Flawless (2 page)

“You’re terrible,” giggled Julia. “You’ll do anything or anyone to make a sale, won’t you, Jake Meyer?”

She seemed to have conveniently forgotten that it was she who’d dragged him into bed this morning and not the other way around.

“Not true,” said Jake as he padded barefoot into the master bathroom, pulling up the jeans he hadn’t had time to take off. “I wouldn’t screw Antonia Jacobs if she promised to buy the Star of India from me.”

Julia giggled again. Ron Jacobs was another studio boss, her husband’s great rival, and his wife was what was politely referred to in Beverly Hills society as “plus-sized.” “Don’t be mean,” she scolded. “Toni has a glandular problem; it’s not her fault. She’s got a heart of gold.”

“Yeah, and an arse of lead,” said Jake, turning on the gold taps at one of the his-’n’-hers black onyx sinks in Julia’s bathroom and gently scrubbing the stone with soap and water. It never ceased to amaze him how women like Julia could show such genuine loyalty and sisterhood toward their girlfriends but thought nothing of screwing over their poor schmuck husbands. Of course, Al Brookstein might be doing the dirty on his wife too. A guy like that must have bimbos all over him, day and night. But he’d be hard pressed to find a better lay than the one he’d married. Jake should know.

“What time do you think your old man might get back?” he asked, slipping the cleaned stone into a dry felt pouch in his pocket, then scouring the carpet for the few smaller strays that had fallen off the bed before. “He’s not gonna flake on me, is he? ’Cause I’ve got a lot of people interested in these pinks.”

Julia’s beautiful, miraculously surgery-free face instantly hardened. She didn’t give a damn who else Jake slept with, but she’d never forgive him if he let another woman touch those diamonds. She was, in so many ways, a woman after his own heart.

“He’ll be here,” she said frostily. “I told him three o’clock, to give us time to…you know.”

“Negotiate?” suggested Jake, stuffing the rest of the diamonds into his briefcase and pulling his black T-shirt on over his head.

“Exactly,” said Julia.

Just then a door could be heard slamming downstairs and a loud, nasal voice began echoing around the house. “Ju-Ju? Jules? Are you there, honey?”

Julia’s face drained of as much color as her professional fake-bake tan would allow, and she looked with wild-eyed panic at Jake. “Oh my God!” she whispered. “It’s him; it’s Al. He’s twenty minutes early, the stupid jerk. He’s
never
early!”

Jake shook his head, looking remarkably unperturbed. “Some people are so thoughtless.”

“This is not a joke,” hissed Julia, her voice half-whisper, half-sob. “What the hell are we going to
do
?”

Grabbing her yellow Fred Segal sundress from the floor, Jake threw it at her, then pulled her roughly up off the bed and onto her feet. “Get into the bathroom and get dressed,” he said. “Lock the door. And take this with you.” Reaching into his jeans pocket, he pulled out the enormous rock that moments ago had been throbbing between her legs, and thrust it into her bewildered hand. “Go! I’ll deal with things here.”

He straightened the bed in lightning-quick time, opened his briefcase, and hurriedly emptied the remaining pinks back onto the black satin bedspread. He barely had time to slip on his handmade Italian loafers and straighten his blond mop of hair before Al Brookstein stormed in, looking far from happy.

“What the fuck are
you
doing here?” he snarled at Jake. “Where’s my wife?”

“She’s in the bathroom, looking at a fuck-off pink diamond I brought back from Siberia,” said Jake breezily. “What do you think of these?” He gestured to the jewels sprinkled across the bed.

Ignoring him, Al marched over to the bathroom but found the door locked. “Julia?” he called. “You in there?”

“Oh hi, Al. I didn’t hear you come in.” Appearing in the doorway in her cute yellow sundress and flip-flops, her long honey mane tied back in a ponytail, and her skin still slightly flushed from sex, she looked both utterly desirable and a picture of innocence. Al, a short, beetle-browed man in a crumpled suit who looked every one of his fifty-two years, softened slightly.

“Jake was showing me some diamonds.” Julia smiled. “Aren’t they beautiful?”

“Hmmm,” said Al, fingering the pink stone she handed him and calculating how much Meyer might try to charge him for it. The thing was almost the size of a fucking golf ball—never a good sign in his book. “He couldn’t show you downstairs?”

Julia looked worryingly blank for a moment, but Jake came to her rescue.

“I wanted her to see the color against a black background,” he said casually, “so we came up here. Nice bedding by the way, Alan. Very P. Diddy. Come and have a look.”

Torn between annoyance at Jake, who he was sure was mocking him, and desperation to steer his young wife toward the smaller, more affordable diamonds, Al grumpily walked back over to the bed. He was a wealthy man, but Julia’s diamond obsession would have tested the bank account of the Aga Khan. Like many of Hollywood’s rich and powerful men, Al Brookstein had developed a distrust of Jake Meyer that bordered on loathing. Not only did the bastard look like Daniel Craig, with the sort of washboard abs that few fifty-something husbands could aspire to, but he was always sniffing around Julia and her friends, dangling bling in front of them like a fucking drug dealer. The mere sight of his distinctive blue-and-silver Maserati in the driveway just now had already brought on Al’s chest pains.

“Pretty,” he said grudgingly, picking up a midsized stone. “How much?”

“
Al
,” Julia chided him. “I’m sorry, Jake. My husband has no soul.” She was about to come out of the bathroom but thought better of it when an unmistakably fishy whiff of sex drifted up from her body, retreating instead for a surreptitious wash while Al was still distracted.

