The Consignment (7 page)

CHAPTER 8

Milton Rossiter took me down to Manhattan in his Lotus. He was going to look at some diamonds.

“All you have to do,” he said as we drove, “is sit there.”

What he meant was that I should sit beside him in the diamond trader’s room and watch for any sign of trouble. If any trouble occurred, my job would be to get Milton out safe and unharmed.

One drawback with being a soldier, or even an ex-soldier, is that people who know your history find it hard to treat you like a regular human being. Attitudes vary from exaggerated respect to downright contempt, but worst are the aging jocks with something to prove. Guys like Fiona’s cousin Wayne from Wyoming, who used to spend his days selling agricultural machinery and his evenings working out, getting himself in shape for Thanksgiving, when he would invariably challenge me to an arm wrestle. To keep the peace in the family, I always had to consent. Wayne, grinning, would then attempt to crush every bone in my hand while simultaneously extracting my arm from its socket. Rossiter’s take on my history was different, but sometimes equally childish.

He saw my Army background as a selling point for his equipment, he knew my presence at Haplon gave his sales team a measure of credibility with the buyers that no number of marketing graduates or MBAs could duplicate. And Rossiter wasn’t averse to spreading word of my supposed military exploits. All lies, of course, he knew zip about the real details of my military career. The Gulf War and Mogadishu were the only operations I’d ever admitted to. Rossiter also enjoyed exploiting my previously unrealized potential as a bodyguard, one that he had on permanent call, and for free. Though he never actually said that to me, it wasn’t hard to figure once I found myself being invited along to negotiations with any potentially violent client of Haplon’s. On two earlier occasions he’d required my presence at handovers of large sums of cash, transactions that I duly reported to Channon.

I went along with my unofficial role without complaint. Rossiter had the usual blindness of someone who’s run his own show for years. He believed he had me under his thumb. One day he was going to be very surprised, but in the meantime my occasional irregular assignment made good copy for my reports to Channon. But dealings in the diamond trade were a new departure for Rossiter.

“I’m guessing this isn’t for your wedding anniversary,” I said, keeping my eyes on the road ahead. He snorted. “Payment on an order?” I wondered aloud.

“Possible payment.”

“Which one?”

“The Nigerians.”

I looked at him from the corner of my eye. The Nigerians. Trevanian’s order, which, as far as I knew, hadn’t yet been confirmed.

“Trevanian faxed me last night,” he said. “He wants to firm up the order.”

“But he doesn’t want to give us money.”

“He doesn’t have any money. He’s got diamonds.”

“That’s acceptable?”

“It’s discussable.” Rossiter shifted down a gear, turning south onto the Harlem River Drive. “While I’m pouring money into that fucking pit in California, everything’s discussable,” he muttered, then he leaned over and switched on the radio to indicate that he wasn’t taking any more questions.

West Forty-seventh is at the center of the U.S. diamond trade, a beat that was made familiar to me by Rita Durranti when I first started with Hawkeye. She was collecting evidence against a guy named Jerry Tyrone. He had supply contracts with several African states whose demand for materiel invariably exceeded their capacity to pay in U.S. dollars, a hard-currency gap that the two sides bridged with barter. Gold and diamonds were the only commodities acceptable to Tyrone, and I frequently found myself making the trip down to a Customs safe house near West Forty-seventh to listen and learn at Rita’s debriefs of her informers after valuations and sightings of uncut stones that were the coinage of Tyrone’s somewhat Byzantine transactions.

But all the time I’d worked for Rossiter, his policy had been to accept only U.S. dollars. His problems at the new factory in California seemed to be making him rash.

As we walked along Forty-seventh, he scanned the shop fronts. I asked him what we were looking for.

“Hersch Building. Nameplate’ll say Greenbaum. M. Greenbaum.”

“Diamond trader?”

“So he tells me.”

We passed quite a few Orthodox Jews—hats, ringlets, and beards—most standing in twos and threes outside the shop fronts, talking. After a few minutes of searching, we located the Hersch Building and went in. When we asked for Greenbaum’s office, the porter gave us some tags, then directed us to the cage-elevator. Upstairs, we found the room. I pressed the button.

“Come,” said a voice from the speaker over the door.

But when we stepped over the threshold we weren’t in an office, we were in a small cubicle of plated steel. A security camera was trained on us from the ceiling. Another speaker was mounted on the wall. I exchanged a glance with Rossiter. Eventually the inner door opened and a small guy with a neatly trimmed beard rose from behind his desk, beckoning us in. Mordecai Greenbaum.

