Page 16 of The Expat Affair

I’m winding my way through the packed tables at Firelli’s, still a popular lunch spot despite the bullet that not all that long ago sailed through the front window and into a mobster’s head, when Fleur’s peal of delighted laughter rips the air.

“Good Lord, . Did you bike here? You’re more Dutch than I am.”

“What gave it away?”

I flap my drenched hands, sending icy drops of water flying. “My hair? My sweater?”

Bad weather doesn’t exist, people here are so fond of saying, only bad clothing. Within seconds, mine was soaked to the skin.

Meanwhile, Fleur is a vision in a silky white blouse. Flawless hair and makeup, a cluster of diamonds glittering at the base of her throat. I see my reflection in the mirror above her head, swiping away a dirty trail of mascara with a knuckle.

“Sit down, sit down.”

She motions for me to scoot into the round velvet booth, her voice peppy and bright. “I ordered us some wine. I hope Sancerre’s okay.”

Wine on a workday, I’m intrigued. I toss my bag on the booth and slide in after it. “Sancerre sounds perfect. I love a boozy lunch.”

Normally, Fleur would turn up her nose at the thought of skipping out on a Thursday to socialize with anyone, much less her barely tolerable sister-in-law. She and I see each other all the time, but it’s always at family or work events, and we never go much deeper than a polite how are the kids? She doesn’t suggest we meet up for happy hours or call me to gossip about the latest couples drama at the golf club. When she called with the invitation to join her for lunch, I couldn’t help but ask, “What’s the occasion?”

“Because you and I never get any one-on-one time,”

she said, her voice playful in a way I rarely hear. “There are always so many other people around.”

Fleur wanted something from me; that much was clear. This is a woman who doesn’t make a move without an agenda, and the fact she wanted to sneak away from the office smack in the middle of a workday said that whatever that agenda was, it was an important one.

“Please?”

she said, turning up the heat. “I really need to talk to you about something, and I can’t do it over the phone. And please don’t mention this to Thomas, by the way. It would turn into a whole big thing.”

My sneaky sister-in-law knew what she was doing by dangling that little carrot. My curiosity wouldn’t let me say no.

She plucks the bottle from the cooler and pours two generous glasses. “Thanks for giving me an excuse to get out of the office. Ever since the mess with Xander, Papa has been in the office every single day, and between you and me, he’s not the easiest person to work for. Or to even be around lately.”

She leans in close like she’s sharing a secret. “Papa can be so difficult.”

I lift a brow. Fleur has spent every family get-together I’ve ever been a part of sucking up to her father, so to hear her speak this way about him now is more than a little surprising. “Imagine what it’s like for people who aren’t named Prins.”

She laughs. “Oh, believe me, I know. When Papa was still CEO, we were losing employees at the rate of one a week. One a week, ! At every level of staff including the polishers, who are so hard to find, and even the best ones need training before we let them loose on the Prins cut. Now people are starting to remember they didn’t have it so bad with the older Prins in charge. But enough about work . . .”

She picks up a glass, taps it against mine. “Cheers.”

I sip the Sancerre, cold and fruity and delicious, thinking about not just what she said, but how she said it, a backhanded way of telling me the staff doesn’t love working for Thomas. Is this why she called me here, to complain about her brother’s management style?

“So what do you usually eat here?”

I say, nonchalant, trading my glass for the menu. The tangy wine, the smell of garlic and pasta, Fleur’s agenda of subterfuge. Suddenly, I’m starving.

“Oh, a salad or something, I don’t know.”

Fleur plunks her glass onto the table with a soft sigh, her fingers twisting the stem. “Look, I know it’s no secret that I don’t agree with Papa appointing Thomas CEO instead of me, but he’s still my brother. My baby brother, which means I’ve always felt this . . . I don’t know, responsibility, I guess, to look after him.”

I bristle a little at the baby brother, mostly because it’s always been the basis of Fleur’s arguments: as the older sibling, it’s only fair this company be handed to her. But this is her pony show, not mine, so I let it slide.

“Understandable,”

I say instead, like I grew up with a younger sibling or for that matter any siblings at all, like before Sem, I had any idea what it was to have someone who needed me. I’ve been on my own since I was sixteen, when my mother’s indifference and her endless string of skeevy, creepy boyfriends became too much to bear. I emptied out the shoebox where she stashed her cash and hopped a Greyhound bus to Atlanta. When she finally called three whole weeks later, it was to yell at me for stealing her money.

“Tell me what’s going on with him.”

“With who?”

“Thomas, of course. He’s just been acting so . . . strange.”

I look up from the menu, curious now. Strange, as in buying thirty-euro necklaces and leaving them on random bikes? That kind of strange?

“Strange how?” I say.

“Moody. Short-tempered and just . . . off. I’m not the only one who’s noticed this change in him. Roland has seen it. So has Mama. We’re all very worried.”

