Blood Stones (16 page)

‘I've opened your mail and sorted through it. There are two overnight faxes, one from New York and another from Reece in Johannesburg. Everything's on your desk. Oh, and some bills have been sent on from Thurloe Square. Would you like to see them, or shall I just take care of them and let you have a note later?'

‘Take care of them,' he said. ‘And get me Ivan Karakov. He's in his office around ten.'

She watched him walk into his office and close the door. She would take dictation when he'd read his mail, probably put calls through for him to London and arrange appointments for the afternoon. A lot of French companies were eager to make contact with him, and the company brokers wanted a meeting. At ten o'clock exactly she called Ivan Karakov's office in rue St Honore.

Then she went into James's office. ‘Karakov couldn't take your call,' she said. ‘His secretary said he was in a meeting.'

He said, ‘Did she say when he'd be free?'

‘She couldn't give a time,' Ruth answered. She decided to drop the barrier a little. ‘I didn't believe a word of it,' she said.

‘I don't either,' James found himself dropping the barrier too. ‘Old bastard.'

‘Mr Hastings?'

‘Yes?'

‘Could I suggest something? Don't call him back. He's snubbed you. Leave it for a day or so.'

James said slowly, ‘I may just do that, Ruth. Personalities aren't important. But my position as D.E.'s representative is. Call again on Wednesday. He should have talked with David Wasserman by then.'

Ivan Leonid Karakov had been born in a dingy New York tenement seventy-one years ago; his grandfather was a diamond merchant who had hawked his stones round the houses of the rich bourgeoisie in Smolensk and made an occasional sale to the gentry. He sold gold and silver trinkets, boxes and curios, and he had travelled constantly, buying and selling from other merchants. He was a middle-aged man when the last pogrom began, and he had gathered his family together and gone into hiding once too often, while his house was pillaged and his friends whipped through the streets. He made a decision then which was being made by other minority groups all over the world. He left Russia and settled in the United States. Ivan's father was his eldest son, and he was twenty when the family came to New York. None of them could speak a word of English, or had any relatives to go to, but their own community took them in and helped them, and Ivan's father began to ply their trade, and taught the rudiments of it to his own son as he grew up. Their name was not Karakov; Ivan had chosen that for himself when he left home. He had seen it on a shop front downtown selling high-quality leather goods; it had a dramatic sound that appealed to him. He was twenty-five then, and full of electricity; ideas foamed out of him, and all of them were big, bold, impossible schemes which made his conservative father wince. But Ivan knew where he was going, and that was as far away from the family jewellery business as he could get. His father was a good man, and he loved him, but he was small and he thought small. He had a good little business and he didn't want to make it bigger. He wouldn't let Ivan make it bigger, either, and so Ivan decided to go out on his own. He had raised loans and invested the money in diamonds, most of them loose stones. He rented rooms in a good downtown district and had business cards printed:
Ivan Karakov. Fine Diamonds
. Then he went into business. He had a natural genius for business and the same kind of genius for diamonds. His father had trained him well; he knew a lot about stones and he learned more. He had a sixth sense for what was good and what would sell. And he had a way with people. Even his enemies said he could sell a diamond to the Oppenheimers if he made up his mind.

The bank's money was repaid, and there was a balance of a hundred thousand dollars in the Karakov account. By this time Ivan was thirty-two. He had an office at a smart address up in the East fifties, and he was shrewd enough not to settle in the diamond belt around 46th where there was a jeweller every five yards and the tourists walked down just to look. He didn't identify with the rest. That way people remembered him. He was an easy man to remember and an easy man to like, especially if he was trying to sell to you. He was tall and plump, going very bald, with a neat moustache and small, sharp features; he wore glasses, but his eyes were always bright, too bright to stay on any one object for long, unless it was a diamond, and then they searched as if they were drawing the colours of the spectrum out of the stone itself, searching for flaws, for irregularity, for possibilities of re-cutting. He had a fantastic artistic sense and took risks. His favourite anecdote about himself was the story of a visit he paid to a rich socialite on Long Island after he'd been established for a few years, and his name was filtering through to the big spenders. This woman was well known for her jewels. As soon as Ivan opened his case to show her a few top-grade pieces, he knew she wasn't going to buy anything and had never meant to; she wanted to show him what she had and get his opinion for nothing. It was a trick people often played, and it lost the dealer valuable time and seldom ended in a sale.

