He nodded, drove through traffic, found the shop.
“Great,” I said. “Now this time you’ll have to answer the car phone whether you like it or not, because there’s nowhere here to park.”
He shook his head. He’d resisted the suggestion several times before.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s very easy. I’ll switch it on for you now. When it rings pick it up and press this button, SND, and you’ll be able to hear me. OK? I’ll ring when I’m ready to leave, then you just come back here and pick me up.”
He looked at the telephone as if it were contaminated.
It was a totally portable phone, not a fixture in the car, and it didn’t receive calls unless one switched it on, which I quite often forgot to do and sometimes didn’t do on purpose. I put the phone ready on the passenger seat beside him, to make it easy, and hoped for the best.
Prospero Jenks’s shopwindow glittered with the sort of intense lighting that makes jewelry sparkle, but the lettering of his name over the window was neat and plain, as if ostentation there would have been superfluous.
I looked at the window with a curiosity I would never have felt a week earlier and found it filled not with conventional displays of rings and wristwatches but with joyous toys: model cars, airplanes, skiing figures, racing yachts, pheasants and horses, all gold and enamel and shining with gems. Almost every passerby, I noticed, paused to look.
Pushing awkwardly through the heavy glass front door, I stepped into a deep carpeted area with chairs at the ready before every counter. Apart from the plushness, it was basically an ordinary shop, not very big, quiet in decor, all the excitement in the baubles.
There was no one but me in there and I swung over to one of the counters to see what was on display. Rings, I found, but not simple little circles. There were huge, often asymmetric, all colorful eye-catchers supreme.
“Can I help you?” a voice said.
A neutral man, middle-aged, in a black suit, coming from a doorway at the rear.
“My name’s Franklin,” I said. “Came to see Prospero Jenks.”
“A minute.”
He retreated, returned with a half smile and invited me through the doorway to the privacies beyond. Shielded from customers’ view by a screening partition lay a much longer space which doubled as office and workroom and contained a fearsome-looking safe and several tiers of little drawers like the ones in Saxony Franklin. On one wall a large framed sign read NEVER TURN YOUR BACK TO CUSTOMERS. ALWAYS WATCH THEIR HANDS.
A fine statement of no trust, I thought in amusement.
Sitting on a stool by a workbench, a jeweler’s lens screwed into one eye, was a hunched man in pale pink and white striped shirtsleeves fiddling intently with a small gold object fixed into a vise. Patience and expert workmanship were much on view, all of it calm and painstaking.
He removed the lens with a sigh and rose to his feet, turning to inspect me from crown to crutches to toecaps with growing surprise. Whatever he’d been expecting, I was not it.
The feeling, I supposed, was mutual. He was maybe fifty but looked younger in a Peter Pan sort of way; a boyish face with intense bright blue eyes and a lot of lines developing across the forehead. Fairish hair, no beard, no mustache, no personal display. I had expected someone fancier, more extravagant, temperamental.
“Grev’s brother?” he said. “What a turn-up. There I was, thinking you’d be his age, his height.” He narrowed his eyes. “He never said he had a brother. How do I know you’re legit?”
“His assistant, Annette Adams, made the appointment.”
“Yes, so she did. Fair enough. Told me Grev was dead, long live the King. Said his brother was running the shop, life would go on. But I’ll tell you, unless you know as much as Grev, I’m in trouble.”
“I came to talk to you about that.”
“It don’t look like tidings of great joy,” he said, watching me judiciously. “Want a seat?” He pointed at an office chair for me and took his place on the stool. His voice was a long way from cut-glass. More like East-end London tidied up for West; the sort that came from nowhere with no privileges and made it to the top from sheer undeniable talent. He had the confident manner of long success, a creative spirit who was also a tradesman, an original artist without airs.
“I’m just learning the business,” I said cautiously. “I’ll do what I can.”
“Grev was a genius,” he said explosively. “No one like him with stones. He’d bring me oddities, one-of-a-kinds from all over the world, and I’ve made pieces...” He stopped and spread his arms out. “They’re in palaces,” he said, “and museums and mansions in Palm Beach. Well, I’m in business. I sell them to wherever the money’s coming from. I’ve got my pride, but it’s in the pieces. They’re good, I’m expensive, it works a treat.”
“Do you make everything you sell?” I asked.
He laughed. “No, not myself personally, I couldn’t. I design everything, don’t get me wrong, but. I have a workshop making them. I just make the special pieces myself, the unique ones. In between, I invent for the general market. Grev said he had some decent spinel, have you still got it?”
“Er,” I said, “red?”
“Red,” he affirmed. “Three, four or five carats. I’ll take all you’ve got.”
“We’ll send it tomorrow.”
“By messenger,” he said. “Not post.”
“All right.”
“And a slab of rock crystal like the Eiger. Grev showed me a photo. I’ve got a commission for a fantasy. Send the crystal too.”
“All right,” I said again, and hid my doubts. I hadn’t seen any slab of rock crystal. Annette would know, I thought.
He said casually, “What about the diamonds?”
I let the breath out and into my lungs with conscious control.
“What about them?” I said.
“Grev was getting me some. He’d got them, in fact. He told me. He’d sent a batch off to be cut. Are they back yet?”
“Not yet,” I said, hoping I wasn’t croaking. “Are those the diamonds he bought a couple of months ago from the Central Selling Organisation that you’re talking about?”
“Sure. He bought a share in a sight from a sightholder. I asked him to. I’m still running the big chunky rings and necklaces I made my name in, but I’m setting some of them now with bigger diamonds, making more profit per item since the market will stand it, and I wanted Grev to get them because I trust him. Trust is like gold dust in this business, even though diamonds weren’t his thing, really. You wouldn’t want to buy two-to-three-carat stones from just anyone, even if they’re not D or E flawless, right?”
“Er, right.”
“So he bought the share of the sight and he’s having them cut in Antwerp as I need them, as I expect you know.”
I nodded. I did know, but only since he’d just told me.
“I’m going to make stars of some of them to shine from the rock crystal...” He broke off, gave a self deprecating shrug of the shoulders, and said, “And I’m making a mobile, with diamonds on gold trembler wires that move in the lightest air. It’s to hang by a window and flash fire in the sunlight.” Again the self-deprecation, this time in a smile. “Diamonds are ravishing in sunlight, they’re at their best in it, and all the social snobs in this city scream that it’s so frightfully vulgar, darling, to wear diamond earrings or bracelets in the daytime. It makes me sick, to be honest. Such a waste.”
I had never thought about diamonds in sunlight before, though I supposed I would in future. Vistas opened could never be closed, as maybe Greville would have said.
“I haven’t caught up with everything yet,” I said, which was the understatement of the century. “Have any of the diamonds been delivered to you so far?”