The Consignment by Grant Sutherland

under the bed when I turned in.”
    “Fiona—”
    “Don’t even try.” There was real scorn in her voice now. “Get some linen from the closet. You can use the spare room.” Gesturing phoneward, she made her exit, saying, “You might as well do it now. Go on. Make your goddamn call.”

CHAPTER 8
    Milton Rossiter took me down to Manhattan in his Lotus. He was going to look at some diamonds.
    “All you have to do,” he said as we drove, “is sit there.”
    What he meant was that I should sit beside him in the diamond trader’s room and watch for any sign of trouble. If any trouble occurred, my job would be to get Milton out safe and unharmed.
    One drawback with being a soldier, or even an ex-soldier, is that people who know your history find it hard to treat you like a regular human being. Attitudes vary from exaggerated respect to downright contempt, but worst are the aging jocks with something to prove. Guys like Fiona’s cousin Wayne from Wyoming, who used to spend his days selling agricultural machinery and his evenings working out, getting himself in shape for Thanksgiving, when he would invariably challenge me to an arm wrestle. To keep the peace in the family, I always had to consent. Wayne, grinning, would then attempt to crush every bone in my hand while simultaneously extracting my arm from its socket. Rossiter’s take on my history was different, but sometimes equally childish.
    He saw my Army background as a selling point for his equipment, he knew my presence at Haplon gave his sales team a measure of credibility with the buyers that no number of marketing graduates or MBAs could duplicate. And Rossiter wasn’t averse to spreading word of my supposed military exploits. All lies, of course, he knew zip about the real details of my military career. The Gulf War and Mogadishu were the only operations I’d ever admitted to. Rossiter also enjoyed exploiting my previously unrealized potential as a bodyguard, one that he had on permanent call, and for free. Though he never actually said that to me, it wasn’t hard to figure once I found myself being invited along to negotiations with any potentially violent client of Haplon’s. On two earlier occasions he’d required my presence at handovers of large sums of cash, transactions that I duly reported to Channon.
    I went along with my unofficial role without complaint. Rossiter had the usual blindness of someone who’s run his own show for years. He believed he had me under his thumb. One day he was going to be very surprised, but in the meantime my occasional irregular assignment made good copy for my reports to Channon. But dealings in the diamond trade were a new departure for Rossiter.
    “I’m guessing this isn’t for your wedding anniversary,” I said, keeping my eyes on the road ahead. He snorted. “Payment on an order?” I wondered aloud.
    “Possible payment.”
    “Which one?”
    “The Nigerians.”
    I looked at him from the corner of my eye. The Nigerians. Trevanian’s order, which, as far as I knew, hadn’t yet been confirmed.
    “Trevanian faxed me last night,” he said. “He wants to firm up the order.”
    “But he doesn’t want to give us money.”
    “He doesn’t have any money. He’s got diamonds.”
    “That’s acceptable?”
    “It’s discussable.” Rossiter shifted down a gear, turning south onto the Harlem River Drive. “While I’m pouring money into that fucking pit in California, everything’s discussable,” he muttered, then he leaned over and switched on the radio to indicate that he wasn’t taking any more questions.
    West Forty-seventh is at the center of the U.S. diamond trade, a beat that was made familiar to me by Rita Durranti when I first started with Hawkeye. She was collecting evidence against a guy named Jerry Tyrone. He had supply contracts with several African states whose demand for materiel invariably exceeded their capacity to pay in U.S. dollars, a hard-currency gap that the two sides bridged