Flight of the Diamond Smugglers Read online

  To be flawless of color, a diamond must have no color; only then can it be called chemically pure and structurally perfect. You must see through it. Its internal characteristics must be clear, naked; its ability to transmit and scatter light unimpeded by cracks or clouds. In this way, flawlessness allows the light to reach its desired destination after traversing the passageways in the air, a successfully transmitted message. A diamond takes light in, breaks it into pieces.

  The miners, the diamonds, and the pigeons are caked in sludge. There are fewer of all of them than there used to be. Akin to overfished coastlines, much of the earth here has been overmined, and once diamond conglomerates like De Beers (or the much smaller Alexkor) decide that it is no longer financially viable to continue their operations, they pull out and seek new territory that may harbor a higher concentration of gems. Just about every town on South Africa’s Diamond Coast has been, or is about to be, deemed “overmined.”

  Operations here, though waning, persist. The noxious groundwater rises above the miners’ knees. Gas-powered water pumps suck and gurgle, like a collection of asthmatic mutant water birds. The tributaries do what they always do: they run away. Security gates groan and beep in the distance. One poor pigeon hops in a dusty trench, three miles inside the front gate, but can’t take off. A novice smuggler—probably one of the child miners—improperly saddled the bird, didn’t consider its anatomy. “The tape attaching the diamonds,” a local police inspector will later declare, “was wrapped beneath the wings. It was blocking the air bags that pump blood into the veins. The bird could not fly.”

  Or perhaps the perpetrator wasn’t a novice smuggler at all, but, as the police later suspected, someone, or something, “more mysterious.”

  “That bird was planted,” the police inspector claims, but no one knows why. “Was it a pigeon hater’s subterfuge? Or a carefully planned decoy? Or maybe a fearless smuggler’s teasing?”

  I am here in Alexander Bay, ten kilometers south of the Namibian border, to speak to this police inspector (who asked not to be named). When I ask him if he has heard of Mr. Lester, and if this is the sort of offense that would warrant a call to him, the inspector stiffens, lowers his voice, and says, “N-no. I-I don’t think that would be necessary.”

  In a whisper, he tells me that no one he knows has ever seen the real Mr. Lester, as he’s rumored to have more body doubles than Jacob Zuma. “He’s invisible. He’s like a spirit.”

  We are standing outside the station on a dusty street littered with broken bicycle tires, driftwood, and at least four species of sun-dried amphibians. The inspector has an angry razor burn at his neck and cheeks, and it appears to redden. He clears his throat, shakes his head, and wants to get back to the story he’s rehearsed.

  The offending pigeon, he tells me, rendered flightless and struggling to breathe, was saddled with six carats destined for the alleyways of Port Nolloth, 90 kilometers south of Alexander Bay—for the pockets of the street hustlers who lurk there. Eventually, after navigating a serpentine network of buyers, sellers, fences, and polishing houses, smuggled diamonds sometimes find their way back to the envelopes of the international suppliers working for De Beers’s Central Selling Organization.

  Law here dictates that all pigeons in and around Alexander Bay are to be shot on sight. The law was first implemented in April 1998 after a pigeon was found hopping through the center of town with diamonds cinched to its feet. The board of the local Alexkor mining corporation collaborated, over the course of a handful of meetings, in writing the law. The local police force, many members of which are in cahoots with Alexkor, immediately implemented it. Many pigeons have been shot here since 1998; the police inspector tells me that no one has maintained a count.

  “But I can tell you this,” he says. “When a pigeon is shot, it explodes.”

  If the pigeon is a smuggler, someone working for mine security is charged with wandering into the landscape to pick the dropped diamonds from the viscera.

  “Boom,” says the police inspector. “It’s really something.”

  *

  WHEN A PIGEON EXPLODES, ITS FEATHERS, ACCORDING TO AUTHOR and pigeon enthusiast Andrew D. Blechman, “sashay” to the ground—that is, by Merriam–Webster’s definitive standards, the feathers move in “an ostentatious yet casual manner, typically with exaggerated movements of the hips and shoulders.” Though an exploded pigeon may be classified as atypical by a dictionary’s rubric (if not Alexander Bay’s), the hips and shoulders, when mapped onto the feathers, would be—depending on the diagram—the downy barbs and the vane, or the afterfeather and the leading edge. In square-dancing, partners “sashay” by circling each other flirtatiously, taking sideways steps.

