Dance Of Death

SIXTY-TWO

George Kaplan exited his Gramercy Park brownstone, paused for a moment at the top of the steps to check his cashmere coat, flicked off a speck of dust, pinched his perfectly knotted cravat, patted his pockets, inhaled the crisp January air, and descended. His was a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood, his brownstone facing the park itself, and even in the cold winter weather there were mothers with their children walking the winding lanes, their cheerful voices rising among the bare branches.

Kaplan fairly tingled with anticipation. The call he had received was as unexpected as it was welcome. Most gemologists lived their entire lives without ever having the opportunity to gaze into the depths of a gemstone one-millionth as rare or famous as Lucifer's Heart. He had, of course, seen it at the museum behind a thick piece of glass, under execrable lighting, but until now he hadn't known just why the lighting was so bad: had it been lit properly, at least a few gemologists-himself included-would have recognized it as a fake. A very good fake, to be sure: a real diamond, irradiated to give it that incredible cinnamon color, no doubt enhanced by colored fiber-optic light skillfully delivered from beneath the gem. Kaplan had seen it all in his forty years as a gemologist, every rip-off, cheat, and con game in the business. He chided himself for not realizingthat a diamond like Lucifer's Heart couldn't be put on display. No company would insure a stone which was always in full public view, its location known to the world.

Lucifer's Heart. And what was it worth? The last red diamond of any quality that had come up for sale was the Red Dragon, a five-carat stone that had gone for sixteen million dollars. And this one was nine times as large, a better grade and color, without a doubt the finest fancy color diamond in existence.

Value? Name your price.

After receiving the call, Kaplan had spent a few moments in his library, refreshing himself on the history of the diamond. With diamonds, it was usually the case that the less color the better, but that was true only up to a point. When a diamond had a deep, intense color, it suddenly leaped in value; it became the rarest of the rare- and of all the colors a diamond could possess, red was by far the rarest. He knew that, in all the crude production from all the De Beers mines, a red diamond of quality surfaced only about once every two years. Lucifer's Heart made the word unique sound hackneyed. At forty-five carats, it was huge, a heart-cut stone with a GIA grade of VVS1 Fancy Vivid. No other stone in the world even came close. And then there was the color: it wasn't ruby red or garnet-colored, either of which was exceedingly rare in its own right. Rather, it was an intensely rich reddish orange, a color so unusual that it defied naming. Some called it cinnamon, and while Kaplan thought it more reddish than true cinnamon, he himself could not find a better word to describe it. The closest analogy he could think of was blood in bright sunlight, but if anything, it was even richer than blood. No other object in the wide world possessed its color-nothing. Its color was a scientific mystery. To find out what gave Lucifer's Heart its unique color, scientists would have to destroy a piece of the diamond-and that, of course, would never happen.

The diamond had a short, bloody history. The raw stone, a monster of some 104 carats, had been found by an alluvial digger in the Congo in the early 1930s. Not realizing, because of its color, that it was even a diamond, he used it to pay a long-running bar tab. When the man later learned what it was, he tried to get it back from the barman, only to be rebuffed. So one night he broke into the barman's home, killed the man, his wife, and their three children, and then spent the rest of the night trying to hide his crime by cutting up the corpses and throwing them off the back porch to the crocodiles in the Buyimai River. He was caught, and during the gathering of evidence for the murder trial, part of which involved killing and examining the stomach contents of a dozen river crocodiles, a police inspector was killed by an enraged reptile and a second drowned trying to save him.

The gemstone, still uncut, made its way through the black market (and several other rumored killings) before it resurfaced in Belgium as the property of a notorious black market dealer. The man badly botched the cleaving of the stone, leaving a nasty crack in it, and subsequently committed suicide. The now damaged rough stone bounced around the diamond demimonde for a while, ultimately ending up in the hands of an Israeli diamond cutter named Arens, one of the best in the world. In what was later called the most brilliant cutting ever done, Arens was able to produce a heart-shaped gem from the cracked rock in just such a way as to remove the flaw without fracturing the stone or losing too much material. It took Arens eight years to complete the cut. The process had since passed into legend. He spent three years looking at the stone; then another three practicing the cutting and polishing on no fewer than two hundred plastic models of the original, experimenting in ways to optimize the size, cut, and design while removing the exceedingly dangerous flaw. He succeeded, in much the same way Michelangelo was able to sculpt the David out of a badly cracked block of marble other sculptors had rejected as unworkable.

When Arens was done, he had produced an extraordinary, heart-cut stone along with another dozen or so smaller stones, all from the same rough. He named the biggest stone Lucifer's Heart after its grim history, commenting to the press that it was "the very devil to cut."

And then, in an act of extraordinary generosity, Arens willed the stone to the New York Museum of Natural History, which he had visited as a child and whose Hall of Diamonds had determined whathis life's work would be. He sold the dozen or so much smaller stones cut from the same rough for what was rumored to be an astonishing sum, but, strangely enough, none of the stones had ever resurfaced on the market. Kaplan assumed they had been made into a single, spectacular piece of jewelry, which remained with the original owner, who wished to keep her identity secret.

Kaplan swung around the corner of Gramercy Park and walked west, toward Park Avenue, where he had the best shot of catching a cab headed uptown. He had half an hour, but you could never predict midtown traffic at lunchtime, and this was one appointment he did not want to be late to.

As he stopped at the corner of Lex to wait for the light to change, he was startled to see a black car roll up beside him, window down. Inside sat a man in a green sports jacket.

"Mr. George Kaplan?"

"Yes?"

The man leaned over, presented the badge of a New York City police lieutenant, and opened the door. "Get in, please."

"I have an important appointment, Officer. What's this all about?"

"I know. Affiliated Transglobal Insurance. I'm your escort."

Kaplan peered closely at the badge: Lieutenant Vincent D'Agosta. It was a genuine shield-Kaplan was well versed in such things- and the man behind the wheel really couldn't be anything other than a cop, despite the unusual choice of apparel. Who else would know about his appointment?

"That's kind of you." Kaplan climbed in, the door shut, the locks shot down, and the car eased away from the curb.

"Security's going to be high," said the policeman. Then he nodded at a gray plastic box on the seat between them. "I'll have to ask you to surrender your cell phone, your wallet with all your identification, any weapons you might have, and all your tools. Put them in that box next to you. I'll pass them to my colleague, and they'll all be returned to you at the vault after they've been thoroughly vetted."

"Is this really necessary?"

"Absolutely. And I'm sure you can understand why."

Kaplan, not very surprised under the circumstances, removed the requested items and placed them in the box. At the next light, at Park Avenue, a vintage Jaguar that had been following them pulled up alongside; the windows of both vehicles went down; and the policeman handed the box through the window. Glancing into the other car, Kaplan saw that the driver had carefully groomed pale blond hair and was wearing a nicely tailored black suit.

"Your colleague drives a most unusual car for a policeman."

"He's a most unusual man."

When the light changed to green, the Jaguar turned right and headed for Midtown, while the policeman driving Kaplan turned south.

"I beg your pardon, Officer, but we should be heading north," Kaplan said. "Affiliated Transglobal Insurance is headquartered at 1271 Avenue of the Americas."

The car accelerated southward and the policeman looked over unsmilingly. "Sorry to inform you, Mr. Kaplan, but this is one appointment you won't be keeping."