Flawless

by Tilly Bagshawe

  But Jake himself cared deeply, and the business side of his life had been distinctly rocky lately. Things were not yet that bad—he was pretty sure today’s Amex problem was a technical hitch, rather than a total absence of credit—but it was fair to say that the triumphant high on which he’d ended last year, screwing over the Brooksteins, seemed light-years away now.

  After a fraught Christmas in London, he’d promised Danny he’d put the kibosh on using simulants, and he’d stuck to his word. With the exception of the Brookstein deal, they’d never made up a huge part of his income anyway. But there was no doubt that a return to purely legitimate diamond trading involved a lot more work and effort than he’d been used to of late, and in particular a lot more travel. This was the perennial diamond dealer’s dilemma: you needed to travel, often on long, risky trips to far-flung corners of the world, in order to source the best ice at the best price. But if you abandoned your patch for too long, you ran the risk of some rival moving on to your turf and nabbing your clients before you got back.

  With the Oscars in February, no dealer in their right mind could afford to leave LA before March. In past years, that’s what most of Jake’s competitors had done, disappearing as soon as the awards were over. Low on stock himself after the Oscar season frenzy, Jake would typically use simulants like cubic zirconia, YAG, or GGG to tide him through the spring months, cleaning up while his competition was out of town. Then he’d run his own, shorter trip to Africa in June, before the summer rush and when the LA market was already overwhelmed with dealers trying to offload their newly acquired product. It was a strategy that had served him well for years and made him the most profitable independent in town.

  This year, however, unable to sell synthetic stones, he’d been forced to join the March exodus. By the time he got back into town in late May, having been delayed a week by a deeply unpleasant stint in a Kazakhstani jail, some opportunist named Tyler Brett was all over his clients like a fucking rash. What was particularly galling was that Tyler was in fact an ex-daytime-soap star, considered something of a heartthrob among Hollywood women of a certain age. The guy might not know a decent diamond from a packet of peas, but he sure as fuck knew how to sell himself, and he’d stolen from Jake big-time.

  “Sorry about that, sir.” The waiter, all smiles now, had returned to their table. “I don’t know what the problem was, but it seems we were third-time lucky.”

  “Great,” said Jake coldly, signing the check. The guy could smile and make nice all he liked. If he thought he was getting a decent tip now, after showing him up in front of Greta like that, he could whistle for it.

  “So.” Greta slipped on her oversized Oliver People sunglasses. They were all the rage in LA this season, which Jake thought a shame, given that they hid pretty girls’ faces and made them look like giant bugs. “Your place or mine?”

  “Yours, definitely,” said Jake. He’d long ago made a policy decision never to bring women home unless he was really serious about them—which was never. The last thing he needed was some married stalker knowing where he lived. “You are sure Michael’s away?”

  “Positive.” She smiled, allowing him and the rest of Sunset Boulevard a glimpse of her sky-high legs in a crotch-skimming white sundress. “We shouldn’t leave together though. I’ll go first and wait for you at the bottom of Stone Canyon.”

  Watching the Mexicans on valet duty drool surreptitiously as she curled herself into her pink Lamborghini, Jake began to perk up. So what if Tyler “Nine Inch” Brett was having a good few months? His novelty value would soon wear off, and the diamond-hungry wives at the Brentwood tennis club would be beating down Jake’s door once again. In the meantime, he’d just enjoyed a damn good lunch and was about to get the best head in Hollywood from Greta Saltzman. Things could be worse.

  “Meyer!”

  Al Brookstein’s booming, furious voice shook the air like an earthquake as he spotted Jake from across the street.

  “I want a word with you, you son of a bitch! You sold me a lump of frikkin’ glass!”

  In a split second, Jake weighed up his options. He could stay and try to reason with the irate Al. Technically he could deny the accusation—GGG wasn’t glass; it was garnet, and for six hundred grand he could hardly have expected the real deal—but one look at Brookstein’s red, straining face told him his chances of success were slimmer than Nicole Richie on a diet. Halfway across Sunset now, weaving his portly form through the angrily beeping traffic, the veins on his temples stuck out so far that Jake could see them from here.

