Stone Cold (12 page)

“Well, all right. But you do some talking for a little while. You’re obviously an American. What part of America do you come from? Are you living in England? How come you work for a security firm?”

I answered all three questions, which took a while. He said, “So you were a soldier. And you speak French.”

I nodded and then said, “Now it’s your turn.”

“All right. Where was I?”

“Your father and your uncle were rounded up by the French police.”

“Ah yes. I suppose Marcel and my father were lucky. They were not sent to an extermination camp, they were sent to Germany as slave labour. They weren’t going to be gassed, they were going to be worked to death, making munitions for the German war machine. These forced labour workers really were slaves. The conditions were horrible. My father was broken in health, and never really recovered. My uncle said he would not have survived without my father’s support. He said he owed his life to my father.

“My father went back to Algiers and I was born and grew up there. He died when I was a small child, I hardly remember him. The Algerian War was a bad time. To the Arabs we were
colons
, colonialists. But the
colons
turned reactionary, and to a lot of them
colons
we were
sales
Juifs
, dirty Jews. So eventually my mother and I moved to Paris again.

“Marcel said he always felt close to my father because of what they’d been through together. He was like an uncle to me, a generous uncle. My mother worked as a secretary and we never had much money. Marcel’s jewellery business prospered. He bought us presents, and he paid for me to go to England for six months and learn English because he thought it would improve my prospects. Mr Root, do you really want to know all of this?”

“Certainly, but I’m worried that you’re tiring yourself.”

“So I’ll tire myself. I’m in bed, I don’t have any work to do.” I noticed that his voice had become stronger as he warmed to his subject.

“All right. You came to England and learned English. Then what?”

“That was just an interlude. I went back to Paris and became a Communist. Today people don’t understand how an intelligent man could be a Communist but back then it was still just possible.”

“I’ve read enough about the period to have some idea,” I said.

“The worst stories about the Soviet Union were reactionary inventions, we were sure. And as for the rest, well, shit happens, as they say nowadays. It was all in the cause of a better world. Remember my background. I knew all about the struggle against imperialism in Algeria. And in France I had two things against me, I was North African, a Maghrebian, and I was Jewish. Even after the war a lot of French people didn’t like Jews.”

He paused and looked reflectively out of the window. I prompted him. “So Marcel Azamouth was the founder of the firm and he was a nice guy.”

“Oh yes. I’ll show you what a nice man Marcel Azamouth was. One day he took me out to lunch at a good restaurant, which he did from time to time. A better restaurant than I could afford. I suppose I was twenty or thereabouts. It was in my Communist days. I was explaining to him that when the working class took over the state there would be no room for businesses like his. He would have to be put to work doing something useful for society. And if he resisted he would have to be put in prison. I said this was unfortunate, there was nothing personal it, but it was necessary. I said he represented a class that had to be eliminated. He didn’t remind me that he was treating me to a nice lunch which he was able to do because of his bourgeois profession. He didn’t even laugh at me. He listened to me seriously. That’s how nice a man he was.

“I got caught up in the student protests of sixty-eight. Do you know about those? You had them in America too, didn’t you?”

I nodded. “I know about the sixty-eighters,” I said, using the French term.

“I was at university at Nanterre, where it all started. But I was in the Communist Party and I knew that this was just a romantic gesture, not a real revolution. It was what Lenin criticized in his pamphlet
Left
Wing
Communism
.
An
Infantile
Disorder
. Trying to have a revolution without discipline, without a party. Are you familiar with it?”

I shook my head. “I’m afraid not.”

“No, of course not. Nobody reads Lenin today. He’s just a historical figure. Anyway, that set me apart from the enthusiasm of the others. I was very taken up with the idea of Euro-Communism. But then came the invasion of Czechoslovakia and that finished Communism for me, and for most of us. Those were the important things in my life at the time, whether to support Communism, how to change the world.

“Marcel’s jewellery business prospered, and he brought his two sons into it. They were quite different from him. He was quite happy to be Jewish and happy to tell people he had started off as a market trader. They wanted to move up in society. They didn’t want to be identified with a Jewish Maghrebian market trader. They wanted to be the sort of people who do business in the Place Vendome. They weren’t interested in who had helped who a long time ago in Germany. They had no time for such sentiment.

“Marcel offered me a job in the firm. I didn’t know what else to do so I took it. I had to earn a living somehow. He said he’d teach me the trade, and he did. Looking back, I realize that it was inevitable that the brothers would resent my presence, but I was young and I didn’t see it. They were constantly telling me off, saying my work wasn’t up to scratch, that I’d lose them clients.

