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, Angola.
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.
We stopped at a tall, wrought-iron gate. The letters JF, painted in gold on a heraldic shield, shone in the floodlight. A pair of rampant lions held the shield in place. With their long red tongues, they looked like they were dying of thirst. Green Shirt punched a code into a panel, and the gate creaked open.
João waited for us by the pool. He was tall and thin, with the gaunt face and sallow skin of the malaria sufferer. He wore a white terrycloth beach robe and a look of bored bemusement. With a flap of his yellow hand he waved at lounge chairs.
“Thank you for coming,” he said. His words ended in a long, racking cough. He held a folded handkerchief that he pressed to his mouth. When the coughing subsided, he examined the handkerchief.
He sat with care, arranging himself in a wicker chaise and crossing his bare feet on a cushion. His ankles were swollen. An inhaler lay on the table beside him. I could hear the wheezing in his chest.
“Something to drink,” he said, lifting his hand in the direction of the house.
A servant came out with a silver tray. On it stood a frosted pitcher of water clinking with ice cubes.
“Very important to stay hydrated,” he observed sadly as the girl filled his glass with water.
“We’re interested in what you wanted to tell us,” I said.
“I did not think you would bring the Russian.” He didn’t even glance at Lily.
Terracotta tubs filled with frangipani and azaleas surrounded the terrace. Beyond the flowers and a thicket of rubbery leaves rose a high wall topped with broken glass and razor wire. I pulled my chair around so I could see anything happening behind Lily; she would have me similarly covered. João closed his eyes and gave his head a shake of resignation. He’d spotted the shape of the machine pistol beneath my shirt. I didn’t think he had invited us there to kill us, but the Fonsecas had murdered people on the diamond rivers and they’d murdered people on the beach and they’d murdered people at the crossings on the Orange River. Kill enough people, it gets to be a habit. In the long view, two more bodies wouldn’t make much difference, but I wasn’t taking the long view.
“I will come to the point, Mr. Turner. You want to know about the stone they now call the Russian Pink. That is why you’re here. You have learned what you wanted from poor Piet.” He shook his head again, as if the cares of the world were weighing heavily on him. “Piet has suffered enough.”
He produced a scrap of smile that stopped well short of his eyes. Probably the bag of high-end rough we’d taken from Piet had been destined for João, and João’s people had gone looking for it. If Piet was still alive when they found him, I doubt they’d have thought that whatever he’d suffered was enough.
João’s concave chest whistled and clanked like broken plumbing. He inspected his handkerchief and found a dot of blood, and refolded the white linen until he had a spotless square again.
“Lime has deceived your Mr. Nash. He has made a fool of him. You know about the Camafoza Pipe?”
“The largest diamond pipe in the world. You managed to hide your continued ownership from the Angolans. They wouldn’t have been too curious about the Camafoza because the pipe has disappointed everyone who’s ever drilled it. How am I doing so far?”
“Yes,” he said. A hairline scar ran from his left eye to the corner of his mouth, like the track of a tear, if the tear had been made of acid. His eyes burned with a feverish brightness. “That is true as far as it goes. What you may not know about the Camafoza is that a loop of the Chicapa River crosses a corner of the pipe.” He looked at me expectantly.
“OK,” I shrugged.
A bright green gecko flashed from a crack in the terrace and froze.
“It is important,” João said, leaning forward, “because the river exposes an edge of the pipe. As you know, a diamond pipe is an extinct volcano shaped like a funnel. It extends deep into the earth, to the place where diamonds are formed. In the geological past, it was the eruption of such volcanoes that brought diamonds to the surface. Each pipe has its own peculiarities.”
His eyes blazed even more brightly.
“I expect you know this very well, because it was your father who described the suite of minerals that enable us to understand the individual chemical signatures of diamond pipes. That is what tells us whether a given pipe is worth the expense of exploration. From that analysis, we concluded the Camafoza was rich in diamonds.”
