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  And to Jake’s astonishment, Dan hung up on him.

  “Well, that’s just bloody charming, that is,” grumbled Jake to himself, pulling into one of the subterranean parking garages on Rodeo. He was closer to his twin brother than to anyone else on earth and loved him unconditionally, but they had always been deeply competitive. Every Christmas, back home in London, they compared notes on their earnings for the year. For the last three years Danny had just squeaked past Jake, but today’s coup with Brookstein would turn the tables for sure. He’d been looking forward to rubbing his brother’s nose in it—in the nicest possible way, of course—but now he was going to have to wait. And though Jake had many good qualities, patience had never been one of them.

  Stuffing the pouch containing his remaining simulants into the glove box of the car and locking it, he headed for the elevator. Late lunch on his own at Nate ’n Al’s was hardly the celebration he deserved. On the other hand, their chicken matzo ball soup put even his mother’s to shame. After the marathon fucking session he’d just had with Julia, followed by the adrenaline rush of pulling a fast one on her husband, he’d worked up quite an appetite.

  On the other side of the country, Danny Meyer was in the midst of a deal of his own. Unfortunately for him, his client was not a rookie like Al Brookstein, but a hard-nosed Russian jeweler known simply as “Vlad” who’d once worked the infamous Udachny mine in the frozen Siberian plains of Yakutia, and who knew an overpriced stone when he saw one.

  Poring over his diamond balance, a sort of miniature old-fashioned kitchen scale, in the back room of his dingy little store in Queens, Vlad placed the second of Danny’s five stones in one pan and, with tweezers, began adding tiny weights to the other pan. It was mesmerizing to watch this big oaf of a man, his hands as fat as bear paws, perform the delicate operation with such consummate skill. Danny stood back to let him work, concentrating on maintaining his poker face while the jeweler made his own assessment of the diamonds he’d brought him, judging each stone according to the “four Cs” that everybody in the industry worked from—color, cut, clarity, and carat.

  Danny wouldn’t have been foolish enough to try to cheat an old hand like Vlad on carats. The stones were all tens and eights (one-tenth or one-eighth of a carat), as the Russian would soon discover for himself. But on clarity, he had chanced his hand, claiming all five diamonds were “perfect,” a technical term meaning that a grader would have to magnify them at least ten times to be able to identify any blemishes, when in fact only three fully met that standard. He could only pray that at the end of a long day, and in such dreadful light, Vlad might slip up and miss the small inclusions he’d omitted to mention.

  Unlike Jake, however, this wasn’t to be Danny’s lucky day. Pulling out a standard 10x color-corrected loupe, Vlad lifted the stone out of the scale and examined it closely.

  “What the fuck…” he mumbled, his broad giant’s brow furrowing into a frown. “You theenk I’m fucking blind? Perfect my ass. This is an SI one. Maybe even a two. Is worth half the price you asking.”

  “Bollocks,” said Danny, doing his best to look affronted. There was nothing for it now but to bluff it out and pretend that he hadn’t noticed the small inclusion, or internal scratch, himself. If Vlad believed he was being deliberately cheated—if he was sure of it—things had the potential to turn very nasty indeed. “There’s nothing wrong with that stone. Let me have a look.”

  Vlad passed him the loupe, and Danny made a great show of looking very closely, as if unsure that what he was seeing was a blemish at all.

  “Are you talking about the feather, top right? Come on. I can barely even make it out.”

  “Barely?” The Russian looked at him witheringly. “You said ‘perfect.’” Carefully rewrapping each of the stones in diamond paper, he handed them back to Danny. Then, very ominously, he clapped his hands. Seconds later, two even burlier figures emerged from the shadows behind him.

  “All right, mate, calm down,” said Danny, swallowing nervously, his eyes swiveling around the room, scoping out the nearest means of escape. He’d been in many a sticky situation during his years in the business and knew how to handle himself in a fight, but these odds weren’t good, and he knew it. “How long’ve we been doing business together, eh Vlad? It was an honest mistake.”

