The Love of Stones

by Tobias Hill

  ‘It’s impossible to say. Whatever someone would give for it.’

  He stubs his cigar out in his kebap. ‘Come on. Let’s assume good stones, yes? They alone could be worth three, four million dollars. Then there is jewel value, and the thing’s history. The Queen of England is always fashionable. I would give it six million dollars plus. The trouble is, my cut of that would be sixty thousand, and – forgive me – but you don’t look like someone who has sixty grand in their pockets. Am I wrong?’

  The rubies are still lying on the table. Bright red between the ruins of the meal. I pick them up. ‘I have these. The smallest is worth four hundred dollars. I’ll give you that now and the largest later. If your information is good.’

  He sighs, crooks a finger at the waiter, motions the writing of a bill. The heavier man brings it in a worked-brass dish. Araf waves a gold card at him and waits for him to take it and be gone. He leans towards me, quiet and serious. ‘You won’t get anything from me if I don’t get a percentage.’

  ‘I can’t sell it.’

  ‘Can’t or won’t?’

  ‘You’re asking for a cut of nothing. I’m offering you two thousand dollars.’

  He shrugs. ‘Of course you can sell it. You can sell it through me. And there is no price high enough for the right information. Listen, I’ll give you the name and address. I can put you on a plane tonight – Eh?’

  The waiter is at Araf’s shoulder, whispering in his ear. The gold card half-hidden in his hand, like a conjuring trick. The President’s face hardens gradually, as if it is freezing over. He stands up, reaching for his billfold. Their voices combine into a deep mutter of Turkish.

  ‘I brushed my teeth.’ Leyla is back. The men don’t look round. She smiles for me instead. She has small canines, very white. In her hand is an ice-cream cone with three garish scoops. The rubies are still on the stained tablecloth. The scrap of paper next to them.

  I stand quickly, before my nerves can stop me, and take it all: the three red stones, the one blue ticket. Leyla licks her ice cream, her eyes on the men. Araf glances up as I back out of the booth. He sees nothing. ‘Your mistake. We could help each other.’

  ‘I’m sorry to have wasted your time.’ I start to walk, away between the busy tables. The skin of my back feels taut. The nerve endings waiting for the voice or hand, so that when Araf calls out again I stop hard, the breath jarring inside me.

  ‘Hey! My dear!’ He’s grinning, angry and malicious. He winks. ‘Watch out for wild ghosts.’

  The curtain to the hall is drawn up. I let it fall behind me, cutting off the restaurant’s noise. In my hand the blue ticket is already damp and soiled. The cloakroom attendant is asleep. He has a sallow, late-night face. When I wake him he looks at me with the expression of a man who has been cheated.

  I give him the ticket. He retreats into his alcove. In the restaurant someone laughs so loud it sounds like shouting. The attendant comes back with armfuls of objects: the briefcase, the Burberry suitcoat, and an unbelievably soft pale scarf, a small fortune in cashmere or shahtüsh wool. The man sighs when I tip him. I hear him whisper goodnight as I go up to the street.

  My feet walk me a block before I know what I am doing. I come to a stop only gradually, the adrenaline ebbing out of me. The air is cool. I close my eyes and stand listening to the city. A cruiser hoots, way out on the Bosphorus, turning towards the Mediterranean.

  When I open my eyes again the street is empty. I look down at the possessions in my hands. I am a scavenger tonight, taking the leavings from a rich man’s table. Not the document file, which is what I would want: only stealing what I can get. It is a small price to pay. There is no price high enough for the right information.

  The basements here are locked up and grilled over. I drop Leyla’s scarf down the nearest steps, bundle up the suitcoat and case and start to walk back with them. The taxi is where I left it. The cab-light on, Asian the driver’s head silhouetted against it. He is still reading, his face calm with concentration, I tap on the window and he rolls it down. ‘You liked the restaurant?’

  ‘I didn’t eat.’

  ‘You must be hungry.’

  ‘Tired. I’ll get something to eat at my hotel.’

  ‘There is a kebap place. The best in Europe. Not far.’ His eyes are gentle. They don’t match his face. He is younger than I realised, under forty. The fat ages him. He has the face of someone who is used to being alone.

  ‘I’d like that.’

