by Ruth Wind
"They'll kill you for that jewel."
"They! Who are they?"
"I don't know. There were others who knew Gunnarsson had the Katerina. And someone killed him before I got there."
"This is too much," I said, putting my fingers to my temples. I desperately needed sleep, a break, some coherence.
"Sylvie, you must not be alone. Not until the jewel is delivered."
"I don't want any part of this!" I cried, and reached into my bra, yanked it out, tossed it at him. "You take it."
The jewel, absurdly huge, fell against the floor with a thump and lay at his feet. He literally shuddered. The elevator moved, headed downward, and he punched the stop button.
The cubicle slammed to a stop. We stood there, staring at each other, with the blood dripping down his forehead, the jewel at his feet. "Please," he said. "I will do whatever you ask. Help me."
"I don't need anything from you."
Blood trickled into his left eye and he blinked, wincing, his fingers white on the stop button. He kicked the jewel back toward me. "I am directly related to the priest who had it dug from the grave. I cannot touch it. I need you."
"You had to touch it somehow."
He shook his head. "I picked it up with a glove, put it in a box."
"You can do that now."
"Please," he said. "Help me. It is not for me. It is for Romania, for the first Katerina. For justice."
For a long moment, I thought about it. There was more I didn't know, more I wanted to understand, and it all bumped around in my head like boxes on a stormy sea. None of the story hung together. Probably a lot of that was exaggerated by the very real case of jet lag that was dragging on my brain cells.
But the one thing I did know was that I did not want to let the jewel go just this moment. Before I decided, I wanted to get some sleep. And if I were honest, didn't some part of me want to carry it to Paul himself, like an offering?
"All right," I said, and bent down to pick up the jewel. In my hand, it was startlingly alive, with a deep vibration I could feel through to my wrist. I looked at it. "It's very powerful, this stone," I said quietly.
Luca looked as if he'd throw up. "Put it away," he said.
I tucked it into my bra again, then remembered my clothes, now sitting upstairs in the hallway. "Damn it! I want to go back for my clothes."
"No," he said, adamantly.
"I have a pair of very expensive custom-made red leather pants in that bag, damn it."
"I'll buy you a new pair for God's sake. Let's go!"
Chapter 7
Clarity is the next step in determining the value of a diamond. Diamonds, more than any other gemstone, have the capability to produce the maximum amount of brilliance. And a diamond that is virtually free of interior or exterior inclusions (commonly called flaws) is of the highest quality, for nothing interferes with the passage of light through the diamond. To determine a diamond's clarity, it is viewed under a 10-power magnification by a trained eye. Minute inclusions neither mar its beauty nor endanger its durability.
—www.costellos.com.au
In the parking lot, he headed toward his ridiculous little car. I shook my head. "I'm driving."
He wiped his forehead, looked at the blood smeared on his fingers. "You'd better get me a towel first."
I looked in the trunk, but it was as bare as every other rental car trunk in the world.
The pair of photographers, who'd obviously followed me to the hotel, swarmed suddenly out of the close, flashes popping. Grr. What an irritation!
"Get in the car," I barked at Luca, and followed him in. "Put something over your face."
"What? I do not have anything!"
"Use your hands, your arms. Cover the fucking blood, all right?" I turned the key. The engine rumbled to humming life, and I backed out, hit the road, letting the car have her head as we hit the open road headed south. Behind us, the photographers scrambled to follow us, but I knew they'd never catch me. Not in this car.
But they tried. They rode my tail all the way out of town.
"Are you squeamish about fast driving?" I asked.
"No."
"Good," I said, and kicked the car into a purring race, swooping around the tight curves and dark downhill drops with glee. The photographers dropped off when we sped down a six percent or so grade that whipped and turned like a test course.
Next to me, Luca was hanging on for dear life, and I laughed. "I thought it didn't frighten you?"
"I didn't know you were going to go 80 miles per hour! Holy Mother of God!"
