The Russian Pink

by Matthew Hart

  We knew each other the way lovers do. Through our skin. That searing, electric surge of information, that animal exchange of scent and sweat. And later, the murmured confidences in the soft parts of the night. When the urge to be known wrings out the past in fragments.

  She was the only child of an elderly musician and a teacher. Her father played first violin in Mirny’s tiny orchestra, padding his meagre salary giving lessons at home. Her mother taught English at the Polytechnic and ran the gun club.

  Every year in July the family packed supplies, loaded their old, tarred boat, and went putting up a muddy river into the endless forest Russians call the taiga. They would spend a month at their cabin. Lily’s mother showed her how to make ammunition—carefully measuring out gunpowder at the kitchen table and reloading cartridges.

  “Economy,” her mother would enunciate, making Lily repeat the English word. “Thrift.”

  Mother and daughter would smear their faces joyfully with mud and stalk off into the forest after deer. Her father stayed behind to play Tchaikovsky to the weasels.

  She loved the winter too. On Christmas Eve they would leave the apartment before midnight and walk through the snowy streets to the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, ablaze with candles and shimmering with the golden images of saints. The massed choir, the vaulted ceiling spattered with stars, and the priests in gorgeous robes. And just inside the church, a nativity scene with the infant Jesus lying in the manger, warmed by the breath of animals and adored, as Lily herself was adored, by rapt adults.

  That world came to a cruel end when the plane carrying her parents on a visit to the regional capital crashed in the taiga. Lily was sixteen. The criminals who ran the town took one look at her and ate her up.

  Her parents’ savings evaporated in a sudden tax claim. Men from the local government came one day to the apartment and shouted at her to get out. They waved a paper in her face. Lily discovered she had no legal right to the only home she’d known.

  A friend of her mother’s at the Polytechnic got her a job at the Mir diamond mine. A menial position. In the sorting room. Lily brought to the task a shattered heart and ice-cold hatred. The heart healed. The hatred remained. Only the diamonds soothed it.

  In church, I think she brushed all that away. In church it was always Christmas Eve, and she was the girl she’d been. In church she reached back into that lost world where devoted parents cradled and protected her. As I watched her pray, her head bowed and her hands joined, I felt a powerful urge to reach forward and touch her. But I didn’t.

  Before we left, Lily folded five hundred-dollar bills into a neat wad and shoved it through the slot beneath the votive candles. She lit a large candle near the top. It flamed into life behind the ruby-colored glass. She made the sign of the cross and genuflected to the Virgin. We walked down the side aisle and out the door.

  The sea had started to settle. Crews were moving around on some of the diamond boats. I doubted they’d put to sea. The swell would last for another day. Not far from the harbor entrance, the ocean ground its teeth on the reefs. We sat on a bench above the harbor while Lily brought me up to date.

  While I was meeting Davy, Lily had sold the pink to Dilip Gupta, whose Bombay family ran the biggest diamond polishing company in the world. Dilip paid her $1.5 million on the spot—a steal for the Guptas, but they knew she was in a hurry. While they were in his office waiting for the wire to clear into Lily’s Zurich bank account, Dilip’s nephew, who handled security, came in to report that hard men were in Antwerp looking for us. Lily got hold of Meier Lapa. It was Meier who’d come to collect me from the hotel.

  Meier’s crew got me to the airport, where Lily had a Gulfstream ready to go. Sofia, Cape Verde, Port Nolloth—that was the route, never mind what the flight plan said.

  While I was lying lashed to the bed, Lily had tracked down Piet Louw, the South African who’d found the big pink and brought it to Barry Stern. Not surprisingly, Piet was no longer working in Angola, having neglected to share the news of his discovery with the government.

  “When will he get in?” I said.

  “Tonight.”

  “He may not come in this rough sea.”

  “It’s calmer at night.”

  “And he’s coming from the offshore fleet?”

  “He bought a small ship with the proceeds of the pink,” Lily said. “Now he buys from the crews of the Namibian diamond fleet. He brings in his rough tonight.”

