"He is very dangerous, Sylvie. Ruthless and ambitious." I raised an eyebrow and waited. If they'd wanted some silly little pawn to position and play, they should have chosen a different woman. Luca could be excused, but Paul could not.
Into the phone, I said quietly, "I can take care of myself, Paul."
"I have never doubted it."
"What do you want me to do?"
For a moment, silence roared between us. Quietly, he said, "Call me when you can."
"So you can warn me about another man I'm involved with?"
"Ah, sweet, you are still angry with me over Timothy."
My ex.
"No. Why would I be angry? You were right."
"And that is why you have not spoken to me in five years, because I was right?"
I ducked away from Luca's avidly listening ears. "No. I don't know. Maybe."
"Sylvie,
venez à moi dans l'Arran,
" he said in French.
Come to me in Arran.
Arran. Not in this lifetime.
"I'm taking the jewel to the inspector," I said, and hung up.
Chapter 9
Carat
is the 4th C. This is the size of the diamond. One carat is divided into 100 "points," so that a diamond of 75 points weighs .75 carats. Carat weight is the most obvious factor in determining the value of a diamond. But two diamonds of equal carat weights can have very unequal prices, depending on their quality, and diamonds of high quality can be found in all size ranges.
—www.costellos.com.au
T
he line went dead. I held the phone a moment longer, feeling a thread reeling out from my ear, across the miles and the years to Paul, to my grandmother, who would be worrying now that he'd talked to her.
Against my breast, I felt the living jewel humming with power.
Luca said, "You must not believe what he says about me, Sylvie. He is very angry with me."
"I've known him a lot longer than I've known you."
"And he is like a father to you, no?"
Stung as always by this spin, I lifted a shoulder. "No." But I remembered again that I wanted to talk to my father. What time was it in Kuala Lampur? I punched the button for the World Clock option on my phone and looked at the little red dot traveling around the globe. "Where is Malaysia, exactly?" I asked.
"In Asia somewhere." Luca scowled. "I don't know."
The map didn't give me many choices. "Closer to Thailand or Singapore?" I frowned. "I think it's south of Thailand."
"That sounds correct, yes."
Only five thirty there. Too early. I clipped the phone closed.
"Paul is protective of you. He's also furious with me." Luca smiled, ruefully. "You know him—would he have anything good to say of my character at such a time?"
"No."
He spread his hands, as if to say,
you see?
I thought of the police, who would be expecting me in a few days, and what they would think of my consort, the jewel thief. Even the very fact that I'd had the jewel now for some six hours without notifying them spoke rather loudly, didn't it?
I did not look away from Luca's brilliant gaze. "What do you want with this jewel?"
"Only to return it to Romania," he said.
"Nothing else?"
"Nothing," he said, and raised his hands, palm up. "I swear."
I tucked the phone into my front pocket, rubbed the obviously comatose third eye between my brows. "Let's have our tea."
"Yes."
We returned to the kitchen area, and settled at the table before the wide window, now obscured by waves of sideways rain. "It's turned into a bad night," I said, pouring steaming tea from the stainless steel pot.
"It will make it more difficult for anyone to follow us."
"No one followed us. I would have seen them."
"Would you?" He stirred four spoonfuls of sugar into his mug of tea.
I raised an eyebrow.
He shrugged. "It's my weakness."
In answer to his question, I said, "I would know if someone followed us, yes. On those dark little roads?"
"Someone must have followed you earlier, or else how did that man in your room know you were there?"
I narrowed my eyes, thought about it. "I don't know. It would be easier to follow me from the airport."
"But who knew you had the jewel?"
"Aside from you, you mean?"
He nodded.
"I made a phone call."
"To?"
I shook my head. "None of your business." But would Paul have sent a man to steal the jewel from me?
No. There were many possibilities, but that wasn't one of them.
"Do not be too trusting,
prieten,"
Luca said.
I glared at him. "Don't be a cliché." A hard gust of wind slammed into the caravan, making it rock slightly, and I shivered. "What do you know? What about others, criminals, who might want the jewel for themselves? Who knew about it?" I gave him a hard look. "If you want me to trust you, tell me what's going on."
"I am not certain I know everything."
"Why did he hire you?"
"To steal it."
I frowned. "That doesn't really make sense to me, Luca. I mean, just out of the blue, he hired you to steal one of the most famous diamonds in the world?"
