The Fourth Protocol

Rawlings was wearing a neat dark suit, silk shirt, and muted tie, and carried a dully gleaming attaché case. The girl behind the counter looked up and took him in with a glance of appreciation. At thirty-six he looked lean and fit, with an aura that was part gentleman, part tough—always a useful combination. She pushed out her chest and flashed a bright smile.

“Can I help you?”

“I’d like to see Mr. Zablonsky. Personal.”

His Cockney accent indicated he was unlikely to be a customer. Her face fell. “You a rep?” she asked.

“Just say Mr. James would like to speak to him,” said Rawlings.

But at that moment the mirrored door at the rear of the shop opened and Louis Zablonsky came out. He was a short, wizened man of fifty-six, but looked older.

“Mr. James”—he beamed—“how nice to you. Please come into my office. How have you been keeping?” He ushered Rawlings past the counter and into his inner sanctum, saying, “That’s all right, Sandra, my dear.”

Inside his small and cluttered office he closed and locked the mirrored door, through which a view of the outer shop could be had. He gestured Rawlings to the chair in front of his antique desk and took the swivel chair behind it. A single spotlight beamed down on the blotter. He eyed Rawlings keenly. “Well, now, Jim, what have you been up to?”

“Got something for you, Louis, something you’ll like. So don’t tell me it’s rubbish.”

Rawlings flicked open his attaché case. Zablonsky spread his hands.

“Jim, would I—” His words were cut off as he saw what Rawlings was placing on the blotter. When they were all there, he stared at them in disbelief.

“The Glen Suite,” he breathed, “you’ve gone and nicked the Glen Diamonds. It’s not even been in the papers yet.”

“So maybe they’re still away from London,” said Rawlings. “There was no alarm raised. I’m good, you know that.”

“The best, Jim, the best. But the Glen Suite ... Why didn’t you tell me?”

Rawlings knew it would have been easier for all if a route for disposing of the Glen Suite had been set up before the robbery. But he worked in his own way, which was extremely carefully. He trusted no one, least of all a fence, even a blue-chip, top-of-the-market fence like Louis Zablonsky. A fence, hit by a police raid and facing a long stretch of porridge, would be quite able to trade information on a coming heist against a let-off for himself. The Serious Crime Squad down at Scotland Yard knew about Zablonsky, even if he had never seen the inside of one of Her Majesty’s prisons. That was why Rawlings never preannounced one of his jobs, and always arrived unheralded. So he did not answer.

In any case, Zablonsky was lost in contemplation of the jewels that sparkled on his blotter. He knew their provenance without being told. The ninth Duke of Sheffield, who had inherited the suite in 1936, had had two offspring, a boy and a girl. By 1974, when his son was twenty-five, the saddened Duke had been forced to realize that the exotic young man was what gossip columnists are pleased to call “one of nature’s bachelors.”

There would be no more pretty young countesses of Margate or duchesses of Sheffield to wear the famed Glen Diamonds. So when the ninth Duke died in his turn, in 1980, be bequeathed them not to his son, the heir to the title, but to his daughter, Lady Fiona Glen.

Zablonsky knew that after her father’s death Lady Fiona had taken to wearing the diamonds occasionally, with the insurers’ grudging permission, usually for charity galas, at which she was a not infrequent presence. The rest of the time they lay where they had spent so many years, in darkness in the vaults of Coutts on Park Lane. He smiled. “The charity gala at Grosvenor House just before the New Year?” he asked. Rawlings shrugged. “Oh, you’re a naughty boy, Jim. But such a talented one.”

Although he was fluent in Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew, Louis Zablonsky after forty years in Britain had never quite mastered English, which he spoke with a discernible Polish accent. Also, because he had learned them from books written years earlier, Zablonsky mistakenly used phrases that nowadays could be regarded as “camp.” But Rawlings knew there was nothing gay about Louis Zablonsky. In fact, Rawlings knew, because Beryl Zablonsky had told him, that the old man had been neutered in a Nazi Concentration camp as a boy.

Zablonsky was still admiring the diamonds, as a true connoisseur will admire any masterpiece. He recalled vaguely having read somewhere that in the mid-1960s Lady Fiona Glen had married a rising young civil servant who by the mid-1980s had become a senior mandarin in one of the ministries, and that the couple lived somewhere in the West End at a most elegant and luxurious standard maintained largely by the wife’s private fortune.

“So what do you think, Louis?”

“I’m impressed, my dear Jim. Very impressed. But also perplexed. These are not ordinary stones. These are identifiable anywhere in the diamond world. What am I to do with them?”

“You tell me,” said Rawlings.