Flight of the Diamond Smugglers

by Unknown

  “Even if you possess an unpolished diamond,” MacDonald says, “it’s a crime against the state. Even for one second. Which means that if you were to pick up a pebble on the beach, and that pebble turns out to be a diamond—whether you knew it or not—that counts as possession.” If a De Beers operative were to catch me with it in my hand—and the beaches of Kleinzee and Port Nolloth are covertly patrolled by men with guns—I would be detained, fined, and carted off to prison.

  “Mm-hmm,” MacDonald says, and gestures with his chin to a strange—and, I fear, self-congratulatory—installation on his office wall: the upside-down nameplates that once fronted the desks of all the people he had to fire: “Mine Secretary,” “Cashier,” “Environmental Manager,” “Exploration Manager,” “Driver Instructor,” “Safety Officer,” “Chief Safety Officer.”

  “Diamond divers especially,” MacDonald continues, “are a slippery bunch. You know that 30 percent of the diamonds are lost to smuggling.” MacDonald speaks of how the artisans and engineers responsible for designing and implementing new and more efficient mining equipment also form teams to unofficially design crossbows and catapults—some hand-held, some industrial-sized—in order to shoot hollowed-out steel bolts, packed with diamonds, into the desert. These teams calculate the trajectory of the bolt, and pinpoint the small area of desert where it has landed. Later, they or their co-conspiratorial friends and family will comb the sand for the bolts. “And the wood pallets that carry cargo and machine parts are rarely X-rayed, so folks drill holes into them, line the holes with lead just in case, pack the holes with diamonds, and seal them off,” MacDonald says. “And with the underground mines, it’s worse.” Smugglers are lowered by rope over two kilometers into the earth, where they live in darkness for years, MacDonald assures me, supplies being lowered in the dead of night by co-conspirators, and when they are finally found (“They’re always found,” MacDonald says) and brought up to the surface, they have to be brought up blindfolded.

  MacDonald tells me that in his entire time with De Beers, he’s held a diamond only once. “You can see why people get the fever,” he says, though when I ask him what became of that diamond, he tells me that’s an off-limits topic, and turns on his defusers. “No, no, really, it was just an ugly rock, I’m telling you, nothing became of it. Honestly, okay . . . well . . . okay . . . I put the diamond back exactly where I found it, and . . . well . . . I know exactly where it is . . . But, anyway, they grow them big here. In 1974, [there was one amounting to] 175 carats, found right here in Kleinzee. How are you going to smuggle that, but with a pigeon, or inside the crop of an ostrich?

  “Look, you really need to talk to Lester,” MacDonald tells me. “He used to direct mine security for De Beers, and not just throughout South Africa. Overseas, as well. He’s big. Actually, he’s due into Kleinzee late tonight, on an assessment call. To see how things are doing here. He always stays out at Die Houthoop—a guesthouse in the middle of the desert. He’ll know about you.”

  “Mister . . . Mister Lester?” I stammer.

  MacDonald smiles. “Yes,” he says. “He’ll know about you.”

  “How?”

  “It’s Lester,” MacDonald says, as if I’ve asked a stupid question.

  “He’s real?”

  “Flesh and blood,” MacDonald says.

  I ask MacDonald to write down the name of the guesthouse, and he pencils Die Houthoop onto the back of another of my gas station receipts. I look at the receipt before folding it into my pocket. Though I know it translates as the, I remain unnerved that the first word of the guesthouse’s name is Die.

  “C’mon,” he says, and motions for me to rise, and follow him. Pinned over his office door, as if an exit sign, is a glossy photo of a meerkat captioned “Everyone calm the fuck down.” MacDonald leads me into a low-ceilinged conference room. On the walls are several diagrams depicting, based on the downwardly zigzagging lines, some schematic for decline; and three antique maps of Namaqualand farms. On the dry-erase board is the directive, written in blue script, “SELL ALL PROPERTIES.”

