‘Are you sure? Mrs. P. came to see you. Didn’t he want to know what she wanted?’
‘We are not even speaking to each other!’
‘He couldn’t have listened?’ I was nervous of Terry. He knew too much about diamonds for safety.
‘No... no! When Mrs. P. came in, he was busy with a client.’
‘Okay. He mustn’t know, Sydney. In fact, no one must know, or Tom will get to hear about it. Strictly speaking, this deal should go through the firm. Tom would have reason to complain if he knew what we are planning to do.’
Sydney again shifted uneasily. He knew this as well as I did.
‘If I buy the necklace with my own money,’ he said a little defiantly, ‘it is nothing to do with Tom.’
‘But Mrs. P. is a client of the firm,’ I pointed out. I wanted to give him a guilt complex. ‘Now look, Sydney, so as to keep the firm out of it, you had better design the collar at home and not at the office. If I get the necklace you had better keep it at home and not at the office.’
He wasn’t to know it, but this was vital to my plan.
He didn’t hesitate.
‘Yes... we’ll keep it strictly between ourselves.’ He looked trustingly at me. ‘You will help with the collar, Larry?’
He had a goddamn nerve, I thought. He knew, without me he couldn’t make the collar nor persuade Mrs. P. to part with her necklace at this outrageous price, yet he was planning to make himself an enormous profit, keeping Tom Luce out of it and only offering me a miserable two percent.
‘You know you can rely on me,’ I said.
During the flight in the air-taxi and while thinking how I could steal the necklace in safety, I kept having qualms about Sydney because if my plan worked, he had to be the loser, but now he was showing his greed, my qualms vanished.
If he had said to me, ‘Look, Larry, let’s split fifty-fifty. You do all the work and I’ll put up the capital,’ I wouldn’t have gone through with it, but as he was so goddamn greedy and selfish, only offering me two percent, I there and then made up my mind to go ahead with my plan. He now didn’t give a damn about twisting Mrs. P.’s arm, so why should I care about twisting his?
The scene I had with Mrs. P. is best forgotten. She didn’t actually call Sydney a thief, but she implied it. She wept and wrung her fat hands. She stormed around the big lounge, making herself look ridiculous. She accused me of lying, reminding me that I had told her diamonds lived for ever and never lost their value. To this I reminded her the necklace would have to be broken up, and if she could wait for a year or so I would get at least a million and a half for the diamonds and platinum, but as she wanted the money at once this was the best Sydney could do.
Finally, she calmed down. After all, three-quarters of a million dollars when it isn’t your loss isn’t to be sneezed at. She hadn’t thought that if we tried to sell the necklace as it was, there would be publicity, and this finally brought her to heel.
She said she would accept the cheque I had ready which Sydney had given me, but she added she would never deal with Luce & Fremlin again.
I made the usual tactful remarks, but I couldn’t care less.
Then she came up with something so unexpected that for a long moment it threw me.
‘The least you can do is to give me the glass necklace,’ she said. ‘It’s the least you can do! If ever my husband wants to see the necklace I can show him the imitation. He won’t know the difference.’
She wasn’t to know, of course, but the glass necklace was the pivot on which my plan revolved. Without it, my plan to make myself two million dollars just didn’t exist.
After Sydney had delivered the genuine necklace to Mrs. P., five years ago, he had asked me about the glass replica.
There was a mean streak in Sydney, and he hated wasting a dollar. I said it was in the safe and what about it? He asked if I couldn’t send it back to Chan and get a rebate on it? Would Chan give us a credit for it... a possible three thousand dollars? What did we want with a glass replica?
The necklace had been a creation of which I was proud. I had had some luck on the stock market at the time and was feeling wealthy. I said I would return the replica to Chan and ask him what he would offer, but I didn’t do that. I kept the necklace as a souvenir. When Sydney asked what had happened, I said Chan had paid me two thousand five hundred dollars for it, and I gave him my personal cheque.
Now, here was Mrs. P. asking for the replica.
After a moment, I said that it had been broken up and the stones used for other mock-ups.
She nearly blew her stack at hearing this and insisted that we should get another imitation made at once. I said I would, of course, arrange this for her, but she must realise this would take at least three months. She had to be content with that.
We went together in her Rolls to her bank, and she got the necklace from the safe deposit bank. It was in a plush leather box lined with black velvet. I hadn’t seen the necklace for some four years. Its beauty made me draw in a sharp breath. I handed her the cheque, and she handed me the necklace.
She nearly fell up the stairs from the vault to pay the cheque in. I left her talking to the manager and took a taxi back to my apartment.
I unlocked my wall safe and took out the glass necklace. I laid the replica and the genuine necklaces side by side on the table and studied them.
Sydney was strictly a designer. He was no diamond expert, and I was sure he wouldn’t know which was which. Chan had done a marvellous job, even Terry might be fooled until he examined the stones, then, of course, he would know, but Terry wasn’t having the chance of examining them. I had taken care of that hurdle.
I put the glass necklace into the leather case and the genuine necklace into the plastic case which I put in my safe.
Then I called Sydney at the shop. I told him everything was fine. He buzzed as usual like a bee trapped in a bottle, said for me to meet him at his penthouse in half an hour.
Sydney’s penthouse was magnificent. It overlooked the sea. It had a vast living room, tastefully decorated, four bedrooms, a swimming pool on the terrace, a fountain in the hall and all the gimmicks a rich queer knew how to use.
He was waiting for me as I arrived.
‘How did she take it?’ he wanted to know, leading me into the big room, eyeing the brown paper parcel I was carrying.
‘As you might expect. She didn’t exactly call you a thief, but that’s what she implied. She said she would never darken our doors again.’
Sydney sighed.
‘I thought the poor thing might react that way. Well, we must be brave about it. After all, she hasn’t spent anything with us for the past few years.’ He continued to stare at the parcel. ‘Is that it?’
This was the moment. I moved into a patch of sunlight, stripped off the brown paper and opened the case. The sunlight gave a sparkle to the glass, and Sydney gaped at the necklace.
‘It’s marvellous, Larry! It really is marvellous! Clever you! And now, I must get down to work.’ He took the case from me, looked again at the necklace, then closed the case. The first, most important test seemed to have succeeded.
‘I’ll get out some designs and then we’ll discuss them. I’ve got the weekend ahead of me.’
‘That reminds me, Sydney, I’ve left my car at Luceville. I’ll fly up there tomorrow and bring it back. Okay for me to take Monday off?’
‘Of course! I’ll have something we can work on by then.’ I watched him walk over to a Picasso, take it down and open the wall safe which the picture concealed. I knew this safe. It was highly complicated and sophisticated: not the kind of safe you can get into without getting a load of law in your lap. He put the case into the safe, shut the safe and rehung the picture. He beamed at me. ‘Keep Tuesday evening free, Larry. Come here. We’ll have a little supper together and then we can go over my designs... say at eight o’clock?’