“I heard what one of them said in the next office when they thought I had gone out. He said, ‘You know how, in the army, in every company there’s one guy who’s a fuck-up, who fucks up everything. Well Pierre’s our fuck-up.’ I still remember those words.”

“It’s the sort of thing one would remember,” I said.

“Looking back, they were probably right. I was better at interpreting Lenin’s theoretical works than selling jewellery. I guess Marcel, Azamouth
père
, wouldn’t let them fire me. But I couldn’t go on working with them.

“They worked out a solution. I would go to London and set up on my own, but I would be the London agent for Azamouth Frères and they would send some business my way. That suited me. I was lucky, I found a good partner and together we had a little business and we did all right. Bullard and Azamouth. In a small way, you understand. We didn’t rely on Azamouth Frères, we worked mostly in the domestic market, although we did get some work through them. But he died suddenly. I sold part of the office space to the firm next door and began to contemplate my own retirement.

“Then this diamond came on the market. This German, Otto Mollering, was offering it for sale and saying it came from a new diamond mine in Uzbekistan. Sotheby’s and Christie’s wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole. He went to Azamouth Frères in Paris. They decided that it was too iffy, but they passed it on to me. I was complaining that I didn’t get enough business from them, and they probably thought this would keep me quiet for a while. I decided that the diamond was genuine and there was nothing to be lost. By chance I had acquired this contact in California, and through him I sold it to Kinsella. The commission was by far the biggest I’ve ever had. It was on the strength of that that I bought the cottage in Dymchurch.

“When the brothers realized it had been sold for a large sum they moved in and made sure that when it went on the market again, which it did surprisingly quickly, they sold it and not me. So that’s that.”

A nurse had been hovering, and now she came over and said, “I think you’ve been talking quite enough, Mr Azamouth.”

He leaned back on his pillows. “Perhaps. But this American gentleman wanted to hear it.”

I thanked him and left. Downstairs I walked around some streets and found an up-market candy store, bought a pound box of Thornton’s varieties, wrote a card wishing Azamouth a speedy recovery, and took it back to the hospital to be taken up to the ward.

Then I checked that Jeremy would be sending him a cheque for five hundred pounds, and told him I would be taking another trip, but not so far this time.

CHAPTER EIGHT

It was the weekend and Cremer’s office would presumably not be open until Monday morning, but I decided to fly over to Amsterdam early on Sunday. I had been to Amsterdam twice before, both times when I was in the army in Germany. The closeness of army life used to get to me after a while, and I would feel the need for a little solitude, so I would go away to another city and wander around by myself for a weekend. I decided that that was how I would spend Sunday. I was finding this hunt for the diamond from country to country stressful and wanted a day to relax.

I was glad I did. An Indian summer showed Amsterdam at its best. The city was in a casual, Sunday afternoon mood. People sauntered on the bridges over the canals, the lines of canal boats showed off their bright colours, and the flowers on the window boxes in just about every house seemed to beam in the sunshine. I walked along the canals, the main ones lined with four and five storey buildings, and then went window-shopping on the Amstel.

I went to the Rijksmuseum, and looked at the Rembrandts, the portraits of stolid Dutch burghers. I looked again at the huge painting that dominates the first gallery, Rembrandt’s
The
Night
Watch
, the group of gentlemen militia smartly dressed with their ruffs and tights, swords on their hips, the embodiment of pride in civic virtue and the new bourgeoisie.

By the evening I felt I still needed to shake off some of the pressures of travelling and the quest. The place to relax was in one of what Amsterdam calls coffee shops. These usually sell coffee and always sell weed.

I chose one of the smaller ones close to the city centre, sat down and studied the menu. The list of varieties and the descriptions reminded me of some wine menus:
High
Fly
, very strong, energy high.
Full
Flower
, sweet, honey-like stoned.
Deep
Smooth
, long-lasting.
Santa
Maria
, a mellow high. I didn’t want anything too serious and certainly not long-lasting, so I chose a joint of Santa Maria for eight euros, and the waitress brought it over along with a glass of water and the cup of coffee I had ordered.

I started smoking it and reading the
International
New
York
Times
. A young man with his girlfriend at the next table gave me a friendly smile and I returned it.

“You’re American?” he asked. I nodded.

“In America they put people in prison for doing this. Smoking this. That is stupid, no?”

