Stone 588 (3 page)

Each of her organs was explored and assessed. As were the integrants of each organ. All the way down to the microcosmic landscape of her cells.

The cause of Janet's mental disorder was determined.

A concentration of nerve cells in two areas of the hypothalamus of her brain were abnormal, malformed. They had axons too short. That made the gaps across to other cells twice as wide as they should have been.

At times that were almost a schedule, the chemical neurotransmitter called norepinephrine accumulated at the ends of each of those short axons, like traffic jams at bridges that are out. The more the secretions of this substance ganged up, the more hell they raised.

As a result Janet experienced mania, phases of belligerence, and, ultimately, violence.

At other times the chemical neurotransmitter acetylcholine brought its inhibiting qualities to the brinks of those abnormally wide gaps and collected there in unmanageable batches. Overdoses of its squelching influence got to the mental system. Janet was then overwhelmed by a phase of depression, her every thought and action stifled with dark ingoingness.

A bipolar disorder of a major affective disorder.

That was the diagnostic label the doctors put on what Janet had. Manic and depressive to extremes. The doctors had no way of knowing that malformed axons in the hypothalamus were behind it all. And even if they had known, there was nothing they could do about it. Brain cells don't change or repair. How ironic that the great suffering of Janet was the penalty of such an infinitesimal mistake, a matter of a few millionths of an inch. Born with it, she was stuck with it.

Now, restrained on her bed in her room at High Meadow, she lay absolutely still, compelled to stillness for some reason. She was unaware of the energy oscillating within her. It traveled now as though in response to a call, gathered in her brain and then, more specifically, in the domain of her hypothalamus. Concentrated, it focused upon the malformed axons.

The changes that took place within Janet's brain during the next two hours would have been impossible for the unaided eye to notice. Perhaps even the most powerful scanning electron microscope might not have picked them up.

Changes on the molecular level.

The defective axons, all the millions of them, were ever so gradually perfected—increased in length, five millionths of an inch. Just enough to perfect the width of the gap from cell to cell. Within a short while the neurotransmitters, acetylcholine and norepinephrine, were gotten into line. Secreted in tiny quantas, they began firing across the gaps at a nice, normal rate.

Altogether, the Righting of Janet took four hours.

Which would be about average.

For Janet it was a lifting of miasmas. Layer after layer of all the old interposing mists and overcasts were dissipated. Diffusion gave way degree by degree to a mental clarity as pure as washed air.

Janet did not trust it. The feeling was too strange for her to trust. With her eyes yet closed she lay there, not believing in it, suspecting it was a cruel tease, that she was merely being given a taste of sanity. She thought perhaps this was the moment before death when utmost wants were granted—although it felt more like life, she had to admit.

Ten minutes passed.

She hung on to it, believed it tenuous, breathed gently not to disturb.

A half hour.

Her outlook improved.

Warily, she opened her eyes.

The afternoon light was mostly gone, the room in dusk. It was later than supper time. No one had come to look in on her, at least not that she knew of. Where had the time gone?

The window was in direct view. She saw outside, blessed outside, where the new green of the maples was black against a sky with some indigo and mauve in it. She loved the leaves, the sky, the lenient colors it was presenting in this hyphenation of day and night. Her chest and eyes were crying.

The incongruity of her hands took her attention to them. They were still fisted. There was something hard in her right fist. From the feel of it she believed she knew what it was. She unfurled her fingers. Her hand was still held by a restraint so she had to raise her head to look at it.

It was from tip to tip a smidgen longer than an inch. Three quarters of an inch at its widest point. Octahedral in shape, like a pair of pyramids fused base to base, forming eight triangular sides. It wasn't a geometrically perfect octahedron. All its sides were not precisely the same measure, but nearly. One tip of it was incomplete, apparently chipped off. Except for that tip its surface was whitish-opaque, as though hazed with frost.

A rough crystal.

A stone.

Her father's reminder stone.

