Glass House (12 page)

That changed with Laurentian. He had a
three-painting collection of art at home, and he had a call to
Antwerp later in the day, in hopes of running down a fourth.
Nothing extravagant, but nothing worthless either.

He had good food. A nice wine cellar. Two
houses, one plain but exceedingly comfortable, the other a
well-kept cottage that held a view of the ocean.

He pocketed the diamond and pulled out a
pack of Rothmans. Better cigarettes, too, he thought, moving to his
own car. He slipped one out and lit it.

To
Liberia

The Rover jerked on the tracked road, and
Binyon rocked side-to-side with it. He tapped his pants pocket by
habit, as though the stone could fly from it at any pothole he hit.
Then he steered straight once more, honked to push tribesmen from
the roadside he was roaring down, and made the plume of dirt rising
behind him a little higher.

Diamond transactions run in layers.
Commercial
layers.

The trafficking of diamond rough is notable
for a number of reasons. First, diamonds represent a pure,
highly-stratified market. The movement of diamonds from remote
mines to jewelry on people’s fingers, ears, and necks is furthered
by any number of people like Binyon, each one fitting into and
recognizing his or her place in the overall, vertical process.

Participants in each level know that when
they touch the goods, their job is to pass them on. They receive
whatever people below them send, maybe modify it a little, and then
move it along to others who will hold it or change it and then pass
it on to another stage, getting more money for doing so, for no
reason other than the fact that they’re farther up in the
chain.

That’s the way it works. The mines sell to
middlemen, who almost invariably are nothing but handlers.
Wholesalers of rough. Marketers of rock.

The mid-levels sell to brokers or cartels or
the black market, who arrange for shipping
out
. Out of
Africa. Out of Russia. Out of Brazil. Out of whatever hinterland
the stones were found in.

Rough moves up the ladder. Regardless of
where someone is along it, he’s paying a certain amount to handle
the goods. He’s doing his thing and moving the stones on, the
person above him paying him a little more still, and so on.

The second notable thing about diamond
trafficking is that it’s rarely seen. By anyone. It’s secretive,
and where secrecy is maintained, it’s easy, with the goods taking
whatever space is available. A shoe. A suitcase. A car. A pocket
like Binyon’s.

That means the goods involved are like
quasi-legal, more-easily transported cocaine. They’re frequently no
more pure in their origins, being a product of either appalling
conditions or corruption. And they’re incredibly valuable, with the
capability of producing untraceable money from nothing more than
dirt and someone who’s willing to push the rough along to whatever
market is required.

Liberia is the darkest heart of that market.
In a year, more than twelve million diamond carats come out of
Liberia. Just 250,000 of those are actually mined there.

Rough goes for less when it’s sold into
Liberia than if it goes directly to De Beers or some other
legitimate buyer. But it also gets less oversight and fewer
questions.

The diamonds end up in the same place, of
course. Whether run through Liberia or sold directly to a cartel,
the rough finds a market, and it moves up that ladder toward a cut
and a polish and a jewelry store. It’s just that in Liberia, it’ll
pass through the hands of someone who looks the other way when
they’re paid their fair share.

Money. Untraceable.

The good and solid pink was in Binyon’s
pocket, headed out from the airport. The stone was on its way to
Monrovia. It was going to Liberia.

Neria
Motaung

Neria Motaung hadn’t joined SAPS out of some
desire to work for justice in post-apartheid South Africa. She knew
right from wrong, and she liked the job and was good at it when
given the chance, but she wasn’t so noble that she’d signed on with
aspirations of making the world a better place. It actually was far
simpler than that.

Growing up in Soweto, Neria saw the gangs at
work. Day or night, no matter the hour, armed men – mostly
young and sometimes no more than twelve- or thirteen-year-old
boys – ran the streets of the township. They were the
amagents. In a country where the right to a weapon was an
historical symbol of power and masculinity, violence was
commonplace, and climbing the ranks to the top of a gang was
equivalent to rising to run a business.

