The Russian Pink

by Matthew Hart

  for Heather

  yet from those flames

  No light, but rather darkness visible

  —Paradise Lost, Book I

  PROLOGUE

  All diamonds are blood diamonds. It’s just a question of whose blood.

  On a black August night Piet Louw and Denny Vorster vacuumed a 1,512-carat diamond out of the Chicapa River, Lunda Norte Province, northeastern Angola, not far from the Congo border. The scent of jungle orchids drenched the air. The screams of animals tore strips out of the velvet night.

  Piet was taking a leak from the side of the barge. It was Denny’s turn in the water. Breathing through an air hose, he was down below on the riverbed, harvesting the gravels with a suction tube. The river was quiet. The only sounds were the shrieks from the bush, the rhythmic whirring of the pump, and the rattle of stones on the sizing screen. Then came a loud clang as something heavy hit the steel mesh. It rolled off and landed on the wooden deck with a thump.

  Piet turned around from where he was standing and stared. The stone lay in the dim circle of illumination outside the harsh light around the diamond screen. He zipped up his fly, stepped over, and squatted down to have a look.

  The stone on the deck was caked in hard material, and yet it glowed. Light found its way into it through cracks, and the crystal fed on the light, magnifying it and driving it back out. In this way the power of the diamond pierced the covering. It pierced Piet’s brain.

  Through narrow fissures in the surface encrustation, the jewel’s light throbbed like the pulse of a ferocious god.

  Piet found a length of mooring chain and coiled it at the side of the barge. Then he dragged over the concrete blocks they sometimes used as anchors. He threaded the chain through the blocks. He took out his bush knife, knelt on the deck, and placed his hand on the cold, wet hose that pumped air to Denny. With a swipe, he slashed it.

  Fifteen seconds later Denny burst to the surface gasping and choking. Piet leaned over and dealt him a crushing blow to the skull with a forty-inch pipe wrench. He pulled Denny alongside, wrapped the anchor chain and blocks around his torso, and let the body go. It vanished in the murky water.

  Now Piet owned the whole diamond.

  He wrapped it in a piece of sacking, climbed into the aluminum skiff, and headed downriver to his camp. He cut the outboard fifty yards from the dock and drifted in, guiding the boat with the oars so as not to wake the cook.

  Quietly, his heart pounding, he carried the stone to the little diamond lab behind the machine shed. He went in and locked the door. He put the stone in a sink under a stream of water and picked and pried at the hard-caked mud. A sudden fear clutched at him. He snatched up a diamond tester, turned it on, and pressed the tip through a crack until it touched the stone.

  Diamond.

  The stone filled his hand like a grapefruit. He had a diamond scale in the lab, but the jewel was too big to fit on it. A staggering, incomprehensibly massive diamond.

  But the color! It seethed. It clamored for release. A savage, unconquerable pink. Was that the true color, or was the diamond taking something from the rocky crust that he couldn’t pick off? If it was a pink it would be worth tens of millions. No, hundreds of millions.

  He packed it carefully in bubble wrap, swathed it in oily burlap, and stuffed it in a canvas bag. His mind was whirling. How could he get the diamond out of Angola?

  He couldn’t take it through the capital, Luanda, where all diamond exports were supposed to go. The Angolans would never let such a stone escape, no matter what bribe he paid. He would have to take it straight out of the country from Saurimo, the nearest city.

  He hid the bag carefully behind a row of oil drums, turned out the light, and locked the door behind him.

  No lock can keep out fear.

  The jewel had established its power inside his head. The power swelled and spread outward into the night, flowing into the forest like a silent animal. As soon as he stepped away from the shack the animal was there already, writhing through the dark leaves that crowded the edge of the camp. Piet found himself gulping for breath. He stumbled back in a sudden panic, tearing and scrabbling at the lock when his key jammed. He rushed inside and hurled a drum aside and grabbed the canvas bag. He ripped off the careful packaging until the stone appeared and a lurid glow spilled out and lapped at Piet’s crooked face. He stood still then, listening. No sound came from the cook’s house. Lucky for the cook.

