“People in Angola call Savimbi a psychopathic killer, but not to his face. This is a man who personally beat to death the wife and kids of a guy who decided to oppose him. Shit, he even blew up a Red Cross hospital making artificial limbs for people he and others like him had chopped off the arms and legs of—or blew them off with land mines.”
“How can business operate in this atmosphere?”
“Savimbi and the Angolan government opposing him need money to feed their war machines. That money comes from oil and diamonds. As long as you’re profitable to the war machines, you’re tolerated. If a lower echelon kills the goose laying the diamond eggs, they die, too. And if you’re caught screwing them, they kill you, but first you’d get your arms and legs whacked off so you can think about your sins as you bleed to death.”
“Jesus.”
“No, Jesus never came this far south. And all this assumes that your own miners don’t kill you because you’ve caught too many of them stealing. Even if you survive diamond mining, you can get bitten by insects the size of birds or step on a snake that can swallow you whole. The mortality rate for small mine managers and security chiefs is enough to give heartburn to the most cynical insurance underwriter. Not that there’s such a thing as insurance in Angola. The best insurance coverage are bodyguards and bulletproof vests.”
“You’ve managed to survive. What makes you think I’m going to get killed?”
“You’re a spoiled rich kid who’s never worked a day in his life. You’ve never done anything more trying than squeezing the steering wheel of a fast car or a pair of knockers on a broad. You haven’t got one fuckin’ iota of street smarts. You’re liable to cash a check with your mouth you can’t cover with your ass. You’re going to look the wrong way and piss off some twelve-year-old kid high on drugs who has his finger on the trigger of a rusty AK-47. And I don’t wanna be standing there when your guts get spewed all over the ground because I’d be next.”
I started laughing.
Cross tried to keep his sour expression, but started laughing, too.
“This whole place is ridiculous,” I said. “If I promise not to get killed, will you stick around for a while?”
“Yeah, if you give me one good reason why you’ve come to this hellhole.”
“I’m broke. The mine’s all I have.”
That stopped him. And stumped him. The expression on his face cast doubt on my truth and veracity. “No shit?”
“No shit, José. The guy managing my money sunk everything into the Blue Lady Mine, an investment that doesn’t return a dime and no one wants to buy. I don’t like being broke, so it isn’t going to happen for long.”
He shook his head. “You think you can drop in and squeeze a few million out of Angola? Man, as black people say in white movies, you be a dreamer. It would be safer for you to go home and rob banks. Or find some broad with more money than brains who’ll keep you in the style you’re accustomed to in return for keeping her serviced.”
“Don’t underestimate me. I’ve been the best at everything I’ve ever tried. Money and diamonds are in my blood. I just haven’t paid attention to them for a while. When you were playing baseball, my father was making me evaluate diamonds. You said you came here to make a bundle. I want what’s mine and what I can earn, but I’m not greedy, not to someone who helps me. Stick by me, show me the ropes, and you won’t regret it.”
“Is this one of those ‘trust me’ situations?”
“This is a sure thing.”
“Well, there’s just one thing I want you to remember.”
“Yeah?”
“My name ain’t José, either.”
26
The next morning we took off in a four-seater chartered Cessna puddle jumper for the mining country.
“We’re heading for Cuango river country, east of Luana, in the northeast corner of the country. Most planes headed for the diamond country land at Saurimo, but that’s too much of a trek for where your mine’s located. After we land in a potato patch, we’ll drive the rest of the way to the mine, north toward Zaire. The entire diamond-mining area is out of bounds for foreigners unless they’re employed in the industry.”
“Is a plane the only way in?”
“It’s the safest and fastest. A small plane like this will get us a couple hours from the mine.”
“Tell me about Eduardo.”
Cross shrugged. “Professional mine manager, a mestizo, born in Angola. His father was a Portuguese coffee planter in colonial days, got into mining after the plantation was burned in the colonial war. His mother was an Ovimbundu, a major ethnic group in the country. Eduardo’s been around mines most of his life. He’s smart enough not to cheat Savimbi’s rep who comes around to collect the rent. If he wasn’t, he’d be dead long ago.”
