The Diamond Secret
At the moment, it seemed impossible.
Steam curled out of the bathroom. I stripped as I went, leaving a trail from bed to bathroom. Sheer white blouse, bra, red leather skirt—I have a penchant for leather—panties. My skin felt sweaty and sticky, and the water was heaven. The toiletries were high-end, smelling of lavender. For one second, as the spray massaged my back, I thought with some pleasure of the possibility of my Continental, with his long, clean hands. Hands on my tired neck would be very nice indeed. He’d seemed charming enough, and it wouldn’t be so bad to have a holiday affair, especially given the anniversary of my divorce.
But I didn’t want to mix family into it. I’d chosen the Drover pub because no one I knew was likely to be there. It’s not always possible, but I keep family and love life, as well as business and love life, strictly separated.
Business is obvious. It’s too hard to work with someone you’ve slept with and dumped or been dumped by.
And the trouble with families is that they always hope you’re going to settle down. That’s not on my agenda. Tried marriage for three years, and really, not married is better. Men are too unreliable. I should have learned that from my father’s example, but it took a bad marriage—with a man so much like my father they might have been clones; that is, handsome, charming, and completely incapable of fidelity—to drive the truth all the way home.
So I stood alone under the hot shower, washing the breath of hundreds of other people from my long hair, scrubbing the layers of grime from my face.
Feeling better, I wrapped one towel around my head and another around my body. Stepping over the clothes on the floor, I unzipped my black carry-on to get out some lotion and deodorant, mentally trying to choose between jeans and a skirt to wear downstairs.
It took ten full seconds to sink in: this was not my bag.
It was an exact replica, which isn’t so weird—how many black, wheeled carry-on models are there, after all?—but in the netted pocket where I keep my underwear, there were boxer shorts. Instead of my prized red leather pants, there was a stack of neatly folded T-shirts.
“Damn!”
I put my hand on the straps, lifted the edge of a blue shirt as if it were a false front, a little practical joke, and just below it, I’d find my own things. How could this have happened? I’d had it with me all the way from California!
But obviously, that wasn’t true, or I wouldn’t be looking at some man’s things instead of my own.
Think. Where could it have been mixed up? It could have happened when I pulled the bag out of the overhead bin. Not likely. I wedged it next to the right-hand wall, and took it down from the same spot.
Where else then? At security. I suppose I could have grabbed the wrong bag off the belt.
Except my shoes were in the bin right next to it.
Which left the van I used to get to the airport. I thought back to the other passengers, wondering which one might be opening my bag with the same sinking feeling I had right now.
There were three men. One was too fat to wear these clothes, one was a college boy and one was a pin-striped, red-tie business man who’d smelled of my father’s Armani cologne. He might wear silk boxers, but I didn’t see him in a turquoise linen shirt. I fingered it with admiration. Silk and linen, gorgeously cut. I’d like to see the man who’d wear this.
Probably not the van, then. Maybe it was the security check point. But I hadn’t paid any attention to who was around me there. I’d been running late.
“Damn!” I said again.
I didn’t want to wear my dirty plane-ride clothes. I wanted something that smelled clean. I wanted my nightgown to sleep in. My other shoes.
But there wasn’t anything I could do, except track down the owner of the case and try to work out an exchange. In the meantime, I’d have to go shopping in the morning.
I found a tag in a small pocket on the outside of the bag. Same place mine was, of course. The handwriting was hard to read, spidery and European. I couldn’t make out the name, which was smeared, but there was a telephone number, in Paris.
Paris. Dialing the numbers gave me a jolt of body memory, one of those electric moments that are stored God knows where, in cells all over your arms or back or collarbone or ankles. This particular memory, dialing Paris numbers, had been imprinted during my seventeenth year, when I’d dialed the number of a man, a Parisian who’d stolen my heart with a single kiss.
So I thought I was just projecting when the recorded voice on the other end sounded exactly like the voice of that very man, Paul Maigny. In French he said, “Hello, thank you for calling, please leave a message.”
Startled, I hung up. Stared at the phone, the card in a hand that had suddenly begun to tremble violently.