  “What time?”

  “Any time. We should be ready from sunset.”

  She sounded low. The onshore breeze ruffled her hair. The tips of her ears peeped through the curls. The bruise was a livid yellow shading into purple.

  “I’m sorry, Lily.”

  She took a deep breath. The smell of seaweed saturated the air. An old man with a stick and a mangy dog made his way along the beach. A cloth bag hung from his shoulder. His sparse white hair blew around his head. When an object caught his eye he stopped to poke it with the stick, prying it out of the sand for a better look, then walking on. Lily leaned forward with her elbows on her knees and watched him scan the beach.

  “Really, Alex, sorry for what? That I’m caught up with you again? That your hold over me is so profound that I charter a jet to fly you to the diamond coast? Poor Lily, forced into a helpless life.”

  The beachcomber stopped and dug his stick into the sand. Then he crouched and wrestled with something until he freed it from the sand. He held the object up to his eye and examined it. He waded into the shallows and swished it back and forth to remove the sand. When he held it up again it glowed dully in the sun. He tossed it back in the water, returned to the beach and plodded off along the shore.

  “You’re not responsible for me. I chose my life. I waited for you that night at the airport. I knew what you were.”

  My body felt empty. Hollow. The sun beat down and the breeze came off the ocean and I tried to take in both the warmth and the freshness of the air. A pair of kelp gulls flashed their black backs in the sun as they hung on the wind, calling back and forth.

  Suddenly she sat up and locked her arm around my neck and pulled my face in close and kissed me. Her lips tasted of salt. “You’re a mess, aren’t you, darling.” She put her hand against my cheek. She smiled tenderly and got up. There were tears in her eyes.

  We walked past the boatyards and along a crooked street to a garage I knew, where we rented a pickup with four-wheel drive. It had seen better days. So had the guy who ran the garage, but he took cash and didn’t ask for paperwork.

  Half a mile out of town we turned off into a small, dusty subdivision carved out of the desert. I followed a rutted lane that skirted the houses. It ended at a compound surrounded by a wall of concrete blocks topped with a coil of razor wire. A peeling sign identified the premises as XHALI SECURITY SYSTEMS. A slot in the steel gate slid open and a pair of dark brown eyes examined us. The slot slammed shut and a moment later came the screech of a metal bar as two young black men pushed open the heavy gates. Each had a Chinese AK slung from his shoulder.

  We parked beside a black Range Rover and entered the dim interior. A thin, elderly man with a scarred face and aviator glasses stood behind the counter watching us come in. He had a clipped gray moustache and neatly combed gray hair and wore a spotless white shirt buttoned at the cuffs. The wall behind him was covered with a display of electronic sensors, surveillance cameras, and examples of the kind of steel-mesh fencing that snips your fingers off if you try to climb it. He also had a rack with throwing knives and the short stabbing spears that Zulu warriors taught their enemies to fear. The main stock in trade was out of sight.

  The powerful smell of steel and gun oil filled the room. The aviator glasses panned back and forth between us.

  “I’m looking for one of your security systems,” I said. “One that can provide maximum coverage.”

  “A portable system?” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  He pursed his lips. “For a
situation where a dispute might arise?”

  “Well, that can happen in any interaction, can’t it.”

  “Yes, it can,” he said sadly, shaking his head, as if the contemplation of the human condition had caused him many disappointments in his life, and he didn’t think it was a situation likely to change. “Would the dispute be with one person, or more than one?”

  “Impossible to say.”

  He spread his wrinkled hands on the table and examined them. The tip of a tattoo poked out from a snowy cuff. It looked like the point of a dagger. He drummed his fingers on the counter, shot me a quick glance from behind the dark lenses, then reached down and brought out a narrow wooden crate. He removed the top and placed it carefully to one side. He took out a brand new Chinese Type 56 assault rifle, removed the plastic sleeve, and placed it before us. Same model as the guards on the gate were carrying, so I guess he’d bought a large shipment.

  “Special this week,” he said.

