Page 60 of Dressed to Kill
He pulled the drawstring loose with his teeth and tipped it into his palm.
Six tiny, glittering gems tumbled out.
Diamonds.
“Putain, Aleksi, do you see?”
“I see them. But what the fuck are a bunch of diamonds doing inside a knockoff leather bag?”
Niko didn't answer me. He was rolling one of them between his thumb and forefinger, up close to his eye, turning it against the light.
"Niko."
"These are not glass." He tipped his hand and let them slide, watching how they caught. He pinched one and held it. "Six of them. In one bag. In one bad bag, in a crate of three hundred bad bags."
"So Mr. K was moving them in the product. This wasn’t just a counterfeiting operation. It was a diamond smuggling operation."
"Mm." He still wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the bag, the slit lining, the false bottom, his thumb pressed into the wrong seam like he was reading something off it. Then something moved across his face, slow, and his hand closed around the stones.
I shook my head. “How did you even know to check?”
"The stitching." He held the bag up so I could see where the false bottom met the side, the doubled line of thread sunk down into the leather where nobody would think to look. "You see how it's set? Recessed. Sewn from the inside so the seam disappears into the grain. You'd have to know it was there to find it. You'd have to know how tomakeit there." He lowered the bag. "Papa had a man who could do this. He used to bring me… Oh, what do you call them? They are…like a firework wrapped in thin paper. You throw them on the ground and they make a loud sound?"
“Bang snaps?”
“Oui!” He snapped his fingers. “Illegal in France. You sell them in supermarkets here. I loved those fucking things. He would put them in his luggage to get through customs and showed me how to cut the lining so you could sew it back up to hide it.”
"Bang snaps," Niko said again, softer, like the words had walked him somewhere he hadn't meant to go. He looked down at the stones in his palm, and whatever was on his face wasn't a joke anymore. "It was the same cut. The exact same cut, Aleksi. He'd open the lining, lay it flat, and sew it back so you'd never know." He closed his hand. "That's how Pop used to get diamonds through customs. Not bang snaps. I just got the bang snaps."
I almost felt sorry for Niko for a second. Here he was thinking Pop cared enough about him to invent a secret compartment just for him, and the bastard was using it to move diamonds. The gift for his kid was an afterthought. I knew the feeling he waswearing intimately, but by the look on his face, it was one he was less familiar with.
"Put them back in the pouch," I said.
"Aleksi—"
"Pouch. Now." I pulled my phone out. "And don't lose the bag. That bag's the only one of three hundred that matters."
He bagged the stones and held them out, and I didn't take them, because the old Aleksi would have. The old Aleksi would have pocketed six diamonds and a problem and gone and solved it himself, quietly, off the books, and called it initiative. The old Aleksi got a man's finger taken off for that exact instinct.
I scrolled to Nikita's number and put the phone to my ear.
He answered on the second ring. "Aleksi."
"We've got a problem with the inventory."
A pause. "What kind of problem?"
"The kind where I'm holding six diamonds I pulled out of the bottom of a counterfeit handbag, and my brother says the stitching's a smuggling job. I think Mr. K was washing money through the product. There's more in here. There's got to be." I looked down the rows of crates, three hundred bags a crate, crates to the ceiling. "What do you want me to do, boss?"
The silence on the line went a beat longer than I liked. Then something in it shifted, and I understood I'd passed a test I hadn't been told I was taking.
"Don't touch another bag," Nikita said. "Photograph what you've got and seal the warehouse. Kostya will put men on the door tonight."
"Understood."
"How sure is Nikolai about the stitching?"
I looked at my brother, who was still holding the black bag like it might bite him. "Sure enough to recognize it from when he was a kid. Says it's a craft job. Says you'd have to know it was there to find it."