They did as they pleased. Assault. Rape.
Murder. Burglary and theft that they labeled “affirmative
shopping.”

Neria saw her brother necklaced when she was
a teenager. The amagents thought he worked on a day when a strike
was called. So they put a gas-soaked tire around his head, lit it,
and danced and sang as he screamed and pleaded for his life.

That was the moment. That was the particular
point in time that most affected her life and its course. Neria
joined the South African Police Service because they wanted
her – black skin was a valuable box-checking label after the
government changeover. But she also joined because SAPS was, simply
enough, the toughest gang she could find in a place where tough
gangs commonly ruled the streets.

She worked and studied and became a
constable, did it more and made sergeant, kept on working and
studying and was promoted to warrant officer and detective. She
couldn’t have said she put together a résumé of great successes in
those positions, but she took every assignment they gave her,
toss-off or not, and she did them all, including her assignment to
the Upington office – the heart of Afrikaner territory. Which
was how she ended up where no one else wanted to be, walking the
halls of Laurentian Mines with Peter Rupert, in a lost corner of
the country.

Neria had been there an hour of the morning
already, fulfilling a role she supposed was a formality more than
anything. It was true she was personally selected to be the liaison
for the Americans on matters involving their interests in
Laurentian, but the task so far had hardly turned out to be the
plum one might imagine. No authority of her own, no responsibility
overall, and stuck too frequently in the middle of nowhere, Neria
always figured she’d gotten the assignment because she was
geographically closest to Laurentian Mines and no one else would
touch the job anyway.

Anthony Dikembé’s personal effects, such as
they were, were sent to the station before her trip to the mine.
She’d looked through them expecting to find nothing and got exactly
that. Neria knew who Dikembé was, which meant she realized before
even looking them over that the things that were left of him were
intended to tell her little – clothes of the sort common to
middle managers in the mines, a few books on unrevealing topics, a
couple of letters from a woman in Cape Town that were designed to
fill in a potential gap for anyone else poking into Anthony’s
existence at Laurentian, and a few toiletries. It was a collection
that said there was nothing special about this man.

Rupert was telling the same sort of story as
they walked the halls of the administrative building. He’d covered
Dikembé’s position and responsibilities while they moved through
the mine works itself, interspersing his few comments on his former
employee with a far more detailed discussion of South African
diamond mining and the workings of Laurentian. In all of it, he
spoke deferentially and openly because of her position, offering to
show her anything she wished to see. He was an old-line Afrikaner
at heart, though. She could hear it in his tone and see it in his
failure to shake her hand when she’d arrived in his office.

“What do you think of him?” she asked
Rupert, interrupting an apparently-practiced description of cartel
politics. Some point about diamond supply controls changing over
the past twenty years was left hanging.

“What do I think of him?”

“Dikembé. What is he like?”

Rupert looked mystified. “I’ve no idea. I
don’t know all the men. Not that way certainly.”

“But you would know a shift supervisor, I
assume.”

Rupert shook his head. “Too big an
operation,” he told her. “I’ve seen him before, of course. Many
times. Doesn’t mean I know him well at all, though, you know. I’m
sure you understand.”

“Not especially.”

Rupert was heading straight, but Neria
turned at the next corner. He swerved back to come up beside her
again.

“As I was saying,” he started.

She cut him off. “Mr. Rupert, I understand
mining very well, thank you. Digging, collection, sorting. All of
it, politics and everything.” She stopped and turned to him. “I
just do not understand a shift supervisor that you don’t know
anything about, who goes missing for no apparent reason.”

“I don’t know about that
no reason
part, detective. These are miners, and they’re a long way from
anywhere when they’re out here. Men like that sometimes just don’t
show up again.”

“Perhaps,” Neria said, moving again. “What’s
in there?” She was pointing at an unlabeled doorway as they passed
it.

“Payroll department,” Rupert said. He looked
back, hesitated as if considering that, and moved to catch up once
more as Neria went on.

