The Jerusalem Diamond (31 page)

Someone crossed the floor and lay down next to him.

“I'm so glad, Tamar,” he whispered.

He felt a rushing happiness as a gentle hand touched his leg.

They bumped noses. He smelled a spicy, obvious scent as his hands found very slender shoulders, breasts like tiny flesh-fruits.

He fumbled for the lamp.

She was no more than twelve. Mehdi's hospitality, he realized dizzily.

Accused by her spare body, he left the bed and opened the door. The girl lay stiffly, watching him, her brown eyes reminding him of someone else. “
Saidi
?” she whispered.

“Out.”

Her eyes slitted, her features dissolved, she began to weep like the child she was. He saw she was afraid to move; he went to her and led her into the hallway by the hand. Hoping she wouldn't be punished or lose payment, he closed the door and flung himself down on the bed.

In a little while he got up and knocked softly on the door between the bedrooms.

Tamar came and opened it a crack. “What is it?”

“Are you all right?”

“Of course. This is an Arab house. Our host will protect us with his life so long as we are his guests.”

The door closed as he returned to bed. Then it opened again. “Thank you for being concerned about me.”

He told her she was welcome.

In the morning he awoke to a rhythmic wailing which eventually he identified as a radio played at high volume. The heat was unbearable and the soprano ululated endlessly. He felt a terrible urgency to find Mehdi and ask to see the diamond, but he put on his shorts and his running shoes. Tresca, wearing a white cotton jacket, was setting the table in the dining room.

“I thought I'd go out on the beach. Is it permitted?”

“Certainly, sair.” He put down a tray of glasses and followed Harry outside.

A white fishing boat was pasted on the blue water, far out. There was no other sign of life. Harry walked until he reached the hard-packed sand, then he began to run. Behind him ran Tresca in his white serving coat.

“We turn now,” Tresca said after about half a mile.

Harry shadowboxed. He briefly considered throwing him a good-natured head fake, maybe a little open-handed sparring. Tresca's breathing wasn't even labored. Harry had the feeling that, at will, the other man could do him a great deal of harm. He turned meekly and began to run back to the house.

Half an hour later there was a good hot-weather breakfast, sliced vegetables and yogurt, khumus and tekhina, bread, cheese and tea. “Eat in the name of God,” Mehdi told them.

“
Bismillah
,” Tamar said. She was showing her tension by talking more than usual. Harry watched as Tresca, cool in a fresh white jacket, went to get fresh coffee for her.

“He's a remarkable servant,” she said.

“Oh? Yes, of course.”

“Not Egyptian.”

“Albanian,” Mehdi said. “I had Albanian forebears. So did Farouk, you know.”

“When did they become Egyptian?” Tamar asked.

“In the early nineteenth century. The Mamelukes rose up against the Ottoman Empire in Egypt, and the Turks sent Albanian shock troops against them, headed by a young officer named Mehemet Ali. He put down the rebellion and then stuck out his backside at the Ottomans and declared himself ruler of Egypt.”

“You are descended from one of his men?” she asked.

“My great-grandfather was one of his foot soldiers. Before they were through they overran Nubia Sennaar and Kordofan, built Khartum, took Syria and, when Ali Pasha was an old man, defeated the Turks who once gave them orders. Ali's stepson and successor was Ibrahim, whose son was Ismail, whose son was Ahmed Fuad, whose son was Farouk.”

Tamar looked as though she would ask another question. “I think I would like to take advantage of the good light,” Harry said casually.

Mehdi nodded. “You will excuse me.”

They drank coffee in nervous silence until he returned. He was carrying a small olivewood box. Inside was a man's brown stocking. When he held the cotton stocking by the toe and shook it, one of the largest diamonds Harry had ever seen rolled toward him across the table. Even in the poor light of the dining room, it glowed against a butter dish. He picked it up, willing his hand not to tremble.

“I'll need a table moved in front of a window on the northern side of the house.”

Mehdi nodded. “It will have to be in my bedroom,” he said apologetically.

“If you don't mind?”

“Of course not. Do you wish anything else?”

“Perhaps the radio can be turned off,” Harry said.

He should have asked them to make the bed. The north light fell through the windows of a room in which a woman's purple nightgown still lay on rumpled sheets.

But they had left him alone. He sank into a chair and stared at the diamond.

It completely disarmed him. The historian in him overwhelmed the diamond expert, allowing him to be shaken by the ages and events the stone had survived.

In a little while he went to the window and saw Tresca sitting outside in the shade, peeling cucumbers. The other servant, whom they called Bardyl, stood behind a low wall on the roof of the house wing. When Harry opened the window Tresca continued his watchful peeling, but Bardyl's hand dropped out of sight behind the wall.

He was satisfied. He felt more at ease when there was security.

His bag gave up a pad of very white paper, a chamois cloth and a small brown envelope containing a half-carat canary diamond of the most desirable color. He rubbed both diamonds with the chamois and placed them on the white sheet so the ripe light was caught softly in the paper's surface and sent up into the stones.

In the smaller diamond the hue was perfect. From the bag he took a bottle of methylene iodide, which had been diluted with benzene in New York until it was exactly the density of the half-carat canary. He poured some of the solution into a glass cup and dropped the half-carat diamond into it. The small canary disappeared before his eyes. The refractive index of the liquid matched that of the stone, so that instead of the rays of light bending, they passed in a straight line through both the liquid and the stone, making the stone invisible.

