“But how does this work?”
“I’m not a broker.” He wore a big silver chain. “Typically, I want to get paid.” He motioned with his hand. I gave him one of the earrings. He examined it with the loupe. “Does it have papers?”
I didn’t know what he was talking about. “Just tell me what it’s worth.”
“A piece like this,” he said, but didn’t finish. He handed it back to me. “Take it to New York. You won’t do better. But take it somewhere else, and if he offers more, then you know I’m fucking you. If you can do better with him, do it, but you won’t. That’s why I say, go somewhere else.” There were cards on the counter. This store had two other locations, in Palm Beach and Rotterdam.
“What if it’s insured?”
“Not my concern. If you have insurance and you get rid of the piece, cancel the policy because you don’t own it anymore.”
I asked if there was a way to identify it, repeating what the first guy said about laser whatever.
“Oh, what a pain in the ass.”
“But if it’s on there?”
“You take it off.” I asked how. He looked irritated. “You polish it.”
The cops would find me. Insurance investigators. A cuckolded billionaire with every kind of connection would take my life and pulp it, hire a ninja, God knows what, sink me into debt that would bury my grandchildren.
“They got these things now measure every angle, every facet. It’s bullshit. One cut and the weight changes, it’s a different stone. Look, they got this stuff helps people sleep better at night. Good for them.” He picked up the loupe again, annoyed. “You got the other one?”
I couldn’t move. He thought I was being coy. He closed his hand.
“It’s funny because you can hold it in your fist, but it’s worth a lot of money.” He smiled. He’d been foggy when I’d walked in but had fully woken up. “I have to look at it under the light and weigh it.” He turned and motioned for me to follow him into the back. I figured I’d be shot in the head when I stepped through the doorway.
“Someone walking in off the street with a piece like this? It’s rare.” He flipped on a bright light and talked about the stone while he looked at it under a microscope, describing the thing in technical terms, jotting down notes. Behind him was a flat steel door painted beige that I continued to stare at for the next ten minutes, trembling like a fish. I shook the way Amy had, last summer, on the beach. I felt most alive when I was doing something rotten.
“What’s this?” he said. I froze. “A stone taken out of the ground. Hey look, if we left these things buried, nobody would know. The world could go to hell tomorrow and this stuff ain’t gonna help. But the labor involved in digging them out, plus they’re rare, and people like ’em. D color, flawless, three carat and above, you’re talking about an investment, easily transportable, and they hold their value. A few of them is a house on the beach.”
I took the other one out of my pocket and slid it across the desk for him to weigh and examine. Security cameras, bank records. Of course I’d get caught, because getting caught had been my goal, that’s what I’d been hoping for, real punishment, real pain. I called myself every disgusting name I could think of. Then I was happy because I could say no, walk out. I hadn’t gone through with it yet. Then I was happy, thinking I still might.
He stuck his glasses on his head and gave me the grading info, the offer per carat, then multiplied it by the weight of the two diamonds. The number had no shape. I tried to find its contours, its boundaries. The upper limit of my earlier estimate had been off by $221,000.
Who would play softball with something like that in their ears?
I hated money. And I hated people who had money, it was disgusting, it made them do weird stuff. I’d rather suffer. I knew how to suffer.
“In a case like this, what I’ll do, I have a few ideas of who I’ll call. And to be honest, I have to throw some percentage on top and hope I don’t queer the deal. I want you to know I’m paying the most, but I want him to think he’s paying the least. Although, look, these days, anyone is happy with a sale.”
He picked up the phone and asked whether I wanted a bank wire or a check. His face went slack as someone answered, and he opened the steel door. “It’s me,” he said. “Put Murray on the phone.” He pulled the door closed behind him.
Dear God in heaven, I wanted a sump pump. In a heavy storm I could take a thousand wet-vac buckets out of my leaking basement, up the back stairs, and dump them in the yard. Sometimes the wet-vac accidentally sucked up pieces of the crumbling floor. Sometimes when it rained, weird stuff from the kitchen sink, like Cheerios and macaroni, floated up out of the basement drain.
The earrings sat in a velvet-lined dish on his desk.
I also had some lingering dental issues. The crown cost $1,600. Or maybe the root canal cost $1,600 and the crown was more. I’d been chewing crookedly on that side for a year. And the retaining wall in my backyard had fallen down and spilled into the alley in chunks. I’d gotten two ominous warnings from the city and a $4,000 estimate from a structural engineer.
I wanted to knock out the pre-K tuition, call an oil-burner repair man, open a retirement account, start a college fund. The murmuring through the door, not the content so much as the cadence, somehow mediated the experience. There was still a layer of protection between reality and me. They were discussing the potential sale of some hot rocks. This guy was either crooked, stupid, or crazy, or maybe he knew the trade well enough to handle a high-grade diamond with no documentation.
I also needed life insurance, a new dishwasher, and those screens that keep leaves out of your gutters. All I’d ever wanted was to save her from him, but I had been kidding myself. They belonged together.
There were too many stories of stupid, vicious, dangerous, cruel, or disgusting things he’d done to her, and to his kids, things she’d encouraged or enabled. Here are your secrets. I don’t want them anymore. I’m giving them back to you, in a story I’ll write and donate to mankind. Better yet, I’ll write to Rapazzo, tell him I’ve been banging his wife, send a few naked pictures of her and threaten to splatter them and every horrible thing she’d ever said about him all over the Web unless he promised to be nice to her. I’ll write to the SEC, I’ll do something. I stood, grabbed the earrings, and walked down the street in the rain to my car.