“However, I hardly get the impression
Anthony Dikembé is the kind of man who just doesn’t show up,” she
was saying.

“And what makes you so confident, Detective
Motaung?”

Neria stopped once more. “And what makes you
so confident he is that kind of person, sir? You not knowing what
he is like and all.”

Rupert smiled confidently. “I don’t know him
well. That’s true enough. But I know the kind of people who come to
work in this mine.”

“And this particular person?” Walking again.
“A shift supervisor? One you admittedly somehow don’t know, but a
man with a position of responsibility nonetheless? Do men like that
commonly disappear from their jobs at your facility?”

Before he could respond, she turned another
corner. Tired of Rupert’s determination to guide her, Neria was
moving with deliberateness, working her way through the building’s
halls. “And that one?” she asked. “What’s there?”

Rupert looked, uncertain. “Maintenance,” he
said. “I believe so, in any event.”

“And what about Anthony Dikembé? When you
suggest he’s the type to go missing, are you just believing so on
that as well?”

Rupert followed her every move. He paced up
when she did, he slowed when she stepped back to check casually
down hallways. “I can’t say for certain. You are correct in your
point. I don’t know what he is like, so I’ve no idea why he
vanished, or whether he did, for that matter.”

“I can assure you he did,” Neria replied.
She picked a hall and started down it, Rupert behind her for a
moment before he caught up. “Did you see his effects?”

“His effects?”

“His things. Personal items. Books,
clothing, what have you. Did you examine those?” Rupert didn’t
appear to know how to answer.

“Here?” she asked him, not waiting for that
answer and pointing at another door.

“Environmental labs.” Rupert was still
working on the prior question, and he responded absently. Neria
peered through a cut-out window on the door before moving on.

“He’d left everything he owned in his
dormitory flat,” she said. “Pitiful as that was. Everything he had
to wear, his shoes, a little spare money. Even his toothbrush. Not
exactly the signs of someone who’s decided to move on, wouldn’t you
say?”

She picked the next hallway, turned down it.
“We know perfectly well Mr. Dikembé didn’t just wander away after
the night of drinking and whoring you must think is typical of
miners in Africa, superintendent,” she said, glancing over at
Rupert. “Not unless you think that drinking and whoring typically
deposits you dead on the Atlantic seashore.”

Rupert’s response was instantaneous and
surprised. “I’d no idea,” he said.

Neria didn’t appear to hear it. She’d
stopped in front of a heavy steel door. She reached to it, running
a hand over the door’s riveted edges, and she bent briefly, staring
at the small and square, sliding panel that was centered at the
bottom.

“What’s in here?”

Rupert didn’t hesitate. “Nothing but
history,” he said. “It’s a holding cell. An artifact of the mine’s
earlier days. It’s been unused for years.”

Neria pointed at the handle. “Lock’s new
enough,” she said.

Rupert nodded. “Sometimes you have to keep
people out, too.”

“You have a key?”

Rupert paused as if to consider it, and
Neria thought he’d say no. But he pushed a hand into his pocket and
pulled out a heavy key ring, sorting until he found the right
one.

Rupert didn’t move once they were in. He
stepped to the side of the door and stayed there while Neria made a
slow, examining pace around the room. There was nothing in it but a
dull metal chair bolted to the floor and a water spigot mounted in
the far wall. Neria walked to the chair and gave it a tug. It
didn’t move. She crouched down and tapped at a drain in the floor,
then bent closer.

The floor was wooden, and the drain was
added sometime long after the room was built. The ends of the wood
planks were cut cleanly where they were fitted around the drain
hole, their edges sharp, not worn. The drain itself was carbonized
steel. Neria sniffed over it, had no reaction, and stood once
more.

“It was built for times when there was
apartheid,” Rupert said. “That and worse, when men were put in here
for every imaginable thing, large or small.” He shook his head
solemnly and added, “Bygone days, thank god.”