Heat of Passion

by Harold Robbins

  My impression was that my father and João were compadres, up to a point—the point where neither one turned his back on the other. My old man had been no angel, that was for sure, no one who wheels and deals in diamonds is. But to refer to João with caution was a sure sign that the man was dangerous besides avaricious.

  “So you know I’m broke and it’s Angola or bust. Ever been there?”

  “Many times. Stop by Lisbon on your way and I will give you some tips on how to survive. With my help, you might even live long enough to make your own fortune. Your best bet for a flight to Angola is through Lisbon, anyway. Few airlines serve Angola directly. Since it’s a former Portuguese colony, and the official language is Portuguese, there is still a close connection with Portugal. I have contacts that you will find exceptionally helpful when you reach that African country.”

  He told me he’d have someone meet me at the airport if I gave him the flight information. We hung up after he gave me a number to call him back on once I booked a flight. My mind was swirling with questions and scenarios. João knew a lot for a guy several thousand miles and a couple decades away. He also had my unlisted phone number.

  João. Leo. Bernie. A diamond mine in Angola. “Many times,” João had said, about visiting Angola.

  I was beginning to get a clue as to how Bernie got into the mining business.

  João knew I was broke. So why was he holding out a carrot for me to go to Angola? What did I have that he wanted? Certainly not a mine hemorrhaging money in a war zone.

  I wondered what my father would have told me about João if he was still alive.

  PART 3

  LISBON

  10

  Victoir Liberte, Lisbon, 1946

  Victoir sat alone at a terrace table at a café across from the casino in Estoril. He sipped garoto, espresso with milk, and ignored a tray of sweet pastelarias the waiter had set on the table in the hopes they would be consumed and thus charged for. He pretended to read a newspaper, but he was more interested in a man at a table on the other side of the café.

  The man sitting across the way had nervous fingers that kept tapping the side of his coffee cup. His wrinkled white linen suit was soiled at the cuffs, his Panama hat had a sweat ring around the crown. His flesh was the anemic gray of the belly of a fish. His unlucky facial features, a small pug nose, weak chin, and watery brown eyes, were marred by a rash on the right side of his neck that his nervous fingers kept leaving the coffee cup to scratch.

  To Victoir, the man had the reek of a Nazi. Not one of the goose-stepping horde that terrorized Europe and murdered millions with its blitzkrieg and death camps, but the scared, whipped-rat variety, crawling for cover after the Allies kicked them in the ass. The war had been over less than a year, but the rats had started abandoning the leaking Nazi ship even before that. They still tried to convey a sense of superiority, as if their loon-crazy leader had accomplished anything besides the death of innocents and his own cowardly suicide to avoid a hangman’s noose.

  Lisbon, a neutral haven for all sides during the war, was now host not only to half the royalty in Europe that had lost their thrones, but for ex-Nazis who came to the port as a jumping-off point for Argentina and other South American countries where the Nazi hallucination hadn’t been crushed under Eisenhower’s heel.

  Victoir sighed and tried to focus on the newspaper he had already read earlier. A moment later João Carmona sat down across from him.

  Victoir ordered another espresso for himself and vinho verde for João.

  It was still morning but João had the peasant’s habit of dipping bread in the green wine for breakfast. João was short, thin, and wiry, with dark olive skin, flinty eyes, a flared nose, and cropped, tight black hair. Not pure Portuguese, he was a mulatto from Cape Verde, islands off the west coast of Africa. Small, but dangerous, is how Victoir thought of him. Tough and fast, João always carried two knives—one under his coat, the other in his boot. A natty dresser, he habitually wore high-collared white shirts, a hand-painted silk tie, and a flashy gray suit tailored in a shiny material called sharkskin. He smoked thin, black, foul-smelling Havana cigars.

  He thought of João as a fighting cock and himself as a cautious dog. Although Victoir was several inches taller and thirty pounds heavier, he was neither as strong nor as fast as João. Good living in Lisbon had already puffed out his waistline. He was intelligent with a good business sense, cautious but ready to take risks after thinking out the situation, unlike João, who relied on a gambler’s instincts—and a quick knife thrust when words failed.