  He carefully rewrapped the diamond, shouldered the bag, and took a path that led downriver to a neighboring camp where some Russians had a diamond mill that processed shoreside gravel. They had a beat-up MI-6 Soviet military helicopter that they used to transport fuel and machinery from Saurimo.

  He hated walking in the forest—the viscous, black, Angolan night clinging to his face, the fetid breath of the jungle, the sudden slithering of animals. Two days ago the cook had killed a dwarf python that got into the chicken run. Only in Africa could a six-foot snake be called a dwarf.

  The weight of the bag dragged at his shoulder.

  The Serb who ran the Russian camp sat on a canvas stool, a steaming bowl of curry in his lap, and listened to Piet’s story. He didn’t believe a word.

  “Too bad for Denny, eh, Piet? Problem with air hose.” He shook his head. “Tough shit for Denny.” He forked a huge piece of butterfish into his mouth and wiped a yellow dribble from his chin with the back of his hand. “What’s in the bag?”

  “Stuff,” said Piet.

  The Serb jabbed his fork into the curry and speared another chunk of grayish flesh.

  “Sure, Piet. Your stuff.” He put the bowl of curry on the ground, grabbed a bottle of Russian brandy, and took a slug. He stared at Piet with bloodshot eyes.

  “We going in the morning, Piet. Same time as usual. Six o’clock. We fit you in. Maybe even have room for your stuff.” He gave Piet a big smile. As much of a smile as you can make with nine teeth.

  When Piet got back to camp he called Johannesburg on the satellite phone and chartered a Learjet to meet him at Saurimo. He told the pilot to file a plan for an onward flight to Luanda. That was in case the Angolans were listening in. He did not sleep, but lay awake all night with the canvas bag clasped to his chest. Twice he opened it and unwrapped the stone, gazing at it as the jewel slid its fingers into the remaining spaces of his brain. In the morning he walked back to the Russian camp. Besides his bush knife, and the snub-nosed .38 in the ankle holster, Piet had a Czech-made Škorpion machine pistol concealed under his jacket. Serbs, you never knew. But they took him to Saurimo without incident.

  The Learjet arrived. Piet flew straight back to Johannesburg. He took the diamond to Barry Stern.

  Barry was as hard as steel, but he couldn’t keep the look of blank astonishment from his face when Piet unwrapped the stone under the bright light on Barry’s desk.

  Barry drew a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment, then reached for his loupe.

  “We don’t even know what this is, Piet,” he said, knowing exactly what it was. His head churned with calculations. “So first things first. We clean it.”

  The normal way to clean the carapace of dirt from rough diamonds is to boil them in acid for twelve hours in a sort of pressure cooker. The acid takes off the surface encrustation and even gets at some of the inclusions—tiny specks of impurities that most diamonds contain. But who builds an acid washer big enough for a fifteen-hundred-carat diamond?

  Barry rigged up something eventually. It took time. Very carefully, with repeated immersions, he coaxed the immense jewel into shrugging off its rocky shell. Bit by bit the crust dissolved in the boiling acid. Barry had never seen anything like the diamond that emerged. No one on Earth, living or dead, had seen such a jewel. Peering into it with
his loupe each time he took it out, Barry saw a galaxy, a universe of pink. He put the stone back into the acid and blinked back tears. Naturally, he used the extra time to trash-talk the stone.

  “The color, Piet—who knows? I’m not putting it down,” he said, searching for the words to put it down, “but who has seen such a color? It seeks to hide. It comes and goes. And the structure, Piet, the fracture planes.”

  He shook his head slowly.

  “Who can trust this stone? It’s not clean, Piet. It’s a danger stone. The man who tries to master this,” he gazed sadly at the diamond, “will never know peace.”

  Piet was not the smartest man in Africa. He took $12 million for the diamond. Barry had a buyer already lined up. A Russian. The buyer knew the stone was problematic, but, on the other hand, it was stupefying. It almost defied belief. It weighed more than fifteen-hundred carats. Men had brought empires to their knees for lesser jewels. Forty million dollars appeared in Barry’s account in Singapore. The Russian took the diamond to Antwerp.

