The Jerusalem Diamond Read Online Free Page B

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. Heseldom 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.
    â€œGo, 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 Germanatelier, 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