The Jerusalem Diamond (42 page)

They got him a portable typewriter. As an afterthought, Harry also bought him a bamboo fly rod that weighed less than four ounces, a seven-foot beauty; but he wasn't sure it would satisfy a boy who dreamed of being Deerslayer.

He began to pay great attention to stories in the
Times
he might have passed by a few months earlier. In Argentina, neo-Nazi gangs were machine-gunning and bombing Jewish stores and synagogues, and they had kidnapped two Jewish families for ransom. In Bavaria, young anti-Semites were drilling in para-military societies. The Soviet government was sending more Jewish dissidents to insane asylums. A professor in Wisconsin had written a book calling the Holocaust a giant Jewish hoax.

The President condemned Israel for settling in occupied territory and joined the Russians in calling for the establishment of a Palestinian homeland. The day after the joint statement was released, Harry went to the vault and took out the Vaseline jar in which the six small yellow diamonds were hidden. He put the jar just where his father had kept it. It was a different desk, but like Alfred Hopeman he used the second drawer on the right side for stamps, paper clips, rubber bands and small
yellow fancies that could save your life if you had to flee in the middle of the night.

Five weeks after he had mailed it in Jerusalem, the laundry arrived. He unwrapped it and took the yellow diamond from its nest between an odorous sweat sock and a pair of Jockey shorts with a shameful stain, and the next morning he went to his customs broker and filled out U. S. Government Form 3509, Notice of Formal Entry, and took it and a certified check to the office of a Customs official named McCue at the World Trade Center.

McCue shook his head when he saw him. “Still smuggling, Mr. Hopeman?”

He had done this a number of times. Although technically he broke the law, Customs understood it was for security reasons, and Harry always came in immediately and paid the import duty, 4 percent of the purchase price for stones under half a carat, 5 percent of the price of bigger gems.

He had an immediate meeting with Saul Netscher, who examined the gem wistfully. “Hah, so large. You're sure this isn't the Inquisition Diamond?”

Harry nodded.

“Then where in hell
is
it?”

“I don't know.”

“What do I tell the people who put up the money?”

“The truth. I can either return their money now or they can wait until I sell this diamond. If they do that, I'll deduct my expenses and divide the profit among them,” he said morosely.

It rained four days in a row, a steady fall soaker. Then a barometric high swept cold air down from Canada, and when the sun came out it was a summer holdover. Things that had been green snapped into color. He had a sudden driving desire to see a deer. The orchard was littered with fallen apples, fermented the way whitetails love them. There were tracks all over, and pelleted droppings that indicated they were eating well, but that morning he ran on the river path without seeing anything but birds and squirrels; deer were like cops, never there when you needed one.

His son walked out and found him sitting near the bank with his back to a tree. Things were good between them. He and Della had shared the difficult explaining. As much as he could, Jeff understood what was happening to their family, and what wouldn't change.

Jeff sat next to him. The beeches were brown, the birches and poplars yellow. Oaks and maples were splashy red and orange, and a stand of white ash had become almost purple, with sumacs here and there like torches. It was all reflected in the moving water.

“I've been thinking about what I'd do if they ever tried to take this place away because we're Jews,” he said.

Jeff was puzzled. “Would they do that?”

“I don't think so.” He threw a stone into the water. “But it's happened other places, lots of times. I learned something in Israel. If it should happen here, I'd buy you your rifle. And one for myself.” .

“ … I wouldn't want to use it on people.”

“That's what rifles are for,” he said quietly. “They kill animals and they kill people.” It was hard for a father to see what his words were doing, but he watched Jeff's face.

“You mean you wouldn't let them do whatever they wanted to us, the way they did in Europe.”

He nodded.

Jeff hunched his shoulders. “It would be better to fight. I'd hate it … But I'd want to be with you.” He touched Harry's arm. “I would, Dad.”

“I know.”

By the time they got back to the house he had decided to take the six small diamonds from their hiding place and sell them. Men willing to die for their piece of earth have no need for an escape plan.

That night he covered the lapidary table with a towel against the grease and took the jar from the desk drawer.

The six stones were small and their color made them hard to find in the petroleum jelly, so he had to feel them out with his fingers, a messy job. The huge paste diamond was just under the surface, like a guard, and he took it out in a glop and dug around until, one by one, he recovered the diamonds.

They were very nice. They would sell as engagement rings.

When he wiped them he found that the petrolatum left a hazy film that dampened their fire. The only naphtha he had was charcoal lighter, but he poured some into a bowl and it cut the film beautifully. He was drying them when his eye was caught by the large paste diamond.

The bottom half was painted with gilt and it was grease covered, but all at once he saw what hadn't been apparent when he'd found the jar as a twelve-year-old boy.

It wasn't paste.

He stood over it, humming, afraid to pick it up.

He could scarcely control himself enough to wipe the petrolatum from the stone.

It had been cut as a lovely briolette. The faceting was very similar to the design in the face of Mehdi's stone. But this diamond had been cut even earlier than Mehdi's, in a period before they knew very much about sophisticated techniques.

The lower two thirds of the gem was covered by the paint, and he scraped the gilt from the bottom shakily, opening a window, and washed it in the bath, spilling the naphtha.

When he switched on the lamp at the base of the microscope and held the stone over it, the internal crystal structure filled his loupe.

The color was superb, golden but warmer than gold.

Intense sunlight. Compressed into stone.

Beautiful fire.

Purity.

Ending in sudden milkiness and a brutal darkness across the culet.

Before he saw the flaw he knew what the diamond was. “
This
is what you were trying to tell me!” he said to his father.

