Star of Africa (Ben Hope, Book 13) (18 page)

Thirty-seven paces long by twenty-two wide. Those were the exact dimensions of the vast antique Oriental rug that graced the centre of the mosaic floor in Eugene Svalgaard’s hotel room. The measurements would remain lodged in his head for a long time to come, after having spent the entire morning pacing up and down and round and round its edge like a mental health patient in the grip of an obsessive-compulsive neurosis. His diary had been wiped clean for the day; all meetings cancelled, the business conference that was his sole reason for being here in Rome in the first damn place now completely unimportant to him.

Eugene halted at the window and glared out at the view beyond his private sun deck, over Via Vittorio Veneto to the splendid panorama of the city and its hallowed and ancient monuments.

What a shit pit. He couldn’t wait to get out of the place.

‘Damn it all,’ Eugene muttered. ‘Damn and hell and blast and—’ He’d never been much for strong language, but now the occasion seemed to merit nothing less and he could feel the urge rising up from deep inside his restless being like a trapped bubble desperate to escape.

‘FUUUUCK!!’ He screamed it at the top of his voice, as if he wanted every living soul in Rome to hear it.

There. He felt a little better now, though only a little. His heartbeat still fluttering and his face flushed, he threw his squat frame down into an antique armchair for a few moments before he jumped restlessly up again and resumed pacing the living room.

Needless to say, this wasn’t any ordinary hotel room, because nothing Eugene Svalgaard possessed, or merely rented for a single night – whether of the bricks-and-mortar, automotive, airborne or fleshly variety – was ever remotely ordinary. When in Rome, his natural inclination was to take the palatial Villa La Cupola suite that occupied the whole two uppermost floors of the Westin Excelsior. It was the largest hotel suite in Italy and reputed to be the grandest in all of Europe, complete with its own private cinema and wine cellar, magnificently frescoed vaulted ceilings and enough priceless classical artwork to outfit a modestly sized gallery. Eugene had booked the suite complete with the five optional extra bedrooms. He had no intention of using them, but he’d taken them anyway, just because he could, without even blinking at the $20,000-dollar-a-night price tag.

But as much as Eugene Svalgaard appreciated and expected the best of everything, at this moment he could have been cooped up in the city’s most pitiful hovel, and barely have noticed the difference. The lavish lunch prepared for him by one of Rome’s top chefs in the suite’s own private kitchen had gone cold, and he didn’t care about that either, oblivious of the hunger pangs that emanated from somewhere deep inside his forty-eight-inch waistline. The fact was, very little in his life mattered to him right now; and that which did matter was in the process of going very horribly wrong.

How, how,
how
could this have happened to him? He’d had it all sewn up. Everything had been going his way. And now, catastrophe.

Eugene contemplated the downturn in his fortunes like a defeated general surveying the devastation of the battlefield. The worst of it all was not even knowing what was happening over there, three and a half thousand miles away where what should have been one of the milestone moments of his life had suddenly turned into a nightmare.

Out of all the vast fleet of cargo ships of the Svalgaard Line, everything hinged on just that one vessel, the
Andromeda
. The disaster had taken shape so bewilderingly fast, within a matter of hours. First the total loss of radio contact with the ship, which was most certainly not part of his carefully hatched plan. Then yesterday’s weird call from Pender on the sat phone, with Pender not sounding like himself at all and then hanging up abruptly without saying why he was calling.

Then, just to deepen Eugene’s anxiety still further, there had been the email at six that morning from Sondra Winkelman at the Svalgaard Line head offices in New York, reporting the ominous news that not only were the company still unable to make contact with
Andromeda
, far worse, according to their sources the tropical storm tearing up the Somali coast had developed into one of the biggest cyclones seen in those seas for a decade. A decade! Of all the cursed bad luck in the world, this had to land on him now.

