Authors: Norman Moss
Stone Cold
© Norman Moss 2015
Norman Moss has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
I was rich. I didn’t know what was going to happen when I started on this enterprise, but I certainly didn’t expect to get rich. I say “rich”, but that’s a relative term. I wasn’t going to make the Forbes List. I wasn’t in the billionaire class, no half-dozen homes and fleet of private jets. But I had a few million dollars – or pounds, I must get used to thinking in pounds. And that was more than I ever thought I’d have.
I didn’t exactly have the money but I had a diamond that was worth some millions of pounds, and I could sell it – the Uzbek diamond. I still think of it as the Uzbek diamond because that’s what we’ve always called it for want of any other name, although the one thing we’ve always known about it, or at least been pretty sure about it, is that it wasn’t Uzbek.
It was held by a silver clasp on a chain, and it was sitting on my kitchen table in its silk-lined box, next to a defrosted pizza and an apple that I was going to have for supper. The incongruity appealed to me. If I were a painter I would have painted the scene as a still life.
I’ve trailed that little bastard halfway around the world, but it never occurred to me that I would end up owning it. A man was shot dead because of it and I was nearly killed, and I have a limp, which I’m assured will heal.
I took it out of its box, holding it by the chain, and held it up to the window. The late afternoon sunlight caught its pale blue colour and flung it around the room so that it bounced off the wallpaper. Well, diamonds are supposed to glitter.
I hadn’t thought about what I’d do with my life as a millionaire. I’d take a long holiday to start with. With Maggie if she’d come with me. I liked the idea of exploring Italy, particularly those cities that produced the great flowering in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Venice and Florence of course, but also Sienna and Pisa. I wanted not just to see the churches and the paintings, but to walk in those city streets. When we’d had our fill of the Renaissance we’d go somewhere along the Amalfi coast, south of Naples, and look at that beautiful shoreline, drink Chianti, and make love in the warm afternoon. That was my dream, anyway.
I’d spend some time sitting around reading. I did a lot of reading in the army but I hadn’t done much lately. I’d buy a present for Jeremy. I owed it to him. Some cases of fine wine, perhaps. He’d appreciate that, he likes good wine. After all, it was Jeremy who sent me on the trail of the diamond.
I’ve had several ideas for careers since I left the army, but now I had all this money I didn’t know what I’d do. Being rich is an occupation in itself.
“Tell me, what do you do?”
“I’m a multi-millionaire.”
“Oh, I see.”
I couldn’t imagine knocking myself out in a boring job when I had all this money. But it wasn’t enough to retire on, and anyway I didn’t want to retire young. God, I’d only been rich for a few hours and it was causing me problems already.
Maybe it was the curse of the diamond. It sounded like the title of a 1940s B-movie –
The
Curse
of
the
Uzbek
Diamond
. You can hear the crashing chords of an organ as the title comes up. No, I’m not superstitious, but it was remarkable that nearly everyone who had owned it had suffered misfortune.
I looked at it again and wondered why people paid vast sums to decorate their wives with something like that. Then I put it back in its box and put the box in the kitchen drawer.
I telephoned Jeremy. “I’ve got the diamond,” I told him.
“You’ll write it up in a full report, of course.”
“Sure.”
“And I’ll take you out to dinner.”
“That would be nice. But Jeremy, you’re not hearing me. I said I’ve got the diamond.”
“What do you mean, you’ve got the diamond?”
“I’ve got it here. I own it.”
“What do you mean, you own it?”
“I mean I own it. It was given to me as a present.”
There was a long pause, and then, “You mean the diamond is
yours
?”
“Yes.”
Another pause, and then, “Jesus. You jammy bastard.”
“I suppose ‘jammy’ is a quaint English word for ‘fortunate’,” I said. “I’m not familiar with it.”
“But how did that happen? Mind you, I’m not sure I believe you.”
“It’s a long story. I’ll tell you all when I see you.”
He was obviously having trouble taking it in. He was the one who was supposed to get rich from Fitzwilliam Harvey Security. “Well, if it’s true, then, you can take
me
out to dinner. In the meantime, I’ll see you in the office tomorrow morning. About eleven? You can tell me all about it.”
“How about tomorrow afternoon? I’ve got a doctor’s appointment in the morning.”
“Can’t do it. The next morning.”
“OK. Eleven o’clock?”
“Yes. I’m looking forward to hearing your story. You really own the Uzbek diamond? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“Yes, that’s what I’m telling you. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I put down the telephone and went to check my e-mails. The usual spam, the New York Times blogs, and a message from my sister in Arizona:
“
You
tell
me
the
reason
for
your
travels
is
secret
but
I
hope
whatever
it
is
went
well
.
I
still
think
you
may
change
your
mind
about
staying
among
the
Limeys
.
What
if
you
go
native
and
start
talking
like
them
?
How
am
I
going
to
explain
that
to
the
family
?
David’s
had
a
mental
breakdown
and
fallen
in
love
with
the
Queen
?
Come
to
think
of
it
,
maybe
there
is
a
female
involved
and
you
haven’t
told
me
.