“The others, they haven’t arrived. I can wait only fifteen minutes.” He checked his watch after shaking Rossiter’s hand, then Rossiter introduced me, explaining my position at Haplon. Greenbaum waved that off. Nodding to me, he sat behind his desk and hitched his ankle onto his knee. Then while he made small talk with Rossiter—politics, and the state of the diamond market—I sat in a corner armchair and looked around. The shelves were overloaded with trade magazines, and several oak cabinets were lined up along one wall. There were no pictures, just a whiteboard scrawled with numbers, carats, and prices. The office of someone who wasn’t too concerned about his working environment, but neat. Greenbaum was wearing a discreetly expensive suit, the kind you might expect to see on a corporate lawyer or a broker down on Wall Street. A skullcap was pinned to the crown of his head. The way he and Rossiter were talking, they hadn’t known each other long.

When the buzzer went off a few minutes later, Greenbaum directed our attention to a monitor off to his right. On the monitor, we watched Trevanian and Lagundi enter the secure cubicle. Greenbaum turned to Rossiter. “That is them?”

Rossiter nodded, and Greenbaum let them in. Trevanian looked hassled, even a little pissed off, but Lagundi seemed like she hadn’t a care in the world. She nodded to me and smiled. After Rossiter did the introductions, Greenbaum cleared his desk. He unrolled a square of black velvet the size of a handkerchief and placed it in the center of his blotter. He took an eyeglass from his pocket and rubbed the eyeglass on his shirt, inviting Trevanian to put the stones on the velvet. Trevanian glanced at Lagundi, who turned away from us and retrieved a leather pouch from inside her blouse. She opened the pouch and gently shook the contents onto the black velvet.

Roughs. Uncut, unpolished diamonds. They sat there, a small pile of crystalline pebbles, they weren’t anything much to the untrained eye. She pushed them apart with one finger, then lined them up in pairs. Five pairs, ten stones. Greenbaum bent and studied them with his naked eye a moment. Then he looked up at Lagundi, raising a brow. When she nodded, the examination commenced. Greenbaum rolled each stone between thumb and forefinger, peered at it, then replaced it on the velvet. Next he picked the same stone up with a pair of tweezers, put in his eyeglass, and swiveled to face the north window. He held each stone up to the soft morning light and examined it carefully. Nobody spoke. After a few minutes’ inspection he dropped each stone onto a set of jewelers’ scales on the window ledge, took a reading, and jotted a note in his pad.

After stone number five, Trevanian asked if he could smoke. Greenbaum shrugged, too intent on the grading to care. Another quarter hour went by. Trevanian smoked, Rossiter thumbed through some diamond-trade magazines, and Cecille Lagundi watched Greenbaum like a hawk. It was like a priestly ritual in some private alcove of the temple. The only sound was the occasional mutter from Greenbaum as he jotted his notes. The inspection finally completed, he lined the stones up in pairs again.

“Certificates of Origin?” he mused. Lagundi told him that certificates weren’t required. “If you wish to realize full value for the stones, certificates would be helpful,” he said. She looked straight at him and said nothing. “You have more?” he asked, passing a hand over the stones.

“You wanted to see a sample,” Trevanian cut in. “This is a sample.”

“You have more?” Greenbaum repeated, unfazed.

Trevanian gave him a look. Then Lagundi folded the velvet around the stones and took them to the window. To the surprise of everyone there except Trevanian, she took her own eyeglass from her purse. Then she carefully examined each stone, and weighed it on Greenbaum’s scales before returning it to her leather pouch. She was checking that Greenbaum hadn’t made a switch. When Rossiter realized what she was doing, he said, “Oh, for chrissake.” But Greenbaum didn’t seem put out. He folded his hands together over his paunch and watched her calmly.

When Lagundi finished, Trevanian stubbed out his cigarette. “Every stone’s a D flawless,” he told Rossiter. “They’ve all been pregraded, every one between five and eight carats. Putting a price on them’s not rocket science.”

Greenbaum produced a copy of Rapaport Report, the bible of the diamond trade, from his drawer. Trevanian flipped through it, then stopped and ran a finger down one column. “D flawless, five carat stone. Fifteen thousand six hundred dollars per carat,” he read aloud.

“List price,” Greenbaum interrupted. “Meaningless.”

“Call it our opening number,” Trevanian told Rossiter. Greenbaum shook his head, frowning. “Opening number,” Trevanian repeated. “We’ll negotiate the discount from there.” Then Trevanian explained how the proposed barter, diamonds for Haplon materiel, should proceed. It was child’s play compared with some of Jerry Tyrone’s transactions. He wanted to agree with Rossiter on a discount figure for the list price per carat for the roughs. Then Greenbaum, on Rossiter’s behalf, would make a selection from the stones that were stored in a Manhattan bank vault. Once Greenbaum’s selections added up to twelve million dollars—the price of the Haplon materiel—the trade would be done. “The only number we have to agree on is the discount,” Trevanian concluded.