  He smiles again. There is a lever beside his steering wheel. He presses it and the passenger door clicks open. I get in as he is starting the engine. The case and the coat gripped tight in my lap. We turn in the narrow street and cruise up past the restaurant and the Mercedes. No one stands in the basement doorway. Asian turns into Independence Avenue and picks up speed.

  ‘You found your friend?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good.’ He nods. Watching junctions. ‘It is good to have friends.’ For a moment he says nothing else. It is warm in the car. The tiredness washes over me again. My eyes begin to close. His voice jerks me back. ‘He gave you these things?’

  ‘No–’ I look at him. His eyes slide to the bundle, back to the road. I shrug. ‘No.’

  He goes quite still at the wheel, understanding, his face dull with surprise. He is not like me, this man, not like Ismet the merchant. Asian knows nothing about me, after all. Not that stones are their own reason, certainly. That jewels, like money, are their own motive. That I want the Three Brethren in the way he might want to sleep or fall in love, and that, given time, I will do anything, almost anything, to get what I want. He looks at me with his small eyes, understanding nothing, and I glance away.

  He drives fast but not too fast. Across the Atatürk Bridge, following the road all the way through town to the Sea of Marmara. There is still heavy traffic along the seafront. Asian turns off and follows the railway.

  ‘Where is your hotel?’

  I tell him the address. Suddenly all I want is for him to take me to his kebap restaurant, the best in Europe. But his voice has changed, it sounds dull and old. In the busy tourist streets around the Aya Sofya cathedral he pulls up. I get out with the belongings under my arm. When I turn back I have to shout over the noise of bars. ‘You have been very kind. I wish I could give you something better. Here.’

  I hold out thirty dollars. In the light of the hotels and bars, his face looks garish, full of colours and shadows.

  ‘I don’t want your money.’ He doesn’t look at me as he speaks. The taxi starts up and I have to step quickly out of its way. The money is still in my hand. I stuff it back in my pocket.

  My fingers touch the rubies. I take them out. Three little stones. There is nothing to be ashamed of in them. There is nothing human about threes. We don’t have three of anything. It’s always the sacred number, the alien one. Three is the odd one out in a crowd.

  Someone jostles against me. A woman’s voice whispers an apology in Turkish. I am still looking at my stones. To anyone in this hubbub, in this dimness, they will look like nothing. Only one person in a thousand could estimate their value. No one in this city can know what they are worth to me. They are my little treasury, my three wishes. There is laughter on a balcony above, and I turn away from the sound into the hotel.

  I go up past the nightman to my room. I undress in the dark, the neon coming in across my back. When I am naked the rubies are still in my hand, wet with sweat. In this light they look bloody and crushed. I put them under my pillow, like teeth, and I sleep.

  * * *

  City Document 2604. Sale between Basel and the Fuggers of September 16th, 1504:

  This shall be the transaction. Namely that we, the Attorneys, sell to Herr Jacob Fugger four jewels as hereinafter properly described. And I, the same Jacob Fugger, have bought these same jewels in the name of myself and Ulrich and Jorgen my dear brothers. And this is the purchase that has been made for forty thousand two hundred guilders, Rhenish, good and suffic
ient…

  Item; the second jewel is called the Three Brethren, there are three large balases, square, thick and free of fouls, each weighing seventy carats and in their midst stands a pointed diamond, pure above and below, which weighs thirty carats, and further around are four pearls: one stands at the top, two broad ones at the sides drilled where they sit, each weighs from ten to twelve carats and further a fourth pearl hangs below, and it weighs eighteen to twenty carats …

  And each item, the money and jewels, will be given to each party on the next Monday after the day of the raising of the Holy Cross in the autumn of the year as is counted from the birth of Christ our dear Lord, one thousand five hundred and four.

  Jacob Fugger citizen of Augsberg recognises the

  abovementioned thing.

  Michel Mayer citizen of Basel

  Hans Hiltbrand citizen of Basel

  Johannes Gerster city clerk of Basel recognise the

  abovementioned thing.

  I want to gain while I can was Jacob Fugger’s motto. It suited him like his own face. There is a portrait of him by Dürer. In it, Jacob has the features of a professional wrestler. He is all flattened sinew and small features. There is nothing to grasp or to lose. He sits at ease, without posture, knowing that he is not defined by how he looks. Only by the price of the painting, the richness of its frame.

