The Jerusalem Diamond

Part I

LOSING

1

GENIZAH

Baruch awoke each morning expecting arrest.

The blank scroll was good copper that had been beaten thin and smooth as a skin. They put it in a sack and carried it secretively, like the thieves they were, to a small lair on the edge of a deserted stubble field. Inside the cave it was dark despite the hard blue sky beyond the opening, and he filled and lighted the lamp and set it on the flat rock.

Three of the younger conspirators sat outside with watchful eyes and a skin of shekar and pretended to be drunk. The older man scarcely heard them. The pain was in his chest again and his hands trembled as he forced himself to take up the mallet and the awl.

The words of Baruch, the son of Neriah ben Maasiah of the priests that were in Anatoth in the land of Benjamin, to whom the commandment to put away the treasures of the Lord has come through Jeremiah the son of Hilkiahu the Kohen, in the days of Zedekiah the son of Josiah, king of Judah, in the ninth year of his reign.

That was all Baruch enscribed on the first day. When the document was finished, these opening words would be a confession that would mean his death if the scroll was discovered before the invaders came.

But he felt impelled to record that they were not ordinary criminals.

Jeremiah had told him what the Lord had instructed them to do. At length, Baruch had realized his friend was saying that they would steal from the Temple, consecrated things from the sacred place. "Nebuchadnezzar is toying with Pharoah-necoh. When his hordes finish sacking Egypt they will be here. The temple will be burned and the objects will be carried off or destroyed. The Lord has commanded us to hide the holy things against the time when they can be used again in His worship."

"Tell the priests."

"I have. When does the house of Bukki listen to the Lord?"

Baruch limped away as fast as his bad leg would allow.

He was dying, but that made even more precious the days he had left. The risks filled him with terror.

He managed to shove them from his mind until a day when half-savage nomads, who ordinarily traveled a wide path around the city, came to the gates and begged protection. A few hours later, the roads to Jerusalem were choked with refugees running from the world’s most terrible army.

Jeremiah found him. Baruch saw the light in the seer’s eyes that some said was madness and others said was the illumination of the Lord. "I hear His voice now. All the time."

"Is there no place to hide?"

"I have tried. It seeks me out."

Baruch reached out and touched the other’s beard, as white as his own, and felt his heart break. What does He want me to do? he asked.

Others had been recruited. When they met, their number was twice seven and therefore perhaps doubly lucky, but Baruch was afraid it was too many. One informer could destroy them.

He was astonished at some of his fellow conspirators against the house of Bukki, the priestly family that controlled the Temple. Shimor the Levite, head of the house of Adijah, was storekeeper over the treasury. Hilak, his son, maintained the inventory and preservation of the hallowed things. Hezekiah controlled the Temple guards, Zecheraia commanded the doorkeepers and Haggai managed the herds of pack animals. Others had been brought in by Jeremiah because they were young, for strength and muscle.

They were able to agree at once on a few things to be selected for hiding:

The tablets of law.

The ark and its cover.

The golden cherubim.

But after that, they argued bitterly.

Some of the best would have to be abandoned. Massive objects were doomed. The Menorah. The Altar of sacrifice. The Molten Sea with its marvelous brass bulls, and the brazen pillars ornamented with brass lilies and pomegranates.

They agreed to hide the Tabernacle. It had been made to be transported, and it was stored broken down and ready to be moved.

And the Tabernacle’s latches and pegs, made all of gold nine hundred years before by the Lord’s artisan, Bezalel ben Uri.

The Breastplate of the High Priest, set with twelve gems, one donated by each of the tribes.

Gold trumpets that had summoned the Israelites.

The ancient tapestry, wondrously fashioned, that covered the Sun Gate.

A pair of harps made and played by David.

Tithe vessels and sprinkling basins of silver.

Gold sacrificial bowls and libation vessels of beaten gold.

Talents of silver and gold, accrued from the annual half-shekel poll tax paid by each Jew.

