Zero Hour pp-7 Page 8

  And then the barricade ceased to exist, Yousaf plowing into its crossbeam with a final surge of acceleration, reducing it to scraps of broken wood. They buffeted the front end of the truck, and jutted from the crashed barricade’s toppled uprights in splintery bits and pieces.

  Khalid braced in his seat, his upper body jolting against its backrest as Yousaf came to a hard, sudden halt scarcely a heartbeat before they would have slammed into an abandoned jeep.

  They sat a moment looking out their partially disintegrated windshield. A wounded ranger lay in the snow near Yousaf ’s door, clutching his chest and groaning in pain. There was still some light, spotty gunfire coming from the roadsides, and Khalid could see the men who’d sprung out of the trucks at his rear sprint on ahead, fanning left and right in the darkness. It wasn’t long before the opposing volleys had been squelched.

  “We’re wasting time,” Yousaf said. “Remove all our papers from the truck and have one of the others help us transfer the component and some spare containers of gasoline into one of the jeeps.”

  Khalid wiped his bloodied face with his sleeve.

  “Do you think there might be others waiting for our trucks farther on toward Chikar?” he said.

  “Forget Chikar, we can’t take the chance,” Yousaf said. “We head north now. I know passes that are rarely patrolled and will take us toward the Neelam Valley crossings.”

  “Neelam?” Khalid said. His eyes widened. “That’s a journey of almost a thousand kilometers. Even should the weather hold, it will take us two days over the mountains—”

  “Then we’d best get started, drive on while we can make the most of the darkness,” Khalid said. “We’ll need to leave the men to clean up here, and travel off-road as much as possible tonight to be safe.”

  Khalid verged on protest a moment, but then thought the better of it. Yousaf was not one to have his wishes denied.

  He nodded and went to follow his orders, his boot-heels sinking deep into the snow as he exited the coal truck.

  Then the crack of a single bullet from its driver’s side made him stiffen, his breath catching in his throat with a little gasp. He glanced sharply over the hood and saw Yousaf standing over the sprawled body of the ranger, looking down at him, the bore of his Steyr pressed to the middle of his head.

  “Gandu,” Yousaf said, using the Urdu vulgarism for asshole.

  He spat on the corpse, straightened, turned to make brief eye contact with Khalid.

  “I did the traitor a favor he didn’t deserve,” he said, holstering his weapon.

  * * *

  His fingers steepled under his chin, Lembock was waiting behind his desk when Delano Malisse arrived for their morning appointment.

  “Delano, hoe gaat het met jou?” Lembock said in Flemish, offering the customary hi-how-are-you without rising from his chair.

  Malisse took no offense. It was not discourtesy, but the depredations of rheumatism and chronic bronchitis that kept him off his feet.

  Malisse sat down in front of him and unbuttoned his overcoat. As usual, Lembock had the office’s heat turned up suffocatingly high, its steam radiator hissing and clanking. Could this possibly be good for his ailing lungs? “Goed, bedankt,” he said. “You’re looking much recovered from that last bad spell.”

  A gracious, soft-spoken man, Lembock smiled with the quiet skepticism of one who was appreciative of the polite words, but might have gently begged to differ. He looked at Malisse, his chin balanced on his hands. The fingers long, tapered, almost spindling, the skin tight and thin over knobby, inflamed joints, they reminded Malisse of the ribbed arches that supported the ceilings of the Gothic churches and palaces at the city’s centuries-old heart, seeming almost too delicate to last under the ponderous weight resting upon them. Yet last they did, their stability ever a marvel to him.

  Rance Lembock’s office was about a mile west of the historic district, on the ninth floor of the Diamantclub van Antwerpen, this first and most prominent of Antwerp’s four diamond bourses located in a rather nondescript, even homely, building on Pelikaanstraat, a sidestreet running south from the Central Station rail terminal. Two stories above, on the top floor, was the seat of the Secretariat of the World Federation of Diamond Bourses, which, as its name indicated, codified and oversaw the rules, regulations, laws, and bylaws observed by every reputable exchange in Europe and beyond, its influence spanning continents, ranging from Tokyo in the far east to New York City in the west.