In the rear view mirror, my tail was clean, so I dropped the speed down to a more normal level.
"Who the hell was that in my room?" I said.
"How would I know that?"
"They weren't your guys?"
"I do not have any guys, as you say it." He swore, or at least I assume it was a swear, since it was in Romanian. His fingers were pressed to his head. "I am getting blood all over me."
"Just don't get any on the car. I don't want to have to pay for cleaning."
His tone was dry. "I will do my best."
I dug in my purse and found a minipack of tissues. "Try these." When he would have tugged out just one, I shook my head. "Take out the whole thing and press it against the wound."
He did. I rounded a turn, realizing that I was headed quickly away from the lights of Ayr, my family. I looked backward into the mirror, feeling an odd sense of plucking loss.
"Do you know how long it's been since I've seen my grandmother?"
"No."
"Years. Three years."
He flicked a shoulder. "So go when we are finished here."
"Here?"
"With all this."
"You seem very sure I'll help you."
He looked at me, and it was like the moment in the pub—such a certainty about his knowledge of me that I was again unnerved. "I do not think you will turn your back on the jewel."
"I don't have any attachment to it."
"No?" He pulled the thick padding of tissue from his head, looked at it. "Perhaps I was wrong."
"That's still bleeding," I said, and downshifted as we sailed over a hill. For a brief, blissful instant, I felt the unity of car and myself. To the right was a ruin standing up against the lowering clouds. The rain was coming. I could drive forever in this elegant machine on these narrow, lonely roads with the rain coming in from the west.
I thought of the scene in the hallway of the hotel. "Who would know I have the jewel? You're the one who planted it. You must have some idea." I shifted, thinking aloud. "It had to be someone who was following you."
He turned his face toward the sea. Silent for a moment. "Probably from the drug gang, people looking for the jewel."
"Ah. Because they know it's missing and the police don't even know he had it."
"Yes."
"How did Paul know Gunnarsson had it?"
"It was on the grapevine that The Swede had purchased a very rare jewel, but Maigny didn't know until Gunnarsson sent him an e-mail."
"An e-mail," I repeated with a short laugh. "How very modern."
From the corner of my eye, I saw him gingerly exploring the wound with his finger, saw him wince. In America, we might have had a chance to find some bandages at some little shop along the road, but out here, on this rocky western coast, there would be nothing open so late save a pub that served the locals. "Does it hurt?"
A shrug.
"I'm headed for my cousin's caravan. We'll camp there tonight and figure out what to do tomorrow."
He turned his face toward me. I felt his measuring, his wondering—would we be lovers?—and did not look at him. "Don't get any ideas," I said.
"Why would I?"
"So long as we're on the same page."
He put his head back against the seat.
"I'm sure," I said, "that he has a first-aid kit there."
"No doubt." Luca closed his eyes.
The act of driving gave
me a kind of cocoon in which to think, and even through my exhaustion, I felt the benefit of it. For a little while, my thoughts were a little less muddled.
What did I know to be an absolute truth? Very little, when it came right down to it. One of the only actual facts was that I had taken possession of a jewel that was rare and storied.
The other fact was that I'd heard Paul's voice on that answering machine. Luca wanted Paul to know I was involved, and by kissing me in front of the paparazzi had made sure of it. "How did you switch the bags?" I asked.
"You were sleeping. It was easy."
"But how did you know what bag I had? It was exactly the same as mine."
He looked at me. "I broke into your apartment in San Francisco."
"Why not just plant the jewel there?"
He paused. "If you came to Scotland, I knew you would be more likely to help me."
True enough. I was helping him, wasn't I? "So you spied on me? Broke into my home?"
"I did not touch anything. Except your cat. He's very nice." He gave me a half smile. "And, the purple underthings were very pretty, hanging on the shower."
"Don't be sly. That's disgusting."
"Expedient," he said, and leaned his head back on the seat. "That is all."