I’ve
had
enough
trouble
getting
used
to
Dad’s
deserting
God’s
own
country
.
Think
again
.
If
Manhattan
was
noisy
and
expensive
,
try
the
clean
air
and
wide
blue
skies
around
here
.
Love
,
Susie
.”
I looked out of the window at the Thames. The river is narrow here at Egham, and I could look down on the suburban lawn on the other side, and the Eagle pub with a few outdoor tables on the patio, unoccupied now that we were coming into winter. All the narrow lawns leading away from houses down to the river’s edge, with docks and boats moored there, squeezed one up against the other, like guests at a crowded party. I thought of the open spaces of even an ordinary American suburb and wondered for a moment whether I was doing the right thing, staying here.
There was a knock at the door. It was Anne. In her mid-thirties, dark-haired, chunky, with big hips and breasts, at home with two small children, bored with her husband. She was wearing a sweater showing a lot of cleavage, as usual. Just the kind of person you want living a floor below you if you’re a single man – or not, depending on your state of mind. Right then I did not.
“I saw you were back,” she said. “I thought I’d drop by and say hello.”
“Hello,” I said. “I’d ask you to come in but I’ve got a whole lot of phone calls to make. Work.”
“OK,” she said, but she didn’t move. “Have you been back to America?”
“Among other places,” I said.
She still stood there. “It still seems strange seeing you here, and not Professor Root.”
“I’m sure.”
“I was so sorry when he died. We all were. He was such a nice man.”
“Yes, I know. Dad had a lot of friends here.”
Finally she turned away. “Well, I’ll see you,” she said. “Drop by one afternoon for a cup of tea.”
*
I came to England because Dad had died suddenly and I had to clear up his affairs. He had left everything to me and my sister, who was married and living out west, and sufficiently well off not to quibble about the details of who got what. So we agreed that she would have the money, which was not an awful lot, and I would have this apartment, which I could sell.
I was at a loose end. I had recently left the army and I was living in a rented Manhattan studio apartment and looking for a job. Since I had to spend some time in England to sort out Dad’s affairs, I thought I would stay and look for a job here and see how it worked out. I had lived in England for two years as a schoolboy, and visited Dad from time to time, so it was not a strange country to me. And there was Tamsin. I was still feeling pain from the break-up, and this seemed like a chance to get away from the scene, and also from the circle of friends where I was bound to run into her and whatever new partner she had acquired.
Naturally, when I came to England I got in touch with Jeremy, or Captain Fitzwilliam as he was when I first met him. Jeremy was socially well connected, and now that he was out of the army I thought he might have some useful contacts. We had known each other when were in our respective armies in Germany, both of us in intelligence, and we became good friends, partly because we shared some attitudes to military life.
I had not wanted to be sent to Germany. I wanted to go to Iraq or Afghanistan. I wanted the experience of combat. That was why I had joined the army. I’m not naturally aggressive. I didn’t want to spend my whole life as a fighting soldier, or any other kind of soldier. If I had wanted a career in the army I would have gone to West Point. But I felt that my intellectual side was overdeveloped compared with other parts of me. I was in the campus ROTC at Columbia, something that got me some flak from my fellow liberals, and I wanted to expand, or at any rate try out, the things that come with a different kind of experience, to have a taste of mortal combat. I suppose that, in a young-man-facing-life sort of way, I wanted to test myself.
Before the army and after Columbia I spent a year in Morocco working for an international NGO, supervising the distribution of medical aid and medical training and trying to see that at least some of the money was kept out of the hands of venial officials and middlemen.
I had studied German as an undergraduate and spent an undergraduate year at the Free University in Berlin. I spoke fluent German, so I suppose I should not have been surprised when I was assigned to Germany. I protested. The Colonel said, “You should have studied Arabic instead of German.”
“But President Bush didn’t tell me he was going to invade Iraq,” I protested.
“What would you have said if he did tell you?”
“I would have told him that it wasn’t a good idea.”
“That’s why he didn’t ask you. He wanted advisors who agreed with him. Now go off and
sprachen
some
Deutsch
.”
So I spent most of my army career liaising with German counter-intelligence looking for terrorist plots against American troops, and supervising security matters. As did Jeremy, in the British Army...
I thought that after the army I might join the Foreign Service as a military attaché, perhaps after going back to college to get a master’s degree. I have the language qualification. As well as German I speak near-perfect French because my mother was French and made sure that I spoke it when I was growing up in Connecticut. After my father left she spoke French to me and my sister a lot of the time, and I also spent a couple of childhood summers with her family in Normandy. I liked the idea of dealing with international affairs, and of embassy life.
In the army in Germany I found that some contractors were short-changing the government and making huge profits. I decided that this could not be allowed, and I blew the whistle. I still remember facing Major Baumeister across his desk. He fixed me with a stare that was far from friendly and said, “You really want to make waves, don’t you, Root.” That and the hostility of a couple of other senior officers persuaded me that I had blown the whistle in the wrong place. Perhaps I should have persevered, but I decided at that moment that my military future was likely to be very limited, and the best thing for me to do now was to retreat into civilian life. That put paid to any idea of becoming a military attaché.