The Russian Pink

by Matthew Hart

  The passenger swore angrily and kicked the gun away. The driver had her tightly held against the door. His accomplice drew a knife and held the blade in front of Lily’s face. Struggling to pull her face away from the knife, she caught sight of me coming out of the grass and approaching the open passenger-side door. I made a sideways gesture with the barrel. With all her strength she managed to lean away from the driver. I stretched across the cab and shot his head away.

  The explosion of automatic fire and the bits of the driver’s skull spattering his face made the other man fling himself away in blind terror. He uttered a high-pitched scream and started scrabbling on the ground looking for the Glock. I came around and kicked him in the throat.

  Lily’s face was frozen. Her eyes seemed adrift, unable to focus. She shook uncontrollably. An awful, tearing sound came from her chest as she gasped for breath. I put out my hand and she dug her fingers into it.

  “It’s OK, Lily.”

  I bound the knife guy hand and foot with plastic ties. I handed Lily her Glock. She stared at it.

  “Now we have to listen,” I said quietly.

  She stood stock-still. The delta was noisy—wind rattling in the reeds, spooked flamingoes, the distant boom of the surf. But the wind was blowing onshore. I doubted anyone approaching from the sea would have heard the gunfire. The man on the ground made gagging noises. I loaded him into the back of the F-150.

  * * *

  A line of black clouds straggled up the coast. There was just enough moonlight to dab a strip of pewter onto the tops of the clouds and add a few highlights to the immense, heaving presence of the ocean. A wild pig snuffled and grunted somewhere in the grass nearby. I heard the buzz of Piet’s outboard before I saw the Zodiac. He came through a narrow slot in the sandbar and slowed to navigate the channel. I stood at the end of the jetty, watching him come. The shred of moon was behind me. He hailed the dock in Afrikaans. I raised an arm and shouted back a garbled string of syllables that I hoped would do the trick, what with the wind and the engine and the swish of water on his boat. Piet came straight in. He cut the engine and nosed the rubber dinghy into the dock. There was an AK-47 on the seat beside him.

  “Hey, Piet,” I said. “If you touch the AK, I’ll kill you where you sit.”

  Piet sat there staring up at me for a minute while his head churned through the possible courses of action available to him and arrived correctly at the number zero. Even somebody as stupid as Piet could see that he was trapped.

  “Ditch it in the water,” I said, “and the .38 in the ankle holster too.”

  When the guns splashed into the river I stepped back and told him to get out.

  He pretended to have trouble balancing the boat while he tried to push a small canvas bag out of sight with the toe of his shoe.

  “Toss the rough to my partner,” I told him as Lily stepped out of the shadows.

  I cuffed him, shoved him into the back seat, and climbed in beside him. Lily drove. Piet didn’t say a word as we bumped past the F-150. Even in the feeble light you could see the cloud of mosquitoes around the slumped, headless driver and the figure in the back. If their fate bothered Piet, he kept it to himself.

  The airport at Alexander Bay stayed open 24/7 to handle the big helicopters that ferried South African crews back and forth to the offshore diamond fleet. I gave the lone security guard 1,000 rand to find something needing his attention. So we sat in the empty, brightly lit departure lounge like three ordinary people waiting for their flight, except for one wearing handcuffs. Lily had come up with the location.

  “He won’t like it there,” she’d said. “It will make him afraid we have a plan to fly him out.”

  Piet’s eyes were bloodshot and his dirty hair hung to his shoulders.

  “We’re not here to mess with your game,” I said, lifting the bag of rough on the plastic chair beside me and then putting it down again. If I had to guess, about a thousand carats. The average price for those ocean diamonds was running around $250 a carat. A quarter of a million dollars in rough.

  “We know you have people stealing for you on the diamond fleet. We don’t care. We want to talk about Angola.”

  Piet hadn’t said a word since I’d put him in the back seat and he didn’t say anything now. His face was roadmapped with a network of burst blood vessels. A scar went across his right ear where he’d been hacked with a machete. He looked at me with his hard, blue eyes. Piet expected everyone to be as mean and crooked as he was. Considering his acquaintances, he was usually right.

