'A' for Argonaut (24 page)

Twenty-Seven

Presqui’le de Banana

I
n her room at Boyko’s Presqu’ile de Banana estate, Amber readied for her trip to Antwerp. She was taking her trunks with her on Boyko’s private jet to Antwerp; four Louis Vuitton trunks filled with diamonds, including 434 pounds of D-perfect gemstones. She had plenty of prior experience helping clients of UBS, the Swiss banking giant, launder hundreds of millions of dollars through sham foreign entities, hiding the profits from the IRS and foreign tax authorities by using undeclared diamonds purchased with illegally-gained funds and transporting them from Angola to Antwerp and all over the world to safe deposit boxes in private banks from Geneva and Liechtenstein to Panama and Miami. Now she was sitting on a micro version of Fort Knox.

While Boyko had been busy with Pajak in Kinshasa, she was enjoying a bit of time to herself before her trip. The pressure of feigning interest in him was highly stressful. He had returned the night before after Pajak left for Washington and had made plans to see her before she left for Antwerp with the diamonds.

In spite of her hatred of Boyko, she secretly nourished the excitement. She was the nuts, the Queen of Diamonds. It didn’t make any sense to feel the way she did‌—‌smug, an overreaction to an alien emotion, defenselessness, but she needed some way around her foreboding sense of doom.

She checked her briefcase for her false passport, citizenship papers, thumbed over a news clip. She had completed the inventory sheets, the shipping documents, packed them all in the travel trunks Boyko had given her, and walked into the area where earlier she had chatted with the office secretary. She was alone. The reception hall echoed with her footsteps. The sound accentuated her aloneness. Her arms tingled, giving her goosebumps. Boyko was in a meeting in a room on the floor above. It was almost 5 P.M. She could feel the day’s strain. The air in the room was still, the windows closed against the putrefied air, which still smelled of burning trash and garbage. She stretched. Then‌—‌for a split second‌—‌a flash of color in the corner of her eye. Behind her.

A man? A huge Afro wig‌—‌from the 70s’ hippie days?

She turned to look. Nothing!

She lit a Dunhill Diamante cigar. Her hands shook. It was the first one she had had in days since deciding to kick the habit, embarrassed into it by the outcry from her son. She glared into the mirror, strained to recapture the image.

Was it real?

Her nerves were charged with electric current. She noticed the book she had left that rested on the table. Opened. She picked it up. A piece of paper fell to the floor. A note. She read.

BEWAR SAYCRD

GEMS OF ARGNAUT

Nightmare!

The note was written in blood. She grew up in a sophisticated family, was schooled by refined people. The occult, devil magic, the spirit world, voodoo, was foreign. She knew superstition still prevailed in the bush, throughout sub-Saharan Africa, but this was her first brush with it. The tremors started in her legs, traveled up her arms, spread through her body. She was shaking apart.

It took her ten minutes sitting in one of the reception area chairs to regain her composure. She looked around, got up, and walked to the bathroom. She opened the bathroom door, looked into the large mirror over the bright red marbled sink!

Him! Vangaler!

But for the cast on one arm where Amber had broken it and a yellow-orange wig that framed his head like an paranormal halo, he was naked and erect.

Her screams echoed off the spare white walls. They reverberated from the tile floor to the cement ceiling. He had run down the hallway by the time Boyko and the rest of his team rushed down the hallway from their meeting upstairs.

They laughed when she told them.

She had composed herself
by the time she and Boyko and Vangaler met later in the lavishly appointed dining room where they dined before she left for her trip. The incident went unmentioned, just another day in paradise. The walls in the room were decorated with velvety rich wood panel wainscoting and lined with beef crown moldings under a ceiling crisscrossed with oak beams. A wild boar’s head projected from the wall above the long dining room table. A chandelier lit the floral arrangements and brightly colored salads that sat in front of them.

“I hope you’re enjoying the roast boar,” Boyko said, glancing as he spoke to admire the Bacchanalian scene that hung on the opposite wall, a copper etching of grapevines and cavorting satyrs.

“Fabulous. Nothing better than a big mouthful of juicy meat,” Amber answered.

Cunt-scum lapper.

She hated the game he forced her to play.

Vangaler thought she sounded like one of the actresses he lusted over in his porn collection.

“I can buy into that,” he leered, swigging a gulp of whiskey from the Waterford wine goblet.

“Shut your mouth, savage,” Boyko snarled at the beast. Vangaler stroked the cast on his arm. His hatred boiled.

The door flew open. A soldier dressed in the tiger stripe camo uniform of Vangaler’s Ninjas rushed into the room. They heard gunfire.

“PFLEC. Outside!” the soldier shouted.

“Quick!” Boyko ordered. “To the vault!”

He pointed to the wall adorned with Rauschenbergs, pushed a button just beneath the wooden frame around the paintings. Amber’s maple eyes widened. The section of the wall rose into the ceiling. Behind it, a sheet of steel ribbed with titanium rods faced them like teeth on a fossil. Boyko punched a code into a switchbox. The shield rose, disappeared, the titanium rods poised overhead.

The hidden room was lined in steel-reinforced concrete, supported in the villa’s infrastructure by steel H-beams. One wall contained an armory cabinet that held several dozen Chinese CK-88 assault weapons and twelve Steyr P-1 sniper rifles with 16-power U.S.M.C. tactical sniper-scopes and silencers. Vangaler turned to an aide and snapped, “Make sure you take one of these cockroaches alive. We’ll burn his feet until he tells us who sent him here.”

