Stone Cold (17 page)

Authors: Norman Moss

BOOK: Stone Cold

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“He was supposed to keep me posted on his progress, and he wasn’t very good at that. But then he told me he had cracked it, the process worked. I told him to do it with smallish diamonds, two or three carats, and release them on the market gradually, so they would not attract attention. He did the exact opposite. It was some kind of pride, I suppose. He produced this enormous diamond, and sold it through an agent in London. It caused a stir, which is just what I didn’t want to happen.

“He gave me my share of the proceeds – he was straightforward about that. So my investment had paid off. But then he didn’t produce any more diamonds, although I was still paying him regularly. He kept saying he would start again soon, that he had to make some change in the process. I asked him to come here and talk about it and he refused. Eventually, I got fed up. I sent someone to talk to him and find out why he wasn’t doing what he was supposed to do. I made a mistake. The man I sent was someone I had used to call on people who owed me money. He could be heavy-handed and I suppose he could seem threatening.

“He told me what happened. According to his account, Mollering panicked when he said he came from me, and told him to leave the apartment. When he insisted on talking to him Mollering took a pistol from his drawer and threatened him. He grabbed the gun, they had a fight, and the gun went off and Mollering was killed. It was an accident. That was my man’s account anyway. I certainly didn’t want Mollering killed.

“Mollering didn’t tell anyone about his method of changing the diamonds, didn’t leave even a clue. So that diamond is unique. There’ll never be another one like it. Unless someone finds a way to do what Mollering did. And that’s the story. That’s what you wanted to know.”

“Thank you for telling me,” I said. “So the diamond is a fake after all.”

He was sipping his brandy when I said this and he almost choked. “No, no!” he spluttered, shaking his head vigorously. “I wouldn’t let my wife wear a fake diamond! It’s a real diamond. It was dug out of the ground. Nothing has been added to it. Impurities have been removed. That’s all.”

“OK, I understand. Mollering turned an ugly duckling into a white swan but it’s still a bird.”

“Precisely.”

“You say your wife is wearing it. That’s the other thing I was going to ask you. How is it that you have the diamond now?”

“It was sort of a whim of mine. I wanted to give her a special present for our fortieth wedding anniversary. When I realized that this diamond was unique, that there would never be another one just like it, I bought it for her. Of course, no one else knows that it’s unique. That’s a secret I share with myself. But they know it’s a large and very beautiful and very rare diamond.”

I let the silence after this sentence go on for a long time. His story was the answer I had spent a long time looking for. Then I said, “I’ve spent a good deal of time tracking down this story. And now you’ve wrapped it up for me. Thank you.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I’m still in your debt for what you did for our family. I always will be. Now shall we join the ladies?”

As I hobbled into the other room my ankle was beginning to throb, and I winced as I sat down. After we had settled ourselves and all declined any more drink or coffee I said, “I’ve had a long day. I think it’s time I went back to my hotel.”

“Certainly,” Stakis said. “I’ll get my chauffeur to take you back.”

“Surely you can call a cab,” I said.

Maggie spoke up. “Marco’s probably gone to bed, and there’s no need to get him up. I can take David back.”

“Why thank you,” I said. Sylvie scowled.

After I had manoeuvred myself into the car and we started out, Maggie said, “I’m sorry about the other night.”

“You don’t owe me an apology,” I said.

“When I like someone, I get nervous with them. I’m sorry, I’m a bit neurotic.”

“Good God! You’re not perfect?”

“You had to find out sooner or later.”

“I hope you’ll get over the nervousness with me,” I said.

“I think I have,” she said.

“I’ve got this difficult foot,” I pointed out.

“We can work around it,” she said.

This was a Friday night and she took the weekend off. I flew back to London on Monday morning a happy man.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

When I got back I telephoned Jeremy. His secretary said he was away until the next day. I sent him an e-mail with a brief account of the story, saying the diamond had been doctored and unfortunately there were not going to be a lot of others where that came from. I left the details for when I saw him, including the encounter with the kidnappers in the snow. I would then point out to him that I spent four years in the army with two wars going on but I had to work for Fitzwilliam Harvey to get shot.

