The Jerusalem Diamond (3 page)

Until this Jewish lapidary of Bruges, diamonds had glittered only through a happy freak of nature; the only way to give them any sort of polish was to rub one against another. Van Berken was a trained mathematician. In 1467 he figured out a precise arrangement of facets which he ground into the faces of stones by using a rapidly revolving disc smeared with diamond dust impregnated with olive oil. He was able to polish each diamond to reveal its fire, and he guarded the method as a family secret. The kinsmen he trained gave birth to the Dutch and Belgian diamond-cutting industries and provided jewelry for the royalty of Europe. One of them even cut a gem—afterward known to the profession as the Inquisition Diamond—in exchange for the life
of a Spanish cousin who was to have been burned as a heretic.

These are the stories Harry had heard when other children were hearing fairy tales.

In the summer of his second year at Columbia he had gone to Europe for the first time. In Antwerp, where much of the economy is based on the diamond industry, he had found a public statue of Lodewyk van Berken. The master is sculptured wearing the jerkin and holster of his trade. He stands with his left hand on left hip, looking critically at a diamond held between his right thumb and forefinger.

Studying the homely features, Harry had seen little family resemblance. Still, he was aware that his father had taught him to polish gems with van Berken's method, virtually unchanged after almost five centuries, as Alfred himself had been taught, and all the generations back to van Berken.

“Are you really relatives?” asked a girl with whom he was traveling for a few days. She was cool and blond, the granddaughter of an Episcopalian bishop. She thought Semites were terribly exotic, a fact on which he was capitalizing.

“So my father says.”

“Introduce us.”

Gravely, he had presented her to the statue.

A week later, when they went to Poland to see Auschwitz, where his father's Czech relatives had been killed, he was overwhelmed by the sadness with which the dead Jews, his blood, communicated with him, and the cool blond girl surprised him with the depth of her feeling: she had hysterics. But in Antwerp she still had a TV comedian's view of history. “Funny, he doesn't look Jewish,” she had said.

When he got back to his office there were telephone messages. He returned a call from California.

“Harry? ‘God for Harry! England and Saint George!'” The voice that had thrilled millions was already slurred. The actor was among the world's most active diamond collectors. He was also in the midst of a celebrated estrangement.

“Hello, Charles.”

“Harry, I need your help. I am in the market.”

He wondered whether the actor wanted a reconciliation symbol or
a token gift for a passing fancy. “Large, Charles? Or intimate and charming?”

The question was understood and appreciated. “Large, Harry. Definitely large and unusual. Something eminently suitable.”

Reconciliation. “Good to hear, Charles. It will require thought and study. How much time do we have?”

“She has just left for Spain. We have some time.”

“Wonderful. And, Charles …” He hesitated. “I am happy for you.”

“Thank you, friend Harry. I know you are.”

He returned the call of a woman in Detroit. She was trying to convince her husband to convert part of their capital into a blue-white diamond of 38.26 carats.

“You sincerely think it's a good investment?” she asked.

“In the past five years most stones have trebled in value.”

“I think he'll come around,” she said.

Harry was not optimistic.

When he was twenty-three years old, he had obtained a large white Indian diamond on a voucher. Credit had been given him only because the dealer had known his father for years. He had sold it in less than two weeks, to the oil-rich mother of a Barnard girl from Tulsa, Oklahoma. During the deal, which marked the beginning of his success, he had experienced an almost sexual sensation. He thought of it as “tingling,” but it was less physical feeling than acute and intense involvement of intuition.

Now the inactivity of this personal radar hinted to him that the Detroit woman probably was not a client.

“Don't push him, Mrs. Nelson. A stone that large doesn't sell quickly. It will wait for you.”

She sighed. “I'll keep in touch.”

“Do that.”

The next call was to Saul Netscher at S. N. Netscher & Co., Inc., importers and exporters of industrial-grade diamonds.

“Harry. A man named Herzl Akiva wants to meet you.”

“Herzl Akiva?” Harry shuffled through the telephone messages and found it. “Yes, he's been calling me. The name is Israeli,” he said resignedly. Netscher, his father's closest friend, bid savagely when he bid for charity, and he was an indefatigable fund-raiser for Israel.