  As chairman of the Diamantclub, Lembock had always seemed to bear the great responsibilities of his position with a kind of dutiful fidelity, like an attentive husband who lifts a heavy bag of groceries from his wife’s arms to carry it himself, seeing nothing praiseworthy in the assumption of a task for which his greater strength naturally suits him. But whatever leadership qualities Lembock’s solid, stable disposition endowed, Malisse felt it was hard work and experience that had finely honed them into something even his frail health of recent years couldn’t diminish.

  In his middle seventies, his face deeply lined under a high forehead and thick cloud of white hair, Lembock wore a spread-collar white dress shirt and blue boxcloth suspenders that clipped onto the waistband of his trousers with gilt brass fittings. No tie, no jacket. The shirtsleeves were rolled up midway to his elbows with particular neatness, exposing part of the faded blue ink tattoo on his right inner forearm, a five-digit identification number he’d gotten after his arrival at Auschwitz aboard a cattle car loaded with Jews in 1942. As Malisse understood from stories he’d heard, Lembock had been deemed physically suitable for slave labor rather than extermination by a camp physician, sent to the Political Section to assure he cleared a watch list of potential agitators and Communists, and then passed along to an SS functionary in the Labor Assignment Office, who had imprinted him with the number using a punch-card machine custom-adapted by IBM Hollerith for that purpose. Hands across the water, as the saying went.

  Malisse sat in respectful silence. Advanced age and stature entitled Lembock to decide when to launch their conversation. Moreover, it was important to be mindful of fundamental protocols. Lembock was the client, he the hired investigator held on no small retainer. And Malisse did not, at any rate, find it difficult to be still and wait. He could discern the numerals 421 on Lembock’s skin, the remaining two digits hidden by his shirt cuff. A precise and exacting man, Lembock always folded his sleeves the same three inches above his wrist, so that he had never seen the final two digits of the slave number exposed. Although Malisse’s obsessive hunger for detail often urged him to look for them, he took pains to be inconspicuous when overcome.

  Just once, to his knowledge, had Lembock become aware of his interest… or if there had been other instances, it was only then that he had commented, speaking before Malisse could become too angry at himself over the uncharacteristic slipup.

  “I was seventeen when they gave me this,” Lembock had said, touching a finger to the mark. “A boy I knew named Yitzhak… we’d lived in Marasesti, a small town in Romania… he was next in line to receive his number. His family was more observant than mine, and he worried that marring the body with a tattoo was forbidden, against our religion. That we might someday be refused burial in a Jewish cemetery. I recall thinking we would be fortunate for that to ever become a problem, for it would mean we’d have survived the camps. But to comfort Yitzhak, I told him that when the time came, God would surely take our circumstances into account and make an oysnem… an exception.” Lembock had paused. “Later, we were both sent to the Mittelbau-Dora camp, at Nordhausen, and put to work quarrying out granite from the Peenemunde rocket tunnels, where the Nazis developed the V2 missile. Yitzhak became weak — I believe he must have had the beginnings of typhus — and was shot to death, put down with a bullet to the head like a crippled farm animal. I remember that they threw his body onto the open bed of a truck with a pile of other dead bodies and took them all back to the crematoriums.” Lembock had fallen silent again, briefly, watching Ma
lisse. Then he’d produced a deep sigh. “Yitzhak did not have to worry about receiving a Jewish burial,” he’d said in the husk of a voice, and after a final pause had changed the subject.

  This had been three or four years back, Malisse remembered. Soon after he’d stepped out from the encumbrances of government service. He’d been reporting on a case, the sale of a Dresden Green diamond brooch fraudulently purported to be from the priceless seventeenth-century collection of the Polish king, Frederick Augustus II. His efforts to track down the counterfeiter had been at a preliminary stage — his leads undeveloped, his groundwork barely laid. With little to furnish Lembock besides assurances of eventual success, he’d wearied of his own delivery and let his gaze rest on the tattoo a few seconds too long.

  Malisse tried diligently to avoid repeating his mistakes, and had some fair confidence that he’d succeeded in not making that one again.

