Leah Pilarsky stepped onto the porch bearing a plate of rugelach. “I thought you might be hungry. Did you talk to David?”
“Yes, thanks. Though I’m not sure how much good it did.” I stood. “Leah, thank you. We’d better go now. If I can do anything, will you promise to call me?”
“And you’ll tell us if we can help in your work? I know Joel would want that.”
I promised I would, thinking that what Joel would really want would be for me to find the bastard who killed him. Silently, I promised I’d do that, too.
24
As we drove back to the highway, I pulled Bill’s papers from the envelope.
“You want to read those again?” he asked. “You’re not depressed enough?”
“Well, for one thing, you paraphrased some, so I haven’t actually read them. But also, I keep having this feeling there’s something we missed.”
“What kind of thing?”
“I don’t know.” I started to go over his translations of Rosalie’s letters again. He was right, they were depressing, but he was also right, I was already depressed. I scanned the ones I’d already read, and was about to slip the last of those back in the envelope and start the first of the ones I hadn’t, when I reached its final paragraph.
“Bill!” I yelped. “This is it! What we missed! It’s the jeweler!”
“What jeweler?”
“Mr. Friedman’s book said the name of the jeweler who made the Shanghai Moon was lost. But here it is! Corens, Herr Corens.” I whipped out my cell phone.
“What do you—”
I waved to shush him as I heard, “Friedman and Sons, you’ve reached Stanley Friedman.”
“Lydia Chin, Mr. Friedman. Do you know a jeweler named Corens? A refugee also, German, I think. He was in Shanghai the same time as Rosalie Gilder.”
“No, I don’t think so. Why?”
“Is there an association, a jewelers’ organization—”
He chuckled. “There are dozens. But the grapevine, it’s better. Shall I check for you?”
“Would you? It’s important.” I thanked him, pocketed the phone, and, in answer to Bill’s skeptical glance, said, “I know, I know, it’s a long shot.”
“Even if he finds him. What could he tell us? And if he’s still alive, he’d be close to a hundred.”
“Right on all counts. But it’s a door.”
And it was a door that wasn’t locked, because as I was finishing the last of Rosalie’s letters, Mr. Friedman called back.
“Yaakov Corens, from Berlin, was in Shanghai from 1933 to 1945,” Mr. Friedman told me. “He emigrated to Australia, one of the first to leave after the war. He died in 1982.”
“Oh.” That deflated me. “Well, maybe that’s not a useful lead after all. But thank you. How did you find that out so fast? That’s some grapevine you jewelers have.”
“Don’t be impressed. Two phone calls, that’s all I made. One to a friend, he retired as secretary of the International Guild of Jewelry Artists a few years ago. He knows everybody. He knew Yaakov Corens.”
“And the other?”
“To Beatrice Gardner.”
“Who’s that?”
“Yaakov Corens’s granddaughter. She inherited her grandfather’s shop, which was her mother’s before her. She’s a jeweler herself.”
“Oh, Mr. Friedman! Thank you so much! Can you give me her number? But you didn’t have to call all the way to Australia. Let me pay for that call.”
“For you, Ms. Chin, if I had to call Australia, I would call Australia. But for this, it was unnecessary. Yaakov Corens left Sydney and came to New York in 1963. Beatrice Gardner has a shop across the street.”
So there we were, back on Forty-seventh Street.
Nothing much had changed since the day before yesterday. Couples stopped to peer in windows; messengers locked bikes to lampposts. A chain-draped rapper with rings on every finger came out of a store grinning, glinting gold teeth. Hasidim in flat hats went by deep in discussion, pockets full of fortunes in stones they’d exchanged on a handshake. Or so I’ve been told. That all these men really carried riches on their persons struck me as doubtful. But the part I liked wasn’t the value of the stones, anyway. It was the handshakes.
We found Sydney Gems and Gold in a street-level shop near the end of the block. A young woman smiled and asked if she could help us. From the back counter an older woman said, “It’s all right, Shana. I think I’m expecting these people.” Like the younger woman’s, her crisp white blouse had a buttoned neck and long sleeves.
“Beatrice Gardner?”
“That’s correct. Ms. Chin?”
“Lydia. And this is Bill Smith. Thanks for seeing us.”