  João also had a good business sense, but it was a different type of intelligence—the kind learned on the streets. The survivor instincts of thieves and Gypsies. He was ready to take risks without always thinking them through. And ready to fight his way out of a corner when backed into one.

  He needed a man like João in his jewelry business. A couple years younger than Victoir’s twenty-six, João was an old soul by street standards. Raised in the Alfama quarter by a mother who was both a fado singer and a whore, João grew up mugging people in back alleys and picking pockets at Rossio Square. He got into the jewelry business at the age of twelve the old-fashioned way—robbing drunks of their watches, rings, and dinheiro.

  Victoir had gotten into the jewelry business through blood. After the First World War, his family migrated to France from a Polish area in the Ukraine, fleeing the Red takeover and pogroms of the region. His mother passed away when he was five and he spent his childhood and adolescence working in his father’s jewelry shop. He entered the French army in 1939, lying about his Jewish background, and was in the Vichy sector after the fall of France, with his father in Paris. His father killed himself rather than be taken prisoner in a roundup of Jews. In 1942, after the Allies landed in North Africa and the Germans occupied the Vichy territory and began rounding up Jews for the camps, Victoir escaped on a Portuguese fishing boat that dropped him in Faro on the southern coast of Portugal.

  False identification papers secured his way to Lisbon where he survived with his knowledge of jewelry, at first stopping just short of practicing his profession at the end of a knife, as João had done. He didn’t bother asking where his jewelry came from. One of his first buys of questionable merchandise occurred when a street tough approached him while he was sitting at his usual sidewalk café along Avenda da Liberdade. The seller was João.

  Victoir, with his instinct for gems, and João, with his street sense, were a natural team. Soon, they were working together almost full time. Fencing stolen merchandise didn’t sit well with Victoir and he directed their energies toward purchasing and reselling legitimate goods. Or at least gems that had some facsimile of legitimacy. Occasionally there was some question as to the prior ownership of jewels, but diamonds and other precious gems were an international form of money for the hordes of refugees that escaped to Lisbon—including the ones who had reasons to still be running after the war ended.

  He taught João how to evaluate gems and the Portuguese took to it. Victoir worked with jewels because it was the only profession he knew. João genuinely loved gems for themselves, especially diamonds, wearing a large diamond ring and diamond tie pin. He was a ladies’ man, for sure, but Victoir suspected João’s greatest passion was diamonds.

  “What do you think of our Swiss friend over there?” João asked.

  Victoir shot the Nazi a look out of the corner of his eye. “The only things Swiss about him are his watch and passport. And they’re both probably stolen. What’s he selling?”

  “A big diamond, that’s all I know. Over forty carats, he claims.”

  “Forty carats. It would be the size of a walnut. Unless it’s heavily flawed, it would be worth a small fortune. Sounds like he has more imagination than I’d give a Nazi credit for.”

  “Pedro believes him. He hasn’t seen it, but from the description, he thinks it’s something really special.”

  Pedro was a jeweler they did business with. An old man in a w
heelchair, he sent business Victoir’s way for a cut. He wasn’t a fool and had a good instinct for gems, which gave Victoir pause to think. He gave the Nazi another look.

  “How much does he want for the jewel?” The question was almost irrelevant. They didn’t know what the gem even was yet, but it was at least a starting point to see if Victoir would even be interested.

  “He wants American dollars. One hundred thousand.”

  “Vá para o inferno! He’d have to have crown jewels to get that.”

  João shrugged. “In this world, maybe he does. We have several ex-kings and twice that many grand dukes exiled here in Lisbon. I bet our waiter was a Russian count before the last war. The question is, now that you’ve seen him, do you want to do business? Sometimes you get fussy about dealing with Germans.”

  “But you don’t. You have the morality of a sheep-killing dog, João.”

