The only remaining fly in the ointment was the difficulty of getting US press coverage, although she was confident her gorgeous new ads would change that. Brogan had set Aidan Leach the task of keeping Trade Fair out of the US media, and he took the responsibility very seriously, more determined than ever not to fuck up after his “oversight” with Scarlett’s Yakutia trip last year. The LA Times had already dropped an interview with Scarlett days before it was due to run, under pressure from Aidan. Even In Style had heavily edited its profile of Flawless and its famous customers, eradicating every mention of Trade Fair from the published text, much to Scarlett’s fury. Brogan evidently had friends in high places.
Still, she reasoned, not even he could keep her out of the press indefinitely. There was a lot of goodwill toward her in LA, where to her surprise she’d been warmly and swiftly adopted as a quirky, British outsider. Only a week ago, Katy Perry’s manager had been in the store, hinting that Katy herself might be prepared to lend her name to Trade Fair if Scarlett could let her people know a little more about it. It hadn’t happened yet, but it was all exciting stuff.
At least, Scarlett thought so. Magnus, much to her disappointment, had been less interested in her charity work than she’d anticipated. After six months “together”—although admittedly 90 percent of their relationship had been spent apart—she’d hoped for at least a modicum of boyfriendly solidarity. But he was so caught up in his own work—most recently he’d been working on an esoteric challenge to some minuscule piece of immigration law that he hoped, when published, would secure him his partnership—he had no mental energy left for her interests.
Having agreed at the outset to spend a minimum of one weekend in three together, Scarlett ended up doing all the traveling. Other than his first, surprise visit in March, Magnus had only made it down to LA once before tonight. Meanwhile, Scarlett had been ratcheting up the air miles to Seattle, a city she secretly found dull as ditchwater, spending her precious weekends mingling dutifully with Magnus’s boring lawyer friends, nodding and smiling her way through corporate cocktail parties and tennis club socials until her jaw ached.
All of which wasn’t to say that she and Magnus never had fun together. When he wasn’t “on duty,” sucking up to his senior partners, he still had the ability to reduce her to tears of laughter. They read the same books, were interested by the same NPR news stories, and thanks in part to the enforced, long separations, the sexual chemistry between them seemed to strengthen rather than weaken with time. The last three times she’d gone to see him, he’d booked them into a swanky hotel, which Scarlett thought was sweetly romantic. But it hadn’t escaped her notice that nine times out of ten, she was the one making the effort and the sacrifices to keep the love affair going. And that on some very basic level, Magnus considered his career and interests to be more important than hers.
At least the fact that he was here tonight was some sort of step forward, and Scarlett was grateful for his support. It was four full months before the Academy Awards, but the pre-pre-Oscar season was already underway in Los Angeles. Every fashion-related business—clothes stores, jewelers, accessories outlets, shoe designers, hairdressers, you name it—was immersed in a fierce and frenzied competition for precious Oscar-night endorsements, bombarding actors, agents, managers, and their wives/friends/dogs with free products and services in the hope that their name might be glimpsed or mentioned on that all-important red carpet.
As the new kid on the jewelry block, Scarlett was at a distinct disadvantage, made worse by the fact that Jake had decided to disappear off to Africa for the second time this year to buy new stock just when the parties and press junkets were beginning in earnest. She felt no small pride in the fact that she’d put together tonight’s celebrity cocktail party all by herself. She knew the Jimmy Choo boss, Tamara Mellon, from London, and when she heard she was in town last month had put in a tentative call, wondering if perhaps they could meet for dinner and she could pick Tamara’s business brain for PR ideas. It was Tamara who’d suggested the joint event—Flawless, like Jimmy Choo, was a luxury brand aimed primarily at a younger, celebrity-conscious clientele—but Scarlett had leaped at the chance.
“Tamara’s such a whiz at these things,” she whispered to Magnus, smiling at one of her regular customers as they strolled past. “I’m lucky she let me hang on to her coattails. Oh look, there’s Kate Hudson. I wonder if she’ll go for my bumblebee pendant? It’s very her, don’t you think?”