It couldn’t be Paul, of course. Only someone who sounded like him. Paul still lived in Paris—my father, his best friend, had recently spent a week with him—but I would have known if he’d been on that plane. With a slight shake of my head, I picked up the receiver and dialed again. Again the voice shocked me.
And again, before I could decide what to do, I hung up.
There are some voices you do not forget. Your mother. Your best friend. Your spouse. I was not mistaken about this one, either. Those elegant vowels, the slight rasp.
I scowled.
It had been almost five years since I’d heard Paul’s voice—since the day of my wedding, as a matter of fact, when I’d told him never to speak to me again. And he was likely in my mind because the island of Arran, lying backward on the sea like a man, made me think of him. Still.
It couldn’t be his case on my bed. I knew it wasn’t his handwriting, which was an elegant, sprawling hand I’d seen thousands of times.
I was just imagining things.
Firmly, I dialed the number a third time. When the voice mail picked up, I left my name and the telephone number of the hotel on the voice mail of the stranger in Paris, who no doubt had my bag and felt as bewildered as I did. In case he’d left a message for me, I next dialed my home voice mail box. No messages.
So there I was, damp in my towels, with a hot date in an hour. The stranger’s bag was open on the bed. I did what any red-blooded woman would do: I looked through it. Maybe there would be something I could wear.
A scent of laundry and man rose from it, entirely alien from the smell of my own packing. I wondered, briefly, if the stranger would go through my things. I thought of thongs and red leather pants—when you have a job as stuffy as mine, you’ve got to take your pleasure where you can find it—and a little sense of discomfort rippled through me.
Beyond the gorgeous turquoise silk and linen shirt, there was a black, zipped shaving kit, three silk T-shirts, a pair of black trousers, black socks, a pair of well-worn jeans, swimming trunks, the aforementioned boxers. A pair of walking sandals were sealed in a plastic bag. A little sand gathered in the corner. He’d been on the beach.
My stomach growled and it hit me again that I was starving. Which brought home the fact that I still I didn’t have anything to wear.
Grr. All I’d wanted was a little supper and a good night’s sleep. The mix-up was a pain in the neck.
But let’s get a grip here—it was not tragedy or disaster. It was only inconvenient. I keep some makeup in my purse, and the hair dryer in the bathroom would work fine for my wet head.
What I didn’t have was deodorant. With only a slight flush of shame, I opened the man’s shaving kit to see if he had any. There it was, a red roll-on that smelled pretty good.
There was also a white box. Jewelry, I thought—after all, jewels are my stock in trade—I opened it to see what taste he had on this level. Judging by the rest of it, it would be something understated. Probably gold, expensive.
It was expensive, all right.
For the second time in five minutes, my brain couldn’t get itself around what my eyes were seeing. It wasn’t a watch or a ring or even a tacky bracelet.
Pillowed in cotton batting was a jewel. A diamond.
A huge diamond.
My hands shook as I pulled it out. Not only was it huge, it was very rare and storied, this jewel. A jewel that was presumed to be lost. It was very old. Priceless.
It was even cursed.
Katerina’s Blood.
Since I was one of only a handful of people who would recognize the astonishment of it at first sight, I was also convinced of one other thing.
The switch of bags was not an accident.
Chapter 4
Many stones are valued for their rarity; for example, the colored stones, rubies, sapphires and emeralds are rated on their scarcity. In spite of public perception, diamonds are not among the rare stones on the earth. They’re plentiful the world over, and if it were not for a cartel controlling the distribution of these sparkling stones, the cost of diamonds would be much lower.
—Sylvie Montague, Ancient Jewels and the Modern World
Jewel geeks are an odd little club. We come to it in many ways, from many walks in life. My entry came through a trip to the British Museum when I was eleven, when a family friend took me to see the crown jewels. There I saw a collection of Indian Raj’s jewels and was stung right through the chest. In that instant, I fell madly in love with the entire mythology and wonder of gems. I have been handling them, assessing them, admiring them in my work professionally for eight years, and have seen some spectacular beauties. My particular specialty—passion—is for ancient and antique jewels.
The Katerina made my heart race. I carried it to the window, as carefully as if it were a baby bird, and held it up to the light.
