The Imperfects Read online

  Karen from HR taps on the partition wall, eyeing Beck’s shelves, absent of family pictures, of framed aspirational quotes, of postcards from faraway friends. “How’s your grandmother doing?”

  “She passed,” Beck says, her attention focused on her screen. If she sees the expression on Karen’s face, she’ll lose it. “I’m just going to finish up the Cunningham brief, then I’ll need to take the first half of next week off.”

  “Oh, Beck.” Karen bends down and awkwardly wraps her arms around Beck and her desk chair. “Don’t worry about the brief. Someone else can do it.”

  “It’s easier if I get it done.”

  Karen continues to stoop beside Beck, rubbing her shoulder. Normally it would make Beck uncomfortable. Today, it’s nice having someone comfort her, particularly someone she doesn’t know very well. Karen’s eyes drift to Beck’s coat and the brooch. Beck fingers it self-consciously.

  “It was my grandmother’s.”

  “It’s exquisite.” Karen leans close enough that Beck can see dandruff clinging to her middle part. “Do you mind if I—” She motions toward the orchid. Beck shifts in her seat, watching as Karen lifts her lapel to investigate the brooch. “It looks like it’s from the ’40s or ’50s.” Karen reaches into her pocket for her cell phone and turns the flashlight on. When the light catches the crystal, Karen gasps.

  “It’s just an old piece of costume jewelry,” Beck says.

  “I don’t know.” Karen’s fingers outline the air around the bedazzled petals. “Those diamonds look real. And the large stone, the fire when I shined the light on it, you don’t get that kind of rainbow effect off quartz or glass.”

  Beck half listens as Karen, in her thick Philly accent, explains dispersion, the way light refracts off the facets of a stone. Citrine—a type of yellow quartz typically used in midcentury costume jewelry—has very low dispersion, so it won’t cast colors the way stones with high dispersion will.

  “My guess is it’s a peridot.” Karen sucks in her breath. “It’s more yellow than green, so it’s not as valuable as a darker peridot. Still, the clarity is high, especially for a stone that big.”

  Beck can hear Helen chuckling. Such a fuss over a piece of junk jewelry.

  Karen stops talking. She turns the flashlight on her phone off and stands. “I come from a family of jewelers. I didn’t mean to overstep.”

  Beck tries not to laugh. “No, it’s just—if you knew my grandmother, you’d know this was fake. She didn’t have... She wasn’t the type...” Beck feels desperate to tell this near stranger what kind of woman her grandmother was. Someone who saved bones to make broth. Someone who got shoes resoled and stitched up worn clothing. Someone far too pragmatic and unsentimental to hold on to a valuable piece of jewelry.

  Karen reaches for a Post-it pad on Beck’s desk and scribbles an address onto it. “I’m no expert, but I’d say you’re wearing a new car on your jacket.” A Kia or Tesla? Beck wants to joke, but Karen looks so serious as she holds the Post-it out to Beck. “Ask for Leo. And if he tries to tell you it’s in bad condition tell him I said to stop being an asshole.”

  In the elevator, once Beck is finished with the brief, she holds out the lapel of her jacket so she can see the orchid. In the fluorescent light, the yellow stone is dull, and Beck doesn’t understand what caused Karen’s outburst. Karen probably did notice something reflected in the stone—her own imagination refracting, splintering into the hundreds of fantasies people have about family heirlooms.

  The elevator opens in the lobby, and she buttons her coat to brave the cold afternoon. As she swirls through the revolving doors to the street, she reaches for her scarf in her pocket. When she weaves it around her neck, she peers down at her lapel. Sunlight hits the orchid, and a rainbow explodes from the yellow crystal. Beck doesn’t gasp so much as lose her breath at the sudden, impossible beauty of the stone against her coat. She scans the sidewalks to see if anyone else has noticed, but the pedestrians continue unperturbed. Quickly unclasping the brooch, she buries it in her purse and clutches her bag against her side as she heads toward the bus stop to return to her apartment. She should go to Orphan’s Court to begin the probate paperwork. Even more than the phone call with the rabbi and the conversation with the medical examiner, the paperwork is the first real step in saying goodbye to Helen. She isn’t ready for that yet.

