Zero Hour

stones of real worth,” he said with another of his dry little smiles. “Even a broker with a long and established schnorrer pedigree who had inherited most of his contacts from his father and grandfather, themselves having run a middling brokerage. But it stunned the dealer to hear he’d sold an exceedingly rare Padparadscha, a reaction that was heightened by his discovery of the Tel Aviv connection. And he muttered his disbelief to a colleague, who told his brother-in-law, who happens to be my great-niece’s fiance…”

Lembock let the sentence fade, shrugged his rail-thin shoulders. In this trade everybody knows somebody, who knows somebody else.

There was an extended silence. Malisse sat in deep thought, attempting to pull together the threads Lembock had dangled as a tease to his inquisitive mind. The radiator knocked insolently, a reminder that it was doing its best to melt him into a pool of sweat.

“The question I originally put to you was whether you’d whiffed fakery or theft,” he said at last. “But it would seem impossible these stones could be counterfeit. Not unless their grading reports were forged or otherwise suspect.”

“They are legitimate.”

“You’re convinced of this.”

“Absolutely convinced.”

“Then the probabilities are narrowed,” Malisse said. “It can only be that your broker has found his way into either a trove of outstanding good fortune or the black market. Creating an authentic but enhanced sapphire that could slip past laboratory analysis is immensely difficult. All the harder to produce a single outright fake able to escape detection. I don’t believe there’s yet been a successful attempt, and would think the chances of it being done with multiple counterfeits, sapphires of different types and cuts, would be infinitesimal.”

Lembock held up a bony hand to interrupt him.

“As we thought about color-enhancing diamonds until General Electric proved us wrong a decade ago,” he said.

Malisse did not answer. Having caught Lembock’s point, what could he truly say? Regiments of scientists employed by De Beers had taken five years before they came up with an advanced detection technology to catch up with the high-heat, high-pressure GE/POL enhancement method. Identification involved cryogenics — cooling a diamond to a temperature as close to absolute zero as possible, then, using expensive spectroscopes, looking for lightband shifts under argon and cadmium laser excitation, vacancies within the diamond’s structure that contained a single nitrogen atom…. Malisse had studied the process for a considerable amount of time and hadn’t managed to fully grasp what was involved.

He sat there thinking for another few seconds.

“If the client is asking the investigator whether he means to keep an open mind, then the investigator’s reply is that he will… assuming he is entrusted with the case.”

“Does he desire it?”

“Very much so.”

Lembock looked at him.

“The broker’s name is Avram Hoffman,” he said.

“Is he still in Antwerp?”

“He’s flown back to New York.”

“And my airline and hotel reservations?”

“Have been made for the day after tomorrow,” Lembock said.

* * *

Tom Ricci’s head felt simultaneously light and full, as if his brain had been packed inside a thin foam liner. While he wasn’t sure he liked the feeling, it did offer some relief. And Ricci had learned that he could appreciate something he needed, even be very grateful for it, without having to like it very much at all.

He stood under a working streetlight — a rarity on this Northside San Jose street — and studied the row of parallel parked cars along the curb, trying to remember where he’d left the Jetta. To his right, it was down the block to his right. Over by the public mailbox.

Ricci turned toward the car and fished around in a pants pocket for his keys. No footsteps in back of him yet, okeydoke. He was honestly thinking he could duck a confrontation he didn’t want, make the night a complete success. And why examine too closely how he felt? Why push it? Too much of the time, far too much, Ricci’s thoughts would come raging over the dam he’d built to contain them, and he’d feel a band of pressure spread across his forehead, and a throbbing in his temples, and terrible stabs of pain under the tops of his eye sockets — that pain below the brow radiating up and out to intensify the pressure at the sides of his head and then run multiple paths around the back of his skull to its base. Before long it would seem as if his entire head was locked inside a steel cage from the neck up, its bars red-hot and tight, and Ricci wouldn’t know whether to curse his rampant thoughts for having put him in that hateful torture mask, or turn all his anger onto himself for leaving the floodgates unattended in the first place.

But at the moment he was doing okay, his brain nestled in its soft cushion of foam. So say he felt grateful for that. Say he was relieved his thoughts hadn’t rocked him with another agonizing blowout tonight, and then be wise enough to leave well-enough alone. Dig too deep and the poisoned water would come gushing from its reservoir again.

Ricci moved down the sidewalk toward his Volkswagen, the key chain out of his pocket, his finger on the button of its remote door opener. Only now he heard the slap of shoes on the pavement behind him and realized he’d been too confident of having gotten in the free and clear.

They had picked him up. There were dark store entrances along both sides of the street, service alleys, one broken streetlight after another with nothing but shadows underneath them… and the dive he’d just left probably had a side or back exit they could have slunk through just as he’d been heading out the front door. They had seemed like regulars, asinine, bored, and pathetic. They would know the shortcuts and places to hide, and see this as a chance to spice their dreary routine with some action. Unlike himself, of course.

Ricci increased his pace slightly, pressed the key-fob remote. His Jetta chirped, blinked its headlights and taillights as the locks and burglar alarm disengaged. He’d had reasons galore for not having taken a walk the moment he noticed a situation brewing. If none occurred to him right now, there must be a reason for that, too. Say he was focused on getting to his car, peeling off into the night with a squeal of tires and blast of tailpipe exhaust.

Ricci reached for the VW’s doorhandle, missed, grabbed air instead. What the hell, it was dark out here, easy to short-arm it. He got hold of it on the second try, looked back up the block toward the sound of footsteps. They were coming toward him from maybe twenty feet away, a couple of bodybuilders with the cliff-top brows and widened jawlines of hardcore steroid abusers. Both of them probably pumped full of Equipoise or some spinoff muscle-mass enhancer formulated for three-thousand-pound farm horses and beef cattle. The tall one with tanning-parlor bronze skin and a mustache, his stockier pal wearing a short-sleeved shirt to display his hairy, bulked-up arms. Suntan was on the curb side of the row of parked cars. Hairy Arms in the street. Subtle tacticians, these guys.

A beater Ford sped past, Latino kids in head scarves hanging out its lowered windows, drumming their palms against its sides to loud pulses of hip-hop on its stereo. Ricci opened his door. The lugs who’d followed him weren’t carrying hardware, nothing heavy anyway, or he’d have spotted it under the tight shirts and pants gripping their virile physiques. But a knife was easier to hide. So was a sap, or brass knuckles. Ricci knew he should have checked them out when he first realized they’d be a problem back in the dive, couldn’t understand why he hadn’t. What the hell.

He looked over his shoulder again, felt a sort of lag as he turned his head. Thick and full, wrapped in foam.

His guys were just a few cars down the curb and moving at a decent trot. No chance to pull away in the Jetta. He would need to scramble just to get behind the wheel before they caught up to him.

Ricci wasn’t about to do that.

He held onto the doorhandle as they approached. Suntan sidling around the door to stand in front of him. Hairy Arms stepping around the mailbox onto the sidewalk and then hanging back around the front fender.

“Okay,” Ricci said. His eyes on Suntan. “I think we should call it a night.”