Diemond

Before we begin, dear reader, allow us to direct your attention to the following proverb:

“Diamonds are beautiful and so is life, but only one of these is forever.”

We regret to inform you that the origin of this quote has become obscured by the fog of time. Regardless, we deemed it a worthy introduction because it lends a certain measure of poetic elegance to the events to come.

Please, don’t let us keep you. Enjoy the story.

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Today, Leo Weinberg only has enough room in a head normally occupied with scheduling business dinners and piercing hangovers for one thing: home. No, not the mansion he works from in West London, but home on the other side of the Atlantic, where his doll of a wife and his five heirs and three heiresses are waiting in his other mansion, the one that might not be as welcoming to his morally-unfettered indulgences but is where the heart is. He wouldn’t mind laying his overworked, wine-soaked bones in the dust with the family jewels up in the attic. No, he wouldn’t mind that at all.

So, when Leo sends the telegram heralding his arrival, he doesn’t bat an eye at the way his valet of thirteen years grumbles something under his breath as he dutifully piles clothes into a suitcase.

Neither does he pay any heed to the feminine aroma wafting out of an alleyway on his way to the harbor, an aroma that scratches at something long-buried in his mind but doesn’t quite get him to slow down.

And he most definitely does not think twice about the eyes boring into him when he gazes out over the railing, the same eyes that are conspicuously absent every time he turns around and furrows his brow in suspicion.

He is Leo, after all, another lion in his lineage. “When you grow up, son,” his father had told him, eyes warm, “you’ll lead a pride of your own. You’ll become a top predator, and all the antelope will scatter before you.”

He smiles at the thought. He has nothing to fear, not after what he’s been through.

His pride will welcome him with open arms, and he can’t wait to tend to them after all these years. Especially his wife. He has plans to tend to her as soon as the children are in bed. And how could she not feel honored to receive him, especially with the gift he has lovingly picked out for her?

The very same gift he has stashed away in his personal briefcase. Yes, the little briefcase he always keeps on his person, has the initials L.W. carved into one face, and only he knows the code to.

Yes, the little briefcase that leaves a trail of blood wherever he goes on deck.

It’s strange; you’d think he’d notice, being a lion and all.

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It has been exactly seven months and seven eternities since Bibiana Pirozzi gazed into an expectant crowd and indulged them in the liquid gold generated by her vocal chords. Lately, they’ve seen more use in bed, where a decidedly different type of indulgence takes place.

“Where are you flying off to now, Bibi?” one man had managed to ask when she was caught slipping away before dawn. Bibi, the Songbird of Sicily—now that’s something she misses hearing in the reverence-laden call of an announcer. These days she hears it popping from the lips of every drooling moneybag she perches on to make ends meet—yes, sometimes the full title comes out if they’re particularly passionate about her. No, it doesn’t make her want to marry them and raise eleven screaming whelps.

Again that question nags her, though it comes from today’s pair of lips. She flashes him a soft smile, sweet as icing, and that’s usually all it takes for a man to rip out his own heart and place it, bloody and beating, into the palm of her hand.

It works, same as usual. A pair of hungry eyes follows the curve of her rump as she leaves the cabin. She drinks in the salty breeze as her eyes track the passage of a flock of seagulls, and that’s when her fingers tighten around the railing. She longs to spread her wings again like the Songbird she once was, to take to the skies and have the world look up in admiration. Flitting from one stiff cock to the next like some common disappointment isn’t what she was born to do, and it most certainly isn’t how she’ll go down.

Perhaps it’s the years of experience navigating life wearing gorgeous but revealing dresses, or perhaps it’s an element innate in all women, but something makes her hand lash out like a viper.

“I beg your pardon, m’lady,” says the red-faced gentleman whose outstretched palm she has managed to catch in the act. “Meant no offence. Just bending down to tie my laces.”

“Do me a favor and tie them at the bottom of the sea.” She bats her eyelashes at him, and only when she’s sure she’s left him baffled out of his mind does she let him leave.

Bibi’s entire frame heaves with a sigh. She has chosen this particular outfit—the midnight-violet one with a lasciviously low neckline and a raven-shaped brooch to match her hair—because this is the one she wore the day her already-deteriorating fame finally dissolved into a fine white mist. The day a certain American businessman clipped her wings and didn’t even bother watching her spiral out of the sky.

She glances down the ship, where a row of deck chairs abides under the soft gaze of the sun. One of them is occupied by a balding man, pipe in mouth, whose bulk strains against a lavish wardrobe. On the planks by him is a little briefcase with the initials L.W. carved into one face.

At some point, Bibi had evolved from a songbird into a hawk, and she has been circling her quarry from above in preparation to strike ever since. She’d been there when he slapped an ungodly amount of cash onto the counter and left the jewel store with an odd spring in his step. Now her prey has cornered itself on the deck of a ship, where there is nowhere to turn to.