  If he waited for the valet to bring his car, they might as well serve him as fresh chopped liver on tonight’s menu; Al was clearly going to skin him alive in about twenty seconds. No, the only thing for it was to make a dive for his keys and run for the car himself.

  Leaping across tables like James Bond, spilling drinks and plates of mung bean salad as he went, he reached into the valet booth for his car keys on their distinctive white-and-blue Tottenham Hotspurs fob and bolted past the trash cans into the parking lot. By some miracle, no one had boxed him in. He could jump into the driver’s seat and go.

  His fingers were trembling so much it took a second or two to start the ignition and auto-lock the doors. As soon as he slipped the Maserati’s silver gear stick into drive and began to pull forward, Al rounded the corner of the alley, shaking his fist like a cartoon baddie.

  “I’ll kill you!” he roared. “I’ll fucking rip your fucking balls off, you British prick!” The next thing Jake knew, he’d lowered his bald head and begun running straight at the car, charging it like some sort of crazed bull.

  Slowly, Jake edged the Maserati forward—there was nowhere else to go, and he didn’t want to kill the guy. But Brookstein kept on running, finally flinging himself onto the hood, where he landed with an almighty chassis-buckling thud.

  “Get out of that car!” he yelled, battering the windshield with his fists. It would have been comic had Jake not been convinced that with a few more blows he might actually break the thing and climb inside, broken glass and all. He hadn’t felt this frightened since the time his parents took him and Danny to Whipsnade Zoo for their tenth birthday, and they’d broken down in a field of monkeys, who proceeded to jump all over the car, stripping it of everything portable from windshield wipers to hubcaps, baring their teeth and shrieking uncontrollably all the while.

  On that occasion, he’d memorably wet his pants. This time, he decided to take the more dignified option of fighting back. Speeding up into the alley, he swung the car sharp right onto Sunset. Al clung on manfully for a couple of seconds, but soon fell to the ground, curling up and rolling to the safety of the sidewalk like a hedgehog. Jake’s last image of him in the rearview mirror showed him bruised but still screaming, waving a wrenched-off wiper like a dagger at Jake’s taillights.

  “Fuck!” he shouted, letting off steam himself as adrenaline gave way to the nausea of relief. “Holy fucking FUCK! How did he know?”

  He’d known the Brooksteins long enough to realize that neither of them would ever think unprompted of verifying one of his stones. Someone must have put the idea into Al’s head. He wouldn’t mind betting that that someone was an iron-jawed Melrose Place has-been called Tyler.

  “I’ll kill him,” he muttered to himself, surveying the dent and scratches Al had left on the front of his beloved car as he sped through Holmby Hills and on toward Stone Canyon. “If that little fucker’s been badmouthing me, I swear to God, I’ll kill him.”

  How ironic it would be if, after years of scamming, the whole simulants thing came back to bite him just when he’d sworn off it for good. He could already imagine the I-told-you-so’s from Danny. Although recently his brother had been so distracted, no doubt mooning over yet another unsuitable woman, he probably wouldn’t register what an almighty fuckup this was.

  But then again, he might. Perhaps it was best if he didn’t tell Danny just yet. He’d come to some sort of arrangement with Brookstein, who’d hav
e to calm down eventually. Either that or die of a coronary, either of which would suit Jake’s purposes admirably. Hopefully with a bit of sweet-talking, he could get Julia to help plead his case, although God knew how he was going to afford to pay her old man back, even in part. The first priority was to get his car fixed. Left as it was, it would serve as a visible daily reminder to the LA gossips of a story that was probably already flying around town like a game of telephone: the great Al Brookstein going psycho on Jake the Rake at Il Sole after Jake sold him a fake diamond.

  Christ. Whichever way he looked at it, this was going to hurt Solomon Stones.

  “Omigod! What happened?” Greta, who moments ago had been starting to get pissed at Jake for keeping her waiting, now stared at his battered car and sweating, anxious face with genuine concern as he pulled into Stone Canyon Drive. “Did you get in an accident? Are you OK?”

