It wasn’t hard for me to imagine that Eduardo was keeping his honey in my diamonds.
“Eduardo is below. A piece of equipment broke and he must inspect it. I will send a message that you are here.”
“Never mind, I’ll go find him,” Cross said.
She gave Cross a look of derision. “We were not expecting you until tomorrow. You did not call and let us know you were bringing Senhor Liberte so soon.”
“Sorry about that.”
He kept his face blank when he spoke—which gave me the impression that Cross had deliberately brought me back early as a surprise to Eduardo and the woman. I didn’t know if he was trying to catch the mine manager or someone else skimming or just did it to keep everyone on their toes. There was a third possibility—that Eduardo and he were in on something and Cross just wanted to throw around his weight.
Cross left to find the man and I made myself at home in the manager’s office while I waited. Laid out on top of his desk was a packet of ten stones and I examined them while I waited. The stones had the slightly “soapy” feel of diamonds pulled from the earth. Each diamond was of high quality and could be polished into a gem of at least a full carat or more.
Ten- or fifteen-carat diamonds were a drop in the bucket considering what had to be taken out of a mine to make it profitable. Tons of earth had to be moved for every carat. But diamonds weren’t supposed to end up on the mine manager’s desk. Their ultimate destination, before being transported from the mine with high security, would be a safe in the sorting room.
I was also struck by the uniformity of the stones. Diamonds that can be polished into a carat are a cross section of what you pull out of a mine. To the contrary, they represent only a tiny fraction of diamonds missed. The Blue Lady was pulling more industrial-grade stones out than ones of gem quality. This packet was obviously hand-picked. From my cookie jar.
Cross came back with Eduardo a few minutes later.
The mine manager rushed in, looking flustered. He was reed-thin, about fifty, with copper skin and rows of bumpy yellow teeth. While Cross came across as a blunt and brutally honest mule, the mine manager struck me immediately as a slippery weasel.
After introductions in Portuguese, I continued in the same language and indicated the diamonds I found on his desk. “Good stones.”
“They’re not from the mine,” Eduardo said, quickly. “They’re alluvial diamonds, I have river claims, like Cross.”
“Yeah, but your claims pay a hell of a lot better than mine,” Cross said.
“I’ve been lucky.”
“I wish the mine had been that lucky,” I said. “It brings up some decent-quality roughs, but they’re mostly small, less than a carat, and a lot of sand-size, along with a huge number of industrial-grade stones. If we could consistently bring up stones like these, the mine would turn a profit.”
“We bring up what the earth provides,” Eduardo said.
I grinned. “If Mother Earth doesn’t get more generous, I’ll be better off getting a bucket and going down to the river than pouring money into the mine.”
“I suspect, senhor, that after seeing Luanda and now the mining country, you will very soon conclude you would be better off back in New York.”
“Why don’t we take a look at the mine,” I said.
“Now? Perhaps tomorrow after you have rested and become oriented—”
“I came thousands of miles to see this pig-in-a-poke. I’d just as soon get it over with right now.”
Cross bowed out, saying he had security matters to attend to.
I followed Eduardo through the security gate that separated the office building from the diggings themselves.
“How long do you intend to be with us?” Eduardo asked.
“As long as it takes,” I said. “If I’m going to own a diamond mine, I want to know how it operates.”
He gave me a look that left little doubt that he thought I was mentally deranged.
“I’m the curious type,” I said. “When I get behind the wheel of something, I want to know everything that makes it tick. I know zero about diamond mining—other than it’s costing me a lot of money.”
“Diamond mining hasn’t changed a great deal over the last century,” he said. “There are diamonds and there is dirt. You still have to dig up and process the dirt to find the diamonds. That means you must go through tons of earth for each little carat of diamond. A hundred years or so ago, Rhodes and others started scraping the surface of the earth and the riverbeds for the stones. Soon they were digging shafts into the earth, hauling out millions of tons of dirt, and examining dirt for what is often no more than a tiny speck of diamond.
“Today, it’s still done much the same way it was during the last century. The big mines owned by De Beers and others may have more modern equipment, especially in the processing stage, but most mines are like the Blue Lady. The methods are tried, true, and basic. Diamond mining is not as dangerous nor as dirty as coal mining, but it still must be done with caution.” With that, he gave me a hard hat to wear.
I listened to Eduardo as if I knew nothing, but I already knew the way diamonds were mined from my father’s lectures. Besides, I only really knew book learning. Seeing the real thing was an eye-opener.
“If we invested in better equipment, would it increase our take?” I asked.
“It would increase the amount of dirt processed, and thus increase the ‘take,’ as you put it. But it would be good money after bad. A diamond mine can be a hole in the ground that money is thrown into.”
We stepped into an elevator cage. Eduardo continued talking as we descended.