Rossiter asked what would happen if there weren’t sufficient stones in their stock to add up to twelve million dollars.

“Our loss,” said Trevanian. “Deal goes down the pan, we don’t get the weapons.”

Everybody in the room knew that was not going to happen, Trevanian hadn’t brought the deal so far to just sit back and watch it collapse because of some stupid miscalculation. So now Rossiter had sighted a sample of the diamonds, and he’d listened to Trevanian’s proposal. He needed professional advice. He beckoned Greenbaum across to confer. While they did that, Trevanian and Lagundi took the opportunity for a few quiet words together by the window. No one paid any attention to me. The whole situation was making me distinctly uneasy. Did my presence in the room implicate me in any way? Was I inadvertently becoming party to the proposed transaction, and was that what Rossiter intended? To compromise me?

Finally Rossiter turned from Greenbaum and announced, “We need to keep one of the stones.” Lagundi immediately objected, but Trevanian raised a hand to silence her.

“Why?” he said.

Greenbaum explained that he needed to show it down on the diamond bourse. “To gauge the market,” Greenbaum added. “If I can’t show the stone, I can’t give Mr. Rossiter an indication of fair price.”

“What’s that, a threat?” said Trevanian.

“A statement,” said Greenbaum mildly.

Trevanian eyeballed him, but Greenbaum held firm. Then Trevanian went into whispered conference with Lagundi again. It was clear she didn’t want to surrender any of the stones, but eventually Trevanian seemed to talk her around.

“Okay,” he said, turning back to Greenbaum. “You can have the smallest stone. But you only have it till the diamond bourse closes. When’s that? Three?”

“Four-thirty.”

Trevanian pointed. “Four,” he said. “And if the stone’s not back with us by then, I’ll report it as stolen.”

“Report it to whom?” said Greenbaum, and Trevanian looked so mad so suddenly that I thought for one moment he was going to plant Greenbaum through the wall. I stepped between them. Greenbaum retreated behind his desk to safety. Trevanian eyed me, surprised, almost as if he’d forgotten my presence there until that moment. At last it was Lagundi who spoke.

“I will need a receipt for the stone.”

Greenbaum laughed.

“It’s a few hours’ loan, for chrissake,” said Rossiter.

Trevanian stood toe-to-toe with me, so close I could smell the mint on his breath. “No receipt,” he said, “no stone.” He was watching me, keeping himself in my face. I held his look, waiting for him to move. But he didn’t move. Finally Rossiter swore and reached for his pen.

CHAPTER 9

“What the hell are you doing here?” said Rita the moment I stepped in and closed her office door behind me. “Well?”

“Good to see you too.”

“Don’t jerk me around, Ned.” She dropped into her chair. “What do you want?”

I took a couple of Customs forms from my briefcase and pushed them across her desk. She glanced down. She had a careworn look, the corners of her mouth turned down. After a second, she looked up.

“What’s this?”

“I thought you might sign them,” I said, and she stared at me. The forms related to a small-arms deal Haplon was doing into Britain. Inconsequential. Rita seemed ready to explode. “Sign them,” I added, “and I’ve had a reason to be here.”

“You’ve got no damn reason to be here.” She pointed. “If you want to end up like Spandos, that’s your business. When I want a target pinned to my back, I’ll tell you.”

“You got my fax?”

“I got it,” she said.

“Have you read it?”

She leaned back and pressed her hands to her face. Then she pulled some stapled pages from her desk drawer and slapped them down. I’d intended to deliver copies of the stolen paperwork to her in person, but after my unexpected late-night visitor at home, I’d decided not to wait. I’d faxed her everything instead. She’d obviously had time to give it some attention. She didn’t seem thrilled. “This is an order, Ned. A done deal.”

“It hasn’t been signed yet.”

“There is no way this slipped by you by accident. Someone did not want you to see it.”

I conceded that. I said it seemed likely.

“No, not just likely. It’s a fact. This is a draft contract.” She indicated the fax. “It’s clearly been gone over by both parties. It’s been gone over by the lawyers. The only one it hasn’t been gone over by is you.” When I made no response, she kicked back in her chair. She bit her lip. “You know what I’m going to ask, don’t you?”

“I’ve got a fair idea.”

