'A' for Argonaut (17 page)

“Diamond has military apps.”

“Right. We can forget that.”

“We can’t forget anything, yet.”

“OK. What military applications?”

“Have you forgotten Mount Haleakala?”

“Maui?”

“Right. For years now, the Air Force has been secretly targeting hostile reconnaissance satellites, blinding them with directed high energy laser bursts.”

“OK, so?”

“The weapon beam is directed by a concave dish coated with micro- scopic diamond film.”

Maran had already left
when Jacques Levine’s phone rang.

“Jackie,” Abe Cone opened. “Y-y-you, ahh, you-you g-get anyw-w-where yet?” Cone stuttered.

Levine sympathized, but Cone’s impediment was a distraction. He still bore emotional scars from his days as a survivor at Theresienstadt, a Nazi concentration camp not far from Prague. Pushing 90, he had been unable to speak until he finally mustered enough composure to stutter out what he wanted to say.

“We just hired a man,” the director said.

“F-f-fast w-w-work. I-I-I’m impressed,” he responded.

“I’m glad you agree.”

“When d-d-d-does…” Cone couldn’t get the words out.

“Take your time.”

“OK. When d-d-d-doe he s-s-s-start? W-w-what’s th-the game plan?”

“He’s already started.”

Levine wondered if Cone’s condition was deteriorating.

Levine hesitated. But Cone was a trusted member of the Board. He filled him in.

The next day, Maran
was back in Jacques Levine’s office. Light streamed across the room, filtered by a potted palm in a window overlooking 47th Street. They sat at a low-slung table of inlaid African Gaboon ebony and elephant tusk ivory. Today, Maran noted, export of such a table from Africa would be banned under international treaties.

On Levine’s desk sat a high-precision diamond scale made a hundred years ago by the Sartorious Gem Scale Company. Levine looked grave. “The price of diamonds is getting weaker. We fear it’s going to get worse. Much worse. More and more of these stones are showing up. The market can’t take much more. KoeffieBloehm is already alarmed. They’re renegotiating their loans with the London and New York banks. Treasury is working with them, gearing up for a full court press investigation. But they want to keep it concealed. If it continues, that will be impossible. This recession will turn into a depression. It will make the thirties look like a scrimmage.”

“Confirms our worst fears.”

“No doubt about it. We want you to pay a visit to Abner Dolitz. He is the head of one of our biggest member firms. Something funny is going on there. To track the growth of the industry, we audit each of our members every year. Dolitz is dumping beautiful stones at bargain prices and it doesn’t make sense. You can check their paperwork to determine where these diamonds originate.”

“Won’t he ask for credentials?”

The diamond maven got up. He took a piece of plastic from his desk. He placed it in front of Maran. The card verified Mack Maran as an auditor for the New York Club.

“You have an appointment with his firm’s Financial Controller. In the meantime, you can meet with one of our top cutters. He has new information.” Levine had turned to Schulim Mostakovictz to examine several suspect diamonds that had surfaced.

Levine called ahead. He was told that Mostakovictz was praying at the
Beit Midrash
, a small synagogue at the back of the Diamond Dealers Club, set up and blessed by a Hasidic rebbe. Schulim had left a message that he would be another fifteen minutes. He would meet with Maran and Levine in the trading room.

“He’s a very religious, very independent man,” Levine told Maran as they walked down the hall to the club’s bourse. It was flanked by cutting rooms.

Levine showed his badge at a bulletproof window staffed by two armed guards. They entered through a thick glass door. Inside, the hall bustled with Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish men wearing untrimmed beards and
payot
, long, curled side-locks that bounced like springs when they turned their heads. Knee-length black overcoats over black suits with black beaver caftan hats. Prayer strings dangled from the sides of their black slacks, completing their unofficial uniforms. Deals here were made without contracts, just a simple, traditional blessing,
mazel und brucha
, and a handshake. Word was law. It was an honor system cast in a tradition as hard as the diamonds it protected.

Maran had never been in a diamond bourse before. He noticed that many of the men spoke Yiddish. Upstairs, Levine ushered Maran through a turnstile. Several rows of simple folding conference tables filled the large room. The traders sat across from one another negotiating prices. At one of the tables, Maran overheard a seller speaking in a hoarse whisper.

