Stone 588 Read online

  The milieu of the street: Add the furtive hustlers wanting to look like thieves in their cheap shoes and team-type jackets, because it will help them pass off twenty-dollar-a-carat cubic zirconium as hot diamonds at two fifty a carat, take a quick two hundred. Then there are the authentic thieves, the swifts, small-time independents trying not to be taken for what they are in their cheap shoes and team-type jackets. They shift along in pairs or threes, unable to be casual, their score of the night before concealed on them as remotely as possible. They go in at places, come out, confer. They're angry that no interest has been shown in a gold-filled cameo brooch, or they're disappointed and pissed because the most they've been offered for a clean two-carat square-cut still in its Tiffany mounting is not even half of half what their minds have already been spending.

  Add in too: the flavor of Colombians. Usually gaunt and tight-suited young men but sometimes older, with a paunch that a jacket can just barely be buttoned over. They are in from a barrio of Bogota or Cartagena, cocaine mules who have gotten through and unloaded. They have also brought their bonus, have it in the safest pocket: one or two hundred carats of cut emerald to peddle. They look only slightly more out of place than the middle-aged ex-wives in from Huntington or Paterson or New Haven wanting to sell away some of their recent alienation. Rings, pins, minor bracelets, things that actually never were favorites serve the vengeance.

  All this at street level.

  Above is where the heavier action is, in the buildings that with only one or two exceptions are prewar. The tallest is thirteen floors, the average is seven. The reason there are no new high-rises on the street is that no one, neither landlords nor tenants, wants to lose what can be made during the months needed to tear a building down and put another up. Thus, the old buildings have been divided and subdivided to the bulging point.

  Precious stones are small. Even the largest dealers can make do with little room. It also helps that it is against the grain of the trade itself to try to impress. Still, even with cramp, there is not enough of the street. Like a garden taking over, it has spread north to 48th and south to 46th and, as well, grown around all the comers it shares with its adjacent avenues.

  The diamond firm of Springer & Springer was part of that spillover.

  But by choice.

  It preferred being just around the way at 580 Fifth. That building was somewhat newer and taller, and Springer & Springer considered itself satisfactorily in place on the twenty-fourth floor with north exposure. Its space there was ample but certainly not excessive. Seven hundred and eighty-some square feet partitioned into a reception area, three windowed offices, and a small catchall room that had a coffee-making machine and a refrigerator in it. Wall-to-wall wool carpeting in a gray shade was unifying to some extent, though it would have been too much of a stretch to say the place was decorated. Furnished was closer to fact. The reception area was a grade better than the rest. The desk of polished chrome and thick clear glass matched the low table in front of a chesterfield sofa of black leather. Next to that a ficus was getting along fairly well in a blue glazed porcelain planter that was sort of Chinese. Otherwise there wasn't any evident try for coordination or color. The walls, ceilings, and doors were all painted as white as possible for no reason other than to keep the diamonds honest.

  On the third Friday of May, Phillip Springer was at his desk. Seated across from him was a dealer named Arthur Drumgold.

  Springer had never done business with Drumgold before. He could only vaguely remember having heard mention of him, which was strange considering the man claimed acquaintance with Springer's late father.

  "Our ways converged occasionally," was how Drumgold put it. "We shared a few amusements and consolations."

  He was British, thickly accented. His hair was yellowish white, sparse, combed straight back and held stiffly in place by whatever he used on it. One could see the tracks made by his comb's teeth. "Honorable man, your father . . ."

  Springer was used to hearing it.

  ". . . but likable as well," Drumgold said, implying the two qualities together were rare in the business. He asked Springer's permission to smoke and brought out an antique silver and enamel case too small for today's cigarettes. He had snipped an inch off his Rothmans so they fit.

  Springer hadn't thought Drumgold would be so old. Late seventies was his guess. It was not unheard of but unusual for a man Drumgold's age to still be out peddling stones from country to country. Springer didn't put too much stock in his observations that Drumgold's shirt cuffs were a bit too frayed for starch to conceal, that his business card was inexpensively ink embossed rather than engraved, and that there were several lighter spots on his tie where he'd dabbed it with cleaner. The ethic that only the totally heartless would bargain to the bone with a man in need was too often used to advantage. Besides, Springer was overwary by habit when it came to business. Only moments after receiving Drumgold's call requesting an appointment and using Fred Holtzer as reference, Springer had placed a verifying call to Holtzer in Geneva. Holtzer's admission to the referral was somewhat apologetic, but Springer recognized that as typical self-exoneration before the fact —in case anything went sour.

  "Let's see what you have," Springer told Drumgold to begin.

  The words corrected the course of Drumgold's thoughts. He'd been momentarily coveting the youth of this Springer fellow, the energies in store, all the chances not yet taken. He crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray, thoroughly, and brought his good but far from new Moroccan leather briefcase to his lap. He had a little trouble with one of its snaps but got it unstuck. He didn't fumble inside the case, evidently had come well organized. He brought out a "briefke," a sheet of paper folded five times a certain way down to 31/2 by 21/2 inches. He placed it on the desk.