  MacDonald allows me to witness a safety meeting comprised of eleven employees who down coffee and eat yesterday’s doughnuts (all the chocolate ones are gone). The room feels like a gambling den secreted behind a bar. He introduces me as a writer from the U.S. (“I’m always wary of writers”), before speaking on hydraulic safety and a recent incident of “failure,” whereupon an unidentified worker lost an unidentified limb, but, based on the solemnity of the coffee-sipping and doughnut-chewing, everyone in the room but me can identify both the worker and the lost limb. When MacDonald lapses into Afrikaans, his secretary, Trinety, retrieves a lambskin drum from the room’s corner, and each employee ceremonially slaps out a clumsy riff as a way of adjourning the meeting.

  I try to pay attention to all of this, to record the details. I look at MacDonald and, though I don’t know the man from Adam, I try to convince myself that he wouldn’t send me into certain danger, that my disappearance would look bad for the company. But, of course, that isn’t really true, and I don’t know . . . I don’t know.

  Suddenly, MacDonald is standing right over me. I can feel his breath on my face. I can smell it. Yellow mustard, mostly. Such proximity silences me.

  He never touches me, much less looks into my eyes, as he leads me where few non-De Beers affiliates have been led, along cramped pale green hallways lined with doors with blacked-out windows and no nameplates on the outside. Exposed piping, a seemingly pumped-in humidity, and low ceiling evoke the boiler rooms of nightmare grade schools. When we reach the first stage of security, I must blow into a Breathalyzer held by a guard with prodigious pectorals and shaking hands. He wears a dull blue uniform, crisply ironed. In his belt holster, a handgun, a two-way radio, and what appears to be a glow-in-the-dark rectal probe. Behind him, a sign reads “You Are To Place All Loose Items On The Tray,” and, in the corresponding picture, a blue tray holds such benign and inexplicable things as a beaded bracelet, a blue plastic fork, a bottle of magenta nail polish, a battery, a coin, an apple, an orange. I have none of these, but I have my wallet, and the wad of tissues often carried by the allergic, which often raises the suspicion of non-allergic security guards who are driven, as is this one, to go through every tissue, as if flipping the pages of the Book of Revelation. Satisfied with the state of my snot-rags, the guard hands me a yellow security vest. MacDonald meanwhile checks his company mailbox, a tiny locked cabinet amid a wall of others, each with a blond wood finish, evoking a 1950s’ bowling alley locker room. At the second stage of security, the tops of my shoes are combed by a rotating shoe brush, and I must drag the soles along a serrated grate. The same guard waits for me to finish so he can give me the pat-down during which he finds my pen and paper.

  “I told you it’s a closed system,” MacDonald says, as the fluorescents flicker like doom. “Just know that what goes in, stays in. It never comes out. No pens, no glasses, nothing. Even this [gesturing to my pen], up until a couple of months ago was taboo. Up until a couple a months ago, De Beers was still mining here full-force. There’s no way you would’ve gotten in here, let alone with a pen. De Beers people couldn’t bring pens in here.”

  We proceed to four separate X-ray chambers, each barred by a locked door. Each chamber is a right-angled womb-for-adults, unfortunately green and about three feet square. An unseen security guard buzzes open each subsequent door only when the last one is closed. In these chambers, MacDonald warns me, “You can’t see out. If the doors open and a big blue guard is standing there, it’s trouble. It’s over. Testing the system is grounds for dismissal. Of course, that’s terribly vague, but the value of the product demands it,” and I want to ask if it refers to vagueness, but a big blue guard ushers me through door number one.

  MacDonald is not exempt from any of this, and when we come out on the other side, the sun has become perfectly white, reflecting off the old mine hostels and razor wire. The multiple wire fences are spaced so as to prevent t
he diggers from throwing a diamond beyond all of them. Behind the hostels, a once-menacing guard tower sinks into the sand, shortening inch by inch as the days pass. When a digger died on the job, his body was to be buried right here on the mine site, as De Beers believed that the corpse would be used to smuggle diamonds. He simply disappeared, his family notified—oftentimes many days later—by postcard, if at all.