"More or less, yes."
"It's been missing for decades. Where did Gunnarsson get it? Where was it all this time?"
"That, I do not know."
I absorbed that for a moment. Then, "Who killed him, then? And why didn't they take the other jewels?"
His eyelids dropped, and again I had that sense of shuddering that came from him. It must have been a terrible scene. "The police think it was an enemy, another drug runner," he said. "Isn't that right?"
"Yes."
"It was more crude than that. Gunnarsson was a very wealthy man, and he liked collecting beautiful things, as your Paul does."
"So?"
"His apartment was filled with many things that could have been stolen—he liked sculpture, art glass and objets d'art. There were those eggs, you know—Faberagé."
"What about them?"
"Some with diamonds and things, you know?" His mouth worked. "None of them were stolen, either."
"How do you know?"
His elegantly beautiful hands—the hands of a musician, or a lover, or a…thief—spread open around the cup. "I heard."
"Heard?"
"A friend of a friend."
Tension made my neck tight. "You're lying. And I'm not going to play if you lie. Get it? You want me to carry this freaking diamond, tell me the truth."
He pursed his lips. "All right," he said, and looked at me. There was new steeliness there. "You will not like it. Your Paul—" he emphasized and drew out the name "—will not look so sweet to you at the end of this telling."
"I have no illusions about Paul Maigny," I said.
"Don't you?" He inclined his head, those blue eyes sharpening on my face. "Do you know that your eyes grow warm when you speak of him?"
"What I know," I said, "is that he is a collector, that his childhood taught him to be shrewd, that he's quite determined when he sets his mind to a thing."
"He will stop at nothing to have what he wants."
"That's probably exaggerating."
"I don't think so," Luca said, meeting my eyes. "Here is the story—Paul was in negotiations with an art dealer for the Katerina, bidding against another collector for it. Unfortunately, the dealer had a little problem with drugs and gambling, and ran afoul of his supplier—"
"Gunnarsson, I assume?"
"Yes. Gunnarsson was going to cut him off. Because he was so desperate, the art dealer gave up the Katerina, which The Swede very much wanted because it was Maigny—your Paul—who wanted it.
"When he hired me to steal the jewel back, he paid me half upfront. The rest of the payment were to be the jewels in the collection."
"
All
of them? Jeez."
"All of them together were not worth a fraction of the Katerina, of course, but for me, it would be a simple matter to find collectors and dealers who would make me quite rich. I could not, on my own, find a buyer for a jewel so expensive as the Katerina."
"I see. And Maigny only wanted the Katerina to
have
it, not to sell it."
"Yes."
He sipped his tea, his eyes on the dark window, the slams of rain. "I am no ordinary thief," he said, and looked at me. "I am very, very good at what I do. In some circles, I'm—" he gave me a wry little smile that managed to be self-deprecating and deliciously seductive all at once "—quite renowned."
"That doesn't surprise me."
"For a month, I planned every detail. Had it worked, it would have been the last job I had to do."
I nodded, filing the information away. "So what went wrong?"
"I arrived as anticipated, while Gunnarsson was out. The Katerina was in a safe by itself, and I'd secured it, and was working on cracking the other safe when—" He winced, shook his head. "He returned. Too early. And there was something wrong—he was afraid, plainly. I hid, and then three men came in, garroted him, and were obviously going to come after the Katerina, so I bolted. Out the back and into the night." He laced his fingers together, touched the tips of his thumbs, point to point. "I'd planned well, so I was able to get away. I hid out in a room nearby the train station that night, trying to decide what to do. In the morning, it was reported that the police had found him dead, and seized his jewels."
A chill rippled down my spine. "So who were the men? Why didn't they steal his jewels?"
"They might not have known about them. They think it was a drug killing."
I searched my memory for details. "I don't remember a lot about the actual murder. It didn't particularly interest me at the time." But I frowned. "It all seems too convenient. You just happened to be stealing the Katerina when these guys come in and murder him and they don't even know that he collects all these jewels?"
He shrugged, and my gut said it was genuine bewilderment on his face. "I don't know. They said it was Peruvians, that he'd crossed someone."
I narrowed my eyes. "The man in my room wasn't Peruvian."
"No, I don't think so."
"Hmm." It seemed there was some answer right in front of my eyes, but I couldn't quite capture it. "I don't think it was Paul who killed Gunnarsson, either."
