of a gemstone’s value, its cut and carat, clarity and color, scientific identification and grading— all of it — meant less than its tenuous hold on a potential buyer’s fancy. No man or woman had ever died for lack of a precious bauble. It could sparkle with the brilliance of a thousand suns, but what did that matter if it couldn’t arouse a comparable gleam in the eye of the beholder… or if its lure to the eye faded before a sale was closed? The true measure of its worth would be found in dreams, desires, and passions — and these were fleeting intangibles, enchantments of fickle power. That diamond you promised me hasn’t arrived? The broker was held up at an appointment? Well, I’m flying out of town tonight and will have to shop around.
Avram had needed to shower Katari with apologies, guarantee him exclusives and special discounts, practically offer verbal supplication over the phone to convince him to come back here today. But Katari was a major client, and Avram wouldn’t hang himself with a noose of pride.
He stepped into the elevator now, out of breath, bleary-eyed with exhaustion, his cheeks flushed above the line of his beard. It was the rushing. The constant scurrying to get things done. He’d been awake most of the previous night in his home laboratory examining the Kashmir with his various instruments… a binocular microscope, a polariscope, an immersion cell analyzer, all state-of-the-art equipment for which he had paid many thousands of dollars. At about eight o’clock, his youngest daughter, Rachael, had knocked on the door with a stack of books in her hand… would he read to her? Avram had sent her off to bed in a brusque, preoccupied tone for which he still felt guilty. Told her he was too busy, knowing he had broken a promise made earlier. But he’d considered it an urgent must to look for any signs of artifice before dropping the sapphire off at the GIA laboratory… a stop he had made first thing this morning, eager to get the certification process underway, hours of his own extensive tests having shown him absolutely nothing that might indicate the stone wasn’t of natural origin. Though the lab was just down the block from the DDC building on Fifth Avenue, Avram’s need to wait for his regular man and put in a request for prioritization had put him behind schedule. If there was a trait shared by experts of every kind, he thought, it was that they seemed to enjoy stretching the patience of those who depended on their services.
As he rose to the trading floor in the elevator, Avram remembered the hurt look on Rachael’s face over his snappish dismissal, and silently pledged to make it up to her soon. Tonight, if he had the time. He would try to be better with Rachael tonight.
Meanwhile, he had to pull himself together and set his mind toward the long day of bargaining ahead.
* * * What Anthony DeSanto usually did after walking the two blocks from his apartment to the office at Dunne Savings and Loan every morning was browse through the newspapers over a cup of spiced apple cider and a blueberry muffin, preferring the city’s two major tabloids, the Daily News and New York Post, for their extensive sports coverage. There were enough hours in the day for him to get beat over his head with the stories of war, terrorism, crime, politics, and economic turmoil that dominated their front-page headlines, and Tony figured the latest developments on all those glorious subjects could wait until he was caught up on the game scores.
Tony guessed he was a creature of habit, and scanning the papers — back to front — was stage one of his ordinary routine at the bank, a chance to catch his breath after hustling uptown on the train, a comforting transitional phase to help ease him into the feverish rhythms of the workday. Right now, though, things weren’t routine, or ordinary, and he couldn’t pretend they were. For maybe two, three days after Pat disappeared, Tony had tried to go about his mornings as if nothing was wrong, thinking it would help stave off his creeping fears. He had picked up the papers at the newsstand outside the Union Square subway exit, bought his cider and muffin at the green market, and, once he’d plunked himself down at his desk, studied the sports section as though everything was the same as usual… although he’d been constantly and ever-more-keenly aware that it wasn’t. But it seemed worth a shot trying to focus his thoughts on the previous night’s monster jams and power plays — even a halfhearted shot — if there was any chance it could temporarily distract him from thinking about what could have happened to his best friend of twenty-five years, a guy who’d seemingly vanished into thin air.
