The waiting-room was luxurious and, thanks to an unseasonable log-fire in the Adam fireplace, tropically hot. In the centre of the close-fitted dark red carpet there was a circular Sheraton rosewood table and six matching armchairs that Bond guessed were worth at least a thousand pounds. On the table were the latest magazines and several copies of the Kimberley Diamond News. Dankwaerts’s eyes lit up when he saw these and he sat down and started to turn over the pages of the June issue.
On each of the four walls was a large flower painting in a golden frame. Something almost three dimensional about these paintings caught Bond’s attention and he walked over to examine one of them. It was not a painting, but a stylized arrangement of freshly cut flowers set behind glass in niches lined with copper-coloured velvet. The others were the same, and the four Water-ford vases in which the flowers stood were a perfect set.
The room was very quiet except for the hypnotic tick of a large sunburst wall-clock and the soft murmur of voices from behind a door opposite the entrance. There was a click and the door opened a few inches and a voice with a thick foreign intonation expostulated volubly: “Bud Mister Grunspan, why being so hard? Vee must all make a lifting, yes? I am telling you this vonderful stone gost me ten tousant pounts. Ten tousant! You ton’t pelieff me? Bud I svear it. On my vort of honour.” There was a negative pause and the voice made its final bid. “Bedder still! I bet you fife pounts!”
There was the sound of laughter. “Willy, you’re a real card,” said an American voice. “But it’s no dice. Be glad to help you, but that stone isn’t worth more than nine thousand, and I’ll give you a hundred on top of that for yourself. Now you go along and think about it. You won’t get a better offer in The Street.”
The door opened and a stage American business man with pince-nez and a tightly buttoned mouth ushered out a small harassed-looking Jew with a large red rose in his button-hole. They looked startled at finding the waiting-room occupied and, with a muttered “Pardon me” to no one in particular, the American almost ran his companion across the room and out into the hall. The door closed behind them.
Dankwaerts looked up at Bond and winked. “That’s the whole of the diamond business in a nutshell,” he said. “That was Willy Behrens, one of the best-known freelance brokers in The Street. I suppose the other man was Saye’s buyer.” He turned again to his paper, and Bond, resisting the impulse to light a cigarette, went back to his examination of the flower ‘pictures’.
Suddenly the rich, carpeted, ticking silence of the room struck like a cuckoo clock. Simultaneously, a log fell in the grate, the sunburst clock on the wall chimed the half hour, the door was thrust open and a big, dark man took two quick steps in the room and stood looking sharply from one to the other.
“My name is Saye,” he said harshly. “What goes on around here? What do you want?”
The door was open behind him. Sergeant Dankwaerts rose to his feet and walked politely but firmly round the man and closed it. Then he returned to the middle of the room.
“I am Sergeant Dankwaerts of the Special Branch of Scotland Yard,” he said in a quiet, peaceful voice. “And this,” he made a gesture towards Bond, “is Sergeant James. I am making a routine inquiry about some stolen diamonds. It occurred to the Assistant Commissioner,” the voice was of velvet, “that you might be able to help us.”
“Yes?” said Mr Saye. He looked contemptuously from one to the other of these two underpaid flatfeet who had the effrontery to be taking up his time. “Go ahead.”
While Sergeant Dankwaerts, in tones which to a law-breaker would have sounded menacingly level, and consulting from time to time a small black note-book, recited a story studded with ‘on the i6th instant’s’ and ‘it came to our knowledge’s’, Bond made an unconcealed examination of Mr Saye which appeared to perturb Mr Saye no more than the undertones of Sergeant Dankwaerts’s recitation.