"Maybe it was the police?"
"That's reaching," I said dismissively.
"And when the murders happened, you were cheated of your payoff and decided to keep the Katerina?"
Luca shook his head. "No. Until I held it, I did not intend to take it back to my country."
I looked at him.
"Stupid, hmm?" he said. "But once I saw her, it was as if I had no choice. I took her back to my hotel, and I waited there, trying to think what to do. And then of course the news hit the papers, and your name was raised, and I knew of your connection to Maigny—and
one thing led to another.
"
"And here we are."
"Yes."
We sat in the kitchen with our tea, each to our own thoughts. The tea was soothing, hot, sweet. In the silence between bursts of wind, I heard the overhead light buzzing faintly.
"Enough of all that." Luca smiled, his healthy white teeth flashing. "My grandmother is a gypsy," he said. "Shall I read your palm?"
I rolled my eyes. "Let me guess," I said. "I'm going to meet someone tall, dark and handsome."
He raised an eyebrow, his eyes twinkling. "That has already happened." With a sideways smile, he bent over my palm and spread open my fingers. It seemed somehow intensely intimate, previewing a different sort of spreading, and I found heat touching my ears, a strange, Victorianesque reaction.
He brushed the hollow and pads and rises with the very tips of his fingers, and in my weariness, I was mesmerized by the look of his fingernails, clean half moons, somehow sturdy-looking.
"Mmmm," he said, and traced a line down the middle of my hand, top to bottom. "This is a fame line," he said. "Not everyone has one. It means you will attain great reputation through your work."
"Or I'll be a pet of the paparazzi."
He flashed a quick smile. "Here the heart and life line join. You are stubborn, but felt betrayed by your family."
"I'm so not amazed that you knew that."
He went back to the perusal of my palm, and he seemed absurdly serious after a few minutes, studying this and that, lifting my hand to see more light on the palm, grunting a little.
"Will you stop that? You're scaring me."
"You have markings that are most unusual. Having one is interesting, two would be a surprise. I have not seen anyone with three." He looked up at me. "You have a very powerful destiny, Sylvie."
"Again, that's my father's mark in my life. He's the famous one."
"You will be, too, for work you do yourself. A fame line comes from your own efforts." He made an
x
on the pad below my forefinger. "This is a star of destiny. It's very powerful, this mark. It's the one that says you will experience greatness in some endeavor."
I gave him a half smile. "You sound so serious."
His glossy lashes did not lift. "I have never seen these marks, Sylvie, though I have heard people speak of them. It is intriguing." Again he stroked the lines. "I wonder what it is you will do?"
I didn't want destiny or anything difficult for tonight, and said, noncommitally, "Who knows?" I took a breath. "Tell me something else."
"This," he said, moving his finger, "is your heart line. It is both strong and broken at times. You will love boldly, and your heart will break. It has broken twice to now."
I must have winced or jerked, because he looked at me in surprise. "Yes? Twice?"
"Well, how hard would that be to guess? I'm old enough to have had at least two."
He pointed to the middle line, side to side. "And there is marriage here, though I do not see children." A frown pulled his brows toward that aggressive nose. He tipped my hand to the side, looking at the edge. "Ah, here. Perhaps one child after all. That's good."
"I'm not sure I'm all that interested."
"No," he said, without looking at me, "you are a woman who will find pleasure in your child. A daughter, perhaps," he added, raising his eyes, "to spoil a little, no?"
I shrugged lightly, but I liked the idea of it, somewhere deep inside of me. A daughter, yes. With my mother's thin nose and graceful hands.
Keeping his eyes on my face, he lifted my hand to his lips. I didn't pull away—I let him press my knuckles, one at a time to the heat of his lush mouth. Just beyond the angle of my knuckle was a hint of moisture, the give of flesh.
One kiss, two, three…
I was exhausted, disoriented by the shift in circumstances, and much too drawn to him. I took my hand away. "Let's not," I said.
"Are you afraid of me?"
"It would be the sensible thing," I answered, "but no."
That pleased him. His white teeth showed. "Good."
As I sat there, the world started to drag, like an old-fashioned cartoon, the sound slowing and slowing, even while I peered at him, genuinely trying to concentrate. Jet lag was starting to press into the folds of my brain like a hot towel, pressing down, ever thicker, into the creases of gray matter until all systems were buzzing with exhaustion.