One after the other, the sellers handed their diamonds to Tajan. He would examine each diamond quickly, then pass it on to the others. They, in turn, examined it and returned it to Tajan, who would then weigh it on his small scale in front of the seller so that he could clearly see what was happening. He would then offer a price based on the diamond’s clarity and weight. If the seller agreed, the Mandingos would pay in cash and the bargain was sealed with a Liberian handshake. I watched with fascination while this seemingly orderly process took place.
I never did find out who the “sellers” were. When I asked Tajan, all he did was smile. It was all completed in less than an hour, and we were on our way back to town where the Mandingos would sell their rough diamonds in Monrovia to local Lebanese merchants or to anyone willing to pay the marked-up price. Once back at Spriggs-Payne, I asked Tajan if I could see a diamond. He willingly opened the brown paper wrapping and picked out one of the stones.
“It’s a small, small ting, Mr. Pilot, a small, small ting,” he said, gazing down at it. After a moment, he placed it back with the rest of the stones. One could see right away they were crystalline, though somewhat dirty and without the glitter of cut diamonds. I asked how much he could get for them, and he said that the stones would fetch thirty dollars per carat from their usual buyers.
“Would you like a small ting, Mr. Pilot?” Tajan asked. “I will give it to you for twenty dollars a carat.” I knew that he had not paid more than ten to fifteen dollars a carat. Still, considering the Mandingoes don’t give away anything, it was very generous. He held the stones closer to me and I selected a reasonably clean one and put it on his scale.
“Ten carats,” he said.
The Mandingos will only deal in cash so I took two hundred dollars out of the cash bag in the airplane and handed it to him. We shook hands and the Mandingos left in a car that had been waiting for them. I went into the operations office with the cash bag and the clipboard with the paperwork on it. I took my last check out of my wallet and wrote it out to Monrovia Airlines for two hundred dollars and put it into the bag. I filled out the paperwork and put it on Andre’s desk. He looked up for a moment. Then I told him about buying the diamond.
He shrugged. “As long as your check doesn’t bounce,” he said to me.
CHAPTER 26
HIM HUMBUG ME
Andre had hired a very large Bassa man, Nathanial, to serve as the company’s security system. He was also there for our protection and “debt collection.” A number of our customers had the money to fly up to the mines but not enough money to pay for the load. They would tend to let the load sit in the hangar, where we stored it until Andre put enough pressure on them to come and pick it up. If it was there for too long, occasionally the boys would steal some of it. When the customer finally showed up, they would shout, scream, and gesticulate with their fist and accuse Andre of thievery and just about everything else they could think up. That’s when Andre would call for Nathanial who, silently and with determined resolve, convinced the customer to be more reasonable and to settle the disagreement by paying his bill. As a gesture of the company’s appreciation Andre had a machinist in Monrovia make a very nice aluminum baseball bat for Nathanial. In Nathanial’s hands it served as a very effective inducement to ending arguments quickly.
When I told Andre about the new missionary near Wiesua refusing the demijohns on my last trip, he was irate.
“That’s it! No fucking missionary is going to get in the way of this operation. You’re flying back up there tomorrow morning, you are picking up the rum from Baisu, and you will drop it off at the mission. And you are taking Nathanial with you!”
I was actually hoping we could fly in, off-load, and leave before the missionary could stop us. However, if that didn’t happen, I explained to Nathanial what to expect.
“We want this man to understand that we need to do our job. If he says no, then you must convince him, but do not kill him,” I emphasized.
We landed and quickly off-loaded the rum and were back in the airplane before the missionary could get there. It was a considerable distance from the mission to the airfield and I thought we could get in and out without interference. However, the missionary’s zeal exceeded my expectations. As we got to the end of the runway and turned for takeoff, he was heading straight for us at top speed on his motorbike, leaving a rooster tail of dust and dirt. I shut the engine off and waited for him. The missionary was a big man and obviously angry. He jumped off his bike and was as at my door trying to get it open.