  You can tell the Chinese version of the classic Russian machine gun at a glance. It comes with a short bayonet folded back against the barrel, which the Russian guns don’t have. Anyway, I didn’t want a gun that was a yard long and weighed ten pounds fully loaded.

  “Something smaller,” I told him.

  The aviator glasses stayed aimed at me until he said, “I think we’ve met before.”

  “It’s possible.”

  He nodded and fished out a ring of keys and unlocked a cabinet behind him. The gun he put on the counter was just what I was looking for. Czech, four-point-five-inch barrel. A sweet little gun with a beautiful, light-wood pistol grip.

  “I’ll take it.”

  “Ten-round or twenty-round magazine?”

  “Two mags of the twenty.”

  Lily needed ammunition for her Glock. He shook his head when she asked for Fiocchi Extrema, her favorite bullets, and slid a box of a cheaper make across the counter. Lily glared at him. She snorted in disgust, snatched the box from the counter and stuffed it savagely in her purse. When we were through she paid in cash.

  “Christ, Alex,” she said as we drove out through the gates. “How many people are we going to have to deal with?”

  “I don’t know. Piet will have some kind of back-up. He won’t hesitate to kill us. He’s tough. He fought in Angola when the South African army was trying to push the Cubans out. He was in the 32nd Battalion.”

  “The Buffalo Battalion.” Like all diamond traders, Lily knew the stories of Angola’s diamond wars, and those who’d fought them.

  “The Angolans called them Os Terríveis,” I said. “The Terrible Ones.”

  “I get it,” she snapped. “What other kind of person could run a diamond barge on the Chicapa? I know he’s a savage bastard.” Her eyes blazed at me. “After all, I know the type.”

  Lily was a whirlpool I had fallen into long ago. After I’d turned her, we had torn a year to shreds, flying off to places like the north coast of Iceland. Think about it: private geothermal pool plus frenzied Russian girl plus zero chance of surveillance. But she could flash from affection into anger in a blink. You bought the whole package with Lily, and there was often a surprise inside.

  We stopped at a grocery on the highway. It was after noon by the time we got back to the house.

  A wooden picnic table stood on the brick patio out back. A tall fig tree with smooth, pale bark and tortured limbs shaded the table. Lily found plates in the kitchen and a faded tablecloth and we unpacked the lunch—packaged ham, pickles, and a hunk of something identified as cheddar. I unwrapped the stale baguette, cut it in half and sliced it open lengthwise. Lily found a jar of mustard in the fridge, and two ice-cold bottles of Castle beer.

  “This is the kind of food I detest, Alex,” she said, regarding the table with revulsion.

  “Yes.” I fit three slices of ham into my half of the baguette, slathered it with mustard and added cheese and pickles. “It was thoughtless of me to pick out this instead of the fresh imported Black Sea caviar so abundant in Port Nolloth.”

  The pain still came and went. My limbs felt like cement. But as we sat there in the sun and I ate the sandwich and drank the beer, I felt strength seeping into me. Lily tasted the mustard on the tip of her tongue, then shoved her plate away and stuck to the beer.

  The breeze from the ocean stirred the leaves. Jigsaw-puzzle shapes of light and shadow shivered on the tablecloth. A pair of small gray birds made piercing cries as they rummaged in the fig for bugs. Their calls reinforced the heavy silence of the afternoon. Neither of us spoke for a while. I suppose Lily was thinking about the night ahead. I was thinking about Lily.

  The long-range jet she’d chartered in Antwerp. Those planes start at $10,000 an hour. Lily would have had to pay a premium on top of that because she’d wanted it right away, needed the pilot to file a false flight plan, and the destination was a strip on a cutthroat coast. I doubted she’d paid less than $12,000 an hour. Say thirty-hour round-trip before the crew gets the jet back to Antwerp. Tab comes to $360,000. On the other hand, she had cash from selling the pink, so she probably got a discount for that—straight into the owner’s offshore bank account when he had a moment to fly out. Call it an even $300,000.

