by Tom Clancy
* * *
His eyes on the floor numbers above the ascending elevator, Jeffreys reached for his phone on the wooden podium that passed for a guard station in the hallway’s close quarters. The smile he’d shown Avram Hoffman was gone, but like a strip of tape peeled from his mouth it had left a lingering hurt on him.
He hoped his expression didn’t show how much pain he felt inside right now.
Jeffreys had known Avram since he was in school. He remembered his late father, Jacob, bragging about his yeshiva grades, and his scholarship to that big college uptown, Columbia University. He remembered Jacob looking so proud of him all the time, coming in with that stack of photos from his year as an exchange student in Israel. The people in this building, and the ones who belonged to the Club in particular… it was fair to say pride was the rack they hung their hats on. What they valued more than anything. Some of them were almost like family to Jeffreys. Sure, there were plenty of characters — the slick, fast-talking millionaires at one end, the crapped-out losers who were always asking favors, riding the backs of their successful friends and relatives at the other. If you got wind of their stories, it could be funny. There was competition, feuds that went on for years. One guy saying another guy’s only doing good because he’s a rotten conniver, the second guy calling the first guy a jealous nitwit, both of them getting on a third guy’s case for whatever reason. He’s this, he’s that, and did you hear what he did to so-and-so? A real kick, listening to them go at it sometimes. But there were the serious stories, too, the ones that’d gotten Jeffreys to truly respect these folks. Stories about what they’d accomplished, how they built something out of nothing. How they’d come to this country as refugees after they were chased from more countries than you could begin to count. Russia, maybe a hundred years ago. Near all of Europe in the Second World War. Generations of them coming to America with just the clothes on their backs, driven from their lands, their homes left behind, everything they’d owned burned, wrecked, or stolen. So many losing their loved ones to the gas chambers and ovens in those Nazi death camps.
Jeffreys respected these people for what they’d made of themselves. Respected how they could keep their own house clean, keep it right, and not have to look outside for police, lawyers, and courtroom judges to settle their affairs. If it was going to last, honor and trust had to mean something here. Had to hold on strong here. Those values started to break down, Jeffreys figured the end was in sight. They could take a wrecking ball to the building, fill the dusty hole it left on the street with some modern skyscraper a hundred stories tall, where there’d be room for a proper guard station near the entrance instead of his tight spot atop a riser near the elevator. Because the heart and soul would be taken out of the place, lost, and it’d be nothing but a sad reminder of what it used to be. Part of a story that started with the words once upon a time.
Jeffreys liked Avram, knew all his relatives, his wife and kids. He didn’t want to cause him any grief. Smile to his face, put the screws into him from behind. But his job wasn’t always about sitting on the wooden stool that’d given him so much trouble with bleeding piles and backaches over the years. He shook its tougher responsibilities, Jeffreys figured he might as well apply for retirement benefits. While none of the men who wrote his paychecks had come right out and told him what Avram was up to, or what they thought he might be up to, it was clear they had suspicions he’d got his hands into some bad shit.
Jeffreys sighed and made his call, cradling the telephone receiver between his neck and shoulder.
The Belgian snoop answered on his first ring. Jeffreys tipped the guy off like he’d arranged and hung up, the call taking maybe half a minute, but leaving behind a crummy feeling that would stay with him for a long time afterward.
Bad shit, this was, he thought. Serious bad. And he was afraid there would be a whole pile more in the offing… enough to throw its stink around the world and back again before everything was said and done.
* * *
Avram wasn’t surprised to find himself getting off on the tenth floor alone. In years gone by, the elevator would have emptied out here. But change came to everything, like it or not. No man, no institution, was impervious.
Passing the guard booth with a wave to the two uniformed men behind its bullet-resistant window, Avram turned left, swiped his identification card through the turnstile reader, stepped into a bare entry foyer, and then inserted the card into a second reader to unlock a door bracketed by overhead closed-circuit surveillance cameras.