  The word can be traced to the Old French chassé, or “chased,” from the verb chasser, “to hunt.” While there’s nothing but wind chasing the feathers as they fall, this description seems nevertheless appropriate, etymologically speaking, though the movement of the feathers seems to evoke more of a cascading than a sashaying—the movement of running water, of rain webbing downward over a car’s backseat window, of a cataract slowly overtaking an eye. They land silently in the dust, these skinny ruined shrouds with such soft bones at their centers. They rest there for a moment, before blowing away.

  The movement of the feathers, bullet-ripped from a ruptured carcass, is important to us. In his book Pigeons, Blechman writes of the competitive pigeon shooting contests that were once a popular pastime worldwide—especially in the U.S. and Europe, and especially among the upper classes. Such contests were often held in resort locations, private ranches, and plantations; the purses were typically enormous, and ancillary gambling rings abounded. Live pigeon shooting was even one of the official events at the 1900 Paris Olympics.

  Soon after the Paris Olympics, after activists successfully petitioned to ban competitive pigeon shoots, companies began manufacturing glass pigeons. After the early versions of the product netted meager sales, the more innovative manufacturers began stuffing the glass birds with real pigeon feathers, so the shooter could feel a post-kill satisfaction similar to the real thing, exhaling into his gunsmoke, watching the seared feathers sashay or cascade sadly, triumphantly, to the earth.

  *

  N THE MIDDLE OF MY CONVERSATION WITH ALEXANDER BAY’S police inspector, another officer approaches us. He eyes me warily, and actually kicks a clod of dirt at me. He leans in, whispers something in the police inspector’s ear. The police inspector’s cheeks redden and his eyes grow rueful. There’s a white crumb of something in his eyebrow. He holds his open palm up to my face and backs away, retreating inside. Like that, the conversation is over. I make my way through the dusty streets, occasionally stopping in at one of the few remaining businesses or squat municipal buildings, mustering bravado, introducing myself to anyone I encounter.

  There’s little to do in this area of the Kalahari Desert; Alexander Bay is dying, street by street. The long-closed tourist lodge has been stripped of its windows and wiring, tiles, and doors. The “bioscope” (cinema) recently closed, all the restaurants closed, the public swimming pool was drained and is now used as a garbage dump, a thorn bush miraculously growing in the deep end. In an adjacent lot, children kick a deflated soccer ball in the dust. They are industrious about their play. None are laughing.

  When I pull open the cracked glass door to the closet-sized butcher shop, a single jingle bell, near the upper hinge, announces my presence. Koos Coetzee, Alexander Bay’s butcher and president of the Alexander Bay Pigeon Club, who owns two hundred homing pigeons, says, “I have two shotguns and I will shoot back if they come to shoot my birds. It is not pigeons stealing diamonds. It is people.” Hanging from a nail on the wall behind him is a handsaw. The meat in his display case is thinly cut, and graying.

  Also graying, and sinking into the sand, is the scoured shack that now serves as the meeting space for Alexander Bay’s town council. No bell here rings when I pull open its screen door and find the town’s board chairma
n eating a banana, a stack of papers anchored to his desk beneath a snow globe within which is a small plastic hand extending its middle finger. When he sees me, he quickly turns the top piece of paper facedown, and fixes his hair. He gestures to a rusty metal foldout chair, and I sit. He has a diamond-shaped freckle on the tip of his nose. “If we can’t afford to handle [the infrastructure] properly,” he says, “we could have sewage running all over the mine . . . The problem is that nobody wants the town, not even the people themselves.” After about five minutes, he says he has to get back to work and gestures to the door. In the bagless metal trash can beside his desk is a mound of banana peels in various stages of decay.

  Along the coast, in a sandy parking lot that fronts no building, I find a local resident trying to remove a headlight from a derelict pickup truck. In the truck’s backseat are piles of clothes, plastic bags, jugs of water, books. She wears a baby blue Garfield-the-cat T-shirt. Garfield defiantly lords over the bubble-letter phrase, “Big Fat Hairy Deal.” “We have no water, no power, no petrol,” she says, thumping a Bible against the truck’s roof, “and people come in [from remote villages] and settle in the vacant buildings. We now have theft and drugs. Something needs to be done.”

