Flight of the Diamond Smugglers Read online

  Bartholomew’s wings belong now to so many past and future birds, hatching and living, eating and mating, rearing, migrating, carrying and dying inside of him. And still, he somehow senses that he is forty-five minutes away from Msizi’s mother’s hands, and his coop.

  There is water, or a mirage of water beneath him. He decides to land, take a much-needed drink. Unlike most birds, who tip their heads backward for the water to run down their gullets, pigeons can drink with their heads down, bowed, as if in mourning, or deference.

  Chapter 12

  This Security Thing

  ABOVE DIE HOUTHOOP, A FISH-SHAPED STAR FALLS AND DIES. THE birds squabble in their cages. I sit at the courtyard’s picnic table—the junkyard’s inner circle—waiting for the enigmatic, venerable, perhaps murderous, and perhaps mythological Mr. Lester to arrive. Filamentous things thread the sky, insectile or hallucinatory, and everything up there, in the face of this bird-sound, seems desperate to declare some kind of fiercely independent identity, jockey for position. Louisa remains in the room. In the dark, the desert opens up, extends itself, the manifest destiny of reddish barrenness. The dunes and pans rush at each other, and at their end, the Atlantic nurtures its nighttime mist, reclaims the crispiest of the seaweed, makes it pliable again. I think of Orpheus, and wonder which ghosts are turning back toward Louisa and me. With the toe of my shoe, I test the elasticity of a fish spine. It fails.

  It’s midnight. A car door slams. Right on time. My face is wet with mist or drool. It’s 12:01. I stand and follow the newly arrived Mr. Lester, the lumpy back of his tucked-in white button-down, losing itself and reemerging in the murk.

  Soon, we are sitting at Die Houthoop’s de facto bar, another piece of wood with bottles behind it. Mr. Lester is frumpish, and his jowl shudders as he rounds the bar and—since it is otherwise unmanned—pours us two deep glasses of Richelieu brandy. He has so far brandished no weapon, has not cut me open lengthwise. He looks tired, but it could be a ruse.

  Mr. Lester is, in fact, Lester Le Roux, former director of De Beers mine security. Currently, he goes by various titles, each of them vague in a way appropriate to someone in the espionage trade: Top-Level Security Specialist, Top-Level Crime Investigations Analyst, Top-Level Law Enforcement Intelligence and Risk Management Assessor, Tactical Assessor of Threat and Vulnerability, Expert Operations Analyst, Expert Investigation Analyst, Top-Secret Security Military Intelligence, Psychometrics Expert, Polygraph Expert, Counter-Strategist, Director of Precision and Accuracy, Mitigator.

  I try to decipher the hieroglyphs of his sweat stains, his white curly hair. He smells sour, mildewy, and familiar, as if ferreted out from the nethers of a forebear’s storage closet. Jackie’s mannequin heads and dummy torsos hover over us, gutted satyresses dripping with herbs, giving the bar the feel of some deserted inner sanctum, the naos in the waste. Half-dead white Christmas lights blink like surveillance cameras, and the desert guards the door. Lester match-lights a Camel unfiltered, slides the pack to me, and I light one too. Together, we cough, give off exhaust.

  Lester wanted so badly to be a chemist, to unstitch the riddles of epigenetics, but instead, he followed the path of his friends, who joined the military to pay off their debts and then, he says, “I got into this security thing.” We sip from our brandies and drag from our cigarettes, and when I set my glass down, I allow my pinky to brush his arm hair.

  Given their perception of Lester’s personality, the military beadledom pushed him toward a covert suborganization in counterintelligence, where he studied criminology, industrial psychology, information science, strategic thinking, and tacit knowledge management, ever feeling estranged from these disciplines at which he excelled.

  “I had to force this distance,” he says. “And always looked at security—the police—as a subculture. It’s a sociological thing. Policing as a science. Police act differently than other people—they’re constantly exposed to the negative aspects of society. They don’t have many friends who are not police, and they talk about police work, which doesn’t involve strawberries and cream and tea parties, but gore and guts. And this fuels aggression.”

