“Wouldn’t that get her killed?’ I asked Jim once, skeptically. “I mean, if it’s true that she does that. Or thrown in jail or something.”
“I don’t think anyone has actually ever caught her at it, Bobby,” Jim said. “Plus she does a lot of business with those fellas. It’s like her commission, I guess. They’re all too busy staring at her legs to notice anyway.”
When Granddad heard we were putting her to work at our place he called me and told me not to do business with the Gypsy.
“I’ve known her since I was a kid, Granddad,” I reassured him. “She helped me sell my first Rolex.” That was not true but she had helped me sell plenty of them. She was the most dexterous liar I had ever met.
“She’s Russian mob, Grandson,” Granddad said. “We don’t want those guys in your store.”
He was a silent investor and he knew how to play by those elegant rules. But I could hear in his voice that he wanted to tell me I wasn’t allowed to hire her at all.
She liked to wear oversized gold hoop earrings. You might have thought that was why some people called her the Gypsy. But they called her the Gypsy because of a different story that no one liked to talk about. It wasn’t because she was a Gypsy, but because of something she was supposed to have done to some Gypsies.
I left Joe in my office and found her in back, at her desk, browsing through jewelry catalogues. She was wearing a bright green dress and her pale, snow-colored legs were bare. She was loveliest when she was concentrating on something, like she was at the moment. I stopped to look at her, for a moment, before she knew I was watching her. You couldn’t help yourself. She makes Kate Moss look like a dog’s belly, I thought.
She turned the pages in the catalogue. She would often tear out a page, look at it carefully, and then crumple it and throw it away. Like all independent custom jewelers, we ordered catalogues from every jewelry store and manufacturer in the world to get ideas for designs and to anticipate new trends. It didn’t work particularly well, but looking for designs was a job our people enjoyed.
She started to show me a new Cartier design that she wanted to knock off, but I interrupted her and said, “Could you go sit with Morgan? Could you entertain him for a minute?”
I had the bracelet in my hand. I held it out to her to explain.
“Ha! Good. That old cowboy. He is horny,” she said.
I did not know how to respond to that remark.
“Bring him a couple of those eggs on a plate, would you?”
“No, I won’t. Those eggs disgust me. An Oriental person would eat them.”
“Polack, come on. Would you help me out, please? As a favor?”
I took the emerald bracelet to Old John. I pulled him back to the polishing room, where we could speak discreetly.
Old John was a former helicopter gunner who held the first bench in our jewelry store. At Popper’s Old John had always worked in the basement—“like the Roman god Vulcan,” Old John used to say — but in our store he sat right up front. All of our jewelers worked in the front-of-the-house. Jim said the customers would worry about their jewelry less, while it was being worked on, if they could keep an eye on it. The best jeweler sat up front. From up front you could watch the teenage girls go in and out of Victoria’s Secret through the big bay window next to the double doors. Tommy, our second-best bench man, sat behind Old John, and behind Tommy was Larry, et cetera, down to the back of the store, where the polishing wheels were. The exception was our wax carver, who always held the last bench because he claimed you couldn’t carve waxes with people watching.
Although Old John used solder to fill the gaps in his channel setting he was a patient jeweler, and was the only one who could reliably work with platinum without costing us money. He never broke diamonds, not even the corners on princess cuts. He worked late like Jim and me. But we came in early and we never asked Old John to come in before noon. Often, after the store was closed and everyone else had gone home, he would tell me about his time as a gunner in Vietnam, or his year in prison in Mexico, or the seven years he did at Leavenworth, in Kansas, where he learned to be a jeweler. It’s a fact many people don’t know, that most jewelers and watchmakers learn how to sit on the bench while in prison.
Old John dyed his hair jet-black. He kept a jade-handled.45 chained to his bench. At Christmas he brought his boa in for the late nights and fed it mice in the store. He was five-foot-three. He drove a small, light, bruised Ford truck. His cheeks were as yellow and shiny as a tortoise’s bottom shell. His lunch and his dinner came to work with him in Tupperware, and he brought his own special coffee in a canteen. He did not drink or smoke, and unlike almost every other jeweler I have ever known, he didn’t take speed or other stimulants. I admired his asceticism.
“Old John, I have a problem,” I said. “We need this bracelet to be platinum.”
He inspected it dubiously.
“I don’t feel very good about pulling those emeralds,” Old John said.
“Me neither,” I said. “Plus we don’t have the time to remake the whole thing. So, let’s do it the old-fashioned way.”
“Change the stamp,” Old John said.
“I think it’s for the best,” I said. “He’s not buying today, but we may as well do it right now. In case he wants to loupe the emeralds. I don’t want him to notice the numbers. Be careful when you’re polishing it. Then bring it back over to me on the other side.”
“Is this a smart idea?” he said. “Does Jim know about this?”
“Old John, it’s important,” I said. “We’re not going to make a habit of it.”
What Old John was doing for me was grinding out the “18kw,” or eighteen-karat white gold stamps, on the bracelet — there were two, one on the tongue of the box clasp and one on the undercarriage — and restamping the bracelet “Pt,” or platinum. He would rhodium-plate the whole afterward to give it that false brightness of freshly polished platinum. This was a common trick in the industry — restamping one karat weight or kind of metal as another — which I tried to avoid because it was amateurish, and easily discovered if the piece in question was ever inspected by another appraiser. Nevertheless, on certain occasions it was handy.
Back in my office the Polack and Morgan were laughing together. My favorite thing about the Polack was when I made her laugh. She looked much happier than most people. And, especially, happier than Wendy. But I wasn’t crazy about it when other men got her laughing.
Morgan took the bottle and poured himself another bourbon. I always left the bottle on the desk, but not too close to him, so that he would never think I was encouraging him to drink. In reach, with a stretch.
“What do you think, girl?” He grabbed her knee with his hand. Then he winked at me and let go. “You taken a look at that old emerald bracelet? Your boss here is trying to rope me into another one of his hundred-thousand-dollar jewelry deals. What do you think, ole Polack? You think that bracelet would make a nice Christmas present for my wife?”
“This bracelet is for a woman of her kind. Your wife is the type of beautiful woman, Mr. Joe Morgan. So, yes, the bracelet.”
Yes, the bracelet. I liked that. Good close, Polack, I thought.
“Mr. Morgan? Did you call me Mr. Morgan, girl? Mr. Morgan was my father! How many times do I have to tell you to call me Joe?”
“That’s not a Christmas present, Joe,” I said. We were half a year away from Christmas. I didn’t have that kind of time. “Your anniversary is barely a month away. That’s an anniversary piece. We’ll figure something else out for Christmas. For anniversaries you want something that will stay in the family. Something your wife can pass down to your daughter. That bracelet is a Morgan family heirloom. At that price, especially. Here, Joe, let me see that pinkie ring of yours. When was the last time I cleaned that for you? Polack, would you mind taking this little diamond of Joe’s next door and have Christian give it a tighten and polish?”