The Sin Within Her Smile

by Jonathan Gash

  ‘Jarge,’ I called blithely, ‘your megaphone get wet?’

  He ignored me. I cheered up. A good omen. 1 declined homemade treacle toffee from some uniformed little girls, paid them a quid not to sell me the damned stuff. God, it looked evil.

  ‘Hello, Lovejoy. You entering?’ Brad’s nautical blokes were all slogging away. I’ve yet to understand what they actually do. I think it’s all sham.

  ‘No, Brad. Hurt my arm ... ‘ I always scupper his invitations. He was waxing his boat’s bum. ‘Heard about your slavery. Grim work, was it?’

  ‘Okay.’ My grouse cut him short. I was sick of jokes at my expense. ‘Anybody after tom lately, Brad?’

  He stopped what he was doing and eyed me curiously. ‘Real tom? No, except the buyers.’

  This was the difficult part. ‘Buyers in, then?’

  ‘Collared the garnet-and-gold unearthed at Burstall. Not much of a piece, but rare.’

  This late Romano-Celtic or Anglo-Saxon had been found by a moonspender - an illicit treasure searcher on Suffolk’s bounteous pastures. I was narked it hadn’t shown up at Sty’s auction, especially after the hassle at The Ship pub on East Hill.

  ‘I heard it was well-nigh ruined in the dig.’

  Brad grinned. ‘You should have asked them about it. They’re staying at Mrs. Arden’s.’ His mate Colley laughed.

  ‘Ta, Brad.’ I started to stroll away, a model of disinterest. ‘Just curious.’ I paused, narked, to get my own back. ‘Oh, good luck with the race. If you’re short of that white beeswax, let me know.’

  And meandered on my merry way. I heard Old Jarge demand, ‘Wax? Competitors waxing their boats will be disqualified!’ ‘Lovejoy!’ Imogen linked my arm. ‘Come to my dancers.’

  ‘Just on my way,’ I lied easily. ‘Superb event, eh?’

  ‘I’m coming to see you off on Sunday. Those lovely horses!’ ‘Eh?’ I gaped, asked what she was on about as we traversed a series of guy ropes between tented stalls.

  ‘The trip, Lovejoy.’ She pursed her mouth in what I can only call an aggravating manner. ‘I only wish I was coming.’

  ‘What about Gee Omen?’ I wasn’t narked, but she was bonny. We’d stopped for some reason. ‘Gee? He’s just gone into partnership. Him and his sightholding.’

  ‘Well, a bloke and his work,’ I said lamely, and put my mouth on hers. Gee Omen was a sightholder? We were mostly silent, until I broke away gasping. She glanced about, breathing stealthily, a woman planning infidelity.

  ‘Not here, Lovejoy. I’ll be finished here sixish.’

  ‘What about Gee?’ I could have throttled her, but needed to know.

  ‘He’s meeting his partner Simon Doussy. He’ll be late.’ She sprang away with that furtive falsity women employ when nearly discovered, and said brightly, ‘No, Lovejoy! I simply don’t have time! Perhaps later..

  And we emerged, talking casually as if we hadn’t agreed on mutual ravishment. Folk are cunning. I’m thankful I’m not like that.

  There were three nick-nack stalls - Margaret Dainty, Liz Sand- well, and a fragile little lady with a piece of porcelain on her stall. I found myself gaping at it, shuddering from its vibes.

  Some of the most lovely porcelain jugs ever made came from the Midlands, Pinxton, near Chesterfield. Valuable, atrociously rare in pristine state, they still turn up. Luckily the press of folk was so great that Margaret and Liz didn’t see me buy the luscious thing. It had that magic oil-on-water sheen that’s a very strong hint. The painted flowers screamed of William Billingsley. I was shaking, but didn’t know if it was because of what Imogen had told me or the little jug. Liz called after me asking what I’d bought. I smiled disarmingly, and escaped to see Brad’s boat get disqualified for waxing. I got an ice-cream.

  Sightholder. She’d said her bloke was a sightholder. Now, a sight- holder spells diamonds.

