Beneath canvases stretched between four sturdy sticks, a hole pierces the dun-colored, dusty ground and descends at an angle. In the shade cast by the canvases, I count a crew of about a dozen miners standing around, dressed in shabby, dirt-stained clothes.
I slant a look at Miss Mona, whose expression screams worry. I say, “Hey! Here’s the Mogok Welcome Wagon come out to greet us.”
Miss Mona smiles. “At least they don’t have guns. From what I can see, that is.”
“They look poor,” Max says. “It’s got to be a tough life.”
Ding, ding, ding!
Give the fellow in the blue shirt a cigar.
“It’s one of the poorest countries in the world, Max. These people are caught up in the fist of a communist government— no human rights or civil liberties, you know—and there’s not much commerce. It’s worse than just poverty you see here.”
I stare past the dirt-dusted mine, the tattered miners, and the dingy canvas cover. A short distance beyond, more of that Zambian-emerald rich green landscape reaches all the way out to meet the Ceylon-sapphire blue sky. The sober contrast hits me hard.
Father God . . . how can you stand to see your children
in these crummy circumstances? I’ll tell you, it’s breaking
my heart. Remind me how tough it is for them any time I
haggle on a price too close to where it could hurt them and
their families. I want to be fair, to honor you, and I want to
get Miss Mona a good deal. Show me how to do that, ’cause
I sure don’t see how. Okay? Thanks.
As soon as we park, the men break out in smiles and conversation.
“Oh, listen to them, Andie,” Miss Mona says. “Isn’t their singsong chitchat charming? I wonder what they’re saying.”
“I’m not so sure I want to know. I half think they’re greeting us and half think they’re laughing at the crazy Americans and all their gadgets. Just wait till Hannah sets up her camera and the rest of her stuff.”
When the Scandinavian blonde does just that, the miners gawk—bet they haven’t seen a girl who looks like her, and worse, who does that kind of work. Their jibber-jabber kicks it up a notch. And while some might think it’s a thrill and a half to watch them get a good giggle at our expense, my patience is now as thin as model Kate Moss. I’ve come to Mogok for one thing.
I rub my hands and open the van door. “Let’s go mine some rubies.”
“You don’t plan to go down that rat hole, do you?” Max asks.
Here we go again.
“If they give me half a chance, I’m there.”
“Do you have a death wish?”
I step out of the vehicle, and the heat from the hard dirt road burns through the soles of my running shoes, sears my legs under lightweight cotton pants, and roasts my short-sleeved arms. “Just a ton of appreciation for the beauty God created under dirt and weeds.”
Max follows me as I approach the mine entrance. “You’re really willing to go into an unsafe dirt tunnel.”
Enough, already.
“Aren’t you?”
Horror fills his face. “Any footballs or golf balls down there?”
All righty, then.
“Tell me one thing. What kind of qualifications did you feed Miss Mona to make her think you’d make a decent jewelry and gemstone show host?”
He crosses his arms. “My years of experience on TV did the talking for me.”
“Reading the weather in Who-Knows-Where, Missouri, right?” When he smiles that knee-melter grin of his, I steel myself against its impact. Well, I try.
Aren’t I too young for hot flashes, Lord?
“Okay, fine.” I swipe the damp back of my hand across my sweat-beaded forehead. “Had it been me, I’d’ve jumped at the chance to peddle stuff too. But didn’t you think you might be on shaky turf selling stuff you know nothing about?”
“The network sells more than baubles.”
“Baubles!” Now you did it, bud. “I show our customers only museum-quality pieces.”
“Hey! You just said if you’d been in my shoes, you would have jumped at the chance to peddle stuff too. So what’s the deal with giving me such a hard time for doing just that? Besides, I figure it’s only a matter of time before Miss Mona promotes me to hosting the sports shows.”
He looks good enough and might know enough to try to edge out our sports guru. But . . .
“Good luck prying Tanya, a former college basketball star
and
international model, off the sports host desk. But let me share a secret. No sane body messes with Tanya. She’s six foot three, and moves at the speed of rumors in a girls’ college dorm.”
“All right, Andie.” He rolls his eyes and shakes his head. “Can we get beyond the Max-doesn’t-know-anything kick?”
“When you get to the other side of doesn’t-know-anything.”