  He could see the Russian thinking about it for a moment. Clearly, everybody in the room knew what had really happened. Honest mistakes from diamond dealers were rarer than a flawless four-carat rock, and Vlad was nobody’s fool. But if he was two parts thug, he was three parts opportunist. Suddenly the power dynamics of the transaction had shifted in his favor. He might as well make use of that.

  “Thirty grand, all five,” he barked.

  Danny started to protest. “Are you smoking fucking dope? The other stones are perfect, and that feather’s a VS one at most.”

  “Very small,” Vlad laughed mirthlessly. “You calling that inclusion very slight? I see Manhattan apartments smaller than that feather. You treeck me, you a-hole.”

  “They’re worth three times what you’re offering, and you know it,” said Danny truthfully.

  “Thirty thousand,” repeated Vlad. “Or twenty-five and I break your fucking fingers.”

  The heavies behind him cracked their enormous knuckles with relish. What the hell did Russian mothers feed their kids, wondered Danny. Miracle-Gro?

  “All right, you bastard,” he said bitterly. “Deal. But that’s the last trade we ever do, my friend.”

  “You damn right it is,” wheezed Vlad, pulling out wads of filthy banknotes from a drawer in his desk. “I see you in my store one more time, Danny Meyer, I fucking kill you.”

  Danny’s first stop was the nearest Bank of America.

  After fifteen years in the business, he was used to carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of stones hidden about his person, in chewing gum, fountain pens, even sewn into the fly flap of his trousers, but he’d never gotten comfortable wandering around with cash, especially not in New York. It was almost closing time, and the branch was full of commuters running end-of-the-day errands. Everyone seemed happy, glad to be out of their offices or off the bitterly cold streets. A few people ahead of him in the line were even exchanging pleasantries with one another, a rare sight indeed in this city. Just as he reached the cashier’s window, the witching hour of six p.m. struck, and the girl at the counter firmly waved a “position closed” sign in his face. It was turning out to be that kind of a day.

  “Come on, darling, give a guy a break,” he pleaded, shooting his hand under the clear plastic so she couldn’t fully close the shutter between them. “It’s Christmas.”

  “I’m an atheist,” she shot back wryly. But something about Danny’s face made her hesitate. He was handsome in a brutish, gangster sort of way, and his broken nose and sexy British accent reminded her of one of those guys from Lock, Stock. He also had the most exquisite eyes she’d ever seen, the same liquid purple as grape juice.

  “So? I’m Jewish.” He smiled, sensing her weakening and realizing belatedly that she was actually very pretty in a young Demi Moore sort of a way. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t spread a bit of festive cheer. Look, I’ll make you a deal. If you let me deposit this wodge burning a hole in my pocket, I’ll take you out for the biggest cocktail we can find; how’s that?”

  “Make it dinner and it’s a deal,” said the girl, suddenly deciding that she’d like nothing more than to be the recipient of this divine man’s festive cheer for the evening. Removing the Position Closed sign, she reopened her window, her eyes widening as Danny shoved the filthy bundle of hundreds tied with twine through to her side of the plastic wall.

  “Early Christmas present,” he grinned, “from my Aunt Fanny in Maryland.”

  The girl rolled her eyes. “Hey, don’t know and don’t wanna know, OK? But dinner’d better be somewhere good.”

  It was four hours later before Danny finally remembered to call his brother back.
r />   “Oh, cheers,” said Jake grumpily. “Nice of you to remember my existence.” Danny could hear the noise of a raucous bar behind him, with a lot of overexcited female voices. “Why d’you hang up on me before?”

  “Sorry,” said Danny, turning the sound down on the TV. Having reluctantly dropped the bank girl back at her apartment earlier—Chiara; lovely, melodious name—he was now back home himself at his apartment on Broadway and Bleeker, drinking a hot whiskey toddy in bed in front of the latest TiVoed episode of his favorite British soap, EastEnders. “I was in the middle of something.”

  “Woman?” asked Jake.

  “Sadly, no. A deal. But after you called the whole thing turned into a shit-show.” He told Jake about his little miscalculation with Vlad and how he’d narrowly escaped a serious beating from the jeweler’s heavies. “I tell you, all that back-and-forth we had about staying out of Africa ’cause it was too dangerous…Russia’s getting just as bad. He made me sell him the whole bloody lot for thirty grand. I’m at least sixty out of pocket now.”