  “I don’t do Angola now,” he said, a drool of saliva leaking onto his chin. “You so smart, you already know that.”

  “It’s the pink I’m interested in,” I said.

  “What pink? No pink. You crazy? Who find pink?”

  “You did. You found it just before you bought the big boat you’ve got offshore. That would coincide with when you left Angola, having killed your partner Denny Vorster, explaining why you are the sole owner of the boat and Denny has vanished from the earth.”

  “Fucked-up hose kill Denny!” Piet screamed. He could no longer keep his fury in check. It wasn’t being accused of murdering Denny that enraged him. His eyes were on Lily and the bag of rough. A quarter of a million dollars was a lot of money to Piet right now. He had overpaid for that mothership of his. While I was still recovering, Lily had put together a good snapshot of Piet’s financial condition. She had bought rough from every corner of the continent, and she had contacts. That’s how I knew Piet was not getting the amount of rough he had counted on, and sure as hell he was not getting this parcel.

  I held up my hand.

  “I don’t care what happened to Denny any more than I care about what will happen to you if you don’t answer my questions. But just so we’re clear, I will take you back down to the river and hogtie you and open shallow cuts in your arms and legs and roll you into the grass. The pigs will do the rest.”

  The tip of his tongue appeared between his dirty teeth as he thought through his options.

  “Start with what the diamond looked like, Piet.”

  “It covered in mud and rock. Not like river stone.”

  “Where did you take it?”

  “Barry Stern.”

  “How exactly did Barry pay you?”

  Piet snorted. “Long time ago. How you think I remember?”

  “And the account numbers too,” I said. “I need your banking details.”

  He displayed his brown, crooked teeth in an ugly smile.

  “I hear he sell to Russians. You think you make trouble for these guys? They chop you and your Russia pussy into pieces and feed you to the crocodiles.”

  There’s always this little to and fro. You have to be patient. I let Piet think about the pigs for a while.

  “He pay cash,” he said at last. “You can’t trace it, because he paid cash. That how it work now.”

  He watched me with glittering eyes.

  “That’s how it’s always worked, Piet. But he didn’t pay you all cash. He paid you part cash and the rest by check. The check amount was his declared value for tax purposes. So take another run at this, and it better add up to the number I already have.”

  I didn’t have any number, but I was guessing Barry Stern had screwed Piet, and I was right. Piet wasn’t the brightest guy, and he had to stick his tongue between his teeth a few more times and think very hard to recall the order in which the payments had come, which ones were cash and which were wires. I led him through the deal until I had it right—one million cash as a down payment, and a week later a bank draft for $11 million. I got Piet’s banking details.

  Dawn was still an hour away when we heard the powerful thwack-thwack-thwack of helicopter blades as a big Sikorsky came in from the diamond fleet for the crew change.

  “Hey,” said Piet. He looked frantic. “You leave me for those guys, they take me out to the fleet and drop me off the side. They bastards.”

  “Relax,” I said. I led him outside, s
hoved him in the back of the SUV and clambered in beside him. The bus from Alexander Bay with the daytime crew was just turning off the highway as we drove out of the airport and headed back down into the delta.

  The herd of pigs clustered around the F-150 scattered into the bamboo as we pulled up. Only the massive boar, who’d managed to get his hooves up onto the tailgate, showed a reluctance to move, his attention divided between the bloody, tied-up guy in the back of the truck and us. Not until Lily gave him a bunt with the front bumper did he drop his legs from the truck and trot off into the thicket with an angry grunt.

  I dragged Piet out of the SUV and shoved him into the truck bed and cuffed his ankles. Lily took a handful of small rough from the bag and stuffed it in his shirt pocket and gave it a friendly pat. Piet said he would kill her and she was a cunt and blah blah blah. Sure, he was mad. If the pigs didn’t get him first, the cops would take a turn when they found the rough in his pocket. In South Africa it’s a criminal offense to possess rough diamonds without proof of where they came from. The law makes the presumption that anyone with rough who can’t account for it has stolen it. They would put Piet in an overcrowded jail where the other inmates mostly had a different color of skin and personal histories that had not taught them to love Afrikaners. Piet would try to bribe his way out, but guess what: He would discover that there was no money in his bank account.