I grunted, and thought of my apartment, overlooking the beach in San Francisco. I paid a bloody fortune for it—and on my modest salary, I'd never have been able to afford it. It was the one thing I'd let my father do for me. Too far from the sea, and I began to feel restless and out of sorts.
"You should be better protected," he said. "The paintings are valuable, no?"
"Some of them." The collection of artwork on my walls was my prize possession and included a tiny sketch by Gaugin, purchased at God only knows what price by Paul for my seventeenth birthday. "Did you steal any of them?"
"No," he said. "I am jewel thief, and I wanted only to discover what model suitcase you owned." His voice was wearing down. "You need better security. It was very simple to break in."
I nodded. Luca fell silent. I thought of the Gaugin, of a collection of works done by a Tahitian painter from the modern world.
Which led to thoughts of Paul. In the darkness, with so much that involved him, it was impossible not to let the past swirl into my brain.
I don't even remember the first time I met him. I must have been five or six—he's part of that stretch of my parents' lives—and a race broke him when he was thirty-three, so it was before then.
It is said that I turned to my mother and said, "I am going to marry that man." She laughed when she told the story, and it used to embarrass me.
I don't remember our meeting, but I have hundreds of other memories of him over the years. He runs like a thread through everything.
He was a sort of artistic guardian, seeing to my education of the world—painters and literature and poets; how to eat and dine and serve; how to converse and be sparkling. We loved museums and saw them all eventually. He loved to take me to the seashore, too, and help me build sandcastles, buy me ices in Italy, ice cream in America. He was boyish and exuberant, unlike the other adults in my world.
I adored him. He had a long, angled face, with large gray-green eyes that could twinkle so beautifully, and big gentle hands.
So much of my childhood is woven through with Paul: bringing a bauble from some exotic jaunt; laughing down at me as I danced on his feet. He read me stories in his lilting, French-accented voice. Taught me to cook hardboiled eggs and serve them in egg cups—which he then collected for me from all over the world.
I know now that—
Never mind. My mother eventually made peace with him. She never truly loved any of my brash American father's racing friends, but Paul had a way about him that pierced even my mother's hard veneer. Like my grandmother, Paul was French, and that held some weight with both of them.
When I was ten, he slammed into a seawall at Monaco, totaling his car and landing in the hospital for nearly seven months. He broke two dozen bones, including his skull and his jaw, most of his ribs, and all the bones in his right arm and hand.
Everyone thought he would die. They were careful to warn me—he's gravely injured, they said. It will be a miracle if he survives.
I insisted that he would not die. Every day, I walked to the little Catholic church around the corner from our coral-painted house in Nice—my mother, being raised by her French mother, was that rarest of beings, a Scottish Catholic—and lit a candle for him. Every single day, I knelt before Mary, in her clean blue robes, and promised I would be good if Paul could just stay alive.
I begged to be allowed to see him, but they would not let me, not for weeks and weeks, during which he lay in a coma, unsupported by machines, but not conscious or aware. I fretted and complained and whined. Once, I tried to sneak in on my own.
At last, my grandmother, visiting our home in Nice from Scotland, took mercy on me. Brooking no argument from my parents, she drove me to the hospital where I could see for myself that Paul was still alive. Barely, but he could breathe on his own.
It scared me, of course—the tubes stuck into his skin and the plaster encasing his legs and arms and shoulders and head. His unmoving stillness seemed like the grave, but I put my hand on his and it was warm. It twitched, just the smallest bit.
Fiercely I said to him, "You must not die, Paul. I am here, waiting for you to wake up."
It was still another month before his coma dissolved, but I was there most days, waiting, talking, reading him stories from a collection of French fairy tales, which were not at all the sanitized, brushed-up American versions. I loved the very terrible things that lurked in French editions—they comforted me in some way that the less dark tellings did not.