  “Don’t worry, bruv,” said Jake, unable to keep the smile of triumph out of his voice. “I’ll be happy to lend you a quid or two until you get back on your feet.”

  Danny sighed good-naturedly. “All right then, come on, you’re obviously dying to tell me. What masterpiece of salesmanship have you pulled off now, you jammy little sod?”

  Jake, who’d been waiting all day to share his good news with somebody, gleefully lingered over every detail of this morning’s events, from Julia Brookstein’s fabulously responsive, gym-toned body to the gleam of genuine satisfaction in Al Brookstein’s eyes when he clinched the deal, convinced he’d just struck himself a hard bargain.

  Danny’s reaction, however, was less admiring than he’d hoped.

  “GGG?” he said incredulously. “Have you totally lost it? What if he has the thing independently appraised?”

  “He won’t,” said Jake confidently. “He’s already asked me to set it for him as a pendant. Insisted I ‘throw that in,’ in fact, as part of the deal. If he was gonna get it checked out, he’d do it now, before I set it.”

  “But anyone who sees a pink that size is gonna know instantly it can’t be real. Did you say three carats?”

  “Yeah,” Jake laughed. “Trust me, if this were London or New York, I’d agree with you, but things don’t work like that out here. People in LA assume you can get anything you want for the right price. Striped blue bananas, snow in August, diamonds the size of a plum. This is Al King-of-Hollywood Brookstein we’re talking about. Everyone’ll think he paid ten million, and hey, presto, he ‘found a way’ to get a supersized pink. The word ‘impossible’ doesn’t mean much in this town.”

  “Oh yeah? What about the word ‘prison’? Have they heard of that one in Governatorville?”

  “Give me a break,” said Jake. “We make a living selling contraband; we’re not fucking Tiffany’s. Brookstein doesn’t want to explain to the judge how he came to pay six hundred grand cash to a dealer, with no receipt, any more than I do.”

  “All right, well how about ‘bankrupt,’ then?” said Danny. “Does that ring any bells?” His earlier festive spirit seemed to have waned. “You can’t keep doing this, Jake. It only takes one punter to catch you out flogging a fake and our reputation is shot. Everything we’ve worked for could be wiped out overnight. This affects both of us, you know.”

  “Whatever,” grumbled Jake. “You’re just jealous ’cause I made six hundred in a day and had sex with one of the most beautiful women in America, while you got taken up the arse by a fat Russki and blew three hundred bucks on dinner with a tart from the bloody bank.”

  Despite himself, Danny laughed. He was furious with Jake for taking such a stupid risk—in their business partnership as in life, Danny had always been the more sensible, practical one, struggling to rein in his brother’s daredevil temperament—but maybe Jake did have a bit of a point. His encounter with Vlad had left him feeling more than a little bitter.

  “She wasn’t a tart, unfortunately for me,” he said, smiling as a furious Pam St. Clement, all caked blue eye shadow and dangly plastic earrings, loomed up on the plasma screen in front of him as Pat Butcher. “I tried to get her back here for a coffee, but it was nothing doing. Great pair of knockers she had, and lovely dark hair. Funny too. Italian.”

  “Oh dear, oh dear. You’re not falling for her already, are you?” Jake teased him. Danny had a romantic side, a quiet hankering for stability and perhaps even some real love in his life that Jake had always found baffling and amusing in equal measure. Who needed true love in their business, when there was a steady stream of no-strings-attached hot sex on tap? “Mum won’t like that. If she’s an Iti she’s bound to be Catholic, which’ll go down about as well as a fart in a space suit back home.”

  “God, Mum,” Danny groaned. “Have you got her Christmas present yet?”

  It was already early December. In a little over a week both brothers would be heading home to London for Hanukkah and then Christmas. Culturally the Meyers were Jewish to the core, but they weren’t big synagogue-goers and had never seen the point in boycotting Christmas, which they looked on as a perfectly good opportunity for more eating and drinking, not to mention a great excuse for the giving and receiving of yet more diamonds. Both Jake and Danny looked forward to their winter trip home all year as a chance to catch up with old friends in St. John’s Wood and to soak up the atmosphere of the grimy, cold, ridiculously expensive city of their birth. After fifteen years in America, the twins remained British to the core and had never fully conquered their homesickness for London.

