“That’s all I have to do, sign a piece of paper?”
“Basically.”
“I’m not Bernie. Let me have it straight. Unlike Bernie, I won’t be taking my own life if I get fucked over in the deal.”
João gave me a humorless raptor’s grin. “Your father was not a physical man. It’s one of the things I admired about him. He did everything with his brain. I would hope his son inherited that good sense.”
“Let’s leave my father resting in peace and tell me exactly what the deal is and what my part in it is.”
João poured us each more red wine from the carafe as he spoke.
“As you might imagine, in this world there is more than one dealer willing to supply arms for diamonds. Because it is a competitive business,” he gave me another raptor’s razor-tooth grin, “a dirty competitive business, secrecy is essential. Suffice to say that the military person desiring the weapons is in Angola.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. Angolan diamonds are certifiable. Why all the secrecy?”
“Let’s call the situation one of delicate transnational proportions. The person getting the arms in Angola does not want others to know that he is receiving them. As I told you, there is a temporary peace accord between the rebels and the government. Not everyone is happy with the situation. The diamonds being used for payment are not necessarily ones that can be traced to a mine in Angola—or anywhere else, for that matter.”
That told me a lot—and nothing. It told me that whoever was passing over the diamonds for weapons was either Savimbi or a wild card, someone who didn’t want the rebel leader or the government to know.
João went on. “You will be contacted once you are in Angola by the person buying the arms. Arrangements will be made for the exchange of diamonds for weapons. You will be told the arrangements when they are finalized.”
“How dangerous is it in Angola?”
“No more than waving an Israeli flag in Baghdad or Teheran during Ramadan.”
“I’ve got a better idea. I’ll sell you the mine. You go to Angola, make the arrangements, and send me a check for my share.”
He sighed and looked to his wife. “Why is it when I am old and tired and confined to this chair that so much merda is dumped at my doorstep.” He cleared his throat. “I am afraid, senhor, that I am persona non grata in that African country. But if you do not want to get involved, that is your prerogative. It will not be difficult for me to find a struggling mine owner in Angola who is willing to participate for the five million dollars you would have earned.”
I sipped my wine and didn’t say a word. He had met my price. I don’t know how much souls were going for with the devil, but five million would make me rich and irrelevant again.
But I didn’t have to say a word. João had spent at least the last half century negotiating deals with other diamond merchants, a breed only exceeded by Persian rug dealers for a reputation of being avaricious.
“Let us drink to our new partnership,” João said.
Simone laughed.
“Do you laugh at funerals, too?” I asked her.
“Only other people’s.”
I asked João to explain why he couldn’t go back to Angola.
“The last time I was in Angola, I played poker with a rebel leader. I was shot in the back by someone who wanted his job. And even if my physical condition didn’t prohibit me from traveling in Angola, my social position would. One tends to make enemies if they stick around the diamond business long enough. The kind of enemies that are bred in equatorial Africa come looking for you with antitank rockets.
“But,” he spread his hands on the table, “if you are afraid to go, I don’t blame you. I can arrange for you to sign the mine over to someone else, perhaps the mine manager. And you would still get a percentage, perhaps as much as ten thousand a month.”
Ten thousand a month was chump change, it wouldn’t pay my champagne bill.
“Five million on one deal, that’s what you’re saying?”
“About two million on this deal. The rest will be earned within six or eight months with more deals. Once we do this one, we will have a steady clientele beating at our door. Shall we say . . . partners?”
“Who’s the third member of the team, the arms dealer?”
“A man who is known as the Bey.”
“Sounds Turkish. Algerian?”
“From one of the Soviet Muslim republics, Turkistan, I believe, but he now lives in Istanbul. Formerly a colonel in the Soviet army quartermaster corps. Left the Soviet Union one step ahead of a firing squad, or so I’ve heard. He apparently got into the black-market arms business while still in uniform. You’ve heard that expression, ‘cannon king’?”
“Not really.”
“It’s an old-fashioned way to describe a merchant of death, a man who sells weapons to warring parties—and is known to fuel the conflicts to drum up business or even engineer the onset of hostilities. I believe the German munitions manufacturer Krupp was the first warmonger described by the phrase.
“The Bey is a modern cannon king. He doesn’t manufacture weapons, of course. He buys stolen ones. No doubt initiating many of the thefts himself. And, like those of his ilk, he is not particular about who he sells to. I understand he supplied weapons to the warring Christian and Muslim sides that turned so much of Beirut into rubble, sells the ingredients for suicide bombs to the Hizbollah and stolen missile-computer technology to the Israelis.”
“Great guy to know—if you want to start a war.”
“Yes, or if you want to trade arms for diamonds. The Bey has the arms, you have the certifications, I have the person who will pay with diamonds. As you Americans say, all the bases are covered.”
I had the feeling that there were more stolen bases in the scheme than João let on. And I wasn’t completely buying his contrite confessions about “poor Bernie” and my lost millions. But right now, João was the only game in town offering me five million dollars.
I saluted João with my wine and gave Simone and him a grin.
