Western Alliances, page 41
Did Roberto hear this right? He would be transporting his own money and some of the Morozov brothers’ money too? Seemed an important detail to be said so lightly. “But,” Roberto asked, “there are still customs. How do I get on a plane—”
“A chartered plane. First, to Crimea. Back in Russian hands, as you know. That is of no interest to anyone. Then a charter to Cyprus, under the name of the Morozov brothers. It is the sort of flight that is unexamined, uninspected, and departing from a private airport. And remember, the Russian state knows not that you are here. Who is looking for a man with millions departing Russia who never arrived?”
Boris said they would meet them at 10:00 a.m. at the Progressbank, right across the street. Perhaps he would bring some vodka for the toast, da?
“If the price is not right for the diamonds,” Roberto said, his legs weak, his heart rate high again, “then there will be no deal.”
“The most they might fetch is twelve million euro,” said Boris, “if they could be sold to a merchant; the biggest stone alone is two or three million. But there is no dealer who will buy them. It would be the end, a finish, of any merchant or diamond house in the Low Countries to touch Meyerbeer Diamonds. Who has these diamonds has lawsuits, international tribunals, the interest of your Donald Trump and our Vladimir Putin.”
“You mean your Donald Trump.”
“Yes, ha-ha, we think it is so. Nevertheless, that lowers the price to ten million. It is good pay for something you merely inherited, do you not think?”
Boris gathered up his papers, patted his pocket to assure his phone was there, bowed his head in farewell. Roberto reached to touch the arm of Georgiye, asking, “Will you hold back a minute?”
After Boris left, Georgiye smiled, patient with his American charge. “It is much to take in, but I see you are your father’s son—up for all challenges.”
“Yes, well, I wanted to ask you about my father. The old days—”
“We will be trapped on a plane together very soon. Crimea, Cyprus, we have all the hours in the world to look back at old times.” He patted Roberto on the shoulder and leaned in for the double cheek kiss. “Tomorrow begins a new day in which everyone will be more rich and more happy, da?” And before Roberto could detain him further, he too was out the door.
And now, except for the newspaper reader by the dim lamp in the corner, the lobby was empty. And now even the newspaper reader, folding his Moskovskij Komsomolets neatly into a rectangle, which he put in his overcoat pocket, was ready to decamp. Wait—this was the man perusing the socks at Yuri’s clothing store. A woman in a maid’s uniform appeared at his side.
“It was, um, unwise,” the man began, “to announce that you had the safe-deposit box key. If you walk outside tonight, someone will take it from you or go through your hotel room to find it. Once they have it, there will be no need for business transacted at the bank tomorrow. They will have what they want. And you can be safely deposited at the bottom of the Moskva River, where your body will be found full of heroin or krokodil or something terrible…” Roberto stared at his new companion. “I am Georgiye Gorki, your father’s friend. Great friend, I may say.”
“I have already met Georgiye Gorki. He just left.”
“The man who convinced you he was Georgiye Gorki just left. Please, he is fifties; I am sixties—think of the calendar. I assure you I am the real one. I knew you were coming—my contacts are still that good. But I could not find your entrance at the airport or through St. Petersburg…”
“I don’t know who you are.”
Mr. Gorki No. 2 pulled out his wallet. There was a library card, a bank card, a driver’s license, and government ID with ГЕОРГИЙ ГОРКИ on them all. “Give me your room key, please.” Roberto had become supine before these authoritative men, which he despised himself for. The maid took the key and left for his room.
“We must move quickly, I think. You must leave Moscow tonight. They will hunt for you at the main borders—you should fool them by going east, deeper into Russia. In a few days, when they see this deal is not to be made, they will forget about you. If you do as I say, you will be safe.”
“I do not believe I am in … in real danger.”
“Oh, you do not believe it?” Mr. Gorki almost smiled but corrected himself. “I am surprised your father permitted you to even dream of the Meyerbeer Diamonds.”
“He told me not to come for them.”
“It is good that Safira called me a few years back, said you had asked for the papers, the deposit box key.”
It took Roberto a minute. “Mrs. Santos? She let you call her by her first name?”