Once past the door he moved into the main hall, an expansive space with floor-to-ceiling windows facing north and south, and rows of plain cafeteria-style tables extending lengthwise from the walls. Although the loudspeaker was presently silent, and the queue of telephones to either side of the central aisle idle, a handful of men were already scattered about the room, pushing glassine packets at each other across bare tabletops. Others were moving toward the end of the aisle, which split to the left and right beyond a second enclosed booth. Most were thickly bearded Hasidic Jews clad in long black coats and wide black hats. Three or four wore conventional office attire like Avram himself, whose goatee was moderate and stylishly trimmed, and whose only clear outward sign of religious orthodoxy was the small yarmulke clipped to the crown of his head.
Avram started down the main aisle after them. God forbid if those men were ever in positions to judge him. They would be appalled, accuse him of falsche frumkeit—false orthodoxy — as he was excoriated for how he’d been carrying on. And his self-righteous uncles would share their condemnation, eyes bulging with blind outrage, words of scorn pouring from their mouths. But what did any of them know? They were complacent, anchored in the past. The small traders in particular. Look at their losses, the hits they’d taken in the market. They had refused to chart its trends, adjust on the move, and instead did nothing but complain. The sight-holders had been undermined by the cartel, they’d blathered. Pipelines were being choked, supplies cut, the middleman shut out.
Avram had heard the dour laments repeated many times over, listened to them blame their predicaments on currents beyond their control, pointing fingers this way and that, even at each other, as their ships took on water and went under — and their fatalistic attitudes had largely carried over to Avram’s generation. It was the same in Antwerp. In Tel Aviv. There was no helping any of them. Not while they were governed by a timid unwillingness to deviate from an outmoded, absolutist code.
That was their biggest mistake in Avram’s view… the attachment to moral and ethical definitions that no longer applied, and probably never had in reality. Morality in business was a joke. A lie of convenience, concocted by the big man to keep the little man down. Business was opportunistic, amoral. Where was the inherent virtue in scraping to survive? Since when did failure get anyone respect? Was Avram supposed to believe that every miserable wretch he’d seen patted on the back for his success had some hidden nugget of goodness in his heart? Surrender to the tug of obsolete ways, swallow the lie, and you were guaranteed to fall right on your face. There was the most ignoble sin in business. His tapping into a new wellspring of profit would kill no one.
Avram passed the second glass enclosure, an intentional step or two behind the small group of men who’d filed into the hallway branching to its right. For him its separation from the rest of the floor was clear evidence of the dividing line between moral probity and material necessity. Yet he was sure none of them — not a single one—shared his appreciation of that symbolism. Avram could only begin to imagine the quakes of scandal that would rock these halls if they somehow learned what he was doing. He’d be expelled, blackballed, his family reputation soiled with disgrace… which was why he’d have to make sure they were never obliged with that knowledge.
In the cloakroom, Avram hung his overcoat on the wall and took the velveteen pouch that contained his prayer shawl and set of phylacteries from the shelf above it. Then he went out the door and moved on toward the
boxy little synagogue chapel farther down the passage.
As was usual these days, Avram saw barely the minimum ten men required by Jewish law for the commencement of services. At nine-fifteen in the morning, it was still too early for the younger sellers, a majority of whom did not even come to the bourse on a regular schedule anymore. Meanwhile the older men who still did their mingling and dealing in the hall outside were for the most part in no hurry to arrive before noon — and those who were observant could conduct their daily morning prayers in shuls closer to home.
Being a broker, Avram mused, his leanings fell somewhere in between.
Now he draped his prayer shawl over his shoulders and donned the phylacteries, or tefillin — two square leather boxes made from the hide of kosher animals, fastened to black leather straps and containing sanctified parchment scrolls inscribed with verses from the Torah. He put one on the underside of his left arm and the other on his forehead, and then quietly recited the appropriate blessings from memory.
