“I’m impressed, my dear Jim. Very impressed. But also perplexed. These are not ordinary stones. These are identifiable anywhere in the diamond world. What am I to do with them?”
“You tell me,” said Rawlings.
Louis Zablonsky spread his hands wide.
“I will not lie to you, Jim. I will tell you straight. The Glen Diamonds probably have an insured value of seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds, which is roughly what they would fetch if sold legitimately on the open market by Cartier. But they can’t be sold like that, obviously.
“That leaves two options. One is to find a very rich buyer who would want to buy the famous Glen Diamonds knowing he could never display them or admit ownership—a rich miser content to gloat over them in privacy. There are such people, but very few. From such a person one could get perhaps half the price I have named.”
“When could you find a buyer like that?”
Zablonsky shrugged. “This year, next year, sometime, never. You can’t just advertise in the personal columns.”
“Too long,” said Rawlings. “The other way?”
“Prise them out of their settings—that act alone would reduce the value to six hundred thousand pounds. Repolish them and sell them separately as four unmatched, individual gems. One might get three hundred thousand. But the repolisher would want his cut. If I carried those costs personally, I think I could let you have a hundred thousand—but at the end of the operation. After the sales had been completed.”
“What can you let me have up front? I can’t live on fresh air, Louis.”
“Who can?” said the old fence. “Look, for the white-gold setting I can get maybe two thousand pounds on the scrap market. For the forty small stones—put through the legitimate market—say, twelve thousand. That’s fourteen thousand pounds, which I can recover quickly. I can let you have half up front, in cash, now. What do you say?”
They talked for another thirty minutes and clinched their deal. From his safe Louis Zablonsky took £7,000 in cash. Rawlings opened the attaché case and laid the wads of used notes inside.
“Nice,” said Zablonsky, admiring the case. “You treated yourself?”
Rawlings shook his head. “Came with the heist,” he said.
Zablonsky tut-tutted and wagged a finger under Rawlings’s nose. “Get rid of it, Jim. Never keep anything from a job. Not worth the risk.”
Rawlings considered, nodded, made his farewells, and left.
John Preston had spent the entire day seeking out the various members of his investigative team to say his good-byes. They were gratifyingly sorry to see him go. Then there was the paperwork. Bobby Maxwell, his replacement, had come in to say hello. Preston knew him vaguely. He was an agreeable enough young man, eager to make a career in Five and seeing his best chances of promotion as lying in a policy of hitching his wagon to the rising star of Brian Harcourt-Smith. Preston could not hold that against him.
Preston himself was a late entrant, having been inducted into the service direct from the Army Intelligence Corps in 1981, at the age of forty-one. He knew he would never get to the top. Head of section was about the limit for late entrants.
Just occasionally, always to the dismay of the people who worked in Five, the post of Director-General went to someone from quite outside the service if there was no obviously suitable candidate within. But the Deputy Director-General, all the directors of the six branches, and the heads of most of the departments within the branches were by tradition lifelong staffers.
Preston had agreed with Maxwell that he would spend that day, Monday, finishing off his paperwork and the whole of the next day briefing his successor on every current file and investigation. They had parted on that note with mutual good wishes until the morning.
Preston glanced at his watch. It would be a late night. From his personal office safe he would have to get out every current file, check those that could safely go back to Registry, and spend half the night going through the current “bumpf” page by page, so that he could be ready to brief Maxwell in the morning.
First he needed a decent drink. He took the elevator down to the subbasement, where Gordon has a well-stocked and cozy bar.
Louis Zablonsky worked through Tuesday locked in his back room. Only twice did he emerge to see a customer personally. It was a slack day, for which, unusually, he was thankful.
He worked with jacket off and shirtsleeves rolled up over his almost hairless forearms, carefully easing the Glen Diamonds from their white-gold settings. The four principal stones, the two ten-carat gems from the earrings and the matched twenty-carat pair from the tiara and the pendant, came easily and took little time.
