Khalid verged on protest a moment, but then thought the better of it. Yousaf was not one to have his wishes denied.
He nodded and went to follow his orders, his boot-heels sinking deep into the snow as he exited the coal truck.
Then the crack of a single bullet from its driver’s side made him stiffen, his breath catching in his throat with a little gasp. He glanced sharply over the hood and saw Yousaf standing over the sprawled body of the ranger, looking down at him, the bore of his Steyr pressed to the middle of his head.
“
He spat on the corpse, straightened, turned to make brief eye contact with Khalid.
“I did the traitor a favor he didn’t deserve,” he said, holstering his weapon.
His fingers steepled under his chin, Lembock was waiting behind his desk when Delano Malisse arrived for their morning appointment.
“Delano,
Malisse took no offense. It was not discourtesy, but the depredations of rheumatism and chronic bronchitis that kept him off his feet.
Malisse sat down in front of him and unbuttoned his overcoat. As usual, Lembock had the office’s heat turned up suffocatingly high, its steam radiator hissing and clanking. Could this possibly be good for his ailing lungs?
A gracious, soft-spoken man, Lembock smiled with the quiet skepticism of one who was appreciative of the polite words, but might have gently begged to differ. He looked at Malisse, his chin balanced on his hands. The fingers long, tapered, almost spindling, the skin tight and thin over knobby, inflamed joints, they reminded Malisse of the ribbed arches that supported the ceilings of the Gothic churches and palaces at the city’s centuries-old heart, seeming almost too delicate to last under the ponderous weight resting upon them. Yet last they did, their stability ever a marvel to him.
Rance Lembock’s office was about a mile west of the historic district, on the ninth floor of the Diamantclub van Antwerpen, this first and most prominent of Antwerp’s four diamond bourses located in a rather nondescript, even homely, building on Pelikaanstraat, a sidestreet running south from the Central Station rail terminal. Two stories above, on the top floor, was the seat of the Secretariat of the World Federation of Diamond Bourses, which, as its name indicated, codified and oversaw the rules, regulations, laws, and bylaws observed by every reputable exchange in Europe and beyond, its influence spanning continents, ranging from Tokyo in the far east to New York City in the west.
As chairman of the Diamantclub, Lembock had always seemed to bear the great responsibilities of his position with a kind of dutiful fidelity, like an attentive husband who lifts a heavy bag of groceries from his wife’s arms to carry it himself, seeing nothing praiseworthy in the assumption of a task for which his greater strength naturally suits him. But whatever leadership qualities Lembock’s solid, stable disposition endowed, Malisse felt it was hard work and experience that had finely honed them into something even his frail health of recent years couldn’t diminish.
In his middle seventies, his face deeply lined under a high forehead and thick cloud of white hair, Lembock wore a spread-collar white dress shirt and blue boxcloth suspenders that clipped onto the waistband of his trousers with gilt brass fittings. No tie, no jacket. The shirtsleeves were rolled up midway to his elbows with particular neatness, exposing part of the faded blue ink tattoo on his right inner forearm, a five-digit identification number he’d gotten after his arrival at Auschwitz aboard a cattle car loaded with Jews in 1942. As Malisse understood from stories he’d heard, Lembock had been deemed physically suitable for slave labor rather than extermination by a camp physician, sent to the Political Section to assure he cleared a watch list of potential agitators and Communists, and then passed along to an SS functionary in the Labor Assignment Office, who had imprinted him with the number using a punch-card machine custom-adapted by IBM Hollerith for that purpose. Hands across the water, as the saying went.
Malisse sat in respectful silence. Advanced age and stature entitled Lembock to decide when to launch their conversation. Moreover, it was important to be mindful of fundamental protocols. Lembock was the client, he the hired investigator held on no small retainer. And Malisse did not, at any rate, find it difficult to be still and wait. He could discern the numerals 421 on Lembock’s skin, the remaining two digits hidden by his shirt cuff. A precise and exacting man, Lembock always folded his sleeves the same three inches above his wrist, so that he had never seen the final two digits of the slave number exposed. Although Malisse’s obsessive hunger for detail often urged him to look for them, he took pains to be inconspicuous when overcome.
Just once, to his knowledge, had Lembock become aware of his interest… or if there had been other instances, it was only then that he had commented, speaking before Malisse could become too angry at himself over the uncharacteristic slipup.
“I was seventeen when they gave me this,” Lembock had said, touching a finger to the mark. “A boy I knew named Yitzhak… we’d lived in Marasesti, a small town in Romania… he was next in line to receive his number. His family was more observant than mine, and he worried that marring the body with a tattoo was forbidden, against our religion. That we might someday be refused burial in a Jewish cemetery. I recall thinking we would be fortunate for that to ever become a problem, for it would mean we’d have survived the camps. But to comfort Yitzhak, I told him that when the time came, God would surely take our circumstances into account and make an
This had been three or four years back, Malisse remembered. Soon after he’d stepped out from the encumbrances of government service. He’d been reporting on a case, the sale of a Dresden Green diamond brooch fraudulently purported to be from the priceless seventeenth-century collection of the Polish king, Frederick Augustus II. His efforts to track down the counterfeiter had been at a preliminary stage — his leads undeveloped, his groundwork barely laid. With little to furnish Lembock besides assurances of eventual success, he’d wearied of his own delivery and let his gaze rest on the tattoo a few seconds too long.
Malisse tried diligently to avoid repeating his mistakes, and had some fair confidence that he’d succeeded in not making that one again.
Now he sat and waited in the stifling office. Although Lembock would have no objection to his lighting a cigarette despite his afflicted lungs, Malisse feared the combination of unventilated heat and tobacco smoke might prove smothering to him. Instead he whittled off several moments letting his gaze drift freely about the room — one never could tell when a worthy surprise would spring out of the familiar to catch the eye like a colorful, never- before-seen bird flashing from an old backyard tree.
Nothing of the sort happened this time. Still, Malisse was always able to appreciate the office’s simple and tasteful decor. There were soft leather chairs, a large blond-oak desk. Framed professional certificates hung on the walls, along with photographs of Lembock’s late wife, his children, his grandchildren. Other photos as well — Lembock in the company of high-placed professional and political associates.
Outside the windows on Malisse’s left, a day of bright, cold sunlight had followed a night of steadily falling snow. Melting frost dribbled down the outer surfaces of panes blasted with overwarmed air from within. As the radiator emitted a high-pitched whistle, Malisse dabbed his wet brow with a handkerchief. He, too, had begun to liquefy.
After a bit, Lembock drew erect in his chair, his fingertips parting ways to settle on the desktop.
“I’ve asked you here because something has come up,” he said. “A potential problem.”
The statement hardly rocked Malisse. For all its shared respect, theirs was not a social relationship.
“Fakery?” he said. “Theft?”
“It could be one, the other… or, I would wish, neither.”