Getting straight on the phone to Sondra before breakfast – 2 a.m. there, but the old harridan was getting well enough paid to work around the clock for him – Eugene had learned to his horror that a fresh communiqué from navy destroyer USS
Zumwalt
, which had been patrolling the east coast of Africa and forced to retreat to port by the violence of the storm, reported sightings of large amounts of shipping wreckage floating across a wide area of the Indian Ocean in the wake of the cyclone. So far, there seemed to be no clear evidence that the
Andromeda
was among the victims, but fears in New York were rising. They’d lost vessels at sea before. It was every shipping company’s worst nightmare – though Sondra Winkelman could have no idea what the loss of the
Andromeda
would mean for her boss.

‘If O’Keefe doesn’t resume radio contact in another few hours, we’ll have no choice but to mount a search and rescue operation,’ Sondra had insisted over the phone.

‘Fine, fine. Keep me posted,’ Eugene had replied, gut-punched and becoming numb all over. But there had been no more from her since.

Of course, Eugene didn’t give a damn about the
Andromeda
herself, or her crew, or her worthless captain. O’Keefe was nothing but a washed-up drunkard whom Eugene would have fired already if he hadn’t been useful to his plan. The ship and cargo were fully insured against losses. Let them wind up on the bottom of the ocean, for all Eugene was concerned.

No, the one thing he cared about – the
only
thing he cared about, with an ardour that set his soul afire – was what his hired accomplice Lee Pender was carrying inside that case cuffed to his wrist.

It was the thing Eugene had lusted after all these years. The thing he’d been so close to finally acquiring and holding in his hand.

Eugene Svalgaard had been rich all his life. He’d been born into huge wealth and would die considerably wealthier. Nothing would ever change that. It was just the way things were. As he knew very well, enjoying such vast fortunes was something you actually had to work at, so as not to let the experience go stale. Most of the millionaires and billionaires Eugene golfed with had little trouble fuelling their passions with whatever turned them on by way of ever-fancier jets and superyachts, fast cars, faster women, Bahamian mansions and Scottish castles, all the routine trappings. But that was simply because most of Eugene’s super-rich acquaintances were, in his opinion, a bunch of brain-stunted unimaginative Viagra-popping shit-assed numbskulls whose empty pursuits held no appeal for a man of his calibre. From an early age, Eugene had yearned for more. The material objects he lusted after were things of pure beauty: immaculate, eternal, transcendent.

What Eugene loved, more than anything in all the world, more than money, more than power, was diamonds.

Diamond
. Even the very word itself seemed to glitter. Cut, uncut, white, pink, red, yellow, he didn’t discriminate. He adored them all in equal measure, and over the last thirty or so years had spent gigantic fortunes putting together one of the world’s most magnificent collections, one that he revered and guarded jealously from anyone’s eyes but his own. The Nizam Diamond, a three-hundred-and-forty-carat colourless topaz that sparkled like all the stars in the sky put together, was one of his favourite pieces. Then there was the Akbar Shah, once part of the jewelled Peacock Throne of northern India’s Mughal emperors, now in the hands of an unknown collector: guess who? The Archduke Joseph, a flawless Golconda beauty snapped up anonymously at Christie’s in 2012 for an eye-watering twenty-one and a half million bucks – that one was his, too. And there were more, a whole sackload more.

He never displayed them publicly, and God forbid that he should ever resort to gifting any of them to some grasping female in an attempt to gain her transient affections. People just didn’t see what he saw in them. While to most folks, diamonds were simply an expression of great wealth, for Eugene their monetary value only mattered insofar as the dollar price required for him to possess them. In no way did he regard them as mere investments, to be cashed in for a profit at some point in the future. Quite the contrary: he intended to hold tightly onto his babies forever, and his will specified that each and every one was to be interred along with him when he eventually shuffled off to a better place. They had come from the earth, and he would accompany them on their journey back.

But as much as Eugene’s magnificent collection nourished his soul, the object of his most ardent yearning was one diamond he’d never in all these years managed to possess. For as long as he could remember, it had haunted him. An image of unattainable perfection that brought tears to his eyes and a lump to his throat every time he let his imagination wander. The Holy Grail of precious stones. A legend. Or, as some believed, a myth. But Eugene Svalgaard had long refused to accept the naysayers’ claims that it didn’t exist. He’d always known it was out there, somewhere, waiting for him.

The lost Great Star of Africa. Possibly the most fantastical diamond in existence. Certainly one of the most elusive, especially to a man who had searched for it for most of his adult life.