When he placed the Inquisition Diamond into the cup it didn't disappear as completely as the smaller diamond. There were frozen bubbles in the interior, and a little milkiness. But a flaw would have stood out like a beacon on a black night. It was immediately obvious that this diamond wasn't flawed.

I should have told you
, his father had said.

“Damn it, Papa.” He allowed himself to be angry with the man he mourned. “You should have told me what?”

He took the two diamonds from the solution and dried them, then he got out his instruments and prepared to take measurements. The Inquisition Diamond rolled in his palm, rich and heavy and glowing with refracted light.

He touched the briolette.

One of his ancestors had created this!

In the base of the stone were small grooves, cut with precision. They had been made by another of his ancestors, he told himself, who had set the diamond into the Mitre of Gregory.

19

THE CANNON FOUNDRY

Each time Isaac Hadas Vitallo went to the Ducal Palace he gave his full name, and each time heard himself announced as the Jew jeweler of the village of Treviso. The smells of the place, damp stone and body odor imperfectly hidden by overstrong perfumes and raw power, washed over him and made his stomach churn
.

The Doge listened with a warm smile and cold eyes. “You take advantage of our nature,” he said, as if scolding a stupid child. “Through our love, you are not forced to wear the yellow hat. You and your family are allowed to live in a fine house like proper Christians instead of within the
Gietto.
But all this is not enough. Still you must pester me about dead Jews
.”

“
Funeral processions are attacked between the
Gietto
and our cemetery on the Lido, Your Grace,” Isaac protested. “We cannot even bury our dead under cover of darkness, since by law the three
Gietto
gates are locked at dusk and not opened until the morning bell rings in the Campanile of San Marco. We require the protection of our soldiers
.”

“
A simple matter,” the Doge said. “Contact me whenever one of your number dies
.”

“
We would not wish to bother you so often,” Isaac said. Both knew that such an arrangement would mean a massive bribe each time there was a Jewish death. “Better if you simply gave the order that a guard shall be furnished for every funeral. Is that not so, Your Grace
?”

“
Hmm.” The Doge regarded him. “I am told that whoever wears a jacinth ring on his finger cannot be felled by plague or fever. Do you know of this, jeweler
?”

Isaac suppressed a sigh of relief. “I have heard it. I know where to obtain a fine jacinth. I shall make it into a ring for you
.”

“
If you desire,” the Doge said carelessly. “At any rate, there may be little need to concern yourself further over funerals on the Lido. The
condotta
expires at the end of the year
.”

“
Your Grace?” The
condotta,
or “conduct,” was the contract by which the Jews were allowed to live in Venice. For several centuries it had been renewed periodically, usually after a show of reluctance by the authorities and the subsequent payment of bribes. “Surely there will be no trouble about the
condotta?”

“
The Church has beatified Simon of Trent
.”

Isaac looked at him numbly
.

“
There have been miracles at the tomb. The dumb, the blind and the paralyzed have been cured, life has been restored to the dead. The child is now St. Simon
.”

More than a hundred years before, a fiery anti-Semitic preacher had delivered the Lenten sermon at Trent, on the German border north of Venice. The priest had told the peasants that the Jews among them practiced ritual murder and had warned them to look after their children as Passover approached
.

On Maundy Thursday a twenty-eight-month-old child named Simon had disappeared. Houses were searched, but there was no trace of the boy until Easter Monday, when some terrified Jews discovered his small body floating in the river. Men, women and children were tortured until some of them screamed agreement that the boy had been killed so his blood could be used during Passover. The leaders of the Jewish community were dragged to the font of the local church, baptized and then butchered, and a long-lived wave of terror swept Europe. More than five years after the incident, in Portobuffole, a village near Isaac's home, three Jews were charged with ritual murder and burned to death
.

“
You must understand the Senate,” the Doge said reasonably. “Even without this beatification, there are many pious people to whom the sight of Jews is an affront
.”

Walking through the Fondamenta della Pescaria, the old fish market abutting the Rio Canareggio, Isaac studied the skewed skyline of the walled quarter, wondering that people should have to struggle to continue to live like prisoners. It was an insalubrious little island surrounded by canals. Once it had been the marshy site of
Gietto Nuovo, “
the new cannon foundry,” that forever gave it its name. When it was decided that the Jews would be kept there, the island's owners had thrown up rickety structures. The right to own property had long since been taken away; in the
Gietto
they paid rents that were 30 percent higher than Christians paid for better housing elsewhere. The quarter was too small. Soon it had spilled over into a small adjacent area
, Gietto Vecchio, “
the old foundry,” and then there had been no place to go but up. The original wooden houses were built higher, shoddy story by shoddy story, until they were tall firetraps that shuddered and swayed during windy weather. The narrow, winding lanes were skirted by alleys that contained half a dozen public wells, the only drinking supply for almost twelve hundred people
.

Isaac walked over the little bridge at the
Gietto
entrance, nodding to the gatekeeper. There were four keepers, all Christians. They were charged to see that no inhabitant went abroad at night, that all wore the yellow hat which was the Jew's mark of calumny, that the males had nothing to do with Christian women, and that they stayed within the accepted rates of interest if they loaned money
.

He made his way into the synagogue and sat in the anteroom while the beadle hurried outside to do his bidding. When the community leaders had entered the shul and seated themselves, some of them stared at him with resentment; he and the Doge's physician were the only Jews in Venice who were allowed to live outside the Cannon Foundry. But his conscience was clear. Despite his privileges he had always worked in their behalf. He leaned forward and looked at them
.