Even as he’d begun to wind the straps around himself in the prescribed manner, Avram had made an effort to push aside the worldly thoughts with which he’d entered the chapel. A reminder of one’s dedication to God, binding body and soul to His will, the laying of phylacteries required the commandments associated with it to be fulfilled. But was it worldly to consider that the stone tablets into which Moses chiseled the law of the covenant had been made of sapphire from the top of Mount Sinai? And that, according to Rashi, the most eminent of Biblical commentators, God had given the p’solet, castoff chips of the carving, to Moses as a precious gift that would bring him and his heirs lasting wealth? The holiest of artifacts given to man had thus come with considerations of worldly value.
But Avram wasn’t a theologian. Bent to his prayers before the Arc, he didn’t know whether to oust those thoughts from his mind or ponder them. And yet he wouldn’t deny they were there, along with his desire to reconcile his constant fear of Heaven and equally constant hunger for the material.
As with the rest of the goals he’d dared to reach for, Avram was determined to find a way to get everything he wanted, and then live with himself as well as he could.
* * *
Malisse would have preferred to start with Plan B and move on from there. Not just today, but on every assignment he accepted. Hurried or unhurried, he saw his plan of first resort as nothing more than a necessary stage-setting prelude, a rough draft of a work in progress — and with fair cause. Nine times out of ten, Plan A was either deficient or a complete waste. Over the course of his four years as a private investigator, and his twelve prior to that with the Belgian Secret Service, he’d found out that no matter how much thought and effort one put into it, how assured one felt of its perfection, there would be unforseen impediments, pitfalls that found the feet, mistakes looming around the bend that would be revealed only when stumbled upon and confronted. So strongly did Malisse feel about his creed that he had preached it relentlessly and zealously to the young, inexperienced agents who’d fallen under his tutelage in the Sûreté de L’Etat. And always he’d been asked by some callow recruits: If Plan A is a kink in the system, predetermined to go awry, why not skip it altogether, put one’s best leg forward, and launch an operation with the honed backup contingency? To which he would point out the question’s obvious logical flaw. Things must start at the beginning. The elimination of Plan A would simply move Plan B up in order of commencement, hence virtually damning it to failure by turning it into Plan A, Plan C into the new Plan B, and so forth. The wheel turned as it would.
In plotting his investigations, Malisse took a Darwinistic approach; in teaching students how to correctly go about them, his method was Socratic. Would it have been better if the lung arose before the gill? he’d sometimes asked to elicit discourse from the lads. Certainly it was the more efficient breathing organ. But how would the first amphibian have fared had not fish preceded it on evolution’s ladder? What could it have done, poor creature, but drown in the salty darkness of some primeval sea? On that sequential glitch, that missed link, as it were, the genesis of terrestrial life would have been brought to a full stop. The frog, the snake, the rodent and higher mammals, none would have ever come into existence. Mankind would have been an undreamt dream. And so it was with the investigative probe: It must proceed in orderly stages or else was destined to falter and fizzle.
Malisse’s small minority of sharp-witted, committed freshmen had taken this lesson to heart and remained splendid and miserably underpaid field operatives throughout their careers; the greater percentage of them, scoffing mediocrities, had gotten promotions to comfortable desk jobs in the Sûreté’s bureaucratic hierarchy.
To each man, his own rewards, Malisse supposed.
Now he sat by himself in the Starbucks café on West 47th Street off Sixth Avenue, drinking a Caramel Macchiato, dipping and taking an occasional bite of his chocolate éclair, and observing the street outside the window with characteristic diligence, inferior as this spot might be. The beverage had nicely warmed his insides while no doubt further eating away at the already eroded lining of his duodenum, aggravating his peptic ulcers — benign despite their burning pain, his doctors had assured — with its high concentration of sugary syrup and caffeine. But it was nine-thirty in the morning, and Malisse’s insatiable sweet tooth awoke when he did at the crack of dawn, as did his craving for tobacco. The latter remained unassuaged, since smokers in America, and this city in particular, were not only stigmatized by their habit, but heavily taxed and penalized, a legal harassment that left them with nowhere to have a cigarette except the streets and, presumably, their own toilets. Saloons, too, were off limits… what was the point of ordering a cocktail, he wondered, if not to delight in puffing a Gitanes or Dunhill between swallows? Malisse didn’t understand — was he not right now in the celebrated land of the free? He’d even had to settle for a nonsmoking room at his hotel, all others having been occupied. Thank heaven for the consolation of his hot beverage, and the éclair, which was his self-prescribed method of soaking up some of its acids.
