“If that’s what it is,” he said at length, “that’s what it is.”
“Will you be able to design a setting based on my photos?”
Urbaniak looked at him.
“I’ve been an admirer of Raymond Yard jewelry for a very long time and would be eager for the opportunity to”—he paused to choose the appropriate phrase—“adapt one of his pieces. Yard was among the greatest ever, an artist without peer among his contemporaries of the Deco period… and, speaking of men who are able to exceed humble beginnings, the son of a rail worker who became friend and advisor to the wealthy. His salon’s clientele was a who’s who of old-money society, and of the New York elite in particular. The Vanderbilts, the Goulds, the Beekmans and Astors… and of course the Rockefellers.” Another pause. “It was for John D. Rockefeller Junior that he arranged the purchase of what may be the world’s most famous sapphire from the Nizam of Hyderabad. A sixty-six carat stone that once shone atop the ring in these photos you’ve brought me, and it would later be remounted onto brooches by both Rockefeller’s first and second wives — and after Yard died, set into an inferior ring at the fancy of a son of Raymond Yard’s colleague, the gem dealer Esmerian. When it finally passed into the anonymity of a private collection several years ago, I believe the blue commanded a record auction price of three million dollars.”
Avram had opened the collar button of his shirt under his necktie and taken more deep breaths.
“In excess of that sum,” he said. “Constantin, let me ask you something now. Suppose another stone was included in Rockefeller’s acquisition from the Indian Maharajah. Much smaller than the first — just under thirteen carats — but from the same source, and of comparable excellence. Then suppose Rockefeller had asked Yard to set it in a platinum ring for a woman other than his wife. A very young, very beautiful ingenue of the Broadway stage who kept her relationship with him discreet, and in her commendable discretion never revealed the identity of the gentleman who gifted the ring to her, or left documentation of its provenance… though it was styled after these photographs I’ve copied and brought you from a Christie’s auction catalogue, and did bear the engraved letter ‘Y’ that was Yard’s signature.” Avram sat forward in his chair. “Do you follow me so far?”
Urbaniak met his gaze with interest, nodded.
“You present an engrossing history.”
“I’ve been working hard to get the details right,” Hoffman said with a conspiratorial glance.
Urbaniak gave another nod. Perhaps working too hard for his own well-being, he mused. Hoffman’s breathing and color had gradually returned to normal, but he still looked tired and overwound.
“Jumping ahead,” Hoffman went on now, “let us say this actress married after Rockefeller’s death, keeping her intimate friendship with him secret throughout her lifetime, bequeathing the ring to her own legitimate heirs. That it passed from child to grandchild, grandchild to great-grandchild, and so forth. And that it eventually fell to a beneficiary of some current social prominence who wishes to sell it without opening dusty boxes of scandal, and has engaged a broker like myself to do that while leaving the ring’s owner unnamed.” He regarded Urbaniak across the table. “My question to you, a supreme craftsman, is this: would the ring’s unique qualities be enough to satisfy a prospective buyer, and whoever he or she may hire to appraise it, that it is an authentic Raymond Yard?”
Urbaniak was unhesitating in his answer.
“The accomplishment of an expert hand always will be recognized by an expert eye,” he said. “And, with or without documents, command a suitable price from lovers of beautiful finery.”
Hoffman remained silent for a minute. Then he nodded and settled back in his chair, finally seeming to relax a little.
“Constantin,” he said, “I’m going to propose that you make me something beautiful and fine.”
Moments after leaving Urbaniak’s office, Avram stood on the corner of 33rd Street and Fifth Avenue, trying not to draw attention from passersby, feeling more than a bit embarrassed by his weakness as he leaned against the metal stanchion of a streetlight and caught his breath.
It had been so close up there with the jeweler, he thought. So airless. The seeming lack of oxygen had stuffed his head, made his chest feel as if it were bound tight with leather straps.
Avram swooped down mouthful after mouthful of cold air, and soon enough thought he felt better — certainly well enough to finish the rest of his business.
He reached into his coat for his cell phone and sent the brief e-mail stored in its memory to Lathrop, then lifted the briefcase he’d set down on the pavement between his feet.
Now he only needed to hurry over to the bank while waiting for his callback.
“You’re sure you don’t want to head up to see Ruiz with us?” Derek Glenn asked Ricci. He raised his shoulders against an explosive gust of wind. “Whatever might be rotten at Kiran, we can’t forget we came here to find Patrick Sullivan.”
Ricci was silent. Along with Glenn and Noriko Cousins, he was standing on Hudson Street outside Sword headquarters, only minutes after the detective had phoned to arrange their appointment.
“Didn’t know we were joined at the hip,” he said. “There are some other things I want to check out.”
Noriko looked at him from under the brim of her leopard Carnaby.
“Things?” she said.
Ricci nodded.
“Like the apartment building where Sullivan’s girlfriend lived, and whatever’s around it, and wherever she might’ve passed before she disappeared,” he said. “Things like that, and maybe more.”
Noriko kept studying his face.
“Do what you want,” she said. “But if you have any intention of snowing me, I promise you’ll rue the day.”
Ricci shrugged.
“You want to put another truant officer on my back, make sure I don’t do anything out of school, go ahead,” he said. “I were you, I’d worry about getting those added snoopmobiles we talked about over to that motel — and doing it before your man there falls asleep at the wheel.”
A moment passed. Noriko looked at Ricci, started to give him an answer, realized she had nothing much more to say, and scratched whatever might have been on its way to her lips.
Raising her arm into the air instead, she stepped past him to hail a taxi at the curb.
Malisse stood looking in the window of the Nat Sherman tobacconist’s shop across from the library on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, one eye on a charming and doubtless exorbitantly high-priced beveled glass and cocobolo rosewood humidor in which he could envision his prized Dominican Davidoff cigars resting in conditions ideal for their robustly delectable preservation. On some other day his fancy might have flared at the sight of it on display, ignited a rhapsodic gleam in his captive eye, propelled him beyond any thoughts of frugality toward a bacchanalian splurge at the store’s sales counter.
Yes, Malisse thought, on another day his abiding passion for the exquisite might have led him to spend without restraint, while today his fidelity to his obligations — reinforced by his deep-seated contempt for the greedy and corrupt — obliged him to earn old Lembock’s advance with due diligence, and to be guided by the eye he had not turned toward the smoke shop’s window display but kept owlishly watching the display of the phone-sized global positioning receiver in his right hand… a device he had dubbed the Duncan in tribute to his good friend for having furnished it. For an hour and more now Malisse had followed the blip on its electronic street map layout that was Avram Hoffman, shadowing him on foot from the quaint lampposts marking the diamond and jewelry district to the great mullioned tower of the Empire State Building over a half mile downtown, where he had then tracked Hoffman to the 93rd-floor office of one Urban Gem Sales on an elevator that thankfully had been in smooth control on liftoff, descent, and between floors — unlike last night’s haywire elevator of his id.