  Piet was a killer. He wasn’t the only murderer on the diamond rivers, but he was the one I had right now. He’d killed his partner, and his accomplices would have raped and killed Lily. If the cops found Piet first, fine. But I was pulling for the pigs.

  * * *

  A saffron dawn walked her fingers up the sky as we drove back down the highway to Port Nolloth. The wind had died in the night. In the strengthening light the ocean blazed like a pane of stained glass, changing color by the moment. The tubby little diamond boats paraded out past the breakwater. They threaded the reef and headed south for the inshore diamond grounds. The suction hoses swam behind the boats like faithful serpents, carving fantastic arabesques on the tangerine surface of the sea.

  We drove along the ocean until I found a strong signal. While Lily examined the rough, pulling out the larger stones and holding them to the morning light, I sent a message to Patrick Ho. It detailed what Piet had coughed up on how the early diamond payments were structured. He would pay particular attention to the wire for $11 million. Barry had obviously waited until his buyer paid before making the deposit for Piet. Connected to what we already knew, Patrick could start to tease apart the strands of the money trail.

  Then I tapped out another message, to Tabitha. I asked her to see if any strand of payments went to a research facility, and to look for a bank connection on Long Island.

  The messages didn’t take long to send, but longer than I liked. The kind of people looking for me probably had access to the supercomputers at Fort Meade. They ransack the world’s message traffic around the clock. If they’re looking for you, you’ll eventually be found. But you can make the search take longer.

  A dark net is a place that normal search engines don’t have access to because they don’t have the code to get in. Most people who want to hide use software like Tor, an acronym for The Onion Router. Tor is a network of subscribers who provide their own computers to construct the onion’s layers. Instead of a message going from sender A to receiver B, it will go from A to C and from C to X and from X to Y. It will eventually get to B, but not until it has slipped from layer to layer through the onion long enough to shake off most pursuers.

  The system Patrick had set up had no subscribers. It was a private dark net, much harder to access. Even so, if people in Washington were looking hard, we could only slow them down, not elude them altogether.

  We went back to the shabby bungalow, made coffee, and took it onto the sagging porch. The sun was higher now and the ocean had turned light green. A pair of giant petrels with black wings and white wingtips wheeled above the beach. We sat side by side in ancient canvas deck chairs and gazed at the Atlantic.

  It’s an evil coast. In places they call it the skeleton coast because of the wrecked ships and the desolation. The first diamonds were discovered when Namibia was under German possession. A railway worker found wind-blown diamonds in the Namib desert. The Germans sealed off the entire southwestern corner of the country. It took them years to find that the diamonds were not in the desert but on the beach and in the ocean.

  “Didn’t Lime have a diamond ship he kept here?” I said.

  “The Benguela Queen. It was an old mining vessel he bought. He established a base at sea and put down the drill and made a mess in the water so the South Africans would think he was mining. Actually, he was buying stolen Namibian rough. He thought he could compete with Fonseca.”

  Portuguese colonists, driven from Angola after independence, ran the Port Nolloth trade in stolen rough, and they ran it for João Fonseca.

  “Lime thought he could outbid Fonseca,” Lily said, “and still make big profits.”

  “What happened?”

  “After one month, Fonseca sent boats out at night. They boarded the Queen and took the crew on deck and tied them together, even the cook, a girl of sixteen. Then they sailed the ship close to shore and ran it on the reef, so everyone in town would see what happened next. Then they set the ship on fire and burned the crew alive.”

  We could see the reef from where we sat. The screams of the dying would have come clearly to those on shore, their relatives and friends.

  The misery coast.

  “What time do we meet Fonseca?”

  “Seven,” Lily said. I looked at my watch. It wasn’t even noon.

