The Jerusalem Diamond (11 page)

He was tired and tried for sleep, but instead he kept reliving the events of the day. Finally he got up and ate some of the dates. They were sweet with heavy juices. He took the package from the drawer. When he opened it, there was no explosion. The box held wads of Arabic newspaper, which he unwrapped carefully. They contained nothing, but in their midst was a stone the size of a grape.

He cleared the table of everything but the stone.

It had a dark, dense patina, but someone had scraped two windows in the covering. When he held it to the electric light, he saw that most of it was translucent but not water clear.

He got the loupe and the measuring instruments from his bag; on impulse, he took out his father's notebooks. Turning to the final item in the last book, he wrote beneath it in a large, firm hand:

This is the end
of the technical journal
of Alfred Hopeman, son of Joshua the Levi
(Aharon ben Yeshua Halevi)

He turned the page and wrote:

This is the beginning
of the technical journal
of Harry Hopeman, son of Alfred the Levi
(Yeshua ben Aharon Halevi)

The instruments were old friends that seemed to use themselves. He wrote measurements, the report taking little time.

Type of stone, pyrope garnet. Diameter
,.75
inches. Weight, 138 carats. Color, blood-red. Specific gravity, 3.73. Hardness, 7.16. Crystalline form, cubic, a rhombic dodecahedron (faces fully developed on all sides and delicately striated)
.

Comments: This stone is rough and unset. About 70 percent of the garnet is fissured or clouded, probably with ferrous oxide. Its poor quality would not negate the claims for its history; on the contrary, in biblical times little was known about how to judge the quality of gems, and a garnet found in the desert during the wanderings of the Israelites and given by the Tribe of Levi for inclusion in the Breastplate of the High Priest would probably have been just such a stone as this. Cutting away the flawed area would result in a stone of about 40 carats that would be a medium-quality semiprecious gem of the second rank, with a wholesale price of about $180. This does not have the quality to be an Alfred Hopeman & Son stone
.

He couldn't get to sleep, his physiological time clock was out of whack. From his windows he saw that now the East Jerusalem wall glowed under floodlights like a Hollywood biblical set. He alternated between the two television channels that were still broadcasting, one in Hebrew, one in Arabic, until both stations went off the air.

For a long time, then, he poured over the photostats of the Copper Scroll. Much as he strained his eyes, it was impossible to make out the two words that remained uncipherable in the passage about the
genizah
of the yellow diamond.

In the burial place where Judah was punished for seizing spoils, buried at eight and one-half cubits, a glistering stone
(something) (something) …

He turned to his father's notebook, seeking a clue to the elusive words in Alfred Hopeman's description of the diamond. But there was nothing.

“Papa, help me.”

He knew what his father would say if they could speak now.
Du bist ah nahr
. It was what Alfred Hopeman had said whenever Harry had
been unable to see something important. Usually it had been said with quiet good humor, but that had never altered the meaning.
Du bist ah nahr
, you are a fool.

He read the notes again and again, trying to visualize the yellow diamond as his father had seen it.

9

BERLIN

Four years after establishing his own atelier and shop in the sleekest section of the Leipziger Strasse, Alfred Hauptmann was invited to an Antwerp meeting of independent dealers seeking to form an association of diamond retailers. Organization was respected by the diamond industry since the DeBeers group had formed the Syndicate to market gems, and he went to Antwerp. The meeting was well attended, but diamond clubs already offered services that fulfilled many of their needs, and successful dealers are so strongly individualistic that there was a good deal of resistance to a new association. And nobody there had the organizational drive or lust for power shown by those who had melded the mining companies into what eventually became DeBeers
.

No one seemed disappointed that the meeting had failed in its stated purpose. There was lots of spirited and enjoyable trading, and Alfred spent time with three of his relatives who had come to the meeting from Czechoslovakia. He was fond of his cousin Ludvik, whom he called Laibel; they had lived together during their apprenticeship in Amsterdam. He scarcely knew Karel, Ludvik's younger brother, who spent most of his time in Antwerp studying Alfred's conservative pinstripe, his
fawnskin spats, the soft gleam of his boots, the fresh flower in his buttonhole. His uncle, Martin Voticky, was pleased during lunch when several people stopped at their table to shake hands with the young dealer from Germany. One of these men was Paolo Luzzatti of Sidney Luzzatti & Sons, a diamond house in Naples
.

Later that day, as Alfred was leaving the Beurs Voor Diamenthandel alone, Luzzatti hailed him. “Can we talk
?”

They found a café on Pelikaanstraate. Luzzatti's German was clumsy and Alfred's Italian was worse, so they spoke Yiddish. “If you're willing, you can be of service to my company
,”
Luzzatti said. “We've been asked to repair and refurbish a very special piece
.”

“
I have several people in my shop who do that sort of thing,” Alfred said
.

Luzzatti looked at him with amusement. “I dare say. We have similar people. But this is a treasure that has been dropped and possibly damaged. It's the Inquisition Diamond, and the mitre in which it's set
.”

“
My family has had a great deal to do with that stone,” Alfred said excitedly, but Luzzatti cut him short
.

“
We know. That's one reason we thought of you. And we're aware of your work in South Africa with the Syndicate. You should know how to assess damage in a large stone
.”

“
I do, I assure you. Dealing with the Vatican.” He whistled
.

“
Yes
.”

The thought excited him. “Will they let me see it now? I could go to Rome from here
.”

“
No, no! It's most sensitive. You understand, a Jewish firm, the Catholic Church. They move ever so slowly. I don't know when they will turn it over to us
.”

Alfred shrugged. “When they do, let me know
.”