  Beck waits at the corner for the bus, stuffing her free hand in her pocket. Her fingers graze the Post-it. Romano Brothers Jewelers, 714 Sansom Street. At the bottom of her purse she finds the orchid brooch and stares between it and the address on Sansom.

  Beck snaps a photo of the brooch and sends it to the only jewelry expert she knows, a former client from the firm, Viktor. Just inherited this, she explains. My coworker thinks it might be valuable. You can’t tell in the photo, the stone (maybe a peridot?) sparkles in the light. What do you think?

  “This is ridiculous,” she says as she hits Send and continues to wait for the bus. Almost immediately, her phone chimes, and she’s surprised Viktor has responded so quickly. It’s Jake, forwarding his flight information as if he expects one of them to be waiting curbside. She’s been so focused on the arrangements for Helen’s funeral she hasn’t fully accepted that she’s going to have to see Jake again. And not just see him but spend three days with him, confined in the house on Edgehill Road.

  The bus pulls up, and as Beck is about to mount the steps, her phone dings again. It’s Viktor.

  Come see me at once.

  * * *

  Gemstones aren’t rocks to Viktor. They aren’t a commodity, the promise of eternal love, a marker of social status. They are millions of years of history, he’s told Beck. First, as carbon in the mantle, then as discoveries among the rubble of the earth’s crust, and finally as physical evidence of the many lives that touched each stone. If anyone will know whether Helen’s brooch is valuable, it’s Viktor.

  Beck met Viktor when he was in need of legal assistance. As soon as they began working together, they developed an instant kinship. Trained as a jewelry maker and gemologist, Viktor worked as a designer at Tiffany’s, until his employer discovered his side gig, the one that bought him the penthouse apartment on Rittenhouse Square. Beck didn’t know you could make real fake jewelry. As it turned out, in the jewelry industry, knock-off rings could indeed hold real diamonds and still be counterfeit if they were a trademark infringement. What was wrong with it? Viktor had argued, and Beck had agreed. They were his designs, unique, if similar, to the ones he’d sketched for Tiffany’s. The top of the box did not say Tiffany & Co., even if the color had a striking resemblance to the little blue box. Beck liked that Viktor aimed to make Tiffany-esque engagement rings more affordable, and Viktor liked that Beck worked with an unrivaled passion to prove his business was lawful.

  As instructed, Beck walks directly to Viktor’s building on Rittenhouse Square. When she arrives, she stares up at the opaque windows that reach toward the sky. She was here once before, a year ago, for a thank-you brunch he held for Beck and Tom, who had been lead attorney on Viktor’s case. The judge had ruled that Viktor’s ring boxes were not a color trademark infringement, saving him from having to pay Tiffany’s damages. He got to keep the money he made, so long as he agreed to stop making his rings. At their celebratory brunch, Viktor had served champagne along with eggs royale—eggs Benedict, Beck discovered, with lox in place of ham—and the three glasses went straight to her head. She tried to hide it as Viktor walked Tom and her to the elevator. Alone in the small marble elevator, Beck glanced over at Tom to see if the champagne had affected him, too. It was the first case they’d worked together, and they’d never spoken about anything else. They’d certainly never had any charged energy between them. In that contained space, Tom had looked thirstily at Beck before reaching over to kiss her. Beck was too surprised to kiss him back. He pulled away sheepishly. Apologies ensued—it was inappropriate, he was so sorry
, he shouldn’t have done that—until she kissed him, as much to silence him as to rediscover the pressure of his lips.

  Beck continues to stare at the dark windows, realizing that she will have to ride in that elevator again.

  When Viktor opens the door, he looks younger than a year ago, closer to sixty than seventy-one. He wears a fitted black cashmere turtleneck, his white hair slicked back, his signature diamond ring adorning his pinky finger.

  “Ms. Miller,” Viktor says, waving her inside. Beck lets Viktor take her coat and hang it on the coatrack in the entryway.

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you have some secret antiaging potion. You don’t, do you?”

  Viktor laughs. “Peace of mind, my dear. Thanks to you.”

  Beck was the one to discover that Viktor’s jewelry boxes shone green in direct light and thus were not Tiffany blue but turquoise, a color so common it could not be trademarked. The case had helped to ensure Viktor’s solvency as well as Tom’s track to partner. It did little for Beck, other than allowing her to stick it to “the man”—she had nothing against Tiffany’s in particular, just the fact that they were a corporate entity that profited off women’s desire to feel loved—and to receive a gift certificate from the firm to her choice of Stephen Starr’s restaurants.

