gravity matched that of any known gems.
Finally, he moved to a third stool that was positioned in front of a
vise. From a drawer he withdrew a ring box in which three large, cut
gems lay on a square of blue velvet.
“Junk diamonds,” he said.
“They look nice to me,” Bobby said.
“Too many flaws.”
He selected one of those stones and fixed it in the vise with a couple
of turns of the crank. Gripping the red beauty in a small pair of
pliers, he used one of its sharper edges to attempt to score the
polished facet of the diamond in the vise, pressing with considerable
effort. Then he put the pliers and red gem aside, picked up another
jeweler’s loupe, leaned forward, and studied the junk diamond.
“A faint scratch,” he said. “Diamond cuts diamond.”
He held the red stone between thumb and forefinger, staring at it with
obvious fascination-and greed.
“Where did you get this?”
“Can’t tell you,” Bobby said.
“So it’s just a red diamond?”
“Just? The red diamond may be the rarest most precious stone in the
world! You must let me market it for you. I have clients who’d pay
anything to have this as the centerstone of a necklace or pendant. It’ll
probably be too big for a ring even after a final cut. It’s huge!”
“What’s it worth?” Clint asked.
“Impossible to say until it’s finish-cut. Millions, certainly.”
“Millions?” Bobby said doubtfully.
“It’s big but not that big.” Van Corvaire finally tore his gaze from
the stone and looked up at Bobby.
“You don’t understand. Until now, there were only seven known red
diamonds in the world. This is the eighth. And when it’s cut and
polished, it’ll be one of the two largest. This comes as close to
priceless as anything gets.”
OUTSIDE Archer van Corvaire’s small shop, where heavy traffic roared
past on Pacific Coast Highway, with disco-frenetic flares of sunlight
flashing off the chrome and glass, it was hard to believe that the
tranquility of Newport Harbor and its burden of beautiful yachts were
just beyond the building far side of the street. In a sudden moment of
enlightenment Bobby realized that his entire life (and perhaps nearly
every one else’s) was like this street at this precise point in time:
all busy and noise, glare and movement, a desperate rush to break out of
the herd, to achieve something and transcend the whirl of commerce,
thereby giving respite for reflection a shot at serenity-when all the
time serenity was only a step away, on the far side of the street, just
out of sight.
That realization contributed to a heretofore subtle feeling that the
Pollard case was somehow a trap-or, more accurately, a squirrel cage
that spun faster and faster even as he scampered frantically to get a
footing on its rotating floor.
Bobby stood for a few seconds by the open door of the car, feeling
ensnared, caged. At that moment he was not sure why, even with the
obvious dangers, he had been so eager to take on Frank’s problems and
put all that he cared about at risk. He knew that the reasons he had
quoted to Julie and to himself-sympathy for Frank, curiosity, the
excitement of a wildly different kind of job-were merely justifications,
not reasons, and his true motivation was something he did not yet
understand. Unnerved, he got in the car and pulled the door shut as
Clint started the engine.
“Bobby, how many red diamonds would you say are in that mason jar? A
hundred?”
“More. A couple hundred.”
“Worth what-hundreds of millions?”
“Maybe a billion or more.”
They stared at each other, and for a while neither of them spoke. It
wasn’t that no words were adequate to the situation instead, there was
too much to say and no easy way to determine where to begin.
At last Bobby said, “But you couldn’t convert the stones into cash, not
quickly anyway. You’d have to dribble them onto the market over a lot
of years to prevent a sudden dilution of their rarity and value, but
also to avoid causing a sensation by drawing unwanted attention, and
maybe having to answer some unanswerable questions.”