A shiny blue beetle trundled into view and the gecko flicked forward and seized it. With its prey in its mouth the lizard froze. The only movement was the beetle flailing its blue legs.
“The problem was the size of the pipe. The Camafoza has a surface expression of 150 hectares—almost 400 acres. That is a vast area to explore. We could drill many holes and still miss the diamonds. But,” a bony finger shot up, “we were lucky. The Chicapa River cuts across a corner of the pipe. The river has washed away all the soil around that part of the pipe. To explore this large section, all we had to do was dam the river and dig directly into the pipe.”
A sheen of perspiration covered his face. He reached for the inhaler and clutched it in his fist. The gecko’s body twitched as it swallowed most of the beetle. Only the beetle’s bright blue head remained in sight, its antennae waving frantically.
“As soon as we penetrated into the pipe, we made an astonishing discovery—huge xenoliths!”
“Stranger rocks,” I said.
“Yes!” he rasped. “Geologists call them that because they are not like any other rocks found on the planet. They have not been fused with other rocks in the normal process of geological formation. They are as they were when formed in the depths. What geologists know from long experience,” he leaned forward, his body shaking, “is that a diamond pipe that has carried up large xenoliths may also have carried up equally massive diamonds!”
A tawny blur shot from the leaves, snatched the gecko in its mouth, and sprang into João’s lap, where it crouched and stared at me with enormous amber eyes. The gecko clawed wildly at the air and the beetle in the gecko’s mouth waved its blue antennae. The Sokoke cat made a soft, snarling sound deep in its throat. It pinned the squirming lizard with a paw against the snow-white robe and bit off its head.
João seemed hardly to notice the cat, or the spreading bloodstain in his lap. His eyes showed a momentary glint of panic and he opened his mouth and took a greedy gulp of the inhaler. Relieved, he closed his eyes for a moment and stroked the cat.
“If the diamonds were, as we believed, as massive as the xenoliths,” he said, regaining his breath, “we should find them where we were digging, at the edge of the pipe, where the centrifugal force of the rising lava would have pushed such heavy stones.”
The hand that stroked the cat stopped and João watched me, waiting for the question.
“And did you find them?”
“Atílio!” João called, and Green Shirt emerged from the house with a leather attaché case. He snapped the catches, opened the case, and placed it on the table beside João.
João took out an enormous diamond, at least 500 carats, and held it reverently. It was roughly egg shaped, flat on one side, and pale brown. He handed it to me and gave me a loupe. I peered in through the flattest surface. Even in the weak light of the poolside lamps, the brown tint was apparent. Some miners have successfully marketed browns. The Australians invented new color names, calling them cognacs and champagnes. But color was not the biggest challenge of the stone. Even if you could accept the color, the diamond I held in my hand would never get to a wheel. It was cobwebbed with fracture planes. I tilted the stone this way and that, straining to penetrate the blizzard of flaws and find, if it was there, some part of the diamond that was clean. And then I caught sight of it, just a glimpse. I made a minute adjustment in the angle, and caught it again. A pool of stillness deep in the center of the stone.
I took my eye from the loupe for a moment. To rest it. Then looked in again. This time I found the pathway to the center more quickly, and there it was. What I’d glimpsed before. A tranquil pool in the eye of the storm. Unruffled and serene—but not unmarked. It swarmed with tiny inclusions, as if an alien horde had invaded the diamond and been captured there for all eternity. I had never before seen such strange inclusions. Except once. Less than a week before. As I sat with Honey Li.
I handed the diamond to Lily. She inspected it briefly. “Hopeless,” she said.
João snatched the stone back. “A Russian would always say that,” he spat. Scarlet patches appeared on his cheeks and he was seized with a violent spasm that ended in a long, racking cough. He dabbed at his mouth with the handkerchief. Slowly he mastered himself. His face softened as he put the jewel back in the case and stared at it.
“When we recovered this diamond from the edge of the pipe, it weighed almost 4,000 carats. It was larger than the mother stone of the Great Star of Africa.”