  Beck follows Viktor into his living room, lined with shelves of old hardback books, where he offers her a flute of bubbly. Beck remembers the champagne last time she was at Viktor’s apartment and declines. Viktor helps himself to a glass and sits in the regal leather chair across from hers.

  “So, let’s see this mystery brooch,” he says, crossing his legs.

  Beck finds the orchid brooch at the bottom of her purse. When she gives it to Viktor, he stares at it for longer than she would have expected. He shifts his hand so the stone dances in the light. While his expression remains impassive, Beck detects a spark in his eyes as the brooch shimmers in his palm.

  On the coffee table, Viktor locates a loupe and lifts it to his right eye as he leans toward the orchid brooch. It’s a tiny noise, almost imperceptible, but Beck hears it: Viktor’s cough as he surveys the large yellow stone.

  “This was your grandmother’s?” Viktor finally asks, his eye still burrowed into the loupe.

  “Is it antique?”

  Viktor returns the loupe to the coffee table. He holds the orchid to his cashmere sweater. “It’s a fur clip. Custom job.”

  A fur clip? The only thing Beck can imagine less than her grandmother owning a valuable piece of jewelry is clipping it to a mink stole. Oh, Helen. This must really be amusing you now.

  Viktor flips the brooch over, pointing to a stamp along a ring of metal circling the girdle of the yellow stone. It reads 950. “Platinum. During the war, platinum wasn’t available to jewelers, so this is definitely postwar.” Beside 950, the letters SJ are engraved. “That’s what’s called a maker’s mark, like a jeweler’s logo. I don’t recognize this one, though. It’s not one of the big houses.” He flips the brooch back over and draws a circle in the air above the petals. “This type of pavé was popular in the ’50s. My guess is it was fabricated in ’54, ’55.” His finger traces the large yellow-green stone at the center, which Beck is starting to suspect is indeed a peridot, and smiles outright. “Here’s where things get interesting. Given the era, this should be a brilliant cut. Instead, it’s a double rose cut, which went out of fashion in the early 1900s. Unheard of in midcentury jewelry.” His face grows even more youthful as he tries not to giggle.

  “Is it a peridot?” Beck isn’t certain she pronounced the name of the stone correctly. Given Viktor’s expression, she assumes she’s butchered it.

  “Beck,” he says excitedly. “This is a diamond.”

  Beck knows nothing about diamonds. She’s always preferred turquoise to emeralds, silver to gold. Still, she knows that Ashley’s sizable diamond is three carats, a mere pebble compared to the rock in Viktor’s hand.

  “A diamond? But it’s so big.”

  “I know.” They stare at the large yellow diamond, glittering with lush color.

  Suddenly, Beck feels dizzy. Helen’s most valuable belonging, other than the house on Edgehill Road, is a decades-old television set. How could Helen have owned a diamond like this? Not owned...possessed.

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Viktor cautions.

  He rests the brooch on the glass coffee table and disappears into the kitchen. Beck hears a faucet flow, then Viktor returns with a cup of soapy water, a travel-size toothbrush, a pink cloth, and a small metal tool.

  “Do you mind?”

  Beck shakes her head, and Viktor deftly lifts each prong away from the yellow stone. He flips the brooch over and the stone tumbles from the finding onto the pink cloth in his left hand. The stone is domed on both sides and shaped like a shield, about the size of a robin’s egg. Viktor dips the toothbrush into the soapy water and begins scrubbing the faceted yellow stone. It grows noticeably less cloudy, if still a bit dull.

  Viktor taps the tweed couch beside his chair and Beck moves closer. She leans toward him as he holds the diamond up to the light. One side juts out asymmetrically. “See how it’s lopsided here?” He runs his finger along the uneven side to the table of the diamond. “And how the faceting doesn’t optimize the stone’s dispersion? That tells me it was cut for size, not fire. Those kinds of cuts—” he whistles “—were popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”

  “So you’re saying this is an old diamond?”

  “Not just old. Historic.” With this, he hands the cloth and stone to Beck, then hops up to scan his wall-to-wall bookshelves.