“He's with the New York office of a textiles firm. See him, won't you?”

Textiles? Harry was puzzled. “Of course, if it will please you.”

“I thank you. When am I going to see you?”

“Let's have lunch. End of the week? No, that's bad for me. Beginning of next week would be better.”

“Anytime. You know my system. I let your father have the headaches of raising you, and I reap the pleasures.”

Harry smiled. He was very fond of Saul, but sometimes there were disadvantages to having a real father as well as an old man who claimed the privileges. “I'll call you.”

“Okay. Stay healthy, my boy.”

“
Sei gezunty,
stay healthy, Saul.”

Although there was no message from her, on impulse he called his wife.

“Della?”

“Harry?” She sounded the same, warm and alive. He had been married to her too long not to hear the little indrawn breath. “How are you?”

“Fine, fine. I just wondered … do you need anything?”

“I don't think so, Harry. But it's sweet of you to wonder. I drove up to Jeff's school on Tuesday,” she said. “He said he enjoyed the weekend with you.”

“I wasn't sure. I had to work on Sunday.”

“Oh, Harry,” she said wearily. “Sending him to boarding school a year early because of our … situation … has been hard on him. So has the separation, and all the rest of this.”

“I know that. But he's all right.”

“I hope so. I'm glad you called,” she said. “Can we have dinner tonight? There are things we should discuss about his bar mitzvah.”

“The bar mitzvah? God, the bar mitzvah is months away.”

“Harry, it is absolutely essential to do these things months in advance. Would you like to have dinner tomorrow, then?”

“Tomorrow I go to my father's for dinner. I could call him …”

“Please don't,” she said quickly. “Will you give him my love?”

“Yes. Well, we'll talk about the bar mitzvah soon.”

“Thanks for calling. I mean it.”

“Goodbye, Della.”

“So long, Harry,” she said in her clear voice.

The Lamborghini, which he drove himself, was in a garage in East Nyack being serviced. Sid Lawrenson, his man of all work, came into Manhattan to pick him up in the second car, a three-year-old Chrysler. Lawrenson hated the city and drove too fast until northbound traffic had thinned and they were deep into Westchester County. The road onto which they finally turned dropped into an overpriced valley between hills elegant with old laurel and rhododendron. A gatehouse marked the entrance to the serpentine driveway, hidden from the road by a screening of tall oaks, sycamores and evergreens. Half the house had been built in the early 1700's by a patroon of the West India Company; the other half was added more than a century later, but so skillfully that it was difficult to tell where one handsome Colonial section left off and the other began.

“I won't need you tonight, Sidney,” he said as he left the car.

“You … ah … certain, Mr. Hopeman?”

Harry nodded. Lawrenson's wife, Ruth, the Hopeman housekeeper, was a domineering woman and Harry long had suspected that Sidney had a less abrasive female friend somewhere nearby, probably in the village.

“Then I'll do some errands.”

“Enjoy them.”

He changed into jeans and sweater and then ate the dinner Ruth Lawrenson had prepared. When the Hopemans had separated, the dour housekeeper, who loved Della and only liked Harry, had made it clear for whom she and her husband would prefer to work. But Della had moved to a small apartment in the city and used a twice-a-week cleaning lady, and the Lawrensons had stayed, for which he—and Sidney, he thought with sudden amusement—had reason to be grateful.

After dinner he went to the cluttered and comfortable workroom upstairs. In a corner, a lapidary table contained saws, files, a lapping machine and a collection of rock crystals and semi-precious stones in various stages of polishing. The rest of the room was more study than shop. A desk was heaped with annotated books and manuscript sheets,
and shelves contained an unlikely combination of periodicals—
Biblical Archeology, Gems and Minerals, Oriens Antiquus
, the
Lapidary Journal
, the
Israel Exploration Society Record, Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft Zeitschrift
…

The night was going to be warm for spring. He threw the window wide to catch the river breeze and then he sat and began to work, completing the research for a paper: “Russian Royal Gems from Ivan's Crown of Kazan to the Jeweled Breastplate of Mikhail Feodorovich Romanov.” Whenever he studied the period he especially appreciated living free in America in the twentieth century, hundreds of years after royal Slavic connoisseurs, who put jewels even on their slippers, had paid for their gem-encrusted throne with the blood and bones of millions. He read swiftly, making notes on three-by-five cards in careful if cramped handwriting, happy for the first time that day.