“Rossiter didn’t start feeling guilty because he’d cut you out. He didn’t just up and give this to you.”

“I stole it.”

She looked at me. “That easy, huh?”

I told her about Rossiter’s double-locked door. She frowned. When I mentioned my late-night visitor at home, she groaned out loud.

“I’ll get the papers back into his office,” I said.

“You have any clue when? Or how?”

“My problem.”

“It’s our problem.”

“I’ll get them back in.”

She cupped her forehead in her hand. “Either you know less about what is going on in Haplon than I do, or you’re lying to me. And if you’re lying to me—”

“Why would I?”

“You work for Channon, not me. How many times have I heard that from you? From you and Dimitri both. And if Channon ordered you to lie to me?”

I pointed to the fax. I told her that the first time I’d seen the originals was the previous night.

“When you stole them.”

“Right,” I said.

She looked out her window, turning things over. She still wasn’t happy. “So tell me,” she said, swiveling back. “What happens if Rossiter checks his files and finds the draft contract gone?” When I didn’t answer, she flipped. “Okay, I’ll tell you what happens. He’ll know it’s been stolen. And given that you’re the guy he’s tried to keep this from, I think we can assume you’re going to be high on his list of suspects. He’ll fire you. And that is not just your problem, Ned. Because if Rossiter decides for sure that Haplon has been under surveillance, he won’t go through with this deal. And if he doesn’t do that, we’ve got no damn case. We’re screwed.”

“If he doesn’t go through with this deal, his bankers’ll pull the plug on his California factory. He’s not going to let that happen.”

“You’re sure of that.”

“I’ve just come from West Forty-seventh.” When she gave a sound of surprise, I nodded. “Diamonds.” I said. “First time ever for Rossiter. He wants this deal.” I explained that there simply wasn’t time for me to go through the regular procedure and arrange a meeting with her at Grant’s Tomb. Since I couldn’t raise Channon, I’d had to come to her office. She grimaced, lifting a hand, brushing my belated apology aside. Then I told her about the meeting on West Forty-seventh. I mentioned Lagundi’s surprising expertise, and I told her about the deal Trevanian was proposing. I offered my opinion that the diamonds might be under Lagundi’s control, not Trevanian’s.

While Rita was considering all that, someone buzzed her. When she took the call on her desk phone, I got up and went to the window. If I was going to keep Hawkeye alive, I needed Rita to work with me. If the deal went ahead, and Trevanian took delivery of the Haplon materiel and transported it in contravention of the embargoes, it was U.S. Customs who would prosecute. And Customs had already agreed with Channon that the deal should take its course, under our surveillance. They were even prepared to let the materiel make its way to Liberia, as Channon predicted it would, just so the illegal trail could be wound up in its entirety, corrupt African officialdom included. But to get the deal that far, Rita had to be satisfied that I was gathering evidence Customs could actually use. She had to be convinced that a smart lawyer couldn’t destroy it in court. She had to be sure that I wasn’t breaking the law.

When she hung up, I faced her, ready to plead my case.

“What happened to the diamonds?” she asked me abruptly.

I hesitated. “Lagundi took them back to the bank. Greenbaum kept one of them to show down on the diamond bourse.”

She stood straight up. Then she invited me to accompany her on a walk down the hall.

In all my time with Hawkeye, this was the first time I’d been inside the Customs building, so when Rita led me through two corridors and down a flight of stairs, I was lost. The decor changed, the feel of the place too, it was bare and functional. We passed a few guys wearing jackets with
CUSTOMS AND EXCISE
stamped on the back in gold letters. The rooms off the hall had numbers instead of nameplates. It was like we’d stepped through a movie-set facade into grim reality.

Rita spoke to a guy outside one room, then led me through an unmarked door just past it. Two steps in, I balked.

“One-way glass.” Rita waved me in. “Soundproof too. We used to do the taping in here.” On the other side of the glass was a small, brightly lit room with a table at its center. A guy in a Customs jacket was seated at the table. Seated opposite him was Mordecai Greenbaum. I was suddenly at sea. “They’re halfway through an interview,” Rita explained. She flipped a switch, and immediately Greenbaum’s voice came through some hidden speaker. He was recounting the meeting I’d just left at his office on West Forty-seventh. Who said what to whom. Recounting it accurately, as far as I could tell.

I looked at Rita. “Okay,” I said, waiting for an explanation.

“You came here uninvited. You’ve got no right to be mad at me.”

“I’m not mad. Not yet.”

“We caught Greenbaum smuggling stones in from Antwerp last year. While we’re thinking about what charges to lay, he’s doing his civic duty.”