  “No, and not really,” said Jake. “I’ll tell you about it later.” Getting out of the car to greet her, he realized he was still shaking. “Listen G, I never thought I’d hear myself say this. But I’m kind of not in the mood for sex right now. D’you mind if we take a rain check?”

  Greta kissed him on the cheek.

  “Not at all.” She smiled. “I don’t know when Michael will next be out of town, but I’m sure it won’t be long. I’d much rather have your full attention.”

  “Thanks,” said Jake, staggering dazedly back to the Maserati. “I’ll call you.”

  “I won’t hold my breath,” said Greta, without rancor. She liked Jake, but she had a wealth of other lovers to choose from. “Take care of yourself, OK?”

  Jake gave her an uncharacteristically nervous smile.

  “I’ll try my best.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  SCARLETT UNSCREWED THE top of her purified water bottle for the second time in as many minutes and took a deep, thirsty gulp. Why had nobody warned her that the Siberian summer was so hot? Strolling along Ulitsa Lenina in Yakutsk, Yakutia’s capital city, past the endless jewelry boutiques showcasing the region’s diamonds in a dazzling array of colors and settings, she felt the energy seeping out of her like moisture from a withered vine. Ugly sweat patches had formed under the sleeves of her Gap T-shirt, and even in linen trousers and sandals she felt uncomfortably overdressed for the ninety-plus-degree heat.

  She’d arrived here last night, courtesy of an Aeroflot flight from Moscow that she wouldn’t forget in a hurry. Wedged between a snoring, farting Georgian businessman and a middle-aged Muscovite woman who brought new meaning to the term “white-knuckle flyer” (her screams must surely have been audible from the cockpit, if not the ground, every time they ran into turbulence), she’d collapsed into bed at the Sails Hotel on the main town square without taking much stock of her surroundings. Only this morning, at breakfast (a surprisingly cosmopolitan spread of pastries, fruit, and cold meats and a vast improvement on the food she’d been offered on her last trip to Russia) did she realize that her room was armored. Tinted windows of bulletproof glass complemented a decor of concrete with subtle accents of reinforced steel, which did rather make her wonder what the majority of her fellow guests did for a living. But as she was here on Trade Fair business—and as the only other hotel in town was the extortionately priced Polar Star, where a cocktail would set her back roughly as many rubles as her entire suite at Sails, she had little option but to make the best of it.

  Catching sight of a bench up ahead, nestled beneath a tired-looking plane tree, she made a beeline for it, sinking down gratefully onto its wooden slats and luxuriating in that rarest of Yakutian commodities, shade. This entire sterile, barren city was at once so rich and so poor, so crammed with jewels and money and light, and yet so unutterably blank and depressing. While the rest of Siberia crumbled uselessly around it, a living museum of its own past greatness, Yakutsk was all about the future, about the Sakha Republic’s vast diamond wealth and what that money could build. But if this was the best they could come up with—bulletproof hotels and breezeblock jewelry stores?—well, it just went to show that money wasn’t everything.

  Tonight—in six hours precisely, in fact—Scarlett would address a packed hall of diamond miners, some of the poorest men in the whole of Sakha, many of whom would have traveled hundreds of miles to hear her speak. It was a daunting thought. Using an interpreter was always difficult. She’d done it on numerous occasions in Africa, during Trade Fair’s early days, but somehow the atmosphere was easier among the smiling Swahili rabble than it was here, in this stark, alien country, in front of such dour, hard-bitten working men. Nor were her nerves eased by the certain knowledge that in a matter of days, perhaps even hours, Brogan O’Donnell would hear about her little foray into his backyard, stirring up trouble.

  She looked at her watch and thought briefly of her father, as she did every time she saw its battered, familiar strap and rose-gold face. She pictured him asleep in his comfy chair in the study with the three o’clock news still crackling out from his ancient Roberts radio. It was rare for Scarlett to get homesick for Drumfernly, but Yakutsk was the sort of place that could make one homesick for anywhere.

  Heavens, twelve o’clock already. She’d better scoot back to the hotel and shower before Gregori from the union turned up.

  “Relax. This is Yakutia.” Gregori grinned. “Everybody else in that hall will have had at least four vodkas before they sit down. Have another.”

