“Any children?”
“You’ll meet Juana later, my fifteen-year-old daughter. If and when she decides to come home.” She laughed again.
“Why’s that funny?”
“You’ll have to be careful.”
“Do I look like someone who would take advantage of a kid?”
“I wasn’t worried about you taking advantage of her.”
17
Muito mulher. That’s what I thought of João’s wife, Simone, as she drove from the airport. She was definitely much woman.
The drive from Aeroport de Lisbon to the Sintra exit was a straight freeway shot, about twenty minutes. A few miles off the freeway started the scenic region which Simone said made the area a World Heritage sight. It was hilly, with a narrow, winding road, small villages with cobblestone streets, and a castle called the Pena Palace peering down from the top of a hill. We passed through Sintra itself, and onto an even narrower road, hardly fit for two cars. We drove by another castle and further up the road passed an elegant hotel.
“Palacio de Seteais, Palace of the Seven Echos,” Simone said. “Once the home of nobility, now a hotel. We’re almost to João’s house, which is quite lovely, too. It was the eighteenth-century country place of a Portuguese marquis.”
João’s house. Odd way for a wife to express the place she shares with her husband. Their relationship was sounding more like the marriage of convenience that struck me the first time I saw her. A rich old man, a young trophy wife to keep his feet warm at night. The good life.
We turned past a row of ten-foot-tall hedges and turned into the open gateway and down a long driveway lined with regal Italian cypresses. The gray stone house at the end of the driveway was poised at a walled cliff. The Atlantic was beyond. Behind me, on the crown of a mountain, was Pena Palace.
It didn’t smell of money—it stank of it.
João was waiting for us by a swimming pool elevated so that a swimmer could have a view of the ocean through a glass partition.
I was right on with my guess about the Portuguese Jack La Lanne. João had the complexion of polished antique bronze, silken white hair, and luxuriously thick white eyebrows. A snappy casual dresser, he was slender built, his skin firm, pulled tight across his facial bones, almost wrinkle-free. His short-sleeved shirt exposed muscles that were hard and thick. Obviously a guy who took care of himself. He was a perfect specimen of a man in his golden years. All except for the wheelchair. I wasn’t expecting that.
“Shot in the back a couple years ago, playing cards,” he said, “just like your Wild Bill Hickcok.”
“Holding aces and eights?” I asked, referring to the hand called bad luck after Hickcok was murdered holding it.
“Just a pair of aces in my hand and another pair up my sleeve.” He laughed. “Leo fucked you.”
Nothing like getting right down to business.
The portable bar on the patio had a dozen bottles of wine. I sipped a glass of vinho tinto, red wine, as I listened. And studied my father’s old friend.
Nothing about João was consistent. He was married to a woman half his age. Built like the proverbial brick shithouse even in his old age, he was hostage to a wheelchair. The house he lived in was a genuine antique, a fabulous place that once entertained kings and queens. But the swimming pool beside us was ultramodern, black bottomed with lots of gilt running through it. Greek and Romanesque marble gods hung out around the pool. Large imperial columns separated the pool patio from the ocean view.
The effect was supposed to make the patio look old and rich. It struck me as nouveau riche, tastelessly ostentatious. Maybe João’s designer did movies about the Roman Empire and had a spare set left over.
Large sardines, boiled barnacles called percebes, and cheese aperitivos were set out by an elderly woman I took to be the housekeeper. The sardines were served Portuguese style—I had to gut them myself. I would have expected caviar and champagne from the ambiance of the house. Even the wine was a surprise. It was a good, inexpensive, red table wine, what the Portuguese called vinho tinto de mesa.
Simone kissed João when we arrived. Now she sat quietly as he spoke, the good wife.
“I’m the one who suggested to Bernie that he consider getting into the diamond-mining business.”
João had a low, liquid voice, like a fine aged wine. It was the kind of voice that massaged you, made you feel comfortable—just before the knife slipped between your ribs. If I hadn’t remembered my father’s distrust of João, I would have been sucked in. Once I knew there was a relationship between Portugal and Angola, it wasn’t hard to put João into the picture. Marni told me on the plane that when the Portuguese colonists left the country in 1975, some of them carried wine bottles full of diamonds out of the country. I could imagine João waiting at the Lisbon airport to meet the planes with cash and a diamond scale.
“I had no idea Bernie would end up sinking your entire inheritance into the mine. I expected him to spread the risk around, but he only brought in Leo, which turned into a disaster. When Bernie had to raise money on a cash call, Leo put the screws to him—and you.”
“Leo knew how to play Bernie. Jerked on his ego,” I said.
“Isn’t that how you control a man? Men are controlled either by money or a woman. Most can’t pass up either.” He gave Simone a meaningful look.
He was right about Bernie—his trigger point was money. But it wasn’t because Bernie was ostentatious. Hell, he probably would have stayed in his rent-controlled apartment if he had won a multistate lottery. No, with him it was a way to get respect and admiration from others. Hell, Bernie wore polyester suits and imitation-leather shoes even in his salad days. Had he spent my money on clothes, cars, and women, I could have understood it better than some screwball mining scheme.