“Sir, that’s beyond our control now. The Ninjas take no prisoners.”

Boyko stepped to the open window. The rest of the party joined him. Outside they watched as Vangaler’s forces surrounded the raiders. They were scattered in teams of two or three, trapped in the sugarcane field outside the villa. The merciless volley of automatic fire from the Angolan government’s Chinese CK-88s riddled their unprotected positions. The heavy grass offered scant protection. It parted as the SSI Ninjas moved through in an organized skirmish line advancing over the protective berm that circled the estate. Live bodies jumped as they were bayoneted.

“PFLEC,” Vangaler snarled. “Scavenger trash.”

Amber said nothing; she noted Boyko’s concern. He walked her to the reception room where she was packed and ready to go. On the way, she asked him about the note that Vangaler had left in her book, about the “Gems of Argnaut.” He dismissed her question.

If her plan worked, she would never have to worry about them again.

Twenty-Eight

Antwerp, Belgium

B
oyko’s corporate jet, an eight-passenger Bombardier Challenger 300 had flown out of Kinshasa. It was circling over Deurne International Airport south of Antwerp. She sat at a window seat and watched the city swirl beneath her. The jet landed and taxied to an unloading dock at an old warehouse building off to the side of the main airport. Amber climbed down the ladder in the charter area. Boyko had made special provisions with his security friends there so she could skirt being checked by customs. The freight handler pulled up to the rear of the plane with a tractor and two carts while the cargo door opened. Two handlers unloaded Amber’s trunks onto the carts. She smiled at their attentions, beamed, lifted her arms to fix her copious hair. The motion accentuated the shape of her body in the sleeveless, neon-leopard shift dress. She had on a pair of red-framed Oakley wrap-around sunglasses with rose lenses; she adjusted the brushed leopard fedora so it shaded her eyes. Her ears dripped with diamond drops.

The driver pointed her to the limousine waiting for her. She reached into her pocketbook and drew out some hundred-dollar bills‌—‌U.S.

“Take this,” she said to the handlers who had put her luggage into the trunk of the limo.

They tooled out of the airport en route to Tolkachevsky’s, past the Meir pedestrian shopping street and Ruben’s house, emerging into the square known as
Wapper,
and took a right past St. Jacobskerk into Lange Nieustraat
.
As she passed through the city she began to quiver. Quiet time allowed her more time to think, and when she thought, her thoughts turned to Tony. She did all she could to drive her fears for him out of her mind, but her best efforts only went so far. Now the tears began to run down her face.

Tony!

Her mind spun as she recalled the horror she had just escaped at the hands of Vangaler. She held up her disfigured hand and winced. Ever since as a child her Bakongo mother told her the tribal tales of witches and zombies who kidnapped naughty little girls and ate corpses, Amber, always naughty, was haunted by a dread of the unknown as a result. Even more frightening was her fear of the infibulations, female genital mutilation. They were too real. She was lucky her father had sheltered her from them, but she knew that there were two-million cases every year in Muslim areas in Africa, including Angola and the DRC. Though she wasn’t Muslim, it was a custom in many African tribes. She had too many friends who had gone through the barbarous practice.

The thought of Vangaler’s face made her sick. She asked her driver to pull over. She wretched.

Tolkachevsky greeted her warmly
at the door to his office. It was located in an early seventeenth century town house with a Baroque façade built on the Meir just by Lange Herentalsestraat, the location of the Belgium Diamond Bourse in the Diamond Quarter. Tolkachevsky was a non-observant Hassid. Although he wore the
payot
and the long black jacket and black beaver hat required of observant Hassids, in his heart he had no faith left. He hadn’t put the horrors of his family’s WWII Nazi experience in Paris behind him.

Amber had wakened his long-dead spirit.

“You know Boyko will be watching us,” Amber said.

“So be it,” Tolkachevsky responded.

“We may not live through this,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m here against my will, you know.”

“Who isn’t? Life is hard,” he answered cynically. “I’m sure you had no choice. For me, it is too late. A deal with the devil. Conflict diamonds, blood diamonds, they argue about what to call them. Hrgggh,” he guffawed. “I never should have; no one in Antwerp should ever touch one uncertified African diamond. High white but stained with innocent blood.”

“You compromised to save your children, the boys.”

“To what avail? Look at what it has gotten me. I loved them, my flesh and blood. They are still running around with women, drinking and gambling, and who knows what else they do in those nightclubs. They have made the wrong choice. So did I. Now I have to make my peace.”

The words sent a shudder through her body.

“Yes,” said Tolkachevsky. “I want you to understand. You have been my friend. I haven’t done too much good in my life. Let me help you now. You stuck by me when those bastards at KoeffieBloehm stripped my status.” Not satisfied with the quality of the batches they were offering him, he had turned down two offers, a taboo in that unforgiving world. KoeffieBloehm took away his status as a “viewer” at their London-based Central Merchandising Organization offices, a major blow to his business.

Amber pointed to the four trunks on the floor. Boyko’s gems.

“You’re an opportunity,” Amber answered in an exhausted monotone. “Don’t feel obligated.”

They sat in silence.

The door opened. It was Jules Schulem, Tolkachevsky’s chief cutter, with a problem. Tolkachevsky excused himself, his age apparent as he struggled up from his desk. When he stepped out into the hallway, the door failed to close all the way. Amber overheard the hushed conversation.