Magnus looked at her as if she’d just let out the most horrendous fart.
“Have you heard yourself lately?” he said disapprovingly. “You sound like a valley girl. How should I know what kind of pendant Kate Hudson wants to wear? More to the point, why should I care? Why should you care? She’s only a stupid actress.”
“Unfortunately, stupid actresses count for a lot in my business,” said Scarlett. “Without them, we couldn’t hope to compete with the established brands. And Trade Fair would sink like a stone.”
She hated his assumption that because of what she did for a living she was somehow more shallow and more tolerant of the vile US Weekly celebrity culture than he was. Publicity was an evil, but a very necessary one. Surely he could see that and accept it without judging her?
“I have to circulate,” she said, kissing him on the cheek. “Are you OK here? Or d’you want to come with?”
“Into that coven of witches?” said Magnus, surveying the army of rich girls in hipster jeans and Fred Segal T-shirts as they drooled over the merchandise, giving little squeals of delight at the kitschiness of the set. “No thanks, honey. I’ll be over at the bar if you need me.”
What I need, thought Scarlett, glad-handing her way through the guests, is some bloody support. If only Jake were here, he’d be charming his way around the garden like Eden’s snake, flirting for England and hard-selling her designs the way that only Jake could. She pictured him, sipping an ice-cold gin and tonic on a veranda somewhere in Africa, gazing out over a savannah sunset—was it sunset there? She could never get the hang of this time difference thing—and felt a pang of jealousy. How she wished she could take a month off to visit her beloved Franchoek—a small, old town in South Africa—and tour the continent while Jake got to stay here, schmoozing LA chicks and doing what he did best.
Over the past few months, she’d developed a grudging respect for Jake’s people skills. But he still annoyed the hell out of her. He was always goading her about Magnus and how lame she was to be doing all the running.
“He’ll be Fed-Exing down his shirts next so you can iron them for him,” he quipped, the day Magnus called to ask if she could call US Air and book his flights. “Tell him to do his own travel arrangements. You’ve got a business to run.”
“Thanks for the advice,” Scarlett replied caustically, irritated because she knew he was right, “But seeing as your longest relationship to date has been, what? Four weeks?”
“Three,” said Jake proudly.
“I think I’ll follow my own judgment on this one.”
“Yeah, good idea,” said Jake. “Maybe you can talk things over with him this weekend. When you fly to Seattle, again. What delights has lover-boy got in store for you this time? The ‘Seattle Over Sixties Please God Make Me A Partner’ Bingo Championships? Bet you can hardly wait.”
“Yeah, well, it beats your weekend,” she shot back. “Another gross, mindless shag-a-thon with some poor, unsuspecting bastard’s wife.”
“Actually, the girls I sleep with are all married to rich, unsuspecting bastards,” smiled Jake. But though Scarlett didn’t know it, he didn’t enjoy the banter. Though he made light of it, he genuinely hated watching her trail around after that stuffed shirt lawyer like a loyal puppy. Ironically, it was Magnus’s nominal support for her charity work that fueled Jake’s own continued resistance to Trade Fair. It’d be a cold day in hell before anyone could accuse him of having something in common with that pompous, prematurely middle-aged bore.
But it w
asn’t just Jake’s needling that annoyed Scarlett. Although he’d kept out of trouble with Flawless, as promised, he continued to employ unforgivably shady business practices when selling to private clients, flogging compromised or included stones for three or four times their market value where he thought he could get away with it. Scarlett was horrified. But Jake, thrilled to finally be regaining ground against the odious Tyler Brett, saw no reason to abandon tactics he’d employed successfully for years and clearly viewed her objections as both naive and unreasonable.
“I’m your diamond dealer, not your pet,” he snapped at her the night before he flew to Cape Town, when she’d ill-advisedly embarked on another morality lecture. “I don’t tell you how to run your business, sweetheart. I’d appreciate it if you stopped telling me how to run mine.”