“I have a feeling the mine must have been salted,” I said. “That would have suckered Bernie in. Leo found out about it and bailed out. Leo’s that kind—a nerd, but he knows how to make money. And keep what he makes.”
I never let anything in my voice expose my suspicion that João might have set the whole deal up.
João shook his head. “You’ll have to explain what you mean by ‘salting’ a mine.”
“Tell you the truth, I have little idea myself, at least in terms of a diamond mine. When I was a kid I saw an old movie where the crooks made a mine appear to have gold deposits by shooting gold into the mine with a shotgun. I can’t imagine that being done with diamonds. Not that it would have lured Bernie in, anyway. I’m sure he never saw the mine.”
“You wouldn’t create a false impression of diamonds by physically planting diamonds in the mine. It would be done through fraudulent geology reports. And you’re right, Bernie never saw the mine. He bought the mine based upon my recommendation.”
“Great. Then I can thank you for setting Bernie up to screw me. Is that what you’re telling me?”
“You have Bernie and Leo to blame,” João said. “I didn’t know your inheritance was going into the deal.”
“It looks like the mine was a bad investment no matter how you cut it. I still own the mine and I’m told it’s losing money. Why’d you recommend Bernie get into something that was bleeding money?”
“The mine was never expected to make money; Bernie knew that going in.”
“Excuse me? Bernie was investing my money in a mine that wasn’t expected to turn a profit?”
“It was a way of opening a door to other opportunities.”
“What opportunities?”
“I assume you know how the world’s diamond industry works. Most of the diamonds coming out of Africa are controlled by De Beers and their system of sight holders. It’s a private club and those of us who aren’t members are left scrabbling for stones where we can. I’ve had good contacts in Africa over the years, especially in Angola because of the Portuguese background of the country, but as people get older and die or retire, and regimes change, most of my Angolan resources have dried up. However, while that
was happening, another phenomena was at work. There is worldwide concern over the conflict diamonds—”
“Blood diamonds. The ones that fuel the wars and civil wars on the continent.” Marni would have been proud of me.
“Blood diamonds, war diamonds, conflict—whatever you call them, it’s diamonds for weapons. There are efforts being made to stop the trade.” João shook his head. “Such naiveté. As if the warring factions wouldn’t find other ways to finance their fighting, methods much more cruel than taking part of the diamond output to buy weapons. The efforts to stop the trade have encouraged a boycott of diamonds from the countries where fighting is being financed by diamond production.”
João paused and took a sip of wine. “As you know, diamonds do not have fingerprints. Whether a diamond was mined in Angola, the Congo, or Siberia, no one can tell.”
“I’ve heard that they’re trying to develop ways of telling.”
“True, true, but it will never be that precise because there are areas in Africa where the same billion-year-old volcanic eruption created diamonds that are spread over more than one country. Those diamonds will all have the same fingerprint. Regardless, the mounting boycott of conflict diamonds has created a great opportunity for us.”
I caught the “us” and let it fly over my shoulder. “Are Angolan diamonds on the boycott list?” It was an important question. I didn’t know if my money-losing mine could ever be made profitable, but it was a foregone conclusion if on top of everything else, it wasn’t possible to sell diamonds mined from it.
“No. Angola is presently in a transitory period. Savimbi and the government have made a temporary peace. Technically, that makes Angola no longer a war zone.”
“Technically?”
“The peace won’t last. I give it a year, maybe two. Savimbi is not sane, he’s a complete lunatic, nor is the government truly representative of the people. It won’t be long before the honeymoon turns into a violent divorce. They’ve been fighting for decades, murdering and butchering each other. A piece of paper called a peace agreement can’t soak up all the blood that’s been spilled.”
“How did Bernie and my diamond mine fit into this bizarre quagmire of civil war and the international furor over blood diamonds?”
“There is a certification process for diamonds. To avoid the boycott, a diamond must come with a certificate that it was mined in a country not on the list of warring nations.”
I put it together. “Diamonds don’t have fingerprints. You mine the diamonds in Sierra Leone or some other place on the prohibited list, get a certificate from a mine in Angola, and you can sell the diamonds in the open market. Because they’re tainted, you get blood diamonds much cheaper than other diamonds. Yet they sell the same as other stones.”
“Very good.” João clapped his hands. “You have your father’s intuitive powers. Yes, you get the diamonds much cheaper—but not just because they are conflict diamonds. Even more important than the pedigree of the diamonds is how they’re paid for. It is a system of barter, not cash-and-carry.”
“What are they bartered for?”
“The warlords would often rather have weapons than money. Traders who go in and offer them arms and ammunition, rather than just money, are fulfilling a need. Like your American movies, the transactions are probably not unlike the gun runners who used to haul wagonloads of repeating rifles to tribes during the days of the Indian wars in the Old West. Only these war supplies come in jet transport planes and the weaponry often includes battle tanks and ground-to-air missiles.”
“Where do diamond dealers get that kind of weaponry?”