“It’s already reached the boring and annoying point, so I suggest, for Miss Mona’s sake, that you get a life. I’m here, I’m learning, and you’re acting like—”
He stops.
I glare.
He adds, “Let’s just say you’re not helping.”
The thought that he might be right zips through my brain at the speed of the Roadrunner, but the gemologist in me does a Wylie Coyote and crashes a boulder on top of it.
Maybe Scarlett O’Hara had that thinking about life thing right. I’ll think about it tomorrow.
One of the men steps away from the rest and comes up to us. He pulls on a tuft of his dirt-dusted onyx-black hair. “Red.” He nods. “You Miss Andie.” His accent does some weird things to my name. “I mine manager. I help you here.”
Hey, Mom. Thanks for the red-hair genes—not.
“Sounds good.” I point to the dark hole in the ground. “How soon can you get me inside the mine?”
His eyebrows shoot tuftward. “You no go there. You woman.”
At my side, Max the Magnificent chortles.
I jerk to my full height. “I’m a woman, a capable, curious woman, and I’ve gone into more mines over the last seven years than you want to count. I so want to go into your mine. And I want to bring a camera with me. It’s what I came to film, what I was invited to show the world.”
He shrugs and goes back to the gathered miners.
“That’s going to go over real well with our three armed shadows,” Max mutters.
“Until they chase me out with one of their guns, I’m doing what I came to do. Are you with me?”
He shakes his head, shoves his hands in his pockets. “I’ll watch.”
I head for the mine manager, a million questions zooming in my head. “Can I ask you something?”
He nods. Dust motes drop from his tufts.
Bad hair day,
or what?
I turn to where our crew is waiting. “Hannah! Let’s get this on film.”
The fascinated manager can’t take his eyes off the camera and its pretty operator. But I have work to do. I nod to Hannah, and the film rolls.
I clear my throat to get his attention. “About how much good rough comes out of the mine every day?”
He narrows his eyes and scratches his head. More dancing dust. “Good rough?”
“Yes. Ruby rocks—good for cutting.”
“Ah . . .” He holds out a hand, cups it, and draws a circle about the size of a dime.
“That little?”
“Every day? Little, yes, little.”
I gesture toward the other miners. “All of them work in this mine?”
He points to the mouth of the mine. “They here.”
To the camera, I say, “Ladies and gentlemen, the small amount these men are bringing up out of the mine explains the skyrocketing cost of Burmese rubies, the finest of the red corundum.” I face the manager again. “How many hours do the men work?”
Hannah gets amazing footage while we talk about the non-glam stuff. I can see this special’s going to kick up a crazy craving for Burma rubies. But where am I going to get enough of the über-rare stones?
Once I tell Hannah to quit rolling and she goes to pack up the van, I ask Tufty—I’ll never be able to remember his name— where I should go to find great rubies in decent quantities.
He smiles and looks at the mine. “You go buying office, not market. Market little ruby, no clean.” He clams up and his expression becomes kind of sad.
My curiosity flames out of control, but this is one of those times when biting your tongue’s the only way to go. The mine manager takes time with his thoughts, and I give it to him. Finally, he looks at me again. “Yes. I tell you. Sometime small parcel is stole. Sometime so-so parcel is stole. One time, big parcel was stole. Beautiful rubies. Big, good red.” He shrugs. “Much ruby stole.”
“Oh, that’s bad! And no one has found any of them?”
He shakes his head. “No. Last stole two year ago.”
“Any idea who might have done it?”
A thin shoulder rises. “Don’t know. Anyone can do.”
“That’s true.” What a shame—and such a loss. “There’s a lot of evil in a lot of men.”
“Evil . . . bad, yes? Much, much bad. Many bad men.”
A few more minutes of sad laments go by, and then Max and Miss Mona wave me over. It’s time to go. I’m ready for one of those buying offices. I want to be amazed by rubies. I head to the van. “Hey, Miss Mona! What do you think? Should we go buy us some rubies?”
Max glances toward the van. “Do we ask the driver, the translator, or the armed goon?”
“Well, they’re all armed. I don’t think any one of them would get queasy about drawing his gun. But I’m sure the secret service one knows we’re here to check out all parts of their ruby industry, and to pick up product for the network.”
The three of us argue mildly over which one will go ask.
