Glass House (29 page)

“No idea at all.”

Megan didn’t talk about Claire Alexander and
her daughter’s death after that. The only things she had to say at
that point needed to be raised with Waldoch. She pulled out of the
driveway, pointed the car toward the stream, and started to follow
the road to the most Midwestern town she’d ever seen and the
highway that would lead out of it.

Cut

They were meeting in a basement in Cape
Town. Stairs in the corner, wood framed and unfinished. Dark
concrete walls, damp in some spots along the floor and unbroken by
windows or anything else save the stairs. A large carpet remnant,
the only warm thing in the room.

There was a pub above them, up the steps,
out into the street, and around to the front entrance. When you
listened closely, you could hear music of an obscured and therefore
indefinable type. It drifted down in snatches of notes and then
disappeared before it could be pinned down.

The basement’s ceiling was clouded. A bank
of smoke hung there, softening the weak light from a single bulb
fixture in the middle of the room. It tinted the room with a
yellowed vapor that made the air seem dense and enveloping, like
syrup.

It was dim enough that Allen Saifee wondered
if Tau Kweyama, one of the two men sitting across from him, could
see what he was doing. Kweyama’s head and shoulders were hunched
over the long steel table that separated them, and he was writing
on square pieces of dingy white paper, stacked loose-leaf in front
of him.

He would write in short, quick strokes, two
or three words at a time, glance up and listen, then write some
more. Never more than ten or fifteen lines on a page, and he’d flip
the sheet facedown to the side. He would lift a cigarette and suck
at it, the orange glow flaring momentarily and lighting Kweyama’s
skin to a fiery blue-black, before turning to his fresh page.

Saifee couldn’t see the words Kweyama was
putting down. The light was too poor, the man’s arm wrapped too
closely around the pages, his body tipped too far forward. So Allen
was concentrating on Jak Kuyper instead.

Judging by his name, accent, and
red-blotched-over-white skin tone, Kuyper was an Afrikaner. That
was somewhat rarer in SAPS than it once was, but it was hardly
unknown. Of all government departments, the South African Police
Service was a focus of change in the country’s turnover, but
necessity dictated that the Afrikaners who’d run the police for
years would continue on in some of the positions.

Kuyper was clearly one of those. After Neria
disclosed Saifee’s involvement in the Ariacht raid and reported
that he had evidence on that and on the disappearance of Ariacht
himself, the response by SAPS was Kuyper’s responsibility. Through
a chain of connections unknown to Neria, it became his command and
investigation, his task alone.

Neria was thanked and politely dismissed,
and Kweyama, a constable, was only there for the secretarial work.
He was to listen, and he was to write, but Saifee hadn’t heard a
word from him since he met them here to report what he knew of
Laurentian’s involvement with Ariacht.

The two SAPS men, both stationed in North
Cape province, had made the trip to Cape Town earlier in the day.
They met Saifee in the pub upstairs, away from SAPS headquarters at
their request, and the three men retreated to the basement,
avoiding bustle and prying eyes.

They’d been there an hour. In that time,
Saifee ran through what he knew of the actions against Ariacht and
his company. Kuyper interrupted rarely in that time, paying
attention and listening and asking only a sporadic question.
Kweyama just wrote.

“You say you witnessed this murder, Mr.
Saifee?” Kuyper was asking.

Saifee nodded. “Peter Rupert, the mine
superintendent. He killed Arthur Ariacht in front of me.”

“With….” Kuyper trailed off as he collected
a clear plastic bag from the floor. A pistol was inside it. “This
gun?”

“My gun, yes. His prints will be on it.
You’ll need to have it examined.”

“I know the procedures. And there was some
document?”

Saifee nodded impatiently. “We’ve already
been through this. I told you, I don’t know what the document was.
But it clearly was important to Rupert.”

“You say you’ve been actively investigating
Laurentian for almost two years. You’ve seen it operate, and you’ve
seen it plan.”

Saifee was confused at the question.
“Yes?”

“You’ve let the mine do these things? You’ve
let them raid diamond shipments and kidnap and murder respected
business people?”

