The Jerusalem Diamond (9 page)

On July 26, 1952, when Farouk was confronted by Gen. Naguib's army in the Ras el Tin Palace and agreed to abdicate, his man Bardissi was in Belgium, picking up a small but choice group of gems from the Farouk collection which had been on display in Antwerp at the Forty-Sixth International Gemological Exposition. Bardissi signed a receipt for seven large diamonds; three matched transparent red rubies, each weighing between nine and ten carats; a fourth ruby described as “the size of a pigeon's egg, presented by Gustavus III of Sweden in 1777 to Catherine II of Russia” ; and a tray containing “historical stones
” —
gems with purportedly interesting backgrounds but little intrinsic value
.

Bardissi never returned to Egypt, where there is still a warrant for his arrest. His lands were confiscated by the State in 1954
.

The Catherine II ruby reportedly has been in the collection of the Iranian Treasury in Teheran since 1954, but the government of Iran will neither confirm nor deny this. The Iranian Treasury Collection is never open for inspection
.

The three matched rubies were sold in 1968 to a Tokyo businessman named Kayo Mikawa. They are almost certainly from the Farouk collection. When questioned, Mikawa told Interpol he had bought the stones in London from a man named Yosef Mehdi
.

Interpol contacted Egypt, from which it has a standing request for information regarding Bardissi. Since Egypt and Britain do not have an extradition treaty, the Egyptians could take no action
.

Mehdi readily admitted to the English that he was Bardissi. He showed authorities a letter from Farouk, postmarked from Cannes on November 18, 1953, which declared that the gems were Farouk's personal property and not that of the Egyptian government, and that Farouk was transferring ownership of the jewels and other articles to Bardissi in return for good and loyal services rendered. Bardissi convinced British authorities that he was wanted as a political figure and not as a criminal and that he would be put to death if they returned him to Egypt
.

He was released
.

After that, he dropped from sight. Obviously, he believes his life still is in danger. But early this year in Amman, a man who gave his name as Yosef Mehdi approached several individuals known to
have western sympathies and connections and raised the question of the possible sale of gems
.

The case of Hamid Bardissi is considered by Cairo to be “current but inactive
.”

The Harry Hopeman System made an intercontinental flight no more difficult than leaping a tall building at a single bound. As soon as the plane was airborne, off came his shoes. In soft slippers and a comfortable sweater he watched a movie, not quite terrible enough to be enjoyable. Over Newfoundland he ate the reheated chicken and a Jaffa orange, ignoring the sweet champagne and ordering a bottle of dry wine.

He spent a long time studying Mehdi's dossier and then his father's notebooks, returning repeatedly to the pages devoted to the Inquisition Diamond. Finally he put on the earphones and listened to Handel, for him a guarantor of drowsiness. All the while, sipping on the wine. By the time the bottle was two thirds empty, he was almost two thirds across the Atlantic. He placed the sleep mask over his eyes and tried the different sound tracks, settling for the sibilant noises of surf. His toes were numb, the sea sounds were in his ears; the mellow grape aftertastes pulled him under until he slipped into sleep, like drowning pleasantly at twenty-two thousand feet.

He paid the real price of the wine next day at high noon when the golden hammer struck him between the eyes as he left the plane at Ben Gurion Airport.

It was hot. He inched through customs and eventually achieved a taxi. The driver manhandled the wheel with the obligatory roughness, and Harry was fighting nausea by the time they passed through the ravine outside of Jerusalem where the roadside was marked with twisted metal hulks.

“The vehicles were destroyed while running the blockade during the War of Independence,” the driver said. “They were trying to bring food and ammunition to the city. During the last wars, the bastards didn't reach here. But the first time, the Arab guns were set up on both sides of the road. We leave these wrecks as memorials.”

Harry nodded. “I've been here before.”

Each time he came, the drivers identified the piles of rust for him.

He telephoned David Leslau, but the archeologist had gone for the day. Harry left word.

