Алистер Маклин: Hostage Tower

The driver glanced up again at the big clock. It gave the time as three minutes after six. ‘Home then,’ he said.

Number Four, Weesperplein, was an impressive, even beautiful, building, and the Gothic-script ornamental letters forming the frieze around the clock described in two succinct words what went on behind the imposing facade. The legend was ‘AMSTERDAM DIAMANTBEUR’.

A brass plate on the wall carried a translation for the benefit of foreigners: ‘AMSTERDAM DIAMOND EXCHANGE’.

Sabrina Carver made her first steal when she was seven.

She lived then – and for the next ten years – in her native town of Fort Dodge, Iowa, county seat of Webster County, as Sabrina learned at an early age, and immediately forgot.

It was also patiently explained to her that Fort Dodge had started life in 1850 as Fort Clarke, but the following year a pressing need arose to honour a certain Colonel Henry Dodge, and the name was changed. The fort was abandoned in 1853, so the tiny settlement, struggling to make ends meet in its uncompromising bed of river clay and gypsum, assumed the name.

‘Good for Colonel Dodge,’ thought Sabrina, and immediately forgot him, too.

The Des Moines River, on which Fort Dodge stands, is still picturesque at that point, though it no longer rings to the cries of marauding Indians and defending settlers. It figured prominently in Sabrina Carver’s young life, though, since it was the scene of that very first theft.

She was on a river trip with family and friends, and she calmly picked a tiny, silvery brooch off the coat of the lady who was sitting next to her, talking animatedly to Sabrina’s own mother. The larceny passed unnoticed for half an hour, until Sabrina’s mother spotted the brooch on her daughter’s dress.

Though she was straightway forgiven by the gushing owner – ‘The poor, innocent little darling doesn’t know, does she’ – Sabrina made no fuss about giving the brooch back.

For this act of mature contrition, she received a quarter from the gushing lady, who petted her like a doll, for Sabrina had appealing dark eyes, long red-blonde hair and a serious, saintly little face. As they were parting from her new-found friend, Sabrina stole the brooch again, and this time made sure her mother didn’t see it.

She sold the bauble to the roughest boy in school for two bucks. It was a gross under-payment, for the brooch had three diamonds set into a silver clasp. But at that time, Sabrina failed to recognize them as diamonds. She thought they were glass.

She never made that mistake again.

From then on, Sabrina stole regularly to brighten her comfortable but tedious middle-class life. She had unearthed a professional fence by the time she was nine, and impressed him with her ability to deliver her dentist father’s instruments, one at a time, over a space of three months. In that ongoing heist, she used a different modus operandi each time. The police were baffled.

All her education, her astonishing physical fitness, her command of sports and special skills, even her flowering beauty, were ruthlessly channelled into serving her over-weening ambition to become one of the great thieves of all time. She chose new clothes, picture shows, books, lectures, holidays, only if they would widen her experience, or add to her prowess, or make the art of stealing easier for her.

Sabrina was, then, supremely dedicated. On her seventeenth birthday she left high school laden with prizes, and clutching a letter from the Principal urging that she go on to Vassar, or at least Bryn Mawr, since she was the brightest student the school had ever known.

Her fence held sixty-seven thousand dollars for Sabrina in his own deposit account. By the end of the following week she had almost doubled her nest-egg with the proceeds of a raid on a Des Moines hotel, which the police said could only have been committed by a small squad of acrobatic commandos.

Sabrina warmly thanked her friend the fence, withdrew every cent of the capital, and disclaimed the current interest. She used the money to set up in business for herself in New York, later establishing branch offices in Paris, Monte Carlo, Rome and Gstaad.

She never once went back to Fort Dodge, Iowa, and had not made the slightest attempt to contact her parents.

Sabrina was a healthy girl and, at the age of twenty-five, almost indecently beautiful. Sex was easy to find, and she frequently found it.

At no time, however, did she allow any ulterior consideration to interfere with what, for Sabrina, was the ruling passion, the most intense pleasure, of her life. Not merely stealing, but stealing diamonds.

At stealing diamonds, Sabrina was indeed internationally acknowledged to be the very best.

There are probably more diamonds in Amsterdam than in any other single place in the world. Diamonds were first discovered in India, but the Dutch – who are inclined to treat anything of value with exaggerated respect – have been cutting and polishing them since the sixteenth century. At factories like Asscher’s, eagle-eyed cutters peer at cleavage panes parallel to the octahedral faces, and divide the fabulous crystals with immense care, skill and courage.

Asscher’s it was who cleft the 2024-carat Cullinan Diamond. Joseph Asscher himself struck the master blow. Had he messed it up, his firm would doubtless have gone bankrupt, and the British Crown Jewels would have a lot of empty spaces in them.

Asscher’s, and other manufacturing plants, are the places where the glamorous work of the diamond trade is done, but for dealing, the centre is the Amsterdam Diamond Exchange. The Exchange, in fact, handles bullion of all kinds, which was why its security manager did not for a moment hesitate to grant a request from an important client, concerning not gems, but a consignment of gold ingots.

‘I would not trouble you,’ the client, Kees van der Goes, had said, ‘except that I owe a favour to this friend of mine. He’s got a big shipment of gold passing through Amsterdam at the weekend … at least, it was supposed to, but the outward journey to London has been delayed. He’s asked me if you’d look after the crates for him until Monday morning. They’ll reach you on Friday night.’

Van der Goes, a well-known diamond and bullion dealer, was a valued customer of the Exchange. The security manager, whose nervousness was endemic, and practically boundless, agreed immediately.

‘We’ll keep the vaults open for the consignment,’ he promised, ‘though if you could possibly arrange for the crates to be delivered by six o’clock, then the time-lock can run its routine, you know.’

Van der Goes said he would try, and the security men backed him to the hilt. They had all, however, reckoned without the dealer’s pedantically fussy agent, who arrived at the Exchange shortly before the shipment, and insisted on examining at least part of the contents of both crates.

They had been carried through to the rear lobby, and there, the massive steel door to the vaults stood open, even though the electric wall clock showed seven minutes after six. The crates stood side by side on the metal floor. The fussy agent had just finished sealing one crate, and was about to open the other.

The nervous security manager’s anxiety increased with each second that passed.

‘Must you check the second crate?’ he pleaded. ‘It’s probably just the same as the first.’

‘I sincerely trust that it is,’ remarked the agent, ‘because it’s supposed to be, after all, isn’t it?’

‘So?’

‘But one must be positive, my dear fellow,’ protested the agent. ‘You would not wish me to do half my job, would you?’

‘ My job is to close the vault.’

‘And so you shall. All in good time.’ The security manager shot the agent a glance of pure detestation, which was completely ignored. The agent unlocked the seals, and prised off the lid of the second crate. Like the first, it was filled to the brim with shiny gold ingots. As he had done before, however, the agent insisted in lifting up ingots from various places, to check the tier beneath. Finally satisfied, he lowered the lid, and laboriously replaced the clasps and seals.