Saifee didn’t answer that at first. He was
watching Kweyama write his two- and three-word scratchings, but he
turned to Kuyper again. “They did those things, detective,” he
said. “But they were not things that
we
let them do.”

“Agent Saifee, let me ask you this. When you
say that, who is your
we
?”

Saifee didn’t understand. He looked at
Kuyper, searching his face in the haze of cigarette smoke, then at
Kweyama, who’d stopped writing and was staring at Kuyper
himself.

“I don’t follow,” Saifee said.

“Earlier, you said
we
have been
investigating Laurentian. And you just said
we
did not let
Laurentian do the things we’re discussing here. Well, who is this
we
you’re referring to?”

“I explained that,” Saifee replied. “In
liaison with SAPS, the Bureau initiated an
investigation –”

“Yes, yes,” Kuyper interrupted. “The Bureau
initiated an investigation to examine control of Laurentian and
United States corporate involvement in black market diamonds and
other activity, then included homicide investigations when it lost
a few men. I understand these things. But I do not know who
we
is, exactly.”

Kweyama still wasn’t writing. He was silent
and watching. It seemed a moment he’d expected would come, and he
was hanging on Saifee’s anticipated answer, as though this exact
question was what he was waiting for.

Saifee could smell the mildewed stench from
the basement’s damp edges. The smoke was sharp enough to sting his
eyes and linger in his nose. The music, distant throughout their
conversation, still came in barely-heard, single notes.

“I’m not at liberty to reveal that,” Saifee
said, suddenly cautious. Kweyama sat back at the statement. His
shoulders dropped. He put his pen down and turned the page he’d
been working on, setting it on the stack. “I’m sure you
understand,” Saifee said, studying the two SAPS men across the
table.

The door at the top of the stairs squeaked
before anyone could offer another word. It opened slowly. Light
streamed in, like a tunnel bored into a cave, bringing unexpected
sunshine with it.

“I’m sure we
don’t
understand, Agent
Saifee.” Rupert was at the top of the stairs.

Allen had a moment of misunderstanding, when
his only thought was the irrationality of pointing to the man
walking down toward them and declaring flatly,
That’s him
.
He would turn Rupert over to Kuyper and Kweyama, and SAPS would
arrest him and push for the damning information they needed to cut
this thing apart.

That idea was gone by the time Rupert
reached the bottom. It was the blade that did it.

He held a boning knife, ivory-handled and
with a long steel blade that managed even in the dim room to
reflect a flash of light that danced against the walls. Rupert held
it in his right hand and was using the tip to clean the fingernails
of his left. He dug under a nail, examined whatever he’d found, and
wiped the blade clean on his pants before moving to the next
one.

The two SAPS men were standing when Rupert
came to the table. He didn’t look at them, and they didn’t turn to
him. All eyes were on Saifee, still sitting at the table in the
windowless basement of a nondescript pub in Cape Town.

Rupert leaned to Saifee, taking care not to
come within arm’s reach. “Do you want to know the sad thing?” he
asked in a whisper. “The truly unfortunate thing?”

He was working with the blade.
Clean.
Examine. Wipe.

Saifee spoke softly, through teeth that
didn’t part. “I’m sure you’ll tell me.”

Rupert smiled. “My level of careful
attention paid to you increased at your failure to kill Ariacht,”
he said. “But I don’t even need to ask you precisely what your full
involvement is anymore. I know it now, from your own mouth.”

Saifee looked at the others. He couldn’t
help it.

Kuyper and Kweyama had moved to stand behind
Peter Rupert. Saifee could pick out the SAPS rank insignia on their
uniforms, just visible behind the other man, and Neria’s words at
the safe house in Cape Town came back to him.

I’ll find someone I hope I can trust more
than others I know I can’t trust at all.

She’d been right in that, he supposed. But
it was still wrong in the end.

“The only thing left is doing something
about you,” Rupert said. He wiped the blade clean.