But Ivan played it, as he said, right off the cuff. He put his own goods back and settled down to a long session with the client about the quality of her jewels. He admired everything; when she mentioned prices he never indicated that he thought she'd paid too much. He paid her compliments and talked and told her stories and every so often he picked up a diamond solitaire set as a pendant and looked at it again and again. It wasn't for sale, she said. It made Ivan laugh to recall how much she was enjoying herself. He protested that he didn't think it was; it was one of the finest diamonds he'd seen in his life. If she offered it he couldn't give her what the stone was worth. But it was such a pity that the cutting wasn't right. He had explained to her that in his opinion the refractions could be improved by cutting down the sides and eliminating a flaw near the outer edge of the table. If this was done, he said, she'd have a unique diamond, worth three times its present value. By the end of the afternoon, he left the house with the stone and a commission to re-cut and reset it. He took the train back to New York and went to the best cutter in the business. He had known the stone should be re-cut, but there was only one person he knew who could do the cutting. The cutter had his own factory and his three sons were top craftsmen. They sat round the stone with Ivan for three weeks, measuring and making designs. They agreed with him: it should be re-cut; the diamond was a little over 45 carats and blue-white, but poorly cut. The result could be superb. But Ivan knew his client; the stone had to be re-cut so that the weight loss wouldn't matter, and the design must enhance the importance as well as the colour. At the end of three weeks they had agreed on a design, and the famous Karakov cut was born. The diamond was delivered as a unique baton-shaped stone of 29.8 carats. He had set it in a ring and it was revealed in breathtaking purity and fire. Ivan charged the owner more for that re-cut than he could have done for anything in his entire stock, and it made him. He was flooded with orders for baton-shaped solitaires. The cutter came under contract to him, and one of his sons was made permanent consultant in the New York office. A new way had been found to cut fine diamonds, and it was the rage in the trade. It was copied, and the way Ivan confounded his imitators was to buy the biggest and finest stones, and charge staggering prices.

He enjoyed doing business more than just making money, though the profits were enormous. He employed the best men in the trade and he paid them the top wages. By the time he was thirty-seven he was a millionaire and he had married Laura Hancock. Until then he'd been too busy to marry; his father had died grieving because his clever son hadn't taken time off to found a family, and his younger brother was not interested. He had the old man's business and he was content. Ivan liked women; they relaxed him, they enjoyed his stories, and they slept with him readily in the hope that he would give them a diamond, which he did. Most of them liked him; he was a virile man and he gave as much as he got out of his sexual encounters. He had always taken up with blondes; he liked them tall, because it made him feel important, and he liked them to be easy-going and dumb, but not so dumb they didn't know how to behave. He was very conscious of the refinements of life. He had met Laura Hancock at a dinner party given by one of his clients. She was much smaller than he was, pale-skinned and golden blonde. She looked like a pretty, clever doll. Her father was a rich East Coast psychiatrist, and she was his only child. She was intelligent, a graduate of Vassar, which really impressed him, and very sure of herself. He found her fascinating.

He invited her out. He didn't try to sleep with her; he knew from the look in those bright eyes that she wouldn't let him. At the end of six months he asked her to marry him. They both had the feeling they were founding a dynasty, and they went to bed like royalty, determined to procreate. In bed the doll turned out to be a real enthusiast. Ivan had got himself the perfect combination; he had a mistress, a wife who ran his home like a super machine, a mother to his two children, and a business partner who ran rings round everyone else in the office. Their great disappointment was having no son, but she couldn't be blamed for that. He had been married to her for a number of years before he stopped to think of her as a person, and he was surprised when he realized that she wasn't a nice woman. She was clever; she was efficient; she never nagged him, except when she thought he had made a bad deal; she got on well with everybody it was wise to get on with. She was good to their daughters; she watched over their education and their health and kept him informed about them without worrying him if he had something important on his mind. She amassed treasures with him so that their last apartment was a showplace, and in spite of the gold plate and the bed which had belonged to the Empress Josephine, there wasn't a vulgar touch in anything she did. But she just wasn't nice; he couldn't identify a soft spot for anyone in her character, except where her children were concerned. She didn't love him, he realized that. To Laura, love meant sex, and when she talked about love that was what she meant.

He realized all of this when he could have done with a little love outside of bed. He reached a crisis in his business life during the Sixties when a new and dazzling salesman gained the ascendancy in the US Market with a revolutionary cut and designs of his own. Harry Winston was a phenomenon and Ivan knew his own position at the top was threatened. Americans loved the newcomer; there was no loyalty in the very rich, they followed the fashion, and Winston was the newest and most dynamic in the world of super retail jewellery. Ivan could see his business waning and it brought him close to a clinical depression.