“But Jake, it’s fraudulent!” Scarlett insisted, exasperated by his apparent total lack of conscience. “Can’t you see that what you’re doing is wrong?”
“No,” he said firmly. “I can’t. I’m happy. The customer’s happy. So why on earth shouldn’t you be happy? You might have been too busy saving Siberia’s diamond miners to notice, but Brogan O’Donnell’s got my brother by the balls in New York.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?” said Scarlett.
“When Tyler had me over a barrel last year, Danny kept Solomon Stones afloat,” said Jake. “Now it’s my turn to return the favor. So just butt out, all right?”
Knowing that the Danny situation was a sore point—after ten months, Brogan and Diana’s divorce was no nearer completion, thanks to Brogan’s stalling tactics, leaving Danny bled dry with lawyer’s fees—Scarlett had backed off, for now. But her dislike of Jake’s business practices hung in the air between them like a constant bad smell, as did Jake and Magnus’s mutual loathing.
“Come and talk to Kate.”
Tamara, looking as radiantly glamorous as ever in a tiny aqua miniskirt and a pair of her own aqua-and-chocolate-brown heels, cornered Scarlett just as she was heading to the ladies’ room.
“She’s in love with that pendant of yours. I’ve told her I’m buying it if she doesn’t, and I’ll wear it to the Oscars myself.”
“You’re an angel,” said Scarlett sincerely. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate all this.”
“Oh bollocks,” smiled Tamara, with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Far more fun to do these things together.”
Glancing back over her shoulder at Magnus, sulking at the bar and checking his watch ostentatiously, Scarlett couldn’t have agreed more.
Sitting in the stifling waiting room of the Freetown orphanage, swatting flies away from his face with a two-year-old copy of Time magazine, Jake wondered if the director, Dr. Katenge, was really in his office, as the receptionist had told him, or off snorting coke somewhere with his buddies like three-quarters of the so-called “charity workers” in Sierra Leone.
The country was so corrupt it made the mafia look like the Salvation Army. You never knew whom to trust. This was his seventh or eighth visit here—he couldn’t remember exactly. In the past, he’d always come with Danny, and the pair of them had been whisked straight from the plane to the dealer’s house, normally a fuck-off fortified white palace up on a hill somewhere. There they’d be offered some good diamonds at a reasonable price, with no questions asked or explanations given as to their origin, supplied with a comfortable bed, a selection of willing local girls, and a dizzying array of hard drugs, and left to their own devices for a night or two. After which, without having set foot out of the compound, they’d drive back to the airstrip and the rather less bountiful pleasures of “civilization.”
This trip was very different.
Unbeknownst to Scarlett, about a month ago he’d read one of the books she’d given him. Written by a boy soldier from Sierra Leone, it painted a horrifically vivid picture of the country’s civil war through the eyes of a child. Though he’d die rather than admit it to Scarlett, the book had affected Jake deeply. He realized with a sharp pang of remorse that the last time he’d been here, living it up with Danny at some warlord’s pad, this kid had been less than a hundred miles away, terrified and alone in the jungle, watching his mum and dad being sliced to pieces by some machete-wielding madman. He also realized that there was every chance that this same madman, or at least his bosses, controlled the very diamond mines from which he was buying ice to sell to the spoiled housewives of Beverly Hills.
Scarlett had been ramming this shit down his throat for so long now he’d learned to switch it off completely, dismissing her impassioned lectures as so much irritating white noise. But this boy’s stark, honestly written book had jolted him out of his stupor. Jake was no saint, he knew that—not like Magnus the holier-than-thou civil rights lawyer. He was quite happy ripping off clients with more money than sense, or doing the dirty with their wives and girlfriends when he thought he could get away with it. But the atrocities that had gone on here and were still going on in countless other diamond-producing parts of Africa? That shit was of a whole different order. Suddenly the well-worn arguments he’d trotted out to Scarlett about the blacks bringing it on themselves or the damage that boycotting conflict diamonds would do to African economies sounded laughably hollow.
What the fuck was this Katenge playing at?
