Page 21 of The Expat Affair

“We need to be very clear about what happened here. Where is the statement, Thomas? Where are the talking points? We should have had both these things days ago.”

My chest gives a little quake and I try again, directing my question this time at my husband. “Thomas, how will Arthur deal with her?”

He taps my knee, a silent signal we’ll talk about it later. “I’ll write up both tonight,” he says to Willem, his marching orders clear. “As soon as we leave here, I’ll do it immediately.”

Fleur whips out her iPhone, tapping at the screen with her thumbs, holding the mic up to her mouth. “It is with great sadness and a heavy heart that we announce the untimely passing of one of our esteemed employees, Xander van der Vos. The House of Prins is deeply saddened by his tragic death. Our thoughts and prayers go out to his family and friends.” She smiles at her father, then Thomas. “If you want, I can email you a copy.”

Roland looks impressed. Thomas tosses back his wine. In the Prins family, sibling rivalry runs deep.

“Shouldn’t we also say something about the Cullinans?” Thomas says, plunking down his empty glass. A server scurries forward to refill it.

The Cullinans, ten flawless diamonds cut from a stone that Willem’s great-great-grandfather once pilfered from a Praetorian mine. Hendrik Prins, the original diamond thief, smuggled the rock back to Amsterdam and cut it to chunks of what’s now known as the Prins cut, then used his booty to position himself as the city’s premier diamond house.

And now, nine of them are missing, vanished last summer from the Prins vault in what police are calling the heist of the century. How? Nobody knows. Even now, police are stumped.

“What about them?” Fleur asks, at the same time Willem barks, “Absolutely not.”

“I think we have to,” Thomas says, throwing up his hands. “The media can’t get enough of the missing Cullinans, and now there’s that necklace floating around the internet and reports of diamonds missing from Xander’s apartment. They’re going to link the stories, especially if they find out I fired him.”

At that, my head whips to Thomas. “Youfired Xander? Why? When?”

“Three days ago, and for theft, essentially.” Thomas pushes his glasses up with a knuckle, and I don’t have to count back on my fingers to know that three days ago is the same night Xander was killed. Looks like I’m not the only one in this relationship with secrets. “I found extra diamonds in the shipments from our Asian lab, way more than Xander had officially sourced and not listed on any of the waybills. I’m pretty sure he was selling them under the table.”

Thomas’s tone is calm, but for a company like Prins, where every diamond, no matter the quality or the size, goes through multiple levels of security, a situation like the one he’s describing is a five-alarm fire. Prins stones do not go unaccounted for on a waybill. A shipment doesn’t arrive with more diamonds than on the order. When Thomas discovered that discrepancy, he would have lost his mind.

But more to the point, selling siphoned diamonds under the table sounds very much like something Xander would do.

“So make sure the press doesn’t find out, then,” Willem says, in a tone I’ve heard him use on chauffeurs and household staff andnow on his son. “And while you’re at it, make sure they don’t link the stories.”

“How? People are going to hear the wordsmissingdiamondsand automatically think of the Cullinans.”

Thomas is not wrong. The Cullinans are iconic, the House’s flagship stones carted out only for the most special occasions. Even now, almost seven months later, the tiniest updates on their whereabouts still make the front page of every newspaper, and rumors are still flying on every tabloid and social media site. It was Frederik Albers, the diamond trader Thomas fired last fall. Or an Italian jeweler who was either pushed or leapt from a hotel rooftop the day before Christmas, depending on who you want to believe. Xander had been at House of Prins for only six months before they vanished from the vault. No way he’s going to escape the scrutiny.

Still. The Prins vault isn’t some muddy river in the middle of nowhere, where you can drop a gigantic rock in your pocket and wander off like Hendrik once did. There are rules and regulations around handling stones, protocols to track them whenever they’re removed from their drawer in the vault, which you can’t open without a Prins. Willem. Thomas. Fleur. They’re the only ones who know the code.

Willem takes a pull from his drink, then puts the glass down carefully. “Whatever diamonds Xander had in his apartment, whatever the killer managed to take on his way out the door, they were not stones from the Prins vault, and they most certainly were not the Cullinans. I need you to make that very clear.”

“How do I do that?”

“By spinning the story. By distracting them with another one. The insurance company is already being difficult enough. The last thing we need is another reason for them to delay the payout.”

Diamonds pulled from African dirt. Diamonds grown in a sterilelab. Diamonds cut from the Cullinan stone and vanished into thin air. A man can be killed with a zip tie in his own shower, and every conversation still revolves around diamonds.

“And for God’s sake,” Willem says, picking up his glass, “do not let anyone find out that you fired Xander.”

Thomas leans forward on the couch, directing his next words at his father. “I’m telling you, Xander didn’t get his hands on any of the mined stones. The mined stones are all accounted for. Every single one.”

“Except for nine of the Cullinans,” Fleur reminds him, her words a projectile, a reminder of everything they’ve lost.

He sighs, long and stoic. “Xander is gone, Fleur. Can we leave the I-told-you-sos alone now?”

I’m unsure ifgonemeansdeadorfired, though it’s probably not relevant here. What’s relevant is that Thomas fired Xander for theft hours before a killer snuck into his penthouse and strangled him with a zip tie. I wonder if the police know any of this.

“I told you hiring that man was a mistake,” Fleur says. “I told you a lab-grown line would devalue the House of Prins.”

Roland dips his head in agreement. Fleur could have said anything—that Xander was a luminary, that he was a scoundrel and a thief, that unicorns exist and the earth is flat—and Roland would back her up on it. It’s why she’s stayed married to him all this time, because the man is like a mime, mirroring her moods and gestures and facial expressions. He’s basically her, which is why she keeps him around. With them, it’s always two against one.

A muscle works in Thomas’s jaw, but he manages to keep his cool. “The House was already in free fall, Fleur, long before I took charge. You’ve seen the balance sheets. We need the customers the lab-grown line is bringing in or we will die.”

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