“Funny, this will be the first real job I ever had. Look’s like it’s going to be a real killer . . .”
Simone laughed but João didn’t know how to take the remark.
We heard youthful voices and several teenage girls came out onto the patio. They were wearing G-strings and bare skin for bathing suits. It wasn’t hard to figure which one was their daughter, Juana. She had Simone’s sensuous looks. Younger and skinnier, she had that starved modelesque look of Katarina and so many other fashion-magazine models.
“Jonny, come over here, I want you to meet someone,” Simone said.
The kid sauntered over, full of a sexy fifteen-year-old’s conceit and arrogance. No doubt she had a modern fifteen-year-old’s foul mouth, too.
“This is Win Liberte,” João said. “You’ve heard me speak of him. His father was an old friend.”
She gave me a look up and down. Rude.
“You look better in magazines,” she said, speaking in English. “But I guess they touch those up.”
I gave it right back to her. “I’m surprised you read magazines,” I said. “But, of course, they have big pictures and little words.”
“Fu—”
Simone’s laugh cut her off. “You deserved that, you’re a nasty little bitch. Now go back to your friends.”
Jonny muttered a filthy Portuguese expletive about a caralho, a man’s private part, and gave me a look that told me she wasn’t finished with me.
I had to admit though, a surge of desire hit me as my eyes lingered on her baby-smooth buttocks as she walked away.
“I’ve got a better idea,” I told João, when his daughter was out of earshot. “Let’s send her to deal with the war in Angola.”
João grunted. “She would steal the diamonds and sell them for a new dress.”
“She should be disciplined more, but my husband spoils her and permits her every excess.”
“She is not half as wild and
crazy as her mother was at her age,” João rebutted.
Interesting remark. With their age difference, I wondered where he’d found his wife. On a school ground?
18
Simone showed me to a room with a view of the ocean. I couldn’t have done better than if I’d stayed at the hotel-palace down the road. The room was luxury-class.
“There’s a minibar in case you get thirsty and the buzzer to call the servants is on the end table. We want you to feel at home here. The servants will provide you with anything you want.”
The servants couldn’t provide me with an hour of lovemaking to their mistress, but I politely didn’t bring up the point.
She paused at the door.
“Would you like me to arrange dinner with her?”
“With your daughter? She’s a little young—”
“With the woman from the airport.”
“I’d appreciate getting her phone number.”
“Why don’t I arrange it so that she believes she is meeting an important contributor to the cause of world suffering.”
I laughed. “She already believes that, but I know what you mean. You think she won’t go out with me if I call?”
“What do you think?”
“It’s easy to say no over the phone.”
“Yes, and I saw her at the airport. She looks like the dedicated type, a person who fights for truth and justice. Not at all the type to waste her time with a man who loves women and fast cars.”
“You’re a smart cookie, Simone. Arrange it for me.”
She gave me a parting shot as she left.
“She’s not like us, is she?”
I stood by the window and wondered what she meant. Maybe I didn’t bleed for world suffering or serve Thanksgiving turkey to winos in the Bowery, but I didn’t think I was—then it struck me. Hell, I was just talking about a deal where I’d make a buck—five million of them to be exact—providing arms that killed people. The deal was murder piled upon immoralities and illegalities. All for filthy lucre.
I was no better than João. And probably had less excuses than he did to be involved in bad things with bad people. My father mentioned João had to fight his way off the streets, held back both by poverty and prejudices against his mulatto heritage. My guess is that Simone hadn’t come from high society, either. The only thing I had to blame for my willingness to do evil was my own stupidity and laziness in not taking care of my financial affairs.
There was another aspect to Simone’s remark that cut me and that I had to think about.
Was I really going to make a deal with the devil? Would I do illegal and immoral things for five million dollars? Acts that could fuel a war?
Look, pal, I told myself, it’s not your fight, not your duty to save the world.
I didn’t create the poverty and misery in Africa and Asia. I know Western imperialism could account for some of it, but mostly, the Third World made its own bed. My job was to make money. If people used the money to hurt each other, it wasn’t my fault. If I didn’t do it, other people would.
My conscience soothed, I started to unpack. I heard someone at the door and turned. Simone had left without closing it.
Jonny and one of her G-stringed girlfriends were in the doorway.
Jonny leaned over and kissed the girl on the mouth and pulled down the girl’s skimpy bathing suit top. She massaged the girl’s breasts and smiled at me.
“Want to fuck us?”
I smiled and went over to them.
“Come back when you grow up.”
I slammed the door. I was no fool . . . or maybe I was.
I needed a cold shower.
19
Lisbon . . . Twenty Years Ago
João entered the cool, dark dining room of the private club. It was his favorite room in the building, conveying to him the elegance of the dining room he once saw in a stately old ocean liner—before the ship was chopped up for scrap and sent off to Japan to be made into can openers and cars. Like much of the club, the walls and floors were hardwood, mahogany, and teak. There was a hint of gilt in the ceiling and polished brass strips on the walls. Palms, great ferns, and objets d’art from Portugal’s former colonial empires in Africa, India, and China, were scattered about.
