The Consignment by Grant Sutherland Page A

with barter. Gold and diamonds were the only commodities acceptable to Tyrone, and I frequently found myself making the trip down to a Customs safe house near West Forty-seventh to listen and learn at Rita’s debriefs of her informers after valuations and sightings of uncut stones that were the coinage of Tyrone’s somewhat Byzantine transactions.
    But all the time I’d worked for Rossiter, his policy had been to accept only U.S. dollars. His problems at the new factory in California seemed to be making him rash.
    As we walked along Forty-seventh, he scanned the shop fronts. I asked him what we were looking for.
    “Hersch Building. Nameplate’ll say Greenbaum. M. Greenbaum.”
    “Diamond trader?”
    “So he tells me.”
    We passed quite a few Orthodox Jews—hats, ringlets, and beards—most standing in twos and threes outside the shop fronts, talking. After a few minutes of searching, we located the Hersch Building and went in. When we asked for Greenbaum’s office, the porter gave us some tags, then directed us to the cage-elevator. Upstairs, we found the room. I pressed the button.
    “Come,” said a voice from the speaker over the door.
    But when we stepped over the threshold we weren’t in an office, we were in a small cubicle of plated steel. A security camera was trained on us from the ceiling. Another speaker was mounted on the wall. I exchanged a glance with Rossiter. Eventually the inner door opened and a small guy with a neatly trimmed beard rose from behind his desk, beckoning us in. Mordecai Greenbaum.
    “The others, they haven’t arrived. I can wait only fifteen minutes.” He checked his watch after shaking Rossiter’s hand, then Rossiter introduced me, explaining my position at Haplon. Greenbaum waved that off. Nodding to me, he sat behind his desk and hitched his ankle onto his knee. Then while he made small talk with Rossiter—politics, and the state of the diamond market—I sat in a corner armchair and looked around. The shelves were overloaded with trade magazines, and several oak cabinets were lined up along one wall. There were no pictures, just a whiteboard scrawled with numbers, carats, and prices. The office of someone who wasn’t too concerned about his working environment, but neat. Greenbaum was wearing a discreetly expensive suit, the kind you might expect to see on a corporate lawyer or a broker down on Wall Street. A skullcap was pinned to the crown of his head. The way he and Rossiter were talking, they hadn’t known each other long.
    When the buzzer went off a few minutes later, Greenbaum directed our attention to a monitor off to his right. On the monitor, we watched Trevanian and Lagundi enter the secure cubicle. Greenbaum turned to Rossiter. “That is them?”
    Rossiter nodded, and Greenbaum let them in. Trevanian looked hassled, even a little pissed off, but Lagundi seemed like she hadn’t a care in the world. She nodded to me and smiled. After Rossiter did the introductions, Greenbaum cleared his desk. He unrolled a square of black velvet the size of a handkerchief and placed it in the center of his blotter. He took an eyeglass from his pocket and rubbed the eyeglass on his shirt, inviting Trevanian to put the stones on the velvet. Trevanian glanced at Lagundi, who turned away from us and retrieved a leather pouch from inside her blouse. She opened the pouch and gently shook the contents onto the black velvet.
    Roughs. Uncut, unpolished diamonds. They sat there, a small pile of crystalline pebbles, they weren’t anything much to the untrained eye. She pushed them apart with one finger, then lined them up in pairs. Five pairs, ten stones. Greenbaum bent and studied them with his naked eye a moment. Then he looked up at Lagundi, raising a brow. When she nodded, the examination commenced. Greenbaum rolled each stone between thumb and forefinger, peered at it, then replaced it on the velvet. Next he picked the same stone up with a pair of tweezers, put in his eyeglass, and