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1


Win Liberte, Beverly Hills, 1997

The phone next to the bed rang and Jonny stirred beside me, her bare leg cocked over my thigh, her knee warm pressed against my groin. I had the Heart of the World in my hand and I wasn't in any hurry to answer the phone. I knew who was calling. It was the front desk informing me I had a visitor.
I held the walnut-size diamond between my thumb and fingers, letting it catch the morning light from the window. Pieces of stars, that's what diamonds were, the hardest substance on earth with fire a billion years old trapped inside. And no diamond on earth had more fire than the one I was holding--a forty-one-carat blood diamond. Not the "blood" of conflict diamonds that fueled African civil wars, but a rare fire-red diamond. It was a gem with a history. Murder, lust, greed--the worst of the deadly sins--were part of its pedigree.
There was no other diamond like it in the world.
Vanity and greed, that's what they say the diamond industry is based upon. And that the human race could be relied upon for an endless supply of both. The stone I held in my hand was able to fuel explosive levels of both vices.
My visitor wanted the diamond. She was part of the history. Not the part where kings who possessed it lost their thrones, but war, murder, lust were contributions she made to the diamond's bloody history.
The phone rang again and Jonny pushed her knee harder against my groin, sending a shot of desire through me.
"Answer it," she said.
"It's your mother."
"Fuck her."
I have.
"Send her up," I told the caller.
Jonny rolled over onto her other side. Her name in Portugal was Juana, but at the Sacred Heart Academy in Beverly Hills, she was known as Jonny. At eighteen, her body was taut, skintight, golden brown, kissed by the Lisbon sun. Her breasts were small and firm, honey melons with rosy nipples that always looked like they were excited. Young, beautiful, wild. She reminded me of a young lionesses cub I saw once in Africa, big enough to rip with teeth and claws but who needed a warm stomach to snuggle up to at night.
I started to get up and Jonny grabbed my cock and pulled me back down.
"Fuck me before she comes up. I want her to smell my cunt on you."
I pushed her away. "Jonny, you're too much for me, I need a grown woman who isn't going to wear the point off my pecker."
I felt sorry for kids her age, kids who are light years away from their parents and anyone else over thirty. Older people have nostalgia for the good old days, but there are no good old days for people nurtured in a culture of sex and drugs. What do they talk about when they meet up with old friends? The times they were getting high together? Getting laid? The first rave party they attended? Raised in an era when Baywatch plastic sexiness was confused with sensuality, Jonny's generation was one in which a good-night kiss often started with the guy unzipping his pants, a generation that didn't believe in Santa Claus and whose dreams were all digital.
She came to me last night, in pain from being young. I put her to bed on the couch. In the middle of the night, she snuck in my room and crawled into bed with me, needing a warm stomach to snuggle against. Sometime during the night she slipped under the covers and down between my legs, cuddling my penis, slipping it into her mouth while it was still asleep, letting it wake up and get excited as she sucked on it.
I slipped on a robe and went into the suite's living room. I pulled the door to the hallway corridor open a few inches. I had already opened the drapes and was calling room service for coffee when Simone pushed the door open.
She stood at the doorway for a moment while we looked at each other. She hadn't changed in the three years since I'd last seen her. Neither had I. She still made my blood pound.
Unlike Jonny's thin, hard body, Simone's body was fleshy, padded succulently so a man could get something in his teeth. She aroused me infinitely more than her daughter. Simone's body was a fine wine, to be savored and enjoyed for hours. She stirred prurient thoughts in me that Jonny never could. When Jonny's tight body clamped onto my cock with her cunt, it was like being squeezed by a vise. She was exciting, but making love to her mother was provocative and memorable--if you survived the foreplay.
While Juana was an overgrown kitten, her mother was definitely a full-grown lioness, able to hunt and kill on her own. She was a few years older than me, in her late thirties, a time in a woman's life when she's the sexiest and the most desirable, when she's replaced the thin brightness of youth with plush sensuality.
Her Latin blood was hot enough to fuel cars at the Indy 500. She was dangerous, but not in a crazy way. Her crimes were always cool and premeditated. When she wanted something, she took it. And you had to count your fingers afterward if you were holding it when she grabbed because she would take them, too.
"You look good," she said, stepping in, closing the door behind her. "Rich, successful, not at all the boy I once seduced."
"Life has been good. I've got money, health, envy--everything but a good woman. Good ones who will tolerate me are rare."
"You're probably looking in the wrong places. The gossip magazines call you a Hollywood playboy."
I laughed. "I think you have to be a movie star or at least buy a studio before that label sticks."
"You forgot to say good-bye," she said, moving by me, toward the open doors to the balcony.
"I was too busy running from the Portuguese Mafia."
She stepped out onto the balcony. My Bel Air hotel suite looked out onto a tropical garden lush with shaded dark green ferns and sun-loving purple bougainvillea, the kind of stuff that grew well in the Southern California desert climate. The sunlight glowed through her white dress, outlining her body.