I put the menu down. Well, that explains the lunch invitation, at least, along with her request I not say anything to Thomas. Thomas has been acting weird. People are worried about him. They sent her here to ask me if he’s okay.

A waiter steps up to the table, but Fleur shoos him away. “He didn’t tell you about all the fights with Xander, did he?”

Fight could mean a lot of things. An argument. A silly little skirmish. A knock-down, drag-out brawl. It’s a word that can have a million connotations, but I don’t have to ask which one Fleur is referring to, because her right hand curls into a fist.

I try to picture it: reserved, respectable Thomas, trading blows with anyone, much less Xander. The image is so ridiculous that I actually laugh. “Oh, come on. They actually hit each other?”

Fleur nods, her eyes wide and earnest. “Yes. More than once. I’m telling you, those two fought about everything. Xander’s designs for a new collection of earrings. A price hike at the lab in China. Thomas’s constant hovering—that’s what Xander called it, hovering and that he needed to back off. One of the polishers had to actually pull them apart.”

“That . . . doesn’t sound like Thomas at all.”

“Yes it does, . Ever since the Cullinans, my brother has been carrying a lot of pent-up rage, and it doesn’t help that Xander was obsessed with them. He was planning on launching a lab-grown Cullinan collection, did you know that? You should have seen Thomas’s face when he found out Xander was growing matches to the Cullinan stones. He planned to use them as the centerpiece in rings, necklaces, bracelets. Like that bracelet Thomas made for you, but with a Cullinan grown in a lab.”

God’s gemstones, that’s what Thomas called them. He could talk for days about how the Cullinans were formed, how millions of years of heat and pressure deep in the earth rearranged atoms into colorful crystal systems for his great-great-grandfather to brush off and polish. He would have never agreed to a lab-grown Cullinan collection.

“Thomas didn’t mention any of this to me,”

I say now to Fleur, and it’s not a lie. It’s Xander who danced around this topic.

I want to lab-grow the shit out of that Cullinan.

Fleur gives me a wide-eyed nod. “Thomas called Xander a thief and a traitor in front of everybody. He fired him on the spot, then had the guards pat him down and escort him off the premises like some kind of criminal.”

Which I happen to know that he was. Whatever stones the killer took from Xander’s apartment, they weren’t exactly on the books, but the Cullinans . . . Could Thomas be right? Could Xander have really pulled off the heist of the century?

“Thomas is just so volatile,”

she says on a sigh. “He has the whole staff walking on eggshells. They’re afraid of saying something that will make him lose his temper.”

Volatile? Steady, serious Thomas?

“He hasn’t been getting much sleep since the Cullinans vanished, but even then. That doesn’t sound like Thomas at all.”

Fleur releases another sigh, a long puff of air that smells like wine and designer perfume. “So you see the change in him, too. Good. I mean, not good, but you know. We’re not crazy to think there’s something wrong.”

“I didn’t say he was volatile, Fleur. I’ve never seen Thomas lose his temper. Like, ever.”

The waiter sidles up to the table for another try.

“We haven’t even looked,”

Fleur tells him in testy Dutch. “Come back in another few minutes.”

His bright smile drops off his face. “Of course. My apologies.”

He scurries away.

Fleur reaches for her wine. “Does Thomas have a 3D printer at home?”

Her question is so unexpected, the switch of subject so far out of left field, the only thing I can think of to say is, “A what?”

“A 3D printer. Do you have one at home, and if so, what kind?”

I think about all the devices Thomas has lining the cupboards of his study upstairs, the scales and the lights and the microscopes and a bunch of other equipment I have no idea what it’s for. What does a 3D printer even look like? Is it different than a normal printer?

“I don’t know. No. At least I don’t think so. Why?”

“Did you know you can print virtually anything these days? Prototypes for jewelry designs, that’s what we use the ones at the factory for, but the sky’s the limit in terms of what you can make. Furniture, artificial teeth, chocolate bonbons, shoes, toys, dinosaur skeletons, guns.”

At the last one, I laugh. “Guns are illegal in this country.”

It’s a common refrain among the Dutch despite regular shootings that make the news, most of them mob related. Criminals have guns, yes, but that’s what makes them criminals. For a Dutch person, the American approach of fighting guns with more guns is asinine.

Fleur gives me a big-eyed, solemn nod. “Illegal to purchase, yes, but a person can still make one. It’s not even that difficult. All they need is a €300 printer they buy on bol.com.”

The Dutch version of Amazon.

“Dare I ask how you know this?”

“Because I saw the blueprints.”

She plants both arms onto the table and leans in. “They were on Thomas’s desk. He downloaded them from the internet.”