“Who owned the mine before I, uh, bought it?”
“Some corporation with headquarters in Lisbon.”
“Ever hear of João Carmona?”
“I’ve heard of him.” Cross was curt.
“And?”
He shrugged. “Carmona’s a crook, which is not always a bad thing in Angola, since we’re all crooks to one extent or another. I heard he’s some sort of Portuguese godfather of the Mafia variety. He’s got a bad reputation in the mining country, among mine owners he’s cheated. He’s persona non grata in the country because he also made a mistake of cheating the government and the rebels. I told you about Savimbi. He’s not a guy that you cheat. He had Carmona shot in the spine. I was told the idea was to cripple him, not kill him. That way he could spend the rest of his life thinking about what happens to people who fuck over Savimbi.”
“Did Carmona ever have ownership rights in the Blue Lady?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been with the mine less than a year and you owned it during that time. He could have been an owner, through that Portuguese corporation that had it before. If he was, he’d have been anxious to get rid of it before Savimbi found out and took over the mine to get it out of Carmona’s hands. Eduardo would know, he’s been around a lot longer and knows the corporate crap. If he’ll tell you.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Why wouldn’t he tell me?”
Another shrug. “Eduardo lives in Angola. That means his first order of business is to survive. You’re a ship passing in the night. You may be gone tomorrow. Or dead. He’s got to keep all his options open. However you look at it, you’re a short-timer. He’s not going to burn any bridges for you, bro.”
“Why didn’t he meet me in Luanda?”
“I don’t know, maybe he’s like me, he doesn’t give a shit and plans to quit anyway. Your mine is not the most profitable one around. I was happy to take his place picking you up because I needed to conduct some business in Luanda.”
“He gets a decent salary. You don’t do bad, either.”
“Bullshit. Those are stateside salaries, neither one of us would work in Angola for that kind of money. We’re both working claims on the side, buying, selling, trading them, staking other prospectors for a piece of the action.”
João said the people who worked for me would also steal a part of their salary. But I didn’t know Cross well enough to bring up the subject. One thing I did catch in his tone—there was no love lost between him and Eduardo. Nor was Eduardo technically his boss. João told me many mine owners keep an administrative distance between the head of mining operations and the head of security, as a balance of power. If the two get together to steal, they could rape a mine. Of course, with an absentee owner like the Blue Lady’s had, there has been no one around to keep them apart.
From the coast, the ground beneath us rose in green foothills and highlands as we flew toward diamond country.
Two hours into the flight, we landed at a dirt field outside a small town. The air was hot and almost as humid as Luanda’s. I followed Cross’s example and stuffed a handkerchief down the back of my collar to catch sweat. I had traded in my fashionable sports clothes for a nondescript khaki shirt and pants
I picked up in Luanda. Long sleeves and mosquito repellent were the order of the day. I bought boots that laced almost to my knees.
“Hoping you only run into short snakes?” Cross asked when he saw my boots.
An African driver with a Land Rover that looked like it lost against Rommel in North Africa back during the Big One drove up to the plane after it stopped taxiing. A wooden sign on the side proclaimed MINA AZULA SENHORA, BLUE LADY MINE, in faded black letters. It wasn’t hard to imagine how the mine got its name. The place to find diamonds is “blue” earth deposits.
“This is Gomez,” Cross said, indicating the grinning, sweating driver. “He drives us, drives for supplies, drives for anything we need. Just think of him as the stagecoach driver hauling loads through Apache country.”
The butt of a pistol protruded from under Gomez’s shirt. A rifle was mounted above the front windshield inside the Rover.
Leaving the landing field, on the outskirts of a dusty little town, we stopped where a fifty-gallon oil drum had been set up in the middle of the road. Three men in army fatigues hung out in the shade, smoking and throwing dice. One of them lazily sauntered over to the car to accept the money Gomez gave him.