  The area’s surviving town councils, as mouthpieces for the mines, have hired bounty hunters to shoot the birds, and others whose sole role is to gather the carcasses of shot pigeons for the pyre. No cinema, no pool, no water, no power, no petrol, no birds.

  “We are trying to go about it in a civilized fashion by asking pigeon owners to remove their birds,” says Steve Thorpe, general manager of the mine’s mineral division. “But the only practical matter is to shoot them.”

  “We have to do something,” says vice mayor Neville van Wyk. He asserts that secret agents working for De Beers’s Central Selling Organization are killing pigeons in an attempt to remove illegal diamonds from the market “so they can control it.”

  “But, listen,” says the town clerk, “people have to make a living. We are living next to the sea, and we can’t even make a living off the sea because the mine even owns the underwater mineral rights.”

  “I know it’s an emotional issue,” says a member (who asked not to be named) of mine security, in regard to the edict demanding the execution of the pigeons, “but we see no other way. Some people believe it is their birthright to own the diamonds under the ground here, so it is not seen as wrong to take a few home. There is a whole mind-set that has to be dealt with.”

  “I have loved pigeons since I was a boy,” says Coetzee, the butcher. “It just tears me apart to think of them killing these birds.”

  “Shoot all pigeons on sight,” cries the chairman of the mine’s parliamentary committee. “The security of the product is paramount!”

  When I mention the name of Mr. Lester to these folks, their responses are oddly similar; their voices quiet, they look around warily. Depending on whom I ask, Mr. Lester either does or does not really exist, is human or giant or spirit or half-man half-animal. He’s the guy De Beers sends in to “disappear” the bigwigs of the diamond smuggling cartels—whether domestically or internationally—but he’s also the guy rumored to control various illicit smuggling cartels of his own, all across the world. He’s so smart he can read your thoughts, detect fluctuations in your body temperature to determine whether you’re telling the truth or lying. Even De Beers corporate is afraid of him. No one, though, has ever seen him. No one wants to see him. In the salty air here, even the words Mr. Lester, the words I inked onto the back of that gas station receipt, are beginning to fade. I decide that I have to find this man, or entity, to see if he is real, to uncover the secrets he harbors, lest all evidence of him and the anxiety he inspires here completely disappear.

  *

  IN 1997, APPARENTLY AS A RESULT OF A MEMO ARCHITECTED BY ONE of Mr. Lester’s underlings, local authorities in Alexander Bay conducted a sting using police-trained homing pigeons to entrap and arrest over one hundred people working for the Alexkor mine (called by the local newspapers “the centre of diamond laundering on the West Coast”), including the (now ex-) chief security officer. Those laboring in the mines apparently couldn’t resist the attractive presence of these “snitch” pigeons. When the workers took possession of the pigeons as their own, the local member of mine security tells me, they often trained them only cursorily, overeager and in a rush to smuggle. “But the pigeons were too smart,” he tells me, “and they remembered their original police training,” which, he assures me, was much more rigorous and imprinting. The diamond-bearing birds often flew right into the hands of the authorities, and arrests were made.

  “How did you know exactly who the offenders were, though?” I ask him.

  He shrugs. “It doesn’t really matter. It’s this mind-set, you see? Everybody is guilty. Every one of them.”

  Rumor has it also that the Alexkor mine, on behalf of De Beers, unofficially regulated the importation into South Africa of conflict diamonds from Angola, which were controlled by Jonas Savimbi’s rebel UNITA forces, the sale of which further inadvertently financed Angola’s civil war.

  “If you get too close to the truth,” said one anonymous South African newspaper source, in an article I read earlier this morning, “you can get a bullet in the head.”

  According to local narrative, after the 1997 arrests, human body parts were found in the Orange River—fingers and ears, knobs of flesh later identified as tips of noses, knees, elbows—and the names of only seventy of those arrested were officially recorded.

