While the planes were still being unloaded, the Bey’s chopper touched down a few hundred yards from the tent. The officer who was supervising me received the call to proceed. “The colonel has authorized the release of the payment.”
Half of the buckets were loaded onto a truck. I signaled Gomez. He brought the Land Rover over and we loaded the rest of the buckets into it. We drove out to the Bey’s chopper. Four of his men were standing by the chopper. They looked as lethal as Jomba’s. I was the only one without an army.
The Bey stepped down from the big gunship as we pulled up. He smiled and gave Simone a little bow. “Senhora.”
She gave him a tight smile back.
Another table with a battery-powered lamp was set up. We watched as another man came out of the chopper, sat down at the table and began to examine stones from the cans.
“I trust you,” the Bey said, “but we have to make sure the buckets were not switched behind your back.”
He trusted me about as much as I trusted him.
After the diamond examiner finished, he gave the Bey a nod. The Bey held out a small pouch. I took it and felt its contents. It was the fire diamond. I didn’t open the pouch. Jomba’s men were standing by and I didn’t want them to see what I had gotten. I gave the Bey the certifications.
“Adeus,” he said, waving as he climbed into the chopper. “Boa sorte!”
Good-bye and good luck. My sentiments exactly.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” I told Gomez. Simone and I climbed into the backseat and Gomez got the Rover moving. Jomba was busy getting his weapons. I wanted to be out of sight, out of mind before he thought about other things. And if Savimbi’s men arrived, there would be outright warfare.
The change in landing spots could be the death of me, I thought. After I was told by the Bey that the location had changed, I never had a chance to call Kirk and tell him. Simone and Gomez were glued to me. Either one could have tipped off Jomba that I was playing a double hand.
My days were numbered in Angola. They would be numbered period, if I stuck around and Savimbi got his hands on me. Once he found out there was a new location for the exchange, he’ll think that I double-crossed him, deliberately misled him.
We hadn’t gone more than a couple miles when I saw a familiar-looking pickup truck parked along the road. It was the mine truck which Cross used to take Kruger to the airfield. Cross was standing by it. He must have dropped off Kruger and had come back. Someone tipped him off that the landing point had been changed. It hit me in a flash—the Bey told him. That’s why it was so easy to turn over the diamond to me rather than João. No one expected me to keep it.
Gomez started to pull over. “Keep going,” I yelled.
“Pull over,” Simone said.
“Yes, senhora.”
Yes, senhora?
Something jabbed me in the side. It was a small, black pistol, the kind of automatic my father used to call a “woman’s purse gun.”
“I told you to search me.”
“Gomez, whatever she offered you, I’ll double.”
He shook his head as he brought the car up next to where Cross was standing. “I’m sorry, senhore, but what she offers only a woman can give.”
Cross opened my door.
“Get out,” he said.
I got out. Gomez got out of the driver’s side and Simone scooted out behind me. As she climbed out, Cross grabbed her gun hand and twisted it behind her. He took the gun away from her and shoved her away. He put her gun away and pulled out a bigger gun.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Get on the ground,” he told her and Gomez, “facedown.”
When they were both on the ground, he asked me, “Where are the diamonds?”
I nodded at the back of the Rover.
He opened the back and twisted the lid off a bucket. “Jesus Joseph Mary.”
It was an awesome sight, buckets of diamonds.
He grinned at me. “How much are in these cans?”
I shrugged. “Maybe eight, ten million.”
“Partners?” he asked.
“I told you two million. That’s about half of my share. If you take João’s, you won’t live long enough to enjoy it.”
“I might take that risk.”
“There will be no place on earth where you can hide,” Simone said from the ground.
He ignored her. “You make the call, bubba. Do we take the whole nine yards? Or theirs, too?”
The “we” gave me a dose of relief. He was on my side.
“Let’s just be rich, not greedy.”
“You got it. You can get up, bitch.”
She got up, howling at Cross with street language that would have even surprised her daughter Jonny.
We suddenly had company. Jeeps pulled up. The first person I saw was Jomba in his jeep with the skull hood ornament.
Then I saw who was sitting beside him and nearly shit my pants.
It was the major, the one who had taken care of us at Savimbi’s.
Cross picked up on it, too. He looked at me. “I think we are fucked.”
Jomba and the major got out and walked up to us. Both were grinning. “You left in a hurry, Senhore Liberte. But you took my diamonds with you. We were on our way to the mine to get them back, but you saved us the trouble. Get the buckets,” he told one of his men.
Simone stepped forward. “Those diamonds belong to my husband. If you touch them, there will be a telephone call made to Savimbi, telling him that you are plotting against him.”
They both howled with laughter at her. Jomba was slapping the ground with his swagger stick, bent over with laughter.
Cross and I looked at each other again. We both got it. Simone still didn’t get it. I grabbed her arm and pulled her back from Jomba. Her mouth would get us both killed.
“Shut up,” I told her.
She wasn’t stupid—she shut up.