Can you believe they both think
I’m
the most likely to set them off? I smell red-hair discrimination here.
But I know at least two worse at it than me. “Aren’t you guys confusing me with Aunt Weeby? She’s the one who says weird things, but she’s back home in Louisville. And if you ask me, I’d have to say Max loves the taste of shoe leather more than I do. He’s always got those big feet tickling his throat, even on screen.”
“It takes two,” he says, his voice a low growl.
Miss Mona points to the van. “Go! The both of you. I gotta tell you. If you’d only stop picking at each other, you might just figure out you’re perfectly matched, and like each other too much instead of too little.”
I gape.
He stares.
We both shut up.
When we get into the van—still speechless—she gives the driver a signal, and we take off at his hang-onto-your-life speed. We go down narrow streets clotted on either side with old cars. Kinda freaky, you know? I have to wonder if we’ll get to that buying office alive.
We do arrive in one piece. How? Beats me, but not thanks to Speedy Gonzalez in the driver’s seat.
The buying office is located midway down a block of old stucco buildings. Some are divided into apartments; others have storefronts, topped by more apartments. Our destination is a plain vanilla two-story structure, no apartments on the second floor. The sidewalk here is made up of chunks of stone; elsewhere in the town I’ve seen boardwalks. Inside the building, we enter another dimension. Soft cream walls, a nice wooden desk, a sapphire and garnet Persian rug, a vintage copper light fixture, and two bulging bookshelves make the reception area a treat after the ruggedness of the mine.
And the rutted roads.
The slender Myanma gentleman in a dark blue suit shows us into an inner room. Wood paneling covers all these walls from floor to ceiling. A long, library-style table runs down the middle of the room. Eight dark wood chairs, possibly mahogany, are pulled up to it. The three of us take seats, while Hannah does her thing.
Just as she’s testing the light, the door yawns into our wood-paneled cocoon, and two men walk in.
“Good afternoon,” the one in a tan shirt and khaki pants says. “My name is Mr. Ne Aung, and I have some nice rubies for you.”
The very Myanma-looking vendor speaks excellent English with a British accent. His partner, Mr. Win, opens a square, black leather case lined in white satin. It’s a nice case, but nothing much can compare with the rich, glowing, pigeon’s-blood red rubies that nestle in the satin.
I suck in my breath. “I’ve seen Burma rubies before, but this . . . Wow! Which mine did they come from?”
Mr. Ne Aung points at two round stones. “These came from the one you visited today.”
And how did he know which one we visited?
I don’t think asking is a good thing. Not right now.
Instead, I say, “Can I loop them?”
Mr. Win holds out a 10x jeweler’s loop and a pair of tweezers. I pick up the stone. Mr. Ne Aung turns on a pure-light lamp, and the ruby comes alive. You see, Burma rubies do this neat little trick. They fluoresce, and not just under the
“black” fluorescent type of light. Rubies from other locales don’t do it, even though they might show off a body color close to that of the Burmese.
“Nice,” I say. “Very, very nice. Do you have a carat scale I could use?”
Mr. Ne Aung smiles at Mr. Win. “I told you she would want to verify the weight.” He turns back to me. “Mr. Pak spoke very highly of you. Said you knew the business.”
Sadness hits me again. “You have heard he died, right?”
Mr. Ne Aung goes kinda green around the gills. “Dead? How can that be? He was here just two, maybe three weeks ago. He was on his way to see you.”
“Really? Did he tell you why? What did he say about the trip? And why me? Why was he coming to see me, of all people?”
My rapid-fire questions seem to surprise him. “Don’t
you
know why he came to see you?”
“I wouldn’t have asked you if I did. What did he say about his trip?”
Mr. Ne Aung glances at Mr. Win. The look they exchange makes me uneasy; the vendor’s answer even more. “Only that he would see you after he left here. Didn’t he tell you his reasons when he arrived? Or did he not reach his destination?”
“He came to the network studios, but someone killed him before I even knew he was there. We never had the chance to get together. I found him dead. In the vault.”
Mr. Ne Aung and Mr. Win swap looks. “Did you receive what he had for you?”
“I did. The police found the invitation from your government to come and film the Mogok mining operations. How else would we have received permission to enter the country? Oh! And I got Rio too—the parrot.”