Several hours later, a tapping.

“It's the telephone,” Ruth Lawrenson said.

“What's wrong?” She never disturbed his work.

“Well, I don't know. Someone named Akiva says it's very important.”

“Ask him to telephone tomorrow. My office.”

“I already have. He insists it's urgent.”

Harry's hello was crisp.

“Mr. Hopeman? I believe Mr. Saul Netscher has spoken of me.”

The voice had an accent Harry ordinarily enjoyed, the sounds made by somebody who had learned English as a second language under the British. “Yes. Right now I'm busy, I'm afraid.”

“I apologize, please believe me. But I must see you on a most important matter.”

“Is it business, Mr. Akiva?”

“It is business, Mr. Hopeman.” He hesitated. “One might say it is far more than business.”

“Come to my office in the morning.”

“That would be most unwise. Could we not meet elsewhere?” The voice paused. “It is urgent that I also have an opportunity to confer with your father.”

Harry sighed. “My father is virtually retired.”

“Please be patient. You shall understand everything after we meet.”

He felt the radar faintly.

“I'll be at my father's apartment tomorrow night, 725 East Sixty-third Street. Will you come at eight o'clock?”

“That will be splendid, Mr. Hopeman.
Shalom
.”

“
Shalom
, Mr. Akiva,” he said.

At four
A.M.
he was awakened by the telephone. There was static and a confused bilingual exchange.

“
Pronto
? Mr. Hopeman?”

“Hello? Hello?”

“Mr. Hopeman?”

“Yes. Who the devil is this?”

“Bernardino Pesenti. Cardinal Pesenti.”

Bernardino Cardinal Pesenti was the Administrator for the Patrimony of the Holy See. Under his care were the Vatican's treasures, the vast art collections and the priceless array of antiquities—the gemmed crosses, the Byzantine jewelry, the altar pieces, the chalices and other vessels. Some years earlier he had arranged Harry's purchase of the jeweled crown of Our Lady of Czenstochowa, a transaction which had somewhat eased the debt of the Archdiocese of Warsaw and had helped make possible the black-and-gray splendor of Alfred Hopeman & Son.

“Your Eminence. How are you?”

“My health is sufficient for our Holy Father's work. And you, Mr. Hopeman?”

“I am very well, Your Eminence. Is there something I can do for you?”

“There is something. Is it your plan soon to be in Rome?”

“It is not my plan. It can always be arranged.”

“We wish you to represent us.”

“In a purchase?” The Church inherited. It seldom sold, but he couldn't remember the last time it had bought.

“In the recovery of a stolen item.”

“A jewel or an antiquity, Your Eminence?”

“A diamond, offered for sale in the Holy Land.” Cardinal Pesenti paused. “It is Alexander's Eye, Mr. Hopeman.”

“It's surfaced?” The stone had been missing for decades, stolen from the Vatican Museum. He was suddenly deeply interested. “My family has had a great deal to do with that stone.”

“We are well aware. One of your ancestors cut it. Another set it in the Mitre of Gregory for Holy Mother Church. Your father once cleaned both the mitre and the diamond. Now we should like you to continue this tradition of service to us. Be our representative and return it where it belongs.”

“I shall have to consider,” Harry said.

There was a small, impatient silence. “Very well,” Bernardino Pesenti said. “You should come here to discuss it, Rome is warm and lovely now. How is the weather in New York?”

“I don't know. It's very dark outside.”

“Oh, dear,” the Cardinal said finally.

Harry laughed.

“I never remember,” Cardinal Pesenti said. “I hope you shall be able to resume your sleep.”

“
Prego
,” Harry said. “I'll call you in a day or two. Goodbye, Your Eminence.”