'A' for Argonaut (6 page)

Months before Maran’s mission, an Afro-Asian beauty stood bargaining for uncut diamonds in a ramshackle shop on Avenue Equateur in Commune de la Gombe, Kinshasa, in the DRC, formerly Zaire. It was one of those shops there that had seen better days under Belgian colonialism. The wood frame of the crumbling structure was newly plastered with a thick coat of red paint. You could see the deeply uneven brush strokes in the paint, making it look like the owner had hired some crippled kids off the street to do the work, which he had.

The street outside teemed with a gaggle of nationalities and races: native Congolese, olive-skinned Arabs, dark-skinned Portuguese Angolans, lily-white Afrikaners. They wore brilliantly dyed robes in myriads of color, turbans, and western-style silk sport shirts. The air stank. Garbage steamed in the cesspools that served for gutters. Gaunt dogs lay nearly dead in the shade. Several stared blankly at a severed, rotted monkey head.

Amber Chu took out a wallet-sized diamond balance from the breast pocket of her Ted Lapidus hot pink silk safari shirt. To look at her, you would not know she spent her spare time at a Russian Combat Sambo martial arts dojo. She was what you would call a bit chunky, although the chunks were put together with the sculptured art of an athletic Rubens, and, if you were lucky enough to touch her, you would feel curves of rock-hard flesh. She looked substantial, strangely beautiful. On her head perched a narrow-brimmed hip white straw fedora. A battery of spectacularly large diamond and platinum tennis necklaces adorned her neckline. Her lips were slashed with fuchsia “Neons & Nudes” lip gloss highlighted with blue pearl. Under a wide black ostrich leather belt decorated with a row of red enamel medallions and a large silver and gold buckle, a bright red silk skirt wrapped her waist and swirled around her legs, hugging the curves of her hips. Leather thongs traced spirals around her calves over patterned nylon tights and the sandals she had bought in a Dubai boutique were speckled with gemstones. She exuded complexity, her toughness contrasted with the undeniable intelligence that sparkled from her eyes. The owlishly-round tortoise-shell glasses perched low on her nose gave her an aura of scholarly dignity.

She stood at the counter of the shop. A photograph on the wall showed Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt supporting a ban on the sale of illegal conflict diamonds. Behind them, a black boy, about twelve years old, stood with an AK-47 against his shoulder, one hand clenched on the handgrip. A sign on the wall next to the photo trumpeted:

ALL OUR STONES ARE GUARANTEED

AS CERTIFIED TO CONFORM TO THE KIMBERLY PROCESS

AND ARE CONFLICT FREE.

Of course, that, like everything else about the place, was a lie. The sign alluded to the Kimberly Process Certification Scheme prompted by the U.N. resolution banning the trade in “blood diamonds,” smuggled stones used to fund terrorism; the trade had attempted to tone down the term by referring to them as “Conflict Diamonds,” but no one was biting. Anyone dealing in non-KPCS diamonds was to be thrown out of the world’s twenty-four diamond exchanges. Amber knew that to be so ridiculous that it didn’t even rise to the level of a joke.

The shop, a
comptoir
that served as an illegal bourse in the center of the war-torn city, was constructed within a wood frame of blackish gray clay blocks and rusted corrugated tin. It sat alongside a wooden shack piled with racks of plastic shoes and umbrellas. In this primitive environment, torn between Catholic superstition, Islamist zealotry, and animistic worship of talismans and animal parts, women were not allowed inside the trading rooms; Amber was an anomaly.

Outside, the stalls were loaded with mounds of fresh melons, cassava roots, and dried fish from the Congo River. Inside, the store was sparely furnished with several desk and table combinations dominated by a worn wooden counter. It divided the front from the back of the shop. There was no jewelry on display; piles of small diamonds filled dishes scattered across the counter like nut offerings on a coffee table.

A small, wiry Pakistani stood at the counter. He took out a damp handkerchief, swabbed his brow, pushed up the sleeves of his paisley silk shirt and poured about thirty rough stones out onto a black velvet scarf on the white marble table. He lit a Gold Leaf Pakistani cigarette and blew a bellow of smoke through an unkempt black mustache.