  “Some were necklaced,” an elderly woman tells me in the checkout line of the Spar supermarket, her passion fruits and lychees rolling along the conveyor belt, bumping against her sheep’s neck in cellophane. She’s referencing a brutal form of punishment wherein truck tires filled with gasoline are stacked over a person’s body and set aflame—the rubber fusing with the flesh. She shares this with me as we wait for our groceries to be weighed and scanned. Louisa is having a bad day, and is waiting for me back at our motel room. The old woman nods, holds onto her shopping cart for support. It seems she can’t stop nodding. We’re both buying painkillers.

  Chapter 4

  Port Nolloth and the Halfway Desert

  DECORATING THE BEACH SAND OF PORT NOLLOTH ARE PIGEON bones. There’s a rib with the barbs of a sun-bleached feather wrapped around it, angling into the ocean wind like the bristles of some post-apocalyptic toothbrush. There’s a three-quarters decomposed head, beak open wide, as if gasping, or praying, or trying to put together some feeble incantation against death.

  The bones are hard to look at, they’re so white. The sun is hard too. At the end of the beach, behind a chain-link fence and scribbles of razor wire, forklifts hoist pallets wrapped in blue plastic, and back up beeping. Though accessible to the eye, this key marine-mining De Beers outpost retains something of the impregnable fortress. Perhaps the corporation felt that, in setting up shop in an impoverished coastal town, they didn’t need to ratchet up the visible security to usual levels. Who, after all, is within earshot of Port Nolloth’s whispered secrets?

  I am here in Port Nolloth to snoop around the local De Beers outpost, which is responsible for deploying a fleet of ships to vacuum diamonds from the seabed. As ever, I don’t know quite what I’m looking for, so Louisa and I kill time walking along the beach. Had we driven straight from Alexander Bay, Port Nolloth would have been a two-hour drive south on a rough road of sand and rock. Instead, we chose the longer, rougher scenic route through the town of Springbok, a gateway to a series of ghost villages that went defunct after the land surrounding them had been sufficiently mined and companies such as De Beers pulled out and redoubled their efforts in places like Alexander Bay, Port Nolloth, and Kleinzee, until they began to exhaust that land too.

  To get to Port Nolloth from Springbok, we drove along Highway 7 until greenery gave way to burnt desert scrub. We passed tiny municipalities named Nababeep (a crumbling copper mining village) and Bulletrap (where Louisa co
unted three overturned donkey carts, and one overturned donkey). Later in the year, this landscape—the richest bulb flora arid region on the planet—will be blanketed, for two weeks’ time, in orange and purple desert flowers, before returning to its apparent infertility. “Bloom hunters” will descend on the region hoping to spot and photograph as many of the 3,000 plant species as possible, and temporary “flower hotlines,” replete with all the latest updates, will spring up. People will drive fast in order to outrun the dusk hours, when the flowers close up for the night. They will use phrases like “flower hour” and “petal to the metal.” In the evenings, people will fill under-prepared cafès, sip chenin blanc, and compare pictures, speaking animatedly of kaleidoscopes and rain-daisies. But this is not that time of the year.

  We drove in waning sunlight among the naked dunes. When we turned west on Route 382, no more municipalities, only the expanse of arid semi-desert—a landscape so forbidding that even desert didn’t want to fully commit its name to it. I prayed for no engine trouble, no flat tires. Something screamed overhead, following the car, and it was no pigeon. We ate while driving from our plastic snack bag—cold boiled eggs and biltong, the beef strips having been hung and spun dry at a roadside slaughterhouse on industrial clothes cleaners’ wheels. After we finished eating, I said, “I’m worried,” and, without asking for clarification, Louisa took my hand, put it beneath her shirt against her belly. I drove one-handed, feeling with the other the parenthetical marks on Louisa’s warm skin—like scars but not scars—reading them, as if foolishly expecting this action to inspire any kind of growth, a twist in our story, a fresh plot beyond consolation.

  We drove like that in that “halfway” desert, the road threading the no-man’s-land between the Namib Desert and the Richtersveld mountain desert, a land that the Port Nolloth tourist office assures me “offers a huge opportunity for those enjoying vast, unspoiled landscapes.” Soon, the ocean—a gray ribbon in the distance—presented itself like some meek sacrificial lamb. I took my hand back, clutched the wheel.