  He grinned. His teeth were glistening white and perfect. “For the past six years we’ve lived in a world in which millions of people killed millions of other people for no good reason that anyone can tell me. In which a not-too-bright Austrian corporal was permitted to conquer most of Europe and murder at will before he killed himself. Tell me, amigo, what part of what’s happened to this world is moral?”

  “Invite him to join us,” Victoir said.

  “Pedro says he won’t talk in public. If you tap the side of your leg with your newspaper when you leave the café, he’ll follow us. We’ll take a ride somewhere we can talk quietly.”

  “Does the guy speak Portuguese? My German’s terrible.”

  “He speaks some French.”

  Victoir padded his leg on the way out and the man followed them to the parking lot where João’s prewar 1934 black, ragtop Hispano Sousa was parked. The car, made in Barcelona, Spain, was his pride and joy. He claimed it attracted more women than his twelve-inch cock. Victoir believed the part about the car. With the world’s car production shut down since 1939, anything running on four wheels was princely. Victoir had no use for a car. He had never learned how to drive and found taxis more convenient than the obligations of ownership.

  They waited for the pale-faced man to catch up to them in the parking lot.

  “We’ll go somewhere where we can have a private conversation,” Victoir told him in French.

  “I have nothing on me, not even money or a passport. It would do you no good to rob me.”

  “My name is Victoir, this is João.”

  “I am Varte.”

  It wasn’t a German name and up close, Victoir had second thoughts about the possibility that the man was German. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t a Nazi.

  He motioned for the man to get in the front seat and he would sit in the back, but Varte shook his head and climbed in the back. Victoir grinned to himself as he got in the front seat. Smart man. It was easy to reach over and strangle a man in the front. He couldn’t be blamed for being paranoid. The master race was now fair game.

  “I don’t have the diamond on me.”

  “Naturally,” Victoir said. “But we’ll need to see it before we can make a deal.”

  “First we talk. You assure me you have the money it takes. And that you’re not a thief.”

  “Woher sind Sie?” Victoir said in German, asking him where he was from.

  “Nein sprechen deutsch,” Varte said.

  Victoir believed him. The man’s German was worse than his own. There was a Balkan favor to his accent.

  “Romanian?” Victoir asked, taking a shot in the dark.

  The man gave him a look of surprise. “No,” he said in French. “I’m Finnish.”

  Finnish, my ass, Victoir thought. He was Romanian all right. Probably had been in the Iron Guards, the Romanian imitation of the Nazis and SS. King Carol, the exiled Romanian king, lived not far from the casino. For sure, the king had nothing to do with the gem or this low specimen of life claiming to have it. If the king owned it and wanted to sell it, he’d do so in London, Paris, or Antwerp, getting full price, instead of having it pass between thieves.

  João drove them down to the shoreline and along the coast to the Boca do Inferno, the mouth of hell, in Cascais. They left the car in the parking lot and walked along the high cliffs overlooking the natural phenomena. The large hole and caves excavated by crashing ocean waves always fascinated Victoir.

  Varte, leery of the narrow cliff-side trail, looked at Victoir and João as if he expected them to shove him off.

  “My favorite place,” João said, smiling at the nervous man. “It’s beautiful and dramatic, no? Like a woman who will make love to you one moment and scream and tear out your eyes the next.” João’s French was worse than Varte’s, mixing a little Portuguese into his statement.

  “I have a gem,” Varte told them, “a very special one, very unique, a diamond at least forty carats in weight, perhaps even larger.”

  “There are forty-carat diamonds that aren’t worth a cup of coffee,” João said.

  “This one is worth more than a coffee plantation.”

  “What makes it so valuable?”

  “It’s a red diamond.”

  “Rare, for sure,” Victoir said, “but then again, a heavily flawed red diamond won’t buy João his cup of coffee.”

  “This is a flawless ruby diamond.”

  “Nonsense,” Victoir said, “you’re either lying or you don’t know what you’re talking about. There’s no such diamond in existence. If there was, it would be known—and in some king’s crown jewels.”