Good grief.
The diamond was legendary, its history vague—very, very famous, but also elusive, changing hands with dizzying speed. I couldn’t remember the exact weight off the top of my head, but I knew it was something over 80 karats. As a point of reference, the Hope Diamond is 43.
Katerina’s Blood was cut in medieval times, so it wasn’t the glittery, winking faceted one of more modern diamonds. It was what they call table cut, flat across the top, with two narrow facets along each side. Laid in a brooch, it was set in white gold, with a line of pigeon’s blood rubies encircling it. The color was nearly crystal, clear without yellow or brown to mar it. In the diamond business, it would be a grade D, nearly as clear as glass.
But it was neither the size nor the extraordinary color that made this diamond so very, very famous and prized. It was a flaw.
Most diamonds have what are called inclusions—bits of other stones or dust or other flaws that mar the clarity of the jewel. Usually such flaws render diamonds much less valuable, but the “flaw” in Katerina’s Blood was a ruby. It floated like a drop of blood in the center of the stone.
As long as I could remember, I’d heard of this possibility—and had often heard of the gem—but the reality was beyond even my wildest imaginings.
It was unbelievably beautiful. I could barely breathe with the wonder of it. One of the rarest, most storied jewels in the world. In my hand. All the history, all the people who’d held it, all the tragedies attached to it—
The phone rang. My reverence shattered so violently that I dropped the Katerina. It banged against my toe and bounced across the rug. The phone rang again. I grabbed the diamond and headed across the room with shaking hands, thinking it must be the person who had my—
Oh, God.
A foot from the table, I stopped. Clutched the jewel to my chest.
It had been Paul on that answering machine in Paris. Some coincidences in life I could buy—say, watching a movie then seeing an actor from it at a local restaurant, or maybe Halley’s Comet streaking by on my birthday.
I could not swallow the notion that somehow, by accident, I held in my hands the jewel Paul Maigny had most wished—all of his life—to see and touch. His father, a jewel thief of some talent, had died trying to attain it. Paul, who had, in turn, fostered my own passion for jewels, had spoken of the Katerina to me many, many times.
I clutched the jewel, narrowed my eyes at the phone, as if it were responsible for this mess.
What was going on here? Paul was a collector and aficionado, not a thief like his father. The Katerina would be a gem he would pursue with great passion if he knew it had surfaced.
But he would not deliberately involve me. Which meant that someone else had learned of my connection to Paul, and planned to use me to get to him, or use me as protection against him.
The phone shrilled again. I had no doubt it was Paul on the other end. My mentor, my father’s best friend, at one time my guardian, and a man I had once believed I loved more than anyone on earth.
I let the phone ring.
I told myself it was because I was going to be damned sure I knew what the hell was going on. I wanted to know who stole it, where it had been, why I had been chosen to carry it here to Ayr.
The ring shrilled. I thought of the last time I’d seen Paul, before my wedding in San Francisco. I thought of picking up the receiver, listening to whatever he’d say.
Instead, I just stood there.
The phone stopped ringing. With slightly shaky hands, I gathered my clothes from the floor. There were spare undies in my purse, and I shimmied into them, then the skirt I’d worn on the plane. The blouse was crumpled and sweaty. Ditto the bra. I thought about going without, but that would be my hiding place, so I had to put it on. The jewel, long and flat, slipped into the space below my left breast. In the mirror, I looked to see if it was obvious, but the blouse draped down loosely, and unless a person touched it, no one would ever notice.
From the suitcase, I took out the silk and linen shirt—payment for my troubles—and it was as luscious against my skin as I’d imagined. It was clean, but I could smell a hint of the man in it. Paul? I didn’t think this was his smell.
By then, I started to feel jumpy. Nervous. Had the jewel been part of the cache taken from the drug honcho? Or had it come from some other source? How could I find out?
A rumble rolled loudly through my belly, and a jetlag headache was pounding against my sinus. Adrenaline had perked me up, but in order to think clearly, I would really need some sleep. First, food.
