Stone 588 (44 page)

Now inside, Townsend let down his black umbrella and held it well away from himself as he shook the rain off. He was in evening clothes, just come from a party. He'd learned of the incident not more than twenty minutes ago when his driver had mentioned it. If he'd heard sooner he would have been there sooner, to see for himself that everything was in order. One thing he knew for certain: The battery-powered backup alarm had to be set. It had shorted and been a bother so many times he'd disconnected it years ago. Hell, he couldn't even remember when they'd last had an outage.

Townsend had a young woman with him, an aspiring fashion model and beauty of the night who hoped to appear in his advertisements in Vogue. He had asked her to wait in the car but she'd refused, resorted to some rather clumsy guile with her hands and sucked at the skin of his neck and pleaded that she wanted to be with him. He knew, of course, that what she really wanted to be with was the tiny platinum vial of cocaine he had in his jacket pocket.

Like a subservient and hungry pet she followed Townsend across the main showroom, dimly lit from the emergency lights out on Fifth Avenue. Her high heels clicked on the parquet marble floor. She had on the merest short evening dress, might as well have been nude, the confident, careless way her body wore it. At the bottom of the stairs she reached for Townsend, who was a couple of steps up, and tugged sharply at the back of his jacket.

He almost fell.

She laughed, a brief, boiling, malicious laugh. "I need a toot," she said.

"No."

"Don't be so goddamn stingy, Gilbert. What's a couple of toots?" She had a numb nose.

"You're being a cunt," he told her. His saying that stemmed from a mild lecture on deportment he'd given her earlier in the evening.

Evidently she hadn't taken it to heart. "Who's a cunt?" she said, making her beautiful face ugly and defiant. "You're a cunt."

Townsend was above getting really angry with her. Smoothly, he assuaged her. "When we get back to the car."

"Now!" she howled like a deprived cat. Her voice resounded through the building with its tall ceilings.

Townsend walked over to the nearest display case, a glass-topped case with Louis Quinze legs. He tapped some cocaine from the platinum vial onto its glass surface and rolled a brand-new hundred-dollar bill into a tight tube. The beauty used the edge of one of Townsend's business cards to divide the cocaine into four lines. She inserted the tubed hundred into her left nostril, then the right, vacuumed up the lines. What little cocaine was left she dabbed up with her second finger and rubbed on her gums.

Townsend wiped the glass top with the sleeve of his jacket. The beauty pouted when he took the hundred-dollar bill from her fingers.

On the third floor in the room above the vault the one thing that was heard was the howl. It was fortunate that Springer had paused for a breather just then, or else the clanging of an emptied drawer dropping within the vault might have given them away. They switched off the lanterns, covered the hole, and stood still in the absolute dark.

After a long moment Strand noiselessly opened the door to the hall and listened. He heard the voices, realized it was Townsend and a woman. He stepped out into the carpeted hall and moved along to the top of the stairs, crouched there.

Townsend came up to the second-floor landing. He went directly to the vault, stood looking at its reassuring thick steel, its door unchanged from when he'd locked it eight or so hours earlier. He considered opening it for a look but remembered the power was off, the electronic combination not functioning. Well, if he couldn't get into the vault, sure as hell no one else could, he reasoned.

Strand, watching from the head of the stairs on the third floor, saw only Townsend's lower legs and feet, saw them turn and move off in the direction of Townsend's office. After a moment he heard keys rattling and scraping against a paneled wall. He believed he knew what Townsend was up to.

A decision for Strand: Should he take the violent initiative, sneak down and strike Townsend on the head? The woman on the first floor, he'd have to take care of her similarly. He'd never struck anyone, but it might be worth it in this instance. He doubted that he could do it without being seen. He'd be identified. Or should he chance everything on timing?

Townsend made up Strand's mind by hurrying from his office and down the stairs to the main floor.

At the same time, nearly step for step, Strand hurried down to the second floor, his stealth aided by the rug and his sneakers and Townsend's own movements. Strand caught a glimpse of Townsend's back at the bottom of the next flight down. The door to Townsend's office was open. Strand went in and straight to the panel that concealed the backup alarm.