“Just as there is a boycott on buying blood diamonds from the African warlords, there is a prohibition against selling them arms. The weapons are, shall we say, black-market items, many of them purchased surreptitiously in the Soviet Union as that country undergoes massive economic problems.
“Naturally, there is a tremendous markup on the prices, not to mention added expense in getting them from one country to another. The system of payoffs is mind-boggling. A rifle that would sell for three hundred dollars in a sale sanctioned by the government where it was manufactured sells for many times that when it is delivered to a dirt airfield in the middle of a jungle in the middle of a war.”
I sipped my wine and thought about it. It was a clever scheme. About as dirty as it can get. And probably as profitable as the illegal drug trade. “You pay much less for the diamonds than you would on the open market, and the payment is made by weapons that are grossly overpriced. You then turn around and sell the diamonds for their regular market price. You double-end the deal by gouging both the buyer and seller.”
“Exactamente! Now do you see why the mine was not expected to make a profit?”
“Yeah, and I can see why Bernie would have jumped at the opportunity. He would have his own mine. It didn’t matter that the mine was hemorrhaging red ink mining diamonds. The diamond production at the mine is irrelevant. The real payoff would be in providing certificates for blood diamonds. Bernie gets to walk around the Diamond District with pockets full of diamonds that he tells people came from his own mine, he gets blood diamonds cheap, and you rack it in as a middleman between the mine owner and warlords.”
João clapped his hands again and Simone let out one of her laughs. “It was what you Americans would call a win–win scenario, yes?” he asked.
“Yeah, but if it’s such a brilliant idea, why don’t you tell me what went so wrong that my inheritance got pissed down the drain—and made poor Bernie take a nosedive out a high-rise window.”
João shook his head. His expression was one of genuine regret. “We could have made buckets of diamonds on the deal and a few pennies’ worth of lead defeated us.”
“Come again?”
“The warlord we made our deal with took a nine-millimeter round in his left eye before the matter was completed. I understand it ricocheted inside his thick skull a while before coming to rest.”
“So why would one deal squelch the scheme?”
“These matters are often a three-party transaction—the diamond dealer, arms dealer, and warlord. In order to maximize our profits, we—Bernie, Leo, and myself—decided to supply the weapons used in the transaction. That meant putting out a great deal of money—”
“Especially after Bernie already put out millions for a mine.”
“True, and the arms and transportation cost millions more. Everything went fine until a government army patrol stumbled upon our airfield when the exchange was being made. Shots were exchanged and an unlucky bullet struck our warlord.” João shook his head again. “The government patrol was run off, but as soon as their leader went down, his underlings started warring among themselves for the diamonds and the weapons. They parked a jeep in front of the plane to keep it from taking off while they argued. The argument turned into a fight and the plane and its contents became casualties. We ended up getting nothing out of the deal.”
“Jesus, this was much too complicated for Bernie,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief. “He wasn’t a bad guy or stupid, he was a pretty good diamond merchant on an even playing field. But this blood-diamond stuff wasn’t the business he knew. Everything went to hell and he found himself ass-high in alligators.”
“You have my sincerest regret,” João said. “I had no idea he had gambled so much. I suffered the greatest loss, but I had other assets to keep me afloat. I didn’t realize Bernie basically had only your estate to gamble.”
I wasn’t buying João’s sympathy act. He wasn’t anyone to cry over someone else’s spilled blood. But there was still no percentage in taking him on until I knew all the cards he held.
All my logic and reasoning went to hell when I met his eyes. Yeah, he was deadly serious, but there was a hint of amusement in his eyes. He was toying with me. It pissed me off.
“So you got Bernie in over his head and fucked with his mind until he lost everything he had and everything I had,” I said to João. “Is that
the bottom line?”
“Bernie knew exactly what he was getting into,” João said gravely. “I also suffered a great loss. Bernie paid for the mine, but I covered the lion’s share of the purchase of arms. When the deal went through, I lost my collateral, something I cherish more than life itself. I regret that the son of my old friend was inadvertently damaged by the situation.” He spread his hands on the patio table. “However, the damage can still be undone.”
“I still own the mine, you still have a contact for the diamond–gun exchange. Is that what the invitation to Lisbon is all about?”
João chuckled. Not the humorous laugh that his wife often came out with, but the sound a hunter makes when a funny thought occurs to him as he’s about to shoot a deer between the eyes.
“As I said, you have your father’s gift of insight. He always knew what I was thinking—even before I did. But yes, as you put it, that’s about it. You have a mine that is worthless at the moment, but that can be put to a valuable use. It is a cover for issuing certifications. I have a contact with another warlord who has buckets of diamonds and is in need of weapons. And I have an arms dealer lined up to provide the barter items.”
“I don’t have the money to finance a deal,” I said.
“Neither do I, at least not one this size. Besides the disaster that Bernie was a part of, I’ve had other reverses caused by situations in Angola. This time the arms merchant will be part of the deal.”
“What do you want from me? And what’s in it for me?”
“As the mine owner, you can sign certifications for the diamonds we get. The certifications have to be signed in Angola and certified in Angola. Bernie would have flown there once we had the diamonds.”
Heat of Passion Page 9