  “You’d better not try to pass off any of your GGG rubbish on her.”

  “On Mum?” said Jake. “Christ, I’m not that stupid. She’d have my bollocks off with the electric carving knife before she’d even unwrapped it. I was thinking of using the last of those marquises we picked up in Amsterdam this summer. Make her up a nice ring.”

  “If you do, let me know, and I’ll do the earrings,” said Danny. “Listen, bruv, I ought to go. It’s past my bedtime here, you know.”

  “Crap,” said Jake. “You just want me off the phone so you can get back to your EastEnders fix on BBC America, you sad git.”

  “Oh, piss off,” Danny grinned, hanging up. That was the problem with having a twin. You could never put anything past them. Sometimes he felt like Jake knew him better than he knew himself.

  CHAPTER TWO

  PEERING OUT INTO the wet darkness of the late London afternoon, Scarlett Drummond Murray looked at her watch, an antique Franck Muller her father had given her for her twenty-first, and tried to decide whether it made sense to close up early for the day.

  On the one hand it was almost Christmas, and she didn’t want to miss any shoppers looking for last-minute brooches or eternity rings for the women in their lives. This being Notting Hill, one of the most expensive enclaves of the city where even a poky little dollhouse could set you back two million, there were plenty of local investment bankers, long on money and short on time, who’d think nothing of running into a store like Bijoux and dropping tens of thousands on jewelry for their wives or mistresses in a matter of minutes.

  On the other hand, it was almost six; she wanted to get to the grocery store before it closed and buy some dinner and a can of dog food for Boxford, her adorably stupid springer spaniel, and the weather outside was so truly foul it was hard to imagine anyone braving Westbourne Grove tonight on their way home from work.

  “What do you think, Boxie?” she asked, flinching at the violence of the rain-cum-sleet as it pounded the empty pavement. “Shall we make a break for freedom?”

  The dog thumped his tail enthusiastically on the floor, his stock response whenever he heard his name mentioned, and returned to the serious business of mauling his mistress’s discarded Ugg boot. Scarlett, who knew full well that he would have thumped his tail just as hard if she’d said, “Come on, Boxford, what about a nice trip to the vivisec
tionist?” decided she would take this as a yes and switched the Open sign in the doorway to Closed.

  Gosh, she was tired. Pulling down the blinds, her back and shoulders ached like an old woman’s. It was an effort to lift the heavy trays of jewelry, all her own designs, out from the glass display cases and into the safe at the back of the shop. She really must try to make it to yoga at The Life Centre this week, for her mental health as much as her poor muscles. Heaven knew she’d have precious little time to channel her inner calm once she got home to Scotland for Christmas.

  At almost six foot, with long, molasses-brown hair and a perfect, willowy figure, Scarlett Drummond Murray had originally come to London to work as a model, one of the first “aristo girls,” as they were known—Jasmine Guinness, Honor Fraser, Stella Tennant—to be snapped up by a big London agency. But despite her striking beauty—porcelain-pale skin, lightly freckled across the bridge of the nose, wide-set amber eyes, cheekbones so sharply prominent you could have served sushi on them—she wasn’t a natural model. Having grown up in a family that set little store by looks, especially hers (her father’s pet name for her growing up was “Giraffe”), Scarlett had never developed the confidence to go with her ethereal good looks and was clumsy when she moved. She was also hopelessly dreamy and found it impossible to concentrate on shoots, which often involved standing in front of a camera for hours on end with nothing to do but keep turning one’s head this way or that. Inevitably her mind would wander to more interesting things—the latest Oxfam report on famine in Congo, her girlfriends’ love-life problems, whether or not she’d remembered to leave fresh water in Boxford’s bowl before she’d left the apartment that morning—and take her eye off the ball just at the crucial moment, to the frustration of the photographer and crew. Catwalk work was even worse. Scarlett was forever missing cues because she was too busy backstage trying to comfort the makeup girl whose boyfriend had just announced he was gay, or missing flights to important shows because she somehow managed to get her days muddled up.