She will have her vengeance and secure her future. Bibi finds herself smirking. Leo Weinberg will see the Songbird of Sicily, and he will remember.

🔷

Joan Reeves wants nothing more than to sprawl senseless on her hammock after a hard day’s work, but the sweat and grease clinging to her brow don’t stop her from lending a poor soul a hand.

“Thank you, thank you so much, kind sir,” pants the balding gentleman whose chubby face glows in the light of a pipe.

Joan flashes him a smile as she rummages around in the night for the thing that tumbled out of his briefcase. She doesn’t bother correcting him; as far as her coworkers are concerned, wearing overalls, keeping your hair short and diving into heaps of steaming metal armed with nothing but a wrench classifies you as something that isn’t female. “Jo,” they’d say, heedless to how masculine that sounds, “what’s it say on the boiler?” or, “Pass me the Worcester sauce, Jo,” as if she didn’t have a pair of very feminine utensils growing out of her chest. She ought to feel lucky, she supposes, that in the depths of this ship there’s a plane of existence where men accept her as one of their own.

Something winks at her in the darkness. There, a few paces from cascading into the ocean.

Jo scratches her head in bewilderment as she turns the jewel in her palm. Christ, it’s as big as a clementine, but it’d probably break your teeth if you had a taste.

It’s back inside the man’s briefcase before she can wrangle the implications. “You’re a lifesaver. That diamond is a gift for my lovely wife, and here I am stumbling about like a buffoon without ensuring my briefcase is properly locked.”

Jo can only smile like an even bigger buffoon as she thinks, Americans talk funny.

“Well, now. I think that concludes my evening stroll. Until then, my good man.”

Cheerio, thinks Jo. The gentleman ambles down the deck before disappearing into a cabin.

“I reckon she’d be a looker if she tidied herself up,” Jo had overheard a fellow engineer say one day.

“A blondie like that?” another had replied. “You bet.”

Once-dormant gears start to turn in Jo’s head as she stands there savoring the melody of the waves. She could be pretty if she tried, she reckons. Pretty as a diamond.

Cold saliva scurries down her throat. She can’t peel her gaze away from the gentleman’s cabin. It’s that bloody diamond; it has her in the cold clutches of its shimmering facets, like a bug on flypaper.

It’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen.

Jo has gone quite numb by the time she trudges back to the engine room, the initials L.W. seared into her brain.

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Ernest Crawford lives up to his name—for thirteen years he has existed in Master Weinberg’s shadow and has never once complained about it being too dark. “Ernest to a fault,” the other servants had joked. Bah. They are simply jealous of his capacity to resist every temptation dangled over his nose.

For a claim as bold as that, it has seen no contention. Until today, that is. Master Weinberg trusts his valet enough to share a cabin with him, and what a fatal mistake that is on his part! Does that American bastard think Ernest will be here to ward off the things that go bump in the night? The threat is much closer to his imaginary bubble of security than he could ever fathom. In fact, Ernest is only too happy to pull out the little briefcase from under the bed while his Master’s girth rises and falls to the rhythm of the undulating sea.

For thirteen years the valet has squirmed in the greasy clutches of Leo Weinberg. He has stifled voracious gags sanitizing the aftermath of his mansionwide orgies, suffered the brunt of his halitosis-laden temper tantrums, and was on one boozy evening threatened at gunpoint for purchasing the wrong brand of tobacco for his pipe. Not to mention the complications introduced by the war. And Master Weinberg had relished it all.

Now it’s his turn to squirm. Ernest wants nothing more than to see the Master’s face melt in distress upon seeing a diamond-shaped indent in the briefcase where there should be a diamond. It’s about time he goes through the rites of experiencing something spiral out of control and be powerless to reign it in. He’ll probably throw another one of his tantrums, and somehow make the ship turn around just to pay the jewel store another visit, but that’s fine. Ernest will be the one to relish it this time, and the best part is that Master Weinberg will never suspect him. No, Ernest will always be his plaything: to be tugged around like a slab of meat on a hook, to be smeared with dirt and piss like a bathroom rug, but completely exempt from guilt. No, Master Weinberg would never suspect such a lowly insect. Not when he’s been clean for thirteen years.

He lays the briefcase out on the floor and gets the numbers to align. Click. No luck there; that fool of a Weinberg even trusts his valet not to glance over his shoulder.

Ernest isn’t sure what he’d do with this whopper of a gemstone, but he spends a few sumptuous heartbeats marveling at it all the same. A rational part of him tells him to pocket it and devour the earnings, but there’s a satisfying sense of finality in chucking it into the sea. Have I finally lost it? he ponders as the gleaming facets seem to seduce him into sparing it. I’m about to throw away a bloody fortune.

A sound. Intrusive. The door strains against an outside force, creaking until—

A short figure stands in the doorway, framed ominously against the ghostly pale of the moon. A crowbar dangles from a gloved hand.