  Lily didn’t get rich by throwing money away. Why had she agreed to such an expense? Because she loved me? That’s not the way it worked. Our love was framed by calculation. Maybe all love is. I’m no expert. What I know is that Lily would not have considered herself bound to grant the wish of the plainly half-demented, feverish man in the hotel in Antwerp when I told her I had to see Piet Louw. I’m not saying she would have abandoned me. But there were lots of places she could have taken me to hide from my pursuers that did not involve a flight down the length of Africa to certain danger. Why had she done it? Only one possible answer. She had her own reason for being here.

  Fear of Lime was one explanation. If that’s what it was, staying close to me might be her best option. She’d stolen the small pink from him. That might have damaged the plans of people she feared even more—the diamond oligarchs. If I discovered something important about the Russian Pink from Piet, Lily could trade that information back to the Russians in exchange for her safety. I wouldn’t blame her. I’m the one who’d put her in the danger in the first place.

  How long had we been sitting silently? Lily watched me speculatively.

  “You’re working through your dark suspicions, aren’t you, darling. I can see the black clouds swirling in your head.” She stood up and took my hand. “You’d better come inside. You need to rest.”

  * * *

  The setting sun was splashing the surface of the sea with molten copper when we left Port Nolloth and drove north along the diamond coast. Just before the Orange River, a range of dark hills between the highway and the sea marked the last of the South African beach mines, a government-run operation that chewed dispiritedly through the depleted sands. Once the sun set, the desert would come alive with the figures of thieves streaming like an army of shadows across the highway and through the porous fence.

  At the village of Alexander Bay we left the highway and dropped down into the delta of the Orange River. We bumped along a potholed gravel road that wound its way through tall marsh grass and clumps of shrubbery. As we rounded a bend, a dense cloud of flamingoes erupted from the surface of a pond, rending the night with their panicked cries.

  The road ended at a small parking lot where a jetty poked into the sluggish current. Just west of where we stood, the Orange River ended its 1,400-mile journey from the Drakensberg and flowed into the ocean. Seals barked on the sandbars at the river mouth. Only a small channel pierced the barrier. Piet Louw would come through that.

  On the north side of the river the low, black shape of a bluff showed where Namibia began. You can cross at a bridge upriver, but unless you have a special permit you won’t get further than the border post. Inland and along the coast lies a 10,000-square-mile control zone called Diamond Area 1. When Namibia was still a German colony
, the area was called the Sperrgebiet—the Forbidden Territory. The beach mines of South Africa are all tapped out, but in Namibia, towering bucketwheel excavators the size of Ferris wheels strip the richest coast in the world. Far offshore, much further out than the little tupperwares of Port Nolloth venture, the red ships of the Namibian diamond fleet smash up the seabed with drills and suck the diamond-bearing gravels up into shipboard recovery plants.

  Like schooling fish, thieves and smugglers swarm this rich feeding ground. Every night a stream of stolen diamonds makes its way across the Orange River and down the old pathways of the diamond coast to Port Nolloth, where middlemen supply it with the paperwork for the onward journey to the diamond bourse in Johannesburg.

  We heard the sound of tires crunching on gravel. Piet’s flunkeys. We’d been expecting them. I slipped into the tall marsh grass. A white Ford F-150 with its headlights off came into view and stopped. There were two of them. They kept the engine idling, and can’t have been happy to find an unexpected complication waiting at the rendezvous in the form of a parked SUV and a woman walking toward them. The driver rolled his window down and stared at Lily.

  “I seem to be lost,” said Lily in her throaty accent.

  The driver turned and said something in Afrikaans to his companion. They both had a good laugh. I had moved around through the pampas grass. While they were distracted by Lily, I was supposed to step out of the grass and put the barrel of my Czech machine pistol into the passenger’s ear. And here’s how fast things can go wrong:

  The driver grabbed Lily by the arm. He was fast, and very strong. His hand clamped her above the elbow and he yanked her against the door so hard her head banged the frame. At the same time, the passenger opened his door, climbed out and walked around the truck. He yanked up Lily’s shirt. The Glock fell out and clanked on the gravel.