“Toll,” Cross said.
We passed a house with cement walls and iron bars on the windows and front porch. A fat man sitting on a rocking chair on the steel-caged porch waved and shouted a greeting to Cross as we drove by.
“That’s Ortego, the biggest diamond broker in the area. He buys stuff from the river people and thieves. More diamonds pass through his fat paws every month than we produce in a year. He looks like an easy pushover, but he killed two men in the last year who thought that.”
Leaving the one-street town, we stopped at another fifty-gallon drum.
“I wish I had the toll concession,” I said.
An hour out of town as we drove along a dirt road in a winding river canyon we began to see men and women working the river.
“There’re two types of diamond gathering in the region,” Cross said. “At the mine, we burrow tunnels into the ground, trying to find and follow a kimberlite, a diamond pipe, what they’d call a ‘vein’ in gold or silver mining. But what you see here on the river is the most basic way of finding diamonds. Alluvial mining. Diamonds were created deep in the earth, under tremendous pressure. They were brought up toward the surface by volcanic action. Erosion, earthquakes, wind, rain, especially river action, uncovered diamond pipes and pushed the diamonds many miles downstream.
“These people are individual diggers, garimpeiros. They wade into the river and haul up mud and gravel in the hopes of finding roughs. Their methods are about the same as used in old-time Gold Rushes a hundred and fifty years ago—a pick, a pan, and a man, or in this case, men, women, and children. Some of the diggers get angels like me who’ll throw in a few dollars a month for beans in return for a percentage. But the percentage is usually zero. Some of the better-financed diggers have sluice boxes or vacuums to suck up more of the river bottom. Most of them just work with their two hands and a bucket.”
I knew more about the history of diamond mining than the actual process. Knowledge conveyed again by my father. Up until the mid-1800s diamonds had been the sole possession of royalty and the super-rich because the supply of them, mostly from Brazil and India, had been small. In 1867 a fifteen-year-old Boer farm boy walking along a riverbank picked up a glittering stone that turned out to be a 21-carat diamond. But it was considered a fluke and caused little excitement. Two years later another boy found a diamond, this time an 85.5-carat stone, the Star of South Africa—and the rush was on. Seamen deserted their ships in African ports, gold miners abandoned their claims, farmers pushed aside their plows, tens of thousands of them, mining thirty-foot-by-thirty-foot claims, “ten coffin-size,” as the saying went.
Ultimately the mining industry also went underground, in search of those kimberlite pipes Cross mentioned. All diamonds, except for the ones that rode to earth on meteorites, came from deep in the mantle of the earth, created when carbon was put under tremendous pressure and temperature billions of years ago. Violent, cataclysmic eruptions drove the diamonds up in carrot-shaped “pipes” of volcanic material bluish-gray in color. The material that brought the diamonds up was called kimberlite, named after the “big hole” in Kimberley, South Africa, one of the first diamond mines.
Kimberlite pipes that reached to or near the surface became eroded from weather and earthquakes over billions of years and diamonds in them were carried hundreds or even thousands of miles along rivers and into the sea.
An African family, a man, woman, and two small children came up from the river as the Land Rover approached. The older man’s right arm was missing.
“A mutilado,” I said, using a word I’d heard describing amputees. “Car accident?”
“Machete,” Cross said. “Some of the river miners were late with their payment to a rebel strongman a couple years ago. It didn’t matter which ones hadn’t paid, Savimbi’s men just pulled a dozen out of the water and chopped off arms. Just one arm per man, though, so they could still work. If they didn’t die from the wound.”
Cross got out of the car and approached them as an old friend, shaking hands, chattering. He pulled a handful of candy out of his pocket and gave it to the kids. To my ear, newly tuned in Luanda, it sounded like they were speaking a mixed pot of Portuguese and some African language. Portuguese was the official language of the country, but it wasn’t heavily spoken outside cities and towns.
