Flight of the Diamond Smugglers Read online

  “I can run fast.”

  He stops smiling. “They’d probably kill you also, for talking to me. And you’re still talking to me.”

  I want to ask, “Who?” again, but I know this is a stupid question. There are so many answers to it. I begin to wonder why Msizi’s mother chose to trust me. Surely, in these diamond towns, she’s seen men who look like me break the bodies of children who look like Msizi.

  Armed men are well paid to protect the rough diamond harvest at all costs—a harvest that can exceed 176 million carats per year. At 200 milligrams per carat, that amounts to 35,200,000 grams, or 77,603 pounds of diamonds produced for sale in a single year. To these armed men and those who employ them, Msizi and I are comparatively worthless.

  *

  DECORATING THIS NAMAQUALAND BEACH: A GOLD-PLATED NECKLACE, its pendant a broken heart; a dog-chewed doll, her stuffing breaching the cloth of her arms; a dog’s red collar; a South African flag; many fish carcasses in various stages of decay, some eyeless, some with eyes watching the sky. A few times per year, confused pigeons with diamonds at their feet land on beaches such as this one, on the ribcages and caudal fins, faces and tails of the dead fish—fish named snoek and kingklip, slimeskate and catshark, puzzled toadfish and leaden labeo. Dime-sized horseflies whirl, and the pigeons land, confused because someone overloaded them with diamonds again. The pigeons will not make it to the miners’ homes, to the spouses who expected to untie the stones, sell them on the black market, and get rich enough so that no one in their families will ever again have to work the mines.

  When a carrier pigeon is overloaded with cargo, it loses its natural GPS, and this is what happens: a confetti of feathers and gems decorate the beach, and lovers stop kissing, and combers stop combing, and parents leave their children to the whimsy of the waves, and they yell and they point, and they fight, and they tear the diamonds from the pigeons’ feet, sometimes tearing off the feet themselves, and, in the sand, no one can tell if it’s the blood of the birds or the blood of the humans, but they fill their pockets, and their noses are running, and their children are underwater, and they are richer, and so they quiet one another. So no one else hears them, they quiet one another. At least one of the mine workers—maybe the culprit, maybe someone mistaken for the culprit—will have his pinky finger broken, or eye excised, or hands or ears or feet, or head, cut off.

  When I ask Msizi about these punishments, and how and why and when and by whom they are administered, his voice goes quiet. He’s not smiling anymore. He seems worried, and exasperated with me. Though we are clearly alone, he looks around the beach for eavesdroppers. He tells me that he is prohibited from talking about it—that if the mine security guards find out he has spoken to an outsider like me, they may call in the services of someone called Mr. Lester. As Msizi begins to describe Mr. Lester, his voice lowers in volume but increases in speed and pitch. His good fingers are nervously working Bartholomew’s feathers. A strange clicking sound, like a time bomb, emanates from someplace within the bird. It seems to me, as Msizi speaks, that this Mr. Lester is probably just a fabricated threat, a tall tale meant to frighten the child workers and keep them obedient—but what do I know?

  “But then why did your mom allow . . . ?” I begin again, but Msizi cuts me off, continuing to describe Mr. Lester. His voice grows shaky and ecstatic. He’s almost whining.

  Apparently, Mr. Lester is ten meters tall, breathes fire, has sharp teeth, no eyes, the wings of a raptor, and the ability to infiltrate one’s dreams. Apparently, there’s a good chance he knows all about our meeting here, and the content of the conversation we’re having in real time. It’s a small, insular community. Outsiders vividly stand out. People talk. Cameras and recording devices may be hidden just about anywhere. Freelance spies abound. Msizi is visibly upset as he divulges this to me, and he’s squeezing Bartholomew, so I decide not to press further. I scribble Mr. Lester on the back of an old Engen gas station receipt, and tuck it into my jacket pocket. Bartholomew shifts uncomfortably, then settles down as Msizi’s grip loosens.