Laura was typically cool and pragmatic. ‘You Russians,' she said to him. ‘You love to sit around wringing your hands. You can't compete with Harry, so why try?' It had been her idea to move the headquarters of the business to Paris, leaving an office and showroom on Park Avenue to fly the flag. It was something he would never have thought of doing. He regarded himself as bound by the American market. As investigations showed, Europe was booming. Germany had accomplished a miracle in spite of being cut in half by the East-West divide, France was on the economic bandwagon after the end of the Algerian war and stable Government under de Gaulle, and Japan and the oil-rich Middle East was a bottomless well with mega rich vying with each other to spend the most.

The move to Paris fired him with a new enthusiasm. He rediscovered his European roots. He talked of himself, in a thick New York accent, as a Russian refugee. About the same time he discovered that Laura had been sleeping with one of his young salesmen. It was a terrible shock to him. He had thought that, in spite of the blondes, he had managed to keep her reasonably happy. He fired the salesman. When he reproached her angrily, she had only looked at him and shrugged. ‘Why get so mad about it? It meant nothing; you're always tired and busy with the move these days. Pay more attention to me, honey, and I won't do it.' He hadn't caught her out again for five years and by that time it was too late; their daughters were growing up and he didn't care enough about her to threaten. He just told her to be careful and they never mentioned it again. She made amends in her own way by dismissing the man herself. It was a French salesman, even younger than her lover in America. He knew what to expect by then, and he had consoled himself with a nice-natured Swedish girl who worked in the Paris office. He visited her off and on for a year, and at the end of it, just because she'd been kind and mothered him a little, he gave her a valuable diamond as a goodbye present. It was 8.6 carats and a fine colour. He had set it at the end of a platinum chain. He wished he'd had a camera to get a shot of the girl's face when she saw it. It would have made the diamond advertisement of the year. Two days later Laura came into the office and picked out a 20-carat blue-white stone, which was priced at $250,000, and said she'd like it as a ring – diamonds on chains didn't suit her. He always reckoned that the Swede was the most expensive piece of tail he'd ever had. That was just like Ivan; he was a character. He was getting to the age when he liked to be talked about in that way. He began to tell some of his clients how he started his business, and the details got a little exaggerated until he wasn't sure of the truth himself. He collected cuttings through an agency, so he could read everything that was written about him or his business. He began buying famous jewels, not only to reset and resell them at three times their original cost, but to get publicity for himself. And he loved the stones. He had agents everywhere who went to auction sales in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Rome, and who got the first offer from the big Antwerp dealers if a really good stone came on the market. He had one man he considered the finest judge of diamonds in the world, even better than D.E.'s David Wasserman, and that was Ernst Richter. He liked and trusted Ernst. Ernst travelled all over the world to buy diamonds for him. He could leave it to Ernst to choose the best; indeed, it was Ernst's repeated complaints that started the war with Diamond Enterprises. Ivan was old now and he liked to make a play on his age; he liked to pity himself loudly because he worked so hard and never went on a vacation, but he was as strong as an ox and as alert as he had ever been. If he had flagged at all in the past year or two, this battle with D.E. was like a new campaign to an old conqueror. He was the biggest man in the diamond business, because Winston was dead, and he knew it. He lived the part and he believed it; he knew what his power meant in terms of money and prestige. He sold the élite of the world their jewels and he bought the priceless and put a price on it that someone somewhere in the world was rich enough to pay. Like the red diamonds. They were his secret weapon in the war he had declared against the whole power structure of Diamond Enterprises. With these priceless jewels, he could break their monopoly, and hold the industry to ransom if he felt like it. And he did feel like it. He felt a sense of mission, which was to open up the restricted diamond markets of the world to the newly liberated Russia with which he firmly identified himself. He had forgotten his grandfather and the pogroms, buried his own cultural heritage, and presented himself as a patriot returning to his roots in the Ukraine. He had given his diamonds a spurious name and invented an Imperial Russian provenance that pandered to his love of royalty. The Romanov Diamonds. Property of the doomed dynasty of the Tsars … They were in the mighty steel safe in his office, enclosed in an inner safe, and nobody but Ernst Richter and his team of cutters had ever seen them. Not even Laura. However, he allowed the rumours about them to seep through the trade, confident that after a time the big fish would begin to bite. One of them had. The biggest. His richest and most discerning client, a man who would be negotiating hard if he had been approached directly.