  As the sun rose, the heat of the desert clamped on the town like an iron lid. Lily wore cotton shorts and a linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. In spite of her pale skin the sun didn’t burn her. It brought out a golden blush. The smell of her skin and hair seeped through the heavy air. Her fragrance. She fingered the hem of her shirt and turned her eyes to me.

  Consider who we were. Old lovers on the run in a seaside town in Africa. We bore marks of violence. Where else would we turn. In the garden of the knowledge of good and evil, we had eaten the apple long ago.

  14

  The bird with the lilac breast sat at the top of the acacia tree, its feathers polished into gems by the setting sun.

  We packed, left the house, and drove to a despondent seaside restaurant decorated with fishing nets and lobster pots. We sat on the concrete terrace. Lily frowned at the menu, as if by concentrating hard enough she could make something more appetizing appear. A young woman in a black T-shirt and black jeans appeared from the kitchen.

  “Try the fried kingklip,” she said. “It’s always fresh.”

  Her hair was plaited into tight braids and coiled around her shapely head.

  Far out on the rim of the ocean a ship was steaming south to the Cape. A drill rig identified the vessel as part of the Namibian diamond fleet. Heading for a refit. The crew would take the opportunity to dispose of whatever diamonds they’d stolen and not already sold.

  “You booked the flight to Cape Town?”

  “Stop fussing, Alex. We’re confirmed.”

  I looked at my watch again. I guessed someone was checking us out. Fonseca would make sure we had come alone. He knew Lily; they’d done business when she ran Russgem’s foreign buying out of Antwerp. I’d never met him, but I assumed “information of interest,” as his message had said, meant he wanted to betray someone.

  João Fonseca bought most of the rough stolen on the diamond coast. Everything from Namibia came through him: Piet’s diamonds from the offshore fleet; the steady trickle of stones from the sorting operation at Oranjemund; the rough that made its way from the beach and along the myriad smuggling routes across the Orange River. All of it passed through João’s hands. As rich and powerful as he was, Fonseca had come a long way down from what he’d owned before.

  Basically, Ang
ola.

  In 1975 Portugal lost a bloody war of independence in Angola. When they lost the war, they lost the diamonds. João’s family had owned the diamond rivers. They had ranches and yachts and private planes. They had mansions in Lisbon and Luanda, a languid city often called the Paris of southern Africa. In those days, rich South Africans swarmed the beaches and casinos of Luanda, finding in the elegant Portuguese city an easy sophistication absent from their puritanical, race-obsessed homeland. And not just South Africans: Aristocrats flew down from Lisbon for the legendary blowouts at the Fonseca palace on the beach. In the end, the Fonsecas had to leave it all and run for their lives. They came to Port Nolloth.

  “The Paris of Namaqualand,” I said.

  “Diamonds were their life,” Lily said, guessing at my train of thought. “If they couldn’t get them one way, they’d get them another.”

  They settled in Port Nolloth and began to rob the diamond beach. There was theft before the Fonsecas took it over. João scaled it into an industry.

  The bottom edge of the sun touched the horizon. Crews from the diamond boats came in and filled the tables on the terrace. Pitchers of beer and plates of boerewors, South African country sausage, clattered onto the tables.

  I saw our contact arrive. He stood at the entrance and looked at us. He was short and stocky. His bright green palm tree shirt billowed around him in the onshore breeze. He stared at me with black, unblinking eyes. I nodded and threw some money on the table. Outside he stopped at a black Mercedes and held the back door open. We walked by and got in our SUV. He shrugged and shut the door and we followed the Mercedes up the hill from the harbor.

  At the north end of town, the ramshackle houses straggled to an end at a stretch of dunes jumbled between the highway and the shore. A suburb of concrete villas nested in the dunes—the Portuguese colony. BMWs and Range Rovers sat in the driveways. Mastiffs with bloodshot eyes glowered through the fences. Fonseca’s lieutenants and relatives, their lawyer, the guy who ran the Portuguese grocery—all huddled here in this cantonment on the coast, gorging on diamonds and dreaming of Luanda.