“Junk,” I said. “Bad color, the faults are so obvious I can see them without a loupe.”
“No, it’s not junk. All diamonds have value, this one just isn’t as valuable as some others. Even diamonds that aren’t gem quality are valuable for industrial purposes. Don’t get into a frame of mind that all diamonds have to be D clarity and flawless. We market different grades for different tastes and pocketbooks. A lot of jewelers claim that a man’s supposed to spend two months’ salary on an engagement ring. Can you imagine how tiny most rings would be if they were all perfect D’s?”
“But they’d be good investments. You told me most diamonds sold in this country have too much yellow to increase in value.”
“True, but Americans like big gems, even if they’re of lower quality, while the Japanese prefer high-quality gems, even if they’re smaller in size. Maybe that’s why we have such a high divorce rate. Tell me more about the stone. What size is it?”
I put it on a diamond scale. Diamonds were sold by weight, not physical dimensions. And having its own system of weight was another unique thing about diamonds. The word “carat” came from “carob,” the chocolate substitute. In India and the Mediterranean, diamonds were originally weighed by placing carob seeds on one side of a scale and diamonds on the other. I didn’t know why carob seeds were chosen; maybe there was more uniformity of weight with them. In modern times, though, it wasn’t a very practical method and the diamond industry ultimately standardized a “carat” as 200 milligrams. Bernie could easily figure my weight in carats because there were 2240 carats to a pound.
In the trade, carats were further divided into “points,” with one hundred points equaling a carat. A fifty-point diamond was half a carat, seventy-five points three quarters, and so on.
“One hundred twelve points, a little over a carat,” I said.
“Good, but that’s the weight of the unfinished stone. We need to know what it will weigh once it’s cut. How would you cut it?”
That was a loaded question. What does an eleven-year-old kid know about cutting diamonds?
I took the stone to a desk off to the side and began to examine it under strong light. I knew the routine, examining the stone with a loupe, looking for the grain, the cleavage lines, discovering exactly the right angle for a cut. If you saw a finished diamond, you would have a hard time imaging that they were sculpted from misshapen stones like the one in my hand.
The most important thing about cutting was being able to envision what the finished product would look like. My father taught me that the people who decide where to cleave, saw, and grind diamonds into their familiar display case have to imagine the gem within the stone before they start.
“Imagine you’re a beam of light,” my father would say when he handed me a stone to be cut. That’s what it was all about, how light traveled. If you could envision exactly how light would react in the diamond, you would know how to cut the diamond to bring out its brilliance.
The first thing you had to know was that all that glitter, the radiance we call diamond fire, those flashes of light, was not from light reflecting off the diamond, but from the light entering it and getting processed inside the diamond. The cut was just as important as the first two C’s—color and clarity. The three work together to create a dazzling gem.
A diamond was divided into three parts—the wide part in the middle where it’s attached to the ring is called the girdle. The area above that is the crown, and the area below the girdle is the pavilion. You had to imagine a beam of light entering the diamond through the table and facets of the crown and getting worked by the facets of the pavilion, the light splitting into different colors as if it was passing through a prism. The light being refracted in the pavilion is the fiery glitter you see.
You couldn’t just chop off pieces until you had the familiar shape of a diamond. Even though most stones were cut to create fifty-eight facets, thirty-three in the crown and twenty-five in the pavilion, each stone was unique, and shaping a gem from a rough took careful study. And it didn’t always come out the way the polisher planned. That’s why some diamonds aren’t the bargain they appear on paper to be. Two stones with exactly the same rating as to weight, clarity, and color may have significantly different brilliance because of the way the gem was drawn from the stone. As a rule of thumb, you started with about a three-carat stone to carve down to a one-carat diamond. You might be able to draw a one-carat from a smaller stone, say, a two-carat size, but you may not get the same fire from the smaller stone despite the fact that it has the same stats. Often, the shape and size of the stone was also determined by working with and around defects.