"Let us leave the talents and hide a greater number of holy objects," Hilak said.

"We must include unsanctified treasures, Jeremiah said. Some day they may pay for a new house of the Lord."

"There are gold bars worth many talents," Hilak said, glancing at his father, the keeper of the treasury.

"What is the most precious of the unsanctified?"

"An enormous gem," Shimor said at once.

Hilak nodded. "A great yellow diamond."

"Include it," Jeremiah said.

They sat and looked at one another bleakly, aware of all they could not hope to include.

Three nights in a row, midway between evening and morning, Hezekiah withdrew the Temple guards from the New Gate.

The main entrance of the Holy of Holies was used only by the High Priest, who entered it on Yom Hakippurim to intercede with the Almighty in behalf of the people. But there was an obscure entrance reached from the Temple’s upper floor. From time to time priestly workers were lowered to clean and refurbish the sacred place.

That was how the fourteen stole the Holy Ark and what it contained, the tablets of laws that on Sinai the Lord had given to Mosheh.

A young priest named Berechia was lowered at the end of a rope.

Baruch stood well away from the Holy of Holies. He was of a priestly family but he had been born with one leg shorter than the other, which made him a haya nega, a mistake of the Lord. He was not allowed to touch the sacred, an honor reserved for the unblemished.

But Berechia’s fear could not outweigh his own as the others paid out rope and the youth, spinning slowly, settled like a great spider into the shadowy fastness of the holy place.

Dim light fell beyond the dangling man and was caught in a gleam of wings. Berechia sent up the cherubim first and Baruch averted his eyes, for the Unutterable Himself sat between these figures on the Most Solemn Day to hear the pleadings of the High Priest.

Then the Ark cover. Solid gold, hard to raise.

Finally the Ark. Containing the Tablets!

They raised Berechia, white and trembling. I recall Uzzah, he gasped.

Baruch knew the story. When King David had sought to move the Ark to Jerusalem, one of the oxen bearing it had stumbled. Uzzah, walking nearby, had grasped the sacred chest lest it fall, and the Lord had become angered and struck him down.

"Uzzah did not die because he touched the Ark, but because he doubted the Lord’s ability to protect it," Jeremiah said.

"Isn’t that what we do when we hide it?"

"Yahweh protects it. We but act as His servants, Jeremiah said sharply to the youth. Come. This work has just begun."

Shimor and Hilak led them directly to the treasures and holy things they had decided upon.

It was Baruch who saw the copper scroll and suggested that it be taken for the listing of the hiding places. Copper would last better than parchment and could be cleansed easily if it became ritually impure.

A camel carried the chest and the Testimony away from Solomon’s Temple, and an ass bore the lid. Looking like errant sticks in a load of faggots, the wings of the cherubim tented their rough cloth cover.

Baruch had been recruited because he was a scribe. Now Jeremiah told him to engrave the location of every hiding on the copper scroll, and he met individually with the thirteen men, doling out the objects and sending the men off to hide them. No man knew a hiding place, a genizah site, save that to which he had been assigned. Only Baruch knew all the sites and what they contained.

Why was he alone so trusted?

The answer came to him during a swift siege of his illness, when the pain froze his breath in his chest and he saw his hands become bloodless blue claws.

Jeremiah had seen Malakh ha-Mavet, the dark angel, hovering above him like a promise. His coming death was part of his responsibility.

The Bukki priests still refused to admit that their world could change, but everyone else smelled war. Wood was stockpiled on the wall for fires, along with oil to be boiled and poured on those who would attack. Jerusalem’s springs were good but there wasn’t enough food. All the grain in the city was gathered and stored in guarded places and every flock was confiscated against the horror ahead.

It was those who would live through the siege who should be pitied; therefore Baruch wasted no pity on himself, though finally the pain left him so weak he could no longer hold the awl or lift the hammer.

Someone else would have to finish the work.