  MacDonald ushers me into the passenger seat of the white Toyota De Beers company pickup, and we take off into the waste within the waste, a blank spot on the map, an erasure. All 32,000 hectares, erased. Officially, MacDonald tells me, this mined expanse doesn’t exist; it’s private, cloaked, off anything resembling the grid, and indeed the miles upon miles of it are absent of visible life—an eternal breadth of undulating rubble of various shades and grains.

  “Welcome to nowhere,” he says. “There are no birds. We’re driving through the heart of destruction. It’s totally closed. There’s no agriculture here. No game, no farming. Even the birds avoid it. There are no birds. There’s no agriculture! It’s lockdown! There’s nothing here!” his voice growing high-pitched and panicky-excited in a What have I done? sort of way.

  The place defies prefixes—every single other, extra, pre, or post I try to heap upon it: otherworldly, extraplanetary, prehistoric, post-apocalyptic. So of this Earth, and so not; the mine honors the look of the Earth, as if a synthetic model of the planet wedged into this corner of the planet itself; something ancient cast in new polymer, which itself has degraded to the point that it seems like the oldest thing in sight—older than the actual mountains, which are still capable of growing their new scrub. The mine property feels biospheric, so insular with its false trenches and false mountains. The mist settles in the crotches of the barrens before steaming upward, as if this whole thing were still cooking, in-progress, waiting to cool and settle. Strange how, not long ago, so many people milled about these endless anthills looking for the shiny crumbs that stand in for our professions of love; 2,500 full-time employees, carried from home to mine and back by private, 24/7 hourly bus routes.

  “No birds,” MacDonald says again, but I don’t believe him, as I distinctly see tiny dark things whirling in the thermals above us—the thermals even De Beers can’t block out—watching the earth for patterns, listening out for its borborygmal supersonics, looking for home. When I blink, they are gone, and I wonder if our brains, as some salve against loneliness, out of instinct to ornament all of that empty space when beholding a blank sky, conspire to put birds there.

  I squint against the sun, which seems to have dropped onto the scene from another solar system; everything here is so unlike the other stuff on Earth it usually brightens. I feel something hungry is stalking us. I want Louisa’s hand, and cool spirals of methylene blue ultrasound gel on bellies, and monitors that register puny heartbeats in clicks instead of beeps. A healthy pregnancy, finally, in no-man’s-land.

  We drive. The company truck is fitted with a speed governor that beeps each time MacDonald exceeds 80 kilometers per hour, about which he complains, pounding on the steering wheel. The roads are sand, compacted until they’ve become dirt, and rutted with ridges that resemble the spines of some Paleozoic mudfish about to be unearthed into our present, about to become part of our story.

  I’m a horrible interviewer, easily distracted by things like the clouds and memories I can’t pinpoint as either good or bad, which made me an equally terrible athlete as a child, when I preferred to pick dandelions and watch the passing birds in right field than catch pop flies. I never know what I’m looking for, what sorts of answers I should try to elicit, so I let MacDonald talk. He points out the window, references the rows of green windbreaks anchored at the foot of dump slopes and pit rims, has an argument with himself; like me, he’s trying to work something out.

  “Look at all this effort at restoration!” he says. “The nets are fiendishly expensive. I’m spending 300,000 rand a month to keep Kleinzee going now. You see these dumps with the holes next to them? I’ve moved 30 million cubic meters of soil since 2011. We round it off, re-create a natural-style surface with the dozers. You don’t hear people talking about De Beers doing this, rehabilitating the environment. It’s an ongoing cleanup of the mess we made. I don’t like De Beers because diamonds are a silly product. De Beers knows you can’t sell a diamond on the secondary market, because it’s forever. You’re selling his love. No! It’s a cold bloody stone! Sell it for hard cash! De Beers does a lot of bad, but also some good. The Oppenheimer family was friends of Mandela and the ANC and tried to smooth things out before 1994, to embrace the change. Look: apartheid is our national shame. Some at De Beers did not take change lightly . . .”

