It had all started several days earlier, after an unexpected encounter and what he thought was an innocent proposal.
* * *
“Yes, Trevor, these are some fine rocks,” said an elderly jeweler, who was unable to roll his ‘r’ as he spoke, as he examined a round diamond the size of a hazelnut. “Take this one – pure perfection.”
A short gray-haired Jew with horn-rimmed glasses perched on his head had been inspecting the diamond for five minutes through a thick magnifying glass, holding it with fine tweezers in his white cotton gloves.
He carefully returned the stone and picked up another from the handful of nearly identical in size and shape diamonds scattered on a black lacquered table.
“Wonderful!” He was clearly admiring them. “The cut is amazing! The girdle on all of them is as sharp as a knife. The colors and purity are like dew from the sky…
Trevor was introduced to Lev Goldenberg, a jeweler and emigrant from the Soviet Union, by Rochefort, chief editor at Les Mondes, who often ordered jewelry from him.
Lev Goldenberg created remarkable copies of the best collections offered by the leading jewelry brands of Europe.
“Show me a photo of a masterpiece and I will make you one that is hundred times better at half the cost,” he loved to say every time potential clients approached him. Indeed, he was the finest craftsman.
“I have a client who can purchase all of these in one lot,” said the old jeweler as he eyed yet another rock. “If you negotiate well, he will pay five million right away, maybe more.”
“Lev, I wasn’t thinking of selling just yet. I just need a safe place to keep them for a while.”
“Teo, you don’t understand,” the jeweler said softly, prying his gaze from the diamond to give Trevor a piercing look. “Five million euros, not dollars. That’s a lot of money, my friend.”
“Lev, I need a safe place for a couple of days, until Christmas. I'm staying at a hotel and it would be extremely reckless of me to keep them in a safe there.”
– Tov[5], my friend, all right,” said the jeweler somewhat dejectedly. He gathered the stones in a green velvet bag. “You know you won’t find a safer place. But if you do decide to sell, just let me know and I will arrange everything within two-three hours.”
Shortly after the conversation with the jeweler, Trevor was sitting on the open terrace of a small restaurant in the heart of Geneva, sipping coffee and reading the latest newspapers.
Military service was in the past, the only reminder being a pale tattoo of a skull on his left shoulder, a device of the Reconnaissance Battalion of the Marine Brigade of the French Foreign Legion headquartered in Algeria. The department of the French Press Institute at Paris II Panthéon-Assas University was also in the past. Now, he was a special war correspondent for Les Mondes.
Trevor remembered only bits and pieces of his childhood, as the family moved around a lot. His father was from Carpathian Ruthenia[6] (territory of modern Zakarpattia region in Ukraine), a Ukrainian Ruthenian (Rusyn)[7].
However, at the beginning of the Second World War, when Zakarpattia, then a part of Czechoslovakia, was occupied by the Hungarian army, his family fled first to Prague and after the war to France, where Trevor was born in the early 1970s. His father would converse with him only in the Rusyn language so that he would remember his heritage. Trevor’s mother, a teacher of French and French literature, tried to instill in him a love for everything French.