I had only been back for an hour and had just started to unpack when my phone rang. It was Maggie. “I have Mr Stakis here for you,” she said. “He has something to tell you that will please you.”

Stakis spoke in French as usual. “I called your hotel but you’d left already,” he said. “I even tried to reach you at the airport. I wanted to get it to you before you left. I’m giving you the diamond.”

“You’re giving me the diamond?”

“Yes. It was my wife’s idea. She thought I ought to have given you some reward since you risked your life for Sylvie. She said that since the diamond was so special to you, you might as well have it. I told her that I had bought it for her but she said she wasn’t going to wear it. She wasn’t going to be going out any more. She insisted. Take it is a personal expression of her gratitude. Our gratitude.”

I didn’t know what to say. Nobody had ever given me a few million dollars before. “Thank you,” was the best I could do. “Thank you very much. And my thanks to Mrs Stakis.”

“A courier will bring it over to you,” he said. “He’ll leave in a few minutes, and he should be with you by this evening.”

He knocked at the door as the sun was setting across the river. The diamond was in a silk-lined box. I stared at it for a while, and decided that I would put it in a bank vault. In the meantime I put it in a drawer, along with my X-ray film, another souvenir of Switzerland.

The next morning I telephoned Jeremy and told him I had the diamond, and he said I was a jammy bastard. I made plans for what I might do with the money once I had sold the diamond, which included a long holiday in Italy, perhaps with Maggie, to the cities of the Renaissance and the Amalfi coast and making love in the afternoon and all that.

Then I went to see a local doctor and told him what had happened, taking the X-ray film. “You should get your ankle looked at in the hospital,” he said. “I could make an appointment for you but it’ll probably take weeks. Your best bet is to go along A and E. St Peter’s in Chertsey is the nearest. Take something to read because it’s likely to be a long wait.”

So I bought
The Times
and the
New Statesman
to catch up on what was happening in the world, and, since I was a rich man now, I took a taxi to Chertsey and the hospital. Unexpectedly, I did not have to wait long. A doctor saw me, heard my story, and looked at the X-ray film. “I’ll send you up to X-ray,” she said.

“You’ve got an X-ray film here,” I pointed out.

“It’s useless,” she said. “The person who took this didn’t know what he was doing.”

I was puzzled. “I don’t want to argue with a doctor but I find that hard to believe,” I said. “It was taken in a high-priced Swiss clinic.”

“If it’s high priced they don’t give value for money,” she said. “It’s overexposed. Look.” And she held it out for me.

It was not the picture I had seen yesterday. It was fogged. I could make out only the outlines of my foot. “I don’t understand,” I said. “I saw it yesterday. It didn’t look like this. Could it have decayed since then?”

“No. Unless they took another X-ray picture on top of it. Or it was exposed to another source of radioactivity.”

I put it under my arm and headed for the X-ray department. Then I stopped. An idea hit me with such force that I had to find a chair and sit down. I remembered my army course in special weapons. I sat there for a few minutes going back over it.

The curse of the diamond. Bridey slept with it under his pillow and the scar on his cheek wouldn’t heal. Cremer worked on it and he got skin cancer on his hands. Helena Stakis wore it as a pendant and now she had a tumour on the lung. It all fitted together. The X-ray film had been in a drawer with the diamond. I hardly heard what the doctor said to me about my ankle.

I had to find out and the next day I called the Imperial College of Science in London. I took it in and he confirmed it for me. “You’re right,” he said. He held up the diamond and put a device next to it. “Here, listen to this Geiger counter clicking away. This diamond is radioactive.”

“Dangerously?

“It’ll give you two hundred rems or so, which is a lot more than you should have. Where the hell does it come from?”

I ignored the question for the moment. “How bad is the radiation? Could it kill you?

“Well, it could certainly do some damage. But where does it come from?”

I told him part of the story, that a German scientist had done something to an industrial diamond to make it a jewel worth a lot of money, and that it had been given to me.

“How did he do it?” he asked.

“I don’t know, and nobody else does. He’s dead. He was killed a few months ago.”

“Amazing,” he said. “Just amazing. Do you mind if I take it away to a lab for an hour or so? I’d like to show it to a couple of colleagues.”

