The Jerusalem Diamond (4 page)

“
Buona notte
, Mr. Hopeman.”

He got up and fumbled to return the receiver to its cradle. The tingling of his intuition was so intense he could almost hear it. He sat on the edge of the bed and waited for it to quiet, so he could try to figure out what was going on.

3

THE APPOINTMENT

When he had known that he wanted both the joys of scholarship and the action and rewards of business, he had realized that extraordinary self-discipline would be necessary to keep one occupation from consuming the other. But a gift day was always accepted without hesitation by the scholar, and he was happy to hear from his office that his calendar was clear. After breakfast he returned to the workroom and wrote the article on the Russian jewels, using the notes he had completed the previous evening. He worked carefully, rewriting every few pages, editing while he ate the lunch Ruth Lawrenson brought in at noon on a tray.

By late afternoon the piece was in its envelope, addressed and ready to be mailed to
The Slavik Review
.

He changed into a sweat suit and track shoes and then walked through the orchard that extended from the house to the river, splitting the woods. When he came to the path that flirted with the bank, he began to jog, enjoying the occasional flash of Hudson through the trees. For more than three years he had taken this route, two miles downstream and then back, across the land of half a dozen neighbors. He
seldom met anyone and he saw no one today. For the return he picked up the pace; by the time the house came into view he was running full out, fighting the air as if it flowed like the river. A deer sprang away as he thudded into the orchard where the animal had been browsing on new leaves. It swept out of sight with a flick of white tail and he wasted oxygen in laughter. Now he knew something else about deer: they ate his apple trees. Jeff wanted a deer rifle but would get it only over Harry's bleached bones.

“Go, you damned stud!”

As he made his sweaty way into the house, he realized it might well have been a doe. His snort brought a veiled glance from Ruth Lawrenson, who did not believe a heartbroken person should enjoy himself visibly.

His father wore a navy blazer of open-weave English worsted; custom-made silk shirt, white as a sop to age; tie of maroon foulard with small paisley pattern of muted blue; pale gray slacks; and summer-weight shoes of black leather, polished but not glossy. Alfred Hopeman used his impeccable tailoring quietly and naturally in the European fashion, a nice habit he had absorbed as managing director of Hauptmann's, one of the best-known diamond houses in Berlin. He had gotten out of Germany in 1931, wearing a fine suit but with almost no luggage. One of the first things he did in New York was to find a tailor. The Lindbergh kidnapping-murder had still been in the minds of Americans; Bruno Hauptmann's execution was recent enough for him to see the little electric-chair current surge through faces every time he was introduced. He changed his name to Hopeman on his naturalization papers.

Forty-seventh Street was cruder and noisier than Berlin's Leipziger Strasse, but despite Alfred's flawless tailoring he felt at home there from the start. The events of his life had made it infinitely clear to him, as it had not been before, that he was a Jew, and he enjoyed the Jewishness of New York's diamond district. For four years he worked for others, husbanding his capital and biding his time until finally he was his own man again. Then for another eight years he worked Forty-seventh Street, dealing in diamonds and cutting and polishing. While the new company never reached the fashionable eminence of his German
atelier, it had been successful. He was solidly, if modestly, established when fortune had reached out and gathered him in.

The DeBeers Diamond Corporation controls 95 percent of all the precious stones mined each year. Only a few persons within DeBeers know the full extent of the vast reserve from which it trickles into the market a supply small enough to make certain that diamonds remain precious. Ten times a year, in a nine-story office building off Fleet Street in London known popularly as “the Syndicate” and officially as the Central Selling Organization, a large number of uncut diamonds are carefully separated into two hundred and fifty smaller collections, each roughly equal in number, size and quality. These are destined for “the Two Hundred and Fifty,” the elite of the world's diamond merchants. The favored dealers are allowed to pick up the gems personally at a showing called a “sight,” but there is no haggling and a dealer is expected to take what he is assigned. Many stay home and accept delivery by ordinary mail. Before each “sight” or mailing, each of these dealers must pay $1 million to the Organization. Much of the time a refund check accompanies the box he subsequently receives, which always contains no less than $250,000 worth and no more than $1 million worth of uncut gemstones, or “rough.”

A new member is added to the select fraternity only in the event that death or severe illness removes a name. Alfred had had no inkling that he would be named to the Two Hundred and Fifty. His elation when informed was replaced by concern as he had realized the amount of capital that would be necessary. But his name on the DeBeers list proved sufficient collateral to raise any amount. He sold the first six boxes of rough stones to wholesalers without even breaking the seals, at mark-ups that averaged 17 percent above what he had paid to DeBeers. Within eighteen months, his loans had been repaid.

When Harry opened a new and fashionable Alfred Hopeman & Son on Fifth Avenue, he had taken over the polishing factory on Forty-seventh Street, and his father had begun to send the London boxes straight to him. It was an enormous advantage. He paid Alfred his profit and took his pick, finishing only the choicest stones in his own atelier and wholesaling the rest throughout the industry. In effect, the arrangement made his father a very wealthy pensioner.

“You men ready for tea?” Essie called.

“Dinner was so fine I didn't leave room.” His stepmother's culinary skill was one of the few subjects on which they could communicate. His mother had died when he was nine; he had grown up watching Alfred in association with a long line of women, some of them beautiful. Yet in his old age his father had married the frumpiest, the dullest of
hausfrauen
.

And had never looked so contented, Harry was forced to admit.

“What time are you expecting that man?” Essie asked.

“Around eight.”

“I should tell the doorman. Since the burglaries they're especially strict, thank God.”

“His name is Herzl Akiva. You've had burglaries?”

“Mr. Akiva.” They could hear her calling downstairs. “Not us, neighbors.”