“Not at all,” said Jake brightly. “I’m always happy to cut to the chase and talk business. Perhaps you and I should go downstairs, Mr. B? Get down to the nitty-gritty, as it were.”

“I’m not necessarily buying anything from you today, Meyer,” said Al, in the hopeless tone of a man who knows he is already defeated. “Let’s get that straight right off the bat.”

“I want the big one!” yelled Julia from the bathroom.

Jake smiled. Sometimes his job really was too easy.

An hour later, pulling out of the Brooksteins’ wrought-iron gates onto North Canon Drive, Jake gave a little whoop of triumph. He’d just sold a three-carat hunk of GGG for six hundred and fifty thousand dollars to a man famed throughout the entertainment business for being one of the toughest negotiators in Hollywood. Flicking the switch to let the top down on his beloved customized convertible, he luxuriated in the sunshine that seemed to pour out of the LA sky like an inexhaustible stream of liquid butter, even in December. He often missed London, his mates, the pub, the know-it-all taxi drivers, the women with breasts that jiggled when they moved, and faces that moved when they talked. But he had to admit that Los Angeles could be a pretty spectacular place to live too, especially on days like today.

Heading down the canyon into Beverly Hills proper, speeding past the seemingly endless rows of tasteless Persian mansions with their manicured lawns and vast, vulgar statues of lions in gold or marble guarding their gates, he couldn’t resist putting in a brief, gloating call to Danny. He imagined his brother freezing his ass off on a Manhattan street somewhere, soaked to the bone in icy drizzle, and began to feel even more pleased with himself as he selected the familiar number.

“Dan?” The phone rang only twice before Danny picked up. “You’ll never guess what I’ve just done.”

“Not now, Jakey,” came the terse reply. “I’ll ring you back.”

And to Jake’s astonishment, Dan hung up on him.

“Well, that’s just bloody charming, that is,” grumbled Jake to himself, pulling into one of the subterranean parking garages on Rodeo. He was closer to his twin brother than to anyone else on earth and loved him unconditionally, but they had always been deeply competitive. Every Christmas, back home in London, they compared notes on their earnings for the year. For the last three years Danny had just squeaked past Jake, but today’s coup with Brookstein would turn the tables for sure. He’d been
looking forward to rubbing his brother’s nose in it—in the nicest possible way, of course—but now he was going to have to wait. And though Jake had many good qualities, patience had never been one of them.

Stuffing the pouch containing his remaining simulants into the glove box of the car and locking it, he headed for the elevator. Late lunch on his own at Nate ’n Al’s was hardly the celebration he deserved. On the other hand, their chicken matzo ball soup put even his mother’s to shame. After the marathon fucking session he’d just had with Julia, followed by the adrenaline rush of pulling a fast one on her husband, he’d worked up quite an appetite.

On the other side of the country, Danny Meyer was in the midst of a deal of his own. Unfortunately for him, his client was not a rookie like Al Brookstein, but a hard-nosed Russian jeweler known simply as “Vlad” who’d once worked the infamous Udachny mine in the frozen Siberian plains of Yakutia, and who knew an overpriced stone when he saw one.

Poring over his diamond balance, a sort of miniature old-fashioned kitchen scale, in the back room of his dingy little store in Queens, Vlad placed the second of Danny’s five stones in one pan and, with tweezers, began adding tiny weights to the other pan. It was mesmerizing to watch this big oaf of a man, his hands as fat as bear paws, perform the delicate operation with such consummate skill. Danny stood back to let him work, concentrating on maintaining his poker face while the jeweler made his own assessment of the diamonds he’d brought him, judging each stone according to the “four Cs” that everybody in the industry worked from—color, cut, clarity, and carat.

Danny wouldn’t have been foolish enough to try to cheat an old hand like Vlad on carats. The stones were all tens and eights
(one-tenth or one-eighth of a carat), as the Russian would soon discover for himself. But on clarity, he
had
chanced his hand, claiming all five diamonds were “perfect,” a technical term meaning that a grader would have to magnify them at least ten times to be able to identify any blemishes, when in fact only three fully met that standard. He could only pray that at the end of a long day, and in such dreadful light, Vlad might slip up and miss the small inclusions he’d omitted to mention.

Unlike Jake, however, this wasn’t to be Danny’s lucky day. Pulling out a standard 10x color-corrected loupe, Vlad lifted the stone out of the scale and examined it closely.

“What the fuck…” he mumbled, his broad giant’s brow furrowing into a frown. “You theenk I’m fucking blind? Perfect my ass. This is an SI one. Maybe even a two. Is worth half the price you asking.”

“Bollocks,” said Danny, doing his best to look affronted. There was nothing for it now but to bluff it out and pretend that he hadn’t noticed the small inclusion, or internal scratch, himself. If Vlad believed he was being deliberately cheated—if he was sure of it—things had the potential to turn very nasty indeed. “There’s nothing wrong with that stone. Let me have a look.”

Vlad passed him the loupe, and Danny made a great show of looking very closely, as if unsure that what he was seeing was a blemish at all.

“Are you talking about the feather, top right? Come on. I can barely even make it out.”

“Barely?” The Russian looked at him witheringly. “You said ‘perfect.’” Carefully rewrapping each of the stones in diamond paper, he handed them back to Danny. Then, very ominously, he clapped his hands. Seconds later, two even burlier figures emerged from the shadows behind him.

“All right, mate, calm down,” said Danny, swallowing nervously, his eyes swiveling around the room, scoping out the nearest means of escape. He’d been in many a sticky situation during
his years in the business and knew how to handle himself in a fight, but these odds weren’t good, and he knew it. “How long’ve we been doing business together, eh Vlad? It was an honest mistake.”