Of the other thirteen men, Abiathar the Levite was best equipped as a scribe, but Baruch had begun to think like Jeremiah and he chose Hezekiah. The soldier was no master at writing and found the task burdensome, but he led swordsmen and doubtless would die on the wall, and the secrets would die with him.

On the morning after the gates were barricaded, Baruch was helped to the wall and he saw that in the night the enemy had come and his tents were raised, like chips in a mosaic that reached the horizon.

He and Hezekiah returned to the cave and managed the final passage:

In the pit under the Sakhra north of the Great Drain, in a pipe opening northward, this document with an explanation and an inventory of each and every thing.

Baruch waited until Hezekiah had hammered the last letter and had rolled the instrument. Outside the wall, foreigners with small beards and high pointed hats were already galloping their shaggy ponies around David’s city.

"Now hide the scroll," he said.

2

THE DIAMOND MAN

From Harry Hopeman’s office high above the floor a two-way mirror allowed him to look down on the quiet opulence that was Alfred Hopeman & Son, Inc. The walls, the rugs and the furniture were soft black or rich gray, the illumination a fine white light that caused the Hopeman Collection to glitter without competition, as though the entire shop were a velvet-lined box.

His visitor was an Englishman named Sawyer. Harry knew he had been buying American corporate bonds for members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. It was also general knowledge that purchasing was only part of Sawyer’s job; he helped maintain the OPEC blacklist of North American firms doing business with Israel.

I have clients interested in buying a diamond, Sawyer said.

Eight months before, a necklace had been ordered from Hopeman & Son by a customer in Kuwait, and then the order had been cancelled abruptly. Since then, nothing had been sold to anyone in the Arab countries. I’ll be happy to have someone show you what we have, he said, bemused.

No, no. They desire a particular diamond, offered for sale in the Holy Land.

Where?

Sawyer raised a hand. In Israel. They wish you to go there to buy it for them.

It is nice to be needed.

Sawyer shrugged. You are Harry Hopeman.

Who are ‘they’?

I am not at liberty. You understand.

I am not interested, Harry said.

Mr. Hopeman. It will be a brief trip that will open important doors and bring you such a lot of money. We are businessmen. Please do not allow politics—

Mr. Sawyer. If your employers want me to work for them, they must ask me themselves.

His visitor sighed. Good day, Mr. Hopeman.

Goodbye, Mr. Sawyer.

But the man turned back. If you will perhaps recommend someone with expertise similar to your own?

Would my company then be removed from the list of boycotted firms?

What list? Sawyer said craftily. But he was programmed to scent a deal; a smile flowered.

Harry smiled, too. I’m afraid I am unique, he said.

Satisfaction with the encounter didn’t carry him through the afternoon.

On his desk were inventories, sales reports, the paperwork he hated.

The man who managed the gem-cutting plant on West Forty-seventh Street and the woman who managed Alfred Hopeman & Son’s elegant retail shop on Fifth Avenue were trained not to need him. This freed him for estate work and for dealing with the small list of personal clients—the very rich who bought rare jewels, the curators of museums that collected gems with religious or historic significance. These were the areas that brought highest profits, but such transactions were not made every week. Inevitably, there were days such as this one.

Dead air spaces.

He bypassed his secretary and dialed the number.

Hello. Shall I come over there for a while?

Did she hesitate before agreeing?

Fine, he said.

When he was sprawled with his cheek heavy on the edge of the mattress, the woman lay with the long hair fanned across her pillow and told him she was moving.

Where?

Smaller place. My own place.

This is your place.

I don’t want it anymore. No more checks, Harry. She had to raise her voice to make herself heard above the television, which she insisted on playing whenever they made love because the walls of her apartment were thin though expensive. But there was no anger.

Now, what the hell.

I’ve been reading about deer. Do you know about deer, Harry?

Not a damn thing.

They don’t screw around. Not at all, except when they go into rut. Then the buck jumps any doe and as soon as he’s finished, he runs away from her.

