tories.
It is quite an office, a long line of comfortably furnished rooms
strung along like railway cars, each with its door leading out into a
corridor that runs the length of the series. "Very convenient," he
explained. "Often you don't want one dealer to meet another." The doors
all had little doors set in them, like our speak-easy windows in the
old days, but backed by strong steel mesh. There are framed
certificates on the walls, and photographs, and a full-length portrait
of Mr. Goldmuntz, who looks remarkably like a younger version of Sir
Winston Churchill (he is seventy-four). There is a model of a
three-masted schooner, made by the children of a home for Jewish
refugee orphans which he organized. There are mineral samples, and
replicas of famous diamonds, and big neat desks, and of course, here
and there, a safe.
Mr.
Goldmuntz and his nephew, who lives in America but comes over every
year to spend several months in Europe, gave me an outline of the
situation in that city. It is the clearinghouse for the diamond
trading of the world. A combination of circumstances has made it the
most important center. To begin with there was its tradition. Then
there were the laws of Belgium, which as far as diamonds are concerned
are less stringent than those of Britain: to put it bluntly, diamonds
licit and illicit can come in and move out, because there is no form of
local control that makes it really dangerous to dispose of smuggled
goods. Most important, however, is the fact that diamond cutting got
under way not only as soon as World War II was over, but actually
before Germany's surrender. Mr. Goldmuntz had taken refuge in England
when the Germans moved in; he already had an office in London. He was
the doyen of diamond men in Antwerp, however, and the plight of his workless col-
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