The Jerusalem Diamond (2 page)

“
Isn't that what we do when we hide it
?”

“
Yahweh protects it. We but act as His servants,” Jeremiah said sharply to the youth. “Come. This work has just begun
.”

Shimor and Hilak led them directly to the treasures and holy things they had decided upon
.

It was Baruch who saw the copper scroll and suggested that it be taken for the listing of the hiding places. Copper would last better than parchment and could be cleansed easily if it became ritually impure
.

A camel carried the chest and the Testimony away from Solomon's Temple, and an ass bore the lid. Looking like errant sticks in a load of faggots, the wings of the cherubim tented their rough cloth cover
.

Baruch had been recruited because he was a scribe. Now Jeremiah told him to engrave the location of every hiding on the copper scroll, and he met individually with the thirteen men, doling out the objects and sending the men off to hide them. No man knew a hiding place, a
genizah
site, save that to which he had been assigned. Only Baruch knew all the sites and what they contained
.

Why was he alone so trusted
?

The answer came to him during a swift siege of his illness, when the pain froze his breath in his chest and he saw his hands become bloodless blue claws
.

Jeremiah had seen
Malakh ha-Mavet,
the dark angel, hovering above him like a promise. His coming death was part of his responsibility
.

The Bukki priests still refused to admit that their world could change, but everyone else smelled war. Wood was stockpiled on the wall for fires, along with oil to be boiled and poured on those who would attack. Jerusalem's springs were good but there wasn't enough food. All the grain in the city was gathered and stored in guarded places and every flock was confiscated against the horror ahead
.

It was those who would live through the siege who should be pitied; therefore Baruch wasted no pity on himself, though finally the pain left him so weak he could no longer hold the awl or lift the hammer
.

Someone else would have to finish the work
.

Of the other thirteen men, Abiathar the Levite was best equipped as a scribe, but Baruch had begun to think like Jeremiah and he chose
Hezekiah. The soldier was no master at writing and found the task burdensome, but he led swordsmen and doubtless would die on the wall, and the secrets would die with him
.

On the morning after the gates were barricaded, Baruch was helped to the wall and he saw that in the night the enemy had come and his tents were raised, like chips in a mosaic that reached the horizon
.

He and Hezekiah returned to the cave and managed the final passage:

In the pit under the Sakhra north of the Great Drain, in a pipe opening northward, this document with an explanation and an inventory of each and every thing.

Baruch waited until Hezekiah had hammered the last letter and had rolled the instrument. Outside the wall, foreigners with small beards and high pointed hats were already galloping their shaggy ponies around David's city
.

“
Now hide the scroll,” he said
.

2

THE DIAMOND MAN

From Harry Hopeman's office high above the floor a two-way mirror allowed him to look down on the quiet opulence that was Alfred Hopeman & Son, Inc. The walls, the rugs and the furniture were soft black or rich gray, the illumination a fine white light that caused the Hopeman Collection to glitter without competition, as though the entire shop were a velvet-lined box.

His visitor was an Englishman named Sawyer. Harry knew he had been buying American corporate bonds for members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. It was also general knowledge that purchasing was only part of Sawyer's job; he helped maintain the OPEC blacklist of North American firms doing business with Israel.

“I have clients interested in buying a diamond,” Sawyer said.

Eight months before, a necklace had been ordered from Hopeman & Son by a customer in Kuwait, and then the order had been cancelled abruptly. Since then, nothing had been sold to anyone in the Arab countries. “I'll be happy to have someone show you what we have,” he said, bemused.

“No, no. They desire a particular diamond, offered for sale in the Holy Land.”

“Where?”

Sawyer raised a hand. “In Israel. They wish you to go there to buy it for them.”

“It is nice to be needed.”

Sawyer shrugged. “You are Harry Hopeman.”

“Who are ‘they'?”

“I am not at liberty. You understand.”

“I am not interested,” Harry said.

“Mr. Hopeman. It will be a brief trip that will open important doors and bring you such a lot of money. We are businessmen. Please do not allow politics—”

“Mr. Sawyer. If your employers want me to work for them, they must ask me themselves.”

His visitor sighed. “Good day, Mr. Hopeman.”

“Goodbye, Mr. Sawyer.”

But the man turned back. “If you will perhaps recommend someone with expertise similar to your own?”

“Would my company then be removed from the list of boycotted firms?”

“What list?” Sawyer said craftily. But he was programmed to scent a deal; a smile flowered.

Harry smiled, too. “I'm afraid I am unique,” he said.

Satisfaction with the encounter didn't carry him through the afternoon.

On his desk were inventories, sales reports, the paperwork he hated.

The man who managed the gem-cutting plant on West Forty-seventh Street and the woman who managed Alfred Hopeman & Son's elegant retail shop on Fifth Avenue were trained not to need him. This freed him for estate work and for dealing with the small list of personal clients—the very rich who bought rare jewels, the curators of museums that collected gems with religious or historic significance. These were the areas that brought highest profits, but such transactions were not made every week. Inevitably, there were days such as this one.

Dead air spaces.

He bypassed his secretary and dialed the number.

“Hello. Shall I come over there for a while?”

Did she hesitate before agreeing?

“Fine,” he said.

When he was sprawled with his cheek heavy on the edge of the mattress, the woman lay with the long hair fanned across her pillow and told him she was moving.

“Where?”

“Smaller place. My own place.”

“This is your place.”

