As chairman of the Diamantclub, Lembock had always seemed to bear the great responsibilities of his position with a kind of dutiful fidelity, like an attentive husband who lifts a heavy bag of groceries from his wife’s arms to carry it himself, seeing nothing praiseworthy in the assumption of a task for which his greater strength naturally suits him. But whatever leadership qualities Lembock’s solid, stable disposition endowed, Malisse felt it was hard work and experience that had finely honed them into something even his frail health of recent years couldn’t diminish.
In his middle seventies, his face deeply lined under a high forehead and thick cloud of white hair, Lembock wore a spread-collar white dress shirt and blue boxcloth suspenders that clipped onto the waistband of his trousers with gilt brass fittings. No tie, no jacket. The shirtsleeves were rolled up midway to his elbows with particular neatness, exposing part of the faded blue ink tattoo on his right inner forearm, a five-digit identification number he’d gotten after his arrival at Auschwitz aboard a cattle car loaded with Jews in 1942. As Malisse understood from stories he’d heard, Lembock had been deemed physically suitable for slave labor rather than extermination by a camp physician, sent to the Political Section to assure he cleared a watch list of potential agitators and Communists, and then passed along to an SS functionary in the Labor Assignment Office, who had imprinted him with the number using a punch-card machine custom-adapted by IBM Hollerith for that purpose. Hands across the water, as the saying went.
Malisse sat in respectful silence. Advanced age and stature entitled Lembock to decide when to launch their conversation. Moreover, it was important to be mindful of fundamental protocols. Lembock was the client, he the hired investigator held on no small retainer. And Malisse did not, at any rate, find it difficult to be still and wait. He could discern the numerals 421 on Lembock’s skin, the remaining two digits hidden by his shirt cuff. A precise and exacting man, Lembock always folded his sleeves the same three inches above his wrist, so that he had never seen the final two digits of the slave number exposed. Although Malisse’s obsessive hunger for detail often urged him to look for them, he took pains to be inconspicuous when overcome.
Just once, to his knowledge, had Lembock become aware of his interest… or if there had been other instances, it was only then that he had commented, speaking before Malisse could become too angry at himself over the uncharacteristic slipup.
“I was seventeen when they gave me this,” Lembock had said, touching a finger to the mark. “A boy I knew named Yitzhak… we’d lived in Marasesti, a small town in Romania… he was next in line to receive his number. His family was more observant than mine, and he worried that marring the body with a tattoo was forbidden, against our religion. That we might someday be refused burial in a Jewish cemetery. I recall thinking we would be fortunate for that to ever become a problem, for it would mean we’d have survived the camps. But to comfort Yitzhak, I told him that when the time came, God would surely take our circumstances into account and make an oysnem… an exception.” Lembock had paused. “Later, we were both sent to the Mittelbau-Dora camp, at Nordhausen, and put to work quarrying out granite from the Peenemunde rocket tunnels, where the Nazis developed the V2 missile. Yitzhak became weak — I believe he must have had the beginnings of typhus — and was shot to death, put down with a bullet to the head like a crippled farm animal. I remember that they threw his body onto the open bed of a truck with a pile of other dead bodies and took them all back to the crematoriums.” Lembock had fallen silent again, briefly, watching Malisse. Then he’d produced a deep sigh. “Yitzhak did not have to worry about receiving a Jewish burial,” he’d said in the husk of a voice, and after a final pause had changed the subject.
This had been three or four years back, Malisse remembered. Soon after he’d stepped out from the encumbrances of government service. He’d been reporting on a case, the sale of a Dresden Green diamond brooch fraudulently purported to be from the priceless seventeenth-century collection of the Polish king, Frederick Augustus II. His efforts to track down the counterfeiter had been at a preliminary stage — his leads undeveloped, his groundwork barely laid. With little to furnish Lembock besides assurances of eventual success, he’d wearied of his own delivery and let his gaze rest on the tattoo a few seconds too long.
Malisse tried diligently to avoid repeating his mistakes, and had some fair confidence that he’d succeeded in not making that one again.
Now he sat and waited in the stifling office. Although Lembock would have no objection to his lighting a cigarette despite his afflicted lungs, Malisse feared the combination of unventilated heat and tobacco smoke might prove smothering to him. Instead he whittled off several moments letting his gaze drift freely about the room — one never could tell when a worthy surprise would spring out of the familiar to catch the eye like a colorful, never-before-seen bird flashing from an old backyard tree.
Nothing of the sort happened this time. Still, Malisse was always able to appreciate the office’s simple and tasteful decor. There were soft leather chairs, a large blond-oak desk. Framed professional certificates hung on the walls, along with photographs of Lembock’s late wife, his children, his grandchildren. Other photos as well — Lembock in the company of high-placed professional and political associates.
Outside the windows on Malisse’s left, a day of bright, cold sunlight had followed a night of steadily falling snow. Melting frost dribbled down the outer surfaces of panes blasted with overwarmed air from within. As the radiator emitted a high-pitched whistle, Malisse dabbed his wet brow with a handkerchief. He, too, had begun to liquefy.
After a bit, Lembock drew erect in his chair, his fingertips parting ways to settle on the desktop.
“I’ve asked you here because something has come up,” he said. “A potential problem.”
The statement hardly rocked Malisse. For all its shared respect, theirs was not a social relationship.
“Fakery?” he said. “Theft?”
“It could be one, the other… or, I would wish, neither.”
Malisse looked at him.
“I hope my ears are not too visibly perked,” he said. “Else the hounds see me for a hare.”
“Better the other way around, eh?”
“Best not to be seen at all in my game.”
Lembock watched him a moment, then gave a calm little smile.
“I want to tell you what I know,” he said, and motioned toward the ceiling with his head. “They are words I haven’t yet shared with those above us.”
Malisse considered a moment, then shrugged.
“My acrophobia keeps me from getting any closer to the rooftop than our present height,” he said. “This anxiety limits, as well, my direct contact with the Secretariat, and reinforces my choice to keep my professional dealings here at your level.”
“So I trust we have an understanding?”
“Clear and absolute, yes.”
“Then I’ll get straight to it.” Lembock inhaled, the ever-present rasp in his breath. “Somewhat over a year ago, a jewelry maker in Tel Aviv acquired a parcel of thirty-eight round-cut Ceylon blue sapphires from a New York broker, a member of the Club. They were small — each about four millimeters in size — but of high quality, weighing approximately a third of a carat each.”
“Their GIA gradings?”
“Clarity was rated as VS Type Two… nearly flawless to the unaided eye. Color is a deep violetish blue, six-five saturation.”