"White's a deceptive color for you to wear," I said.
"I could take the dress off if you prefer."
She knew me. That's the trouble with being a man--women know we think more with our testosterone than brain juices.
"Last time we tried that you took off everything but a gun."
She came closer, near enough for me to feel her body heat, to smell the sex in her perfume. Women didn't wear perfume to make them smell sweet, but to stimulate a man's sex drive. Wasn't some guy named Odysseus held captive by a sweet-smelling woman? He wasn't the first or last guy to get bowled over by the scent of a woman.
I knew this woman was trouble--she'd tried to kill me once--but I guess it was like the fascination some people got playing with deadly snakes--the danger just made it more exciting.
"I've missed you, Win," she said.
"You know where I've been. You stayed in Lisbon."
"You don't understand loyalty," she said. "You were an only child, then an orphan; you've never had anyone to be loyal to. João took me off the streets, away from selling my body for food and drugs when I was younger than Jonny."
"He's old enough to be your grandfather. And you've fucked everyone around him, from his lawyer to his chauffeur and friends."
"I have a woman's needs, but I've always been there for him. When he dies, I'll cry at his grave. He knows that."
"That makes you a regular Mother Theresa. Congratulations--now what do you want?"
"Do you have it? I'd like to see it, see what all the fuss is about."
I hesitated. I was expecting this, thinking about it since I got the call. I wasn't afraid she would grab it and run. Simone wasn't stupid or amateurish--she'd be more likely to pull a gun out of her bra and shoot me between the eyes. Something else bothered me--the simple truth was that I had a hard time sharing the stone because of plain, old-fashioned greed. Maybe the gem carried a greed virus and infected everyone who touched it. Whatever it was, the fire diamond affected everyone that way. Like a sorcerer's stone, its mysterious magic cast spells.
Ask the people who had killed for it--or died because of it.
I took the Heart of the World out of my robe pocket and gave it to her.
She held it up to the light. "My God, it's a piece of fire."
"Fire of the gods, hurled down from a star. It's almost as old as the earth itself. It took a billion years to make and a billion more to find."
"I've never seen a ruby-red diamond before," she said.
"They're rare. They have one sitting near the Hope Diamond at the Smithsonian, but it's smaller and not as brilliant as the Heart. There's no other diamond like it."
"I heard that computer billionaire who bought a Hawaiian island has offered you a fortune for it. Are you going to sell it?"
She was cloaked in innocence, as if we both didn't know she'd come to Los Angeles for the stone. If she was in town, João was here, too. And he would never give up until he had the fire diamond--or one of us was dead.
"I don't know."
But I did know. I couldn't sell it, any more than I could chop off an arm or leg and put it on the market. It wasn't like money to me, money was meant to be spent; it was something I've done without and can do without again. Diamonds are like sex: you never forget and never stop regretting good sex if you give it up. And this one was like owning the Mona Lisa. There was nothing comparable.
"João thought of you as a son, you've hurt him very much."
"I'm sorry, it must have been the bullets flying by from his thugs that caused me to be ungrateful."
"You don't understand, you never did. João was trying to protect you. He still wants to do something for you."
"He can. He can die soon. That would help us both, wouldn't it?"
I took the diamond from her and she came closer. She pulled open my robe and wrapped her cold fingers around my cock. My blood pounded. Her lips brushed mine. My blood ignited and I felt the lead rising in my pencil. I wanted to push her away, but I was weak.
"I missed you," she whispered.
"Hello, Mother."
Jonny stood in the bedroom doorway, naked.
Simone's eyes came back to me.
I shrugged. "She dropped by on her way home from school for cookies and milk."
* * *
Simone and Jonny left, bickering, bitching at each other about times and places and things that meant nothing to me. And without the diamond. But the game had just begun--again. Simone would be back. She knew how to please a man, stroking his cock like it was her best friend. Until she got what she wanted. Then she'd bite it off.
The coffee came. I stood on the balcony and drank the steaming hot liquid, thinking about the past. New York. Lisbon. Africa.
There was something alien to me now about those times and places, like "past lives" the Buddhists talked about, and there was a surreal quality to my memories.
Christ, if that past-life stuff was true, I must have been an ax murderer in a prior life to deserve what I've been handed in this one.
A woman wearing a tennis outfit came by and gave me the look. But I wasn't in a mood for women in white today.
LIFE'S A BITCH AND THEN YOU DIE, some bumper-strip wit once said. I never thought of life as a struggle, not even when the chips were down and my luck was running south. But I had learned something about myself, something that would sound strange to the people who'd been around me. I had been running scared most of my life. That's why I always went for the gold with everything I'd ever done, why it had always been all or nothing with me--Win wasn't just my name, it was how I lived.
I'd spent my whole life living like there was no tomorrow.
Maybe there wasn't.

Copyright © 2003 by Jann Robbins