  Fugger was the greatest merchant of his time, the prototype capitalist. Born into a trading dynasty in smalltown Germany, Jacob’s family business came to influence the whole of Europe and beyond. The spice trade. Mercury mines. Imperial loans. Precious stones. He was a patient man, and he bought the Burgundian jewels as investments, working secretly to avoid an old Papal claim to the Fugger profits. Along with the Brethren, the purchase involved three other named jewels: the White Rose, the Little Feather, and the Girdle. All three came to be separated into their constituent stones, which were many and minor, by Jacob or his successors. None of them was ever heard of again.

  Only the Brethren kept its form. It was too famous to be dismantled. Fame gave it value. Fugger kept the jewel until his death in 1525. He was succeeded by his nephew Anton, who learned severity from his uncle. Anton’s motto was Pecunia nerves bellorum: ‘Money is the sinews of war.’

  By now the Three Brethren had been unworn for almost half a century. Anton was its sixth owner. To the Fuggers, the jewel was a measurement of power, as it had been to the Valois dukes. But to Jacob and Anton it represented something to be locked up. A secretive wealth. By the time Anton began the sale of the jewel it was 1547, and seventy years since Charles the Bold had been slaughtered on the fields of Nancy.

  Anton’s buyer was Henry the Eighth of England, and he would have worn the jewel, if he could. The King’s appetite for the knot had been whetted for years by reports of its beauty. His own sickness didn’t weaken his desire. By the new year he was dying, but in his January accounts, Anton recorded the payment received from England. Weeks later the King was dead.

  The Brethren would have suited Henry. He was the Tudors’ Minotaur, a bull of a man in a political age, losing through lack of subtlety everything he gained from strength. His brute hunger comes through in portraits: he looks as if he is always about to bite. Henry was photogenic three centuries before the invention of the camera. Like the Brethren, he had a crude and effective power.

  He was a man characterised by hungers; for alcohol and progeny, meat and land. His appetite for jewels was inexhaustible, and after the Catholic Church was sacked he had the wealth to buy at will. The heaped gold and silver Henry extracted from the monasteries weighed in at 289,768 and seven-eighths ounces, and he spent as if his health depended on it. By the time of his death, jewels and wars had reduced England to the brink of bankruptcy.

  It took five years for the Fugger dynasty to complete the sale of the jewel. Aged fourteen, it was Edward the Sixth who committed the Brethren to the Lord Treasurer in June 1551. Within two years, the Child King himself was dead. The Brethren was delivered to Bloody Queen Mary on Hallowmass Eve 1553, and on her death five years later – pregnant with tumour, praying for it to be a Catholic child – to her younger sister, the Protestant, Elizabeth Tudor.

  There is a painting of Queen Elizabeth in Hatfield House, Hertfordshire. It is called the Ermine Portrait, after the stoat which sits on the Queen’s arm. It is a political portrait in the old style, the Queen surrounded by her treasures. A show of potency to the powers across the water. In this picture the Brethren is the brooched centrepiece of the Queen’s black jewelled skeleton.

  Elizabeth’s maid of honour, Elizabeth Brydges, appears in a similar portrait by Hieronimo Custodis, painted three years later. In her parure of jewels, she looks as insignificant as the water vessel in a still life. The jewels cover her like flowers and butterflies and moths. The human figure has faded, its character smothered in those of the stones. It is a mannequin in jewels.

  The Virgin Queen is more substantial. Her eyes are small and quite hard, like those of the ermine poised on her sleeve. It is nearly three decades since she gained the throne, the assassins sent for her from Europe finding themselves, inexplicably, assassinated. It is two years before she orders her cousin to be killed. Elizabeth, like the Brethren, grew into herself with age.

  When Elizabeth gained it, the Three Brethren was a hundred and fifty years old. It took this time, five generations, before a woman owned the jewel. Bloody Mary was the first, but Elizabeth was the one with the leisure to enjoy it.