  Beck stares at the enormous yellow diamond, waiting for Helen’s face to appear in it, to roll her eyes and say, Please, you always knew I had my secrets. Beck knew that Helen had stories she’d never shared. Stories about what happened to her family in Vienna during the Holocaust, why she traveled to the US alone. These were an untold past, one that Beck assumed held too much pain for Helen to revisit. This stone, though, it bears secrets, ones Beck can’t begin to imagine.

  Viktor plops into the chair with two books and an electronic scale. One book is gray canvas. The other has a glossy dust jacket and is titled Historic Diamonds.

  Together, Beck and Viktor count the sides of the shield-shaped diamond—nine—and weigh it on the electronic scale—137.27.

  “Is that carats?” Beck asks, astounded. Viktor nods, reaching for the gray canvas book. He opens it to a chart of famous yellow diamonds. Beck and Viktor scan the carat weights of the diamonds until they reach the fifth largest on the chart—the Florentine Diamond. Its carat weight is noted at 137.27, the same as Viktor’s scale. It’s listed as nine-sided.

  “Oh, my... This is... Wow.” Viktor tries to piece together a sentence. It’s the most excited Beck has ever seen him. His foot taps erratically; his face erupts into a smile as he puts his arm around Beck and pulls her to him, laughing.

  “What’s the Florentine Diamond?” Beck asks.

  Viktor lets go of Beck and flips through the glossy book until he stops on a black-and-white photograph of a massive four-tiered hatpin that looks more like a chandelier pendant than a piece of jewelry. Each of the top three tiers is comprised of several round stones surrounding larger square and circular stones. At the bottom, the largest stone dangles from the pin, surrounded by tiny stones that look like lace. The gem hanging from the bottom is more or less the same shape as the yellow diamond resting on Viktor’s scale. Beneath the photograph, a caption reads Florentine Diamond as hatpin. Last known setting. Photograph c. 1870–1900. Beneath the photograph there is another image of the diamond. Its description says The Florentine was a 137.27-ct, nine-sided fancy yellow 126-facet double rose cut. This is a replica. The real diamond was lost to history.

  “What kind of hat could support a pin like that?” Beck asks.

  “A cro
wn. I don’t know how the royals didn’t snap their necks, with all the gemstones they wore on their heads.”

  Beck studies the photograph of the hatpin with its arcs of small round stones and larger square ones at the center. “Are those all diamonds?”

  Viktor nods. “Worth a pretty penny, too. There must be at least a hundred of them in that hatpin, each a few carats. It belonged to the Habsburgs until the fall of the empire. After that—” Viktor waves his hand as if disappearing the piece of jewelry into thin air.

  “The Habsburgs? Like Franz Ferdinand?” Beck searches the crevices of her brain for any other information on the Austro-Hungarian royal family. She took European history in college, then promptly never thought about the subject again.

  Viktor shakes his head. “Franz Ferdinand is the only Habsburg most folks have heard of because his assassination started WWI, but he was never emperor, so the Florentine didn’t belong to him. It belonged to his older brother, Emperor Franz Joseph, who put it in a necklace for his wife, Sisi, not that it made her love him.” Viktor flips the book around to read the paragraph beneath the photograph’s caption. “It seems that Sisi was the last person to wear it. She was assassinated by an Italian anarchist. After that, the Habsburgs thought the diamond was cursed, so no one wanted to wear it. They fashioned it into this hatpin and put it on display at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. When Franz Joseph died, his great-nephew Karl inherited the throne, briefly. Two years after his ascension, WWI ended, and the monarchy was overturned. Before Karl fled with his family, he had one of his advisers take the crown jewels from the treasury and the Florentine from the Kunsthistorisches Museum to send ahead to Switzerland. Only, when the royal family arrived abroad, the Florentine wasn’t with the other jewels. It hasn’t been seen since.”

  Beck points to the yellow diamond, suddenly afraid to touch it. “Until now? You think that’s the Florentine Diamond?”

  “It’s possible that this has been cut down from a larger stone, but it has the exact weight of the Florentine. Plus, as the chart shows, there are only four known yellow diamonds in the world that are larger than 137.27 carats—the Incomparable, the Oppenheimer, the De Beers, the Red Cross—and they’re all accounted for.”