  Now he sat and waited in the stifling office. Although Lembock would have no objection to his lighting a cigarette despite his afflicted lungs, Malisse feared the combination of unventilated heat and tobacco smoke might prove smothering to him. Instead he whittled off several moments letting his gaze drift freely about the room — one never could tell when a worthy surprise would spring out of the familiar to catch the eye like a colorful, never-before-seen bird flashing from an old backyard tree.

  Nothing of the sort happened this time. Still, Malisse was always able to appreciate the office’s simple and tasteful decor. There were soft leather chairs, a large blond-oak desk. Framed professional certificates hung on the walls, along with photographs of Lembock’s late wife, his children, his grandchildren. Other photos as well — Lembock in the company of high-placed professional and political associates.

  Outside the windows on Malisse’s left, a day of bright, cold sunlight had followed a night of steadily falling snow. Melting frost dribbled down the outer surfaces of panes blasted with overwarmed air from within. As the radiator emitted a high-pitched whistle, Malisse dabbed his wet brow with a handkerchief. He, too, had begun to liquefy.

  After a bit, Lembock drew erect in his chair, his fingertips parting ways to settle on the desktop.

  “I’ve asked you here because something has come up,” he said. “A potential problem.”

  The statement hardly rocked Malisse. For all its shared respect, theirs was not a social relationship.

  “Fakery?” he said. “Theft?”

  “It could be one, the other… or, I would wish, neither.”

  Malisse looked at him.

  “I hope my ears are not too visibly perked,” he said. “Else the hounds see me for a hare.”

  “Better the other way around, eh?”

  “Best not to be seen at all in my game.”

  Lembock watched him a moment, then gave a calm little smile.

  “I want to tell you what I know,” he said, and motioned toward the ceiling with his head. “They are words I haven’t yet shared with those above us.”

  Malisse considered a moment, then shrugged.

  “My acrophobia keeps me from getting any closer to the rooftop than our present height,” he said. “This anxiety limits, as well, my direct contact with the Secretariat, and reinforces my choice to keep my professional dealings here at your level.”

  “So I trust we have an understanding?”

  “Clear and absolute, yes.”

  “Then I’ll get straight to it.” Lembock inhaled, the ever-present rasp in his breath. “Somewhat over a year ago, a jewelry maker in Tel Aviv acquired a parcel of thirty-eight round-cut Ceylon blue sapphires from a New York broker, a member of the Club. They were small — each about four millimeters in size — but of high quality, weighing approximately a third of a carat each.”

  “Their GIA gradings?”

  “Clarity was rated as VS Type Two… nearly flawless to the unaided eye. Color is a deep violetish blue, six-five saturation.”

  “Enhancements?”

  “The typical blow heating done near Sri Lankan mines.”

  “They are Code E, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very nice, if unremarkable,” Malisse said. “What did they go for wholesale, do you know?”

  “Two thousand five hundred dollars, U.S. currency.”

  Malisse grunted. Again, that seemed normal.

  “You mentioned Sri Lanka,” he said. “I would imagine, then, that the sapphires come from Ratnapuran gem mines… ”

  Lembock shrugged.

  “The source wasn’t divulged,” he said. “Of course, a broker is under no obligation to share that information.”

  “Understandable,” Malisse said. “And a common policy, is it not?”

  “Every middleman’s worry is to be cut out of the process, their very warranted insecurity premised on being nonessential,” Lembock said, nodding. “In the field, they are sometimes joked about in a disparaging way. Called schnorrers. Sponging, conniving beggars.”

  “Because their commission adds to the selling price.”

  “And on the simple theory that leaving them out of a sale reduces the price,” Lembock said. “Most purchasers would rather bargain directly with the manufacturer. There is so much aggressive competition in the marketplace these days, so much pressure to best a rival dealer’s lowest markdown, that it is becoming truer and truer to say this is also favored on the supply side… although many dealers still prefer to use brokerages.”

  Malisse thought for a moment, mopping himself with his handkerchief. There were, he knew, different reasons for that preference, all legitimate. Conditions of anonymity stipulated by collectors in antique and estate sell-offs, the simple lack of a sales, marketing, and distribution force by a gem producer… to name a couple.