  Speaking of diamonds - who isn’t? - they’re no longer a girl’s best friend. Everyone’s saying it. Diamonds are not forever. Because there’s a glut, a mighty one that won’t go away. The world’s awash with diamonds, and looks likely to stay so. Once, diamonds were paradise. Possession meant bliss, affluence, and the bitter admiration of your rivals. Stick a diamond on a lady’s finger, she swelled with pride. The more dazzle, the greener her jealous friends. But in the early 1990s diamonds sickeningly proved you can’t trust anything. Or, indeed, everything, ‘everything’ being the combined greed of the world’s greatest superpowers, plus the world’s most formidable cartel, plus politics. For nations everywhere shored up the world’s diamond markets. The price was kept up there in the stratosphere. You’d think nothing could unglue such a financial empire, right? No, wrong. Crooks did it. And include politicians, governments, plus even me. Oh, and thee.

  Remember those diamonds-forever halcyon days before August 1992?

  Any tome on gems will give you the ‘facts’, those well-worn myths we all learnt and, in a sordid way, loved. The diamond facts: native carbon; found mostly as isolated cubic crystals; the only mineral with a Mohs scale of ten, maximum hardness. India supplied the Ancient World, then Portuguese Brazil three centuries ago. Then South Africa, Zaire, Angola, the Soviet Union, Botswana. Tanzania came up on the rails, China’s Hunan Province, Australia, with South America doing its stuff.

  Okay so geographical far. But diamond prospectors have hidden worries. Diamonds must be wrenched from the earth and polished. Not easy, because diamond mining was only economic if the diamonds were one in twenty million. (Get it? You dig, smash, wash, and search twenty tons of solid rock to find one-thirtieth of an ounce of gemstone.)

  Except it’s not even that easy. For first you have to know where. Then you have to recognize the stuff. History’s littered with stories of prospectors who dug in the wrong places, or made ‘miracle finds’ of Scotch mist. And diamonds don’t come all sparkly like in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. They come up looking like the twenty tons you’ve shovelled aside. Worse still, your diamonds might only be industrial-quality gems, worth practically nil. Of course, you might be lucky, like little Erasmus Jacobs who started South Africa’s diamond rush by finding his 21.7 carat glittering diamond, and set the Victorian world agog. But might be only means might not be.

  Nowadays, diamond investors are likely to be unlucky.

  For the Soviet Union fragged. Governments shredded. Politics back in the 1990s changed from wholesale to piecemeal. Human greed, fuelled by hope’s sad longing, altered for ever the stolid, solid world of diamonds where money and beauty reigned supreme. Like balloons do, it went pop. And it was the garimpeiros did the popping. The great De Beers people sweated in the ultimate nightmare, as diamond merchants blamed recessions, retailers blamed governments. But the garimpeiros - the universal word for treasure rustlers, wealth-crazed wildcat prospectors - screamed delight. They literally undermined the globe’s diamond cartels in the biggest diamond bonanza the world has seen. De Beers borrowed. Even the plain words make me wince. It’s like saying God’s got lost. Don’t misunderstand: diamonds aren’t a huge industry - only one diamond miner to every thirty gold miners, after all. But the money is beyond belief.

  Once, diamonds were simple: countries digging them up cut a deal with the secretive CSO - Central Selling Organization, London, the virtual handmaiden of De Beers, nooked away in London’s unprepossessing Charterhouse Street. Botswana, for instance, simply sells the lot to the cartel. This controlled the flow of the precious diamonds that everybody wants. So the price stayed high, and every country mining them made a fortune. Bliss for the international cartel, bliss for the countries owning the diamond fields, right? Yes, way back then. But in Angola the garimpeiros suddenly realized they were not being policed much any more. Towns mushroomed as a thousand gun-toting prospectors a day trudged in across porous borders to Luanda Norte, and the Wild West was reborn.

  It was odd of God to lend a hand. But He did. Just when the diamond world really began to panic, the Almighty, always a joker, sent the worst droughts of recorde
d time - and the diamonds suddenly became fifty times easier to spot in that old alluvial gravelly soil! Illicit diamond mining became a digging delirium, a tunnelling turmoil. And the CSO - four-fifths of all traceable carats subject to their stern rules, remember - spent hundreds of millions buying up the flood of new extraneously mined diamonds. (Incidentally, holiday in Belgium, to see the diamond rush’s European terminus.)

  Then, when diamond merchants were mopping their foreheads in relief, thinking it all over, the Soviet Union did its stuff. The old USSR used to play along, fourth in the world’s diamond-producer league. Okay, the KGB nicked some superb gems, and good old decent Switzerland smarmed its bank-vaulted way into the KGB crooks’ hearts by storing the smuggled stones, but basically it was stable: Yakutia - you’ve to call it Sakha Autonomous Republic now - in Siberia mined virtually 100 per cent of that nation’s diamonds, and trickled them out at the correct rate. Happy bankers flourished everywhere. Very important, really, because whereas Angola grubs up something over a million carats a year Russia does ten times as much.