After the social preliminaries were over, the man handed Cross several stones. Cross held them up to the light and used a loupe to examine them. After more dialogue, Cross gave them money and got back into the vehicle.
“One of my partners. I grubstake some of the river people, usually just for food and supplies, for a percentage. Other times I buy up claims and get people to work them, again for a percentage.” He handed me the diamonds. “Any idea what they’re worth?”
It was a test. I took out my father’s loupe and gave them a once-over. “They’re flawed but workable. In New York, maybe a thousand, fifteen hundred. I have no idea how much here.”
“Less than ten cents on the dollar to what they’ll be worth wholesale in New York or Antwerp, probably a hundred dollars from Ortego, the diamond man. And that’s a couple month’s haul for that family, and a good one, and they only get half after expenses. But a few dollars is a lot of money to people who have nothing. I’ll sell these to Ortego and pay a tax on them to the rebels.”
Cross sneered at me. “I pick up an extra thousand each week with my outside activities, not even tip money to a rich guy like you, but it keeps my feet in the business.”
“Waiting for the big one.”
“Waiting for the big one. And the gods like to play games with the big one. There’re just enough decent stones found to whet your appetite, keep you sweating and cussing, but not enough to get rich on. And every once in a while lightning strikes. Couple months ago a woman working a claim found an eighty-carat stone, flawed, but still worth a couple hundred thousand, even to the fat man. But I don’t know how much the woman and her husband got—if anything. Some people say they’re in Luanda living like kings. Others say their bodies are buried in back of the fat man’s house. Or in some mass grave the rebels dig periodically.”
“What do you say?”
“I say I’m going to make it big, kick a rock and find out it’s a thousand-carat flawless blue. I’m going to sell it to one of those Silicon Valley billionaire computer nerds and buy me an island somewhere in the South Pacific with palm trees, beautiful native women, and my own microbrewery. Just like in the movies.”
27
The mine was on top of a hill. It looked like a prison from the bottom of the hill and the impression wasn’t far from the truth. It had a ten-foot chain-link outer fence with barbed wire, plus an inner fence made of solid wall, eight feet tall with another four feet of barbed wire at the top. Between the two fences I spo
tted a guard walking a Doberman. The first thing we came to was a guardhouse.
“Jesus. I feel like I’m about to serve a term at Alcatraz.”
“There are three things you have to know about diamond mining,” Cross said. “Security, security, security. If there is any way anyone anytime can get their hands on diamonds, they’ll figure out a way to steal them. They swallow them, stick them up their ass, fly them out with pigeons, throw them in garbage that their wives will pick through at the dump, wedge them into the tires of a supply truck, or drop them in the gas tank for their accomplices to pick up later. And those are just some of the ways.
“The workers sign on for three-month stints and never leave the compound during that time. Because diamonds are small and can be swallowed by the dozens, not to mention stuffed in other orifices of the body when they quit or leave the mine for R and R, the workers get X-rayed. So does anyone else and anything that comes into contact with the miners, except Eduardo and me. Work here long enough and you start to glow in the dark. And hell, that isn’t anywhere near foolproof. They make deals with the X-ray technician to phony up the results of the X-rays or even mess with the machines.”
Eduardo wasn’t in the office when we arrived. His bookkeeper, Carlotta Santos, a top-heavy woman in a dress that barely constrained her well-nourished body, was surprised to see us. Cross mentioned that Carlotta was also of Portuguese-Angolan mix.
From the appearance of the woman, I immediately latched onto the idea that she was something more than clerical help to Eduardo. Cross told me Eduardo’s wife and kids were living in Luanda. One look at the bookkeeper and I was sure he kept his bed warm here at the mine with her. I admit to being a little more sensitive about who is or isn’t doing it than most people.
For a lowly bookkeeper, she was wearing some fine stones. One on a necklace was a good two carats. To the naked eye, it looked like more than a couple years’ salary for her, even at the rate of inflated salaries in the diamond region.
Heat of Passion Page 14