The story of the diamond was a long and twisty tale that began in February 1905 at the famous Premier diamond mine in what was then the British-ruled Transvaal Colony of South Africa, with the discovery of an enormous rough stone that would become legendary as the Cullinan Diamond – named after Sir Thomas Cullinan, the mine’s owner. When first unearthed, the diamond was so huge that the stunned mine’s superintendent didn’t at first believe it was real. Weighing in at over three thousand carats, or more than a pound, the sheer size of the monster had a similar effect on the famous Dutch jeweller who would eventually cut it, Joseph Asscher, said to have fainted from the stress of having to cleave such a valuable stone.

The Transvaal Colony government had purchased the Cullinan for the then-huge sum of one hundred and fifty thousand pounds, and presented it as a gift to King Edward VII. Amid rumours of an impending robbery attempt, the British government had a decoy fake replica of the diamond transported under heavy armed guard on a ship to England while, in a flash of insane genius that could have gone very horribly wrong, the real one was sent by ordinary parcel post. King Edward then commissioned the Royal Asscher Diamond Company of Amsterdam to cleave the stone into smaller pieces. Ultimately there were nine of these, the choicest of which found their way into the British Crown Jewels. The largest was set into the head of the sceptre originally crafted for the coronation of Charles II in 1661. The second largest became the centrepiece of the Imperial State Crown. A third was crafted into a brooch often worn by Queen Elizabeth II throughout her long reign. The smallest of the Cullinan fragments adorned a ring designed for Queen Mary in 1911. It was soon after the cutting that the polished pieces of the original diamond became known as the ‘Stars of Africa’: the Great Star, the Second Star, and the various Lesser Stars. More than a century after its original discovery, all of the pieces of the original ‘Star of Africa’ were still accounted for.

Except one. One that remained the most exciting and tantalising mystery in the history of the diamond world.

When first discovered in its rough state, it had been noted that one whole side of the diamond was so flat and smooth that it was thought to be only part of a much bigger crystal, separated under the ground by the massive pressures inside the earth. That smooth, flat surface was called a cleavage plane, which theoretically should mate perfectly to that of its enormous half-brother like matching pieces of a puzzle.

Soon the hunt was on, and hopeful prospectors were falling over themselves in the mad rush to unearth the Star of Africa’s missing half. For many years, wild yarns had abounded about its possible whereabouts. Nothing was found, until 1934. Eugene possessed a copy of the
Chicago Tribune
dated January 18th of that year, in which an article had appeared headlined: FIND LOST HALF OF CULLINAN DIAMOND.

‘
Reports from Pretoria, South Africa, yesterday told of the finding of a massive gem which may be the lost half of the Cullinan diamond
,’
the article proclaimed, going on to describe the lucky discoverer as a ‘poor digger’. That poor digger had been a black worker named Makani, employed by Johannes Jacobus Jonker, a veteran diamond prospector who had established a claim at a site called Elandsfontein, less than five kilometres from the Premier Mine. On making his amazing discovery on January 17th 1934, Makani had thrown his hat in the air, run to show his boss, and the incredible diamond had been promptly locked in a hut guarded against thieves by men with revolvers until they could decide what to do with it.

This diamond, soon to be named the Jonker, did at first sight appear to be the missing half of the Great Star of Africa; but when carefully examined by experts it was found that its cleavage plane didn’t match perfectly enough with casts of the original Cullinan. Moreover, the Jonker diamond had been unearthed such a distance from the Premier Mine that it seemed unlikely they could have ever been related: thus, speculation that they had once been one huge diamond was laid to rest. The Jonker was ultimately divided into thirteen smaller diamonds. Past and present owners of these pieces included the Maharajah of Indore, John D Rockefeller Jr., and one Eugene Svalgaard.

All of which of course meant that, if the missing Star of Africa indeed existed, it was still out there. Did it remain buried deep underground? Had it been found and its discovery kept secret? For years after the Jonker episode, those questions still burned brightly in the minds of many. But as with all things, in time the excitement faded. The advent of World War Two pushed all thought of diamonds aside and the legend soon lost its lustre.