I’d work out a more detailed plan later, but for now, I’d go ahead and meet the guy from the plane—it occurred to me that I didn’t even know his name yet—and eat, then come back and get some sleep. In the morning, I’d ring the Glasgow police and do some fishing. In the meantime, I’d keep it to myself. The fewer people in the loop, the better.
Maybe I’d ring my father, too, if I could figure out where he was staying and under what name. I’d check the race schedule first, to be sure he wasn’t in the middle of the Grand Prix. No point in worrying him if he was driving. He’d done very well last year, and there was talk that he was making a comeback, that he might be the one to unseat Michael Schumacher at last.
If the race hadn’t started, I could innocently probe him about Paul.
My hair was just damp, and rather than taking time to dry it, I wove it into a braid that hung against my spine. I examined myself in the mirror. The diamond did not show.
The phone rang again. I grabbed my purse and coat and rushed out without answering. A creepy sense of urgency crawled down my neck, the same warning that shows up when I’m driving sometimes—a sharp directive I’ve learned to obey. This one said, Get out, get out! I did. I was on the high street in three minutes.
It was early evening, still light, and there were plenty of people out walking. Too dark for sunglasses, and I had not thought to bring a hat. I was worried that I might bump into someone I knew—a cousin or a neighbor of a relative—and they’d want to join me, and then I’d have to say no, and then there would be hurt feelings all around. Plus, until I could figure out what was going on, I really didn’t want to take the chance that this business might put somebody in danger. Besides me, anyway.
I really wished I hadn’t stopped at my grandmother’s house.
I kept my head down. The street was busier than I would have expected for mid-March. There were tourists around, mixing with the matrons in their cardigans, plaid skirts and sensible shoes, teenagers with piercings and their shaved heads. It all made me very aware of both my jet lag and my empty stomach, which now roared in response to the smell of meat and onions in the air. I paused for a minute, looking around.
And damned if I didn’t see my cousin Keith three doors down. Luckily, he was talking on a cell phone and didn’t see me. I ducked behind a crowd of Australian schoolteacher-types and followed them into the pub. I found a seat in the dark back room, ordered a pint of Stella and the most ordinary meal in the world—pie, beans and chips—and tried to figure out what my next moves should be.
The jukebox played old rock and roll quietly. At the bar sat a gathering of after-work males. The sound of their voices—that lilting accent, always the sound of my mother—eased the tension in the back of my neck. I took the first big breath I’d had in a half hour.
Beneath my left breast was the comforting bulk of the diamond. Who had made sure I got it? Why?
As if called by my questions, the man from the airport materialized at the end of the room. He stood there, staring straight at me, for a minute. No longer smiling, and I didn’t know if it was the light or my fresh knowledge, but he looked older and a lot more dangerous than he had sleeping over the Atlantic.
The certainty penetrated my jet-lag fog: he, too, had a part in this.
I knew he was too good too be true. I cursed myself for being attracted to him anyway.
He approached and gestured toward the empty seat in front of me. “May I?”
I just looked at him. He sat down, and I realized he was older than I first thought—early- to mid-thirties instead of a decade younger. The bartender came over and he ordered a pint.
The bartender nodded. “Want something to eat?”
“I ordered the pie,” I said.
He nodded. “Another then.”
When the bartender was gone, the man took off his leather coat and rubbed a hand across his face. “Pssh,” he said, and leaned on his elbows. Even in the darkened room, his eyes were astonishing, like chips of blue marble. Looking at the shirt I’d taken from the suitcase, he said, “My sister bought me that shirt in Paris. It’s my favorite.”
“I’m keeping it for my troubles.”
His gaze slid admiringly down my body, over my breasts. Somehow—I don’t know why—a European man can almost always get away with that, while it’s only the rare American who can. His eyes came back to my face. Direct contact, eye to eye.
He had those beautifully cut lips, a slight grizzling of black beard. Good hands. You can tell a lot about a man by the way he moves his hands. An old boyfriend of mine used to just barely scratch the top of a cat’s head. It was frustrating. Guess what else was frustrating?
“It suits you,” he said. It took me a moment to realize he meant the shirt.
“Thanks,” I said, then shook my head. “Let’s not play games, all right. You need to tell me what’s going on. Who are you? And what is this really about?”