I wasn’t going to make my living cutting stones, but if I followed in my father’s footsteps and became a diamond trader, each time I examined a rough to see whether I wanted to buy it, I had to keep the biggest “C” of all in mind—cost. I had to accurately see the gem in the rough to determine how much I should pay for it—and how much the person I sold it to would pay.
So that’s how I was trained, to always start by seeing the gem hidden inside the stone, imaging I was a beam of light and following it as it entered and was processed, seeing how facets would refract and disperse the light to gauge how the cut should be.
After determining where to cut, the stone was marked with ink to show where the cleaving, sawing, and grinding are to be done. Using a small mallet and blade, the stone had to be cut precisely on its cleavage to split properly. A hair off and the stone would be damaged or even shattered. That was really the paradox about diamonds—they were hard, but not tough. They were the hardest substance on earth—we all knew only a diamond could cut a diamond. You could put a diamond on an anvil and hit it with a sledgehammer, driving the diamond unbroken into the iron anvil—but it just as likely would shatter because a diamond will shatter when hit along any of its cleave lines.
“Diamond cutting originated in India,” Uncle Bernie told me during an earlier lesson. “They knew diamonds were hard, hard enough to embed into an anvil when they hit a diamond on one, but they also discovered there were ways to shatter diamonds—if you keep hitting it, by trial and error you’ll strike it along the grain and it’ll break. They wrapped the stones in sheets of lead and broke them by hitting them hard. They took sharp pieces from the broken stones and imbedded them in the edge of swords when the blades were almost hot enough to melt. It created swords that could cut steel.”
I took the stone in the other room and studied it for an hour, examining it by eye and under the loupe. When I figured out how I thought it should be cut, I marked the lines with ink. Then I reported to my father.
“I would go for a forty-point oval cut. That would be a loss of almost two-thirds of the stone, with some of it recovered as sand.” Sand referred to small diamonds, usually under ten-points. Anything under one hundred–points, a carat, was called a small. “There’s a gletz.” A tiny crack. “I would cleave it off, taking away about a quarter of the stone. If it’s left in, it would probably split the stone during the sawing and grinding needed to create the facets.”
Splitting off the crack would be done with cleaving. It was a procedure that used a mallet and blade to sever off part of a diamond and the process most people identified with cutting a diamond. Cleaving is the way it’s done in the movies, but in real life most of the shaping was done by tedious hours of sawing and grinding. Cleaving was risky, though, because the stone could shatter.
I spent the rest of the afternoon and after supper that evening and all free hours between school and sleep the next week examining the diamond and preparing it for a cut. I talked about the diamond to my dad, Bernie, and Emile, a cutter who worked for my father. I put it on a device called a dop and used another diamond to cut a groove in it. Since a diamond could only be cut with a diamond, a pointed diamond was used to cut the groove I needed to set the cleaving knife. I’d cut industrial diamonds, a number of them, practicing on them for the big day when I had to cut something more valu
able.
When it came time to do the actual cleaving as my father watched, I began my cut, the diamond mounted and grooved, with a wooden mallet in one hand and the cleaving knife in the other. Before I struck the blow, I looked up at my father.
“What if it shatters?” I asked.
“You’ll never know failure unless you try. And you’ll never know success until you’ve experienced failure.”
“So it doesn’t matter if I shatter it?”
“Of course it matters. That diamond is worth a year’s allowance. If you shatter it, you’ll have to come here every day after school for a year to earn your allowance.”
“That’s not fair.”
“That’s life. You’re going to learn something as you grow up. The only justice you get in this world is what you fight for.”
“Why do I have to learn how to cut a diamond?” I knew the answer, but when you’re a kid, you keep testing the waters, looking for the answer you want. “I don’t want to cut diamonds when I grow up.”
“You need to know the business. Every inch of it. Otherwise people will take advantage of you, even let you down because they’re incompetent.”
