The Angel's Cut by Knox Elizabeth

Author:Knox, Elizabeth [Elizabeth Knox]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780864736659
Publisher: Victoria University Press
Published: 2009-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

Cahuenga Building, Hollywood Boulevard

October, 1930

The new, sober Flora found the time to dig out the address of the appraiser to whom she’d sent Xas. She drove to a building on Hollywood Boulevard, and took the elevators to the fourth floor.

The appraiser was a manufacturing jeweller, the best on the coast. Flora spoke to a receptionist behind a steel grille. The receptionist pressed a button and let Flora into the showroom, a room with thick carpet, and very modern, recessed downlighting. There were more lights in glass cases, illuminating diamond necklaces, bracelets, and rings. Among the diamonds were plump and oily pearls.

Flora took a seat in a gilded chair and waited. She picked up a Photoplay and flicked through it. She found a portrait of Cole’s new star, and stills from Flights of Angels. She remembered the scenes of the stills as stopped frames in her editing machine. She had spent so long on the film, and it had receded so quickly. Flora stared and tried to imagine it all as history, instead of merely last month’s news. She found that mattered to her. She felt her life with its new long perspectives might one day feel finished, and thought through like Cole’s film, rather than just made of moments like the sweepings from the floor beneath her editing bench.

‘Miss McLeod?’

The jeweller was a neat person in a double-breasted suit that made his shoulders too wide for his height. He introduced himself—‘I’m Mr Green’—and took Flora’s hand, retaining it as he sat beside her. She could see he was worried because he didn’t know who she was. Whose wife, whose girlfriend—though she was unescorted, and not pretty enough.

Flora said, ‘I sent a friend to you several months ago. He wanted to get a valuation on some pearls, and possibly to sell them. Black pearls.’

Flora actually saw the man’s hair bristle as his scalp tightened. It was one of those expressions that looked as much like disgust as surprise. She went on, ‘What I want to know is, if my friend did sell the pearls, whether he ever collected his money?’

‘Miss McLeod—this friend of yours, was he a good friend?’

‘Were the pearls stolen?’

‘Why would you say that?’

‘He didn’t own anything.’

The man scratched his ear. ‘I still have them,’ he said. ‘Your friend, Mr Jodeau, struck me as very confident, very candid in his manner. He didn’t act like someone selling stolen goods. He wasn’t in any great hurry either. I did say to him that a pearl rope like that must have some provenance. Each one of those pearls would have been a remarkable find, a once-in-a-lifetime find.’ The jeweller waited, watching Flora while this sank in. He said, ‘They’re not cultured. I used an X-ray to check the material at their cores. They are wild South Sea Island pearls, perfectly matched, and an extremely rare true black.’

Flora understood that she was being made to appreciate some enormity, some professional miracle.

‘Pieces like that have names,’ he said.

‘Did it?’

Green shook his head. ‘No.

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