His room was at the rear of the hotel. From his windows he looked down on a long section of wonderful ancient wall and a series of cubed Arab buildings—East Jerusalem. The Old City beckoned, but the sun burned high and hard and he chose cool sheets, his soft bed.

When he awoke, his headache was better. At 9:10
A.M.
he was breakfasting on eggs, pita, small green olives and iced tea, when Leslau telephoned and agreed at once to come to the hotel.

He and the archeologist knew one another only by reputation and publications. Leslau turned out to be short and ugly, with a chest like a bull's. Both his ginger-colored hair and his full beard needed cutting, and a thick tuft of graying yellow-brown hair poked from a tieless shirt no longer white. He peered through thick glasses that magnified restless brown eyes. His skin was leathered from outside work. He wore dusty shoes and chino slacks, and somehow he made Harry feel overdressed and overwashed.

They sat in leather chairs in the lobby, while around them tourists clustered like sparrows.

“Which passage did you translate?” Leslau asked at once, pulling an ear with thick fingers.

Harry started to tell him.

“Yeah, yeah. Jesus, Joshua and frigging Job. My poor, new friend, fresh from America with dreams of immortality—”

“Don't talk to me like that,” Harry said quietly.

“You're the fourth person to identify the
genizah
described in that passage. Not the first.”

Harry looked at him.

Leslau sighed. “Come along, come along,” he said.

Leslau had an old Volkswagen that acted tubercular on the hills, which as a result he took at ferocious speeds. The road twisted and undulated, dropping steadily.

“Ever been to this area before?”

“No.”

They were passing plantations of bananas and citrus. “Unusual climate. Like Africa's. Sudanese, really, as you can see.”

“Mmm.”

Leslau gave him a quick glance.

“Took the song right out of your heart, didn't I? Hell, never mind what I said back there. I'm a caustic sonofabitch. I realize it, but I'm too old to change.”

“Who spotted the
genizah
location first?” Harry asked.

“Max Bronstein sent me to it almost immediately. Before his letter reached me, I had more or less figured it out. And then a very bright woman at the Hebrew University had been consulted, and after a week or so she came up with the Vale of Achor, too.”

At the fork in the road, Leslau veered south, nodding toward the left branch. “The Jericho
tel
is a few kilometers north of here. It's provided an interesting dig for more than seventy years. Jericho's the oldest city in the world, goes back to the year 8,000
B.C.E
., long before there were Jews. In the mound, excavators found nine human skulls, wrapped in clay instead of flesh and with shells representing their eyes.”

“What were they?”

“Gods,” Leslau said.

Harry turned toward him. “When you excavated the
genizot
mentioned in the scroll, what did you find?”

“We didn't excavate the
genizot.
We simply dug them for the third time. The
genizot
already had been excavated.” He bumped the Volkswagen off the main road. The car followed a wadi until it reached a sheer stone escarpment and they could drive no farther. “So far we have found nothing at all,” Leslau said.

He took an electric torch from the glove compartment and led Harry away from the car. “This is the Valley of Buk
ē
'ah. Once it was the Vale of Achor.”

A few kilometers away were lush oasis plantations, but now Harry followed him over broken desert. Birds he couldn't identify, small and black, with white tails, sang loudly in tamarisk brush and acacia trees. “Do you think Achan and his family actually were stoned to death here?”

“A military execution to set an example? It has the ugly ring of reality,” Leslau said. “Armies were just as insane then as now. I think they were killed here.” He led Harry to an opening in the cliff. “Watch your head.”

The entrance was less than four feet high. Inside, the ceiling was perhaps a foot higher. Leslau had switched on the hand light to reveal a chamber about eighteen feet by twelve. The far end of the ceiling sloped like an attic eave. Two rectangles were staked out on the earthen floor like barren gardens.

Harry squatted by the first. “Which
genizah
is this?”

“ ‘ … Buried at eight and one-half cubits, a glistering stone,' etcetera.”

“The diamond was buried here. But you found nothing.”