  When De Beers attained an 85 percent share of the diamond market, they also faced the expected backlash, and so hired Lester to study the size and impact of the “illicit” diamond industry, and that’s when his chronic sleeplessness began. De Beers briefly (and deliberately) decreased their market share to 50 percent, as they tired of their image as an evil monopolistic syndicate, and wanted to change public opinion.

  “We’re not miners,” Lester says, speaking as De Beers. “We’re just earth movers. We’re strippers. Our biggest fear is diamonds traded for drugs, diamond mines that fund the huge cartels and international terrorism that fueled 9/11. De Beers has to manage that rhetoric, keep an eye on things, so they contract out satellites, flyovers.”

  Lester first came to Kleinzee in 2009 and found that “the entire of the local population was used as a medium in illicit trade.”

  He sips and sighs. He becomes MacDonald’s warning from the future, parroting MacDonald’s edicts. “Legitimate diamond dealers have to buy in to what is known as the Kimberley Certification—a regulatory thing, to assure the diamonds aren’t illicit. The Ivory Coast was banned for years because of the terrible stuff going on there, but we’ve readmitted them. They have to accept the vision, you see? But, it’s flawed as hell in any case. The certificates are issued by the country, so if you have a corrupt official somewhere in the process, they can demand a high price for the certificate and go ahead and issue it, and no one will know the difference. As a guarantee, you have only the integrity of people, and the human race is corrupt. We’re driven by greed. Big Mr. G. De Beers’s whole vision—the Diamond Dream . . . It has no intrinsic value. Its value comes from the foolishness of man. Even talking about this, I’ve got the fear of God in me for even thinking that there’s value in that thing. I’m not allowed to say that. As being part of the company, one of the values is being passionate about the product, so I need to just see the longevity and foreverness of the stone. But the fear . . .”

  I watch Lester glimpse himself in the mirrored glass behind the bottles. He can likely see only a portion of his face between them, a cheek, or one eye, but still he averts his gaze quickly, as if afraid of inspiring the aggression of his own reflection.

  “We’ve already found the main diamond deposits in the world, and now the business is to control them,” Lester says. “Diamond formation depends on lava and eruption, and that happens only so often. In Mozambique, I’ve seen trucks filled with Zimbabwean diamonds as if gravel. But most people can’t control themselves. Around a diamond—like a beautiful woman—people lose control of their cerebellum. The illicit diamond trading is still good and well in Port Nolloth. After 1994 [and the fall of apartheid], and the change in dispensation, all of these police forces were disbanded. And they became services. We didn’t enforce anything anymore, but served the people. The Diamond Squad was replaced by the Scorpions, who were more or less general crime investigators. Diamond investigations had to be funded by the industry itself—by De Beers. If they catch someone with diamonds, they know more than the police how to get them to talk.

  “I just picked up a pigeon yesterday in Alex Bay. It was exhausted, a leather container around its neck. They have pictures of it at the security gate at Oranjemund. How long has this been going on? How long have pigeons been around? They have a number of uses other than being eaten. When I was a kid, the caretaker’s son used to hunt pigeons off the school roof because they make a terrible mess, and he sold pigeon pies. Here, private companies are employed to eradicate the pigeons in town. I mean, the poor thing: a diamond can’t steal itself. The sweepers develop special tricks where they flick a diamond into their mouth, or even kill another sweeper’s pigeon. A carcass can be used as a conduit. And there are definitely on-site consequences if you are caught with a diamond.”

  Miles down the road, beyond the Kleinzee boom g
ates, in the shuttered museum, two crossed assegai spears—once the tools of mine security here—lurk in their closet of glass. I think of Msizi’s lame pinky. And I think of how, in 1991, a digger caught trying to smuggle a rough diamond was shot through the head. Two years later, mine security discovered—by means redacted from their report—the “highest number of rough diamonds secreted in a bodily orifice”: 475 of them with a mass of 431.56 carats “found in a condom retrieved from the suspect’s anus” (which De Beers, in their report, referred to as “in the vicinity of the subject’s lower stomach”), prompting the random cavity searches. In this bar, in this light, even stories of violence take on a soft glow. I sip. Lester sighs, woolly, a big sheep.

