The Big Killing (13 page)

We had a puncture in Katiola and a small breakdown in Niakaramandougou, whose name caught in Ron's throat like a cocktail stick. We arrived in Tortiya at dusk, about as ready for work as two severely whipped Egyptian mules.

Ron gave Moses the name of his contact and we watched his white shirt disappear into the mud huts of the village. I stripped off my shirt and put on a fresh one and offered another to Ron who asked where I'd bought it. I discussed the fine lines of Armani and the fussiness of Christian Lacroix and Ron got the picture and backed off, saying he'd wear one of his own. Where did Martin Fall find this guy?

The sun set unusually, in a crimson streak through dove-grey clouds on the horizon. Then it was dark and the cicadas drew in with it, rubbing out any sound that might have come from the village. Woodsmoke cut the thick night air and the smell of cooking, something viscous and bland, came on the back of it.

The weak light of a cheap torch bounced between where we knew the houses were and took its time arriving. Moses introduced us to someone whose hand we fumbled for in the night and who called himself Borema. We left Moses with the car and crossed the dirt street into an alleyway between mud walls. We walked through the layers of woodsmoke that hung outside the doorways where weak hurricane lamplight painted cracks down and around the doors. There were voices over walls and behind doors, all low, hungry and tired from a long day looking for what the white man had come to buy. The white man was asking me, why these people lived in such shit, why didn't they get themselves organized, why...?

After stumbling along the rough alleyway we came into a round clearing where there was thick, audible drainage trickling down a black ditch. We crossed the ditch and went into another narrow alley and then across a wider street into another passage which had been dabbed with tincture of billy-goat sweat. There was bright light at the end of this passage and the sound of an old generator which we found was connected to a forty-foot container.

The container stood in a swept earthen square with a queue of fifteen hajis in long robes and cylindrical hats leading to a door that had been cut in the side at one end. Borema went to another door cut in the opposite end of the container, opened it and turned the light on inside. The generator's tone changed as the air conditioning came on and the apprehension that had hunched Ron's shoulders forward lifted and he held his hands out to receive the miracle before him.

Inside the container was a pristine diamond room that could have been lifted straight out of the Antwerp exchange and transported intact to this dark and miserable place. The floor was polished, the walls painted white. In the middle was a long table with two chairs and on the table two large white blotters. There were Anglepoise lamps by the blotters and, in between, a set of scales. At one end there was even a telephone. The only downmarket element was another table in the corner with a primitive sink and a tap. On the table was a plastic tray and in the tray a bottle of clear fluid in a plastic bottle.

'This is a fucking mirage,' said Ron. 'If these were electric'—he pointed at the scales—'it would be perfect.'

I picked up the plastic bottle in the tray.

'Careful with that, Bruce. Hydrofluoric acid. Cleans diamonds, burns flesh. We probably won't need it, all the goods around here are alluvial which means...'

'They come from the river bed.'

'Right, so you know your Latin. They dig up the river bed, wash the gravel, move on. The goods'll be clean enough to price. When we get them back to Antwerp they'll be deep boiled in hydrofluoric and that stuff you really don't need on your hands.'

He sat down and from the holdall took out a pad, pen and calculator, then a pair of tweezers and an eyeglass. He combed his still-wet hair straight back and straightened his black T-shirt so that the white legend 'Moolah' was clear. He sat up, clasped his hands and bent them back, cracking his knuckles. 'Let's go,' he said.

Borema opened the door and the first haji came in. The haji produced a packet from under his robe and Ron tipped out the contents on to the blotter. In a matter of seconds he had divided the stones into three piles. A single stone on its own, then two others and the remainder in a small pile. He looked at the three main stones through the eyeglass.

'What do you know about diamonds, Bruce?'

'They're forever.'

'Corny.'

'They're a girl's best friend.'

'Which decade are you from?'

'They're not cheap.'

'Yeah.'

'Hoods call them "ice".'

'They're wrong.'

And they're probably trouble.'

'That's for certain.'

