The Jerusalem Diamond (43 page)

He telephoned David Leslau and spent a long, expensive time answering delighted questions.

Eventually, however, David began to laugh. “Tell me again. You found it
where
? In a jar of
what
? … My God, that's where I made my mistake. I never dug in Cincinnati, in my backyard.”

Somehow, he didn't enjoy Leslau's amusement. “How is the digging?” he was able to ask finally.

“Promising, we're finding all kinds of signs. But no payoff.”

“What signs?”

“I'll write to you. A complete report.”

He tried to settle back into a work routine. News stories about museum thefts breed more museum thefts, and the three museums wanted publicity about the Inquisition Diamond to be handled with gingerly care, and by them. He approved. Publicity was good for business, but no diamond man likes his picture in the newspapers, marking him for muggers.

He began spending more time than necessary on Forty-seventh Street, drawn back to his beginnings. Evenings, when the ateliers and
shops were closed and only the oddball regulars remained, he sat at their table in the delicatessen and appraised their stones when they asked him to, and listened to and told diamond stories. He met people he hadn't known. It seemed as if they were all Israelis; he heard more Hebrew spoken on the Street than he had ever heard before.

He knew what he had to force himself to do. At the Diamond Association he met a beautiful woman who smelled nicely of soap and just a touch of something else and he took her to lunch twice. When he asked her to go away with him for a few days, she agreed without hesitation. They drove to Pennsylvania, to an inn near Amish farms that looked as if they were posing for postcards. She was getting her law degree from Fordham and wanted to transfer from Research to Law at the association. She told him frankly that she would welcome his help.

She talked a lot about the place in the industry of actions of tort. Her skinny body was sexy but her skin was pale and so was her personality.

Driving home, he stopped in Newark for lunch and saw that the upper left-hand corner of page one of
The New York Times
was filled with the news that, a few hours before, David Leslau of the Hebrew Union College had found one of the cherubim of Solomon's temple.

The figure was no kewpie doll. It was small, barely seventeen inches tall, a man-beast with the face of a human male, the body of a lion and drooping eagle's wings that once—unbelievable!—would have covered the Ark of the Covenant.

It had been carved out of some kind of wood that hadn't yet been identified because it crumbled when touched. Around the wood was a skin of beaten gold. The
Times
quoted a metallurgist from the Technion who estimated that it contained 4 percent silver as a natural impurity, and that another 10 percent of copper had been added for strength and stiffness. The gold alloy was pure enough so there was almost no oxidation, but a film of brown discoloration, thought to be chemical salts, was being removed from the surface.

Harry wanted to run for the nearest plane. Instead, he sent Leslau a two-word cable:
Yasher koach
. Well done. Then he dove back into the newspaper accounts.

The cherub had been dented by a laborer's spade on discovery, and an old ragged cut on the lower edge showed evidence that once it had been joined to something—the ark cover. There was no mention in the first stories of the Copper Scroll, or of anyone else who had worked on the project, but that afternoon Harry began to get calls from reporters and writers. He referred everyone to Hebrew Union College. A few days later most of the details had been released, including a description of the scroll. It was obvious that David had been generous but
Time
referred to “diamond dealer and dilettante scholar Harry Hopeman.”
Newsweek
called him an amateur cryptologist.

U. S. News & World Report
said Professor Leslau gave credit to Tamar Strauss-Kagan, wife of the Director General of the Ministry of the Interior, for helping to locate the
genizah
.

She was married.

He tried not to think about her, but his subconscious refused to give her up. A few months before, he would not have believed the possibility of such pain.

AI
138
BZ LB NY NEWS STORIES STINK STOP NO DILETTANTE COMMA YOU STOP SO MUCH WORK EXCLAMATION COME HELP LESLAU

Dear David
,

I'm proud you found your guardian of gold. Was it indeed buried in clay at twenty-three cubits? It's a detail the stories didn't mention
.

As I don't have to tell you, problems lie ahead. I doubt there's a master key to the Copper Scroll. Each
genizah
will have to be approached as a separate puzzle. I read that you discovered the cherub with its face to the north. Undoubtedly the other figure is lying in earth with its face to the south, and the ark is hidden somewhere between the two
genizot.
But the second cherub may be far from Ein Gedi—on Mt. Hermon, for example. That would narrow your search to the whole blooming country
.

The scholarly jackals will try to chew holes in the cherub's authenticity;
one “expert” already is saying the figure is Babylonian. You must begin to write your papers for the learned societies
.

The point is, you're going to need a team of the very best specialists. Heavy hitters. And truth is truth: as a scholar, I am a dilettante whose most important discovery was made in his own desk drawer. As a dealer I'm a pro (Hopeman the name, diamonds the game), what Dylan Thomas used to call “a bloody commercial traveler” with such contempt. Not to speak ill of the dead, but he was a wildly talented fool. The world needs merchants as well as poets
.

For a wistful and wishful moment, when I got your very kind cable, I thought I might work for you next summer. But somebody has to watch the store, and next summer I'll be teaching my son to polish diamonds
.

I look forward to seeing you both when you come to New York. Until then, my love to Rakhel
.

Your friend,
Harry

He had trouble forgetting. In a fruit store on Madison Avenue he saw long, narrow Modigliani-designed apples with skins of blushing yellow porcelain, exactly like the picture on the tin plate nailed to the Druze farmer's apple house in Majdal Shams.

When he asked the clerk, all she could tell him was that they were Turkish. But the warehouse knew the variety.