He leaned back to let the bartender set down his pint. Waited until he was gone before he said, “You found it, then?”
“A little hard to miss.”
A slight inclination of his chin, not quite a nod. “And you have it?”
I gave him a look. “What do you think?”
“Good.”
“Where are my things?”
He drunk from his glass of beer, thirstily. “I have your bag in my car.”
“I was furious about my leather pants. Do have any idea how much they cost?”
“I have good reasons to involve you, I swear it.”
“Where does Paul Maigny come into it?”
The heavy lashes swept down for a minute. Good. He wasn’t a total fool if he was smart enough to be afraid of Maigny. “May I tell you after we eat? It would be safer.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Maybe we can take a little walk on the beach, eh?”
If I hadn’t been so bloody starving, I’d have insisted we go right then, but there was nothing to be gained by skipping a meal that would be served any minute. “All right. Maybe in the meantime, you can tell me your name. You already know mine.”
“Luca Colceriu.”
“What do you do?”
One eyebrow lifted elegantly. “That’s saved for later.”
I lifted my beer and took a slow sip. A burly man with a receding hairline walked to the jukebox and put in some coins. “Well, then, what shall we talk about, Mr. Colceriu?”
“Do you know the legend of this jewel?”
“Bits and pieces,” I said. “Not the whole thing. Something about a prince, and curse.” I almost touched the comforting solidness of it beneath my blouse and resisted. It was there.
“It was discovered in India, in medieval times,” Luca said. “A Romanian prince—”
“Ah-ha. Romanian. Of course.”
He looked confused. “Pardon me?”
I shook my head. “I couldn’t place your accent earlier. Romanian, of course.”
“Right.”
“Anyway, on with the story.”
Looking a little bewildered, Luca continued. “Yes, well, the prince purchased it and had it made into a splendid necklace for his wife-to-be.”
“Katerina.”
“Yes. Three days after he gave it to her, she was gruesomely murdered by the prince’s rivals. The prince, in his grief, ordered her buried with the gem around her throat, and then he killed himself. His younger brother took the throne.”
A jewel that had been buried in a grave now pressed into my left breast. Even with my passion for stones, that was a little unnerving. “Eww.”
He raised an eyebrow.
Our food came, two heavy white plates of plain Scottish pub fare. It smelled heavenly—like onions, like meat and fat and a thousand blipping memories of my mother. I picked up my fork and took a deep breath before digging into the beans. “Perfect,” I said.
He followed suit, without my reverence, and nodded. “Not bad.”
“Back to the jewel,” I prompted. “Someone must have done some grave-robbing, however, because it’s not down there around her neck anymore, is it?”
He took his time, then in his slightly formal English said, “It was two generations before enough of the curse had ebbed for people not to be afraid of it. A greedy priest, with his eye on the papacy, twisted church law for a new prince to dig it up, retrieve the jewel.” He took a bite of pie, washed it down with beer. “The priest was killed by a lunatic three days later, a leper who’d lost his mind and killed three others before he was restrained.”
I scowled, and maybe it was my imagination, but it suddenly felt the jewel was very hot against my skin. “What about the prince who ordered it dug up?”
“I do not know about him.”
There are some things worth enjoying, and food was one of them. Despite the weird circumstances, the danger, the jewel, I was determined to enjoy my first Scottish meal in nearly five years. Hot food. Good food. Heaven. “I guess mass murder isn’t a new thing after all, huh?”
His teeth flashed, white and square. The grin lightened his whole face, and I could suddenly see through to someone else, a man who made jokes in a language I didn’t understand, to friends he’d known his whole life, who all lived a life entirely different from my own.
I wanted, suddenly, to go back with him to his Romanian world, into a walk-up flat in a faceless post-war building. I could see the kitchen, Communist-built utilitarian and plain, with half curtains at the window. There would be a little television on a stand on which he watched football games. The kind of football where they wore shorts, not shoulder pads.
It lasted only a flash, my little vision, but it must have put a different expression on my face, because his shifted. His gaze was more direct, his mouth softer in that way that’s so dangerous for a woman who has been devastated by the games of men. “What do you know, Sylvie Montague? Hmm?”