  “The sapphire transaction,” he said. “What was unusual about it?”

  “Nothing,” Lembock said. “Aside from the broker being known chiefly as a trader of diamonds.”

  “Comparably graded merchandise?”

  “Very,” Lembock said. “Decent, but not close to the best.”

  Malisse looked at him.

  “Then there is either more going on than a broker’s minor diversification, or you are losing me,” he said.

  “I’m not sure, Delano, that you are ever lost,” Lembock said, and paused. “But I want to move ahead a half year or so to last June. Knowing he had to make a trip to New York, the broker contacts the same buyer to inquire if he is interested in another parcel of small round-cuts similar to the previous stones… this time offering several sapphires of a higher grade along with them. Ceylons again. VS Type Two. Again violet-blue, six-five saturation. This time they are between six and eight carat ovals. No enhancements… their Code N certifications guaranteed in a detailed laboratory report and a second evaluation by a highly accredited gemologist.”

  “Asking prices?”

  “Twenty-five hundred dollars per carat. The largest sold for almost thirty thousand dollars.”

  “Quite a stride for the broker.”

  “Yes,” Lembock said. “And what if I were to tell you he was also at the Miami bourse earlier that month for a delivery to a regular wholesale customer, his typical parcels of so-so diamonds… and that he showed that customer, in addition, a matched pair of blue and pink oval-cut sapphires? Top-notch, Ceylon, six carats each, priced in the neighborhood of two thousand per carat?”

  Malisse lifted an eyebrow. “If you were to say that, I would begin to think it less likely our broker had stumbled upon a fluke one-time contact than found a new and steady source of merchandise. I would further have some thoughts about whether his strides, plural, had raised him into an entirely different league.”

  Lembock nodded.

  “The Florida wholesaler reluctantly passed,” he said. “Financial constraints prevented him from making the investment on speculation — without a resale to a jewelry maker or retailer lined up — but he was impressed, and asked whether he might keep our seller in mind should he have a need for those sa
pphires, or sapphires of that caliber, in the future. He offered to tell anyone else who might be in the market about the stones.”

  “An offer which, I take it, was accepted.”

  “With appreciation,” Lembock said. “And seven months later, earlier this month, he did mention the broker to a close friend in Germany, a fellow wholesaler who’d won a high-end designer client with a consistent demand for select goods.”

  “Such selfless generosity to a competitor.”

  Another faint smile appeared on Lembock’s face, crinkling the lines around his eyes.

  “Our trade borders on the incestuous,” he said. “Everyone knows somebody, who knows somebody else, who happens to know the first person, and has a fair chance of being married to his or her relative… and all this makes for very bankable assets.”

  “One hand washes the other.”

  Lembock gave another nod.

  “As it turned out in this case, the friend’s hand already had been washed.”

  “He knew of the broker?”

  “From a common acquaintance, the Tel Aviv buyer I mentioned,” Lembock said. “Moreover, our broker had just sold him an exquisite gem… one that put the matched ovals to shame.”

  “Sapphire again.”

  “Padparadscha sapphire,” Lembock said. “Cushion-cut. Almost nine carats. Perfect symmetry, intense color saturation.”

  Malisse’s eyebrow, which had remained raised, now bent to a sharply acute angle.

  “It must have been worth — what? — fifty, sixty thousand dollars?”

  “The stone sold for over seventy-five, our broker and purchaser meeting right here in Antwerp only days ago to finalize their deal.”

  Malisse formed a spout with his lips and exhaled a stream of air.

  “How did you learn of it?” he said.

  Lembock looked at him.

  “The Miami dealer could see how a second-rate broker he’d known for many years might come upon several stones of real worth,” he said with another of his dry little smiles. “Even a broker with a long and established schnorrer pedigree who had inherited most of his contacts from his father and grandfather, themselves having run a middling brokerage. But it stunned the dealer to hear he’d sold an exceedingly rare Padparadscha, a reaction that was heightened by his discovery of the Tel Aviv connection. And he muttered his disbelief to a colleague, who told his brother-in-law, who happens to be my great-niece’s fiancé…”