  The carrier pigeon’s life is one of servitude and, thereby, mutilation. Of flight girdled. Msizi tells me that he has fashioned little smuggling bags out of old cornmeal sacks, and that, on a good day, Bartholomew can accommodate up to four of them: one cinched to each foot, one tied beneath each wing. Not all days are good—sometimes there is only one bag, sometimes none at all. Msizi tells me that Bartholomew’s left foot is the stronger one, and that he only uses the wing bags on the most bountiful of days, as they can stifle the bird’s air vents there. He tells me that he’s more careful than most; that he usually doesn’t try to sneak Bartholomew onto mine property more than once a week. If someone else gets caught smuggling, he tells me, he’ll wait up to three weeks before trying to use the bird again.

  These timelines aren’t hard and fast. He admits that there have been occasions when he was feeling reckless or angry, or desperate, or lucky; nervous-excited times when he dared to sneak the bird onto mine property five days in one week. “Everybody does it. Or tries to do it,” he tells me. “Everybody knows. So you have to be tricky. Sometimes, I’m the trickiest.”

  “Everybody knows?” I ask him.

  Msizi waves his hand, and Bartholomew stretches his wings. Up close like this, they appear longer than I would have expected. “Yeah, you know. Ask anyone. You have to be tricky.”

  “So the guards know?”

  “Of course. Go ask them. They’re the best at taking away the diamonds.”

  “You mean, smuggling them?”

  “Yeah, of course. Go ask them.”

  I scribble furiously on the back of another receipt. In the distance, the ocean sounds as if it’s sizzling, boiling something alive. A pink crab spider emerges from a hole in the sand, tests the air, and decides to return to its lair.

  “Do you ever deal with any of the guards? Sell to them, I mean? Are some of them middlemen, you know . . .”

  “I can’t, I can’t,” Msizi says.

  “Who, for the most part, buys them from you?”

  “Everyone. So many people. Not just one type. Everybody knows. It is very easy here. You just have to be tricky.”

  When I ask Msizi how much his family makes from the smuggled diamonds, he refuses to give me a figure. He smiles, shakes his head, slaps my shoulder, and says, “Nah . . .” When I press, he assures me that it’s not much, but only slightly more per carat than he makes as the “legitimate” bonus that De Beers gives to diamond diggers—which is, according to Msizi, the equivalent of about 20 cents. When I question the accuracy of that figure, as it seems surprisingly low, Msizi confirms it.

  In contrast to Msizi’s makeshift smuggling bags, “official” trainers of carrier pigeons have designed tiny and expensive backpacks, fitted to the pigeons’ bodies, to be filled with anything from confidential blueprints for spacecraft meant to land on Mars, to heroin meant for prison inmates, to declarations of love and war, to blood samples, to heart tissue, to diamonds—anything we secretly desire, or desire to keep secret. Our underbellies, our interior lives, our fetishes, our wishes. A clandestine network mapping the diagrams and fluctuations of our ids, tied to bird-backs and bird-feet, twining the air above us—the air we’re so busy trying to dominate, to bring down to our level.

  Bartholomew tries to get away, but Msizi traps him with his good hand. The pigeon, alarmed, makes a grunting sound.

  When first lowered into an underground mine, Msizi tells me, it’s ceremonial and superstitious to exhale voluminously and with bravado, leaving a portion of oneself, in breath form, behind on the surface. When he demonstrates this exhale for me, it begets another one of his terrible coughing fits. He spits pink saliva to the sand. He tells me that legend has it that the breath will lend luck to the subterranean body, wait for the corporeal form to return to the surface, and reclaim the air into the lungs in an exhausted sort of homecoming.

  “It’s like magic,” he says.

  Bartholomew
opens his beak. The pigeon’s exhale is a coo-cum-hiss. In the articulation of its jaw joint, concludes ornithologist Dr. Jeff Birdsley (yes), is the most “important vestige of the [pigeons’] ancestral relationship to reptiles.” Their necks coil like snakes, but we can’t see this when they’re alive and well, fat-breasted and double-chinned as they are, loaded with secrets and jewels. We can see this best only when they’re dead.

