Berkshire Funds

Berkshire Funds is an investment company whose rented New York office becomes the point where a long-running attempt to acquire the D’Anjou family cameo intersects with the September 11 attacks. The company’s role in the novel is chiefly as a business setting and a link in the chain of arrangements surrounding the jewel, rather than as a participant in the scheme itself.

Company and New York Office

The company is described as having offices in the World Trade Center. Georges D’Anjou tells a family gathering that Desbois appears to have been either a contract employee or a European associate of Berkshire Funds, and that he sometimes rented one of its offices for his New York business. The account leaves Desbois’s precise status uncertain; it does not establish that he was a permanent employee.

The address gives the company’s otherwise incidental presence grave significance: its office was on the 99th floor of the North Tower. Georges reports that this was the tower struck by the first plane. When Alain asks whether a list of Berkshire’s victims can be obtained, the exchange makes clear that the family is trying to understand who may have been caught in the attack, while the company’s connection to the building turns an office detail into a matter of immediate concern.

Connection to the Cameo Scheme

Berkshire Funds is adjacent to, but not itself identified as a party to, the plan Charles de C... devised with Roger Bolduc. Charles proposed making a convincing copy of the cameo, reproducing its old patina and distinctive scratch so that the D’Anjou family could keep a symbolic stone while Roger profited from the original. Because an impression and copy were to be made by a New York artisan, Charles sent his agent Franck Aubry, an expert in gemstones, to assess the cameo’s authenticity and oversee the process.

The narrative links the proposed meeting to the 99th floor: in his anxious calculations, Charles wonders whether the appointment was to take place there. The evidence does not say that Berkshire Funds arranged the transaction or employed Aubry. Its relevance is narrower and more consequential: its office was the anticipated meeting place within a New York operation that depended on authenticating and copying the jewel.

September 11 and the Lost Jewel

As news of the attacks spreads, Charles initially worries about the fate of the cameo more than the lives of Aubry, his assistant, or Roger. He imagines the jewel lost among the immense quantity of material and human debris when the World Trade Center towers collapse, and repeatedly contacts his friend in Paris despite knowing that nothing can be done. The catastrophe thus destroys the practical basis of the proposed exchange and, in Charles’s view, makes the jewel unrecoverable.

Berkshire Funds serves as a geographic and narrative hinge between a clandestine commercial arrangement and a mass disaster. The company itself is not said to have caused the plan, suffered a specified list of casualties, or taken any action after the collapse. What the novel establishes is the office location, its connection to a possible meeting, and the abrupt loss of the setting in which the cameo scheme was meant to proceed.