  The rest of the diamond story you know: how USSR’s elite but unpaid regiments joined the unemployed; how their special forces, including the famed Spatsnaz, disbanded into lone mercenaries scrapping in the Balkans or new republics. And how secret crimes were committed - like the mysterious death of Mr. Nikolai Urkin, boss of Russia’s most efficient diamond mines, who fell so very ‘accidentally’ from his high window into the dark Moscow street that nobody knows about, that didn’t get properly investigated or explained ... See what I mean? You can think about diamonds in general and it’s like a merry game. But dwell on one particular aspect, it’s death and corruption. It’d worry me, if it wasn’t normal.

  All money’s relative, isn’t it? The USA thinks nothing of blueing twenty-three million dollars on one toilet for an astronaut, and a cool two hundred thousand dollars on a toothbrush holder (the toothbrush is extra). And what do I get for being sold for a day? But, to be a sightholder is an Oscar plus a peerage plus a fortune plus film starlets plus everything. The ultimate, in diamonds, so to speak. It all hinges on how diamonds are actually sold. I mean, even if your land yields glittering diamonds every square yard, you just can’t dig them up and sell them, no. You take them to London. Specifically, to the CSO. And not everyone can walk in and simply buy. You have to be a sightholder. And there’s only about a hundred and fifty in the entire world.

  It’s been written about everywhere, so I won’t go on. Glossy magazines, thrillers, films, all harp on the great secret vaults in Charterhouse Street, and the selling ‘sights’ they hold.

  Basically it’s simple. If you’re a sightholder, you get invited to come to view the new release of diamonds. But then the simplicity ends, for you don’t just pop along when you’re ready, go two floors up in De Beers, and pick what you want. You have a front man, a London diamond broker, whose job it is to tell them what sorts of diamonds you’re hungry for. Then, you know what? On the appointed day, you turn up with your broker, all eager - and get handed a tiny package. Because they’re all heart, you’re actually allowed to open it and look. Inside, is a selection of uncut diamonds.

  Now comes the crunch. You’ve got to buy the lot. Or not. At the price they say. No debate, no haggles, no let’s-talk-prices. You humbly pay up, and depart rejoicing (or, possibly, seething). If you think the stones aren’t good enough, you can walk out. But then what? Where’s your business? What do you tell customers who want a diamond necklace? And what if the CSO cross you off their list? So you pay up. You’ve seen those small cardboad boxes that babies’ bootees come in? That’s how your diamonds are packaged. No plush velvets, no gold-edged leather cases. Cardboard. The box, the trade jokes, is free.

  That’s all there is to it. Umpteen thousand millions of us on Planet Earth, a hundred and fifty sightholders who are allowed in, and five diamond brokers to do the brokerage. Okay, there’s a synchronized mini-sight in Kimberley, and one other in Lucerne, but you get the idea. A handful of people control diamonds. And you and me’re on the outside looking in.

  And Imogen’s lover was a sightholder?

  It’s not blasphemous to grumble about God’s quirky humour. But sometimes the Great Architect really does make you gasp. His great bounty gives control of all diamonds to one massive Corporation in the hands of, unbelievably, one family, the Oppenheimers. To prevent another writ, I must record that they’re nice blokes, charitable to a fault. They give stable employment to a good twenty thousand and more. But all legit diamond marketing in the lap of one clone? Like I say, God’s merriment is weird. And it gets quirkier. Guess what else they own? The answer is a rare yellow precious metal; you dig it out of the ground. Good old God gave them gold as well. Some quirk.

  An antique dealer’s life is rough, if you’re any good. If you’re a sessile trundler who whimpers on, then you’re wasting everybody’s time. I decided to stir things up.

  So I went to watch Liffy nick a posh motor car, and saw Florence. My heart warmed. She was dithering in front of Raddie’s new window. You can spot a woman eager to buy a mile off. She becomes a huntress. Get between a dragon and its aim, and you’re for it.

  Liffy’s nothing to do with Dublin’s river. It’s short for lifter. He can lift - i.e., nick - anything. Five years ago he lifted a house. Honest - lock, stock and doorways. Took him two days. By the time the parish realized, it was gone. He got arrested, but the Plod’s only interested in breaking and entering. Liffy stayed baby-faced, all what-me-sergeant? They let him go. He said he’d tipped the house in a landfill, which was a fib. I sold it for him to a parson creating an Elizabethan village, and parsons don’t pay honest gelt. What with forking out for Liffy’s dismantlers, the lorries, Sordid Bell, our bent lawyer, the money evaporated.