Knowing every inch was something he drilled into me. Like the time I won a bike race. Before he let me ride in the race, he made me strip down the bike and put it back together until I could do it blindfolded. “That’s how they train soldiers,” he said. “They live with their rifles day and night so they have to be able to take their rifle apart and put it back together in the dark.”
I set down the mallet and wiped my hands. They were sweaty.
“Can you imagine how a diamond cutter felt in the old days when he cut a stone worth a king’s ransom? They’d often study the diamond for a year or more and have a doctor standing by in case the stone shattered.”
“Would the doctor fix the broken stone?”
“No. The doctor was there to treat the shattered diamond cutter.”
He told me the story of Joseph Asscher, the Amsterdam diamond cutter who cut the Cullinan Diamond, the largest diamond in the world, for Edward VII in 1907. The diamond was 3106 carats, over a pound and nearly the size of a man’s fist, and the royals wanted it cut down to smaller stones, some of which were planned for the crown and scepter. Asscher had a doctor and nurse standing by as he raised his mallet and swung it down to cleave the diamond. Then he promptly fainted as it cleaved smoothly.
The part of the story I liked best was how it was shipped to Britain. When the Cullinan was found in South Africa and it was decided to send it to London to be cut for the king, the mine owners put on an elaborate charade of shipping the diamond in an iron box under heavy guard—but actually sent it by parcel post with a three-shilling stamp. Diamond traders still pulled the same sort of tricks to ship their stones around the world.
I laid the mallet atop the stone again, raised the mallet, and brought it down.
The diamond shattered. I stared at the pieces with a sinking heart. My father’s face was expressionless when I looked up to him.
“I want another one,” I said. “I want another diamond to cut.”
His lips shaped a small smile. “Okay, but you’re going to go barefooted if you break it.”
4
Long Island Sound, 1991
Some women love speed. Something gets inside them, triggering more desire than a man’s touch. The investment banker’s wife was one of them. She sat across from me in the sailboat’s cockpit, creaming her panties as wind and sea hit us. Sailboats actually don’t move much faster than a crawl, but when they keel in a good blow and you have to grab your ass—hanging on for dear life from getting swept overboard—it’s not much different than the sensation of barreling toward the earth in a stunt plane.
“I’m so excited!” she yelled to me.
Yeah, I could see that. She spread her legs further every inch I keeled the boat deeper on its side. Her pink panties and a line of pubic hair were exposed in the crotch of her short-shorts. Her mouth hung open, inviting. She wanted something, I just wasn’t sure where she wanted it first.
An awful moaning came up the companionway from the cabin below. Then the sounds of gasping and gurgling as her husband threw up.
They say there are only two kinds of sailors—those who have been seasick and those who will be. But her husband, Barney, made up a third kind—getting nauseated before we even pushed away from the dock. When he got cross-eyed from vomiting out his guts, I stowed him below, on a bunk with foul-weather straps to hold him in. Last time I looked, he’d fallen off the bunk and was rolling in puke.
“Go faster,” she squealed, “they’re catching up.”
“They” was the Hedge Fund, a fifteen-meter cutter we were racing. It should have cleaned the clock of my twelve-meter. Wind and current being equal, a sailboat’s speed is determined by the length of its hull. But that’s like saying the performance of a golf club is determined by the quality of its manufacturer. Two sailors of unequal ability won’t get the same performance out of a boat any more than two golfers using the same club will hit a ball the same distance. The skipper of the Hedge Fund, Nolan Richards, didn’t have the balls or racing instincts to beat me. A half an hour ago, he followed standard protocol by staying in his line of sail and waiting it out when the wind got spotty and full of holes. That’s the conventional wisdom, hang onto that old breeze, because if you cut across the waterway looking for a better wind, you’ll lose time and distance. But good sailors also know that every wind has a personality of its own. Like women, some come across and others are just prick-teasers. In my book, you don’t win races sailing by the book—you have to adapt to the conditions. My experience on the Sound is that an easterly will shift to a sou-west when the time current tables say that the tide will be at flood. So I shifted over to pick up that wind. The Hedge Fund had finally gotten a piece of it, too, but it was too late for them to close the gap.