He sat there.

And touched it.

Making contact, through his fingertips, with the memory and the promise of the Temple in Jerusalem.

With the long silence of
genizah
in the Vale of Achor.

With the holy
maksura
of the Acre Mosque.

With the blood-sin of the Spanish Inquisition.

With the sacred majesty of the papacy.

All this, suspended and contained, for most of his father's lifetime, in a jar of chemical jell.

In a little while he became aware that he was making sounds. Crazy noises.

Above, the door of the Lawrensons' room opened.

“I tell you, it's him. He's probably sick,” he heard his housekeeper tell her husband. Sid Lawrenson's footsteps began to descend the stairs.

Despite the hour, Harry reached for the telephone.

“Mehdi's stone is the one that was stolen from the Vatican Museum,” Harry told Saul.

“ … What the hell, make up your mind! You said it wasn't the Inquisition Diamond!”

“It's not. They're two separate diamonds. I want to return this one to Rome. Would your money people donate it back to the Vatican? I'll waive my expense money.”

Netscher was outraged. “What are you asking? They agreed to buy something important to Jewish history. They'll tell me to go find a bunch of rich Catholics.”

“Listen, Saul, they'll get more than they paid for.” He talked long and hard.

“There are fourteen donors,” Netscher said at last, dazed. “With twelve of them, I'd have a hard time but maybe I could do something. Two of them wouldn't donate to the Catholic Church under any conditions.”

“Then I'll contribute two shares myself,” Harry said.

“That's a lot of money. What's it to you whether or not they stuff the diamond back into the Pope's mitre?”

“This is stolen property, after all. It's … a family obligation.” He hated Peter Harrington for having assessed his conscience so precisely. “Tell them they'll be recognized in a papal ceremony. You can persuade them, Saul,” Harry said gently.

Netscher sighed.

Monsignor Peter Harrington met him in Rome and drove him straight to the Holy See.

Harry had cabled Cardinal Pesenti, telling him only that a group of philanthropists had bought the stolen yellow diamond and that he was returning it to the Vatican Museum.

Now the Cardinal swept down on them. “
Molte grazie
,” he murmured. “How generous and kind!” He led them inside to his study. When they were seated at the refectory table and Harry had produced the diamond from his briefcase, the Cardinal held it almost unbelievingly. “I thank God that He has sent you to replace Alexander's Eye in the Mitre of Gregory, Mr. Hopeman.”

“It is not Alexander's Eye, Your Eminence.”

The Cardinal was puzzled. “Your cablegram said you were returning the stolen diamond.”

“This is the stone I bought in Israel—the diamond that jewel thieves ripped out of the mitre in your museum. But it is not the diamond that was cut by Julius Vidal, my ancestor, and then donated to the Church.”

“I do not understand.”

“The diamond you're holding had been substituted for the original, Your Eminence. Long before the modern theft.”

They stared at him in dismay.

Peter Harrington shook his head. “We keep such excellent descriptive records. It's hard for me to believe such a substitution could be made.”

“The diamond was sent outside the Vatican only twice,” Harry said. “One of those times was when my father repaired the mitre in Berlin and reset the stone. Your records will confirm that the gem he returned through the jewelry firm of Sidney Luzzatti & Sons of Naples was this diamond, the one that had been sent to him. He knew then that it was not the real Inquisition Diamond, which was in his safe. But he described the unflawed mitre gem in his journal as the Inquisition Diamond, carrying out his part in a 350-year-old charade.

“The substitution could only have been done on that other occasion, about 1590, by another of my ancestors, Isaac Vitallo of Venice—the jeweler who set the diamond when the mitre was made.”

He told them what he had discovered in his workshop two evenings before. “Maybe Vitallo was a common thief. Perhaps he felt he had sufficient cause for what he did. I know only that ever since, my family kept his secret, and the diamond.”

“A long time,” Harrington said.

Harry nodded. “Through periods that were terrible for Jews. It may have comforted them to work a small, personal revenge.”

“Why didn't your father tell you?”

“He waited too long. I think it had come to be an embarrassment to him, an anachronism.” He shrugged. “Revenge is an anachronism. It is time to take it out of hiding.”

Cardinal Pesenti was fascinated. “This stone is extremely valuable,” he said, holding it up. “Therefore, the diamond for which Vitallo substituted it—the genuine Alexander's Eye—is worth a great deal more?”

“It is literally priceless.”

“You intend to return it to the Church,” Cardinal Pesenti said at once.

“No, Your Eminence.”

He and the Cardinal sat and looked at one another.

The air changed subtly.

“It was stolen from Mother Church. You have undertaken to return this less valuable stone to us. We rightfully own Alexander's Eye, do we not?”

“We call it the Inquisition Diamond. Before it was owned by the Church, it belonged to a man who was burned to death because he was a Jew.”

In the silence, Peter Harrington cleared his throat. “You have no right, Harry!” he said hoarsely.

“I have every right. Unlike Jerusalem, it's possible to divide the ownership of a diamond. I've taken steps to give it to the Israel Museum, to your museum here in the Vatican, and to the Jordan Museum in Amman. It will be displayed at each museum on permanent rotation, for five years at a time.”

The Cardinal's mouth had become a slash. His jaw was rigid. But, watching him struggle to control his emotions, Harry saw with wonder that what filled the prelate's eyes wasn't anger.

Bernardino Cardinal Pesenti nodded. “It
is
time.”

His hand reached out and touched Harry's.

“It is time for a healing, Mr. Hopeman,” he said.

28

THE GUARDIAN