Amber leaned down while she examined the gems. Tariq Faisal flashed a gold-toothed grin from his stool behind a wooden booth. He was one of a minority of Pakistani-Kenyans who pitted themselves against the Indians, Lebanese and Chinese dominant in the trade there. At 45, he was twelve years older than Amber. Schooled earlier as a security officer with Branch Energy, a now-defunct former British mining company, he made enough money in illegal gemstones to feed his appetite for young women. Amber could feel his lust slither over her body like leech slime. She put up with it because he offered great prices. She was always ready to deal. Someone who knew her situation might think she had no choice, but she operated under one premise: You always have a choice. The problem is that some choices are equally painful.

A small gold ring, accented by a brilliant-cut diamond, decorated her nose and when she laughed, Faisal could see an emerald-stud cock-tickler pinned into her tongue. While admiring her body, excited by the smell of sweat that radiated from under her arms, he fantasized about what it was she did with that piece of equipment. Never mind that he had known her for four years; he had never seen anything like her before, with her tawny, perfectly unblemished skin. Clear as a high-yellow D-perfect diamond, her complexion hinted at the origin of her given name.

The temperature outside was ninety-five degrees. It was worse inside the shop. The electricity had been off for a month due to problems with the government-owned utility. She had her shirt opened to the fourth button that strained against the tension across her chest. He squinted, hoping for a glimpse of nipple.

“With all due respect, honey,” she said, her voice a throaty whisper through her pearlescent glossy, ample lips. “Keep your syphilitic fucking eyes off my tits. I have to concentrate and you’re making me nervous.”

That direct, rude candor ignited him. It drove him crazy whenever she reached into her crocodile purse, came out with a leather travel box filled with thick Cuban Cohiba Robusto cigars, lit one up, blew a thick stream of smoke in the air. Meeting her for the first time shocked him. She seemed so out of place in his seedy arena. All suspicions of amateurism or incompetence disappeared as soon as she first picked through his roughs and negotiated for rock-bottom prices. During their four years of dealing, she had earned his respect.

Sometimes she would come in with her own rough stones to sell; more often, she was looking to buy cut and finished stones. It never mattered to either of them which side of the trade they were on.

She had proven her worth with skills he had never before witnessed. Shortly after he first met her, she was scanning a bunch of stones with a 10X triplet loupe when a troop of Zimbabwean U.N. soldiers came into his shop.

When the soldiers threw a bag of cut stones on the counter, demanding a bid, Faisal turned to Amber. He didn’t want to make the decision himself.

“I have to have my appraiser look them over before I can give you a quote,” he told the uniformed captain in charge of the contingent.

Amber held the largest of the stones to the light.

“These things look like gall stones passed by a fucking pancreatic baboon. Full of feathers, knots, grains, needles, pinpoints, clouds, and cracks. Browner than shit.”

She told Faisal the stones, in addition to their dirty quality, had all been octahedral, eight-sided crystals. That meant they had to be scanned and bruted, cut and polished as brilliant cuts with added facets to mask the problems. By the time the cutting was finished, there would not be enough gemstone left with which to bother. While the color could be bleached out, on top of all the other problems there would be no way to profit on the buy.

“There you go,” Faisal shrugged to the Captain.

As the soldiers filed out the door, Amber assessed them.

“Dickwads.”

She always picked the
very finest stones, even if he had misrepresented their quality according to the International Gemological Institute’s four C’s guideline: carats, color, clarity, and cut. Not only could she distinguish cuts between Asschers, Antique Cushions, and Old European cuts, she could count the number and describe the shape of the facets in the blink of her eye. Using only her naked reading vision, holding the diamond girdle-to-girdle in her tweezers, away from her face and up to the light, she could pick out even a VS1 flawed stone, with inclusions that only a trained grader could see and then only under 10X magnification. Her knowledge went beyond appraisals. It was beyond his imagination how she could tell, more often than not, where the gem was mined and where, in the case of finished stones, they had been cut and polished; she knew the intricacies of how important diamond pricing was to the world economy, how it had historically propped governments from Russia to Great Britain and the U.S.

She regaled Faisal with stories. He reveled in them.

