Felix Hartmann

Felix Hartmann is 47 and has been curator of the castle treasury's jewels for eleven years. He was born in Leipzig, the son of a watchmaker and a piano teacher, and spent his childhood watching his father open tiny mechanisms with tweezers. He studied art history in Heidelberg, wrote his thesis on Baroquebaroque Ornate European style of the 17th and 18th centuries, with heavy decoration, gilding and dramatic curves. goldsmithing and came back to Saxony because, he says, there is no other place in the world with so many diamonds per square meter.

He lives in a high-ceilinged apartment in central Dresden, with creaking floors and bookshelves running from floor to ceiling, auction catalogs squeezed between volumes of art. He cooks little, drinks strong coffee from an Italian pot and listens to Bach while he reads. On the living room table sit a loupe, a velvet cloth and plaster replicas of old brooches, which he uses to study the settings without touching the real pieces.

He has wavy brown hair with white at the temples and round tortoiseshell glasses that slip when he gets excited. He wears a brown tweed suit with a silk handkerchief in the jacket pocket, folded in three points, a different color each day. He speaks of the jewels with passion and gives each piece a biography, but dodges any question about his own life, as if it interested no one. When he gets nervous, he speaks even faster.

About the small hours, his account is a specialist's: at 4:50 a.m. the distribution box under the bridge caught fire, blacking out the street and the entire west facade, and the outside cameras went blind. He says twenty-one pieces from three eighteenth-century sets were taken, more than four thousand diamonds, and that State insurance pays money but does not give back the piece. About the display case, he explains that the glass can withstand a hammer, but against an axe on the same corner it lasts a minute, and that whoever struck knew where to strike. With the street dark and the outside cameras blind, no one can say for certain who was near that window in the days before the robbery.

Felix knows that the curator knows the treasury room better than anyone and that, on a night of robbery, this weighs against him. When the detective asks if he sold the map of the display cases to the thieves, passion turns to offense: he says he has devoted his life to those jewels and refuses to be called a fence. It may be the indignation of a scholar who lost a lifetime's work. It may be someone who talks about diamonds so as not to have to talk about himself. The detective will have to decide which.