He came back with it a little while later along with a young woman. “Whatever this man did to the diamond,” he said, “he seems to have changed a number of the carbon atoms into the isotope carbon 14. A diamond is basically carbon. Does carbon 14 mean anything to you?”

“No, nothing.”

“Carbon 14 is a radioactive isotope of carbon, which means that it is chemically the same but has slightly more neutrons. Most carbon is carbon 12. The number is the number of neutrons and protons in an atom. A very small part of carbon is carbon 14, much less than one per cent. This scientist turned some of the carbon 12 atoms into carbon 14, the radioactive isotope.”

“Do you know how he did it?”

“No. We’d love to know. Why did he do it?”

“He was trying to turn an industrial diamond into one very much more valuable. I suppose the radioactivity was just a by-product.”

So, as I thought, I had a diamond worth a few million dollars but I couldn’t sell it. A radioactive diamond. A dangerous jewel. “I suppose I just bury it in a lead box,” I said. “There’s not much else I can do with it.”

The young woman spoke. “You can’t do anything with it. You have to call the police and hand it over. You’re obliged by law to do so. Hazardous Substances Act.”

“Oh.” She saw my face and said, “I’m sorry. Did you think you had a mega-valuable diamond there?” I nodded mutely.

I handed it in as required. I am told that the Uzbek diamond is now in a deep depository at Sellafield, along with used plutonium and other radioactive nuclear waste.

I went back home with my head whirling. I sat down in the recliner and studied the paintings on the wall, the Andrew Wyeth and the Cherokee Indians and the French Impressionist, all my dad’s choice, just as I had a few weeks ago before Jeremy took me to see a man with a question about a diamond. I told myself that I was in the same position now that I was then. In fact, I was better off, because I had been tested and had come through. I just was not a multi-millionaire.

Yesterday I thought I was worried about what to do with the money, and thinking of long holidays and the Renaissance cities of Italy and making love to Maggie on the Amalfi coast. Now I was back to square one, and I would have to start looking for a job.

Fate was jerking me this way and that way. I sat there trying to adjust to my new situation.

Michelmore shrugged off his disappointment at not finding a new diamond mine to exploit. When I told him the whole story he said, “It’s surprising that nobody spotted it. Radioactivity is used on diamonds sometimes. They irradiate some diamonds to give them more colour, and these are called doctored diamonds and they’re less valuable.”

“I’m guessing,” I said, “that Mollering knew it was radioactive and the reason he didn’t produce another was that he was trying to work the process without producing the radioactivity.”

“Maybe,” Michelmore said. “Or maybe he didn’t care. We’ll never know now.”

Jeremy was pleased. “You did well,” he said. “It’s a hell of a story. I’m sorry you’re not mega rich. I know the FHS fee doesn’t quite make up for it.”

Back home that evening the telephone rang and it was Maggie again. “I thought I’d tell you. I’ve quit my job,” she said.

“Really?”

“Yes. Stakis is so much not my kind of person, and I decided that perhaps it’s time to come home again. We’re parting on good terms.”

“You’re coming back to England?”

“Yes. I’ll be back as soon as Stakis can find a replacement.”

“I’ll see you then.” The words came out spontaneously. Then I asked anxiously, “Will I?”

“I’d like that.”

I was delighted that she was coming back. I had left Villars hoping I would somehow see more of Maggie, a lot more, but I was not sure how this would happen. Did Maggie feel the same way? Was this why she had quit her job? I was wondering.

“But I should tell you, Maggie, I’m not really rich.”

“No, of course not. Not really rich. You’ll have to make do with only one yacht and it probably won’t have an anti-missile launcher.”

“No, I mean I’m really not rich. I haven’t got the diamond.”

“What? What happened? Did you lose it in a poker game?”

“No. It’s difficult to explain. I can’t sell it.”

“OK. I’ll wear it around my neck when you take me out.”

“You certainly will not! “

“No?”

“No. I’ll explain when I see you. I really am not rich.”

“I don’t understand, but that’s OK. To tell you the truth, I’m a bit bored with rich people.”

“So it’ll be just me without the diamond.”

“OK, no diamond. Just David.”