“Hi there,” he said good-naturedly. “So you’re Odelia Poole? I’ve read your articles, Miss Poole.”
“Mrs. Poole,” Odelia corrected him with a smile. “I wasn’t aware I was famous all the way down to Thailand, Mr. Cesseki.”
“Just call me Ken. Well, Craig lived in Hampton Cove all his life, and he was a big Gazette reader, and I guess it rubbed off on me. It’s nice to keep up with the home front. When you’re living as far away from home as I am these days you tend to get homesick, and reading about daily life in such a nice and cozy place like Hampton Cove makes up for it to some extent. Almost like you’re there!”
“Thanks, Ken. That’s probably one of the nicest compliments anyone has ever paid me.”
“Well, it’s true, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels that way.”
“So the reason I’m calling you—I talked to Craig’s daughter Caroline, and she told me to get in touch with you.”
“Sweet Caroline. Did you know I used to dandle that little tyke on my knee once upon a time? I guess she’s all grown up now.”
“She certainly is.”
“So what did you wanna know?”
“I don’t know if you’ve followed the news, but a famous pink diamond turned up on our beach the other day. The Pink Lady.” She waited to see if the name rang a bell, and wasn’t disappointed. The man’s eyebrows shot up into his cap and practically knocked it off his head.
“The Pink Lady, huh? Well, I’ll be damned.”
“So you have heard about that particular diamond?”
“I’ll say that I have, Mrs. Poole.”
“Odelia, please. So Caroline told me that you and her dad used to work several projects around the world, and one particular project was in Khemed.”
“Oh, I remember it well. Fall of 1986 and Craig and I had been summoned by the Sheikh of Khemed. He wanted to build a dam on the Nabataean River to provide electricity to the countryside. So we landed there and we’re set up at one of those fancy hotels, the name of which escapes me right now, and set to work. Only we soon discovered there was a fly in the ointment in the form of the Sheikh’s right-hand guy, who had a little side project he wanted to interest us in.”
“A side project?” asked Odelia.
“This guy sure likes to talk, doesn’t he, Max?” Dooley commented.
“And a good thing, too,” I said. “Imagine if he didn’t want to talk. It would make our job a lot harder.”
“So what did he want?” asked Odelia.
“Well, so the guy comes to our hotel room one night, okay? And so we figured he wants to talk numbers. You know, look at the project and maybe get the ball rolling a little faster by cutting through some of that bureaucracy and red tape. But no, he had something completely different in mind. Turns out the Sheikh had recently gotten married to his hundredth or two-hundredth wife or something, and this guy clearly wasn’t happy with his boss’s choice of life partner. So he pretty much asked us to talk to the lady, and maybe try to convince her to come back with us.”
“Come back with you? I don’t understand.”
“Yeah, that makes two of us. Or three. We didn’t get what the guy was driving at either. But then it all became clear. Crystal clear, in fact. He wanted me and Craig to meet the lady, and have a chat with her at the hotel, ostensibly about the dam, but also about her home country. Turns out that even though she’d grown up in Khemed, her folks were actually American, and she’d gone to college in New York. And so the Sheikh’s man said the lady would love the pleasure of our company for some innocent reminiscing. You know, shoot the breeze a little, and talk about the good old days when she was a student in the West. So we said sure, send her along, and he did. The whole thing felt a little off, though, if you know what I mean, but then when you’re doing business in a country like that everything feels off, so it’s very hard to know if things are really off, or if that’s just the way they do things down there.”
“So you met Laura Burns?” asked Odelia, her attention riveted, as was ours, I have to say. The guy was a very good raconteur.
He now took a sip from an umbrella cocktail and continued. “So about an hour or so later the lady drives up—yeah, Laura Burns her name was—only the receptionist called up to our room—we were sharing a suite at this point, Craig and me—and said there was someone in the lobby who wanted to see us. So we said send her on up, figuring this was probably the Sheikh’s wife. And it sure was, and she was even more beautiful in person than in the pictures I’d seen.”
“And so what happened then?”
“Well, nothing happened, really. We talked about the States, and she asked us what was going on with this and that, and a good time was had by all. We talked about an hour or two, and then she left, very graciously thanking us for our time, and so we figured that was that. Another notch on our belts for the mutual benefit of the project. Cause there wasn’t a hair on our heads that thought anything untoward had happened.”
“Just a friendly conversation between two foreign contractors and the wife of the Sheikh.”
“Exactly! So we went to bed feeling pretty good about ourselves, only to be woken in the middle of the night by a persistent banging on the door of the suite. And even before we managed to open the door, it was busted open and an entire contingent of cops or soldiers or security people or whatever they call it down there came bursting into our room, and before we could ask what the hell was going on, they’re wrestled us to the floor, handcuffed us, put bags over our heads and were carting us off!”
“You were arrested?”
“Arrested, tried and kicked out of the country, all in the space of an hour, and in the middle of the night, no less.”
“But why?”
“We were hauled in front of some kind of judge, and as far as we understood from the court-appointed lawyer we were being charged with insulting the Sheikh. Turns out that it’s illegal for a so-called commoner to talk to any of the Sheikh’s wives. And not only had we talked to Laura, we’d been alone in a room with her, with not a single other person present, which was considered a crime. For a moment it looked as if we might be hung, drawn and quartered, but in the end the fact that the Sheikh really wanted that dam built saved our hides, and so we were exiled instead. Exiled never toset foot in Khemed ever again.”
“My God, that must have been terrible.”
“We used slightly stronger language to describe the experience, I can tell you.”
“But didn’t Laura know that it was illegal for her to associate with you?”
“She must have known, but either she threw caution to the wind, because she was so eager to talk to a couple of Americans, or she was misinformed. But that’s where our Khemed adventure ended, and not a high note either.”
“So what happened to Laura?”
“Well, it wasn’t long after that she died.”
“Jeez.”
“Yeah. So I have no idea if she was sick, but I can tell you that when we met her she was in great shape.”
“What was the official cause of death, do you know?”
“Nothing was communicated as such, but we heard through the grapevine that she’d suddenly gotten very ill, was taken to the hospital and died within a couple of hours.”
“Died from what?”
“No idea. You have to understand that Khemed is one of those countries where everything is hush-hush. So whatever really happened to her, we’ll probably never know.”
Odelia chewed on this for a moment while Ken took another sip from his umbrella drink.“So the thing is, Ken, that I’m investigating the Pink Lady, specifically how it ended up in Hampton Cove.”
“Oh, that’s right. You wanted to ask me about that diamond, didn’t you?”
“Yes, turns out that Craig kept it in a safe at the bank all these years, until the bank was burgled and the diamond was stolen, then lost again, only to be found by a little girl playing on the beach. Now I talked to Caroline, and she was as surprised as anyone that the Pink Lady would have beenin her dad’s safe. He’d told them the safe only contained some old documents and work stuff.”