  *

  THAT NIGHT, LOUISA AND I TRY TO SLEEP ON THE HORRIBLE MATTRESS at the local caravan park. When I close my eyes, I see red sand and birds and thin men with fat guns. I see Msizi again, walking home from our meeting for supper along a seam where the sand had drifted into other sand. When I open them, I watch the shadows of the mosquitoes at our window screen, their bloodthirsty ballet. Louisa pats my ribcage, tries to calm me down, tells me that I need sleep. I try to take comfort in thoughts of more familiar places—of our mundane “real life,” and our home back in the Midwestern U.S: our kitchen, our bedroom, our laundry room, our backyard. I envision us on our patio there, so far from any desert, lying on our matching chaise longues and sipping our whiskies at sundown, the fireflies just beginning to show themselves, the crickets beginning their songs. The mosquitoes back home are different than the mosquitoes here—ganglier and less inclined to bite, bored by the regional familiarity of our blood. The mosquitoes here are still excited to drain us.

  The too-bright security lantern outside our dorm pops its orange over the walls. I can see where someone long ago soaked their brush with too much white paint. The walls of the place are comprised of a series of these arrested old drips, none having quite made it to the linoleum; arrested mid-wall, as if mid-air. Our middles dip nearly to the floor. They don’t quite make it either.

  I push my nose deeply into the feathers of my pillow, know that the soft downy stuff before the quill is known as the afterfeather. Something secondary. Louisa reaches for the nightstand—a downturned basket—and takes another pain pill without water, says something about trying again in the new year, that some couples—like her sister-in-law and brother—successfully conceive only after losing a half-dozen, and when they’re—like us—in their early forties. I want to believe that, like us, the pigeons roosting in the caravan park’s eaves anticipate tomorrow’s burdens, even if they are convinced that their sleep is squeegeeing clean their tiny brains.

  Chapter 2

  Isaac Newton & Co.

  ISAAC NEWTON WAS BORN IN THE YEAR THAT GALILEO DIED: 1642. Christmas morning. Newton, born prematurely, was expected to die, and his mother, newly single (his father had died three months earlier), kept him warm in a one-quart copper saucepan. Copper was reputed to have healing properties—defending the body against infection by stimulating our red blood cells, myelin, melanin, collagen. In fact, copper plumbing originated with the ancient Egyptians, as they believed the metal destroyed water-borne pathogens.

  Baby Isaac lived (for all we know, that saucepan saved his life), and as a child was sent away to a reputable grammar school in Grantham, where he slept in the back room of the town’s apothecary and developed his obsession with chemicals. Later, in order to pay his way through university, Newton worked in taverns and restaurants, wiping rings of whisky from wooden tables. But when the plague hit Europe, and started infecting Cambridge in the summer of 1665, Newton, according to University of Virginia physicist Michael Fowler, “returned home.”

  Newton was captivated by pigeons. He would seek them out in the wild and sit in the tall grass watching them mill about, sometimes for hours. He would gaze upon their bodies, and contemplate their fluidity—how one part of their bodies compelled other parts to move. He became obsessed with connecting the movements of the pigeon with the movements of other things in nature, including the petals of the pasque flower, his favorite plant. Often, Newton would sit on a riverbank and stare at these purple flowers swaying in the wind. In their windblown petals he saw the movements of the pigeon’s wing, and thought of each as interconnected engines, mechanisms, the sort that drive all machinery and all of nature. Without the pigeon, he thought, there could be no waterwheel. Without the pigeon, no telescope, no calculus, no gravity. Newton, in fact, contemplating the interconnectedness of engines both natural and synthetic, based his famed third law of motion (“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”) on the “magical” flight of a wooden pigeon.

  Said flight occurred around 400 BC, when a Greek physicist named Archytas bemused and unnerved the citizens of Tarentum by employing principles of rocket propulsion, launching a wooden pigeon along a wire by heating water and using the power of the steam. The Great Flying Pigeon, as it became known, was, according to the Kotsanas Museum of Ancient Greek Technology, “the first autonomous volatile machine of antiquity,” the world’s first robot—and a great inspiration to young Newton. Eventually, this technology would be adapted in the service of war weaponry, and the information gleaned from this magical wooden pigeon would soon result in rocket artillery, lost limbs, the sort of war that yielded the lyrics of “The Star Spangled Banner,” the sort of war whose end was announced to the masses by real pigeons with crumpled paper tied to their feet.