'How about you? You look as if you've done this before.'

'This is the best bit,' he said. 'You ever collected coins?'

'I've never been that interested in money,' I lied.

'I did, when I was a kid. I sifted through pennies, that was all I could afford, looking for the ones I didn't have. When I had them all I looked for ones in better condition, but all the time I was dreaming that one day I'd come across the ultimate: the unaccounted-for, priceless nineteen thirty-three penny. Every time I came back from the bank with a bag of pennies ... the excitement ... there's nothing like it.'

'Bags of pennies—well, you've got me there, Ron. I never would have seen it.'

'Funny guy,' he said, looking down. 'You're going to learn something today, Bruce. This isn't about money. This is about beauty and perfection. Money's the scale, nothing more. The reason I'm here is because of the stones. Bigger, better and more perfect stones. I'm not an asshole, I know the money is important but ... take a look at this.' He held the single stone he'd divided off and handed me the eyeglass. 'That is what we call a sawable. You see that double pyramid form. Octahedron, remember your geometry? It's the best kind of stone because it can be cut and shaped with the minimum of loss, but look inside the stone. You can see blue and yellow and pink in there and behind them all a bright white light ... That's what it's all about.

'Those are the easiest stones to spot. These are more difficult,' he said, taking one of the two stones from the middle lot. 'This is a cleavage. Sometimes they can be as good as a sawable in quality but there's always going to be more loss because of their irregular shape. You value it by seeing how you can cut it.

'This...' he said, putting it down and picking up the other stone, '...is a problem. It's a maccle. It looks nice; it even looks a bit like the other one, but you look harder and you see problems in the middle. You're more likely to find flaws in these. Sometimes the flaws are tricky to see. Sometimes I make a mistake and I end up with a piece of shit, having paid for something better. Every stone teaches you something. I won't buy it unless he gives it away.'

'What about the other?'

'They're industrials,' he said, without looking round. 'Nothing of interest, like broken glass. They'll go to make those baguette diamonds you see on either side of better stones to enhance them. Either that or industry. They're no big deal. These three are what we're here for.'

He weighed them and asked the haji to give him a price. Shaking his head, he punched the figure into his calculator, converting it into dollars.

'He's asking for more than I can get in Antwerp,' said Ron, brushing the diamonds back into the packet which he handed to the haji who gave him another figure. Ron shook the packet at him and another lower figure dropped out of the haji. Ron tossed the packet at him. The haji didn't want to pick it up, as if by picking it up he would lose the sale. He told us he was seventy-three years old. He looked fifty. Ron nodded. He told us he had twenty-eight children and his fourth wife was pregnant with number twenty-nine. He gave another figure and Ron folded his arms. The figure was a lot lower and the haji said it was for the whole packet.

Ron opened the packet and poured the diamonds out in an expert sweep. He took a towel out of his holdall and wiped his hands. Then he sat back, taking his time, running his hands through his hair and flicking it up over his collar and using the towel again. The haji, half bent over the table, was locked in position with the tension. Ron picked up the flawed maccle he hadn't liked and took another look at it through the eyeglass, weighed it, and shook his head. He weighed all the industrials, writing down their weights on the pad and a money amount next to each one. He totalled the column. He weighed the sawable and the cleavage but didn't write anything down.

He thought for some minutes. The haji's white-slippered feet shifted in the silence. Then for the first time Ron gave a figure. The haji blinked. This was real money and I could hear his brain ticking through it like a note counter, wrapping rubber bands around it and stacking it off. The haji started to say something, started to try and reopen the negotiations and Ron stared him into the ground. They shook hands.

Ron took a fresh sheet of paper out, wrote the haji's name on it, the agreed price and the carat weight of the parcel. They both signed it. Ron told the haji the name of the Belgian who was financing the deal and the haji nodded as if there was nobody else.

'How was that?'

'Good,' said Ron, his brain buzzing, blinking fast. 'He was too desperate.'

'All those children.'

