Faye Kellerman - Sanctuary

Decker looked around. To the right was another set of steel revolving doors that led to a main lobby of the building. Security was visible at every turn of the head-in the sally port, in the lobbies, behind the windows. He must have spotted dozens of men and women dressed in gray shirts, blue ties, and dark blue pants.

The line inched forward, people nudging Decker in the back. In his experience, crowds brought tension. Strangely, no one seemed irritated. Here was humanity in all shapes, sizes, and religious inclinations stuffed into a small area and no one was grousing.

They finally made it to the front. Four security guards manned the window behind bullet-proof glass. Three of the watchdogs were seated; one male was standing behind the others, either overseeing them or kibitzing. Yalom got up to the window and spoke his case, the guard nodding and looking Decker and Rina over as the old man explained what he wanted.

“Passports, please,” she said.

Decker took them out of his jacket, then reluctantly forfeited them to the guard. She opened them, but her eyes weren’t on the ID. Instead, she seemed to be listening to the goings-on at the line next to hers. Then she butted into the conversation, arguing with her colleague who was dealing with a woman and a small child.

“What’s going on?” Decker asked Rina. “What’s she doing?”

Rina smiled wearily. “She’s getting distracted is what she’s doing. There seems to be a sh’aylah about kids under twelve needing a passport.”

“A sh’aylah?”

“A question.”

“Oh. A shylah!” Decker said, pronouncing it as if he were in the yeshiva.

Rina smiled. “Yes, a shylah.”

Finally, the guard deigned to look at the passports placed in her hands. She studied them, then punched something into a computer. Mr. Yalom spoke to Rina.

She said, “They’re issuing us badges and ID cards.”

A minute later, Yalom handed them two plastic cards and they were allowed to enter the main lobby. A thick fog of people scurried across white and gray marble floors. To the left was a bank of lockers; straight ahead were the elevators. They squeezed into the first car and rode up one floor. To Decker’s surprise, everyone got out. Yalom took them into a second elevator and pushed the fifteenth-floor button.

Decker said to Rina, “What was that all about?”

Yalom seemed to understand the question. He talked to Rina in Hebrew.

Rina said, “The first elevator goes only to the Bursa. You take these elevators to get to the offices.”

“For peoples,” Yalom said. “Too much peoples.”

Decker didn’t understand but didn’t press it. Maybe it was some security thing. The car rode up to the fifteenth floor and they got out. It was quiet and looked similar to Yalom’s office in Los Angeles. But unlike the LA diamond center, every door had a mezuzah on it.

The mezuzah. The symbol of a Jewish establishment. On every single door. Yes, Decker finally realized they were in a Jewish country. It made him feel simultaneously strange and at home. Yalom pressed a button to the office and they were buzzed into an anteroom.

The secretary behind the glass partition reminded Decker of Yochie. She had jet-black hair and wore lots of makeup and jewelry. She spoke to Yalom; the old man turned around.

“Yossie’s downstairs in the Bursa,” Yalom reported in English. “He likes make old man go up and down, de mamzer.”

Decker told Rina she didn’t have to translate.

Taking up almost the entire floor, the Bursa was an open area framed by a northern wall of glass. It held strip after strip of black picnic-sized tables, the surfaces covered with hundreds of squares of calendar paper set into black leather blotters. The tables also were crowned with dozens of scales, loupes, and pincers. Chairs were set on both sides of the tables. The place was crowded, but there was plenty of elbow room to walk down the aisles. Opposite the glass wall was a series of teller booths, some marked OFFICIAL WEIGHING STATION. Above the booths seemed to be a viewing area-maybe an upstairs lounge-framed in smoked glass. A nice place to have a drink or watch TV and still be able to see the action below.

Hanging from the ceiling were television monitors that broadcast rows of numbers. Yalom saw Decker staring at the screens.

Rina translated his words. “Those are pager numbers. Someone needs you, your number goes up on the monitor.”

She took her eyes off the monitor and studied the vast open space. So many people-sitting, standing, milling around, going from table to table as if mingling at a cocktail party. There was a definite camaraderie. The smiles, the greetings, the pleasant conversation. And of course, the sense that there was business to be done. At any given time, there must have been a hundred jewelers holding loupes to stones.

And what stones they were! Diamonds! Thousands of them! Their worth just too staggering to contemplate. Piles spilling carelessly onto blotters, being freely passed from one hand to another. How easy it would be to palm a stone. And no one did. What a sense of trust!

Rina suddenly laughed inwardly at her naïveté.

It wasn’t trust that prevented theft, it was all the security. Lots and lots of security-unobtrusive, but a constant presence. She caught Peter’s eye. “It’s something else, isn’t it? Kind of like a stock exchange only without the suits and ties.”

Decker nodded. It was a good observation. There was little diversity in the population. Most were men and they were all dressed casually-dark pants, white shirt, no tie. Except for the occasional sleek-garbed woman, everyone looked the same. Even the religious seemed to blend in once they took off their long black coats.

His eyes went to the tables. Dozens of men sitting across from one another, opening briefcases and photographers’ bags filled with folded blue tissue paper. The valises were attached to metal chains, the chains were anchored around the vendors’ waists. The noise level was surprisingly civil. It was easy to hear conversation. Too bad Decker couldn’t understand any of it. But he was good at reading body language. He could tell at a glance who was making a deal, who was not.

Rina was wide-eyed. The old man looked at her face, smiled, then whispered something into her ear.

“What?” Decker said.

Rina moved in close. “He said there’s enough wealth in this room to buy all of Israel.”

Decker inched closer to the action, caught prisms of sunlight bouncing off the tabletops. Stones strewn over the blotters of white calender paper. A young man opened up a shoe-sized box stuffed with the blue tissue paper. He unwrapped one of the pieces of paper. A heart-shaped gem winked flirtatiously at Decker.

Yalom caught them staring and said, “You want see close? Come.” He walked over to a vendor and tapped him on the shoulder. The man looked up, then placed something in Yalom’s hand. The old man showed it to Decker. It was a raw stone and had an odd shape-two triangles fused at the base. It also looked like bottle glass.

The old man hefted the diamond and spoke in English. “Maybe three and half carat. They make two.” He made a slicing motion with his empty hand and spoke in Hebrew to Rina, showing her the stone as he talked.

Rina said, “The cutter will cleave the diamond at the base where the two triangles meet. That way he’ll have two nearly identical gems which will be set for earrings.”

“Tell him it looks like glass. That I’d pass it up without a second glance.”

Yalom nodded to Decker and smiled.

Rina said, “I think he understood you.”

The old man talked to Rina. “He says usually the buyers sit on one side of the table, the sellers opposite them. The buyers, even if they have offices, often come down here to see the action. If it’s real busy, the buyers will take their ‘want’ lists of what they need to the floor, sit down at a table, and place the list in front of them. The sellers walk down the aisles and look over the lists. If there’s a match, it’s a mazel und b’racha-a luck and a blessing. That means they cut a deal.”