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Barron pushes open the door. A bell rings as we walk in, and a man behind the counter looks up. He’s short and balding, with huge horn-rimmed glasses and a jeweler’s loupe on a long chain around his neck. He’s dressed tidily in a black button-up shirt. Fat rings sparkle over his gloves on each of his fingers.
“Are you Bob?” I say, walking up to the counter.
“Who’s asking?” he says.
“I’m Cassel Sharpe,” I tell him. “This is my brother Barron. You knew our father. I don’t know if you remember him, but—”
He breaks into a huge grin. “Look at you! All grown up. I saw pictures of the three of you Sharpe boys in your daddy’s wallet, God rest his soul.” He claps me on the shoulder. “Getting into the business? Whatever it is you need, Bob can make it.”
I glance around the shop. A woman and her daughter are looking at a case of crosses. They don’t seem to be paying attention to us, but we are probably the kind of people you try a little harder not to notice.
I lower my voice. “We want to talk to you about a custom piece you already made—for our mother. Can we go somewhere in the back?”
“Sure, sure. Come into my office.”
We follow him past a curtain made from a blanket stapled to the top of a plastic door frame. The office is a mess, with a computer in the center of a sagging wooden rolltop desk, the surface covered completely in papers. One of the drawers is open, and inside are watch parts and tiny glassine bags with stones in them.
I pick up an envelope. The name on it is Robert Peck. Bob.
“We want to know about the Resurrection Diamond,” Barron says.
“Whoa.” Bob holds up his hands. “I don’t know how you heard anything about that, but—”
“We saw the fake you made,” I say. “Now we want to know about the real thing. We need to know what happened to it. Did you sell it?”
Barron walks intimidatingly close to Bob. “You know, I work memories. Maybe I could help you recall something.”
“Look,” Bob says, his voice quavering slightly, rising a little too high. “I don’t know what’s made the two of you take this unfriendly tone with me. I was a good friend to your father. And I never told nobody that I’d copied the Resurrection Diamond—that I knew who’d stolen it. How many people would do that, huh, when there was so much money on the line? If you think I know where your father kept it or if he sold it, I don’t. We were close, but not close like that. All I did was make the fakes.”
“Wait. I thought you made the stone for my mother,” I say. “And what do you mean, fakes? How many?”
“Two. That’s what your dad asked for. And there was no way I switched anything. He didn’t let me keep the original diamond for longer than it took to take the measurements and some photographs. He was no fool, you know. You think he’d let something that valuable out of his sight?”
I exchange a look with Barron. Dad was a lot of things, but he wasn’t lazy about a con.
“So what happened?” I ask.
Bob takes a few steps away from us and opens a drawer in his desk, pulls out a bottle of bourbon. He screws off the cap and takes a long pull.
Then he shakes his head, like he’s trying to shake off the burn in his throat.
“Nothing,” he says finally. “Your father came in here with that damn stone. Said he needed the two copies.”
I frown. “Why two?”
“How the hell should I know? One fake I set on the gold tie pin where the original had been. The other I put in a ring. But the original, the real one? I kept that loose, just the way your father wanted it.”
“Are they good fakes?” Barron asks.
Bob shakes his head again. “Not the one on the pin. Phil came in here, wanting it fast, you know? Within the day. But the second one, he gave me some more time. That was a fine piece of work. Now, are you two going to tell me what this is about?”
I glance at Barron. A muscle in his jaw is jumping, but I can’t tell if he believes Bob or not. I’m trying to think, to play this thing through. So maybe Mom gives Dad the stone and says she needs a fake really fast, before Zacharov notices that the piece is gone. Dad goes straight to Bob, but he asks for two stones, because he already knows that he’s going to steal the diamond for himself—maybe out of spite, since he discovered that Mom was screwing around with Zacharov? Anyway, Dad brings her one of the fakes, and she slips it back to Zacharov before he notices that it’s gone. Then Dad tells her he has a present for her—a ring with the Resurrection Diamond set in it, which is actually the second fake. If that’s what happened, the original could be anywhere. Dad could have sold it years ago.
But why put the diamond in a ring that Mom can’t wear outside the house without drawing attention? That, I’m not sure about. Maybe he was so pissed off that he liked seeing it on her hand and knowing he’d gotten one over on her.
“What would something like that be worth on the black market?” I ask.
“The real thing?” Bob asks. “Depends if you really believe it’ll keep you from getting killed. As a stone with historical value, sure, it’s something, but the kind of people who buy rocks like that don’t want something they can’t show off. But if you believe— Well, what’s the price on invulnerability?”