“I would have married her had she waited for my defection. Alas, she did not. She had a low opinion of Russians; I should have liked the chance to persuade her otherwise. Perhaps when she is a widow.”
Roberto decided not to mention that she had passed on. He was beginning to see that this man was, truly, his father’s comrade and probably was the sole option to surviving this idiotic choice he made to join his father in the sordid history of the Meyerbeer Diamonds.
The maid returned with Roberto’s suitcase, all packed up.
“Out the back door,” Georgiye directed. There was a taxi in the service alley, and the maid hopped behind the driver’s wheel. Georgiye put Roberto’s suitcase in the trunk. And Roberto and Georgiye sat in the back seat. “We are better to be in a crowd than off somewhere isolated—too tempting.”
Roberto was hoping he might see Red Square before departure; in fact, he intended to spend the evening, where it never got dark, walking to see Moscow’s most famous sight. But Red Square loomed into view, as if conjured up.
Georgiye mused, “Again, I have my contacts, but you got by me at the airports. Perhaps you came by train through Minsk?”
“Bus from Kaliningrad. They told me I would be off the radar, so to speak.”
“What patience—the bus.”
“I like to see what’s between two points.”
Georgiye chuckled; the contemplation of a three-day bus ride was inconceivable. “Between here and Kaliningrad, as you now know, is absolutely nothing. But your father was the same way,” he added. “Had to see everything for himself.”
At the bridge over the Moskva, the driver slowed, and Georgiye hopped out with Roberto sliding over the seat to follow him.
The bridge was full of pedestrians on this crisp late afternoon, and the square ahead was packed with tourists and Muscovites. Georgiye nodded to the piles of flowers halfway across the Bol’shoy Moskvoretskiy Most. “In broad daylight, Putin had his chief critic, a former deputy prime minister, shot four times right here, within view of the Kremlin.” Georgiye brought his hands together like a child in celebration. “And how fortunate for us all that Vladimir Putin himself said he would take charge of the investigation personally! After our coffee, we could take a tour of buildings where people just happened to fall out of the windows…”
“Seems to be a Slavic propensity, defenestration.”
Georgiye smiled at him, sounding out the word. “De-fen-is … defenestratsiya, it is the same word.”
“The Thirty Years’ War,” Roberto mentioned. “I’m not sure if Russia was dragged into that one.”
“Oh, quite. The Romanovs were reduced to paying off the Polish king to renounce his claim to being a czar. The Thirty Years’ War was a close call—I could be speaking Polish to you and making homage to the pope of Rome. It was a time of muddle in Russia. You remember from Pushkin, Czar False Dmitri I followed by Czar False Dmitri II.” Before Roberto could follow up about the czarring of the False Dmitris, Georgiye clapped a hand on Roberto’s shoulder, tall as it was.
“Why, young man, would you ever wish to soil yourself with the wretched business of the Meyerbeer Diamonds? There is now the phrase conflict diamonds. For the Meyerbeer, there needs to be totally new word: massacre diamonds, Holocaust diamonds, apocalypse diamonds. Since they were found in the time of King Leopold II, in a mine disputed between the Germans in the East Congo and the Belgians in the West Congo, the bodies have been making themselves into a pile. A miner, it was thought, stole one of the diamonds and swallowed it or had a fellow villager swallow it to keep it from being found. There was a Belgian officer who followed him to his village and disemboweled him and everyone in his family, hunting for the diamond, which he retrieved. To cover up the crime, the entire village was killed and the village burned … and this is just one of the diamonds, one of the thirty or so, who all are attached to a tale of horror.”
From the north end of the bridge, they began their ascent of Red Square. It was surprising, thought Roberto: from the the historical film clips of the May Day parades where Soviet officials stood in the cold with heavy, stolid faces watching missiles rumble by, the square looked flat as a pancake. But it’s actually quite a hill.