Very hard to keep a buck.

She didn’t smile. You don’t detect a certain … similarity?

Am I crashing off into the underbrush?

"Harry Hopeman isn’t an animal, he’s a businessman. He makes sure the thing is taken care of, so he can use it again. Then he goes away."

He groaned.

I’m not a thing, Harry.

He raised his head. "If you feel so … used, will you explain the past two months?"

I was attracted to you, she said calmly. She looked at him. Your hair, that bronze color with little bits of red. And your complexion is the kind most women would like to have.

They’d have to shave twice a day.

She wasn’t smiling. Teeth like an animal’s. Even your football hero’s nose.

He shook his head. A guy hit me. A long time ago.

Now she laughed. That fits. For you, life’s little tragedies become assets. With her fingertip she touched the dark hairs on his wrist. Just looking at your hands used to make me … you have the most perfect hands. So controlled. I always stopped working to watch you hold up a pearl or a stone. She smiled. I was ready for you long before you knew it. I thought I could land you. So young for all that money. So beautiful in your homely way. I knew your wife must have lost her mind or her appeal to have moved out of your house.

He looked at her.

I was going to wait until exactly the right moment to pick up the whole prize.

It’s not such a prize, he said. I never realized you wanted to pick it up.

The fingers that once had typed his letters now touched his cheek. The moment will never be right. Do you need me, Harry? Or really want me?

He felt remorse. Listen, he said, do you have to do this to us?

She nodded. Only her eyes gave her away.

Get dressed and say goodbye, Harry, she said, almost gently.

Forty-seventh Street between Fifth and Sixth had drawn him and given him comfort since he was a young man running as hard as all the other young men who were learning the diamond trade. The richest block in the world was a shabby collection of dingy storefronts and old buildings that reminded him of a tattered recluse who kept bags full of money under the bed. There were a few anomalies—a famous old bookstore, a stationer’s. The rest was diamond industry, talking louder than it did uptown, one of the several disparate places in which Harry Hopeman felt at home.

He passed a youth barely out of adolescence, buttonholing a man who could have been his grandfather. The pair stood in front of a store window to which a faded, torn sign was taped.

SOLICITING

OF

PEDESTRIANS

BY

PULLERS-IN

IS

AGAINST THE LAW

ADMINISTRATIVE CODE

# 435–10.1

—Jeweler’s Vigilance Committee

No, but I have something almost like that. I’ll give you a helluva deal on it, the boy was saying earnestly.

Harry grinned, thinking of his own apprenticeship on these sidewalks.

The retail stores were by-products. The real Forty-seventh Street could be found among the little groups of Orthodox Jews standing on the pavement, islands among the eddying shoppers, Semitic Quakers in long drab kaftans and wide fur-trimmed hats called streimels, or in dark fedoras and modern suits, black or navy blue. He nodded and greeted those he knew. Several were examining the contents of dog-eared tissue-paper packets, like small boys trading aggies—but from these aggies came the kids’ schooling and braces on the teeth, and rent and food and membership in the synagogue, the shul

A casual observer wouldn’t have known what they were looking at. Diamonds are the easiest way of putting a huge amount of money in a tiny space. For the most part these were middlemen who got stones from importers like Harry’s father, often on credit, and sold them to retail jewelers. Most of them didn’t have a showroom or even an office. When the weather was bad they left the street and traded over a cup of cafeteria coffee or in the corridors or viewing hall of the Diamond Dealers Club, into whose vault many locked their stock every night.

Some would graduate to tiny spaces in the warrens that lined both sides of the street. A few would go on to grander things. Some of the great mercantile fortunes in America had begun with a diamond dealer who did business on this sidewalk with his office in his pocket, buying and selling carefully, dealing in Yiddish phrases and handshakes instead of contracts.

Harry walked up Fifth Avenue to the other side of the diamond business, pausing at Tiffany & Co. to admire a piece in the window, a white nonpareil of perhaps 58 carats, set as a brooch. It was impressive, but it was not a diamond around which legends could be created. And his was a legendary business.

