In plotting his investigations, Malisse took a Darwinistic approach; in teaching students how to correctly go about them, his method was Socratic. Would it have been better if the lung arose before the gill? he’d sometimes asked to elicit discourse from the lads. Certainly it was the more efficient breathing organ. But how would the first amphibian have fared had not fish preceded it on evolution’s ladder? What could it have done, poor creature, but drown in the salty darkness of some primeval sea? On that sequential glitch, that missed link, as it were, the genesis of terrestrial life would have been brought to a full stop. The frog, the snake, the rodent and higher mammals, none would have ever come into existence. Mankind would have been an undreamt dream. And so it was with the investigative probe: It must proceed in orderly stages or else was destined to falter and fizzle.
Malisse’s small minority of sharp-witted, committed freshmen had taken this lesson to heart and remained splendid and miserably underpaid field operatives throughout their careers; the greater percentage of them, scoffing mediocrities, had gotten promotions to comfortable desk jobs in the Sûreté’s bureaucratic hierarchy.
To each man, his own rewards, Malisse supposed.
Now he sat by himself in the Starbucks café on West 47th Street off Sixth Avenue, drinking a Caramel Macchiato, dipping and taking an occasional bite of his chocolate éclair, and observing the street outside the window with characteristic diligence, inferior as this spot might be. The beverage had nicely warmed his insides while no doubt further eating away at the already eroded lining of his duodenum, aggravating his peptic ulcers — benign despite their burning pain, his doctors had assured — with its high concentration of sugary syrup and caffeine. But it was nine-thirty in the morning, and Malisse’s insatiable sweet tooth awoke when he did at the crack of dawn, as did his craving for tobacco. The latter remained unassuaged, since smokers in America, and this city in particular, were not only stigmatized by their habit, but heavily taxed and penalized, a legal harassment that left them with nowhere to have a cigarette except the streets and, presumably, their own toilets. Saloons, too, were off limits… what was the point of ordering a cocktail, he wondered, if not to delight in puffing a Gitanes or Dunhill between swallows? Malisse didn’t understand — was he not right now in the celebrated land of the free? He’d even had to settle for a nonsmoking room at his hotel, all others having been occupied. Thank heaven for the consolation of his hot beverage, and the éclair, which was his self-prescribed method of soaking up some of its acids.
He sat, sipped, dipped, and watched the early-bird buyers and sellers head toward their retail stores, street-level market booths, and offices here on what was known as Jewelry Way. Hasidic males dominated the center, although not to the exclusion of women or any other group. Sprinkled among them were secular Jews, Asians, Africans, Australians… Malisse knew there were traders of every nation, religion, and ethnicity passing between the diamond lampposts at the north and south sides of the block over on Sixth. Might the Katari gentleman of whom he’d been told be among them? Moreover, he wondered, would Katari prove integral or irrelevant to his probe? Time and persistence would tell.
Regarding his main player of interest, Malisse wished he could have found a superior vantage from which to monitor Avram Hoffman’s arrival at the Diamond Dealers Club this morning, the third of his open-ended surveillance. In the days since Malisse had followed Hoffman from Antwerp to New York — an affair that entailed some hurried packing, a shaky trip aboard an F50 prop, and a nearly missed connection at Heathrow — what surer formula for jet-lagged exhaustion? — he’d stayed close to the DDC entrance down at the corner of Fifth Avenue, remaining out on the street, browsing storefront displays, dawdling at newspaper stands, and generally weaving his way through and among the crowd. Cold as it was, he’d been able to keep the building’s doors in easy sight and incidentally enjoy an occasional cigarette… reminding himself of the murderous heat of Rance Lembock’s office whenever his bones protested against the low outdoor temperature. But this was post-tragedy Manhattan, where anonymity had come to have a paradoxical downside. In a city of strangers, unfamiliar faces now took on an air of the conspicuous. Passersby were wary of those who might once have escaped their notice as ignored nonentities, blending in amid the urban multitude. Teams of police officers in flak vests, armed with bullpup submachine guns and accompanied by bomb-sniffing German shepherds, could be seen guarding the entrances to large stores and office buildings against terrorist strikes. If Malisse were perceived to be loitering about the block, he, the honest investigator, might himself become a target of curiosity or criminal suspicion. And Lembock had been emphatic about keeping the authorities — and the Secretariat, for that matter — out of this business at any cost. Worried about a scandal that could soil the reputation of the bourses at a time when some in the trade had already assigned them to the junk bin of antiquated global institutions, he wanted to be sure of knowing the facts before they got out of the bag.
And so Malisse had today migrated from the street to his current unexposed position in the café. While offering the niceties of warmth, a cushioned seat, a steaming drink, and pastries, it hindered his ability to do his work, demanded a reliance on his informant within the DDC’s security detail to keep him notified of Avram’s comings and goings, and, not inconsequentially, prevented him from lighting up.
Malisse, however, could not complain about Jeffreys. He showed every sign of being a dependable set of eyes and ears, and had been quick to message him with confirmation of Avram’s appearance at the club. Everything had so far gone smoothly and according to plan.
Plan A, that was.
Which was why Delano Malisse shied from taking optimism too far. If Avram Hoffman was involved in dealing illicitly obtained gemstones — or wondrous fakes — Malisse was confident he could prove it and track them to their source.
He just had a gut feeling that it wouldn’t be as simple as A, B, C, or unfortunately D.
Nimec was watching Megan take a quick turn at the speed bag when he happened to notice Chris out the corner of his eye. A minute earlier the kid had been following Meg’s every move. Now he’d suddenly gone wandering over to the plate tree near Nimec’s free-weight bench.
Nimec saw him spin one of the large thirty-five-pound weights on its post with both hands, and almost winced as he pictured it slipping off to drop straight down onto his foot.
“Chris,” he said. “Don’t mess with that.”