a college boy and one was a pin-striped, red-tie business man who’d smelled of my father’s Armani cologne. He might wear silk boxers, but I didn’t see him in a turquoise linen shirt. I fingered it with admiration. Silk and linen, gorgeously cut. I’d like to see the man who’d wear this.
Probably not the van, then. Maybe it was the security check point. But I hadn’t paid any attention to who was around me there. I’d been running late.
“Damn!” I said again.
I didn’t want to wear my dirty plane-ride clothes. I wanted something that smelled clean. I wanted my nightgown to sleep in. My other shoes.
But there wasn’t anything I could do, except track down the owner of the case and try to work out an exchange. In the meantime, I’d have to go shopping in the morning.
I found a tag in a small pocket on the outside of the bag. Same place mine was, of course. The handwriting was hard to read, spidery and European. I couldn’t make out the name, which was smeared, but there was a telephone number, in Paris.
Paris. Dialing the numbers gave me a jolt of body memory, one of those electric moments that are stored God knows where, in cells all over your arms or back or collarbone or ankles. This particular memory, dialing Paris numbers, had been imprinted during my seventeenth year, when I’d dialed the number of a man, a Parisian who’d stolen my heart with a single kiss.
So I thought I was just projecting when the recorded voice on the other end sounded exactly like the voice of that very man, Paul Maigny. In French he said, “Hello, thank you for calling, please leave a message.”
Startled, I hung up. Stared at the phone, the card in a hand that had suddenly begun to tremble violently.
It couldn’t be Paul, of course. Only someone who sounded like him. Paul still lived in Paris—my father, his best friend, had recently spent a week with him—but I would have known if he’d been on that plane. With a slight shake of my head, I picked up the receiver and dialed again. Again the voice shocked me.
And again, before I could decide what to do, I hung up.
There are some voices you do not forget. Your mother. Your best friend. Your spouse. I was not mistaken about this one, either. Those elegant vowels, the slight rasp.
I scowled.
It had been almost five years since I’d heard Paul’s voice—since the day of my wedding, as a matter of fact, when I’d told him never to speak to me again. And he was likely in my mind because the island of Arran, lying backward on the sea like a man, made me think of him. Still.
It couldn’t be his case on my bed. I knew it wasn’t his handwriting, which was an elegant, sprawling hand I’d seen thousands of times.
I was just imagining things.
Firmly, I dialed the number a third time. When the voice mail picked up, I left my name and the telephone number of the hotel on the voice mail of the stranger in Paris, who no doubt had my bag and felt as bewildered as I did. In case he’d left a message for me, I next dialed my home voice mail box. No messages.
So there I was, damp in my towels, with a hot date in an hour. The stranger’s bag was open on the bed. I did what any red-blooded woman would do: I looked through it. Maybe there would be something I could wear.
A scent of laundry and man rose from it, entirely alien from the smell of my own packing. I wondered, briefly, if the stranger would go through my things. I thought of thongs and red leather pants—when you have a job as stuffy as mine, you’ve got to take your pleasure where you can find it—and a little sense of discomfort rippled through me.
Beyond the gorgeous turquoise silk and linen shirt, there was a black, zipped shaving kit, three silk T-shirts, a pair of black trousers, black socks, a pair of well-worn jeans, swimming trunks, the aforementioned boxers. A pair of walking sandals were sealed in a plastic bag. A little sand gathered in the corner. He’d been on the beach.
My stomach growled and it hit me again that I was starving. Which brought home the fact that I still I didn’t have anything to wear.
Grr. All I’d wanted was a little supper and a good night’s sleep. The mix-up was a pain in the neck.
But let’s get a grip here—it was not tragedy or disaster. It was only inconvenient. I keep some makeup in my purse, and the hair dryer in the bathroom would work fine for my wet head.
What I didn’t have was deodorant. With only a slight flush of shame, I opened the man’s shaving kit to see if he had any. There it was, a red roll-on that smelled pretty good.
There was also a white box. Jewelry, I thought—after all, jewels are my stock in trade—I opened it to see what taste he had on this level. Judging by the rest of it, it would be something understated. Probably gold, expensive.
It was expensive, all right.
For the second time in five minutes, my brain couldn’t get itself around what my eyes were seeing. It wasn’t a watch or a ring or even a tacky bracelet.
Pillowed in cotton batting was a jewel. A diamond.
A huge diamond.
My hands shook as I pulled it out. Not only was it huge, it was very rare and storied, this jewel. A jewel that was presumed to be lost. It was very old. Priceless.
It was even cursed.
Katerina’s Blood.
Since I was one of only a handful of people who would recognize the astonishment of it at first sight, I was also convinced of one other thing.
The switch of bags was not an accident.
Chapter 4
Many stones are valued for their rarity; for example, the colored stones, rubies, sapphires and emeralds are rated on their scarcity. In spite of public perception, diamonds are not among the rare stones on the earth. They’re plentiful the world over, and if it were not for a cartel controlling the distribution of these sparkling stones, the cost of diamonds would be much lower.
—Sylvie Montague, Ancient Jewels and the Modern World
Jewel geeks are an odd little club. We come to it in many ways, from many walks in life. My entry came through a trip to the British Museum when I was eleven, when a family friend took me to see the crown jewels. There I saw a collection of Indian Raj’s jewels and was stung right through the chest. In that instant, I fell madly in love with the entire mythology and wonder of gems. I have been handling them, assessing them, admiring them in my work professionally for eight years, and have seen some spectacular beauties. My particular specialty—passion—is for ancient and antique jewels.
The Katerina made my heart race. I carried it to the window, as carefully as if it were a baby bird, and held it up to the light.
Good grief.
The diamond was legendary, its history vague—very, very famous, but also elusive, changing hands with dizzying speed. I couldn’t remember the exact weight off the top of my head, but I knew it was something over 80 karats. As a point of reference, the Hope Diamond is 43.
Katerina’s Blood was cut in medieval