“The objective of diamond mining is to find the kimberlite pipes, the veins of blue earth where diamonds are found. Diamonds form in the tremendous pressure about a hundred miles under the earth’s surface and are coughed up when volcanoes erupt. When the volcanoes brought up the blue earth millions of years ago, some of it reached the surface, but most of it stayed buried or got buried over time.”
He waved at the ground we were passing along the descent. “The ground surrounding a pipe is called a reef. The reef here is about a hundred feet thick, so originally the mine had to go down at least a hundred before hitting any diamonds.
“After the reef, before you get to blue earth, is an area we call yellow dirt. This yellow dirt is a mixture of gray-blue earth and common, non-diamond-bearing soil, created when other soils mixed with and diluted the blue ground over an eon ago. Diamonds are found in yellow ground, but the richest hauls are in the blue earth itself, the pay dirt.
“And that, senhor, is the problem with your diamond mine. We have only hit yellow dirt. Blue earth isn’t here—or it has evaded us. We have tried tunnels in all directions in the reef, but have never had enough funding to dig the number we need.”
“What if I came up with more money?” It was a bluff. I didn’t have the money and it wasn’t the type of place you got bank financing. I was just testing the waters.
“As I said about new equipment, good money after bad,” he said. “The Blue Lady is a puta with a dry hole. She wants money but gives little of her charms. We scrape out just enough to keep paying the rent and overhead. You can find better and safer investments for your money in America. And a safer place to spend your life.”
The elevator groaned to a stop. We stepped into a shaft that was whitewashed and lit with dim electric lights.
“We paint the walls and ceiling to reduce the need for lights.”
He took me through passageways to a tunnel where we ran out of white walls. Eduardo indicated the miners and a pile of rock debris at the end of the tunnel. “This area was blasted this morning. First we drill holes in the wall to be blasted, then pack the holes with explosives. After the blast, the debris of rock and dirt is loaded into wheelbarrows. We will follow them.”
The wheelbarrows were rolled back down the tunnel. Along the way, they went through special doors that were closed in case of flooding. The rock and dirt was
dumped into small carts on a rail track. It was hot, sweaty work.
“Now we will follow the rail cars to the crusher.”
As we walked, Eduardo told me an old joke about diamond mining.
“One day, a miner came out of the mine pushing an empty wheelbarrow. The act made the guards highly suspicious and they thoroughly searched the man. And found nothing. The next day, when work was over, the miner came out, again with an empty wheelbarrow. Again, a thorough search and nothing was found. This went on day after day, and even the mine manager and security director got involved in the searches, but they never found a single diamond on the man. Do you know why, senhor?”
I did, having heard the story as a kid from Uncle Bernie, but I pretended ignorance.
“Because he wasn’t stealing diamonds,” Eduardo howled, and slapped his leg, “he was stealing wheelbarrows!”
The rail carts were dumped onto conveyor belts that carried the ore to a crusher. Once the ore was crushed to reduce it down to dirt and gravel, conveyor buckets carried it to the surface.
“You will ask, can diamonds be crushed in this contraption?”
I wouldn’t ask, but I was still playing stupid and I nodded like the visiting yokel Eduardo had taken me for.
“Yes, even diamonds, the hardest substance on earth, can be shattered if hit right. There is always a possibility of damage to huge stones, but such stones are extremely rare. Also, all along the process, the miners themselves are on the lookout for anything that reflects light. They get bonuses for finding stones before they enter the crusher.”
We took the elevator back to the surface. There, we followed the ore to water tanks.
“These are the churning tanks where the ore from the crushers are dumped. The heavy gravel and diamonds sink while the rest is washed away. Large rocks are separated off and from here the residual ore, gravel, and diamonds go back onto a conveyor belt to be carried to the grease tables.”
The “grease tables” were a series of vibrating aluminum terraces coated with about half an inch of grease. The ore was washed over the tables.
“The special characteristic of a diamond is that it will attach itself to the grease while other stones and gravel will wash off.”
Eduardo had the water flow shut off for a moment and scraped off some of the grease with a trowel. He used his pen to poke in the grease and brought out several small stones. “Here you see diamonds truly in the rough.”
He spoke to me as if I was a schoolchild being given an educational tour of the mine. He wiped the trowel on a metal basket that resembled a kitchen sieve, but with much finer holes. “The grease is scraped in the baskets that have extremely fine holes in them, and the baskets are stuck in boiling water to remove the grease. Then the stones are sorted and graded.”
In the grading room, workers with good lighting and magnifying glasses examined the stones and graded them. While Eduardo explained the grading process, I made polite listening responses.
After we left the sorting room, Eduardo said, “You Americans always like to get down to the bottom line, so this is it. Diamond mining is mostly a simple, mathematical proposition. Once you have found pay dirt, it becomes a question of how many thousands of pounds of dirt must be removed for each carat of diamond recovered. The less earth moved and the more numerous and higher quality the diamonds are, the more profit is made.