  Springer hardly lifted it from the surface as he opened it, deftly, although mainly with his thumbs. It was something he'd done countless times. The folds of a briefke form a pocket to hold stones. This one contained melee, ten-pointers in this case, or, in other words, at the standard 100 points per carat, stones that were one tenth of a carat. Fifty of them. Springer examined them only for a moment before setting the briefke aside.

  Drumgold presented another.

  More melee. Twenty pointers of a better quality. A hundred carats in the lot.

  Springer also set these aside without revealing interest. He turned partly away from Drumgold, not actually giving attention to what was outside his window. His usual view: tarred rooftops and standpipes, the dun-shaded symmetry of Rockefeller Center, the spires of St. Patrick's cathedral contrasting with the ominous black of Olympic Tower, and, a few blocks farther up the avenue. Trump Tower, also black and attractively sinister. To Springer they were like the elements of a painting or a photograph he'd looked at so often there were no more discoveries.

  After another lot of melee of nearly the same size and quality. Springer asked, "Did Holtzer say these are the sort of goods I might want?"

  "No."

  "All you have is melee?"

  "At the moment," Drumgold said, his eyes dropping.

  The point had been reached where Springer could kiss Drumgold off, do something else with his time, perhaps sort through and match up some of the two-carat stones now in inventory. However, Drumgold's last three words moved Springer to consider all the fine precious stones that had probably passed through this man's hands. All the glowing times when he'd bought well or sold well. Beautiful deals made and celebrated. Now the years, like a sieve, had him down to melee.

  "These your best?" Springer indicated the three briefkes he'd opened.

  Drumgold had several briefkes in hand. He thumbed through them and extracted one.

  Springer unfolded it. After a glance he tilted it, and the diamonds flowed down the groove of a crease and out onto the white paper sorting pad on his desk.

  He ran the edge of his tweezers over them, gently disturbing them, provoking scintillations. When bunched as they were, they borrowed brilliance
from one another. He wanted to see how they did on their own. There were eighty stones in the lot. Round-cuts of a quarter of a carat each. Twenty carats total. Springer separated about a third of the diamonds from the rest. Using the tweezers he turned those over one at a time, so they were all table down, their pointed bottoms up. He did it with professional swiftness, arranged the stones into a single row, spaced about an eighth of an inch apart.

  This enabled him to observe their color through their pavillion facets. He went over them bare-eyed and then with the help of a tripod table loupe that magnified them ten times. Bent over with his eye close down to the loupe he inspected the color of each stone, compared it with its companions, while also searching for inclusions, specks of carbon, clouds, or any other imperfections.

  "Aikhal goods," Drumgold said.

  Springer had already figured they were Russian, from their colorless quality. They were so white they looked frozen, an appropriate characteristic inasmuch as they had been mined in a region of Siberia called Yakut, where the earth never thawed. Aikhal diamonds were the finest out of Yakut, and, as nature's frequent perversity would have it, they were also the most difficult to get at.

  Springer took up a single stone with his tweezers, used an eye loupe to look at it. Its cut appeared perfectly proportioned, the underpart of the stone in proper ratio with that above its girdle. Its facets were clean, sharp-edged, and precisely angled so the spread of its face was right. Everything about the cut contributed to getting the greatest possible brilliance from the stone.

  "Nice make," Springer said, to the stone as much as to Drumgold. He inspected the cut of several others. They were identical. It was known the Soviets were now using electronic devices that could be set to cut to such perfection.

  "How much?" Springer asked.

  "Finest water, those," Drumgold said. The old epitome of British praise for diamonds.

  A maybe shrug from Springer. He sat back, pushed back from his desk a way. "You regularly handle Russian goods?"

  Drumgold told him no, regretfully. "I happened onto these in Hong Kong. They were part of a larger lot. The far better part, I must say."

  Nothing unusual about that. Sellers nearly always fattened their better lots with stones of lesser quality.

  "I went a bit overboard on them," Drumgold admitted.

  Springer took that as part of Drumgold's sell.

  Drumgold did a little scoffing grunt and diverted his eyes. "By now I should be beyond such foolishness, not heeding my common sense, allowing diamonds to have the final say." He paused briefly to consider his words. Again the stones prevailed. "But they are lovely goods, aren't they?"

  "Yes."

  "Be something, wouldn't it, if they were each twenty carats?"

  Springer didn't go along with that dream, but the times of his own similar losses occuned to him, when the owning of a certain lot or stone had mattered more to him than his better judgment. It hadn't happened much, however. Perhaps, he thought, the tally had been no greater for Drumgold when he was thirty-four. "What price have you put on them?" Springer asked.

  Drumgold didn't reply quickly and firmly as he should have. "Sixteen," he said, meaning sixteen dollars a point, sixteen hundred a carat.

  Springer looked to Drumgold's eyes, saw the off-color of their whites, the shade of old yellowish pearls, outlined by the pink of his inflamed lids. What business battle was left in the gray of the irises was not enough. "Will you take a check?" Springer asked him.