“A stooge.”

“An informer.”

“How’d you get him into the Trevanian deal?”

“We didn’t. He got us in.” Rita explained that two weeks earlier, Greenbaum had told his case agent, the Customs guy at the table, about some loose talk he was hearing on the bourse. Someone in the arms trade was looking to off-load some African roughs, provenance unknown. “Our agent told him to get himself involved. Offer his services.”

“And you thought I didn’t need to know that?”

“Our guy thought it was bullshit. Informer overdoing it. They always do. Then yesterday Greenbaum came up with a name. Rossiter.”

“When was I going to hear that?”

“Today.” She looked at me, her expression blank. She was lying. I didn’t know why. She asked me if I was sure Greenbaum had kept one of Trevanian’s stones. When I nodded, she left the room. A minute later, the agent rose from the table behind the glass and disappeared into the hall. When he came back in, he immediately started questioning Greenbaum about the conclusion of the meeting over on West Forty-seventh. Rita rejoined me. As we listened some more, Greenbaum became evasive.

“What’s so important about the stone?” I asked Rita.

“Analysis.” She braced her hands on the ledge, her face up close to the glass. “We can send it out to the lab in Santa Fe. They’ll put it through some tests.”

“Greenbaum already confirmed they were D flawless.”

“Bully for Greenbaum.”

“You don’t trust your own informer?”

“Not just that. The lab can tell us where it’s from, whether they’re conflict diamonds. Blood stones. If we know where they’re from, maybe we can get ahead of the game.”

“Channon’s still guessing Liberia.”

“They’ve got the war and the diamonds. But we need some corroboration.”

I watched Greenbaum through the glass. “Greenbaum has to give the stone back to Trevanian by four.”

“Four?”

“Half of eight.”

“Shit,” she said. Her face tightened in dismay, and I stepped up closer to the glass. After leaving Forty-seventh I’d walked a block, then gotten a cab down to Customs. Greenbaum must have been just minutes behind me. It wasn’t possible he’d already taken the stone to the bourse. I was sure the diamond was still on him.

“Have your man search him.”

Rita frowned. “Greenbaum’s not stupid. He’d have to wonder how we made such an inspired guess.”

“You could have bugged his office.”

“Yeah. Either that, or else one of the three people he just met came scurrying back here and told us.” She folded her arms and faced the glass again.

Greenbaum’s interview continued. It was a polished performance, he answered each question without embellishment, and though he cast a few glances in our direction, clearly aware someone might be watching from behind the glass, he never faltered. He acted more like a colleague of the Customs agent than the unpaid informer he was. When the questions finally returned to that point at the end of the West Forty-seventh meeting, when he’d kept a stone, he was ready. There were no evasions this time. He said straight out that Lagundi had taken them all.

“Search him,” I said.

Rita looked at me. I stared at Greenbaum through the glass. Rita finally shrugged and went out, and a few seconds later the agent left the interview room. Rita must have spoken to the agent out in the hall, because when he returned to the interview room, he skipped the preliminaries and asked Greenbaum if he was carrying any diamonds. When Greenbaum hesitated, the agent told him to stand up. After considering his options, Greenbaum opened his jacket, removed an envelope, and passed it to the agent. With a straight face, he told the agent that he wanted a receipt.

The agent left the room, and within moments Rita rejoined me from the hall. Greenbaum’s envelope was in her hand. She opened it with two fingers, we peered in at the stone. An unremarkable pebble.

“We could send it to Santa Fe anyway,” she said. “Let Greenbaum take the heat from Trevanian.”

“If they don’t trust Greenbaum, they’ll drop him. You’ll lose your source.”

“We could switch the stone.”

“It wouldn’t get past Lagundi.”

We considered the rough. It was a crystalline rock the size of a pea, something you’d sweep off your porch without a second thought. Unless it was analyzed before evening, it was, for the purposes of Rita’s investigation, totally worthless.

Rita studied it, musing out loud. She returned to her first idea, sending the stone out to the government lab in Santa Fe, letting Greenbaum deal with the inevitable eruption from Jack Trevanian. She was trying to argue herself into it against her own better judgment, trying to convince herself there was actually some merit in the plan.

By that time, of course, I’d long since made up my mind. Through the glass, I watched Greenbaum rise from his chair, then stretch. He asked the agent what had happened to the rough. When the agent ignored him, Greenbaum rapped the table in an ill-advised show of impatience. He asked the agent how much longer he was going to be kept, he said that he had business to attend to at the bourse. The agent told him to shut the fuck up.

I opened a hand toward Rita. I told her to give me the stone.