Although it was late July and the room was bright with sunshine, M had switched on his desk light and tilted it so that it shone straight at Bond. Bond picked the brilliant-cut stone up and held it to the light. As he turned it between his fingers, all the colours of the rainbow flashed back at him from its mesh of facets until his eye was tired with the dazzle.
He took out the jeweller’s glass and tried to think of something appropriate to say.
M looked at him quizzically. “Fine stone?”
“Wonderful,” said Bond. “It must be worth a lot of money.”
“A few pounds for the cutting,” said M dryly. “It’s a bit of quartz. Now then, let’s try again.” He consulted a list on the desk in front of him and selected a fold of tissue paper, verified the number written on it, unfolded it and pushed it across to Bond.
Bond put the piece of quartz back into its own wrapping and picked up the second sample.
“It’s easy for you, Sir,” he smiled at M. “You’ve got the crib.” He screwed the glass back into his eye and held the stone, if it was a stone, up to the light.
This time, he thought, there could be no doubt about it. This stone also had the thirty-two facets above and the twenty-four below of the brilliant-cut, and it was also about twenty carats, but what he now held had a heart of blue-white flame, and the infinite colours reflected and refracted from its depths lanced into his eye like needles. With his left hand he picked up the quartz dummy and held it beside the diamond in front of his glass. It was a lifeless chunk of matter, almost opaque beside the dazzling translucence of the diamond, and the rainbow colours he had seen a few minutes before were now coarse and muddy.
Bond put down the piece of quartz and gazed again into the heart of the diamond. Now he could understand the passion that diamonds had inspired through the centuries, the almost sexual love they aroused among those who handled them and cut them and traded in them. It was domination by a beauty so pure that it held a kind of truth, a divine authority before which all other material things turned, like the bit of quartz, to clay. In these few minutes Bond understood the myth of diamonds, and he knew that he would never forget what he had suddenly seen inside the heart of this stone..
He put the diamond down on its slip of paper and dropped the jeweller’s glass into the palm of his hand. He looked across into M’s watchful eyes. “Yes,” he said. “I see.”
M sat back in his chair. “That’s what Jacoby meant when I had lunch with him the other day at the Diamond Corporation,” he said. “He said that if I was going to get involved in the diamond business I ought to try and understand what was really at the bottom of it all. Not just the millions of money involved, or the value of diamonds as a hedge against inflation, or the sentimental fashions in diamonds for engagement rings and so forth. He said one must understand the passion for diamonds. So he just showed me what I’m showing you. And,” M smiled thinly at Bond, “if it will give you any satisfaction, I was just as taken in by that bit of quartz as you were.”
Bond sat still and said nothing.
“And now let’s run through the rest,” said M. He gestured towards the pile of paper packets in front of him. “I said I’d like to borrow some samples. They didn’t seem to mind. Sent this lot round to my house this morning.” M consulted his list, opened a packet and pushed it across to Bond. “What you were looking at just now was the best-a ‘Fine Blue-white’.” He gestured towards the big diamond in front of Bond. “Now this is a ‘Top Crystal’, ten carats, baguette-cut. Very fine stone, but worth about half a ‘Blue-white’. You’ll see there’s the faintest trace of yellow in it. The ‘Cape’ I’m going to show you next has a slight brownish tinge, according to Jacoby, but I’m damned if I can see it. I doubt if anyone can except the experts.”