The Jerusalem Diamond (40 page)

Mehdi was silent. Harry surrendered. “I don't sell my advice. Are you planning to sell the rest of the gems to me?”

“That is my hope.”

“Then that's how I'll earn my money. Can I see them?”

“No, not now. But I have certified appraisals for each one,” Mehdi said, pointing to some papers on the table.

There was more to the collection than he had expected. Mehdi was a clever and cautious man. The appraisals had been done by a number of people in various parts of the world, and most of the authenticating signatures were respected and familiar names. He took his time, reading the descriptions of each stone carefully, noting when the appraisal had been made and what had happened to values since then as a result of market fluctuations.

Mehdi had included copies of the appraisals of the four jewels he had already sold and the prices he had obtained.

Harry told him that in two of the transactions, he had done very badly.

He nodded. “I know. That is why I value this service.”

“A schedule for selling them one at a time is difficult to plan,” Harry said. “It depends on your need for money. For many people, selling one of these would be enough to keep them in comfort for life.”

“All my life I have lived like a king. Why should I stop now, because the King is dead and I am still alive? And, more important, uncertain circumstances sometimes make my continued existence a very expensive commodity.”

So, like an insurance agent arranging a system of annuity payments, Harry worked out a schedule of purchases, the first to begin in three years.

“Of course, there'd be one great advantage to your selling them all at once,” he said. “You may die before the entire collection is sold.”

“If I die, I shall not miss the money.”

“Ah, but
I shall
,” Harry said.

Mehdi laughed like a child. “I like you, Mr. Hopeman.”

“I like you too, Mr. Mehdi.” He did, despite the Egyptian's not believing him about the yellow diamond. “I don't know if I'd have liked you when you were with Farouk. But now I like you very much.”

“No, you would not have liked me then,” Mehdi said quietly. “At the end we did not like ourselves, we knew we were a pair of fat and jaded libertines. But in the beginning … In the beginning we were bloody marvelous. When we were boys together at the Royal Military Academy in England, the best men, the most respected minds in Europe, would come to Woolwich and sit in our rooms until late at night, helping us plan a better Egyptian monarchy. They kept telling us to study Sweden.”

“What ever happened to them? To all the plans?”

“I would not want to hear the story, much less tell it.” Mehdi favored Harry with a strange and bitter smile.

“But once we were like young lions,” he said.

Bardyl served them an excellent dinner accompanied by three wines. Business completed, they were able to relax with one another for the first time. The Egyptian was excellent company, and
Harry almost felt regret when he was told they wouldn't be staying the night.

“We'll drop you at a comfortable hotel. You've done a good deal of traveling today,” Mehdi said sympathetically.

“No, I want to return to Jerusalem. Please just leave me where I can hire a taxi.”

“Ah, we can do better than that. We are driving past Jerusalem. We shall take you all the way.”

So they said goodbye to Bardyl, who would tidy up and take the Chrysler. But when they were outside, Harry felt a reluctance to get into the Duesenberg. He walked around it, admiring the styling Detroit has tried to imitate for decades.

He couldn't resist. “Have you considered selling your car?”

Mehdi was delighted. “I have waited and waited for you to ask. I am so happy you have finally done so.” He didn't even bother to refuse. “The motor car is the reason I accepted such a low price for the first stone.”

“The ruby. The Catherine II?”

“Yes. This car was in Egypt. It had been baking in a field for four years, a nest for magpies. Not even up on blocks, just settled into the cracked tires. Bardyl had to go there and place cash in a number of hands. It was taken apart to the smallest components and each piece shipped separately. What a task! The chassis alone weighs two-and-a-half tons.”

“May I drive it?”

“But you must,” Mehdi said. “I'll sit next to you.” He held open the rear door for the driver. “For tonight, Tresca will be the master.”

It started with a throbbing. When he tried to turn the wheel it was so bad he couldn't believe it. It took muscle, worse than a heavy truck.

“The car must be going at the speed of a walking man,” Tresca said anxiously from the back. “Then everything moves on ball bearings.”

It was true, once he let it roll it steered with ease, a unique driving sensation. He was aware of being higher above the road than usual. The roofs of ordinary cars would come close to the top of the SJ's doors. He drove too carefully and too slowly in the beginning, because the rocky road was bad. But the Duesenberg seemed to pick its way over the rocks.

When they reached the paved highway the tires bit and the car
responded beautifully. He barely pressed the accelerator and they were doing ninety, the engine just burbling.

“It will go twice this fast,” Mehdi said.

“If you brake too hard, sair, we shall bump our heads,” Tresca said urgently.

He braked gently. As they knifed through the darkness he thought of Ben Hur, driving a chariot hitched to four hundred and twenty great horses, all pulling their hearts out.

He slowed all the way down when they went through a village. When he had been driving about an hour, he saw the lights of a town ahead and touched the brakes again.

At their approach, a flock of gray ghosts eddied into the road.

“Now what is it?” Mehdi asked.

“I think they're sheep,” he said, killing the motor to save the fuel.

Beyond the animals a one-ton truck strained, pulling tight a rope hawser that stretched across the road, attached to a Land-Rover on the other side. The big truck seemed to be having a lot of trouble pulling the smaller car.

Tresca leaned across the back seat. “Remember this place?” he said to Harry. “We were delayed here when I drove you to Jordan.”

He did remember it, a truck had killed a goat in the road, halting traffic.

“I don't like it,” Tresca said to Mehdi. “To be stopped here two times. Maybe they are looking for you. Twice is no accident.”

