Stone 588 Read Online Free Page A

degree by degree to a mental clarity as pure as washed air.
    Janet did not trust it. The feeling was too strange for her to trust. With her eyes yet closed she lay there, not believing in it, suspecting it was a cruel tease, that she was merely being given a taste of sanity. She thought perhaps this was the moment before death when utmost wants were granted—although it felt more like life, she had to admit.
    Ten minutes passed.
    She hung on to it, believed it tenuous, breathed gently not to disturb.
    A half hour.
    Her outlook improved.
    Warily, she opened her eyes.
    The afternoon light was mostly gone, the room in dusk. It was later than supper time. No one had come to look in on her, at least not that she knew of. Where had the time gone?
    The window was in direct view. She saw outside, blessed outside, where the new green of the maples was black against a sky with some indigo and mauve in it. She loved the leaves, the sky, the lenient colors it was presenting in this hyphenation of day and night. Her chest and eyes were crying.
    The incongruity of her hands took her attention to them. They were still fisted. There was something hard in her right fist. From the feel of it she believed she knew what it was. She unfurled her fingers. Her hand was still held by a restraint so she had to raise her head to look at it.
    It was from tip to tip a smidgen longer than an inch. Three quarters of an inch at its widest point. Octahedral in shape, like a pair of pyramids fused base to base, forming eight triangular sides. It wasn't a geometrically perfect octahedron. All its sides were not precisely the same measure, but nearly. One tip of it was incomplete, apparently chipped off. Except for that tip its surface was whitish-opaque, as though hazed with frost.
    A rough crystal.
    A stone.
    Her father's reminder stone.
    It had been among the belongings of his she'd had on his old dresser. During her rampage she must have unintentionally grabbed it up.
Chapter 5

    Forty-seventh Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues is not really a good place to walk a dog. Nor, for that matter, is it the best of places to walk a mistress.
    Diamonds are why.
    Rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and pearls too, but mainly diamonds. There are well over a thousand jewelry shops and concessions, counting from comer to comer along both sides of the street. Every window is arranged like an altar to avarice. On tier above tier in tray after tray precious stones are set, perfectly angled to wink and keep winking. They take such advantage, naked as they are against black velour. They are teasers, motionless Salomes. They flick their selves iniquitously on the stages of motives behind the eyes of in-lookers, suggesting the wantonness that might be given the giver in retum. Or, for the wanter, bringing up new resolves to accommodate old erotic persistencies, after which nothing could possibly be denied. Of course, the same is tme of such offerings at Cartier, Bulgari, Van Cleef's and other Fifth Avenue establishments, however, there the lust is rather oblique, more decently disguised and not so thoroughly atmospheric.
    A fifteen-carat marquise diamond appears self-conscious of its relationship to the word reduced. In the same window is a tray that contains twenty-seven apparently identical diamond rings, each set with three quarters of a carat, pear shape. A platoon of rings, their shanks sunk in separate slots in the black velour, five slots down, six across. Three slots are purposely unoccupied, stuck with red plastic buttons that have the word sold imprinted on them, three of thousands of lies.
    The street.
    People in the trade now even leave off the number when they speak or think of it. Pelikaanstraat in Antwerp is a diamond place, as is Hatton Garden in London. But 47th in New York is "the street." It handles, one way or another, over half the finished diamonds in the world.
    Such industry is unbelievable — at nine o'clock at night. Come night the street looks