  *

  HAVING SPENT COUNTLESS HOURS CONSIDERING THE MOVEMENTS of the pigeon, Newton naturally became infatuated with the building blocks of those movements—their bones. Soon, he became so obsessed with bones in general that, when he was knighted in 1705 by Queen Anne, he chose as his coat of arms an X comprised of human tibiae. Newton began to consider the interaction between the shapes and functions of bones, and such musings began to play a role in his larger conceptions of space, and of various bodies (whether human, avian, or otherwise) traversing that space.

  As Newton and future scientific luminaries would find, the pigeon’s skeletal system is streamlined and tapered, planed, twisted and fluted to meet the axiological and spirited rigors of flight. The muscle mass responsible for animating the legs and wings is packed into the center of the pigeon’s body. The power comes from its middle, which is not to say that the pigeon’s power comes from its heart. Humerus depends on radius, which depends on pollex, carpometacarpus, ulnare, and ulna. These are the bones of the wing, which itself would be nothing without the vertebrae and the ribs, the pubis and all of those beautiful lobes. The ulna (Latin for elbow) carries for etymologists implications of luna, the moon, and of the Sanskrit term for the point of a needle. Bone, moon, needle—all of this sharp celestial whiteness hidden beneath the filthy feathers.

  The bones of the pigeon are mineshafts—hollow, filled with dark air. They are leashed to the intricacies of the respiratory system, fed by the air slurped into toothless beaks.

  Pigeons don’t eat worms so much as French fries, pretzel salt, hand-me-down popcorn. Their ocular orbits are huge. They have monocular vision (as opposed to binocular), and as a result of their eyes being side-mounted, pigeons bob their heads to lend themselves the illusion of depth perception.

  Anatomy dictates: when the pigeon steps forward, its head, for just a moment, is briefly left behind. The rest of the body enjoys a brief atmospheric future, waiting for the head to catch up. There’s something buried both in their little backpacks and their anatomy. Diamonds, blood samples, bloodlines, codes. They deliver all of these things to our waiting hands.

  *

  THOUGH WE NOW UNDERSTAND MUCH OF A CARRIER PIGEON’S PHYSIOLOGY, we still know very little about its miraculous ability to find its way, oftentimes over great distances, to its singular home. Soon after liftoff, a pigeon wants only to land, roost, soothe her giant breast—which constitutes one-third of her body. She doesn’t wait for home to present itself, but senses home—days and nights away—someplace beyond sun, Andromeda, the rank marshes and fragrance factories of our own expansive ant farm. She wants to calm her 600 heartbeats per minute down to her resting rate—a reasonable 200. She needs no sleep, or we think she needs no sleep. On an ounce of birdseed—the caloric equivalent of a single Cheeto—she has the capacity to
fly 2,640 miles (or 13,939,200 feet) a day. That’s New York to Los Angeles. Her wings necessitate a distance of three feet each to complete a single up-and-down motion. That’s six feet of movement per flap. As pigeons are not anatomically designed for gliding on thermals and must flap constantly in order to remain airborne, they propel themselves forward at approximately four feet per flap. That’s six feet of wing movement per four feet of forward propulsion. In order to cover her day’s capacity of 2,640 miles, driven by her innate need to return home, she must flap her wings 3,484,800 times—in a sleepless single day, on a single Cheeto—her wings alone moving through space a distance of 20,908,800 feet. That’s New York to Rome. Those are countless fish threading the ocean far beneath her. That’s her climbing and falling, but not yet touching down. This self-flagellation costumed in instinct propels her. This is flight as chastity and vision quest, faith and skepticism. How can we greet such purity without thinking it aims to dupe us, keep us ignorant? Such soft three-quarter-pound bodies, such lima-bean hearts unbraiding their ventricles, pumping and pumping, the world below her—great lake and soy field—reflecting dusty bursts of some mystery light. She’s not even hungry.

  *

  DRIVEN BY MALIGN CURIOSITY AND DREAMS OF SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS, humans manipulate the bodies of pigeons with scalpel and scissors, ligature and syringe. We’ll do anything to find out why and how they “home,” to strip the varnish from our ignorance. Given that a pigeon can locate its loft even in overcast weather, we suspect that the bird navigates via a covert diagram other than that offered by the stars. Scientists refer to this mystery-map as an “inherited spatiotemporal vector-navigation program,” or an inborn star map that interacts with other inborn maps of the Earth’s magnetic field, and an innate “chronometer” that can “read” the sun’s elevation and arc.