  She’d expected the miners’ union rep to be a typical Russian—monosyllabic, with a paunch spilling over polyester trousers and all the charm of a traffic warden with a migraine. Instead, Scarlett found herself passing a remarkably pleasant afternoon at the hotel bar with a good-looking guy about her own age who seemed intent on delivering her to the podium drunk.

  “I can’t, honestly,” she giggled. She’d only had two gin and tonics, but the seventies-themed bar was already starting to look blurry, a psychedelic mishmash of orange and brown. Russian barmen were notoriously easy on the mixers. “It’s all right for them; they don’t have to give a speech. Besides, they’re used to it. Isn’t the average Siberian miner’s diet eighty percent alcohol?”

  “At least,” Gregori smiled, ignoring her protests and ordering a third cocktail for both of them. “Now where were we? Oh yes, you wanted the cancer statistics. It’s all a bit ad hoc I’m afraid. But these are the best numbers I have.” He reached into his briefcase and handed her a sheaf of cheap-looking printer paper, covered in spreadsheets with a few handwritten addendums in the margins.

  “Can you summarize?” Scarlett asked hopefully. Numbers tended to swirl before her eyes at the best of times. After two stiff drinks, he might as well have handed her the Enigma code.

  “Sure.” He took a gulp of his cosmopolitan. “This column here shows the number of confirmed cases in the last three years.”

  “These are all O’Donnell employees?”

  “Yes,” he nodded. “Page two shows you comparable numbers for Alrosa miners.”

  “The government diamond interest?” asked Scarlett, scanning the figures where Gregori pointed.

  “Correct. I know it looks a lot, but that’s about the average level of lung cancer occurrence for adult males in this part of the Russian Federation. Everybody smokes.”

  “I know, I know,” said Scarlett, sighing. “It’d make my work an awful lot easier if they didn’t.”

  “But the O’Donnell workers are at well over twice that level,” said Gregori, directing her back to page one. “Statistically, everything points to the fact that there must be some particulate matter in those pits that’s fucking with those guys—excuse my language. Brogan O’Donnell knows it. He just doesn’t want to address it, and why should he when labor here is so cheap and plentiful?”

  Scarlett shook her head. Poor Gregori. He was educated, but he could identify with the diamond miners and their struggles in a way that she never could. These dying men were his friends, his uncles, his brothers. No wonder he looked so angry.

  “Wh
at they need is organization,” he went on. “Someone to help them harness the power of their numbers and their situation.”

  “That’s why I’m here,” said Scarlett. “This is exactly the sort of work Trade Fair needs to be doing. We’ve had quite a bit of success in South Africa, helping the unions…”

  “I know,” said Gregori, “and that’s great. But Russia is completely different.”

  “In what way?”

  He frowned, searching for the right words. “It’s hard to explain. Russians, Yakuts, they’re a very proud people. They won’t thank you for your charity, the way that a South African might.”

  Scarlett looked at him quizzically.

  “You’ll find it a lot harder to whip up international sympathy for white Russian miners than you will for black Africans,” Gregori blurted. “I’m sorry if that sounds racist but it’s true. I love these men; they’re my people. But they aren’t cute and cuddly. There is nothing…adorable about them.”

  “Nothing adorable?” Scarlett laughed.

  “I’m putting this badly,” said Gregori. “Just don’t expect miracles tonight, OK? They need help, but they don’t know they need it. Especially not from a woman. A foreign woman,” he added, meaningfully.

  “Come on,” said Scarlett. “I’m sure they can’t be that bad.”

  Now it was Gregori’s turn to laugh. “Don’t you believe it. Why do you think I’ve been buying you drinks all afternoon? Trust me, Scarlett, you’re going to need them.”

  He wasn’t wrong.

  The sight of some three hundred semi-inebriated Yakuts crammed into an auditorium in the former Soviet Party headquarters was enough to make her contemplate bolting.

  “Oh God,” she whispered to Gregori, who stood beside her onstage as the last of the men took their seats. “My knees are shaking. I shouldn’t have come.”

  “Nonsense,” said Gregori. “You’ll be fine.”