When they were out of their beds he could examine them more closely. They were truly beautiful, flaming and sparkling in the light. They were already known to be blue-whites, once also called “top river,” but now reclassified under the standardized gradings as “D flawless.” These four, when he had finished admiring them, he dropped into a small velvet bag. That done, he began the time-consuming task of easing the forty smaller stones out of the gold. As he worked, the light occasionally caught a faded mark in the form of a five-figure number on the underside of his left forearm. To anyone who knew the significance of such marks, the number meant only one thing. It was the brand of Auschwitz.
Zablonsky had been born in 1930, the third son of a Polish-Jewish jeweler of Warsaw. He was nine when the Germans invaded, and by 1940 the ghetto of Warsaw had been enclosed; incarcerated inside it were close to 400,000 Jews, and rations were fixed at well below starvation level. On April 19, 1943, the 90,000 surviving ghetto inhabitants, led by the few able-bodied men left among them, rose in revolt. Louis Zablonsky had just turned thirteen, but he was so thin and emaciated he could well have been taken for five years younger.
When the ghetto finally fell to the Waffen SS troops of Major-General Juergen Stroop on May 16, Zablonsky was one of the few who lived through the mass shootings. The bulk of the inhabitants, some 60,000, were already dead, from bullet, shot, shell, crushed beneath falling buildings, or executed. The remaining 30,000 were almost exclusively the aged, women, and small children. Into these Zablonsky was herded. Most went off to Treblinka and died.
But in one of those freaks of circumstance that occasionally decide life and death, the engine of the train hauling Zablonsky’s cattle car broke down. The car was attached to another engine and ended up at Auschwitz.
Though destined for death, Zablonsky was spared when he gave his profession as jeweler. He was put to work sorting and classifying the trinkets still being found upon the persons of Jews in each fresh intake. Then one day he was summoned to the camp hospital and into the hands of that smiling blond man whom they called “the Angel” and who was still carrying out his manic experiments on the genitalia of pubescent Jewish youths. It was on Josef Mengele’s operating table that, without anesthetic, Louis Zablonsky was castrated.
In late 1944 the survivors of Auschwitz were force-marched westward and Zablonsky ended up in Bergen-Belsen, where, more dead than alive, he was finally freed by the British Army. After intensive hospitalization Zablonsky, having been sponsored by a North London rabbi, was brought to Britain, and after further rehabilitation he became a jeweler’s apprentice. In the early 1960s he had left his employer for his own shop in the East End. Ten years later, he had opened the present, more prosperous establishment in the West End.
It was in the East End, down in the dockland, that he had first started to handle gems imported by seamen—emeralds from Ceylon, diamonds from Africa, rubies from India, and opals from Australia. By the mid-1980s Zablonsky was a wealthy man from both his enterprises, the legitimate and the illicit. He was one of the top fences in London, a specialist in diamonds, and owned a large detached house in Golders Green, where he was a pillar of his community.
Now he tugged the last of the forty smaller stones from their settings and checked to see that he had missed none. He counted the stones and began to weigh the
m. Forty in all, averaging half a carat but mostly smaller. Engagement-ring stuff, but worth about £12,000 in all. He could pass them through Hatton Garden and no one the wiser. Cash deals—he knew his contacts. He began to crush the white-gold settings into a shapeless mass.
When the gold was a mangled blob of metal, he dropped the lump into a bag along with other scrap. He saw Sandra off the premises, closed the shop, tidied up his office, and left, taking the four primary stones with him. On the way home he made a phone call from a public box to a number in Belgium, a number situated in a small village, called Nijlen, outside Antwerp. When he got home he rang British Airways and booked a flight for the morrow to Brussels.
Along the shore of the River Thames, on its southern bank, where once had stood the rotting wharves of a dying dockland, a huge redevelopment program had been continuing through the early and mid-1980s. The program had left great swaths of demolished rubble between the new buildings, moonscapes where the rank grass tangled with the fallen bricks and dust. One day, it was intended, all would be covered by new apartment buildings, shopping malls, and multistory garages, but when that would be was anybody’s guess.