He enjoyed even the slightest glimpse of one of the fabulous stones. The stories of his childhood had been true chronicles about the Queen’s Necklace, the Great Mogul, the Orloff, the Black Star of Africa, the Mountains of Splendor, the Cullinan. Some of these great diamonds, hidden away in vaults, have been seen by few eyes in this century. But the men who gathered in his father’s apartment to drink black tea on Sunday afternoons spoke of them intimately, having been told by their own fathers.

Some of the old diamond families survived and spread in much the same way as the woodchucks that thrived along the Hudson. They bred and increased. When things became crowded, younger members moved into new areas, until French, English, German, Italian, Dutch and Belgian branches of the same family plied the jewelers’ trade. A few diamond men can trace their families back generation by generation, in a way that is strange during this age when most people cannot go back to their great-grandparents. Such men are said in Yiddish to have yikhus avot, the eminence of ancestry. Alfred Hopeman, Harry’s father, spoke confidently of the fact that he was a descendent of Lodewyk van Berken.

Until this Jewish lapidary of Bruges, diamonds had glittered only through a happy freak of nature; the only way to give them any sort of polish was to rub one against another. Van Berken was a trained mathematician. In 1467 he figured out a precise arrangement of facets which he ground into the faces of stones by using a rapidly revolving disc smeared with diamond dust impregnated with olive oil. He was able to polish each diamond to reveal its fire, and he guarded the method as a family secret. The kinsmen he trained gave birth to the Dutch and Belgian diamond-cutting industries and provided jewelry for the royalty of Europe. One of them even cut a gem—afterward known to the profession as the Inquisition Diamond—in exchange for the life of a Spanish cousin who was to have been burned as a heretic.

These are the stories Harry had heard when other children were hearing fairy tales.

In the summer of his second year at Columbia he had gone to Europe for the first time. In Antwerp, where much of the economy is based on the diamond industry, he had found a public statue of Lodewyk van Berken. The master is sculptured wearing the jerkin and holster of his trade. He stands with his left hand on left hip, looking critically at a diamond held between his right thumb and forefinger.

Studying the homely features, Harry had seen little family resemblance. Still, he was aware that his father had taught him to polish gems with van Berken’s method, virtually unchanged after almost five centuries, as Alfred himself had been taught, and all the generations back to van Berken.

Are you really relatives? asked a girl with whom he was traveling for a few days. She was cool and blond, the granddaughter of an Episcopalian bishop. She thought Semites were terribly exotic, a fact on which he was capitalizing.

So my father says.

Introduce us.

Gravely, he had presented her to the statue.

A week later, when they went to Poland to see Auschwitz, where his father’s Czech relatives had been killed, he was overwhelmed by the sadness with which the dead Jews, his blood, communicated with him, and the cool blond girl surprised him with the depth of her feeling: she had hysterics. But in Antwerp she still had a TV comedian’s view of history. Funny, he doesn’t look Jewish, she had said.

When he got back to his office there were telephone messages. He returned a call from California.

Harry? ‘God for Harry! England and Saint George!’ The voice that had thrilled millions was already slurred. The actor was among the world’s most active diamond collectors. He was also in the midst of a celebrated estrangement.

Hello, Charles.

Harry, I need your help. I am in the market.

He wondered whether the actor wanted a reconciliation symbol or a token gift for a passing fancy. Large, Charles? Or intimate and charming?

The question was understood and appreciated. Large, Harry. Definitely large and unusual. Something eminently suitable.

Reconciliation. Good to hear, Charles. It will require thought and study. How much time do we have?

She has just left for Spain. We have some time.

Wonderful. And, Charles … He hesitated. I am happy for you.

Thank you, friend Harry. I know you are.

He returned the call of a woman in Detroit. She was trying to convince her husband to convert part of their capital into a blue-white diamond of 38.26 carats.