Ruined Rough

Dumont and Martin, the cleaver, cut the pink
well. They followed Dumont’s original cut plan closely, carefully
working the stone with steady hands and easy pressure. By contrast
to Martin’s first work, cleaving the pieces apart, they cut with a
saw, and they didn’t hurry in doing it.

The saw was a vertical rotary, with a
dop – a clasp – holding the pink above the blade, which
was copper in composition, seasoned with linseed oil, and dusted on
the edge with diamond powder. The dop and diamond were weighted
precisely, so the stone, when lowered, touched the spinning blade
with just the right amount of pressure as the cut,
2/1000
^ths
of an inch wide, appeared.

They did the pear, the necklace piece,
first. They cut it to the planned height and width, then bruted the
stone on a lathe, rubbing it to the desired shape, smoothing
corners off to fashion the slight-at-the-top, heavy-at-the-bottom
shape. Then they faceted it.

That was like the cutting, but the blade was
a horizontal cutwheel this time, and the “cut” was more grinding
than anything else. Over the course of four days, Dumont and Martin
ground the set amount of facets onto the stone, in the exact order
they’d both known since their apprenticeships. They worked the
cut-back rough into a gem, one face at a time.

They didn’t consult with Robbe Lefevre when
the pear was done. Over those days, the two men had lived with the
stones and the blade long enough to know how the two rounds would
cut, and they set the pear aside to fashion the rounds the same
way – cutting, bruting, faceting. They didn’t need to consult
with anyone else about it.

When the three stones were cut, they
polished them each in turn, in the same order, the pear first and
the two rounds after. With Dumont at the polishing wheel and Martin
lending a critical eye, they brought each facet of each stone to a
brilliant, finished shine, working a face, turning the stone,
working another face.

Diamonds don’t need anything but that. No
chemicals. No coatings. No artificial touches to bring out the
light inside them. They just have it.

After Dumont finished the last one, he wiped
it clean of dust, and he set it beside its mates. The three stones
lay on a white cloth, impossibly brighter in their pink color, with
the two men staring at them. Dumont called for someone to ring
Lefevre, then so thoroughly lost himself in the stones again that
he wasn’t sure anyone actually did it until the man arrived at
their elbows.

Dumont gestured unnecessarily at the cut
gems on the table and managed an “
Eh?
” that seemed the best
thing he could find to convey a thought along the lines of,
Can
you believe this?

Lefevre closed his eyes and touched his head
and chest in a cross. “Ruined rough?” he said in a whisper. The
diamantaire’s
adage – the stone is the rough, the cut
only the risky fluff that follows. “Pray we always ruin it this
way.”

The men beside him nodded, but they did not
say a word.

Search

Assistant United States Attorney Smith
slipped his suit jacket off. He folded it neatly in half along the
back, matching its shoulders and draping it over his knees as he
sat on the porch step at the front of the building. He crossed his
arms, a kind of resigned and tired sentinel who’d dressed poorly
for this trip.

Three Bureau agents were working through the
file cabinets in DMW’s office behind him. Two local sheriffs were
at each door, front and back. The ones up here, oblivious to the
attorney at their feet, were chatting about the Royals and their
prospects on the diamond this year.

Each person who entered the room had a copy
of the search warrant executed by Judge Graydon, who’d barely
looked at either the paper or Smith when he signed to have the
warrant issued by his Court. An original and another copy of that
warrant were in the hands of the DMW office administrator, who
stood just inside. She was as mute as Smith.

When served, DMW’s administrator turned out
to be like one of many who, faced with a warrant, simply let people
in and stand by. Something about that official seal turns them
near-catatonic, and they only watch and wait, wide-eyed and more
than a little scared, until the search is done. Smith knew some
calls were made, and he had suspicions about who was being
contacted, but no one showed up. It was only him and the others
from the government, with the office administrator looking on.

Smith had retreated to the front step after
everyone settled into the routine. The agents were working
methodically, logging the materials they found and then going
through them, searching for anything listed in the warrant. They
gave him a brief report every fifteen minutes or so. One of them
would show him the list, tell him where they were, what they’d
found, what they were thinking.