  “But how’d it come to pigeons?” Lester says. “If you got hold of a diamond, you have to get it out of the area. You can’t walk out the gate, because you’d get searched. And we have the X-rays, so if it was in an alimentary canal, or concealed in the foreskin or behind the scrotum, we would see it. One woman was caught hiding diamonds in the socket behind her glass eye. So the natural criminal instinct is to put it through the fence. Then we put in a second fence, made the distance between them greater, so they can’t throw it over the second fence. Then, they got really clever with the bows and arrows, until we added even more fences and increased the distances even more. Something had to get over these fences, and it was a pigeon.

  “So you train homing pigeons. Security would often follow the pigeons home, and wait for [the smugglers] there. From a risk management perspective, it was determined that we should not have pigeons in the mining areas, which included then the towns, this town of Kleinzee—a closed-off town. And if you saw a pigeon, you would shoot it. You couldn’t even bring in your own furniture. You got a house with furniture already inside. Those garages you see outside the security gates? Workers park there, walk through the gates, and then take the company buses wherever they needed to go—to the mine, shopping. Vehicles from inside town would never go outside town, and vehicles from outside town would never go inside town. You’re removing a conduit. Believe you me, the smugglers know more than I do. That’s why they still smuggle.”

  Outside, I hear the pigeons. Lester swirls his glass.

  “Some people get away with it and some don’t. I had a mine collapse here in 2012. I’ve got photographs of the boards that I put up on the fence that said, NO ENTRY, MINING AREA, KEEP OUT, WARNING, TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED, which they actually took off the fence and used to keep the backflow of dirt from running into the little tunnel. The first photo I took was of that. I’ve confronted illegal diggers in the act and told them they’d have to cease what they were doing or I had to arrest them. I told them to just go home. And they say to me, ‘We will cut your throat now and it will be days before your bosses know about it.’ I’m quite afraid of what’s happening. I’m there alone. I once had to get ninety people out of this mine by myself. Without security. We didn’t have the staff to do it. And they swear at me, and curse at me, and say things like I won’t see my wife by Christmas, because they’ve seen my eyes, and a spell has been cast. And I don’t carry a firearm. Actually, I’m shit-scared of carrying a firearm, because then I’d be had up for murder.

  “I worked a case with border police recently,” he says. “In South Africa, we have a church [the Apostolic Faith Mission of South Africa, the country’s largest Pentecostal church, which conducted most of its early missionary activity in mining compounds]—we call them the Blourokkies because they all wear that light blue dress. Extremely conservative. The ladies always have their hair in this little ball. We interrogated some of them and said, ‘We know you smuggle diamonds, but how did you manage to get the diamonds across the border?’ They admitted the ladies actually stuck it in their bolla [hair bun]. Can you imagine? You’re being searched, and someone wants to undo your bolla . . . No, not if you’re a Blourokkie . . .”

  In the Christmas bar-lights reflected from the rheum in Lester’s eyes, I can see them, muddied, pious bluebirds traipsing through the morning fog coming off the Orange River, their mouths tight, chins dimpled, approaching the Namibia–South Africa border, dragging behind them their children, their babies strapped to their breasts and their backs, their supplies heaped onto pulks sewn of the branches of scorched quiver trees, smuggling diamonds in their hair. They smuggle also the rotten edicts responsible for the success of their denomination, namely, their shunning of medical treatment in favor of divine healing through prayer, their enforced racial segregation within the religion and creation of an all-white executive council who controlled an all-white subcommittee, who in turn dictated what was to be the denomination’s “black work”—building their churches, for instance—making of their black constituents an indentured labor force who would be expelled from the cloister should they defy the “holy” edicts laid down by that all-white executive council. Dressed in their blue cloaks, they cross the border, speaking in tongues or holding their tongues, their hands raised in the orant posture, their blue sleeves sagging like the secondary feathers of the underwing, retaining their gems, just as their version of Jesus—perhaps also veiled in blue, judge of the living and the dead—predicted.

  “One of the guys,” Lester continues, “took a baby and undid the nappy and put the diamonds in the nappy of the baby and then closed it up. Who is going to think of undressing a baby, thinking that there’s diamonds in there?” (And clearly one border guard did think of doing this, as Lester has the story to tell.)

