Stone 588 Read Online Free Page B

depressed. Shop next to shop next to shop appears vacated, the windows stripped, empty, exposing fades and dust boundaries on the velour surfaces. And beyond in the unlighted interiors the shelves of glass display cases are barren. The impression is that everyone packed up every carat in a hurry and fled. Truth is, of course, the precious stuff has been given over to the deep dark of vaults and safes. But it never sleeps. Darkness is an imposition to facets, perhaps even a suffering.
    Come the day, the street awakens, more instantaneously vigorous than any other commercial street in Manhattan. It flashes open. Store windows and display counters are swiftly kindled with cold blaze, and the pitch seems already under way before it starts.
    Especially outside along the sidewalks. They are sidewalks as ample as those of most east-west New York blocks, but here they are too narrow. Here the sidewalk is a place for negotiation, where men pause and stand together to conduct business in a manner that really isn't as much happenchance as it appears. For many the sidewalk is office, pockets are vaults. Many of that many are Hasidim, the most pious of orthodox Jews, unmistakable in their long black coats and beards. No neckties, white home-laundered shirts buttoned at the collar. Beneath the crowns of their black wide-brimmed hats, long hair hides, except in front on both sides, where gathers of strands to the chin are braided or curled into tubelike locks with a curling iron. The Hasidim — or beards, as they are called — seem less arduous somehow and therefore more confident. Their black outfits probably enhance that; surely their legion does. Whatever, the scurry goes past and around them, such as the carrying of stones from place to place. Every moment lots of the precious hard things are being taken to be seen, being returned. Those who bear them cut and thread through the street traffic swiftly, avoiding jostle, never allowing contact, stepping off the curb so as not to be brushed. Incidents of pocket-picking have taught overcaution.
    The milieu of the street: Add the furtive hustlers wanting to look like thieves in their cheap shoes and team-type jackets, because it will help them pass off twenty-dollar-a-carat cubic zirconium as hot diamonds at two fifty a carat, take a quick two hundred. Then there are the authentic thieves, the swifts, small-time independents trying not to be taken for what they are in their cheap shoes and team-type jackets. They shift along in pairs or threes, unable to be casual, their score of the night before concealed on them as remotely as possible. They go in at places, come out, confer. They're angry that no interest has been shown in a gold-filled cameo brooch, or they're disappointed and pissed because the most they've been offered for a clean two-carat square-cut still in its Tiffany mounting is not even half of half what their minds have already been spending.
    Add in too: the flavor of Colombians. Usually gaunt and tight-suited young men but sometimes older, with a paunch that a jacket can just barely be buttoned over. They are in from a barrio of Bogota or Cartagena, cocaine mules who have gotten through and unloaded. They have also brought their bonus, have it in the safest pocket: one or two hundred carats of cut emerald to peddle. They look only slightly more out of place than the middle-aged ex-wives in from Huntington or Paterson or New Haven wanting to sell away some of their recent alienation. Rings, pins, minor bracelets, things that actually never were favorites serve the vengeance.
    All this at street level.
    Above is where the heavier action is, in the buildings that with only one or two exceptions are prewar. The tallest is thirteen floors, the average is seven. The reason there are no new high-rises on the street is that no one, neither landlords nor tenants, wants to lose what can be made during the months needed to tear a building down and put another up. Thus, the old buildings