempt radiated from him. Honey reached out a warning hand.
“Harry. No.”
“Play it out,” he said. “How does Bolt shame me off the ticket? By revealing I was behind the short? She can’t do that without blowing herself up too.”
He shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his coat and looked around at the mansion, as if annoyed to find himself still there.
“If she carried out such a threat, it would wreck her. I’d say it had been her idea, and let’s face it, it was.”
“Harry,” Honey pleaded again. “It’s enough.”
But he kept his eyes fixed on me.
“So she doesn’t reveal it to the public, does she? Who does she talk to?”
You think nothing can surprise you. But I hadn’t seen this.
“Your partners,” I said. “The Russians.” I thought it through. “She told them you were permanently crippled. That if the details of your deal with them came out, the deal that let you control the fund, you’d never be able to help them. She convinced the Russians, and they convinced you.”
He forced a smile onto his face. An expression hacked out by a blade.
“Next time you’re in the office,” he said, “see if there are any orders to unfreeze Russian bank accounts.”
“Maybe she set you up from the beginning,” I said, getting up to leave. “You were always her Trojan horse to get to the nomination. She must have suspected you’d try to take the presidency for yourself. If she had a deal with your Russian partners, who knows when she made it?”
He made a gun out of his hand, pointed it at me, and pulled the trigger.
“Now you’re getting somewhere.”
Tommy was waiting outside to drive me to LaGuardia. He still had the Impala. Minnie liked it.
I reviewed my conversation with Nash. He waved his hand.
“The bad guy speech at the end of the movie.”
“Cut the bullshit, Tommy. Bolt screwed everybody. You helped her. You got your reward.”
He shrugged. “You can’t play the game if you’re not on the field.”
“Come on, Tommy. I’d be surprised if you even know who the teams are.”
Tommy wasn’t taking me to the airport as a favor. That’s not where things stood with us. Our friendship had been punched too many times to be getting off the canvas anytime soon. But Tommy was my boss now, and extended leave or not he needed to make sure I understood what the consequences would be if I revealed what I knew. I’d thought Bolt and I understood each other, but I guess she thought I needed the message driven home by a hammer like Tommy.
I listened to his heavy-handed message as we went up the FDR. Traffic was snarled at the toll gates on the Triborough Bridge and slow through the tangle of construction around the airport. I waited until we got to the departures drop-off. We sat there for a few minutes, both of us staring straight ahead.
“I thought you knew me better,” I said. “Nobody has anything to fear from me. But that’s a two-way street. So make it clear when you report this conversation that if somebody gets nervous about me, and so much as a shadow of a threat falls across my family, I’ll come back. You will never see me coming. And so help me God, I will pull the house down.”
We still hadn’t looked at each other, and he didn’t look at me when he replied.
“Everybody knows you’re a serious guy, Alex.”
“I sure hope so, Tommy.”
The flight to Montreal arrived late in the afternoon, the sky already shading to purple. My car had been sitting in long-term parking at the airport since I’d left it there on my way to Brussels. A truck came out from a garage to boost the battery, and I followed him back for an oil change. Another $250 got it detailed at a carwash. A 1978 BMW 530i. Metallic blue. Four-speed manual, like pushing a knife through butter.
I drove onto the expressway that led into the city. The first flakes of an early snowstorm slanted through the headlights.
Half an hour later I tossed the keys to the valet at a downtown hotel and checked into a room on the top floor. I changed into a bathing suit, grabbed the bathrobe, and walked the short distance to the pool. I dropped the robe and slipped into the heated water and swam through the narrow tunnel that led outside into the gathering snow. Wisps of vapor rose from the bright-blue water. The lights climbing up the side of Mount Royal glimmered through the gauze curtain of the snow. The pool was empty except for a lone swimmer slowly doing lengths.
I stood with the water to my waist. The snow fell more thickly now, and the lights of the city filled the sky with a soft glow. The traffic streaming across the St. Lawrence River bridges melted into a magical tableau of drifting lights and rising steam and the white cascading sky.
The swimmer turned at the end of the pool and came crawling back: strong, thin arms pulling through the turquoise water and the falling snow. As she passed, I sank to my chest and swam beside her.
The snow danced around her elvish ears. The wind shifted into the north and came rushing down the mountain with a howl, erasing the city. We sank to our chins in the water and watched the blizzard stream through the sky.
Later, in the room, as she watched me with her speculative Russian eyes, I reached under a pillow and pulled out the little package I’d hidden there. Lily sat up and unwrapped it eagerly, flinging the paper aside until she got to the dark-green velvet of the innermost layer. Her eyes shone as she ran her fingers over the rectangular shape. She folded back the fabric reverently. The Virgin and child emerged in a blaze of gold leaf. He didn’t look so irritable this time. Lily sighed and pressed the icon against her naked breast.
“Alex, that is so adorable.” She held the icon out at arm’s length and tilted her head. “Did you steal it from poor, dead Sergei?”
“At the time, he wasn’t dead.”
“That makes it so much better,” Lily beamed.
We’d left the curtains open to watch the snow fill up the city. I was wondering what we would do in the morning. Drive further into the snow.
She lay back in the pillows and cradled the icon in her arms.
I told her about Nash and Honey Li.
“Yes,” she said dreamily, holding the icon out again to ravish it with her eyes, “they destroyed the reputation of the jewel. Call it moral closure.”
“Well, the bad guy’s still a billionaire and his Russian partners got away with murder, so maybe not.”
“You worry too much. There were rules Sergei lived by. He should have told them about the pipe from the beginning. They were Russians, darling,” she said, running her finger down the edge of the gold frame. “There were worse ways he could have died.”
The snow brushed by the window like tufts of cotton wool. A soft blue light fell on Lily’s face and on her breasts.
She’d never looked more beautiful. Maybe that’s why I searched so desperately for an explanation other than the one right there in front of me. How would Lily know there were worse ways to die if she didn’t know how Lime had died? It was the detail we’d never released.
I reached up and pushed a lock of hair away from the tip of her ear.
I went through the short list of people who knew the manner of Lime’s death, and discarded each one as a possible source for Lily. I pulled each name aside, one by one, like veils, until I could see Lily clearly, as I suppose, at the end, so had Lime, his last sight on earth her calm gray eyes.
I had no illusions about Lily. Nor Lily about me. The five million we stole from Nash had become $62 million, thanks to Great Pipe. Lily had got in early and bailed when the price hit eighty dollars. She’d seen the short coming a mile away. Naturally she’d tried to get the money out of her Luxembourg account before I twigged.
We left in the morning and drove north into the mountains, into the snow.