That’s when I said to Nathanial, “Nathanial, him humbug me too much!” Nathanial got out of the airplane from his seat on the passenger side, walked around the tail of the airplane, and came up behind the missionary and hit him over the shoulder with the aluminum bat. It wasn’t a love-thy-neighbor tap. I heard the man’s shoulder crunch and saw him drop to the ground. The missionary made a struggling attempt to get back on his feet. Nathanial hit him again and again. This time the missionary stayed down.
By now, some villagers who lived around the mission had gathered at the edge of the runway near us. I noticed that they were laughing, jumping, and cheering as Nathanial worked on the missionary. I told Nathanial to get back in the airplane, which he did to the adulation of the crowd. I restarted the engine, did a quick double check and opened the throttle to takeoff power. I thought that the missionary was well clear of the main wheels, which he was, but I had misjudged his position with regard to the tail wheel. I felt the tail of the airplane bounce, bump, bump, over the missionary’s legs as we started the takeoff run.
He had made the mistake of ignoring the customs and had interfered with a Big Man’s charter operation. That was always a sure ticket home. I knew the missionary wouldn’t be there on my next trip.
Back at Spriggs-Payne, I told Andre what had happened. He simply nodded and smiled.
I was on my way out when he said, “Got a job for you tomorrow, so don’t drink too much and get some sleep—zero eight hundred.”
I nodded and waved then drove over to the Airport Bar. The place was crowded, mostly pilots and a few locals. Honorable Williams was there at a table surrounded by laughing pilots. I couldn’t hear what he was telling them, but he was very animated and laughing himself. I saw Colin sitting at the bar and came up beside him. He was quietly sipping a beer.
“Hello, mate!” he said. “Would you like to join me for a drink?
I said that I would but there were no more seats and I didn’t like drinking standing up. At that he pulled out his revolver, stuck it between the legs of the man sitting next to me and said, “If you don’t want your fucking balls blown off, get the fuck out of here.” The man, a local, looked momentarily terrified then jumped up and hurriedly left the bar.
“This isn’t exactly The Eagle and Child pub in Oxford, old boy,” Colin said. “Have a seat.” He slowly replaced the revolver in his jacket pocket.
“What do you know of the diamond business?” I asked.
“Only that it’s like fucking—almost everybody does it. And if you do it enough you end up dead or dickless. You thinking about doing it?”
“It looks like it might be a lucrative side line,” I said.
“Not for me, mate—too many cutthroats. And besides, DeBeers controls the market. The stuff we see around here is penny pound shit. DeBeers is where the real money is and, excuse me for saying so, matey, but you ain’t got a snowball’s chance in hell of breaking into that racket.” He hesitated for a moment. I think he noticed my look of disappointment.
He went on, “But I’ve got something that’ll cheer you up. Have you heard the latest about our illustrious president?”
I said that I had not.
“Well, it seems that President Tubman is scared to death of flying, as you probably know, so he, that is to say the government, bought him a yacht—a hundred-and-twenty-five footer. He had it all refurbished at great expense and he got himself a British captain and a first mate who was, allegedly, a
Liberian. They went down the coast once or twice a month carrying the president, so he could go back to his home province. But there started to be a lot of nationalistic pressure from the papers, saying stuff like ‘Why don’t we have a Liberian captain on the presidential yacht . . .’ Well, the government decided that they would. Not long after that, the British captain had enough of the bullshit and just walked off the boat and left the country. So now the president wants to go down to the town of Harper at Cape Palmas—it’s his hometown, you know—and his Liberian first mate is now captain. The new captain’s only credentials are that he’s stood around dressed in an immaculate white uniform on the presidential yacht for a couple of years.”