“It’s not stupid,” I told him. “There’s a lot of unemployment in America, and putting more people in prison means more jobs for prison guards. Also, since nearly everyone under the age of sixty has smoked weed at one time or another, it makes it easier to put someone in jail if we don’t like them. And it makes it easier for a lazy policeman to keep up his arrest rate. I don’t see what’s stupid about that. Mind you, you can get it legally in California, but you’ve got to get cancer first.” They both nodded, but somewhere along the way I had lost them.

An older man at a nearby table had heard the exchange and grinned. He leaned over and said to me, “I suppose this is what Amsterdam is known for abroad, places like this. Is that right.”

“It’s certainly one thing everybody knows about.”

“And the red light district. The girls in the windows.”

“That too. “

“That’s the impression I get when I travel abroad. Those are the things people know about Amsterdam. Strange. Because we’re not really awash with vice.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s what’s curious. Holland seems to me to be a terribly stolid bourgeois country.

“It is.”

I warmed to my theme. “I think of today’s Dutch as descendants of Rembrandt’s upright burghers that I saw in the Rijksmuseum this afternoon.”

“That’s us,” he said. “We’re a boringly law-abiding people for the most part. We like family life. We’re very domesticated. There are probably more whores in New York and London than Amsterdam. I’m damned sure there are more crack heads in most American cities.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” I said. “In England also.”

“We don’t go in for these things in a big way,” he went on. “But it’s there if someone wants it.”

“I don’t see you smoking,” I observed.

“No. I’ve just come here for a cup of coffee and a
kuchel
. I like this place and I find the atmosphere relaxing. Maybe that’s how I express the tiny bit of me that isn’t conventional, coming here for my coffee. That’s my little rebellion.”

*

I went back to my hotel and, as usual after I smoke weed, I slept like a baby for nine hours, so it was nine o’clock when I came down to the breakfast room. I had forgotten about those great Dutch breakfasts with cold meats, fruit, cheeses, and rolls and brioches, and was sorry that I had not got up early so I had time to linger over it, but I was in a hurry to get going. I telephoned the number I had for Cremer’s office. The hotel operator told me it was a ceased line. I took a taxi to the address, which was on Damstraat, in what the guide to Amsterdam in my hotel room told me was the middle of the diamond district. It advertised itself as the diamond district, which Hatton Garden does not. Some small streets blazoned the diamond tradition. Signs invited me to buy diamonds of many shapes and prices, tour a diamond cutting factory, visit the Diamond Museum.

The address was in an office building that was old but smartened up. I walked into a busy office and spoke to a young woman at the nearest desk. I asked whether she spoke English out of politeness. Everyone in Holland seems to speak fluent English; with a language that no one else speaks and that sounds like a disease of the throat, I suppose they have to be linguists from the cradle. She told me in faultless English that this had been Cremer’s workshop but he had left it some time ago, and now it was the studio of a firm of architects.

Did she have an address for him? She was very helpful. She sat me down, gave me a cup of coffee, called the landlord and got me Cremer’s home address. She did not have a telephone number.

It was a quaint, gabled two-storey house on a picturesque square with a fountain at the centre, number 22. I knocked on the door and there was no answer. I decided to kill a few hours and then try again. I had a slow lunch, then strolled along the canal banks. In the late afternoon I went back to Cremer’s house and knocked on the door.

This time a woman in her mid-thirties wearing a drab sweater and jeans answered. Having established that she spoke English, I asked to see Mr Cremer. “Who are you?” Her expression was uninviting.

“My name is David Root. I’d like to talk to him about a diamond he worked on.”

“He can’t see anyone. He is not well.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Is it serious?”

“Yes. As I said, he can’t see anyone. I’m sorry.”

I hesitated. “That’s too bad. Have you any idea when he’ll be better?”

“No.” She moved to close the door. I put my hand against it.

“I won’t disturb him for long,”

“He cannot see anyone and that is final. Now please go away!” And she pushed the door shut. I stepped back. It seemed that this tough little lady, who was his housekeeper or whatever, was being very protective.

I walked across the square to a café on the other side and sat down next to the window. I ordered a genève, the mild Dutch flavoured gin you don’t get anywhere else, and lingered over it. The square was criss-crossed by tram tracks. A huge oak tree at the centre loomed over it. There were benches under it, only one occupied, by two elderly women with shopping baskets engaged in whispered conversation. I looked across, peering through the oak leaves at the doorway of number 22, with its Romanesque arch. I decided that now I had the address I would write a letter to Cremer and put it through the letter box. Then I stopped thinking about it for a few minutes and took in the passing scene.