In warm weather the winos camped out in these wastelands and any South London “face” wishing to lose a piece of evidence had but to take the article to the center of these abandoned places and burn it to extinction.
Late on the evening of Tuesday, January 6, Jim Rawlings was walking across an area of several acres, stumbling in the dark as he tripped over unseen chunks of masonry. Had anyone been observing him—and no one was—he would have seen that Rawlings carried in one hand a two-gallon can of gasoline and in the other a beautiful handcrafted calfskin attaché case.
Louis Zablonsky passed through Heathrow Airport on Wednesday morning with no trouble. With heavy greatcoat and soft tweed hat, hand luggage and big briar pipe jutting from his jaw, he joined the daily flow of businessmen from London to Brussels.
On the plane, one of the stewardesses leaned over him and whispered, “I’m afraid we can’t allow you to light the pipe inside the cabin, sir.” Zablonsky apologized profusely and stuffed the briar in his pocket. He did not mind. He did not smoke, and even if he had lit it, it would not have drawn very well. Not with four pear-shaped fifty-eight-facet diamonds crammed into the base below the tamped tobacco.
At Brussels National he rented a car and headed north up the motorway out of Zaventem toward Mechelen, where he pulled right and northeast to Lier and Nijlen.
The bulk of the diamond industry in Belgium is centered upon Antwerp and is specifically located in and around the Pelikaanstraat, where the big enterprises have their showrooms and workshops. But like most industries, the diamond business depends for a part of its functioning upon a mass of small suppliers and outside workers, one-man operations working out of their ateliers, to whom can be subcontracted some of the manufacture of settings, cleaning, and repolishing.
Some of these outside workers also live in Antwerp, and Jews, many of East European origin, are predominant among them. But east of Antwerp lies an area known as Kempen, a cluster of neat villages in which are also located scores of small shops that undertake work for the Antwerp industry. In the center of Kempen lies Nijlen, astride the main road and rail lines from Lier to Herentals.
Halfway down the Molenstraat lived one Raoul Levy, a Polish Jew who had settled in Belgium after the war and who also happened to be a second cousin of Louis Zablonsky of London. Levy was a diamond polisher, a widower who lived alone in one of the small, neat, red-brick bungalows that line the western side of the Molenstraat. At the back of the house was his workshop. It was here that Zablonsky drove and met his relative a little after lunchtime.
They argued for an hour and struck their deal. Levy would repolish the four stones, losing as little of their weight as possible, but enough to disguise their identity. They settled on a fee of £50,000, half up front and half upon sale of the last stone. Zablonsky left and returned to London.
The trouble with Raoul Levy was not that he lacked skill; it was that he was lonely. So each week he looked forward to his one expedition. He loved to take the train into Antwerp, go to his favorite café, where all his cronies met in the evenings, and talk shop. Three days later he went there and talked shop once too often.
While Louis Zablonsky was in Belgium, John Preston was installing himself in his new office on the second floor. He was glad he did not have to leave Gordon for another building.
His predecessor had retired at the end of the year, and the deputy head of C1(A) had been in charge for a few days, no doubt hoping he would be confirmed in the top man’s post. He took his disappointment well and briefed Preston copiously on what the job entailed, which seemed to Preston to be mainly grinding routine.
Left alone that afternoon, Preston cast his eye down the list of ministry buildings that came under A Section. It was longer than might be imagined, but most of the buildings were not security sensitive, save for leakages that might be politically embarrassing. Document leaks concerning, for example, intended social security cuts were always a hazard since the civil service unions had recruited so many staffers with extreme-left political views, but they could usually be handled by the ministry’s in-house security people.
The big ones for Preston were the Foreign Office, Cabinet Office, and Defense Ministry, all of which received cosmic-rated papers. But each had pretty tight security, handled by its own internal-security team. Preston sighed. He started to make a series of phone calls, setting up getting-to-know-you meetings with the security chiefs in each of the principal ministries.