Kandil Sinap. He even liked the name. He called Cornell and a pomologist told him they were hardy in New York State and where he could buy grafted dwarf stock, a Michigan nursery. Harry ordered three trees for spring planting in the orchard.

One morning, walking uptown on Park Avenue, he saw Tamar.

Governments send officials overseas all the time. The officials take their wives.

He plunged into the crowd of bodies, brushing past people. He saw her again, and it
was
Tamar. Anywhere and until he died, he would know that walk.
This thy stature is like to a palm tree, how beautiful are thy steps in sandals, O prince's daughter!

She stopped to look at dresses in a window and he came up behind
her and touched her arm and said her name, and a brown face he had never seen before looked at him for a speechless moment before the woman moved away.

They sat in the first row of the sanctuary. Della had saved some surprises; she had allowed Jeff to name the people who would receive honors, and Saul Netscher was called to the Torah to recite the blessing of the patriarch in place of his dead grandfathers. Harry felt nothing but pleasure when he was called up himself. The nervousness began with the haftorah, but his son chanted the story of Gog and Magog earnestly and sweetly, as if he did it for a living. Halfway through, Harry's hand found Della's. What the hell, Walter Lieberman wasn't there. They held on tightly, even when the rabbi asked them to stand and repeat the prayer:
Blessed art Thou, O Lord, King of the universe, who hast kept us in life and sustained us, and enabled us to reach this happy day
.

In the morning Jeff woke him early and they took the new rod and went to the river. They climbed down to the rocks and Jeff tied on a red-and-white streamer. The wind was to his back and he got good distance on his second cast. The river was misting. A small animal—fox?—moved along on the far shore; Harry didn't know if Jeff saw it.

“Bang,” his son said softly, laughing at him.

“Great day, yesterday,” he said.

“Mmm …” Jeff stripped in line. “You know what I didn't understand? Why were you called to the Torah second?”

“I belong to the Tribe of Levi.”

“Tribe? You mean, like Indians?”

“Exactly like Indians.” He explained that the original twelve tribes had dwindled to three. “Kahanes, the descendents of the priests, are called first. Then Levis, whose ancestors were Temple officials and poets and musicians. And then Israelites, all the other tribes merged into one.”

Jeff cast again. “How do you know you're a Levi?”

“My father told me. His father told him.”

“Hey.” Jeff picked up a fish, promptly lost him, and then almost immediately got another strike. This time he kept the tip up and played in a very nice small striper.

“Keeping size, you think?”

“Oh, lunch.”

“I'll tell my son.” The boy handed him the fish. For a moment they both held it, hard and cold and alive; almost a rite.

“I hope so,” Harry said.

In November a letter arrived, requesting that he forward a deposit to the Diamond Corporation for the next shipment, and giving the dates on which deposits would have to be received during the coming year. It meant he had been selected to succeed his father as a member of the Two Hundred and Fifty. He never learned why the succession hadn't taken place sooner, or on what basis they finally had decided on him, but he knew that from then on his life would be marked by the arrival of packets by regular mail from London, ten times a year.

He felt no guilt over his life, his good fortune; but he was troubled to read of another rocket attack that left more wounded in Kiryat Shemona. He thought of the rabbi in Kiryat Shemona who had helped him find Rakhel Silitsky's missing husband, and he hoped the rabbi and his wife and baby were unharmed.

Mornings, instead of going straight to the Fifth Avenue shop, sometimes he parked near Forty-seventh Street. He walked by pairs of small, bearded men talking quietly on the sidewalks or in the shabby doorways that were their offices, pulling beautiful fortunes out of their pockets in grimy envelopes. In the Diamond Club he went past the viewing room, where other dealers examined stones in the soft north light, and into the chapel. Some of the Hasids held services every morning on the chartered buses that took them to Forty-seventh Street from their modern ghettos, but there were always enough others in the chapel to make up a
minyan
of ten people to say the mourners' prayer. It made no sense for Harry to say
kaddish
for his father on an irregular basis, but he felt no compulsion toward logic.

The winter turned severe and the country burned Arab oil recklessly. On numbing mornings he and Sid Lawrenson cut firewood and pruned apple limbs in the orchard. It gave him a chance to pick the places where he would plant the new trees, the Kandil Sinaps. He felt himself to be a tree that had finally set a taproot.

His life was marked and measured in stones. At the cemetery he
found that other visitors had left seven pebbles on his father's grave, where he would erect a marker in the spring when it was warmer. He decided to give the garnet to Jeff; perhaps the stone of their tribe would be passed down the generations openly, a healthier tradition. He almost never thought of the yellow gem he had bought in Israel, safe again in the Mitre of Gregory. More often, he thought of the Inquisition Diamond and wondered if sometimes the dark-skinned woman stopped to look at it as she went about her work in the Museum. In the sleepless hours when unnamed fears crept out of the ages and his genes, and he shivered with a reasonless chill, haunted by screams he had never heard, he thought of Alfred Hopeman's six diamonds. But he never regretted that they were no longer in the desk of the old house in Westchester County.

Noah Gordon
has had outstanding international success.
The Physician
, soon to be a motion picture, has been called a modern classic, and booksellers at the Madrid Book Fair voted it “one of the 10 best-loved books of all time.”
Shaman
was awarded the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction. Both of these books, and five of the author's other novels—
The Rabbi, The Death Committee, The Jerusalem Diamond, Matters of Choice
, and
The Winemaker
—are published in digital formats by Barcelona eBooks and Open Road Integrated Media. Gordon's novel,
The Last Jew
, will also be published digitally in the near future. He lives outside of Boston with his wife, Lorraine Gordon.