The problem, though, at least over the past couple of days, was that all it seemed to do was remind Tony of how very wrong things were. The interest he and Pat had in the games was a huge part of their friendship — was intertwined with it, you could say. Every so often they’d sandwich an alternate topic of conversation between heated debates over stats, wins, and losses, almost as if to prove they could, like a couple of hardcore alcoholics trying to convince themselves they were really just social drinkers. Of course, those departures from their subject of choice were hardly what Tony considered sweeping in scope, and tended to swing between venting about their jobs and observations about female acquaintances past and present… juicy commentaries and footnotes often laid out in terms that might not be considered clear signs of male maturity to someone in a position to overhear them. It wasn’t that they made a deliberate attempt stay away from the serious shit, and there were enough exceptions to the rule. Tony felt closer to Pat than he’d ever been to his own brother, knew he could share virtually any secret with him, open up to him when something important needed to be confided… and he’d always figured Pat felt the same. Twenty-five goddamned years, they’d been friends. A quarter century. Over that time they had trusted each other with all kinds of things, protected each other a load of different ways, but hadn’t needed to waste too many words in the process. You take a couple of guys from Brooklyn who’ve hung out since they were teenagers, put them together at a sports bar to watch a ballgame and drink a few cold ones, they aren’t all of a sudden going to turn into weepy members of the studio audience on the Dr. Phil show. That, Tony thought, was not what they’d have foremost in mind when they got together after work needing to shake off a million different varieties of stress… but it also didn’t qualify them as two slobbering, jockstrap-sniffing morons.
And yet Pat had been gone a while now. Over a week. Too long, and under circumstances much too suspicious for Tony to box up his concerns for even a minute. He’d known what Pat had going on the side, of course. Wouldn’t have been shocked to learn he’d been treating himself to a little something extra on top of it every now and then… can’t eat the same pie every day, he always said. Tony had been originally hoping he’d decided to have his fill of la vida loca, celebrate some of the big new sales commissions he’d been netting these last few months with a weekend fling to the Caribbean or somewhere. God knew he’d had enough practice running cover stories to the wife.
Still, though. A week. A week and counting. It was way, way too long for Tony to explain away.
Tony didn’t like it, not a bit.
There was missing, and there was missing. And after what Tony had heard the other night — making him frustrated enough to leave those answering-machine messages, and then get into that nasty argument only to have the phone slammed down in his ear — after all that, it wasn’t doing him one iota of good to read about yesterday’s Madison Square Garden face-off between the Islanders and Rangers. To the contrary, it only got his mind veering off into dark places he wanted to avoid.
And so Tony had quit on the sports pages and started flipping through the daily rags front to back. He hadn’t been aware of looking for a particular type of news article, hadn’t consciously realized that he had been skimming over the world, national, and business reports, and totally bypassing the editorial columns and entertainment dish to peruse the city sections, paying closest attention to pieces about local crimes and accidents… his eye drawn toward any shred of information, any apparent clue, that could somehow help him figure out what could have happened to Pat.
Seated at his desk now, his hot cider steaming in front of him, Tony went through the automatic motions of peeking at the general news in today’s Post and then once again found himself turning to the NYPD DAILY BLOTTER section. He skimmed quickly down the latest batch of dreary, depressing items scratched together by police, hospital, and morgue beat reporters every night. Listed under separate borough headers, and summarized in bulleted paragraphs, they seemed pretty typical: A trannie prostitute discovered bound and beaten to death on a Bryant Park bench. A boiler explosion in the South Bronx that had killed a couple of senior citizens and hospitalized three firefighters with acute smoke inhalation. Gang-related tensions that had erupted into shootings and stabbings in a midtown nightclub. Some Harlem kid who’d gotten nabbed while breaking into a Mercedes-Benz SUV that turned out to be owned by a hoton-the-charts rap artist and packed to the roof with crack cocaine, heroin, and marijuana, plus a small arsenal of illegal firearms for good measure….