“Now, if you go down the coast, you leave Monrovia, turn left and go about two hundred miles and then you make another left turn and go into the Hoffman River at Harper. It’s a tricky entrance. You’ve got to cross the bar just right. There’s a very long line of sand bars on the left with breakers all over them, but once past that there’s a big harbor at Harper. And there’s a quay where the yacht would tie up. Doable, but not a piece of cake, right? This guy, the new captain, goes all the way down the coast, turns in, gets passed all the breakers, and manages to find the only rock in the harbor. The boat runs hard aground. Bump! The president’s on board. The boat lists about ten degrees. So they manage to get the president off and the boat’s sitting there. Now it’s a joke, sitting up on this rock. Then the paper announced the next day that the captain really wasn’t Liberian, he was born in Sierra Leone, so, you see, he wasn’t a real Liberian captain after all. He was a foreigner! Brilliant!
“So some fast operator gets involved and brings in this Dutch dive team to try and get it off the rocks. The idea was that they’ll blow the rocks up and free the yacht. Well, they only succeeded in blowing up the fucking boat. Then what’s left of the boat caught on fire and burned. The Dutch divers realized as soon as it happened what kind of trouble they were in, so they got in their dinghy and headed full speed for the Ivory Coast.”
“Did the yacht sink completely?” I asked.
“Unfortunately for Tubman, it did not. It sat there on that rock, a burned-out hulk, as a constant reminder of yet another government failure, and a great source of humor for the locals. So they got a British demolition company to come and finish blowing the thing to pieces. We’re pretty good at blowing things up, you know.”
“I’ll say you are,” a voice behind us said. We both turned to see Honorable Williams standing behind us. He placed his hands gently on our shoulders.
“I must tell you that it is a funny story, and I have laughed about it with many of my friends, but if I were you I would be careful how loudly I told it. There are two things the president hates more than anything else, and that is to look weak or foolish. Make no mistake, my friends, I am no great admirer of President Tubman, but he does have ears everywhere.”
He must have noticed Colin going a little pale, for he continued, “Oh, I doubt that he would ever harm a European or an American, but you might find yourselves on an airplane headed out of the country with your visas, work permits, and licenses revoked.”
“Thank you, sir. I will keep that in mind,” Colin said with his relief clearly audible in his voice.
“Not at all, my friends. I want you to stay in Liberia. Your work here is of great benefit to the country.” With that he patted us on the shoulders and left the Airport Bar.
“Shew Gawd!” Colin breathed. “But that was a right close one.”
“Yeah,” I said. “What if it had been Tubman’s secretary of state?”
“Or worse yet, one of his whores,” Colin added.
I put a couple of dollars on the counter. “It’s time I was shoving off,” I said. “Got an early flight tomorrow.”
“Cheerio, mate,” Colin said, draining the last of his beer and still looking a bit shaken. I don’t think he would have been nearly as frightened if Honorable Williams had put a gun to his crotch. Colin could deal with that kind of threat. What scared him was what went on behind closed doors in the Big Men’s houses.
On the way home I had become enveloped in a sense of dread, and I wanted to shake it off. Had I wandered into some witch doctor’s curse? Was there any truth, at all, to bad juju?
When I arrived back at the beach house, Ku was waiting on his stool in the kitchen.
“Ya hav mail, boss,” he said, handing me a single letter. “Ya like gumbo fo tonight? I get de recipe straight fom yo stay o Louisiana.”
“That would be fine,” I said. “Would you fix me a large gin and tonic?”
“Yah, boss, right away.”
It was too hot to sit on the porch facing the sun, so I flopped down in the living room community chair, directly under the fan, and opened the letter. It was from Jenny. She was arriving the day after tomorrow at Robertsfield on Pan Am Flight 485.
CHAPTER 27
COFFEE RUN
I was to take a load of mining tools, valves, and spools of wire to an iron mine near the Guinea boarder. I also had a Lebanese merchant with me who wanted to pick up a load of Guinean coffee beans. This coffee was in great demand on the world market, so the Guinean government made it illegal to export without a strict licensing agreement. My pick-up, I assumed, was part of a smuggling operation. As long as the proper dash was paid, the job should go along without a hitch.