He had to wait.

There was a built-in delay on the alarm that gave whoever activated it sixty seconds to get out of the building. Townsend was well aware of that. How close would he cut it?

On the main floor Townsend picked up his umbrella. The beauty was temporarily satisfied. She wanted to go someplace and play, she said. She complained that her shoes were ruined from the rain. She made a remark about the empty display cases and wanted to know where all the fucking diamonds were.

"Sleeping," Townsend told her and pulled her out the door.

In the office above, Strand waited until he heard the door being closed. The lock on the panel would have been easy to jimmy if he'd been prepared for that. Within the paneled compartment the time delay clock was ticking off the seconds that would cost him year after year.

It didn't matter if he broke every bone in his hand.

He rammed his fist through the paneling.

Whatever noise that caused was lost to the commotion out on Fifth Avenue. Anyway, Townsend surely didn't hear it because it coincided with the racket he made shutting the exterior flexible-steel gate.

Strand tore away the split wood to get to the backup alarm. It was enclosed in a large gray metal box. He opened the box and saw the controls. There had to be an on-off switch, but where the hell was it? Townsend had just turned the alarm on, so why shouldn't he be able to just turn the alarm off? There were two wires, a blue and a red, running together from something to something, and another pair of wire connections elsewhere, a white and a black. He had no idea what purpose they served. He just yanked and tore them all loose.

He beat the timer by half a second.

He went back up the stairs to the room above the vault, merely told the others what they wanted to hear: Everything was okay. They switched on the lamps, uncovered the hole, and got to it again.

Springer tried to cut down on the time required to bring up the drawers. He was more efficient with the reacher now, but instead of taking the drawers as they came, level by level, he began choosing by hunch. A certain drawer would catch his eyes, as though saying to him, I'm the one you want, choose me, I'm the one that will give you back stone 588. They were deceitful, these drawers, Springer thought, as one after another they failed to produce that stone. Nevertheless, his hope continued to listen to them.

One of the drawers contained an assortment of rough diamonds, evidently Townsend's ample allotment from the most recent sight in London. They were still in the box they came in, but the ribbon had been cut and The System's seal broken. Several of the stones in the box resembled stone 588, were about the same size, give or take a few carats. Audrey went through these carefully, looking for the telltale tip that was chipped off. One of the stones was almost identical to stone 588 except for the chip. Audrey had an intuitive feeling about that stone.

"My souvenir," she said as she showed the stone to Strand. He shrugged and resumed the more important matter of snipping from their necklace settings twenty-four rectangular-cut diamonds of four to six carats each and forty-eight two-carat pear-shapes. They were. Strand noticed, nicely matched D-color stones and of such fine quality that he would probably have to search hours to find a flaw. The value of these diamonds alone was enough to cause most people to consider retirement.

Naturally, Strand had given thought to what he would do with his share of the take. He couldn't go whenever he wanted or greatly change his life-style because he had two years of parole to do, including regular monthly visits to his parole officer. A requirement was that he get a job of some sort. To rehabilitate himself. As far as he was concerned, this Townsend thing was perfect rehabilitation. It settled a lopsided, long-chafing score and provided him with the wherewithal to do something straight and satisfying. When his parole time was over he would move to Europe, to Monaco or Nice. He would open a small, exclusive business, dealing only in the most finely made merchandise. He would enjoy attending auctions in Geneva and Paris and London, outbidding other dealers when it was a pleasure or profitable to do so. He would never in his life knowingly touch another piece of swag. And sometime, somewhere along the line, there would be a more patient Patricia.

Scoot, too, had his plans. He wouldn't stick around New York. Oh, he'd return every once in a while for a visit, but where he'd live would be someplace like Bermuda or the Bahamas. Not too far from the action, not Tahiti or one of those dry and scrubby Greek islands, but just far enough away that he could come and go and stand less of a chance of running into one of his old cellmates. He would have to get a passport. He'd never had a passport. He would never in his life steal another thing. In fact, he'd probably be the one to get stolen from. Just thinking about such an eventuality pissed him off.

