The Tavernier Stones (11 page)

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Authors: Stephen Parrish

BOOK: The Tavernier Stones
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After leaving the room that housed the National Gem Collection, John tested doorknobs in the hallway outside until he found one unlocked.
It was behavior he had never understood about himself, something he had picked up since entering the English world—where all doors had locks, and rarely was anything behind them worth securing. Once in a while he was cornered into explaining that he was only looking for a bathroom, “real nearby, if you know what I mean.” He considered unlocked doors invitations to satisfy his curiosity about the English and locked ones challenges to his resolve.
The unlocked door, labeled “Staff Only,” opened to what looked like a specimen preparation laboratory. Saws, grinders, and buffers rested on long tables strewn with mineral specimens, fragments, and dust. On the other side of the laboratory was another door, and John was about to cross the room and test
its
knob when he heard scratching noises coming from beneath one of the tables.
Then he saw tennis shoes and realized a man was down there, doing something on his knees. He took one quiet step backwards.
“Well, don’t just stand there,” the man said. “Come on in.”
“Sir?”
“You’re from the press, aren’t you?” He raised his head above the table. “You’re half an hour late.”
The man stood up and dusted his hands with vigorous slapping actions, as though he had just completed repairing a machine (he had plugged one in), then stepped around the table to greet John. He was fortyish and sported a long ponytail despite a receding hairline. He wore a solid green tie loosely knotted, a wrinkled blue suit jacket, and a pair of faded jeans. The tie was marked with stains that might have once been ketchup. He kept glancing around the room although no one else was there, as if he were used to people surrounding him, watching him—or not watching him, it was hard to tell which.
“Dr. Cornelius Bancroft,” he said. “Curator in charge. And what paper are you from?”
“Uh, the
Lancaster Intelligencer Journal
.”
“That’s funny. I could have sworn the appointment was with a Virginia paper.”
Oh, crap.
John was about to turn and run, but then figured he’d been telling lies all along, one more wouldn’t hurt. He said, “I called you from Virginia when I made the appointment.”
“That explains it. Well, shall we start? I’m afraid I’m just about the only research staff member here today, but at least you’ll get to see everything.”
Bancroft showed John an electron microprobe, an x-ray diffractometer, infrared and atomic absorption and emission spectrometers, and even an old wet lab equipped with streak plates, goniometers, and Bunsen burners.
“We keep the wet lab mostly for sentimental reasons,” Bancroft said. “Nowadays, what we attend to are isotropic and crystal structure analyses, physical properties at low temperatures, elasticity, infrared absorption … you know, I could give you some technical literature if you’re having trouble getting all of this down.”
“I’m getting it,” John said. His notebook was filling up with nonsensical scribbles.
At the end of the tour, the two men entered Bancroft’s office, where John accepted the offer of a seat and a cup of coffee.
“Every summer I go to Tanzania,” Bancroft said, “to study tanzanite deposits, what we know in academia as blue zoisite. It’s sort of my specialty. What the hell, the National Science Foundation pays for the trips. Actually, my dream is to discover a new mineral and name it for myself:
Bancroftite.
What do you think?”
“Excuse me, Dr. Bancroft, but what I really came for was information about the lost Tavernier stones.”
He nodded. “Of course you did. Everyone does.” He rose from his chair and gazed at a map of Tanzania hanging on the wall behind his desk.
“So …” John began.
“So, if you saw my first television interview, you know about as much as I do. If you want more, you can read the exhibits outside. There’s also quite a bit of literature on the subject.”
“Well then, sir, who
is
the expert?”
“No one here on the staff, really.”
“Someone, somewhere else, on some other staff?”
He chuckled. “There was a kid, he used to be a mineralogy student of mine at College Park. He made a major study of the lost Tavernier stones. The guy was sharp, too sharp for his own good. I think he became obsessed with actually finding the things, and it went to his head. He was the one, by the way, who cut the replicas we have on display.”
“Where is he now?”
“Probably in jail. He went bad right after his father, who was in the jewelry business, got taken by unscrupulous business partners and blew his brains out. It’s tragic, too; the boy was a brilliant student, and he loved minerals and gems. He knows more about the lost Tavernier stones than anyone else alive. I’ll give you the last address I have, but I doubt you’ll find him there. When he dropped out of school, he dropped out of everything—life itself.”
Bancroft shook his head and smiled. “I have to give the guy credit. When he’s bad, he’s good. He got caught palming off Chatham emeralds as the genuine article. Got hold of some Chatham rejects, some really flawed stuff, I don’t know how, and cut it to look like natural crystals. Then he cemented the crystals in matrix and tried to sell them to museums. They passed the Chelsea test, of course, and their index of refraction was within limits, but some staff mineralogist on the ball at Los Angeles County routinely checked long wave fluorescence and got suspicious.”
“What’s his name?”
“Feinstein. David Feinstein. Last I heard, he lived in South Philadelphia, in a hole on Volta Street. But if you want to save yourself some time, check the state penitentiary first.”
“You miss him … don’t you?” John regretted the question immediately. Bancroft lowered his eyes and bit his lower lip. Then he rose, took the empty coffee cup out of John’s hands, and opened his office door, indicating the interview was over.
“He was like a son.”
TEN
 