“Who… who the bloody hell are you?” gasps Ernest as he shoots to his feet.

The man quietly steps inside. A glove reaches out—the one without a weapon, because that is what Ernest realizes a crowbar bloody is—and there is something impatient about the gesture.

That same rational part of him begs him to give up the diamond. But something louder makes him shirk back and hold it close. The Master’s pain is his to inflict. He has every bloody right to be the one to whisk his diamond away from him.

“I shall scream,” warns Ernest. “I shall alert the Master and every sailor on board and—”

The first blow knocks the wind out of him.

The second knocks him flat on his arse.

The third makes inky splotches converge around his field of vision.

Before everything goes black, Ernest swears he catches a grease-stained face inspecting him.

There’s something inexplicably feminine about this man.

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Jo hadn’t planned on beating someone to a semi-faceless pulp tonight, but her arm just wouldn't stop swinging! An adrenaline-fuelled concoction of that man threatening to (quite literally) scream bloody murder and her own longing to see the diamond, she suspects. If she was caught breaking into a passenger’s cabin, she might as well tie a lump of lead to her ankle and jump overboard.

Jo cradles the diamond in one glove. Did it crack when it hit the floor? No, thank goodness, the hardy little bastard’s doing fine.

There’s something so unfathomably intoxicating about it. Something that reaches into the depths of her being with polished fingers and caresses her heart in a way nothing else ever could. Something that purrs at her guilt and shock and manages to disarm the both of them.

Lithe as a cat, Jo slinks into the night, leaving the American bloke to snore it off (Goodness, how some people love to sleep!). First things first: the sea can have her gore-stained crowbar. Next, she leaves her coworker’s lucky scarf at the crime scene (Sorry, Charles). All she has to do now is retreat below deck and—

A pretty lady in a pretty dress comes face to face with her as she rounds the corner. That’s impossible. Everyone ought to be taking forty winks at this hour.

“Where do you think you’re going with that?” she snaps.

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It takes a few heartbeats for reality to settle around the Songbird of Sicily. A crimson trail follows this short man in overalls all the way from her prey’s cabin. Bibi sure as hell hadn’t slipped sleeping pills into her beau’s champagne just to find tonight’s real target of her affections dead.

“Sapristi,” she gasps. “You killed Leo Weinberg.”

Silence from the man. Perhaps… confusion?

“You weren’t supposed to do that. He was supposed to see me. He was supposed to remember. The way he cast me aside in favor of that… that tasteless fraud, that goat with the voice of a thousand hornets that was somehow chosen to perform at his gala when it should’ve been me. That was my last chance at publicity. After that…”

Well, she knows what happens after that. She tries to serve a cold dish of revenge but drops it.

The man cocks his head. No matter. Maybe this will get a better reaction out of him. It’s a good thing that some of Bibi’s more criminally-inclined inamoratos have rubbed off on her.

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What the bloody hell is this lady talking about? ponders Jo. I reckon “Leo Weinberg” is what “L.W.” stands for. But I didn’t kill him! He's fast asleep in his cabin!

Her windpipe slams shut when the pretty lady lifts her dress to reveal a pistol—complete with a silencer—holstered at the band of her thigh-high. In a heartbeat, it jumps from her leg to her hand, and suddenly Jo’s life is flashing before her from the polished muzzle of a gun.

“Give me the diam—”

The thrill grips Jo again. She lashes out, sending the pistol careening across the planks. Before the pretty lady takes a step after it, Jo grabs hold of her, only to get a heeled foot in the crotch in response. Her face lights up in surprise when Jo barely reacts.

But that’s all it takes for her to drop the diamond. The minute tilt of the ship is enough to send it rushing across the planks to join the pistol.

The two women don’t hesitate. One pounces on the weapon, the other on the gemstone.

Two shots whisper in the dark.

“Let go,” screeches the lady as she wrestles the diamond out of Jo’s glove.

Jo wraps herself around her opponent, the thrill numbing the pain of two bullets. In a flurry of tangled limbs and desperate grunts, the entwined souls, whether purposely or not, thrust each other under the railing and over the edge—

—where the frigid ocean is the warmest welcome they receive.

Italians are so pretty, thinks Jo as she sinks at a pace far slower than that of the diamond.

🔷

The cold is an anaconda around the Songbird's chest. Every cry for help comes out as a pathetic splutter.

Which is why Bibi isn’t that surprised when the ship continues determinedly on its course, heedless to a lady getting left behind.

For the last time.

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That, dear reader, concludes our tale. We hope you found it more enjoyable than its protagonists did, especially Leo Weinberg, who might not get to tend to his wife the way he envisioned.

If only there was some way of warning them beforehand of the events that transpired that night. That each of them was never alone in their diamond-pinching endeavor.

If only.