He sat, sipped, dipped, and watched the early-bird buyers and sellers head toward their retail stores, street-level market booths, and offices here on what was known as Jewelry Way. Hasidic males dominated the center, although not to the exclusion of women or any other group. Sprinkled among them were secular Jews, Asians, Africans, Australians… Malisse knew there were traders of every nation, religion, and ethnicity passing between the diamond lampposts at the north and south sides of the block over on Sixth. Might the Katari gentleman of whom he’d been told be among them? Moreover, he wondered, would Katari prove integral or irrelevant to his probe? Time and persistence would tell.
Regarding his main player of interest, Malisse wished he could have found a superior vantage from which to monitor Avram Hoffman’s arrival at the Diamond Dealers Club this morning, the third of his open-ended surveillance. In the days since Malisse had followed Hoffman from Antwerp to New York — an affair that entailed some hurried packing, a shaky trip aboard an F50 prop, and a nearly missed connection at Heathrow — what surer formula for jet-lagged exhaustion? — he’d stayed close to the DDC entrance down at the corner of Fifth Avenue, remaining out on the street, browsing storefront displays, dawdling at newspaper stands, and generally weaving his way through and among the crowd. Cold as it was, he’d been able to keep the building’s doors in easy sight and incidentally enjoy an occasional cigarette… reminding himself of the murderous heat of Rance Lembock’s office whenever his bones protested against the low outdoor temperature. But this was post-tragedy Manhattan, where anonymity had come to have a paradoxical downside. In a city of strangers, unfamiliar faces now took on an air of the conspicuous. Passersby were wary of those who might once have escaped their notice as ignored nonentities, blending in amid the urban multitude. Teams of police officers in flak vests, armed with bullpup submachine guns and accompanied by bomb-sniffing German shepherds, could be seen guarding the entra
nces to large stores and office buildings against terrorist strikes. If Malisse were perceived to be loitering about the block, he, the honest investigator, might himself become a target of curiosity or criminal suspicion. And Lembock had been emphatic about keeping the authorities — and the Secretariat, for that matter — out of this business at any cost. Worried about a scandal that could soil the reputation of the bourses at a time when some in the trade had already assigned them to the junk bin of antiquated global institutions, he wanted to be sure of knowing the facts before they got out of the bag.
And so Malisse had today migrated from the street to his current unexposed position in the café. While offering the niceties of warmth, a cushioned seat, a steaming drink, and pastries, it hindered his ability to do his work, demanded a reliance on his informant within the DDC’s security detail to keep him notified of Avram’s comings and goings, and, not inconsequentially, prevented him from lighting up.
Malisse, however, could not complain about Jeffreys. He showed every sign of being a dependable set of eyes and ears, and had been quick to message him with confirmation of Avram’s appearance at the club. Everything had so far gone smoothly and according to plan.
Plan A, that was.
Which was why Delano Malisse shied from taking optimism too far. If Avram Hoffman was involved in dealing illicitly obtained gemstones — or wondrous fakes — Malisse was confident he could prove it and track them to their source.
He just had a gut feeling that it wouldn’t be as simple as A, B, C, or unfortunately D.
* * *
Nimec was watching Megan take a quick turn at the speed bag when he happened to notice Chris out the corner of his eye. A minute earlier the kid had been following Meg’s every move. Now he’d suddenly gone wandering over to the plate tree near Nimec’s free-weight bench.