He never entered the club called Palácio de la Mar without reminding himself how far he had come in life. Here he was, now a genteel middle-aged bachelor whom bankers and ship owners eyed as a potential mate for their daughters. Not that all respectable Lisbon society felt that way about him. When his membership application was considered, there were many objections to him joining the club. His social background was vague. His financial dealings often questionable. And there were rumors about him, some of which connected him to the crime organizado that controlled vice, gambling, and drugs from Porto to Faro.
In the end, it had not been his character—or lack of it—that decided the issue. A large bribe placed with a member who was the country’s finance minister gave him a sponsorship boast. And the man who was most vocal about João’s suspicious background changed his mind after he received pictures of his college-student daughter having sex with a soccer player—one on the woman’s team.
It wasn’t that João wanted to socialize with members of the club. He, in fact, did not. A nod and smile upon entry, a salute with his brandy glass or cigar when a member who had been friendly walked by were about the limits of his elbow-rubbing with Lisbon society.
After he became a member, there had been a number of invitations to parties and other social gatherings from members. He knew that the motive behind the invitations was to display him at the event, so that the host could boast about rubbing shoulders with someone they thought was a godfather of Portuguese crime. He refused them all. He also never engaged in business deals with other members, neither in terms of his own diamond business nor investing in their schemes. When a member would propose he enter into an investment, he was always polite—and noncommittal. The same was true of his gem business. When they queried him about diamonds, he referred them to a trader who secretly worked for him.
João’s reason for seeking membership had nothing to do with social climbing. He cared nothing for those people. His opinion of them was universally low. Almost all of them had inherited their social and financial positions. Portugal was an old country with established bloodlines—there was little upward mobility. People pretty well stayed at the level they were born into.
João had more than the arrogance of a self-made man toward others who pulled themselves up with family bootstraps—he had the monstrous conceit of a man who had robbed and killed.
But membership had been important to him. His reason was one of personal satisfaction, accomplishing a goal that he had set out as a boy to make. As a twelve-year-old street arab, he had shined shoes near the entrance to the club. He had seen men arrive in chauffeur-driven cars, stepping out onto the sidewalk in their handmade shoes and expensively tailored suits. Even as a child, João had been a clotheshorse—admiring fine clothing on men and women.
Wondering what the interior looked like, the exclusive inner sanctum of a privileged few, led him inside as the doorman was carrying a bag in for a member. Sticking his head in, he smelled the oil polish used on the mahogany walls. He slipped into the entryway and crept down the hall and peeked inside a lounge where men sat around tables smoking fine cigars and drinking aged brandy.
The doorman chased him out, but as he walked down the street, he swore to himself that someday he would walk into the club and have the doorman bowing and scraping. Ultimately, he had bribed and bullied a membership to satisfy that quest. As he grew older, the membership had come to mean less to him.
Frankly, the place bored the hell out of him. He now came rarely, mostly to spend time in the dining room and lounge the amount required of each member.
Senhora Tavora was at a table waiting for him.
“Senhora,” he said. He kissed her hand before sitting down.
“João
, you are so gallant. You would be surprised how few men in this world today know how to treat a lady.”
“I would not. But perhaps you would be surprised how few women in this world know how to be a lady.”
“Like you, I am not surprised, but dismayed.”
They chatted for a moment like two old friends, the gracious older woman, wealthy with pristine bloodlines, the successful businessman. Of course, both impressions were wrong. Senhora Tavora was the biggest procurer in Lisbon—and what she procured were women and men. Whether it was a light-skinned girl for an oil-rich Arab, or a teenage boy with fragile features for a man who preferred entering through the back door, the senhora was accommodating—for a price.
When he told her to meet him at his club, it had occurred to João that someone at the club might have dealt with her in the past and would recognize her. That notion amused him on two levels: they would assume that her scandalous activities were part of his organization—and be fearful that she recognized them.
They talked idly over a glass of wine before lunch, really having few interests in common. João knew the senhora first as a customer for his diamond business. And over the years, he had occasionally used her procurement services to find women.
Looking at João, one would wonder why he paid a procurer—a fancy name for a pimp—to provide him with women. In good shape physically, he had grown handsome in middle-age as his youngish face contrasted with his prematurely silver hair. The hair was part of the secret for his look of youthfulness and vitality—it was thick and full, not gray or black-streaked. When he was young, his dark skin and slightly flared nose had been marks of a mulatto and a social stigma. But age and money had been kind to him. As other men grew flabby and thin on top, his genes topped his small-but-powerful, wiry frame with that handsome spray of hair. And his money bought him a manicured, finely tailored look. But the refinements were all on the outside—he still carried two knives.
João’s problem was getting women who satisfied his particular need. Each of Senhora Tavora’s clients had their own special needs to suit their tastes. The average women bored him. He had no time for the niceties of romance and lovemaking, any more than time and patience for ordinary business affairs. João instinctively went into business deals that offered profits which were rarely available to legitimate enterprises—and he liked the danger and excitement of the shadowy world of business where deals were sometimes made in blood. He was drawn to women from a different world, too, ones with a dangerous edge.
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