Lisa Unger - Smoke

It looked like a laboratory, with clean well-lit workstations that were empty at the present. Large magnifying glasses were mounted on moveable arms over tables lined with delicate tools, Jeffrey imagined for mounting gems in their settings. They walked into an office with glass walls. The space had an unobstructed view of the work stations. Chiam, he guessed, liked to keep an eye on things. In the back of his office, there was a large safe that looked like it recessed into the wall when it wasn’t in use.

Chiam motioned for Jeffrey to sit in a chair opposite a small wooden desk as the older man sat heavily into a wooden banker’s chair. The desk was meticulously organized, files neatly arranged, ten blue Bic pens in a leather cup. A computer sat neat and white on a small metal desk to the side. Jeffrey removed the gem from his pocket and handed the little velvet pouch to Chiam. He took a jeweler’s loupe from his drawer, unwrapped the stone, and examined it.

“Lovely,” he said. “Quite nearly flawless. A tiny, tiny imperfection deep in the stone but invisible to the naked eye. Pink diamonds like this are very, very rare. Though recently there’s been a huge demand for them. So some jewelers started buying irradiated stones, real diamonds that have been colored. Most people don’t know the difference. But this one is real.”

“How can you tell?”

“Trust me,” he said looking at Jeff with eyes that had examined a million stones. “I can tell.”

He had deep, knowing brown eyes set in a landscape of soft and wrinkled skin. A full gray beard hung nearly to the middle of his chest.

“Where did you get this?” Chiam asked when Jeffrey nodded. He’d narrowed his eyes just slightly.

“It came into my possession by accident,” said Jeffrey, wanting to be vague without being rude.

“That’s a lucky accident,” said Chiam, leaning back.

“I guess that depends on where you think this stone might have come from.”

Chiam stared at Jeff for a second and then nodded, as if deciding with himself to talk.

“Last week a dealer came to New York City from South Africa. He supposedly had in his possession a collection of rare diamonds. Flawless, colorless stones… some pink and yellow. He traveled here on a private jet with three heavily armed bodyguards, carrying more than five million dollars in precious gems. Somewhere between the airport and his first appointment, he, the driver of his limo, and his three bodyguards were all killed. The diamonds, quite obviously, are gone.”

Jeffrey remembered hearing something about a South African businessman being killed, his limo found on a service road near the Westchester Airport. The implication of the report, if Jeffrey remembered, was that it was some kind of an organized crime hit. But he didn’t remember hearing anything else about it.

“And you think that this might be one of those diamonds?”

He picked up the diamond and looked at it again. “Like I said, they’re very, very rare. Last week a dealer is killed, his gems stolen, among which there was supposedly a cache of nearly flawless pink diamonds. This week you come to my shop with an extraordinary stone that you say came into your possession ‘by accident.’ If you weren’t a friend of Striker’s, I might be calling some of my friends,” said Chiam with a flat smile.

Few people realized that the Jews had a pretty nasty mob themselves. Jeffrey had noticed another exit door toward the back when he’d followed Chiam to the office and noticed a set of keys hanging in the dead bolt. He found himself wondering whether he could get to the back or the front exit faster, and where the back exit would leave him off.

“Has there been any speculation as to who might have killed the dealer and taken the stones?” asked Jeffrey.

“There’s always speculation,” he said with a sigh. “Maybe the Albanians, maybe the Italians, maybe the Russians.”

“Maybe the Jews,” said Jeffrey.

“No,” said Chiam with a short, mirthless laugh. “Not the Jews.”

Jeff nodded and guessed that if it had been the Jews they probably wouldn’t be having this conversation.

“Anyway,” said the old man. “There’s been no movement. At least not locally. Whoever took the diamonds will want to sell them eventually. That’s when maybe we hear who is responsible.”

“Then what?”

He turned up the corners of his mouth, but Jeffrey wouldn’t have called it a smile. “Too many variables. No way to know.”

“When you hear something, I’d like to know,” said Jeffrey, sliding his card over the desk toward Chiam. He nodded, taking the card.

“Are you pursuing this through your own avenues?” asked Chiam.

“I am,” he answered.

Chiam seemed to consider his response. “Well, then. I’ll promise to tell you what I learn, if you promise to tell me what you learn.”

“It’s a deal,” said Jeffrey.

“Now,” said Chiam, looking satisfied. “How much do you want for this stone?”

When Matt Stenopolis called, Lydia was sitting in Jeffrey’s office staring at the box. A couple of times, she moved toward it but had wound up sinking back into the couch. She knew all about opening boxes. Once the lid was off, it could never be closed again. She considered herself a pretty tough chick, but that box scared her. She couldn’t quite say why.

The buzzer on Jeffrey’s desk sounded and a voice came over the speaker. “Lydia,” said Jessa, one of the trainees, “are you in there? There’s a Matt Stenopolis on line two.”

She jumped up, glad for the distraction. “Got it,” she said and picked up the call.

“Detective,” she said.

“Yeah, Ms. Strong. Can we get together?”

She was surprised he wanted to meet rather than talk on the phone. She got the feeling that he didn’t like her very much, considered her a necessary evil as far as Lily Samuels was concerned.

“Sure,” she said. “Where and when?”

The New Day achieved tax-exempt status in 1997. They claim to have over two hundred and fifty thousand members worldwide, growing steadily since their origination in 1977,” Matt told Lydia over strong coffee and a scratched Formica table at a Greek restaurant in midtown. It was bustling with the dinner crowd, loud voices, clinking silverware, and the occasional cry of “Opa!” as a waiter lit the saganaki on fire. The place itself was a dive, looking more like your average New York diner than anything else, but it had the best Greek food outside of his mother’s kitchen and he had a craving for pastitso that would not be denied.

“So The New Day is a religion?” she said, sounding skeptical, tracing the rim of her coffee cup with a delicate finger.

“Yeah, I guess that’s what they call themselves,” he said. Matt was not of the belief that you could just start a religion in the same way that you could start a company. It seemed a little backwards to him and he was suspicious of any so-called religion that had just popped up in the last twenty or thirty or even fifty years. Some backwoods bumpkin or science fiction writer declares himself a prophet, gets a few weak-willed souls to agree, and all of a sudden he’s talking to God. Maybe he was just being picky but frankly he would need some parting of the seas, water into wine, or something along those lines to be convinced.

“What are their precepts? I mean are we talking a Heaven’s Gate kind of thing… hitch a ride to God on the Hale Bopp Comet? Or what?”

“Well, from what I can determine, there aren’t any deities involved. They claim to be compatible with any religious belief, kind of a direct line to whatever God you believe in. Their whole concept is that through a kind of spiritual cleansing they can help people overcome addictions, reach their full potential as human beings and in so doing get closer to God.”