Flawless Read Free

in December. He often missed London, his mates, the pub, the know-it-all taxi drivers, the women with breasts that jiggled when they moved, and faces that moved when they talked. But he had to admit that Los Angeles could be a pretty spectacular place to live too, especially on days like today.
    Heading down the canyon into Beverly Hills proper, speeding past the seemingly endless rows of tasteless Persian mansions with their manicured lawns and vast, vulgar statues of lions in gold or marble guarding their gates, he couldn’t resist putting in a brief, gloating call to Danny. He imagined his brother freezing his ass off on a Manhattan street somewhere, soaked to the bone in icy drizzle, and began to feel even more pleased with himself as he selected the familiar number.
    “Dan?” The phone rang only twice before Danny picked up. “You’ll never guess what I’ve just done.”
    “Not now, Jakey,” came the terse reply. “I’ll ring you back.”
    And to Jake’s astonishment, Dan hung up on him.
    “Well, that’s just bloody charming, that is,” grumbled Jake to himself, pulling into one of the subterranean parking garages on Rodeo. He was closer to his twin brother than to anyone else on earth and loved him unconditionally, but they had always been deeply competitive. Every Christmas, back home in London, they compared notes on their earnings for the year. For the last three years Danny had just squeaked past Jake, but today’s coup with Brookstein would turn the tables for sure. He’d beenlooking forward to rubbing his brother’s nose in it—in the nicest possible way, of course—but now he was going to have to wait. And though Jake had many good qualities, patience had never been one of them.
    Stuffing the pouch containing his remaining simulants into the glove box of the car and locking it, he headed for the elevator. Late lunch on his own at Nate ’n Al’s was hardly the celebration he deserved. On the other hand, their chicken matzo ball soup put even his mother’s to shame. After the marathon fucking session he’d just had with Julia, followed by the adrenaline rush of pulling a fast one on her husband, he’d worked up quite an appetite.

     
    On the other side of the country, Danny Meyer was in the midst of a deal of his own. Unfortunately for him, his client was not a rookie like Al Brookstein, but a hard-nosed Russian jeweler known simply as “Vlad” who’d once worked the infamous Udachny mine in the frozen Siberian plains of Yakutia, and who knew an overpriced stone when he saw one.
    Poring over his diamond balance, a sort of miniature old-fashioned kitchen scale, in the back room of his dingy little store in Queens, Vlad placed the second of Danny’s five stones in one pan and, with tweezers, began adding tiny weights to the other pan. It was mesmerizing to watch this big oaf of a man, his hands as fat as bear paws, perform the delicate operation with such consummate skill. Danny stood back to let him work, concentrating on maintaining his poker face while the jeweler made his own assessment of the diamonds he’d brought him, judging each stone according to the “four Cs” that everybody in the industry worked from—color, cut, clarity, and carat.
    Danny wouldn’t have been foolish enough to try to cheat an old hand like Vlad on carats. The stones were all tens and eights(one-tenth or one-eighth of a carat), as the Russian would soon discover for himself. But on clarity, he
had
chanced his hand, claiming all five diamonds were “perfect,” a technical term meaning that a grader would have to magnify them at least ten times to be able to identify any blemishes, when in fact only three fully met that standard. He could only pray that at the end of a long day, and in such dreadful light, Vlad might slip up and miss the small inclusions he’d omitted to mention.
    Unlike Jake, however, this wasn’t to be Danny’s lucky day. Pulling out a standard 10x color-corrected loupe, Vlad lifted