When the buckets had been transferred, Jomba called over Gomez. I could see the beads of perspiration on the driver’s forehead as he walked over to him. Jomba put his arm around Gomez’s shoulders and walked him to the side of the road.
He shot him in the head. Gomez’s body flew backward, off the road.
Jomba put away his gun and shook his head. “He was my eyes at the mine, now I will have to replace him. He would not have betrayed me for money, but like all men, he was weak when it came to a woman.”
He tapped his swagger stick against my chest. This time I didn’t try to push it away. I expected to die.
“You want the woman dead?” he asked.
“No.” My voice had shook. “No, I don’t.”
“Okay. I give you the woman.” He laughed and grabbed his crouch and did a humping motion. “And Savimbi says you keep your mine. But I get the diamonds.”
Jomba and the major roared with laughter as they returned to their jeep.
My knees were weak. I jumped in behind the wheel of the Rover. Cross started to get in the front passenger seat but changed his mind. “You ride up front,” he told Simone. “For all I know, you have a gun up your snatch.”
“That fool Jomba,” she said. “João will let Savimbi know he’s plotting against him. He’ll never enjoy what he stole from us.”
“You still don’t get it,” I told her. “The weapons were for Savimbi. Jomba’s not working against him, he’s working for him.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The peace accord between Savimbi and the government is going out the window. Savimbi needs weapons, he has diamonds to buy them with, but he can’t buy them openly. He sets up a deal, using Jomba as a front. And he uses Angolan diamonds, ones he’s been collecting from the mines for years. There was no need to certify the diamonds, they were all Angolan. It was all a charade in case the government found out. If that happened, Savimbi would claim Jomba was plotting against him.”
We drove directly to the airfield where Simone’s charter was waiting. No one spoke
during the entire ride. When we got there, she got out without saying a word. Cross and I were halfway back to the mine when he let out a big sigh.
“Fuck, I was rich for a minute. A shitload of diamonds, they were all mine. I had my own island, the Riviera, beautiful women, the whole nine yards, right in my hand. Now all I got to keep me company is pulling my pud.”
“You still have a piece of the mine.”
It was his turn to howl with laughter. “Yeah, and all the fuckin’ muddy water I can drink.”
57
Kruger came back the next day, cursing me for having wasted his time with a trip to Luanda. “I’m sick of this goddamn bloody country and your goddamn bloody mine. When I get this thing dry, I’m out of here.”
I barely saw Cross for the first couple of days after we got back. Neither one of us wanted to talk about how we lost the Big One. I got enough out of him to understand that I had been the high bidder, otherwise he would have thrown his lot in with Simone. “I made a deal to help out with the blood-diamond deal before you arrived in Angola,” he alibied. And he was right. He had agreed to screw me before he met me. I’m sure screwing a stranger is on a higher moral plane than screwing a friend.
Cross didn’t know that I had the Heart of the World. I kept that entirely to myself. When I was alone in my quarters, I pulled out the gem and examined it like a little boy surreptitiously looking at girlie magazines. Jomba didn’t know about the diamond either or I would have joined Gomez along the road.
I could feel the power of the gem as I rolled it in my fingers and it sprayed me with fire. Looking at it with a loupe was like staring into the heart of a volcano. None of my possessions—cars, boats, money, women—affected me like the fire diamond.
Giving it some thought, I believed I would kill anyone who tried to take it away.
I finally got together for dinner with Cross three days after we got back. I invited Kruger, too, but he sent a message from down in the mine that I could shove dinner up the same hole he planned to shove my entire mine up.
Dinner was as cheerful as a Baptist’s wake. Cross was moody and had too much to drink. And I didn’t try to be the life of the party.
“I’m going home,” Cross told me. “When Kruger goes, I go.”
“You’ve had it with Angola, too.”
“I thought things were tough in Michigan City, but let me tell you, bubba, my old pals who get recycled in and out of prison are choir boys compared to the bastards running—and ruining—this country.”
The door suddenly burst open and Kruger rushed in. I groaned. He looked like he had just crawled out of a muddy hole, which he had. I had never seen the man smile.
He came up to the table with a muddy chunk of mineral in his hand. I thought for a moment he was going to hit me with it.
“This came out of the goddamn tunnel that flooded.”
“Did it cause the flooding?”
“You are the worst goddamn mine manager I ever saw. You don’t know your ass from that hole in the ground out there.”
I sighed. I had brought the poor bastard into a war zone and stuck him a hundred feet below ground for weeks. All on a wild-goose chase. I wouldn’t blame him if he did hit me with the chunk.
“You know what?” I said. “Eduardo was right, putting more money into this place is good money after bad. And I’m out of good and bad money. I think we should all bail out and go home.”
“Bail out, my ass. Not after I hit a pipe.”
Cross and I froze. I looked at the chunk of gray-blue earth Kruger was holding.
“You two are so goddamn stupid you don’t even know blue earth when you see it. You’re one very rich man, Mr. Liberte.” His face broke out into a wide grin. “Damn if we all aren’t.”