'Yeah, right. Even with Allah on his side he needed that cash. Shit, they always come down hard, the ones with their opening bids out there in cyberspace. You come in fifteen per cent above the real price and make a man fight for each point—that's the way to do it. They're the tough guys.'

'Where's cyberspace?'

'Up there on the Internet, Bruce. Where've you been the last decade?'

I felt like Fat Paul then, hearing new words, not knowing what they mean.

We shook hands with the haji. I asked him why he was still having children, old age was a time for rest. He laughed and said in French, 'My wife is a young woman. If I don't give her children, she doesn't feed me. I'm too old to go hungry.'

Ron was impressive. He worked for nearly five hours without a break, seeing all the hajis in the queue. He sipped mineral water, used the towel a lot and found some good stones, most of which he had to fight hard for. By 11.30 p.m. he had bought more than a million dollars' worth of product at Antwerp prices and he didn't look unhappy about it—looked as if he was going on holiday this year. He asked the last haji who was going to come down to Abidjan with the goods and they said it was going to be the father of twenty-nine. So Ron called him back in again and they arranged to meet in Rademakers's office at 8.30 the following night.

Ron had just started packing up when Borema looked in from outside.

'
Allons y,
' he said. '
A minuit la police va faire une patrouille. S'ils nous attrapent, on doit payer
'

He turned off the air conditioner and locked the door from the inside and waited for us by the other door. Borema set off at a pace that made me think he was trying to shake us off. It was close to midnight by now and the few people about were running. We reached the clearing with the audible drainage. More people were running and Borema spoke to them. They didn't stop. Their bare feet thumped across the beaten earth and they disappeared down alleyways.

'Probleme,'
said Borema, the word I'd been waiting for.

We turned back on ourselves and followed Borema at a slow jog through the village labyrinth. He stopped in front of a house and hammered on the door as if it was the tenth time of asking. A woman made a noise which sounded like a local version of 'Keep your hair on', and opened the door. Borema shoved us in, talking to the woman over our heads in her own language, while she looked at us, then back at him, and then back at us again, her mouth set tighter than a belligerent bivalve.

Borema shut the door on us and ran.

'Fucking brilliant,' said Ron.

The woman's hair was plaited in straight furrows over her head. She nudged the three pieces of smouldering wood under the pot with her foot and dropped on her haunches to fan them with a piece of rafia matting on a stick. She banged a large wooden spoon on the side of the pot and a gob of glutinous manioc flopped back in.

'Fucking brilliant,' said Ron again.

'What d'you expect?'

'After the day we've had I
was
hoping for a fuck-up-free night.'

'You don't buy a million dollars' worth of diamonds in a place like this and not eat shit for free.'

'I was just hoping.'

'It didn't strike me as a hopeful kind of place.'

'How so?'

'Everybody in here thinks about nothing except diamonds whether they've got them or not. The white man comes and in fifteen seconds they all know about it. In fifteen seconds everybody in this town is thinking of an angle. How to separate you from what you've got. You're a "have" in a sea of "have-nots".'

A baby mewled. Lying on a piece of cardboard in the corner of the room was another, younger woman. The baby was lying on her stomach and she pulled it up, lifting her T-shirt, and torpedoed her breast into its mouth. She stroked the back of the baby's head and played with the sputnik points of her hair looking off at the wall, stoned. Ron picked at the beard on his chin with his thumb and forefinger and looked at her as if she was a life form off the evolutionary scale.

The manioc in the pot chupped and popped steam like a mud geyser. The air was thick with smoke collecting under the corrugated iron roof with no way to get out into the still night outside. The woman came over with a bowl of water and I washed my hands; so did Ron. Then she filled two bowls with manioc and splashed some sauce over it which looked red and chilli-hot. I took one and Ron asked me what I thought.

'It's vegetarian.'

'But, you know, hygiene?'

'It'll take your stomach three days to break the manioc down before it gets to the dysentery.'

'What'd you say it was?'

'In-fill and chilli. She's getting upset now, so decide.' He took the bowl and watched me eat with my fingers. 'What do we do after dinner?'