I took my dolls in, and left a stuffed cat on his bed, which the nurses found charming. I learned to knit like my grandmother, and tried to knit lace as I sat at his bedside, watching the sky through the windows.
Every morning, before school, I detoured into the tiny church and lit candles to the Virgin, and to Saint Bernard, patron saint of racers. It was not clear, exactly, that Bernard would be of help to an auto racer, or healing, but his was the statue I could find, so it was to him I offered my petition.
The afternoon Paul did awaken, I was there all by myself, holding his big, knobby-knuckled hand. It was a blustery day, wind slamming sheets of rain into the windows, and I was watching it, fretting, wondering if he would ever wake up.
His fingers slowly curled around mine, warm and large, and I turned slowly, to see him looking at me. A sideways smile lifted his lips on the left. "My Sylvie," he said, and the words sounded raw in the voice that had not uttered a word in all that time.
I flung myself on him. "Paul!"
His other hand came up and touched the back of my head. "Sweet Sylvie. I heard you."
In my relief, I cried and cried. That day, I took flowers and all my accumulated little bits of money and offered them to the saints who had saved his life.
Offerings to saints had become a habit. I needed to make the offerings on my own behalf now.
Chapter 8
Diamond, the hardest known material, is pure carbon, crystallized under a very high pressure and temperature. In nature, such an environment exists only at depths of 150 to 200 km below the surface of the earth. Volcanic eruptions drive the diamond-bearing rocks called "Kimberlite" and "Lamproite" to the surface of the earth where the diamonds can be extracted.
—www.costellos.com.au
The caravan park sat on a spit of level ground nearby the sea. By day, the views were spectacular—the sea and hills, a ruined castle, and in the distance, an unruined one. My preference was always for those that were not spit-shined and orderly; my mother had loved the gardens at Culzean, the topiary and paths and the gilt within the castle itself, and my great-grandmother often spoke of her childhood walking those lanes to Sunday school, she and her sisters, along the beach and up the long, long stairs to the castle.
But my
taste was for the neglected ones. They didn't have to be falling down, but I wanted them to myself so I could hear their stories, put my hands on the walls and feel the past vibrating through the stones. I wanted the possibility—however thin—that I might find some forgotten relic, some dropped thing from a hundred or even a thousand years ago. It was the romantic in me.
Which was the part I'd been trying to kill now for at least a decade. My mother's life, then my own, had shown me there was no such thing as soul mates or eternal love, and intellectually, I'd given up believing in them.
Emotionally…well, that was more difficult. The heart wants to believe all kinds of things, doesn't it? And what was I doing in my work—specializing in legendary jewels. Hard to imagine anything more romantic than that. Being in Scotland made me remember…
The view from the caravan at night depended upon how many people were around, and how many lights were on, and what the weather was like. Sometimes, a full moon could make the seascape and hills seem hauntingly cold and lonely. Tonight, there was no moon, only the cloud-washed sky, faintly gray, and the sea spray in the air. I saw no other lights in the caravans. It was a place for weekenders, summer getaways. At midweek in late March, there was no one about at all. I found the key beneath the flower pot, and let myself in; Luca came in behind me.
It was very cold inside, but the light went on when I flicked the switch. It was ordinary and tidy, the big front window facing the darkness of the water, a table with bench seats tucked beneath it. In the back were two bedrooms and a shower.
As I leaned against the counter, I suddenly felt again the slam of jet lag. I really needed some sleep. The lack of it made my neck and shoulders feel as brittle and hard as an old book.
"Sit down," I told Luca. "I'll find the first-aid kit."
I turned on the stove, a space heater that would warm the area quickly, then shuffled through the cupboards in the small kitchen area. There was a first-aid kit in a drawer, and I took it out, along with a face cloth.
Only then did I look back to Luca. In the light, the blood looked gruesome, crusted in his hair and on his face, gumming up his eyebrow. His skin was pale, and the angle of the light made his cheeks look hollow, like a skeleton or death.