  1

  Slav Lily believed in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and Earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only begotten son, but she also believed in a Glock 42 slimline subcompact. Sixteen ounces with the six-round clip fully loaded. She wore it strapped against her T-shirt, concealed by her short red leather jacket. You couldn’t leave everything to God. She would have liked a nine-round clip, but fewer shots was a trade-off she accepted for a gun you could practically hide in your bra. If you couldn’t put somebody down with six rounds of .380 Fiocchi Extrema, a really dependable hollow-point bullet Lily liked, you deserved what you got.

  She sat in the eighth pew from the front and bent her head in prayer to her patron saint. There is no saint named Lily, but she had a special devotion for Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, Lily of the Mohawks. Extremely chic in a beaded deerskin way, as Lily saw it, plus she was a princess, plus knew how to float through the forest like a phantom. That last part about the forest Lily had made up. She felt that her own piety, as demonstrated by the $1,000 in twenties that she gave the priest for every diamond drop, gave her the right to add a few qualities that the saint must have had anyway but had escaped the notice of the seventeenth-century French Jesuits who’d written the history of that part of North America in between having their fingernails pulled out.

  The ability to reconcile religious devotion with a utilitarian attitude to homicide is not uniquely Russian. But Lily had other attributes—a maniacal devotion to the Bolshoi Ballet, madly slanted eyes, a fondness for an expensive Siberian vodka called Beluga Noble Gold—that, taken all together, accounted for her nickname in certain twilit parts of the diamond world.

  With her body turned at a slight angle, Slav Lily could see the whole interior of the Church of the Guardian Angel.

  So could I. We had cameras in the church. I was running surveillance for a Treasury operation. There was a high-end money laundry rinsing dirty cash into the United States in diamonds. I had been planning to spring the trap, but not until I knew more about how it worked. Then I got an order in the middle of the night: The operation had been moved up. So here I was.

  At 7:00 A.M. Mass, the sound of early traffic on Ocean Parkway was a light hiss of tires in the rain.

  “Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,” the priest continued with his recitation of the Apostles’ Creed.

  The traffic noise got louder when the main door opened for a moment, then subsided when it closed. Lily heard the light pad of sneakers on the terrazzo floor. That was another thing she liked about Guardian Angel. With terrazzo, you could hear a fly.

  “He descended into Hell,” she intoned in time to the priest and the seven regulars. Always the same seven. That was good. No surprises. Today there was an eighth, a guy in his thirties in a denim jacket. Younger than the regulars. But Lily had watched him closely when he came in and had apparently decided he was OK. He’d dipped his hand in the holy water and made the sign of the cross. Knew when to stand and when to kneel.

  The only other people in the church were the paymaster Lavrov and his wife. They sat ten rows behind Lily with their mouths open, a matched pair of trolls with lantern jaws and squished-on noses like lumps of putty. Square yellow teeth showed in their open mouths. Lavrov had problems with his circulation, and his blue nose and large blue ears were the color of his cheap suit. A plastic penholder crammed with ballpoints protruded from his breast pocket. His wife wore a floral print dress. She had enormous breasts that strained the buttons at the front, but the dress would have been tight anyway because of the Kevlar vest. With both hands she gripped a canvas purse the size of a knapsack. The money was in the purse.

  Everybody in the church was older than Lily, who was twenty-nine. She stood out because of her youth, her red jacket, and her striking appearance—the spiky black hair cut short, black eyebrows, and white skin so pale that the down on her lip showed as a faint shadow. She had stormy dark gray eyes and pointy, elvish ears. Strands of dark hair writhed around these delicate, strange shells like eels after prey.

  “On the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the Father almighty.”

  The man came up the side aisle: medium height, big chest, wrinkled khaki pants. and a light blue button-down shirt with a logo on the pocket. His shirt wasn’t tucked in, so he was probably carrying. People in the diamond trade like to tell you it’s a handshake business. Sure, except sometimes the hand has a gun in it.