PART 7
ANTWERP AND PARIS
58
The Blue Lady made me rich, but did nothing toward extending my life expectancy as the fragile peace—what Cross called a bleeding peace—between Savimbi’s guerrillas and the government slowly dissolved.
It took a year to reach the kimberlite pipe of blue earth. When we did, the horn of plenty started flowing.
“We gotta get out of this acreage in hell that passes for a country before we’re too dead to enjoy being rich,” Cross told me, after a firefight occurred on our doorstep between conflicting war-lords who wanted the same “rent.”
The only comfort I got in Angola was the fact that it would be harder for João to kill me there. I had done everything but piss on his grave, and I’d do that if I outlived him. One thing I knew from the blood I inherited from my mother: the Portuguese don’t forgive and don’t forget. And they love a good blood feud, which is how I’d come to think of the fight over the fire diamond.
I knew I’d hear from João again. I just hoped to hell I’d see the knife coming when he shoved it in my back.
“We’re leaving,” I told Cross. “Get us a plane.”
“Where are we going?”
“Antwerp.”
“Where the hell is that?”
“France, Holland, Belgium, hell I don’t know, one of those countries, I was never good at geography. All I know is that most of the best diamonds in the world go through there. Bernie and my father had dealt with a diamond merchant at the bourse in Antwerp. I gave him a call the other day and asked him to find me a buyer for the mine. He has an offer.”
“Who the hell would want to buy a diamond mine in a war zone?”
“Bernie did.”
Cross chartered a big executive jet from a French company. When I came aboard, I found out he had rented one with frills. There was champagne, caviar, a master chef, bedroom suites, and four women of easy virtue.
“Four?” I asked Cross.
“Two for me, two for you.” He grinned and blew smoke in my face. “You wouldn’t begrudge a starving man two steaks, would you? Bubba, it’s been so long since I’ve been sucked or fucked, my cock’s liable to strike one woman dead, so I need a backup.”
Who the hell was I to begrudge a starving man?
59
I showed the fire diamond to Cross on the plane.
“You smart sonofabitch,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m telling you now.”
There was a reception committee waiting for us at the airport in Antwerp. Asher van Franck, my diamond contact at the bourse, came aboard with a customs inspector. He spoke English with a heavy accent. He had arranged for us to clear customs privately because of the value of the fire diamond.
“I have the armed car, additional guards, and even the TV camera crew from CNN you requested. The people with cameras were harder to get than the men with guns.”
Franck was a tall, skinny man, six-six at least. Now over sixty, I imagined that in his youth he could have played basketball in the days when white men still played the game—if anyone played the game in Belgium, which by the way I found out from the plane’s cabin crew was where Antwerp was located. The other geography lesson I learned was that the city was the second largest port in Europe despite the fact it was on a river, fifty miles from the North Sea.
Franck’s beard, temple locks, and yarmulke advertised the fact that he was an Orthodox Jew, not a surprising cultural statement since historically, most of Antwerp’s diamond trade has been under their control.
I introduced Cross to him and noticed that Franck looked askance at the feminine foursome standing by to disembark.
“Don’t worry, I’ll make sure they wait until the news cameras are gone before they leave the plane,” I reassured him.
“What’s all the excitement about?” Cross asked. “Wouldn’t it have been better if we had just snuck into town?”
“Publicity never hurt a diamond. I’ve got one that belongs in a king’s crown. I’m going to play it to the hilt. Hell, let’s let the reporters know that a king has made an offer.”
“Which king?” Franck asked.
“It’s confidential. So confidential I haven’t fig
ured out yet which one it is.”
Cross gave me a look that told me he wasn’t happy about the fact I hadn’t discussed my plans with him. But he’d made it plain that he’d had it with diamonds and only wanted to see them on a woman’s fingers—wrapped around his dick. He jerked his thumb at me. “When I met this guy, he didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. Now look at him, Mr. Wheeler Dealer.”
Poor Franck. He looked a bit distressed. I don’t think several decades of working with Bernie and my father had prepared him for the entourage I’d arrived with.
I still hadn’t decided what I was going to do when I grew up. If the sale of the mine went through, I’d walk away from the Blue Lady with over forty million dollars in my pocket. And one of the most valuable diamonds in the world—one that wasn’t for sale. The fire diamond was a link to my father.
I wasn’t the same person anymore. Angola had changed me. I didn’t know what had happened to me in that ravaged land. Maybe working for a living changed a person. I was more thrilled about keeping the mine alive and functioning than I was about the payday. And now that I had my blood warmed up, I wasn’t sure I was ready to walk away and go back to being the irrelevant, irresponsible ass Marni believed me to be. Not that she was wrong or that I wanted to change for that reason. Mostly I liked the sense of accomplishment. It brought meaning to my life. My father and mother would have been proud of the way I had run the mine and made it a winner. That meant more to me than the money or anyone else’s opinion.
“The diamond’s in this briefcase,” I told the lead security man when he boarded, speaking to him in French. Franck translated my statement into something that sounded a little like French, but the security man understood me. “I want your automatic weapons at the ready when you take it down the steps and put the diamond in the armored car.”
Heat of Passion Page 28