  He’s a loner. I saw his hallmarks by St Peter’s church. Liffy’s cousin’s lad Dashboard was tying his shoelace by the traffic lights. The traffic wardens aren’t about on fair days. Liffy’s own wheels, a motorbike with a sidecar, was the giveaway. I crossed to Florence, to enjoy the fun.

  ‘Lovejoy!’ She only gave me a tithe of attention. Her eyes were on Raddie’s display. Mine were on Liffy’s reflection. He doesn’t look about, just strolls by. He opens the cars with a coathanger. The car alarms he strangles first squawk. Dashboard tied his shoelace for the dozenth time, shaking his head. A car droned off towards the Castle. Hardly anybody about, the world gone to be counted. ‘That white hand and shell’s lovely, Lovejoy. How much duck?’

  Duck is discount. ‘Oh, say a quarter.’ She grimaced. I got the

  point. Raddie charges women more. ‘I could send Tinker in for you.’ ‘Would you, Lovejoy?’ She batted her eyelashes, wafting gales of perfume. I reeled but manfully stuck it. ‘Is it naughty?’ Naughty means a fake.

  ‘It’s bonny,’ I said grudgingly, then listened to my chest. One day, I suppose doctors will investigate us divvies. I stood near to the window, held my breath. A definite chime, like Sunday bells across the estuary. ‘It’s sound, Florence.’

  Her face shone. I feel guilty at naked hunger. Why did she need money so desperately? Her husband had gone off with some younger tart, which shows how barmy blokes are. It’s no good telling women that youth isn’t everything. They think they know better.

  ‘English?’ Florence was saying. I smiled, because Dashboard straightened up. They were going for a Rover. I called across the roadway.

  ‘Liffy. That Bentley, okay?’ I grinned feebly at Florence and explained, ‘Just a joke, love.’

  He shrugged, which motor was all the same to him. His skills know no bounds. He nodded, whisked inside the silver Bentley with hardly a hitch-step, and fired its engine. Dashboard - small, but a clever twenty-eight year old - trotted over, slid inside and drove it sedately away. Liffy casually walked to his motorbike, and drove towards the Castle. There would be a small scene at the gate. Rat- bag’d call the Plod. Who would witness Liffy on his motorbike. And somewhere tonight I’d have the opportunity of e
xamining the diamond people’s motor at leisure.

  ‘Lovejoy?’

  ‘I’m looking, love,’ I said, narked.

  Her piece was a woman’s hand, cupping a shell and resting the dorsum on a second, inverted, shell. Lovely white biscuit porcelain, they were mostly made from slip, which is creamy clayey stuff, really fine ceramics. They say the Yanks copied English methods in the 1840s. They did it superbly. I loved it.

  ‘See Tinker, Florence. Tell him I said get it for you.’

  She filled. ‘You’re kind, never mind what they say.’

  ‘Then you’ll sell me your collection, love?’

  Her face fell a mile. ‘I wish I could, Lovejoy. I need the money for something really big. Gwyn took the collection.’

  Gwyn, her no-hope husband, failure at any cost. I was brokenhearted. I’d lusted after her collection of William Howson Taylor ware, from Birmingham Tile and Pottery Works of 1898 on. It sounds derisory saying that Taylor simply made pottery buttons, tiles, jugs. But he was mesmerized by the immortal John Ruskin, and suddenly shazammed into the greatest studio potter of his day. At his renamed Ruskin Pottery he slogged, no holidays for the best part of forty years. He invented processes and glazes - and kept them secret. Refused fortunes, and went silent to his grave. You’ll never see a simpler vase than a Taylor. All sorts, dappled or lined glazes, lovely colours, each valuable item costs a mint. Okay, so people scorn ‘art nouveau’. Let them. I was almost in tears. Why couldn’t Florence simply put up with a lifetime of sordid sorrow, keep her dud hubby and her collection? It wasn’t too much to ask, for Christ’s sake. Women have no sense of priorities.

  ‘Lovejoy. You shouldn’t have made Liffy play that joke on Imogen’s feller. His friends were so nice when I asked - ’

  ‘You asked? I almost screeched it.

  ‘Yes!’ she said brightly, silly cow. ‘You told me to find out. They were happy to explain. They’d come for early jewellery, silverware, gems. They saw the glass piece and bought that instead.’