  “Give me a better shot of him,” I said, and the screen in front of me flicked to a different angle.

  We were parked a mile away in an equipment bay at Coney Island. An NYPD command vehicle is basically a windowless bus with a TV control room inside. A capsule sealed off from the outside world, filled with dim green light and whatever smells the occupants brought in with them.

  A young cop beside me did the switching and controlled the audio. A captain in a starched white shirt surveyed the operation from a high-backed leather chair bolted to a dais in the corner. The chair creaked when he moved. He wore a sour expression in case I’d missed the fact that he hated civilians.

  Slav Lily stiffened as the man approached. She didn’t like the loose shirt either. He kept his hands in sight, holding them slightly away from his body.

  He had thick, curly gray hair and sallow skin. I recognized him. A Brazilian diamond trader. Not too careful about where he got his goods.

  He walked up the aisle with a limp, pit-PAT, pit-PAT on the terrazzo floor.

  He slid into the pew two rows behind Lily. That was one of her rules: two rows. Close enough, not too close.

  When he was in his seat he looked around the church. Finally he knelt and bowed his head, clasping his hands as if in prayer and extending his arms into the empty pew between him and Lily. A three-inch-long rectangular white shape slid into view between his thumbs. She plucked the folded-paper packet from his hands and took a long, slow look around the church.

  She flicked the packet open with the fingers of the hand that held it, a display of deftness that revealed practice with the way diamond people fold their paper packets.

  “I believe in the Holy Ghost.”

  A mist of pink light fizzed out of the paper and lapped at Lily’s face.

  She gazed at the contents of the package, her face softened by the rosy luminescence.

  “Tighten up on that angle,” I told the young cop.

  The packet held a single pink diamond. It was shaped like a dagger, long and thin and pointed at one end. It glowed against the paper with a fiery intensity.

  Suddenly the crackle of a radio pierced the quiet of the church.

  Lily twitched the packet shut with a flurry of her fingers. She leaned back against the pew and looked across the church. The priest recited the last few lines of the prayer. Tight on Lily’s face, I could see a bead of perspiration above her lip. It glistened in the soft dawn. She was looking straight at the guy in the denim jacket, who was fiddling fr
antically with his ear.

  “Is that your guy?” I snapped at the captain.

  “Not one of ours,” the young cop muttered while the captain gaped at the screen, plainly uncertain what was going on.

  The Brazilian reached forward and tried to snatch the parcel back, but Lily held it away from him.

  “Please tell me you didn’t add a backup,” she said in her husky voice. It came rasping over the speaker.

  He joined his hands together again and watched her, his black eyes steady.

  “Darling,” Lily growled reproachfully, “have you gone Brazilian on me?” She spoke English with a mid-Atlantic accent, too polished to be American and too slick with Russian vowels to be British.

  “That backup whose radio betrayed him,” she continued in an angry whisper. “That’s very bad. We had no agreement. What are you doing?” She slipped the packet into an inside pocket. “Who else have you got here?”

  “What’s going on?” said the captain. His chair gave a loud squeak as he stepped off his perch and stood behind the young cop.

  “It’s going sour,” I told him. “She thinks the courier is pulling a double-cross. He was supposed to come with a single backup.” I glanced at a monitor. “That’s him there, waiting outside the main door. I don’t see anybody else, but this is not going well. Where are the arrest teams?”

  “Here and here,” the young cop tapped a screen that showed the grid of streets around the church. “There’s a third over here. That’s the on-ramp to the Belt Parkway.”

  We had two cars of our own but he didn’t know where they were. That was another thing that pissed off the captain: NYPD teams would take out the Russians, and Treasury agents would swoop in for the collar.

  “Where are the Russians’ cars?”

  “Black Escalade out front. That’s it.”

  I didn’t think that was all they had, but I let it go because things were starting to go off the rails inside the church.

  The Brazilian shook his head. He held his right hand out toward Slav Lily. His left hand was no longer in sight.