She told him the history back to 1482 when Diogo Cao, a Portuguese naval explorer, paved the watery route that opened the slave trade in Muanda at the mouth of the Congo and about the founding of the original diamond cartel in 1871 that gave the British Empire the money muscle it needed to colonize East Africa. She knew how Henry Morton Stanley’s famous, and theatrically orchestrated, Anglo-American expedition set off that same year to find Dr. Livingston, and how the expedition with 356 heavily-armed men and families, looting and claim-staking, left behind a trail of hundreds of dead, innocent, and primitively-equipped native defenders in their wake. Amber also knew about King Leopold II of Belgium’s barbarous rule and how he used the Democratic Republic of Congo as his personal fiefdom.

She was a walking library and a breathing gemological laboratory. He thought her to be the most brilliant person he had ever known, a fountain of African lore. Of course she was. She had been drilled from the crib on the struggle for the People’s Liberation and how that struggle had been conjoined with the intricacy of the diamond markets in Africa. She was her father’s daughter and he had been force-trained by the best, China’s military spy agency.

It was her current storehouse of knowledge, however, that he found most valuable. She outlined the collusion between major U.S. political and diamond industry figures working behind the scenes with the CIA and Israel’s MOSSAD to tip over pro-Communist government leaders in the region, a relationship that gave rise to the trade of illegal diamonds in what she called “the cauldron of the Cold War.” But it was her tales of the private military companies like Strategic Solutions, inseminated by the secrecy birthed by that older conflict, that really piqued his interest. He knew about SSI.

What he knew frightened him to death.

Over a double shot of Absolut 100 neat, her standby, she shifted his attention to her stories about Boyko, the man who headed SSI.

“A cunt-picker! The Animal of Angola,” she told him.

She had never met the mastermind behind the organization, although she had seen a picture of him in a newspaper. She didn’t know much about him, but she knew from her father that he came out of the Soviet military espionage apparatus. He had spent time with them in Angola and now ran a massive arms-for-diamonds op. The pursuit earned him more than a billion U.S. dollars a year running his own mined stones from the DRC through Angola to Antwerp and gave birth to the bloodthirsty terror he inflicted on innocents from Kinshasa to Cabinda.

Now Faisal scooped the stones into a diamond envelope, poured the lot onto Amber’s tiny scale. She picked up several of the uncut stones, her good fingers rolling over the greasy skins. She smiled with the knowledge that diamonds have a magnetic attraction to oil and grease, a factor applied by mine owners who run the dirty stones over a grease table to separate them from rocks and pebbles. From her purse, she pulled out a small vial. It contained gin. She poured a bit onto a linen hankie and rubbed the stones clean. Oily film from the mine’s sorting and cleaning process masked flaws and made grading them more difficult.

She used a pair of tweezers to add a series of Lilliputian weights in the opposite pan until the scale balanced.

“High whites,” he assured her. “Thirty-six stones. The smallest is a half.”

She reached back into the purse. Her hand emerged with a small leather pouch. Three stones tumbled onto the marble table, her masters. She used them to grade the goods and kept a set of thirty of them at the apartment she kept in Antwerp. Except for the rarified fancy blues, greens, and reds, everyone wanted pure whites, colorless diamonds. She pushed a color-corrected 10X loupe into the socket of her right eye, the one she favored to key the quality of stones before she made her bids.

“How is Tony?” he asked. Her seven-year-old son suffered from what she had learned was diagnosed as Type 1 near fatal brittle asthma, a life-threatening condition.

“Still on the prednisone,” she answered. Her worry about Tony’s health was constant.

“Hope he feels better,” the dealer said.

“Thanks. OK. Forty-point-oh-three carats total,” she said as she resumed her inspection. She tweezed out the smallest stone and poured the rest of the lot back into the envelope. “I can always count on you. But they’ve got a lot of inclusions, pretty dirty, low-grade, they’ll cut at about GIA S-1, S-2.”

“OK. You’re right. But the smallest’s a half-carat. OK. Ninety dollars a carat. Thirty-six hundred U.S. cash for the lot.”

“I’ll give you fifty, two thousand, and I’ll throw in this bag of eights.” She threw a small bag on the counter. They were less desirable and they were not worth the money; she knew how to make them go to pink, added value, with just a dab of nail polish on the culet.

“You’ve got a bargain,” Faisal assured her.

She would have to get them across two borders, Angola and Belgium, to her Antwerp cutter, the best in the business.