Pierre stopped pacing his office. He turned and looked slowly at Gregoire Lazard. Dull-witted fool he might be, but Lazard had all his attention.

“Then how do you know?”

“I still have contacts.” Lazard had boasted that his friends, gangsters all, had purchased his ticket to the West when Russia was still under Communism’s grip, and perestroika was just a theory. “Some moujiks found a stone in the soil, washed from a riverbed. They sold it in a mining town for a handful of American dollars. It was a piece of rough.”

Pierre licked his lips.

“Did anybody cut the stone?”

“It wound its way to the Giaperellis in Milan.” Pierre nodded; he knew them well, Angelo and Gepetto; they were shady, but brilliant; they agreed to cut rough without knowing its provenance, and had made a fortune laundering conflict diamonds.

“It was orange,” Lazard said. “A brilliant, true orange, eight-carat oval. I hear it looked like a fine spessartite garnet.”

Pierre’s eyes sparkled. Spessartite was perhaps his favourite stone: tangerine to blood orange, it combined the warmth of fire with the coolness of a diamond—passion in control. He never gave spessartite to any of his women. It was his own stone, and he wore a museum-quality round set in deep twenty-four-karat gold in place of a signet ring.

But how much better than spessartite would be a real orange diamond. And that’s what the kimberlite must be, which was pushing great hunks of rough onto the surface of rivers.

He felt a lust for acquisition that momentarily surprised him. Yet why should it? He was rich, true, but not in the league he wanted to be. He dominated Paris, yet he was not the richest man in France, let alone the world. In the playground of the Roth schilds and the Gettys, he had still not earned admission. . . .

The man who owned diamonds would be different.

He would no longer be a merchant or a jeweller. He would be an owner. He would be De Beers.

“Who owns the land?”

“It is in private hands. The Kamazhak family have much of it. And they do not want diamonds . . .”

The Kamazhaks were devils; some of the cruelest of the Russian mafia, they robbed, shot, and bribed at will. They ran drugs into the decadent West, and they regarded themselves as rulers of a vast tract of Siberia.

“They would sell the unpopulated areas for ready cash, and supplies of weapons and trucks. Perhaps we could send somebody there, to do a deal.” Gregoire looked hopeful. “You’re running the firm. . . . Perhaps I could go.”

Surprised at his transparency, Pierre laughed disdainfully and launched into rapid-fire Russian.

“I don’t think so, Gosha! Little Grigory Alexandrovich, finding himself the lord of miles of Siberian diamonds!”

“But they need somebody that speaks their language. And knows their culture.”