Earl put on his underwear, socks, jeans, and sweater, fetched his boots from where he’d left them by the door, and sat on the edge of the bed to get his feet into them, jerking their tops up over his ankles.
He didn’t care about the millions. Not a whit. If all those people didn’t make it into the next dawn, Earl would shed about as many tears for them as had been cried for him throughout his entire life… which came to a grand total of none.
They could fend for themselves, the same way he’d always looked out for himself.
The way he would keep looking out for himself today, tonight, tomorrow, and on into all the tomorrows they might or might not live to see.
“Good to see you again… Mr. Friedman, that right?”
Malisse stood facing Jeffreys in the entrance lobby of the DDC building on West 47th Street, a black vinyl garment bag folded over his left arm, a hard-shell briefcase in his opposite hand.
“Right, indeed,” he said. “You have a knack for remembering names.”
“Don’t know ’bout that, unless you count bein’ able to match the ones in this here book with people’s faces.” The security guard tapped the guest register on his podium with a finger and flashed the exaggerated grin of a silent screen performer. “Norman Green called to leave word you’d be comin’ by early this morning.”
“Called?”
“He’s runnin’ a bit behind, but you can sign in an’ go right on upstairs to wait for him,” Jeffreys said. He leaned forward with a pen, a shaded look on his face. “Got yourself ’least half an hour, Hoffman’s sayin’ his prayers,” he said in a hushed voice. Then, in a still lower whisper that seemed to slip out unintended: “Hope the Lord has mercy on the sinner lookin’ for repentance.”
Malisse grunted, took the pen, and signed the guest book in the column beside his hand-printed alias.
“If God were obliging enough to ask my opinion, I would advise him to save his concern for the just, and piss an ocean down on the rest,” he said, turning toward the elevator.
Urban Jewelers on West 47th Street was a thirty-year-old, family-run storefront business that sold mediocre but affordable jewelry to the targeted walk-in consumer. The shop’s seemingly unimaginative name did, in fact, possess a certain double meaning that was not lacking in cleverness, since the bland reference to its location at the heart of metropolitan New York—urban—was also a shortened version of the surname belonging to its founder and principle owner, one Constantin Urbaniak, a Georgian Jew who had come to New York at the head of a half-million-strong wave of ambitious arrivals when, under tremendous internal and international pressure, the former Soviet Union relaxed its emigration policies toward persecuted minorities in the early 1970s.
While Constantin still oversaw the store’s general affairs — with a close eye on tax-time bookkeeping — he had for the past seven years left its daily management to his daughter and son-in-law, a hardworking and borderline honest couple, who, when they gypped their customers at all, preferred exaggeration and embellishment to outright deceit, following examples they’d learned growing up with a steady diet of American television, on which multibillion-dollar corporations sold sneakers as schoolyard status, soft drinks as adolescent sex appeal, and expensive cars as adult success with flashy primetime advertising spots.
Constantin Urbaniak had never done any such straddling of the line. Not when he’d stood behind the shop’s display counters from morning till night, and especially not these days. In his opinion, honesty, or relative honesty, was for the uninspired, men like his daughter’s dull but diligent lug of a husband. An artisan by disposition, and a forger by heritage — his beloved uncle on the maternal side was the famed World War II counterfeiter Solomon Smolianoff — Constantin had always felt his true calling to be creator rather than seller. And in the back room of Constantin’s office space on the seventy-second floor of the Empire State Building, a space whose front room housed Urban Jewelry’s mail-order and Internet sales operation — the pet project of his eldest son, Mikail, who had earned a doctorate in business from Johns Hopkins University — his view of himself as a virtuoso of the sham was a conceit indulged with exacting, tirelessly unscrupulous dedication.
Among forgers of antique jewelry, Urbaniak strove to be the best of the very best.
Avram Hoffman had followed a loud trail of whispers (as if there were any such thing as quiet whispers in the trade) to Constantin many months ago, bringing with him a genuine Japanese pink pearl and a handful of brilliant-cut diamonds, and requesting the fabrication of a gold Edwardian hatpin on which to mount them and exponentially increase their already fair value.
Gathering from the frequency of his return visits, Urbaniak’s work had not disappointed. Indeed, the difficulty of Hoffman’s commissions had graduated by broad, bold leaps, as had his confidence that the hand of Urbaniak would render them to perfection… and there could have been no greater testament to this than the challenge he’d presented upon entering the office moments before.
The question before Urbaniak this time around — underscored by the photographs Hoffman had laid out for him — was whether Hoffman truly had what he’d claimed to have in his possession. With it, Urbaniak knew he could fashion Hoffman something memorable, a classic piece of work. Without it he could give him nothing.
“I must ask again about the sapphire, if you don’t mind,” he said, looking at Hoffman across his desk. “A twelve-point-eight-carat cabochon of first quality is noteworthy. An oval of that size from the old mines of Kashmir would be fabulous. A sensational rarity…”
“And why shouldn’t a broker who is the son and nephew of brokers attain the fabulous and sensational?” Hoffman said. “Or don’t you believe even the man in the middle can exceed his origins?”
Urbaniak shook his head, a bit confused over his snappish tone.
“Don’t forget, you are talking to one who has done just that,” he said. “In the USSR, I was a factory worker. Here, a shopkeeper for many years.” He paused. “No insult was implied, and none should be taken. I only want to be sure we understand each other before moving ahead.”
“Then consider yourself assured, though I don’t see any reason it should matter to you.”
Urbaniak shrugged.
“We can start with pride,” he said. “You know my policy, Avram. I am not a peddler of glorified costume jewelry. Of crap. What leaves my workshop must be faithful to the past work that inspires it in all but age.”
Hoffman was quiet a moment, his lips tight, his face suddenly flushing above the line of his beard.
“Avram, are you all right?”
“Yes,” Avram said, sounding short of breath. “Fine.”
“You’re positive? I can get you a glass of water…”
Avram waved him off, inhaled, exhaled.
“Never mind,” he said. “The stone I’m providing will be a bona fide Kashmir. With certifications.”
Urbaniak had noticed the flush spreading to Avram’s neck and forehead in little red blotches, but given his touchiness thought it be best to refrain from further comment. He instead considered his words in silence, inspecting the pictures of the sapphire ring spread out on his desk.