  I think of the Oppenheimer family inhabiting their estates and urban sanctuaries, roving the grounds among their man-made forests, Japanese gardens, and tennis courts. When forging business deals with other companies, the Oppenheimers required the chief executives of those companies to send out official memos to their own employees thanking De Beers for their willingness to work with them, and pledging, “We understand that diamonds are different, special, and not a commodity.” MacDonald raises a hand from the wheel as if to silence my thoughts.

  “But I like De Beers because of the rehabilitation,” he continues. “It’s all about the phytoremediation, you know?” and I don’t. “I’m a geologist, okay? I never said, ‘Hey, you know what? I want to close mines.’ The opportunity presented itself and, well, I’m good at it. They call me the Executioner.”

  I suddenly remember Nico Green’s use of this word back at Vespetti’s in Port Nolloth. “You?” I say. MacDonald nods.

  I ask him if he can tell me more about Mr. Lester, and his role in all of this, executionary or otherwise. “No, I really can’t,” MacDonald says. “And besides, I don’t even know the extent of it. I’ve met him, sure, when he’s been here on prior assessments, but I’ve heard he’s a real chameleon. I’m not even 100 percent on whether he’s really South African or not. I’m pretty sure he is. Some people think he’s KGB or CIA, or without any real allegiance. A mercenary, or king of the mercenaries, or the guy who hires the mercenaries. But I just know him as the former director of all security, everywhere, for De Beers.”

  “But if he’s a former director, why does he still come here to assess the goings-on?” I ask.

  “Not 100 percent on that,” MacDonald says. “I just know what I know. He’s the only guy De Beers trusts to do certain specialized things. Like I said, if you want to know these things, you need to speak with him directly. Go to Die Houthoop. Tonight.”

  “Okay, but someone I’ve spoken to referred to Lester as the Executioner who lords over other executioners,” I say. “And your nickname is the Executioner?”

  “Who spoke to you?” MacDonald asks, a meanness creeping into his voice.

  Uh-oh. I feel as if I’ve slipped up here. “I . . . I didn’t get his name,” I say.

  “What did he look like?” MacDonald says.

  “I . . . I . . . Look, I . . .”

  MacDonald snorts, and shakes his head. “Fuck it,” he says. “It’s not like it matters anymore. Not like it used to, even last year. Even a few months ago. You don’t want to tell me, don’t tell me. Who gives a shit now, right? I can pretty much guess anyway.”

  I hold back a cough.

  “So, yes, to answer your question. They call me the Executioner,” he says. “Sometimes, I’m the Hangman. But it’s all in good fun.”

  I nod, and I let out my cough, and I know that I’ve gotten away with something here. I know that I’m lucky. Still, I wonder how all of this will end. I’m trapped here with this man, and nobody but Louisa knows where I am, and she’s all alone, and have I now endangered her?

  “Don’t worry so much,” MacDonald says when he notices the look on my face, the assured paleness of it, my reluctance to open my mouth again. “It’s all in good fun,” he repeats.

  I wonder about the nature of fun here, on this blank spot on
the atlas, where we are now officially disappeared according to the rest of the world and its radar. I wonder exactly what Nicky and Jonathan Oppenheimer meant when together, as father and son, they sent a memo to their employees on August 16, 2012, overstating, “We have spent decades exalting anniversaries and unbreakable bonds. We are good at it. It is in our DNA! We love De Beers. My father loved De Beers as did his father before him. Through it all, the diamond has always been our guide.”

  In spite of their rhetorical sunniness, the Oppenheimers—along with the remainder of the De Beers executives (when taken together, they are known as the Syndicate)—were banned from conducting firsthand business in the U.S. from 1948 to 2004 due to their insistence on price-fixing, a violation of antitrust laws. Still, they were able to peddle their diamonds in the U.S. via loopholes and “indirect methods”—a network of separate contracted entities and retail conglomerates. Before entering the U.S., every De Beers diamond passed through a “sight” (one of a series of clandestine international diamond-dealing houses), and it was that “sight” that often directly sold to U.S.-based luxury retailers.