“I don't want it anymore. No more checks, Harry.” She had to raise her voice to make herself heard above the television, which she insisted on playing whenever they made love because the walls of her apartment were thin though expensive. But there was no anger.

“Now, what the hell.”

“I've been reading about deer. Do you know about deer, Harry?”

“Not a damn thing.”

“They don't screw around. Not at all, except when they go into rut. Then the buck jumps any doe and as soon as he's finished, he runs away from her.”

“Very hard to keep a buck.”

She didn't smile. “You don't detect a certain … similarity?”

“Am I crashing off into the underbrush?”

“Harry Hopeman isn't an animal, he's a businessman. He makes sure the thing is taken care of, so he can use it again.
Then
he goes away.”

He groaned.

“I'm not a thing, Harry.”

He raised his head. “If you feel so …
used
, will you explain the past two months?”

“I was attracted to you,” she said calmly. She looked at him. “Your hair, that bronze color with little bits of red. And your complexion is the kind most women would like to have.”

“They'd have to shave twice a day.”

She wasn't smiling. “Teeth like an animal's. Even your football hero's nose.”

He shook his head. “A guy hit me. A long time ago.”

Now she laughed. “That fits. For you, life's little tragedies become assets.” With her fingertip she touched the dark hairs on his wrist. “Just looking at your hands used to make me … you have the most perfect hands. So controlled. I always stopped working to watch you hold up a pearl or a stone.” She smiled. “I was ready for you long before you knew it. I thought I could land you. So young for all that money. So beautiful in your homely way. I knew your wife must have lost her mind or her appeal to have moved out of your house.”

He looked at her.

“I was going to wait until exactly the right moment to pick up the whole prize.”

“It's not such a prize,” he said. “I never realized you wanted to pick it up” .

The fingers that once had typed his letters now touched his cheek. “The moment will never be right. Do you need me, Harry? Or really want me?”

He felt remorse. “Listen,” he said, “do you have to do this to us?”

She nodded. Only her eyes gave her away.

“Get dressed and say goodbye, Harry,” she said, almost gently.

Forty-seventh Street between Fifth and Sixth had drawn him and given him comfort since he was a young man running as hard as all the other young men who were learning the diamond trade. The richest block in the world was a shabby collection of dingy storefronts and old buildings that reminded him of a tattered recluse who kept bags full of money under the bed. There were a few anomalies—a famous old bookstore, a stationer's. The rest was diamond industry, talking louder than it did uptown, one of the several disparate places in which Harry Hopeman felt at home.

He passed a youth barely out of adolescence, buttonholing a man who could have been his grandfather. The pair stood in front of a store window to which a faded, torn sign was taped.

S
OLICITING
OF
P
EDESTRIANS
BY
P
ULLERS
-I
N
IS
AGAINST THE LAW
A
DMINISTRATIVE
C
ODE
# 435–10.1

—
Jeweler's Vigilance Committee

“No, but I have something almost like that. I'll give you a helluva deal on it,” the boy was saying earnestly.

Harry grinned, thinking of his own apprenticeship on these sidewalks.

The retail stores were by-products. The real Forty-seventh Street could be found among the little groups of Orthodox Jews standing on the pavement, islands among the eddying shoppers, Semitic Quakers in long drab kaftans and wide fur-trimmed hats called
streimels
, or in dark fedoras and modern suits, black or navy blue. He nodded and greeted those he knew. Several were examining the contents of dog-eared tissue-paper packets, like small boys trading aggies—but from these aggies came the kids' schooling and braces on the teeth, and rent and food and membership in the synagogue, the
shul

A casual observer wouldn't have known what they were looking at. Diamonds are the easiest way of putting a huge amount of money in a tiny space. For the most part these were middlemen who got stones from importers like Harry's father, often on credit, and sold them to retail jewelers. Most of them didn't have a showroom or even an office. When the weather was bad they left the street and traded over a cup of cafeteria coffee or in the corridors or viewing hall of the Diamond Dealers Club, into whose vault many locked their stock every night.

Some would graduate to tiny spaces in the warrens that lined both sides of the street. A few would go on to grander things. Some of the great mercantile fortunes in America had begun with a diamond dealer who did business on this sidewalk with his office in his pocket, buying
and selling carefully, dealing in Yiddish phrases and handshakes instead of contracts.

Harry walked up Fifth Avenue to the other side of the diamond business, pausing at Tiffany & Co. to admire a piece in the window, a white nonpareil of perhaps 58 carats, set as a brooch. It was impressive, but it was not a diamond around which legends could be created. And his was a legendary business.

He enjoyed even the slightest glimpse of one of the fabulous stones. The stories of his childhood had been true chronicles about the Queen's Necklace, the Great Mogul, the Orloff, the Black Star of Africa, the Mountains of Splendor, the Cullinan. Some of these great diamonds, hidden away in vaults, have been seen by few eyes in this century. But the men who gathered in his father's apartment to drink black tea on Sunday afternoons spoke of them intimately, having been told by their own fathers.

Some of the old diamond families survived and spread in much the same way as the woodchucks that thrived along the Hudson. They bred and increased. When things became crowded, younger members moved into new areas, until French, English, German, Italian, Dutch and Belgian branches of the same family plied the jewelers' trade. A few diamond men can trace their families back generation by generation, in a way that is strange during this age when most people cannot go back to their great-grandparents. Such men are said in Yiddish to have
yikhus avot
, the eminence of ancestry. Alfred Hopeman, Harry's father, spoke confidently of the fact that he was a descendent of Lodewyk van Berken.