He sat, sipped, dipped, and watched the early-bird buyers and sellers head toward their retail stores, street- level market booths, and offices here on what was known as Jewelry Way. Hasidic males dominated the center, although not to the exclusion of women or any other group. Sprinkled among them were secular Jews, Asians, Africans, Australians… Malisse knew there were traders of every nation, religion, and ethnicity passing between the diamond lampposts at the north and south sides of the block over on Sixth. Might the Katari gentleman of whom he’d been told be among them? Moreover, he wondered, would Katari prove integral or irrelevant to his probe? Time and persistence would tell.
Regarding his main player of interest, Malisse wished he could have found a superior vantage from which to monitor Avram Hoffman’s arrival at the Diamond Dealers Club this morning, the third of his open-ended surveillance. In the days since Malisse had followed Hoffman from Antwerp to New York — an affair that entailed some hurried packing, a shaky trip aboard an F50 prop, and a nearly missed connection at Heathrow — what surer formula for jet-lagged exhaustion? — he’d stayed close to the DDC entrance down at the corner of Fifth Avenue, remaining out on the street, browsing storefront displays, dawdling at newspaper stands, and generally weaving his way through and among the crowd. Cold as it was, he’d been able to keep the building’s doors in easy sight and incidentally enjoy an occasional cigarette… reminding himself of the murderous heat of Rance Lembock’s office whenever his bones protested against the low outdoor temperature. But this was post-tragedy Manhattan, where anonymity had come to have a paradoxical downside. In a city of strangers, unfamiliar faces now took on an air of the conspicuous. Passersby were wary of those who might once have escaped their notice as ignored nonentities, blending in amid the urban multitude. Teams of police officers in flak vests, armed with bullpup submachine guns and accompanied by bomb-sniffing German shepherds, could be seen guarding the entrances to large stores and office buildings against terrorist strikes. If Malisse were perceived to be loitering about the block, he, the honest investigator, might himself become a target of curiosity or criminal suspicion. And Lembock had been emphatic about keeping the authorities — and the Secretariat, for that matter — out of this business at any cost. Worried about a scandal that could soil the reputation of the bourses at a time when some in the trade had already assigned them to the junk bin of antiquated global institutions, he wanted to be sure of knowing the facts before they got out of the bag.
And so Malisse had today migrated from the street to his current unexposed position in the cafe. While offering the niceties of warmth, a cushioned seat, a steaming drink, and pastries, it hindered his ability to do his work, demanded a reliance on his informant within the DDC’s security detail to keep him notified of Avram’s comings and goings,
Malisse, however, could not complain about Jeffreys. He showed every sign of being a dependable set of eyes and ears, and had been quick to message him with confirmation of Avram’s appearance at the club. Everything had so far gone smoothly and according to plan.
Plan A, that was.
Which was why Delano Malisse shied from taking optimism too far. If Avram Hoffman was involved in dealing illicitly obtained gemstones — or wondrous fakes — Malisse was confident he could prove it and track them to their source.
He just had a gut feeling that it wouldn’t be as simple as A, B, C, or unfortunately D.
Nimec was watching Megan take a quick turn at the speed bag when he happened to notice Chris out the corner of his eye. A minute earlier the kid had been following Meg’s every move. Now he’d suddenly gone wandering over to the plate tree near Nimec’s free-weight bench.
Nimec saw him spin one of the large thirty-five-pound weights on its post with both hands, and almost winced as he pictured it slipping off to drop straight down onto his foot.
“Chris,” he said. “Don’t mess with that.”
The boy didn’t answer, but kept rotating the plate on its metal post.
Nimec wondered if the steady rat-a-tat of the speed bag had drowned out his voice, called out at a louder volume.
Chris was oblivious. Or seemed to be. Ignoring Nimec, he gave the weight another turn, climbed onto the bench, and then stretched out on his back, sliding under its rack to grip the barbell resting across its uprights.
Nimec had shouted at him this time, starting toward the bench, no longer contemplating what would happen if a single plate clunked down on the kid’s big toe. He’d been pressing two hundred pounds with that bar — about double Chris’s weight — and didn’t want to imagine the consequences of it somehow falling on his chest.
Behind him, Megan had cut short her exercise and turned to see what was going on. Standing near the bag, she watched Chris sit up, slowly toss his legs over the side of the bench, and hop off onto the floor, as if only then having become aware of Nimec.
“Chris, did you
And he did. In fact, Nimec thought, he’d always shown impressive maturity in the gym after being cautioned about its do’s and don’ts, staying away from its equipment when unsupervised, earning a fair amount of latitude while hanging around to observe Nimec’s workouts. This wasn’t in the least bit like him.
Nimec stood waiting for an answer, instead got a blank stare and silent shrug.
He looked at Chris with equal parts anger and confusion, not knowing what to make of his unresponsiveness. And the kid’s wooden attitude wasn’t exclusively reserved for him. He’d gone from fawning over Meg to acting as if she wasn’t there.
“Okay if I go downstairs?” Chris asked. His tone flat, not a jot of defiance or stubbornness in it.
“I think you’d better,” Nimec said.
Chris went past him to the elevator, touched his index finger to the biometric access control pad beside its door, and entered like a sleepwalker.
Nimec stood alongside Megan as the car descended, tugged confoundedly at his chin.
“You have any idea what that was about?” he asked.
Megan groped for something to say that would offer a bona fide insight.
“None, Daddy-O,” she replied, giving up. “But you might want to consider changing the code on that lock till after the kid is past puberty.”
“Throne’s all yours, Collins,” Jeffreys said, and rose from his stool to make room for his young reliever.
It was nine-twenty-five according to Jeffreys’s wristwatch, which he set against the official clock in the big room upstairs at least once a week just to stay on the ball. The hour between nine and ten was when things were slowest in the building. The first wave of traders was over, these men being mostly relics around his own age who were programmed to show up early, looking for some other graybeards to bargain with in person, or maybe check their office answering machines, devices they still saw as being the latest in high-tech gadgets. The second wave wouldn’t start till eleven, eleven-thirty, when the younger dealers came in from their home offices after they got through doing whatever it was they did to earn money over the Internet.
A quiet time, Jeffreys thought, and a good one for him to stretch his legs for a few minutes, pick up a coffee at the corner doughnut stand, argue some Middle Eastern politics with Musaf the vender, and have a smoke out on the sidewalk. You couldn’t do that last thing anywhere else nowadays, not without getting slapped with a fine, or even risking
Jeffreys stepped down from the guard platform, mentally praising himself for having voted for the other clown in the last election.
“Anything you want me to bring back?” he asked the relief man.
“Yeah,” Collins said. “Halle Berry.”
“Cream cheese or butter?”
“Butter.” Collins grinned. “That much woman, you better ask for lots extra on the side.”