“Diamond trading,” said Georgiye, clearly expansive, enjoying an excuse to speak English, “can be a deadly business. I carry the diamond to you, but I am killed by you and it is taken. You buy it from me, and you are killed and it is taken. Maybe you kill me rather than pay me. Maybe you pay me, take possession of the diamonds, and as I try to leave the country, you kill me and take your money back. Then the henchmen returns to you triumphant, only to kill you … And this is the history of diamonds.”
“So I gather.”
“Only the Jews have figured out a way around this problem. Their system is nearly incorruptible. I have some Jewish blood, I am proud to say. Only a stateless people with a code of honor could handle diamonds. They might game each other in the arena of bargaining and fixing of price—that was fair. But they would not kill each other. And they did not exchange money. Accounts were kept, money eventually would find its way where it must. Mostly, with Jehovah looking over their shoulders, the diamonds made their way from Africa to Low Countries to Forty-Seventh Street in New York.
“But when you have something this size”—Georgiye reached into his pocket and produced a wrapped cough-drop lozenge—“worth half a million, something this small to be slipped into a pocket … there is no way to stop the greed. Only after the Meyerbeer family of Germany, with the aid of organized crime, secured them did the murder and thievery die down … in time for the Nazis. The Meyerbeers all died in the camps, and their houses, holdings, art, antiques, first editions, all stolen and hoarded by a trio of SS officers who are part of the eastern offensive against Russia in 1941. They use the mayhem of war to try to kill each other—all three plotting against the other two—and the jewels fell into Russian hands, who dutifully send them up the line to Stalin … except, no surprise, they were not to not reach their destination. The Germans seize Smolensk, and the great war criminal Klaus Schurz kills the contingent of Russian officers entrusted with this task—just doing his job, killing all my countrymen he can find, of course—when he bumbles onto the diamonds.”
Georgiye directed them to the interior gallery of the GUM department store, abutting Red Square. This used to be the showplace of communist commerce. Brezhnev would walk Nixon through this mall of malls to show that Russia had everything it needed—frumpy, gray, ill-fitting clothes for the women, suits ten years out of fashion for the men. Now it was an oligarch’s dream—Prada, Dior, Van Cleef & Arpels, Omega watches, Tiffany, Levi’s, and for the home team, a caviar bar. The normal Russian could no more afford anything in here than the average American. So was this the triumph of the West? Dull goods that everyone could afford under communism versus luxury items only affordable by the Ivanka Trumps of the world under capitalism? Roberto felt it would be a short victory lap for capitalism.
“That is where we will sit and have a coffee.” Georgiye pointed to an ice cream parlor besieged with squealing kids who ran in and out and up and around the tables like electrons circling uranium-238. “The ambient noise will destroy their directional listening devices.”
After the coffees were set down before them, Georgiye picked up his story. “So we come to the seventies; there was still some good Nazi-hunting left to be done in South America. Simon Wiesenthal had found Franz Stangl working for Volkswagen in São Paulo. Nazis everywhere you looked—Erich Priebke ran a Viennese deli in an Andes resort, Rauff was protected in Chile, Schwammberger in Argentina, Barbie in Bolivia, Mengele in Buenos Aires. And Klaus Schurz, under an assumed name, was also in Buenos Aires. Schurz was wanted by the Russians for medical experiments on Russian soldiers, among his other SS tasks of shipping Jews and Gypsies to extermination. The KGB wanted him, Mossad wanted him, the CIA wanted him despite having permitted his escape to Argentina, facilitated by that fanatical Catholic bishop in Austria.
“Right before the Israelis closed in, Schurz tried to secure an international bank account, imagining he would soon flee. I have no idea how he landed on Hightower Wiggins, but he did—walked right into the office and opened an account with your stepfather, Gehrman van Till. Oh, what a treasure trove our Mr. Schurz had gathered onto himself—bearer bonds from German industries, gold coins from the czars back to Alexander—those stolen, of course, from the museum in Smolensk. There were stacks of currency—dollars, pounds, deutschmark, Swiss franc. And a small velvet pouch with thirty-three unpolished diamonds.”