Luzzatti nodded. He signaled a waiter to bring them fresh coffee. “Tell me, Hauptmann, how do you like living in Berlin
?”

“
It's the most exciting city in the world,” he said
.

Berlin was where he had been born. His childhood was spent in a square, ugly house of gray stone on the Kurfürstendamm. He left it, stricken and terrified, when he was fourteen, three days after his parents were burned to death in a hotel fire in Vienna, where they had been on
business. His uncle was conservator of the estate. Martin Voticky, whose surname had become a Bohemian version of Hauptmann when he had moved to Prague as a young man, seemed a forbidding and foreign figure
.

“
You can live with us if you like,” Voticky told him. “Or you might enjoy a boarding school
.”

Alfred made the wrong choice
.

His uncle had unpleasant memories of German gymnasia and enrolled him at an expensive school in Geneva where the students were reflections of their parents' attitudes. While Alfred was in Switzerland, he grew accustomed to hearing his name only when he was called upon in class or when he spent an evening playing chess with a boy named Pinn Ngau, a Chinese who was the school's other untouchable. When Pinn talked with others, he referred to Alfred as
le Juif.

After three years of wracking loneliness he was graduated with a fluency in French and an aversion to repeating the experience at a university. When his uncle suggested that he go to Amsterdam to study diamond cutting with his cousin Ludvik, he agreed eagerly
.

The next years were the happiest he had known. Ludvik quickly became Laibel, the brother he had never had. They shared a gabled attic overlooking the Prinsengracht Canal, three buildings downstream from a windmill whose squealing shaft kept them awake for several nights and then seemed like an unending lullaby. Almost as quickly, they developed a taste for Dutch schnapps and women and little smoked herring called bokking, though they seldom had money or time for anything but the herring. Every day but Sunday they attended classes in mathematics and optics at the technical institute Martin Voticky had chosen for the rigor of its instruction, and they spent long hours at their benches in one of the city's oldest diamond houses, working with all the precious metals and a variety of stones
.

Neither of them would become famous as a cutter, but after four years they left Amsterdam with technical knowledge that would prove invaluable to them as diamond merchants
.

Laibel returned to Prague and his father's shop. Martin Voticky was resigned to making room in his firm for his nephew, too, but Alfred surprised him by having dreams of his own. He applied for a position
with the Diamond Syndicate. Within weeks, feeling like a cosmopolitan adventurer, he found himself in Kimberley, South Africa
.

The city was on a flat African plain, built around all that was left of the Kimberley Mine. In prehistoric times, molten lava had pushed its way to the surface and then had oozed back and cooled. The miners discovered early that big diamonds were found in the blue earth of such a “pipe,” and by the time Alfred saw it, the Kimberley was mined out. From 1871 to 1914, men had removed three tons of diamonds—14,504,567 carats—leaving the Big Hole, a yawning space almost a third of a mile across and thirty-six hundred feet deep, with seven hundred feet of water on the bottom. There was a fence around it. Alfred avoided the sight of it whenever possible
.

Because of his fluency in French, he was assigned to
Compagnie Française de Diamant,
one of the holding companies, and put to work sorting, classifying and evaluating rough gems. All day he worked under the supervision of people who could read the internal structure of a crystal as if it were printed matter. He studied a variety of flawed diamonds, helping to decide which could be improved by cutting, which could be saved as gems and which were fit only for industrial use. It was a rare learning experience and he was well paid, but he hated the racial ugliness he saw every day, and the climate. And while he understood that it was necessary, he never became accustomed to men with flashlights checking the bodily orifices of other men to look for stolen stones
.

At the expiration of his two-year contract, the operating director of
Compagnie Française
called him in and asked if he would like to stay on
.

The director peered over his spectacles when Alfred politely refused
.

“
Oh? Where will you go then, Hauptmann
?”

“
Berlin,” he said
.

I do not like your plan,
Uncle Martin wrote
.

You had a brilliant future with the Syndicate. And it is folly for a man of your tender years to go into the diamond business on his own. Who will buy such expensive things from one so young? If you must leave DeBeers, come to Prague. Our business is prosperous and we can use you. In ten or fifteen years
you will be experienced and mature, and we'll help you off to a good start.

But Alfred persisted, and Martin gave in. “It is time. You will be your own responsibility,” he said, summoning his nephew to Prague. Martin locked the door to his office, opened his safe, and gave the astonished Alfred his patrimony—a lump whose base was covered with gilt
.

“
It has been in the family for long generations, passed from eldest son to eldest son. In your father's place, I give it to you
.”

Along with the gilt-painted stone went its story and the other secrets of the family's diamond tradition. The telling took all afternoon and shook Alfred to the core, fed something deep within him, allowed him to begin to understand himself. It was a history to match his dreams
.

Finally, his uncle turned over to him the money his father had left. It hadn't been a fortune to begin with, and the cost of his education had made inroads. But Alfred also had a smaller amount he had saved out of his salary at Kimberley. It would have to be enough
.

He couldn't have chosen a better time to return to Germany. While he had been away his country had seen defeat, revolution, unemployment and hunger, but by the middle 1920's the world had never been so prosperous nor felt so profligate, and foreign investors had begun to pour great sums into German industry and commerce. He wandered about Berlin, trying to decide where to locate his shop. Someone older or younger might have been repelled by what he saw, but he was at the age when vice seemed attractive. The avenues were still wide and clean and beautiful, but armies of prostitutes in green leather boots patrolled the Friedrichstrasse at any hour. Bars, amusement parks and honky-tonks had sprung up in streets he remembered as stolid residential neighborhoods of working people and merchants. Everywhere in Berlin there were beautiful women, the most stylish he had ever seen, long-legged, slender and luscious
.