A paper packet lay opened on the table in front of them under a small pyramid of gems. “All right, all right. The whole lot, fifty carats and twenty-five points.”

“
Gut
,” the buyer responded in guttural Yiddish. “Und ve credit you ze ten carats ve owed from our last transaction und fector een ze two percent. That eez…”, the man said, “…three-hundred-ninety-four-thousand-four-hundred-fifty dollars.” Maran noticed he didn’t use a calculator.

The buyer’s hand flashed in and out of his inside jacket pocket. He extracted a wallet thick as a phone directory. It was secured by a chrome steel chain to a heavy leather belt around his waist, hidden from view. His hands reached across, enveloping the paper packet of diamonds. He smoothed the pyramid, scooped the gems back into the envelope, and crimped the edges closed with the diamonds inside. In a flick of his hand, it went into the buyer’s billfold and back with it to the inside pocket. As the buyer’s hands parted his coat lapels, Maran spotted a heavy automatic pistol in a shoulder holster. No cash was exchanged.

The two men smiled, got up, shook hands, and left.

Mostakovictz, in his shirtsleeves
and looking solemn, came into the bourse and joined Maran and Levine. The men exchanged pleasantries.

“Schulim has some discoveries to pass on to you, about ‘our problem.’” Levine said.

“Yes. Mr. Maran. The diamonds I have examined so far were all cut the same; they come from the same firm’s cutting rooms,” Mostakovictz said.

“Go on.”

“Let me explain. The beauty of a gem is dependent on its brilliance, its gentility, the way it reflects light. The standard round ‘brilliant’ cut breaks the stone into several main sections.”

“I know only that the facets are the polished faces on the surface; the crown is above the girdle and the girdle is the cut band around the stone,” Maran confessed.

“That’s right. But these questionable stones have two unusual aspects that regular diamonds do not possess. First, they are all perfect‌—‌in spite of their incredibly low price. Unheard of! Second, the cut of these stones is highly stylized, even experimental. Whoever designed this unique cut is a man of uncommon skill. He has set a new standard.”

“Amazing.”

“He is also a monumental crook,” Mostakovictz added.

“Did he fall on hard times?”

“I’ll get to that, Mr. Maran.”

“Sorry. Please continue.”

“When a stone is manufactured, half the weight is lost‌—‌”

“‘Manufactured?’” Maran interrupted.

“…Conversion from rough to a finished gem.” Mostakovictz explained. He paused.

“Continue.”

“A two-carat rough crystal should yield a finished, cut stone of one carat. A cut stone is priced at nine times the cost of the rough and a rough crystal as perfect as these, would sell for many thousands of dollars a carat. Once cut, a one carat stone could be sold at a multiple of nine by a wholesaler like Dolitz. We suspect Dolitz is selling these stones wholesale for one-hundred dollars a carat. Something is terribly wrong.”

Maran agreed.

“But how? Why? Where are they coming from?”

“That is for you to find out,” Levine said turning to Maran.

“What else can you tell me?” Maran asked.

“The ‘brilliant’ cut has always been considered to be the one to provide the most vivid fire,” Schulim said. “But these stones are even brighter. Somehow the firm’s owner has found a way to increase the depth of the crown which allows him to make more cuts in the stone’s pavilion. It’s ingenious. But what’s very strange is he has sought no publicity for this cut. I wondered why he would want to keep such a brilliant new technique out of the limelight. Perhaps now we know why.”

“Who is he?”

“Last February, a friend showed me one of his stones at the International Diamond Trade Show in Shenzhen, China. It was the only time I’ve ever seen that cut. My friend said the cutter is very secretive. He comes from a long tradition of KoeffieBloehm Diamond viewers. His grandfather, founder of the firm, was one of the first of the cutters named by Sir Albert Stevens as a “viewer,” privileged dealer, at the turn of the century. By the mid-fifties, the family had become Antwerp’s largest dealer with more than five hundred cutters in various locations. Now the children have invested in other, newer, faster tech businesses and left the diamond cutting to the old man. It was tough for him when his sons turned their backs on everything he taught them as observant Jews. They took a shine to fast horses, wild women, and gambling. It took a lot of cash to keep the loan sharks off. Their debts piled up so high, he couldn’t handle them so he started cutting corners. Things got worse when he lost his ‘viewer’ status with KoeffieBloehm.”

