Carla Neggers - Cut and Run

Delftshaven, The Netherlands

Alone in her small dressing room, Juliana Fall took a handful of ice chips and rubbed them on her cheeks and the back of her neck. She was so unbelievably hot! But it was her own fault. She’d left her long, pale blond hair down and had chosen a dress of heavy winter white silk-and the tiny seventeenth-century stone church had been her idea. It was packed with people. Her manager had fought her choice for weeks. Why make her Dutch premiere in a church with limited seating capacity when she could have had the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam? Was she crazy? No, she’d said, just adamant. She’d refused to explain that the church, in the old Delftshaven section of Rotterdam, was the one in which her parents had been married. It was the truth, but it sounded too sentimental for a rising international star in the highly fickle, competitive world of concert pianists.

Even at twenty-three, she was scrutinized not just for how she performed, but for what she wore, said, did-for everything. Already she was being touted as the most beautiful pianist in the world. One critic had raved about “her dark emerald eyes, which fill with passion even as she gives her trademark distant smile.” If only he’d paid as much attention to her interpretation of the Mozart sonata she’d performed.

She laughed, wondering what he’d say if he could see her smudged mascara and the sweat that had matted her dress to her skin and dampened her hair.

“Juliana?”

Johannes Peperkamp smiled sheepishly from the doorway. He was her uncle, a balding, gentle old man, tall and all bones inside his ill-fitting suit, with a big nose and a permanent soft, sad look in his blue eyes. He was sixty-six but looked eighty. Until that afternoon, he and Juliana had never met. He’d taken the train from Antwerp, where he was one of the world’s preeminent diamond cutters, and had taken his niece into his arms as if he’d known her all her life. He’d told her he owned all her recordings and liked to listen to them at dawn, when it was quiet. What a change from his younger sister! Wilhelmina Peperkamp was a stout, difficult woman. She lived in Delftshaven, one of the few sections of Rotterdam not demolished by the 1940 German bombings that had led to the capitulation of The Netherlands and the long Nazi occupation. Aunt Willie had been so annoyed at Juliana’s ignorance of Dutch that she’d refused to speak English for their first thirty minutes together. Catharina, Juliana’s mother and the youngest Peperkamp by thirteen years, had sat in quiet humiliation. She must have known-Juliana certainly did-that she was the one being criticized for not teaching her American daughter Dutch.

Juliana recovered from her surprise at seeing her uncle, and the indignity of being caught rubbing ice on her face. But she reminded herself that he was family. “Uncle Johannes, hello, what’re you doing back here?”

“I’ve brought you something,” he said in his own excellent English.

Juliana winced. Now? She had fifteen minutes to pull herself together for the second half of the concert. She snatched up a hand towel as her uncle withdrew a small, crumpled paper bag from inside his jacket. What was she supposed to say? The Peperkamps mystified her, and she wondered if her idea for a family reunion had been a good one after all. She’d already had to accept the mediocre instrument, the lousy acoustics, and, although the church was sold out, the comparatively small audience. But now the Peperkamps themselves were proving to be quite a handful. Her mother was obviously ill at ease with her older brother and sister, whom she rarely saw, and hadn’t had much to say since arriving in Rotterdam the night before. And Aunt Willie was impossible. After getting off to an inauspicious start with her niece, she’d snored through most of the first half of the concert.

And now this.

Johannes thrust the bag at her. “Please-open it.”

“But, I…”

She couldn’t bring herself to argue. Her uncle looked so eager, even desperate. Unprepossessing as his gift seemed, it meant a great deal to him, and with the death of his wife Ann a few years ago and no children of his own, Juliana guessed he was a lonely man. For the first time, she felt the weight of being the last of the Peperkamps. She could indulge him.

With the towel around her neck, she stuck her hand in the bag and pulled out a heavy object wrapped in faded purple velvet. Her uncle’s water blue eyes glittered as he urged her on. She unwrapped the velvet. In a moment, she held in her hand a large, cool rock. But her pulse had quickened, and she lifted her eyes to her old uncle, licking her lips, which had suddenly gone dry.

“Uncle Johannes, this isn’t-tell me this isn’t a diamond.”

The old man shook his head solemnly. “I can’t do that, Juliana.”

“But it’s too big to be a diamond!”

“It’s what we call rough. It has never been touched by a cutter’s tool.”

Juliana quickly wrapped up the stone and stuck it back in the bag. For four hundred years, diamonds had consumed the Peperkamps. They’d entered the trade in the late sixteenth century when Jewish diamond merchants had fled the Spanish Inquisition and arrived in more tolerant Amsterdam. The Peperkamps were Gentiles. Why they’d taken up one of the few trades open to Jews-and dominated by them, even today-remained a mystery. But it wasn’t one that interested Juliana. She considered diamonds ordinary and bland. Even ones like the Breath of Angels, which her Uncle Johannes had cut and was now in the Smithsonian, bored her. An exquisite stone, everyone said. She supposed it was, for a diamond.

“I’m flattered, Uncle Johannes, deeply flattered. But this must be a valuable stone, and I just can’t accept it. It would go to waste on me.”

“Juliana, this is the Minstrel’s Rough.”

“The what?”

A look of anguish, but not surprise, overcame the old man. “Then Catharina has never told you. I’ve often wondered.”

She listened for a note of criticism of her mother in his tone, looked for it in his expression, but saw none. Perhaps he knew as well as his niece that Catharina Peperkamp Fall rarely discussed the first twenty-five years of her life, the years during which she’d grown up in Amsterdam, with her daughter-or anyone else. When Juliana had complained to her father about her mother’s reticence, Adrian Fall had nodded sympathetically, for he too had been shut out from so much of his wife’s early life. But he said that it was Catharina’s past, not Juliana’s or his.

“She won’t approve of my telling you now, even less of my giving you the Minstrel,” Johannes Peperkamp went on heavily. “But I can’t let that stop me. I have a responsibility to future generations of our family-and to past generations.”

Juliana was beginning to question whether she should take her uncle seriously. Was he just a crazy old man? And what she was holding just a hunk of granite? But he seemed so intense, and his guttural accent lent a mysterious quality to his words. She said carefully, wiping her jaw with a corner of the towel, “I don’t understand, Uncle Johannes.”

“The Minstrel’s Rough has been in the Peperkamp family for four hundred years. We-your family-are its caretakers.”

“Is it-” Her voice was hoarse, her hands trembling as they never did when she performed. “Is it valuable?”