DAVID’S FIRST TASK SATURDAY evening was to grind and polish a small window on a relatively flat part of the cubic zirconia, so he could see inside the rough stone and study its internal characteristics. He had spent the better part of the last two days in his workshop—a spare bedroom outfitted with lapidary equipment—meticulously calipering the stone, punching a calculator, and drawing diagrams. He had skipped baths and meals, and was so absorbed in his work he didn’t even hear Sarah’s admonishments.
Although cubic zirconia contained none of the inclusions usually associated with diamonds, it did often contain spherical bubbles and small uncrystallized masses that would give it away.
David powered up the lap, inserted the rough into a tang, and rested it briefly on the rotating wheel. He smiled as he thought of the popular misconception of a diamond cutter at work: a round-shouldered man striking out facets with hammer and chisel, collecting the chips later to set in cheap jewelry.
After magnifying the window, he was confident the raw crystal would at least meet the VVS grade; at ten power it appeared flawless. He would need to put the finished product under his microscope to make sure, but he didn’t think there was any danger of Mr. Bowling scoping the stone. The assistant manager could not be intimate with the internal characteristics of every diamond in his inventory.
An experienced gemologist could recognize cubic zirconia from its relative transparency: facet junctions were more visible through the table of a slightly tilted stone. But even the most experienced gemologists would exercise caution and test the stone with a thermal conductivity probe.
The first step in fashioning was preforming. David clamped the rough in a vise, orienting it so the vertically-mounted saw blade, a thin steel disk embedded with diamond powder, would remove about one-third of the rough. The large, flat surface on the remaining two-thirds would become the table of the finished stone. After the blade had cut through, he dopped the stone by gluing its new table to the end of a wooden dowel with wax. The dop would act as a handle during grinding, to protect David’s fingers from heat and friction.
He imagined what it must have been like to cut and polish the lost Tavernier diamonds. In Tavernier’s time, grinding wheels had to be powered by foot or running water. Stones were shaped by manually rubbing them against each other, often for weeks at a time. It was a wonder ancient cutters could make a facet at all.
Sarah appeared in the doorway, dressed in her nightgown, rubbing her eyes. “David,” she said softly. “It’s bedtime. You can finish this in the morning, can’t you?”
As he got deeper into the job, David forgot he was working with cubic zirconia. The stone’s sole purpose was to mimic a diamond, and not just any diamond, but a particular stone that had become, for the moment, his Holy Grail. As he fashioned the CZ, he kept a picture of the diamond in his mind and strived to metamorphose the hunk of artificial compound before him into that stone. It was no longer CZ, as far as David was concerned; rather, it was the diamond itself, trapped inside a formless hunk of transparent medium, and it needed liberation to do justice to light as only a diamond could do.
He remembered the allegory of the little girl watching a sculptor at work and asking, when he had finished, how he had known there was a lion inside the marble block.
“David, I’m worried the noise will wake the neighbors.”
It was time to cut the bezel facets, the eight surfaces adjacent to the table that would take the shape of kites when the crown assumed its final form. David fitted his faceting machine with a copper lap and lubricated it with a large wad of water-soaked cotton. Then he inserted the dop arm into the 40-degree hole of the jamb peg. As soon as he finished one facet, he rotated the dop 180 degrees and ground another. He checked his work often with a ten-power loupe, each time returning the stone to a different place on the spinning lap, arcing gradually toward the center like a phonograph stylus to avoid uneven wear on its copper surface.
“If you’re hungry, I could make you something. Then I really have to get some sleep.”
The defining attributes of a gemstone were beauty, durability, and rarity, and diamond qualified exceptionally each time. Some people considered other gemstones to be more beautiful, but experts like David, who had acquired a taste for the idiosyncrasies of diamonds, were able to appreciate the difference; there just wasn’t the same romance associated with topaz or lapis lazuli.
Jade was more durable, but nothing was as hard. Other gem species were rarer, but rarer also was demand for them.
Diamond was dull in the rough; there was no obvious promise of its potential when cut, no suggestion of the brilliance and dispersion flat facets would reveal. Indeed, raw quartz was more attractive. Why, then, did the ancients prize it so?
Until the eighteenth century, India had been the sole source. The rarity and extreme hardness of the diamond earned it a reputation for mystical qualities. It had the power to ward off illness, evil spirits, and bad luck of all sorts; thus it became a talisman, for if a diamond was indestructible, so was its wearer.
It guaranteed victory in battle. It brought wealth and virility. It even served as a fountain of youth.
During the Middle Ages, diamonds were reputed to have curative powers, especially when ground and consumed. The proof was obvious: poor people, who didn’t own diamonds, suffered from more diseases than rich people, who did.
Diamonds made their wearers invisible.
Diamonds raised them from the dead.
David checked his stone once again under magnification, then returned it to the lap.
Sarah, still watching from the doorway, whispered a eulogy: “‘Identify that activity, the success or failure of which is irrelevant to your pursuit of it, and you will find your one true passion.’”
“Did you say something?” David asked. He turned, surprised to find her standing there.
“No, David. I’m just now going to bed.” She left, and the only sound in the room was the humming of the lap’s electric motor.
“Good night,” he whispered after her. “And sleep well. Tomorrow’s a big day.”
ELEVEN
 
THE RELIEF DAVID SAW on Mr. Bowling’s face was unmistakable. The tension the poor man had endured the past week, wondering whether David and Sarah would return to Nineveh & Shimoda on Sunday morning, was enough to make any salesman nauseous.
It was the last day of the month, and David knew it was also the last opportunity for a struggling salesman to pull his numbers up and meet or exceed his monthly quota. That Bowling’s expression went from tortured to peaceful the instant the two stepped into the store was proof enough that one or more of the other employees was ahead of him on the May chart.
David’s suit was different from the one he had worn during their first visit to the store; it was the only other suit he owned. Sarah, likewise, was in her “Phase II” miniskirt, one so provocative she could hardly sit in a chair in public. A trench coat was draped over her arm. She held onto it as though it were a life preserver.

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