“In this building?” He looked at his father.

Alfred shrugged.

When Harry was eleven, one day his chapped fingers had found strange lumps in a jar of Vaseline in the lower right-hand drawer of his father's desk. Just below the surface of the petroleum jelly was an enormous and vulgar jewel, its lower two thirds painted gilt like an overgrown sequin. Below it were hidden six small yellow diamonds. Alfred, confronted, told him that the large jewel was paste, a good-luck piece that had been given to him by his own father. It was kept, he said, to persuade a thief that the jar contained junk; for despite their smallness the six diamonds were of excellent quality and worth a lot of money. All Harry could feel was disbelief at the contents of the jar he had tossed aside so many times while searching for rubber bands, paper clips and other valuables.

He had asked his father: “Why are they there?”

“Never mind.”

But Harry kept after him stubbornly. Finally he was told that a similar stash had allowed Alfred to escape from Germany. “Animals in brown shirts, I hope they caught cholera, waiting at my shop to arrest me.”

Harry had stared, feeling the presence of Nazis.

“Stay the hell out of my desk. Understand?”

A few years later Harry had found Alfred's prophylactics in a closeted shoe box. The loss of several had been noticed; the shoe box had
disappeared and Harry had been called out of class at his Orthodox day school on the West Side, to have frozen talks about sex with Mr. Sternbane, the school psychologist. But the Vaseline jar had not disappeared. It had gone back into the lower right-hand drawer to stay, his father choosing to share the responsibility with him. Harry recognized the compliment. The secret made him different from the other kids at school. He never again opened the jar. It was enough that it was there, and that he knew what it contained. The diamonds in the desk didn't cause arguments until, years later, he realized that no insurance company would write a policy for gems protected from New York City by doormen and a petroleum jelly disguise.

He had asked Alfred to keep them in the vault at the shop. His father refused, and they quarreled about the stones.

“Burglaries,” he said.

Alfred ignored him. “When am I going to see my grandson?”

“He isn't avoiding you. The school keeps him busy.”

“The
goyishe
school. And Della?”

“I talked with her yesterday. She sends her love.”

Alfred nodded sourly. He sighed as the telephone purred.

“He is on his way up,” Essie called.

“What can we do for somebody in textiles?” Harry said.

Herzl Akiva was of medium height, with salt and pepper hair and a thin mustache, almost entirely gray. “I spend very little time with textiles. I work for the government, Mr. Hopeman.”

Alfred leaned forward. “The United States government?”

“The government of Israel.”

“If my friend Netscher sent you, you sell Israel Bonds.”

Akiva smiled. “I do not. How much do you know of the Copper Scroll?” he asked Harry.

“The Dead Sea Scroll of copper?”

Akiva nodded.

“It was found in the early 1950's, a bit later than the parchment fragments. It is not in Jerusalem, at the Shrine of the Book with the other Dead Sea Scrolls. This one is in Amman, isn't it?”

“In the Jordan Museum. You are familiar with its contents?”

“Descriptions of places where relics and treasures were hidden.
There's an unresolved controversy, isn't there? Over whether the listed valuables came from the Temple or from the monastic community at Qumran.”

“Do you have an opinion?”

Harry shrugged. “It's outside my specialty. But it's always seemed unlikely to me that the men of Qumran could have accumulated riches in the quantity and variety described by the scroll.”

“Suppose I were to tell you that another copper scroll has been found? And that it substantiates the opinion that the Temple was the source of hidden treasures?”

In the silence, Harry could hear his father breathing. “Are you telling us that?”

“Yes,” Akiva said.

More than a year before, he told them, David Leslau, Professor of Biblical History at the Hebrew Union College of Cincinnati, had been excavating at the southern wall of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. At nineteen and one-half feet he had found detritus—shards, coins, a few hand tools. Six feet deeper, his diggers came to an open gutter, built by King Herod's engineers.

“The archeologist's instinct was to follow that gutter through the wall, to find evidence that would tell the story of the birth and death of the great Temple of God,” Akiva said. “But it was forbidden. It had taken him months of filling out forms and waiting for permissions before he had been allowed to dig at that place. Twice, Orthodox students had stoned his workmen and the police had had to be summoned to give them protection. And he knew that in the Arab Quarter a rumor had risen that the excavation was the start of tunneling into the Temple Mount—supposedly, they would emerge near the Dome of the Rock and plant explosives that would destroy the Mosque of Omar.

“It called for no decision. He followed the section of gutter that went away from the Temple site. It ran almost due south, toward the City of David.

“After almost seventy feet, Leslau saw that the people who had built the open gutter had linked it with an even more ancient drainage
system, a large culvert made of massive stones, each hollowed in the center. Around the borings the stones had been ingeniously hewn male and female so they fit into one another to form a huge, tightly sealed pipe.

“Leslau entered the culvert with an electric torch and saw nothing unusual, except that in the upper portion one of the stones had been replaced by two smaller pieces. But when his workers removed these stones, they found behind them something that looked like a rusty hunk of tail pipe.” The Israeli looked at them. “It was a copper scroll.”

“Impossible,” Harry said flatly.

Akiva waited.

“I correspond regularly with Max Bronstein, Leslau's close colleague on that faculty. He most certainly would have told me.”

“They have been pledged to silence, for political reasons,” Akiva said. “Both the Vatican and the Moslem community in Israel oppose anything that adds to the Jewish claim on East Jerusalem, and they have never stopped working to have it declared an international city. Leslau found his scroll at a time when the Church and the Mosque of Omar were making a concerted diplomatic push to outlaw all digging on or near the Temple Mount. At first it was thought the announcement could be made after things quieted down. But by that time, the scroll had been translated.”