  "Of course," Drumgold managed to say. He was stunned that there'd be no haggling.

  "I can give you cash."

  "Whichever accommodates you. A check will be fine."

  Springer gathered up the Russian melee with a small flat scoop. On the counter within reach of his chair was an electronic scale about the size of a toaster oven stood on end. He transferred the stones from the scoop to the shallow pan housed within the scale. The hitting of the little diamonds on metal sounded disproportionately loud. The readout in green numbers on the face of the scale settled on 20.60 carats.

  "Make it an even twenty," Drumgold said.

  That sixty points just conceded was worth $960. Springer held back from refusing it. Better he should allow some reciprocity. He poured the stones back into their briefke and closed its folds. Drumgold put away his other goods while Springer wrote out a check for $32,000.

  "How long will you be in town?" Springer asked.

  "Perhaps a week. It's been a while since I was last here. I find everything even taller and faster than I remember. London is my home field, naturally."

  "So then you're probably a sight holder." After a deal. Springer usually eased things down with conversation: a tactic his father had instilled.

  "Used to be. For many years I was one of the chosen. Got struck off."

  Only Springer's eyes inquired.

  Drumgold told him. "Business was tight for . . . various reasons. I had difficulty raising payment for a couple of packets. Presold them seal unbroken to an Indian dealer. The System got wind of that, of course. Didn't approve. Didn't approve of an Indian getting such goods nor of my financial bind. My very next packet was half again larger — only half, mind you — but the price The System put on it was three times as much. Three million. They had me. I couldn't presell the packet. I couldn't buy it. I was out."

  Springer's nod was genuinely sympathetic. He was well acquainted with The System and its ways, as hard and insensitive as the diamonds it controlled.

  Drumgold continued. "That was in 'seventy-seven, just before the bren. " Meaning, like a fire out of control, the run-up of diamond prices from $8,000 to $63,000 per D-flawless carat. It lasted from 1978 to 1980. "Unfortunate timing for me. Could have recouped, possibly even made a bundle." Drumgold's good-loser smile was incongruous with his recollections. His teeth were tea-stained.

  Springer got up and went to the safe, situated within a recess of the near wall. When he swung open its heavy door he realized why he hadn't waited for Drumgold to leave before putting away the Russian melee. He took his time, enough to deal with the ambivalence he felt, and then removed from the safe one of several small zippered leather cases. He returned with it to his desk.

  Inside the case were at least fifty briefkes. They were neatly filed with contents coded in pencil in their upper left corners. Springer fingered through them. Withdrew one, considered, and decided against two others. "I take it you'll be calling on other people while you're here."

  "Yes, I'd thought I would."

  "Then perhaps, as a favor, you wouldn't mind showing some of our goods around."

  "Happy to oblige."

  Springer opened four briefkes. Each contained a diamond: a 2.30 carat, a 3.05 carat, a 2.26 carat, and a 2.01 carat. They were brilliant cuts, E to F in color and of WSl quality: that is, only very very slightly imperfect. These diamonds were part of a parcel that had recently arrived at Springer & Springer from one of its contract cutters in Antwerp, had just been placed in inventory. Springer took a pad of memos from his desk drawer, listed the stones on it along with their weight and price per carat. In the diamond trade a memo serves as combination record, receipt, and promissory note that is made out whenever a stone but not money changes hands. Drumgold's signature acknowledged his having received the goods and assumed responsibility for them up to the amount indicated. Springer kept the memo original; Drumgold got the carbon copy. He shook Springer's hand across the desk and again at the door as Springer showed him out.

  Back at his desk Springer was in the wake of what he'd just done. He felt his father's presence admonishing but also commending. He could have bought the Russian melee from Dnimgold for less, surely for twelve, maybe ten. Was it a weakness that he hadn't been able to put his knee on that old neck? Actually, nothing was lost other than the profit not taken. He was sure that a client, a jewelry manufacturer in Chicago, would pay sixteen for that melee.

  The four stones from inventory were, however, something else. The price per carat h
e had stipulated on the memo would just about cover cost. Drumgold would be able to sell them easily, make a nice profit for himself, twenty-five thousand minimum. Well, hell, that had been the idea of it, hadn't it? That and to supply the old casualty with something to go in with to make him a bit more significant than melee.

  Springer zipped up the leather case, returned it to the safe. There was no sin in being soft in such a hard business once in a while, he told himself. At least he thought that was himself he heard.

  At that moment Linda looked in to see if Springer was alone. She was the all-around assistant, a graduate gemologist who appreciated that she was in a good spot with Springer & Springer. She'd been with the firm for four years. She was twenty-five, and not merely attractive, a natural blonde who helped herself to some strawberry. Linda was extremely capable. She knew diamonds, could even grade rough when necessary. Her real love, however, at least when it came to stones, was color, especially sapphires. Springer shared that with her.

  "Mal called," she said. She came all the way in.

  "Where is he?"

  "I'm sure I heard the rustle of satin sheets."

  "No clinking of glasses?"

  "Just rustle. He said he was on his way in, whatever that might mean."