  Five generations, in an age when jewels were worn by as many queens as kings. I wonder why it took so long. It seems to me that the character of the Three Brethren is masculine. The shoulder-knot of a cloak, worn for battle. A jewel plain as a piece of armour across the collarbone. Functional as the blood-groove of a sword. It is beautiful in the half-ugly way that certain men are beautiful. Angular, muscular, dulled. It has that hardness.

  There is a sexuality to it. The rubies warm to the skin, the diamond cool. I know this is a fallacy. There is nothing human about the Brethren. It is eight stones connected by a single metal element. Still, I wonder how it felt, when Elizabeth wore it. Its heaviness on her breasts. Physical. Like a hand.

  It suited Elizabeth. The monarchy of England was growing rich on trade and piracy, and the Queen’s jewels gauged and reflected its strength. Elizabeth’s possessions came to include the Sancy diamond, and a rock-crystal bracelet from the workshops of Emperor Akbar which is now the earliest surviving piece of Mogul jewellery in the world. In Elizabeth’s 1587 inventory it is described as of rock crystal sett with sparckes of Rubies powdered and little sparckes of saphiers made hoopwise called Persia worke. There were jewels on her fingers, jewels in her hair. In her coiffure Elizabeth wore ‘a spinel the size of a baby’s fist’. This was the Black Prince’s ruby, which is now set in the Imperial State Crown of England.

  Under Elizabeth, England had become a repository for jewels. They were pure power. Armies held in waiting. Fleets of ships in the making. And at their heart was the Three Brethren. It was already old, even then. Its inch of pointed diamond remained harder than anything the world could discover.

  * * *

  The hotels I live in are always cheap. In their plain rooms I never oversleep. These are the advantages of my habits. For hours I lie listening to the traffic picking up outside, a lovers’ argument through the thin walls, the muezzin testing his microphone at dawn. When he begins to sing one mosque joins in with another, and another, like birdsong. In hot countries this is my favourite time, when the sky is light but the air is still cool.

  At eight I put on a gym shirt and a pair of chinos and go downstairs to pay for another day. The chipstone steps are cold against my feet. Outside the building the neon sign says: Sindbad Tourist Hotel, but by the time you step into the lobby it has been reduced to Pansiyon, and the bargain promises are simplified to three prices in changeable peg-board digits. There is a bar in the courtyard where they serve flatbread pizza in the evenings. No one is out there n
ow. My stomach is taut and empty.

  I think of other courtyards, other nights. Sindbad the Sailor, giving meat and gold to Sindbad the Porter. Telling him his old man’s stories: I collected some large branches of Chinese and Comarin aloes and, laying these on some planks from the wrecked vessels, bound them with strong cables into a raft. This I loaded with sacks of rubies, pearls and other precious stones, as well as several bales of the choicest ambergris. Then, commending myself to Allah, I launched the raft upon the water.

  The receptionist is busy with a TV soap opera, her mouth hanging open. When she sees me she smiles and mutes the volume.

  ‘Hiya! You must like it here.’

  ‘It suits me. Is the room free for another night?’

  ‘Sure.’ She speaks English with an Australian accent. I’ve been here long enough for her to recognise my face, my voice. No doubt she knows the belongings in my room, and that I sleep alone.

  I pay the cheapest of the three prices, counting out soiled lira notes. There’s a photo on the desk. A young man with sideburns, smiling with the sea behind him. ‘He’s handsome.’

  ‘Oh, that’s my boyfriend. Fiancé.’ She touches the photo towards her. ‘We’re getting married. He’s really cute. At first I thought he was kind of a wuss but then he grew on me and now I love him.’ She shrugs and smiles, her eyes wide. I have to smile back.

  ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘What else can I do for you?’

  ‘Breakfast would be good.’

  ‘Hold on.’ She goes into the office. There is the hiss of a hot water reservoir being depressed. She comes back with a glass of apple tea and a handful of pistachios. ‘These are really great. And healthy too. I’m Cansen.’

  ‘Katharine.’

  ‘So how long are you staying?’

  ‘I don’t really know. Thanks for these. Good luck.’

  I put the nuts in my pockets and go back to my room with the tea cradled in my hands. The briefcase and the suitcoat are on the floor. I sit on the bed, open their pockets and locks and spread everything across the one sheet and two pillows. The nuts are good, fresh, and I eat them all at once, gorging myself. The sun falls across the papers and stays there.