“Relatively speaking, of course. We found a few medieval French coins. At about three feet, a Carolingian denier. At seven feet, three lesser coins known as half-pieces. At a foot deeper we sifted out the upper portion of a dagger. The blade was of poorly tempered steel. Not a finely made weapon, so it probably belonged to a common soldier and not to a knight. Perhaps it had snapped when used as a digging tool. Engraved in the hilt is a Bouillon cross of Lorraine.”

“French Crusaders.”

“Without a doubt. From the Second Crusade, we believe, although not many came here then from France.” Leslau played his light on the other site, the size of a burial plot. “They took the yellow diamond out of this place and it fell into Salaheddin's hands, to be recaptured, subsequently, by the Christians.”

“What evidence do you have?” Harry asked.

“Look. The first historical reference to the stone comes shortly after this
genizah
was violated. When Salaheddin gave the great diamond to the Mosque at Acre, where he had won his fame as a general, he himself recorded that his Saracens had seized it from French soldiers, a scattered remnant of the army of Louis VII, who had just been soundly defeated by the Turks.”

“But less than a hundred years later, the yellow diamond was cut in Christian Spain,” Harry said.

“Yes. After it was cut, it was donated to the Church by Estabán de Costa, Count of León, who was a kind of lay functionary of the
Inquisition. He had seized it from a condemned Jew, a relapsed ‘new Christian.' At the same time, De Costa made much of the fact that it had been taken from the Mosque at Acre by Spanish knights of pure Christian blood during one of the later Crusades.” Leslau grinned. “The stone has been treated like a goddam football by the three religions. But I think the Jewish claim goes back very, very early. How well do you know your Bible?”

Harry shrugged.

“You will remember that King David was denied the honor of building the Temple, because there was blood on his hands.”

“Second Book of Samuel.”

“Yes. It tells that David bequeathed his plans and treasures to his son in order that Solomon might build the Temple. Later, the Bible describes the inheritance, including ‘onyx stones, and stones to be set, glistering stones, and of divers colors, and all manner of precious stones.'”

“First Chronicles?” Harry said.

Leslau smiled. “Chapter twenty-nine, verse two. That was the beginning of the Temple. The end came eight hundred years later, when Nebuchadnezzar's juggernaut approached. If the scroll is to be believed, the priests coldly selected for hiding the most holy and most valuable objects of their world. Let us assume for the moment that the canary diamond came from the Temple treasury—which I believe. It could be easily hidden, and it could be traded, in some happier future, to help build a suitable structure to house the holy things that survived.”

“Akiva told my father and me, in New York, that Mehdi is trying to peddle another stone. A garnet.”

“The garnet is harder to authenticate. There is only one yellow diamond like that, but there are many garnets. If it came from here, it could be a holy object. Perhaps one of the stones taken from the ‘garments of the Sons of Aaron'—the costume of the High Priest.”

Harry nodded. “They wouldn't have buried ordinary priestly clothing, which could be replaced. But they'd have hidden the stones that had been donated by the tribes and set into the High Priest's breastplate.”

“Consider the cleverness of those who did the hiding,” Leslau said.
“The first
genizah
was relatively shallow. They gambled that if it was violated, the intruders would find the great yellow diamond and not go far deeper down, where the more precious holy stones were hidden.”

It occurred to Harry that it was the technique his father had used when hiding his jewels in the jar of Vaseline. “How do you know the Crusaders didn't empty the deeper
genizah
as well?”

“The deeper
genizah
was violated a long, long time later. The only thing we found when we sifted it was a copper button from a British Regular Army uniform, circa early twentieth century.” Leslau sat down in the dry clay. “The modern inhabitants of this valley have been Bedouin goatherds. Because fodder is so sparse, Bedouin families have vast grazing territories that are handed down from generation to generation and almost never infringed upon.

“The Israeli authorities are very good at this sort of thing. They found the family whose territory included the Valley of Buk
ē
'ah. They are now growing cotton in Tubas, living in the first houses in their history. One of their old men remembers that when he was a boy he came to this cave to bury contraband.”