Between calls he glanced at the pile of personal stuff he had brought down from his old office, two floors above. Waiting for a call to be returned by some official otherwise engaged, he rose, unlocked his new personal safe, and put the files inside, one by one. The last of them was his report of the previous month, his own copy. Other than the report he knew to have been NFA’ed in Registry, this was the only one in existence. He shrugged and put it at the back of the safe. It would probably never be examined again, but he saw no reason why he should not keep it, for old times’ sake. After all, his own copy had taken a hell of a lot of sweat to put together.
Chapter 3
The men, when they came to visit Raoul Levy, were four in number; big, heavy men who arrived in two cars. The first car cruised to a halt outside Levy’s bungalow on the Molenstraat, while the second halted a hundred yards up the street.
The first car disgorged two of the men, who walked briskly but quietly up the short path to the front door. The two drivers waited, lights doused, engines running. It was a bitter night, just after 7:00 p.m., pitch-dark. No one walked the Molenstraat that evening of January 15.
The men who knocked on the front door were brisk and businesslike, men with little time to waste, a job to do, and the opinion that the sooner it was over, the better. They did not introduce themselves when Levy answered the door. They just stepped inside and pulled the door closed behind them. Levy’s protest was hardly out of his mouth when it was cut off by four rigid fingers jabbing into his solar plexus.
The big men pulled Levy’s overcoat around his shoulders, clapped his hat on his head, left the front door unlocked, and walked him expertly down the path to the car, whose rear door opened as they approached. When they drove off with Levy sandwiched between them in the rear seat, only twenty seconds had elapsed.
They took him to the Kesseise Heide, a big public park just northwest of Nijlen, whose fifty acres of heather, grass, oaks, and mixed conifers were completely deserted. Well off the road, in the heart of the heath, the two cars stopped. The driver of the second vehicle, who was to be the interrogator, slipped into the front passenger seat.
He turned toward the rear of the car and nodded to his two colleagues. The man on Levy’s right swept two arms around the small diamond polisher to hold him still, and the gloved hand of one arm went across Levy’s mouth. The other man produced a pair of heavy pliers, too
k Levy’s left hand, and deftly crushed three knuckles, one after the other.
What frightened Levy even more than the shattering pain was that they did not ask him any questions. They seemed uninterested. When his fourth knuckle pulped in the pliers, Levy was screaming to be asked questions.
The interrogator in the front nodded casually and said, “Want to talk?”
Behind the glove Levy nodded furiously. The glove was removed. Levy let out a long, bubbling scream. When he had finished, the interrogator said, “The diamonds. From London. Where are they?” He spoke Flemish but with a marked foreign accent.
Levy told him without delay. No amount of money could compensate him for the loss of his hands and therefore his livelihood.
The interrogator considered the information soberly. “Keys,” he said.
They were in Levy’s trouser pocket. The interrogator took them and left the car. Seconds later, his sedan crunched away across the crackling grass toward the road. It was gone for fifty minutes.
During that time Levy whimpered and held his ruined hand. The men on either side of him seemed uninterested in him. The driver sat and stared ahead, gloved hands on the wheel.
When the interrogator rejoined them, he made no mention of the four gems that by now were in his pocket. He said only, “One last question. The man who brought them.”
Levy shook his head. The interrogator sighed at the waste of time and nodded to the man on Levy’s right. The heavy men reversed roles. The one on the right took the pliers and Levy’s right hand. After the crushing of two knuckles on that hand, Levy told them. The interrogator had a couple of short supplementary questions and then he seemed satisfied. He left the car and went back to his own vehicle. In convoy the two sedans bumped back toward the road. They drove back to Nijlen.
As they went past his house, Levy saw that it was dark. He hoped they would drop him off there, but they did not. They drove through the center of the town and out to the east. The lights of the cafés, warm and snug against the freezing winter air, went past the car windows, but no one came running out. Levy could even see the blue neon word POLITIE above the police station across from the church, but no one came out.