Mehdi opened the glove compartment containing the gun.

Harry strained to see. In the periphery of the headlamp glare, the sheep were beginning to part; men were walking through the flock. He could make out six or seven figures. In a moment he could see that one of the men wore a turban of white cloth with dark stripes. Slightly behind him was another with a tightly fitted cloth cap on his head. The man in the turban may have been nervous or afraid. He kept looking back, as if to make certain others were behind him.

Now Harry could see their hands.

“Oh my God,” he said.

Tresca said something in Arabic and Mehdi clawed to get the gun out of the glove compartment, but the Arab in the cloth cap had
already thrown something at the car, and it struck the windshield. The glass cracked and crazed but it didn't shatter, and the grenade bounced off and events slid together, everything happened at once.

He reached past Mehdi and opened his door, then he put his foot in the other man's side and shoved, scrabbling after him until they both lay on the ground. It had been an act of pure instinct. He had no idea to which side of the car the grenade had gone, and he might have been pushing Mehdi right on top of it.

It exploded on the other side just as a terrible racket began. All the Arabs were firing their weapons into the Duesenberg.

Harry grabbed Mehdi and they were scampering away from the car. Holding hands like children, they fled blindly into the darkness. Mehdi didn't move well, even for a fat man. He could scarcely run; to Harry it felt as if they were moving over glue. He was afraid the other man would have a heart attack. Through the sound of the firing he could hear the heavy rasping of Mehdi's breathing.

They fell into a barbed-wire fence and he cut his arm. The wire felt old and rusty. No doubt it had been salvaged after one of the wars and he thought about tetanus as he wriggled and flopped through between two of the strands, scratching himself further.

The barbed wire was hung up in Mehdi's clothes and Harry struggled to free him.

“Allah,” Mehdi gasped. Finally his shirt tore. All the while, a hundred feet away men fired into the car. The gas tank went as Mehdi ripped free, and they pressed themselves into the ground in an attempt to get away from the flaring light.

He saw that Mehdi carried Tresca's thick-barrelled pistol. Harry was afraid he would shoot and reveal their hiding place, but when he tried to take the gun he couldn't pry it from the other man's fingers.

“Don't use it,” he said, but his words were hidden by a burst of firing.

He took a fold of skin on Mehdi's plump hand and pinched it. “Don't use the gun,” he whispered.

Mehdi looked at him dully.

Harry was trying to keep his head low, behind some rocks that lined the fence. Sooner or later he expected them to find him. When he was a small boy he had learned of the man whose last name his father had shared, and for years he had had a nightmare in which he huddled in
the basement of their apartment house while Bruno Hauptmann came to kidnap him. It was as if the dream had changed only slightly.

But instead of Hauptmann, there was the ragged sound of vehicles and then a magnification of the gunfire. He raised his head long enough to see that the Arabs were no longer shooting into the burning car. They were firing beyond the car and, more important, others were firing at them. Harry could see only two of them in the pool of light but while he watched, they were being hit. They lay still, but whoever was shooting at them kept it up, and each time a bullet struck, the impact made its target jerk, so the two bodies seemed to writhe.

From the edge of the shadows another Arab turned and came straight to them. He was in a panic, as they had run, and when he was close they could hear the rasping of his breathing and then his grunt, almost on top of them, when he struck the barbed wire. He put his head and chest through first, as Harry had done.

They looked up at him and he looked down at them.

Mehdi lifted the pistol in both pudgy hands and held it to the man's neck and fired.

Harry stood with his arms around the fat man.

“I never intended to sell it to anyone else,” Mehdi whispered. “Only to my own people. Returning a part of their heritage.”

He seemed to be having a quiet form of hysterics. “Still they won't allow me to return. They have never forgiven,” the Egyptian said. He had lost his fez.

“
Haim atah margish beseder
?” a soldier asked them. “Are you all right?”

Harry nodded. “
Kayn
,” he said, watching them spray chemicals on the car.

What bothered him later—the thing that shamed him and filled him with fright—was that, with Mehdi shuddering in his arms, and dead men on the ground, and the thing that had been Tresca still sitting in the smoldering seat of the master, he was able to feel an overriding regret that now there were only twenty-nine SJ Duesenbergs left in the entire world.

26

LUCK AND A BLESSING

They were taken to an army camp and questioned by a young, dark major who had the patience to repeat the same questions until he had compiled a second-to-second account of the attack from their viewpoint. The officer asked them nothing personal; Harry was certain he knew all about their lives.

Only two of the attackers were still alive. One had been flown to Jerusalem for surgery. They were taken to see the other in his cell.

“Do you know him?”

An Arab about nineteen years old. Dressed in work shoes, brown cotton trousers and a net shirt, blue. Hair uncombed, circles under his eyes, a shadowy bruise on his unshaven jaw.

They shook their heads.

“There were eleven. All Egyptian university students.” The major looked at Mehdi. “They thought it was you they were killing in the back seat of the Duesenberg.”

Mehdi nodded.

“They say you are selling a holy Moslem object to unbelievers.”

Everything about the boy was relaxed except his eyes.

“I would never sell it out of Islam,” Mehdi said in Arabic.

“You would,” the youth said. “You bargain with them like a diseased whore, selling our soul. Trading for part of the Acre mosque with Christian swine, with Jew bastards who take, take, take what is ours. We see, we have been watching.”

“I did not sell it to them. I had other plans.”

The major nodded. “Both prisoners had information that you were also negotiating to come back into their government.”