The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [155]
He glared at her, unable to say no in front of the doctor without looking foolish. “Oh, I suppose so,” he agreed sullenly, as she fled from the room to tell Beulah the good news.
They packed quickly, just enough for a few weeks’ stay in Paris. Eddie left, following his mother in the ambulance, but they were to travel by train and meet him later at the Hotel Bristol.
When the train drew into Paris, it was an easy matter to take a taxi to the Gare du Nord instead of the hotel. After leaving Azaylee and Beulah at the station, Missie went to the Rue St-Honoré. As she walked into the smartest jeweler’s she could find, she tilted her nose arrogantly in the air, removed the enormous diamond from her finger, and told them she wanted to sell it.
Without batting an eyelid, the worldly-wise Frenchman agreed it was a fine stone and offered her three thousand dollars. She took it with a smile and went immediately across the street to Thomas Cook and bought second-class passages on the liner America, sailing for New York that evening. Then she dashed back across Paris to the station and they caught the first train to Cherbourg.
By seven o’clock that night they were on board and on their way to New York. And this time Missie did not even look back. She was afraid to, because she didn’t know what Eddie Arnhaldt would do when he found they had gone.
Istanbul
Gerome Abyss rose early from his bed that morning for the first time in years. He threw off the stale sheet, walked barefoot across the dingy carpet to the bathroom, and inspected himself in the unframed rectangle of mirror. The bright morning light was not flattering. His face was puffy, folded, straining at the seams. His stomach churned and beads of sweat trickled down his back as last night’s alcohol attacked his liver. Suddenly he doubled over with pain. After a few moments the pain lessened and he straightened up and stepped into the shower. Maybe now that he was rich he would go to one of those new clinics, try a cure. “Cure” they called it, as if it were a disease, when any man with any sense knew it was a pleasure: mostly the pleasure of oblivion, but still a pleasure.
As he soaped himself he stared at his body, larded with fat like a white whale’s blubber. Maybe he would lose a few pounds too, now that he was rich, and get himself some smart suits. Like he used to have in the old days when he was Gerome Abyss, the best gem cutter in the world. When companies like Cartier begged for his talents and paid him a fortune. Not as much as he’d gotten for cutting the emerald, of course, but in those days it seemed to go much farther.
And maybe, now that he was rich, he would set himself up in business again. He might let it be known, discreetly of course, to his old contacts at the big jewelers that it was he who had cut the Ivanoff emerald. It didn’t matter that he had given his word never to tell. After all the excitement the sale of the emerald had caused and the amount of money it had made, that beautiful girl with the long black hair and slanting blue eyes would not be selling anything else for a long time. Leyla Kazahn. He knew her name now, but he didn’t know how she came to have the emerald, and what’s more he didn’t care. Last night a banker’s draft for over $648, 000 had been delivered to him at the Locanta Antalya, the local bar where he did his drinking. He was a rich man.
The open razor drew blood under his unsteady hand as he shaved the five days of gray stubble, and he flinched. He thought about the newspapers again. They paid a fortune these days for an exclusive. With a story like this he could have the whole world competing. He grinned, showing a broken line of dirty yellow teeth. Yes, he could become even richer. More than that—he would be famous.
He took a shirt from the closet, inspecting the grimy band around the collar; it would have to do. The old white sharkskin suit was yellowed with age, sweaty and creased, and it looked ridiculous on this cold