  “Known to who? Europeans? Hundreds of years ago it was in the Peacock Throne of Persia. In the last century, it was in a scepter belonging to the Khedive of Egypt. From there to the treasures of the Sultan of Turkey. When the Sultan lost his throne in ’twenty-two, the scepter was purchased by the Romanian king. The problem with Europeans is that they forget that they are not the whole world.”

  “Is the gem still mounted in a scepter?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have other gems?”

  “Not anymore.”

  In other words, he used them to buy false documents and passage to Lisbon. Victoir could guess the rest of the story. The Romanian king went into exile, having a fire sale on his way out—or lost the scepter to thieves, probably his own palace guards. One way or another the stone passed from hand to hand until it stuck in the palm of the nervous little man with the white linen suit and Panama hat. Victoir was curious about what happened to the gem since it left the Romanian king, but he didn’t want to spook the man by making him account for ownership.

  Victoir accepted the man’s story that he had a red diamond. Even if flawed, it would be extremely valuable. If not flawed—no, that wasn’t possible. A flawless red diamond would be worth a king’s ransom because it was so rare.

  “How do we arrange to see the gem?” Victoir asked.

  Varte’s eyes darted to each man. “When I see the money.”

  “How much are you asking?” Victoir asked.

  “Two hundred thousand American dollars.”

  Victoir kept a blank face, but João whistled. “Nobody in Lisbon has that kind of money. And if they did, they wouldn’t pay it for a stolen diamond. That’s what it is, isn’t it?”

  “Drop me off at the casino. There are others who will give me what I want.”

  By the time they got back to the parking lot at the casino, they had agreed upon fifty thousand dollars. It was an enormous amount of money. But Victoir was excited. If the diamond really matched the man’s description, it was worth much more. He couldn’t handle that much money on his own, but Pedro and others would kick in. João, too, though he usually insisted upon a cut just for bringing in the business.

  After they got out of the car, Victoir said, “We need a couple days to get the money together, but before we do, we need to meet so I can examine the diamond.”

  Varte pointed at João. “You stay here. Come,” he said to Victoir. He led him across the parking lot to a Peugot with a man sitt
ing in the driver’s seat. Victoir recognized the man instantly—Heinrich, a German thug with short hair, a flat square face, and a pug nose. He reminded Victoir of a boar hog. He’d heard the man had been a sergeant in a SS unit during the war. Too broke to get out of Lisbon, he hung around the city, acting as a bodyguard and errand boy for émigrés. He was a dull and stupid man, which made him dangerous. Today he was particularly dangerous—he had a German Luger on the seat beside him.

  Victoir got into the backseat with Varte. “So it’s in the car.”

  “Only when I am in it.” Varte grinned and took off his hat. “No one searches hats, not even at border crossings.” He removed a small leather pouch from the inside band, opened the pouch, and shook a stone onto his hand.

  Victoir smothered a gasp at the sight of the stone, but he couldn’t hide his reaction. His breath was swept from him.

  “You thought I was lying, didn’t you?”

  Even in the dull light of the car, the Old European–cut diamond glittered red hot. It was exquisite. And Varte was right about the weight. Victoir estimated it to be about forty, maybe a carat or two more.

  “It’s worth many times what I’m asking,” Varte said.

  “I don’t know, it has to be evaluated. It’s too dark in the car for me to examine it.” Even with flaws, the diamond would be immensely valuable. Without flaws—that was unthinkable. The stone was absolutely unique. Varte had not lied, it was a true ruby-red. He doubted Varte really understood what he had. The man knew it was valuable, but either didn’t understand it’s true value . . . or maybe he was just desperate. At that, the amount of money he demanded would give him a good life in South America.

  “Does it have a name?” Victoir asked. Like winds, some diamonds were unique enough to have a name—the indigo blue Hope Diamond, the Koh-i-Nur “Mountain of Light,” the 530-carat Star of Africa, the blue rose-cut Great Mogul, the great pink Darya-i-Nur, the big canary yellow Tiffany. A name sent the diamond’s value soaring.