You sincerely think it’s a good investment? she asked.

In the past five years most stones have trebled in value.

I think he’ll come around, she said.

Harry was not optimistic.

When he was twenty-three years old, he had obtained a large white Indian diamond on a voucher. Credit had been given him only because the dealer had known his father for years. He had sold it in less than two weeks, to the oil-rich mother of a Barnard girl from Tulsa, Oklahoma. During the deal, which marked the beginning of his success, he had experienced an almost sexual sensation. He thought of it as tingling, but it was less physical feeling than acute and intense involvement of intuition.

Now the inactivity of this personal radar hinted to him that the Detroit woman probably was not a client.

Don’t push him, Mrs. Nelson. A stone that large doesn’t sell quickly. It will wait for you.

She sighed. I’ll keep in touch.

Do that.

The next call was to Saul Netscher at S. N. Netscher & Co., Inc., importers and exporters of industrial-grade diamonds.

Harry. A man named Herzl Akiva wants to meet you.

Herzl Akiva? Harry shuffled through the telephone messages and found it. Yes, he’s been calling me. The name is Israeli, he said resignedly. Netscher, his father’s closest friend, bid savagely when he bid for charity, and he was an indefatigable fund-raiser for Israel.

He’s with the New York office of a textiles firm. See him, won’t you?

Textiles? Harry was puzzled. Of course, if it will please you.

I thank you. When am I going to see you?

Let’s have lunch. End of the week? No, that’s bad for me. Beginning of next week would be better.

Anytime. You know my system. I let your father have the headaches of raising you, and I reap the pleasures.

Harry smiled. He was very fond of Saul, but sometimes there were disadvantages to having a real father as well as an old man who claimed the privileges. I’ll call you.

Okay. Stay healthy, my boy.

"Sei gezunty, stay healthy, Saul."

Although there was no message from her, on impulse he called his wife.

Della?

Harry? She sounded the same, warm and alive. He had been married to her too long not to hear the little indrawn breath. How are you?

Fine, fine. I just wondered … do you need anything?

I don’t think so, Harry. But it’s sweet of you to wonder. I drove up to Jeff’s school on Tuesday, she said. He said he enjoyed the weekend with you.

I wasn’t sure. I had to work on Sunday.

Oh, Harry, she said wearily. Sending him to boarding school a year early because of our … situation … has been hard on him. So has the separation, and all the rest of this.

I know that. But he’s all right.

I hope so. I’m glad you called, she said. Can we have dinner tonight? There are things we should discuss about his bar mitzvah.

The bar mitzvah? God, the bar mitzvah is months away.

Harry, it is absolutely essential to do these things months in advance. Would you like to have dinner tomorrow, then?

Tomorrow I go to my father’s for dinner. I could call him …

Please don’t, she said quickly. Will you give him my love?

Yes. Well, we’ll talk about the bar mitzvah soon.

Thanks for calling. I mean it.

Goodbye, Della.

So long, Harry, she said in her clear voice.

The Lamborghini, which he drove himself, was in a garage in East Nyack being serviced. Sid Lawrenson, his man of all work, came into Manhattan to pick him up in the second car, a three-year-old Chrysler. Lawrenson hated the city and drove too fast until northbound traffic had thinned and they were deep into Westchester County. The road onto which they finally turned dropped into an overpriced valley between hills elegant with old laurel and rhododendron. A gatehouse marked the entrance to the serpentine driveway, hidden from the road by a screening of tall oaks, sycamores and evergreens. Half the house had been built in the early 1700’s by a patroon of the West India Company; the other half was added more than a century later, but so skillfully that it was difficult to tell where one handsome Colonial section left off and the other began.

I won’t need you tonight, Sidney, he said as he left the car.

You … ah … certain, Mr. Hopeman?

Harry nodded. Lawrenson’s wife, Ruth, the Hopeman housekeeper, was a domineering woman and