“What’d I get if I win?” I yelled back to her.
She nodded her head and licked her lips. Her face was warm and flush, her lips swollen red and full like the lips of an excited cunt.
I got the idea. And put on more sail. As I turned the winch, Barney’s groaning and moaning floated up the companionway. I felt sorry for the poor bastard. Anyone who’s never been seasick has no idea of how miserable it is. Not that I cared much for the guy. The boat ride was strictly business. Katarina, my girlfriend, asked me to take Barney and his wife out on my sailboat and show them a good time. She was supposed to be here, too, but a photo shoot for Vogue ran overtime and she couldn’t make it.
Katarina’s a supermodel with a yen to be a Hollywood star. Barney’s a paunchy vice president of an investment bank that bankrolls films. A match made in heaven, in Katarina’s eyes. I found Barney to be a boring jerk, who reminded me too much of my stepbrother, Leo. When my father and stepmother were killed in an accident fifteen years ago, I inherited a diamond business I had no desire to run. I left it in the hands of Leo and Uncle Bernie. They joked that I thought I owned Citibank, because that was the name on the trust-account checks that came each month and kept me in fast cars, a sailboat, and an apartment in the Dakota on the Upper West Side.
Something dark crawled in me when I lost my father a few years after the death of my mother: a worm called fatalism. You never knew when those Dark Sisters called the Fates were going to grab your ankles and pull you six feet under, so you’d better squeeze every succulent bit you can out of life. What it boiled down to was I didn’t give a rat’s ass about anything except having a good time. No, having a great time—good times were for ankle biters.
Sometimes after I partied hot and heavy, I’d wake up in the wee hours and wonder what my father would have thought of my lifestyle. Neither of my parents lived long enough to wring out all the joys there are in life. But then I’d push the guilt aside—I didn’t want to be on my deathbed agonizing over a wish list of things I never did.
The investment banker’s wife jerked her thumb at
the open companionway and laughed. They had a marriage made in heaven, too. He was rich and a bore—she had expensive tastes and was bored. She was a pulpy blonde, ripe and juicy, with a hot cunt—he’d probably have a heart attack if he ever got a good fuck. “She’s looking after his health,” Katarina had theorized, “by fucking other men so she doesn’t wear him out.”
More sail put the boat’s lee side deeper into the water. As the bow exploded waves, the spray came back at us and the blonde giggled like a banshee reeling from a hit of the drug Ecstasy. On the high side of the cockpit, she spread her legs to brace herself as the boat keeled more. She hung onto the lifelines with one hand and her other hand slipped in past the crotch of her panties and worked her clit like the gearshift knob on my Bugatti.
She let go of the lifelines and fell onto me. I was seated behind the big wheel-helm and she landed with her knees on the cockpit floor and her breasts in my lap. She pushed herself back and unzipped my shorts. Her hand dug into my shorts and found my bulge. She freed it from restraint and my long, red, throbbing phallus shot up at her.
“That’s why they call it a cockpit,” I told her.
She took it in her mouth with one big gulp. Her mouth was hot and wet. I reared up, driving it down her deep throat.
“Oh, God, I’m dying.”
Her pea-green husband had struggled up the companionway to the foot of the cockpit. He stared at us, dizzy and cross-eyed. His eyes teared and his face gasped as his innards erupted and vomit exploded out his mouth.
5
Katarina was waiting on the dock for us. She carried the couple’s day bag as I helped the pulpy bonde get the investment banker into the backseat of their car. Katarina made a point of fussing over the guy until his wife got the car going. As the blonde shot away, she threw me a carnal look.
Heat of Passion Page 3