It had been among the belongings of his she'd had on his old dresser. During her rampage she must have unintentionally grabbed it up.

Forty-seventh Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues is not really a good place to walk a dog. Nor, for that matter, is it the best of places to walk a mistress.

Diamonds are why.

Rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and pearls too, but mainly diamonds. There are well over a thousand jewelry shops and concessions, counting from comer to comer along both sides of the street. Every window is arranged like an altar to avarice. On tier above tier in tray after tray precious stones are set, perfectly angled to wink and keep winking. They take such advantage, naked as they are against black velour. They are teasers, motionless Salomes. They flick their selves iniquitously on the stages of motives behind the eyes of in-lookers, suggesting the wantonness that might be given the giver in retum. Or, for the wanter, bringing up new resolves to accommodate old erotic persistencies, after which nothing could possibly be denied. Of course, the same is tme of such offerings at Cartier, Bulgari, Van Cleef's and other Fifth Avenue establishments, however, there the lust is rather oblique, more decently disguised and not so thoroughly atmospheric.

A fifteen-carat marquise diamond appears self-conscious of its relationship to the word reduced. In the same window is a tray that contains twenty-seven apparently identical diamond rings, each set with three quarters of a carat, pear shape. A platoon of rings, their shanks sunk in separate slots in the black velour, five slots down, six across. Three slots are purposely unoccupied, stuck with red plastic buttons that have the word sold imprinted on them, three of thousands of lies.

The street.

People in the trade now even leave off the number when they speak or think of it. Pelikaanstraat in Antwerp is a diamond place, as is Hatton Garden in London. But 47th in New York is "the street." It handles, one way or another, over half the finished diamonds in the world.

Such industry is unbelievable — at nine o'clock at night. Come night the street looks depressed. Shop next to shop next to shop appears vacated, the windows stripped, empty, exposing fades and dust boundaries on the velour surfaces. And beyond in the unlighted interiors the shelves of glass display cases are barren. The impression is that everyone packed up every carat in a hurry and fled. Truth is, of course, the precious stuff has been given over to the deep dark of vaults and safes. But it never sleeps. Darkness is an imposition to facets, perhaps even a suffering.

Come the day, the street awakens, more instantaneously vigorous than any other commercial street in Manhattan. It flashes open. Store windows and display counters are swiftly kindled with cold blaze, and the pitch seems already under way before it starts.

Especially outside along the sidewalks. They are sidewalks as ample as those of most east-west New York blocks, but here they are too narrow. Here the sidewalk is a place for negotiation, where men pause and stand together to conduct business in a manner that really isn't as much happenchance as it appears. For many the sidewalk is office, pockets are vaults. Many of that many are Hasidim, the most pious of orthodox Jews, unmistakable in their long black coats and beards. No neckties, white home-laundered shirts buttoned at the collar. Beneath the crowns of their black wide-brimmed hats, long hair hides, except in front on both sides, where gathers of strands to the chin are braided or curled into tubelike locks with a curling iron. The Hasidim — or beards, as they are called — seem less arduous somehow and therefore more confident. Their black outfits probably enhance that; surely their legion does. Whatever, the scurry goes past and around them, such as the carrying of stones from place to place. Every moment lots of the precious hard things are being taken to be seen, being returned. Those who bear them cut and thread through the street traffic swiftly, avoiding jostle, never allowing contact, stepping off the curb so as not to be brushed. Incidents of pocket-picking have taught overcaution.

The milieu of the street: Add the furtive hustlers wanting to look like thieves in their cheap shoes and team-type jackets, because it will help them pass off twenty-dollar-a-carat cubic zirconium as hot diamonds at two fifty a carat, take a quick two hundred. Then there are the authentic thieves, the swifts, small-time independents trying not to be taken for what they are in their cheap shoes and team-type jackets. They shift along in pairs or threes, unable to be casual, their score of the night before concealed on them as remotely as possible. They go in at places, come out, confer. They're angry that no interest has been shown in a gold-filled cameo brooch, or they're disappointed and pissed because the most they've been offered for a clean two-carat square-cut still in its Tiffany mounting is not even half of half what their minds have already been spending.