  “A Bic pen,” he says, and takes the pen from my hand, pinches the plastic bottom from it. “You take this off, and you have a canister for a diamond. Boot heels! Hollow them out!” he says, and leans back in his stool, shows me that his own boots are made of ostrich skin. “These impulses! The human brain is a fascinating machine. But we’ve taken new measures, too. We embed the floor of the X-ray rooms with wedges, so the floor tilts slightly, so these things show up more easily in shoes. You take a new vulnerability, and you put in a new control.”

  Lester passes me another cigarette and lights it for me. The bar lights are blinking, and Jackie’s thyme is growing slowly and silently from the skull of a strung-up mannequin.

  I wonder to what lengths De Beers may be willing to go to deploy Lester to implement these “new controls.” In the book Cross Currents: The Promise of Electromedicine, the Perils of Electropollution, orthopedic surgeon and electrophysiologist Dr. Robert O. Becker cites research that proves that the human brain contains magnetite, a crystalline iron, which we share with whales, salmon, honeybees, and homing pigeons, the chemical component which, we believe, allows them to detect the vibrations in the earth’s magnetic field responsible for their navigational prowess. In manipulating the magnetite, we can manipulate thought, some psychologists believe. Our telephone poles and our power lines, the whispers and hums emitted by our own brains, affect those of the pigeon; allow our homes to be their homes in a way we can’t entirely call deliberate, but can’t quite call generous either.

  Perhaps this space shared by our brains can help explain B. F. Skinner’s 1947 finding that pigeons are susceptible to what was believed to be an element strictly of the human condition: superstition. According to Psychologist World, “Skinner conducted his research on a group of hungry pigeons whose body weights had been reduced . . . For a few minutes each day, a mechanism fed the birds at regular intervals. . . . [T]he birds develop[ed] superstitious behaviour, believing that by acting in a particular way, or committing a certain action, food would arrive.” One pigeon came to believe that if it turned around three times in succession counterclockwise, that would yield a feeding. Another was compelled to swing its head like a pendulum six times, three to the right, three to the left. And another nodded in bursts of five. Yes-yes-yes-yes-yes, it seemed to be saying before pausing, staring plaintively through the bars at the macrocephalic forehead of Burrhus Frederic, and then nodding again, five times fast, the magnetite in its brain confused, as if asking, as I am now, How in t
he world did I end up here, with this man?

  I think of purposely starving pigeons. Of weighing them down. I think of how hunger, like the lobotomy, like carriage, changes the ways in which we perceive and traverse sound. The absence of it, or the intensity of it. The blood beating into our ears, or draining from them. How we make our way across this phonic pandemonium and back, as if along one of those saggy suspended jungle gym nets, toward some kind of home, or a memory of home, or simply a homey memory. I think of desperately wanting to land, even if at random. Funny, how I remember the miscarriages in sounds, as sounds; the first one in that Mexican restaurant in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan—the tortilla chips sweeping through the variable viscosities of the salsa and the guacamole, cracking in our teeth; the tamarind sodas burbling up through the straw as they passed over ice from glass to mouth, the horrible medical nature of the roomful of silverware ringing and screeching against the earthenware plates. And the absence of sound—the music Louisa and I missed, the sounds we chose to cut out of our lives from then on; how, even though we had second-row tickets, we skipped the Loretta Lynn concert at the Mt. Pleasant casino to go to the emergency room; how, even though we didn’t see the show, and couldn’t associate any specific songs with this first particular sadness of many, we still to this day cannot listen to Loretta Lynn’s music.

  “When I was driving in today,” Lester says, “I saw this bird. It wasn’t a vulture, but another kind of raptor. It had caught like a little rabbit thing. As I was coming over the Garies road, I saw it in the middle of the road there, and wondered what it was, and as I got closer, she flew up with this thing between her legs, and she could hardly get over the fence. It was too heavy for her. She was going to have to eat only some of it, and leave another piece of the kill. Strangely enough, I thought, they’re built to move themselves. To carry only themselves. They’re not built to carry a small lamb, although they’d enjoy eating it. And I thought about the pigeons who have actually collapsed in front of security buses, because the bags are too heavy for them.”