The Consignment by Grant Sutherland Page B

swiveled to face the north window. He held each stone up to the soft morning light and examined it carefully. Nobody spoke. After a few minutes’ inspection he dropped each stone onto a set of jewelers’ scales on the window ledge, took a reading, and jotted a note in his pad.
    After stone number five, Trevanian asked if he could smoke. Greenbaum shrugged, too intent on the grading to care. Another quarter hour went by. Trevanian smoked, Rossiter thumbed through some diamond-trade magazines, and Cecille Lagundi watched Greenbaum like a hawk. It was like a priestly ritual in some private alcove of the temple. The only sound was the occasional mutter from Greenbaum as he jotted his notes. The inspection finally completed, he lined the stones up in pairs again.
    “Certificates of Origin?” he mused. Lagundi told him that certificates weren’t required. “If you wish to realize full value for the stones, certificates would be helpful,” he said. She looked straight at him and said nothing. “You have more?” he asked, passing a hand over the stones.
    “You wanted to see a sample,” Trevanian cut in. “This is a sample.”
    “You have more?” Greenbaum repeated, unfazed.
    Trevanian gave him a look. Then Lagundi folded the velvet around the stones and took them to the window. To the surprise of everyone there except Trevanian, she took her own eyeglass from her purse. Then she carefully examined each stone, and weighed it on Greenbaum’s scales before returning it to her leather pouch. She was checking that Greenbaum hadn’t made a switch. When Rossiter realized what she was doing, he said, “Oh, for chrissake.” But Greenbaum didn’t seem put out. He folded his hands together over his paunch and watched her calmly.
    When Lagundi finished, Trevanian stubbed out his cigarette. “Every stone’s a D flawless,” he told Rossiter. “They’ve all been pregraded, every one between five and eight carats. Putting a price on them’s not rocket science.”
    Greenbaum produced a copy of Rapaport Report, the bible of the diamond trade, from his drawer. Trevanian flipped through it, then stopped and ran a finger down one column. “D flawless, five carat stone. Fifteen thousand six hundred dollars per carat,” he read aloud.
    “List price,” Greenbaum interrupted. “Meaningless.”
    “Call it our opening number,” Trevanian told Rossiter. Greenbaum shook his head, frowning. “Opening number,” Trevanian repeated. “We’ll negotiate the discount from there.” Then Trevanian explained how the proposed barter, diamonds for Haplon materiel, should proceed. It was child’s play compared with some of Jerry Tyrone’s transactions. He wanted to agree with Rossiter on a discount figure for the list price per carat for the roughs. Then Greenbaum, on Rossiter’s behalf, would make a selection from the stones that were stored in a Manhattan bank vault. Once Greenbaum’s selections added up to twelve million dollars—the price of the Haplon materiel—the trade would be done. “The only number we have to agree on is the discount,” Trevanian concluded.
    Rossiter asked what would happen if there weren’t sufficient stones in their stock to add up to twelve million dollars.
    “Our loss,” said Trevanian. “Deal goes down the pan, we don’t get the weapons.”
    Everybody in the room knew that was not going to happen, Trevanian hadn’t brought the deal so far to just sit back and watch it collapse because of some stupid miscalculation. So now Rossiter had sighted a sample of the diamonds, and he’d listened to Trevanian’s proposal. He needed professional advice. He beckoned Greenbaum across to confer. While they did that, Trevanian and Lagundi took the opportunity for a few quiet words together by the window. No one paid any attention to me. The whole situation was making me distinctly uneasy. Did my presence in the room implicate me in any way? Was I inadvertently becoming party to the proposed transaction, and