The Jerusalem Diamond by Noah Gordon Read Free Book Online

living room.
    â€œWhat is it you want?” the voice from the bedroom asked.
    He was acutely aware that she had rushed to him. She had been his wife in his trouble. “I don’t know. Everything.”
    In a little while he stood alone on East Eighty-sixth Street, holding the cardboard cartons by the twine, hailing a taxi. In Westchester before dawn, he sat in the workroom and undid the boxes. His father had been a saver. There were lots of receipted bills, a number of letters. Some, written in German, were from Essie. He read enough to understand that she and his father had had an affair for years before they were married. Unlike her spoken English, her written German was pure and passionate. He sat as the sky pearled outside and for the first time saw the fat old woman as a person.
    There were ledgers. His father had kept careful books, now so old not even Internal Revenue would be interested. Three notebooks he half expected to be more financial records instead contained diagrams. Crystal planes and angles were carefully marked to indicate light dispersions and refractions, and detailed descriptions were written in Alfred Hopeman’s spidery script. As he turned the pages Harry realized that his father had made exacting drawings and notes about every important gem that had passed through his hands. What he was holding was a legend in the diamond industry: Alfred Hopeman’s fabulous memory.
    He was partway through the second book before he found his father’s analysis of the Inquisition Diamond. It was detailed and exacting, but it puzzled him. It made no mention of the flaw in the stone that his father had tried to describe on his death bed.
    It was still too early; he took a shower and had something to eat. Then he telephoned Herzl Akiva.
    â€œShall I send the notebook to you?”
    â€œPlease keep it, Mr. Hopeman. As I told you, we wanted the information for your use.”
    â€œI haven’t changed my mind.”
    â€œWould you like to study the new Copper Scroll?”
    Harry hesitated and was lost. “Not enough to go to Israel for you.”
    â€œYou are willing, I suppose, to go to Cincinnati?”
    â€œOf course.”
    â€œGo to the office of your friend, Dr. Bronstein. He will be expecting you,” Akiva said.

5
    THE COPPER SCROLL

    Harry corresponded regularly with Max Bronstein but he hadn’t seen him in years. They shared the memories of two Brownsville yeshiva youths who once upon a time had spent long evenings talking over coffee cups and reinforcing their rebelliousness until each was able to break with the life that had been planned for him.
    It had been a strange time for Harry, who had felt like a swimmer struggling against crosscurrents. His father had torn up his very roots in his escape from Germany, but in America Alfred Hopeman knew what he was: Hitler had turned a Berlin boulevardier into a Jew who clutched at ethnicity and wanted his child to remember the Holocaust. So Harry went to a Hebrew day school instead of one of the New York day schools or the New England boarding schools most of his friends attended. A real tug-of-war for his soul took place in his senior year at the Sons of the Covenant Orthodox High School. The principal, a brisk man named Reb Label Fein, had told Alfred Hopeman that his son was a conqueror of examinations without peer. “A young
gaon
, a genius in
Gemara
. The future of such a youth is no light responsibility.”
    Alfred had pondered, finally turning for advice to his best friend, Saul Netscher.
    â€œSend him to my brother, Itzikel.”
    When told, Harry had been sufficiently flattered to agree, for who at the Sons of the Covenant Orthodox High School didn’t know of the awesome Rebbe Yitzhak Netscher, a spiritual leader of Chassids and director of Yeshiva Torat Moshe, one of the most prestigious religious academies in the new world?
    So while others went to Amherst or Harvard or N.Y.U., he became a