The police helicopter hadn't gone over for an hour and a half.

The shoe box was more than half full.

The gutted platinum and gold mountings were a pile in the comer.

It was five minutes to four.

Strand had accumulated eight of Townsend's sleeping beauties, had them lined up on the face of the two bricks on the workbench. The largest of these special diamonds was a 112.43-carat cushion cut. It was most likely a famous stone. All eight were probably famous stones, for that matter. Even now under these subjugating circumstances, they seemed to flaunt their preeminence, draw strength, blaze from one another. Strand was not without respect for them. He gave them a full minute of deferential regard before returning to the fact that they belonged to Townsend, were, in a way, his professional heart.

Strand took up the acetylene torch, ignited it, and adjusted its flame. Audrey observed, fascinated with what he was doing. She was not aware that diamond is one of the most thermal-conductive of all substances. Heat shot right through it. But at 3400 degrees Fahrenheit, not without causing change.

Strand went from left to right with the acetylene torch, giving each of the eight large diamonds a mere lick with the blue hot tongue—no more than that was necessary to transform the diamonds into hunks of graphite, the same as found in ordinary lead pencils or used to eliminate the squeak from hinges. For Strand it was the coup de grace.

He began picking up, putting things in the pockets and compartments of his vest, preparing to leave.

Springer was still working the reacher. He hadn't gotten to thirty or so of the drawers. Most of those were high up along the rows. It was doubtful that Townsend would have put stone 588 in a drawer so inaccessible. In fact, the drawer Springer was bringing up now contained less valuable pieces and loose stones not nearly so desirable as those before.

"We've got to quit," Strand said.

"A couple more," Springer told him.

And after one of those drawers contained only some low-grade Thai sapphires and the other a few mixed lots of very included Brazilian emeralds. Strand told Springer, "C'mon, it's four o'clock straight up."

Springer didn't seem to hear. He went for another drawer. Audrey knelt beside him, peered down into the vault, saw the drawer that was being brought up by the reacher. This drawer looked promising, had some chamois pouches and fat briefkes in it. Audrey grabbed them up, opened them eagerly, and found aquamarines, citrines, tourmalines, amethysts. She poured them back down into the hole.

"One more," Springer insisted desperately.

The drawer that came up was empty.

He was coming up empty.

Strand and Scoot had to wrest the reacher from his grasp, pull him away from the hole. He struggled with them briefly and then gave up.

They got the lanterns up from the vault, disassembled the reacher, and packed everything into their vests. Changed back to their leather work gloves. They double-checked to make sure nothing was being left behind that might incriminate them. Audrey even retrieved a pink Good and Plenty that she'd dropped an hour ago.

They moved the upended table away from the hole in the wall. Scoot peeked out. They heard a helicopter approaching: from uptown this time. As it had before, it hovered a short while almost directly above the building and then continued on.

One by one they climbed out through the hole. They wouldn't have left the fabric taped to the wall if it hadn't been for the helicopter, the chance that it might come patrolling again and notice the hole and heat up the entire area too soon.

The rain was still coming down hard. It felt refreshing, cleansing in a way. They blinked as it washed their eyes. They crossed to where the climbing rope hung from the six-story roof. They would go the way they'd come. Strand motioned to Springer to go first.

Springer reached as high up the rope as he could, grabbed hold, and planted his feet flat against the wall of the building. The rope was soaked through, but its weave was designed for such inclemency. It wasn't at all slippery, and the knots that Scoot had made in it were now especially helpful. Springer went up, hand over hand, a knot at a time, putting resistance against the wall with his feet, sort of walking horizontally. His arms and hands were tired from having worked the reacher all those hours, but there was a mixture of anger and disappointment in him that potentiated his strength. When he reached the top he rolled up over the edge and onto the surface of the roof and just lay there, face up. He had the sensation that the rain was dissolving him, as it would so much clay. It occurred to him that because of the rain he could give in to crying and his tears would go undetected.