“Mr. Meyer?” A pretty, very dark-skinned woman in a shift dress and sandals emerged from the director’s office and held out her hand. “Sorry to keep you waiting. I’m Doctor Katenge.”
“Hi. You’re…? Wow.” He stumbled to his feet. “Thank you for seeing me.”
She laughed at his confusion. “You were expecting a man? Or someone older?”
“Both, actually,” he admitted. “They say it’s a sign of aging when you start to think that doctors and policemen look young. I must be getting up there.”
Dr. Katenge smiled. “Nonsense. You’re in the prime of your life, Mr. Meyer. I’ve had fifteen-year-olds turn up on my doorstep looking older than you do.”
Knowing a little about what they might have been through, Jake wasn’t surprised. He’d heard about the St. Catherine’s orphanage through a friend in New York, another transplanted North London Jew who was heavily involved in fund-raising for a charity called Hope for Children. At first the friend had thought Jake was joking.
“This is a joke, right? You and Danny wanna start giving something back to Africa? Give me a break!”
“Not Danny,” said Jake, mildly offended that the idea he might choose to do something selfless provoked such instant disbelief and hilarity among his friends. “He’s got enough on his plate right now. Just me.”
“Blimey, you are serious,” said the friend. “What do you want to know?”
Jake wasn’t sure. Part of him felt foolish. He’d read one book, and now he wanted to wade in like the Lone Ranger and start changing things? After telling Scarlett she was naive?
“I’d like to find a small charity, something that isn’t already funded by one of the big Save Africa foundations, that works with kids from the diamond-mining areas.”
“I can give you a thousand,” said the friend ruefully. “They all need cash. Want to narrow it down any more?”
“A group that isn’t run by a muppet,” said Jake. “Or some greedy bastard with his hand in the cash register.”
“Ah, well, that’s a little tougher,” admitted the friend. “It’s pretty much every man for himself out there. I mean, some of the NGOs do good work, but they all take bribes. It’s part of the culture.”
“Screw the culture,” said Jake. “I’m buggered if I’m gonna line the pockets of those fuckers. I want to deal with someone I can trust.”
“All right,” said the friend. “Give me a few days. I’ll dig up some names and get back to you.”
When he heard about St. Catherine’s, a small, church-run orphanage on the outskirts of Freetown that took in teenage girls who’d been raped by the rebels and their unwanted, ostracized babies, Jake thought it sounded
like a good place to start. Following Dr. Katenge through the gaudily painted corridors, peering into rooms stuffed with tatty, broken toys and noisily happy toddlers, he was confirmed in this impression.
“How many children do you have here?”
“Right now, twenty-eight,” said the doctor, scooping a lost little girl into her arms without breaking stride and depositing her in another overcrowded nursery room two doors down. “We have had as many as forty. That’s not including the mothers, of course, most of whom are children themselves.”
Turning down a second, smaller corridor, she led him into a classroom with two rows of old-fashioned desks and a teacher, a white man in his twenties, standing at a blackboard at the front. Each desk was occupied by a smiling black girl—some of them were heartbreakingly young, not more than eleven, Jake guessed—all of whom swiveled around to stare at this unexpected, not to mention handsome, visitor.
“Carry on, Mr. Harris,” said Dr. Katenge. “We’re not staying.”
“What are they learning?” asked Jake, wiping the sweat off his forehead as they continued the tour. It was stiflingly hot.
“Not much.” Dr. Katenge sighed. “Their teacher is a volunteer, on loan to us from UNICEF, but he only comes for two hours, twice a week. Very few of the girls can read or write; only half speak English. He’s trying to give them basic instruction in child care and health and safety—how to sterilize a bottle, what to do if their baby has a fever, contraceptive advice. One or two will learn other skills, to help give them a chance of a job once they leave us. We have a computer, so they can practice typing.”
“Only one?” said Jake, trying not to look as shocked as he felt. Passing the kitchen and dormitories, he saw that the girls were sleeping on rush mats on the floor and living off maize meal and chicken scraps. He couldn’t understand why they all looked so happy.
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