Georgiye picked up a sugar cube from the bowl. “A diamond, uncut, this big, maybe five or six carats, is already heading to a million in value. It is rare to have a pure diamond be larger than three karats, not yellow or brown or have seams and fissures throughout the stone. The Meyerbeer, they gleam as if already polished. They must be the purest uncut diamonds at loose upon the world. And one must speak … speak of the beauty…” Georgiye, dazzled by the mere memory of the diamonds, drifted momentarily. “Even a man who cares not a thing for diamonds is drawn … drawn into their labyrinth of light. They are the sort of diamonds where the uncut price is greater than the cut, for the potential is, my friend, infinite. The scepter of a czarina, the tiara for the Queen of England, a pendant for a high lady of society. Your father told you all about them?”
“Just that they existed.”
“So, let us finish off the despicable Mr. Schurz. Mossad moved upon his mansion on the outskirts of Buenos Aires to arrest him as they had Eichmann; Schurz had a phalanx of Germanic guards ready to do battle. Schurz was shot and killed in the melee. Ha, I suspect he was shot by CIA, since among the secrets he had to tell included who were his Russian informants during World War II, who had turned informants for the Americans in the Cold War—so bye-bye and good riddance to Herr Schurz.
“Given the publicity, the notoriety, Van Till alerts the Russian embassy about the coins, the gold ten-ounce bullion bars with swastikas on them, all the loot. Israel, Germany, and Russia descend upon Buenos Aires to discuss who gets what, what goes where. End of case, one might think.”
“But the diamonds?”
“Gehrman—I will never forget the day—was having his usual whiskey and soda, your father, his one and only one pisco sour, and myself, Stoli on the rocks, in our usual booth in the Hotel Carrera bar in Buenos Aires. The Schurz excitement was all that there was to talk about. That’s when Gehrman pulled out the velvet pouch. He had not handed over the diamonds to authorities. ‘Well, boys,’ he said, ‘what do we do with these?’
“Understand, we three had no idea of what the diamonds were worth or what their history had been. Eventually, I said, ‘There will be a demand for these in Russia, in Germany, by Israel, who had a claim to Jewish assets when a family was wholly exterminated by the Nazis … eventually, someone will check Mr. Schurz’s Germanic record-keeping and come looking for these.’ And that is when your father said, ‘Let’s each take one. And hand this in to the UN or someone.’”
“Did you do that?”
Georgiye rested more comfortably in his chair, finishing the end of his espresso. “That is what we did. Your father said he knew a fence—that is what you still call it? A fence in Providence who would take the jewels, no questions asked, and give good value. Probably not top value, but good enough. So we each picked a jewel. We left the big five-karat monster to the bag; that would be way too obvious.”
“How did the diamonds end up in Moscow?”
Georgiye, smacking his lips, was quiet for a moment. “I betrayed everyone. After we pocketed a diamond apiece, I kept the thirty-some other diamonds and did not turn them in. I kept them. Someone must have figured out that I was the last to have them, because twice in the eighties and once in the nineties, my apartment was ransacked, floorboards lifted, plaster broken … If they were looking for the diamonds, they did not find them. I buried them deep, in my mother’s old farmland. When the Soviets went away, and Yeltsin was in power, banks opened, and I retrieved them and confined them to a deposit box there. A bank that eventually became owned by some disagreeable oligarchs. I put the box in the name of Gehrman van Till, and I sent him the deposit box key. When I defected, I told Salvador and Gehrman what I had done. They did not blame me. There was no selling the other thirty diamonds in the Soviet Union without suspicion, so there they have sat for decades, waiting for a time we might make good our theft. In 1986, off-the-grid diamonds became illegal to trade, so we may have missed our moment. Of course, they still have value to a criminal class, the underworld.”
“Do you know what became of my father’s and stepfather’s diamonds?”
“I most certainly do. I followed the path of their diamonds with great interest. If they fumbled and ended up arrested, I might be arrested as well. Sal used his for a down payment on your home—you remember that lovely house up the high hill in Providence, with the beautiful porch. You were a toddler—you do not remember me coming by the house. You used to take a newspaper, yes, and circle your father’s name, I think. And leave it for him to see. I remember what a beautiful boy you were. I never warmed to your sister, sorry to say.”