Add in too: the flavor of Colombians. Usually gaunt and tight-suited young men but sometimes older, with a paunch that a jacket can just barely be buttoned over. They are in from a barrio of Bogota or Cartagena, cocaine mules who have gotten through and unloaded. They have also brought their bonus, have it in the safest pocket: one or two hundred carats of cut emerald to peddle. They look only slightly more out of place than the middle-aged ex-wives in from Huntington or Paterson or New Haven wanting to sell away some of their recent alienation. Rings, pins, minor bracelets, things that actually never were favorites serve the vengeance.

All this at street level.

Above is where the heavier action is, in the buildings that with only one or two exceptions are prewar. The tallest is thirteen floors, the average is seven. The reason there are no new high-rises on the street is that no one, neither landlords nor tenants, wants to lose what can be made during the months needed to tear a building down and put another up. Thus, the old buildings have been divided and subdivided to the bulging point.

Precious stones are small. Even the largest dealers can make do with little room. It also helps that it is against the grain of the trade itself to try to impress. Still, even with cramp, there is not enough of the street. Like a garden taking over, it has spread north to 48th and south to 46th and, as well, grown around all the comers it shares with its adjacent avenues.

The diamond firm of Springer & Springer was part of that spillover.

But by choice.

It preferred being just around the way at 580 Fifth. That building was somewhat newer and taller, and Springer & Springer considered itself satisfactorily in place on the twenty-fourth floor with north exposure. Its space there was ample but certainly not excessive. Seven hundred and eighty-some square feet partitioned into a reception area, three windowed offices, and a small catchall room that had a coffee-making machine and a refrigerator in it. Wall-to-wall wool carpeting in a gray shade was unifying to some extent, though it would have been too much of a stretch to say the place was decorated. Furnished was closer to fact. The reception area was a grade better than the rest. The desk of polished chrome and thick clear glass matched the low table in front of a chesterfield sofa of black leather. Next to that a ficus was getting along fairly well in a blue glazed porcelain planter that was sort of Chinese. Otherwise there wasn't any evident try for coordination or color. The walls, ceilings, and doors were all painted as white as possible for no reason other than to keep the diamonds honest.

On the third Friday of May, Phillip Springer was at his desk. Seated across from him was a dealer named Arthur Drumgold.

Springer had never done business with Drumgold before. He could only vaguely remember having heard mention of him, which was strange considering the man claimed acquaintance with Springer's late father.

"Our ways converged occasionally," was how Drumgold put it. "We shared a few amusements and consolations."

He was British, thickly accented. His hair was yellowish white, sparse, combed straight back and held stiffly in place by whatever he used on it. One could see the tracks made by his comb's teeth. "Honorable man, your father . . ."

Springer was used to hearing it.

". . . but likable as well," Drumgold said, implying the two qualities together were rare in the business. He asked Springer's permission to smoke and brought out an antique silver and enamel case too small for today's cigarettes. He had snipped an inch off his Rothmans so they fit.

Springer hadn't thought Drumgold would be so old. Late seventies was his guess. It was not unheard of but unusual for a man Drumgold's age to still be out peddling stones from country to country. Springer didn't put too much stock in his observations that Drumgold's shirt cuffs were a bit too frayed for starch to conceal, that his business card was inexpensively ink embossed rather than engraved, and that there were several lighter spots on his tie where he'd dabbed it with cleaner. The ethic that only the totally heartless would bargain to the bone with a man in need was too often used to advantage. Besides, Springer was overwary by habit when it came to business. Only moments after receiving Drumgold's call requesting an appointment and using Fred Holtzer as reference, Springer had placed a verifying call to Holtzer in Geneva. Holtzer's admission to the referral was somewhat apologetic, but Springer recognized that as typical self-exoneration before the fact —in case anything went sour.