I watched the cyclists, whole families of descending size on bicycles, women with small children riding on the pillion, men with women on the pillion. A very tall man with spindle limbs rode by, staring into the space ahead of him as if he were puzzling out an abstruse problem, with a bunch of tulips on his handlebars. Two pretty girls still wearing light summer dresses walked by talking, prettier still when they laughed. Trams clanked by in linked pairs, and I wondered why they were painted that garish yellow colour.

Then, while I sat there looking and not thinking about much, the woman walked out of the front door of number 22. She looked very different now. She had let her hair down over her shoulders. Her lips gleamed with bright red lipstick. She was wearing a red mini-skirt showing fleshy thighs and white calf-length boots. She walked off down the street at a brisk pace. I got up and followed her at a distance. She turned several corners and, after about ten minutes, she came to a place with a neon sign outside saying “Moulin Rouge”, and went in. It looked like a night club. Perhaps she was a waitress there.

I went back to number 22 and rang the bell. There was no answer. Israel Cremer had not gone out. If he was there earlier he was still there, and he was not answering the door.

*

Back in my hotel I looked at the city guide in my room. It listed restaurants, night clubs and bars. The Moulin Rouge was not on any of these, but the guide also had a list of what it called “Gentlemen’s Clubs.” These, I assumed, were brothels, and the Moulin Rouge was on this list. As my friend in the coffee shop had said, this sort of thing was there if you wanted it. And this chick in the mini-skirt, I thought now, was probably not a waitress.

She had only seen me for a few moments. There was no reason why she would remember me. I guessed that in the Moulin Rouge the lights would be low. I went out and bought a pair of sunglasses. I looked in a mirror and gave myself a moustache with a fibre-tipped pen. I changed my clothes, putting on a red shirt that might erase the memory of the blander suit I was wearing before. And I decided to adopt a British accent, which I thought I could do well enough to fool a Dutch person. My friends would recognize me, but this seemed an adequate disguise for someone who had seen me for a few moments in a different context. I also made sure I had plenty of cash in euros.

There was no madam but a tall, slim, tuxedoed man at the door who acted like a maître d’. It seemed like a classy place. “It’s two hundred and fifty euros,” he said. “That includes drinks and some time with one of the girls.” I paid, wondering what I was going to put on my expense account, and he ushered me in.

Inside I found a bar and four small tables, with tasteful jazz music playing softly in the background. Four women sat at the bar, all wearing short skirts and low tops, ranging in age, I would guess, from nineteen to forty, two of them European, one of Asian origin, and one African. A few men sat at tables alone, eyeing them while they sipped their drinks as if pondering over a menu. The lighting was dim, as I had hoped it would be. The woman I had seen at Cremer’s house was one of the four sitting on bar stools, swinging her legs, chatting with the other women but also surveying the room continually.

I ordered a Scotch on the rocks from the waiter and looked around, taking my time while I pretended to make up my mind. Finally I signalled with a nod to the one I was interested in. She pointed at herself questioningly, I nodded again and she came over to my table. She said she was not drinking and asked for a Coca Cola, which was brought to her. She told me her name was Sabrina and asked my name. I said I was David. She asked where I came from and I said I was English, and I was a visitor to Amsterdam and no, I was not a tourist, I was here on business. She held my hand while we talked, occasionally stroking the top with her finger.

The prelude over, she said, “Shall we go upstairs?” I agreed and she led me by the hand up a flight of carpeted stairs and into a room. It was furnished with a double bed covered with a tastefully patterned counterpane, a wash basin, and little else. She turned to and said, “Shall I get undressed?”

“I’d like to talk to you,” I said.

“OK.” She sat on the edge of the bed, crossed her legs, smiled, and said, “What shall we talk about?” I suppose she was used to clients wanting to talk a bit first.

“I want to talk to you about Israel Cremer and a diamond,” I said.

Her face froze and she stood up. “Who are you?” she demanded. “Wait a minute. I recognize you now. You knocked at my door a little while ago.”

“That’s right. And you wouldn’t let me see Mr Cremer.”

“He’s ill, I told you. What do you want to see him about that’s so important?”

“It’s about a diamond he handled.”

“Why is it so important to you?”

“Why are you keeping him hidden away?”

“I’m not keeping him hidden away. I told you.”

“Look, you don’t need to worry. I’m not from the police.”

“My husband isn’t afraid of the police!” she said angrily. “He hasn’t done anything wrong. Now get out of here, or else stay and take what you’ve paid for.”

“It wouldn’t be very good for you if I did get out of here,” I said. “If I walked out after three minutes and said you were a dead loss and I want my money back. That wouldn’t be good for your career here.”