“The biggest stone in history,” I said.
The Sokoke finished the last of the gecko, closed its eyes, and began to purr like an idling truck.
“Four thousand carats. Can you imagine? I was going to call the color ‘umber.’ Cognac and champagne—they are not names for a jewel. This would be pale umber,” he placed a finger on the case. “Others would polish to a deep, vivid umber.” His voice had taken on a dreamy tone. “I thought it would restore the glory of Angola.” He turned his ruined face to me. “Was that so wrong?”
He was infected not just by his disease but by the stone. The diamond ravaged his imagination.
“We tried to cut it.”
“And it blew up on the wheel,” I said.
João closed his eyes and let his head sink back. At last I understood. It should have struck me sooner. Browns and pinks were companion colors. They could exist together in the same deposit. In Australia’s giant Argyle Pipe, eighty percent of its eight-million-carat-a-year production were low-grade browns. Yet also present at the mine was a small population of fabulously rare and sought-after pinks. The presence of one color could indicate the other.
“You’re saying the Russian Pink came from the Camafoza Pipe,” I said.
“Where else,” he murmured hoarsely.
I played it out. The pink would have got into the river the same way every diamond gets into a river: by washing in from its primary source, a pipe. In this case, the pink would have been dislodged by the mining at the edge of the pipe, and the machinery had failed to capture it. It rolled in the current until it was vacuumed up. Unlike other river stones, its placement in the river had not been millions of years ago, but recently. That explained why it still had pieces of rock clinging to it.
The Sokoke licked at the bloody patch in João’s lap, then laid its chin in the gore and glared at me. João paused to summon his strength, drawing in deep, rattling breaths.
“Lime stole my pipe. He found out that I owned it through a nominee and told the Angolans.” Another wrenching cough shook his body, ending in a string of violent spasms. He shoved the handkerchief hard against his mouth until the shaking stopped.
“When the world learns where the Russian Pink came from, the shares in the company that owns the pipe will rise to many times their present value.”
“What’s the company?”
“Great Pipe,” he gasped, groping for the inhaler. His eyes alight with fear, he drew two puffs deep into his disintegrating lungs. The last of his strength was bleeding away into the viscous night. He closed his eyes and waited for his body to calm itself.
“It’s all in here,” he said in a whisper, handing me a manila folder. “I even put in your father’s conclusions. He believed in the Camafoza.” He fixed me with a gaze as full of hopelessness as hatred. “Lime is using your Mr. Nash. I ask only that you ruin Lime.”
“Why did no one see it?” I said to Lily as we drove away.
“The reputation of the Camafoza,” she shrugged. “Every previous exploration failed.”
We left Port Nolloth behind and headed north up the highway to Alexander Bay.
“What’s the pipe worth now?” Lily said, breaking the silence with what we’d both been thinking.
“You tell me. Hundreds of billions? In Australia, brown and pink diamonds exist in the same deposit. Obviously they do in the Camafoza too. Even if a lot of them are badly flawed, they might still yield large stones. Look at the Russian Pink.”
Lily nodded. “And now we know why Lime was smuggling in that small pink.”
“That’s right. If he could show that those bits and pieces left over from the shattered stone could be polished into jewels, then the value of the deposit explodes. If Lime revealed that all at once—that the Camafoza had produced not only the Russian Pink, but other smaller pinks as well, polished from the same stone—the share price would skyrocket.”
We left the car at the airport in Alexander Bay and caught the hopper that goes through Springbok on its way down to the Cape. Springbok is the capital of Namaqualand. It has a Dutch Reformed Church, a post office, and a road that ends at the abandoned copper mine. You wouldn’t normally expect to find the local cop poking his head into the once-a-day Beechcraft and carefully checking out the passengers against a photograph he had. He held it up and frowned at it and turned it this way and that before he decided that, yes, it was me, folded the image away, and left. So I wasn’t surprised to find someone waiting for us in the terminal at Cape Town, but I didn’t expect it to be Chuck.