I stare at Fleur, and her eyes bore into mine because this. This is what she brought me here to tell me. Not that Thomas is losing his temper at work. Not that he exchanged blows with Xander. That he’s armed. I picture Thomas in his office not all that far from here, seated behind his father’s old desk and his grandfather’s before that, printing a gun, a real, actual gun with a random set of blueprints he found on the internet, and the image is so ridiculous that I laugh again. He wouldn’t even know how to hold the thing.

“Be serious, Fleur. Those blueprints could have belonged to anyone. Did you ask him why they were on his desk?”

“Of course. He said he found them on the printer, but he was lying. I could tell.”

She plunks both elbows on the table and leans over her empty plate. “, why does my brother need a gun?”

Her brother, not my husband. Even when she’s trying to manipulate me, Fleur can’t help but be possessive.

“He doesn’t. Are you kidding me? Thomas doesn’t need a gun. And having a printout of instructions on your desk is a very different thing than holding the actual weapon in your hand. Blueprints are circumstantial evidence at best. Blueprints don’t mean anything.”

She leans back in the booth, shaking her head. “I know my brother, , and this means something. There is something going on with him, something very serious and very wrong, and my gut says it has something to do with Xander. Thomas won’t talk to me about it. But I’m hoping he’ll talk to you.”

He won’t. I almost say the words out loud, but I swallow them down because Fleur is really serious. She really thinks Thomas is sitting behind a 3D printer somewhere, feeding the machine a file that will build him a handgun. This was her agenda all along—to tell me he’s arming himself, and for what? To paint her brother as unhinged? To pry information out of me she can use in her campaign for CEO? To scare me?

“I’ll try. I’ll talk to Thomas tonight.”

I say this in lieu of what I’m really thinking, that Fleur might have an agenda here, but so do I. And my agenda has nothing to do with hers.

“Good.”

Fleur nods, just once, settling back in the booth with a satisfied smile. And why wouldn’t she? Fleur is a Prins, and she’s used to getting what she wants. “Let me know what he says, will you?”

A request, even though we both know it’s not one.

There’s movement in our periphery, the waiter creeping up to the table for another try.

Fleur looks up with a bright smile. “There you are! Tell us about the pasta special.”

November 17th, 11:13 p.m.

The second I’m settled in my chair, Xander pops out of his, stepping to a framed black-and-white photograph on the wall. A Bastiaan Woudt, a Dutch photographer whose prints go for €10,000 and up. Xander tugs on the edge of the frame, and it swivels away from the wall. Behind it, bolted into the concrete, is a safe.

I watch as he skips the finger pad to tap in the code: 05732#, which I commit to memory. The safe beeps three times, followed by a metallic thwunk. He swings the door open and pulls a black velvet tray from the bottom shelf.

A black velvet tray filled with diamonds. Dozens and dozens of them, of every shape and size and color. Far more diamonds than a Prins employee should have at home, locked in a safe hidden in a wall.

With a pair of tweezers, he picks up the largest stone from the center compartment and holds it under the desk light.

“Here’s the one I grew to the certification specs,”

he says, sinking onto the chair across from me. “Same weight, same clarity and fluorescence, same cut of course. The Cullinans were all the original Prins cut. There’ve been some improvements since, but this one is old-school.”

I nod, but I don’t have a gemologist’s eye. For me, a diamond is a diamond is a diamond.

“There’s a tiny bit of feathering between seven and eight, but it’s not visible to the naked eye. You’d need a scope with at least 10x magnification, and even then, the inclusion is hard to find if you’re not trained to look for it. This stone is virtually flawless.”

“Like the one in my bracelet.”

“Exactly like it. Except the one on your wrist took a billion years to make, and this one”—carefully, he settles the stone on the leather desk pad. It tips to the side, blinding white in the light—“about ten weeks.”

“That’s it? Only ten?”

Xander grins. “And that’s not even the best part. The best part is there’s no limit to how many I can grow. One or ten or ten thousand. I can grow as many as I want. As many as I can sell.”

All these months I’ve spent wondering why a man with Xander’s résumé would take this job. Why when he could work for anyone—Cartier or Van Cleef & Arpels or Chopard—he’d choose to work for the shaky House of Prins. Or launch his own firm. He’s got enough names in his Rolodex to support it, models and A-list actresses and royalty who already serve as walking advertisements for his designs. Xander could work for anyone. He could live anywhere. Why choose a struggling diamond house in Amsterdam?

He stretches an arm across the desk. “May I?”

The answer is: for this. The Cullinan on my wrist. Its lab-grown twin sitting on the desk. The dozens of diamonds locked in a hidden safe on the wall, all copies of Prins-mined stones, I’m guessing.

I flick the safety latch with a fingernail, but I don’t slide the cuff from my arm. Not yet.

“On one condition.”

Part Two

“I never hated a man enough to give him diamonds back.”

—Zsa Zsa Gabor