“His name?”

“Chaim Tolkachevsky. Owns the only firm in Antwerp capable of cutting such large volumes of stones.”

Before Maran left New York City, Levine had supplied him with the two complete sets of credentials he’d asked for. One, matching the business calling card he had already had printed up, identified him as Rodney Davis, investigative journalist. The other had him as Walter Q.R. Jackson, investigator in competitive intelligence at Bang!

Eighteen

Presqu’ile de Banana, Angola

T
he Zebra Tours charter jet from Brussels descended through the moonlit night over the jungle. It set down with a bump on the surprisingly puddled airport tarmac. The heavy-set man looked out on the large field of oil tanks at the edge of the Lulondo River and in the near distance noted the graffiti that marked an old warehouse wall, confirmation that PFLEC had taken up arms again.

His passport said he was Alex Pajak, but he never signed checks. He didn’t have to. All his business transactions were in the hardest of currencies‌—‌diamonds. In his mid-fifties, of average height, he was built like a block of cement with his clipped blond hair severely brushed back, short as a Rottweiler’s. He wore a chocolate tweed sportcoat over an olive shirt under a tan sweater and khakis. He could see Boyko waiting for him, leaning against an armored Humvee at the edge of the runway. Two security guards sat up front. Pajak took note of the Humvee’s U.S. Special Forces add-on goodies, especially the remotely operated weapon station. It let the gunner fire the MK-19 Grenade Machine Gun from inside the armor. He greeted Boyko and they climbed in together. They drove a half-hour past bombarded houses and buildings through two different checkpoints. The first was a concrete bathhouse where the road swung down through Little Ilha beach. A fully loaded gasoline truck, its motor rattling, barred the way.

“That beach hasn’t seen a swimmer all summer,” Boyko remarked.

Security in the DRC was a joke. A lone soldier sat inside the concrete guardhouse, a Russian AK-47 pointed out at them over the rim of the shed’s small window.

“Internal fuckin’ security assholes,” Boyko muttered.

He flashed a security pass encased in plastic.

“Smarten up, if you don’t want the ditch,” he warned the soldier whose facial expression showed that he had heard about it, Boyko’s answer to those who got out of line. The point was too late for the victims. Friends and families, however, never missed the message. Pajak had seen one. Victims were staked out alive on the dirt floor of the trench, burial-grave deep. The ditch crawled with hordes of two-inch long, flesh-eating red army ants and blow flies. As many as 50,000 of the ants, wielding large, sharp mandibles, had marched in columns down from the surrounding fica trees into the ditch to devour the faces and naked bodies of the staked out victims one bite at a time. The flies joined the party, sucking up the ooze through their tube-like mouths and inserting maggot-producing eggs as soon as there was enough exposed dead flesh to attract them. The screaming of the victims ripped the surrounding area for as much as three days. When the feast was finished, nothing remained but a starkly-stripped skeleton for the nearby residents to witness.

Boyko and Pajak continued
their drive across the Devanangan Bridge past a second checkpoint before arriving at
Largro Pedro Benge,
a main street in Cabinda proper. They pulled up to a new building, highlighted by a huge neon sign that flickered its come-on twenty-four-seven.

GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS!

ALL SEX ALL TIME

Boyko’s Grand Tropico Aphrodiziax night club stood out like a baroque Barcelona cathedral designed by Antoni Gaudi in an apartheid-era South African tin shack township. Boyko operated a chain of similar bars in Luanda and Kinshasa. He relished the thought of Pajak’s prudish discomfort on learning that the teenaged pole-dancers were slaves to be sold to the highest bidder. The slave trade, started by the Portuguese in 1616, thrived from ports located along the Atlantic coast from Pointe Noire south through Cabinda and Luanda to Benguela. Born of collusion between European pillagers and local native tribal societies like the Imbangala and the Mbundu, the trafficking ensnared more than 100,000 prisoners before it was curtailed in 1880 by Cuba, the last country to recognize it as inherently inhuman.