The weather was good, and it was an uneventful flight. The loaders were still removing the cargo when I heard the sound of a heavy truck, an old two-and-a-half-ton US Army truck, rumbling out of the bush on a narrow dirt road. The truck pulled up next to the airplane. A white woman with red hair and a beer in her hand was sitting in the front seat between two Lebanese.
The Lebanese men jumped out of the truck, followed by the woman. She was tall; her hair was short and a spray of freckles scattered the bridge of her nose and under her eyes. She was dressed in a man’s white shirt and khaki shorts with laced boots. She also had a pistol in a leather holster strapped to her waist. She walked quickly up to the Lebanese merchant, but I could not hear what they were saying.
Then she approached me. “How many bags can you take?” she asked, her green eyes shining with intensity and her eyebrows knitted slightly.
“How heavy are they?”
“Twenty-five pounds each,” she said.
“I can take half, maybe more if there is room, and even that is an overload.”
She looked disappointed. “Can you make two trips?”
“If the weather cooperates, I can be back in three hours.”
“Good.” Then, looking over at the Lebanese merchant, she said, “Have your men load thirty bags. He’s coming back in three hours for the rest. I’ll take the money now.”
“No, no, no!” said the Lebanese merchant. “I’ll pay you when the job is done.”
“All right, all right, suppose you pay me for thirty and the rest when this man,” she gestured with her hand toward me, “returns.”
The merchant thought for a moment. “Agreed,” he said.
When the mining equipment was off-loaded and placed on a mining company truck, the merchant directed the men to start loading the coffee. The woman watched intently, resting one hand on the grip of her pistol and the other on her hip. It didn’t take long to load the coffee. I secured the bags with the cargo belts and told the merchant to get in the airplane. He was counting the cash, in US dollars, as he handed it to the woman. After that he climbed into the passenger seat, fastened his seatbelt, and we took off.
“Who is that woman?” I asked the merchant.
“Her name is Sam. She is in the American Peace Corps.”
“Peace Corps! I didn’t know the Peace Corps was in the coffee smuggling business.”
“It is not, but I think that she likes it. She has a gift for it, and I don’t know what she does with the money. I do know that she has a lot of contacts in Guinea and she gives the dash to a lot of people. The Guinean government seizes all coffee that they can f
rom the growers and pays them far below the market price. The only way they can survive is to keep some aside to sell to people like her. She pays them the fair market price, and she never seems to have trouble getting the coffee across the border.”
Once back at Spriggs-Payne, the coffee was unloaded onto a waiting truck. The merchant gave some instructions to the driver, who then put the truck in gear and drove off with blue-black smoke belching from the exhaust at the rear. When we returned to the mine, the woman and the loaders were sitting on the remaining bags of coffee, patiently waiting. I taxied up next to them and switched the engine off—the propeller, now powerless, ticked over a couple of times then stopped. I popped my door open and the merchant popped his open and we both jumped out of the airplane. I opened the cargo door and the loaders began to load the airplane with the remaining coffee bags. I walked over to where the woman was standing.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Ken.” I extended my hand.
She looked at me with complete indifference and, ignoring my hand, said, “How did a nice American kid like you end up here?”
“Not through the Peace Corps,” I said.
“Don’t get the wrong idea, hot shot. The money this coffee earns goes to the village—most of it to the hospital and the school.”
“So what do you do in the village? That is, when you’re not smuggling coffee.”
She stared at me for a moment, and I thought she might actually take her pistol out and put a bullet through my head. Then a smile flickered across her lips and I had the feeling that she had just, at that moment, decided not to kill me.
“I teach math and science there,” she said.
“Oh,” I said, genuinely astonished. “Where did you go to school?”
The Dung Beetles of Liberia Page 20