“Our profits are affected both by the fact that we operate in a war zone, where we must pay bribes and everything costs more, plus the elementary fact that we have not hit a blue pipe. There doesn’t appear to be a blue pipe anywhere near this mine. Much more yellow ground per carat must be removed to recover diamonds than mines operating in rich blue soil. Obviously, the more dirt to be dug, moved, and processed, the more it costs per carat. We must process almost twice as much dirt per carat as most other mines. Which is why this mine can barely turn a profit despite my full-time efforts.”
I listened and said nothing. I was still processing everything I’d heard and seen since arriving only hours ago.
He brought up another subject as we walked toward the administration building. “I’ve been approached by a syndicate who is interested in buying the mine. I expect to get the final details very soon, probably sometime tomorrow. I’m told that the offer will have a short fuse; you would have to decide immediately. I’ve stalled them already as I awaited your arrival.”
“Why are they interested in buying a losing mine?”
“They believe they can run it more cheaply. And perhaps they can, using literally slave labor, or even prison labor provided by the UNITA.”
I added the new twist to the information I was digesting. Eduardo was as sincere and truthful as a Luanda whore. And less honest. That he was stealing from me, skimming diamonds, was obvious. He was a thief. My real question was whether Cross was in on it with him. And whether I would get out of Angola alive once I confronted them.
The other issue I was processing was the offer to buy the mine. Someone obviously thought that the mine could be operated at a profit. So why wasn’t it? I was eager to see the details of the offer, but I wasn’t getting any hopes up. Eduardo wasn’t the type to pass on something good to me.
Before we parted, I asked Eduardo a question that had been buzzing around my head.
“Have you ever heard of a big red diamond, an actual ruby-red?”
He shook his head. “If such diamonds exist, I have never seen one. There is one I’ve heard of, a flawless stone that once belonged to a king, but I don’t know if it actually exists or is just a legend.”
“How about João Carmona?”
That caught him by surprise. “Carmona? A real crook, believe me. I suspect he was behind the Portuguese corporation that once owned the mine. He is held in disfavor in Angola. He made the mistake of cheating Savimbi.” Eduardo grinned. “A very bad mistake. Savimbi is not just crazy, but loves to kill. A very bad combination if he is your enemy.”
28
I settled into the room assigned to me in the building that housed the mine’s management employees and added up the score.
For a certainty, Eduardo was skimming from the mine. That was a no-brainer—he lied to me about the source of the roughs I found on his desk. The stones had a soapy feel. Diamonds that come out of the ground have an oily film on them. I suppose that’s why they stick to the grease table. But the oily coating on alluvial diamonds is washed and rubbed off by exposure to water and other elements—another diamond fact my father taught me during those after-school sessions.
The stones handed to Cross by the river miner which Cross had me examine in the Land Rover didn’t have a soapy feel. Eduardo’s stones did. They had come from my mine and bypassed the sorting room. Usually by the time they reach the graders, the soapy film is boiled off, which meant the stones went into Eduardo’s pocket inside the mine. And the best candidate for the source of the thefts was the grease table.
Was Cross in on it with Eduardo? They had two different personalities—one blunt, the other innately deceptive—but they both worked for an absentee owner who was thousands of miles away. It also would be harder for Eduardo to steal without letting the security manager in on it. And Cross was blunt about the fact that he was in Angola for one reason only—to go home with a poke. Of course, that was my only reason for being in the country.
I had to assume that they had a skimming operation going and that the undercurrent of animosity between the two was an act for my benefit. One thing I was sure of—if Eduardo was skimming, the bookkeeper was in on it, too. Stealing at work was something you shared with your lover, not your wife.
The next morning I watched at the window until I saw Eduardo go through the gate in the mine. Then I left my quarters and arrived bright and early at the bookkeeper’s office.
“I want to see the books, Carlotta.”
She stared up at me like I’d just been beamed down by Scotty.
“The books? Why?”
“Because I own the place.
”
I could see from the way she pouted that she wasn’t used to people at the mine snapping at her, which nailed it for me in terms of her relationship with Eduardo. People are more likely to tiptoe around the boss’s girlfriend than his clerk. She was a hot item, pure animal in terms of her body and sex appeal, too hot for a man to work around without having his testosterone heat up. And Eduardo didn’t strike me as a man who was above a little sin. But the real tip-off was how formal they were to each other, “Senhor Marques this . . .” and “Menina Santos that . . .”
Calling each other “mister” and “miss” wasn’t how two people who worked together in an office all day, every day acted, not unless they had something to hide and were putting up a front.
Sitting down in front of the accounting books, I realized I knew zero about how to read them. I hadn’t flunked out of accounting at school—I just hadn’t taken any business courses in the first place.
I stared at the books and wondered what the hell to do. I could probably get the gist of them, even though some of the terminology might throw me. But I realized all they would tell me was the present state of the mine. To really understand the figures, I had to have something to compare them to. Past histories of the mine. Other mines with a similar production.
I dug in as best I could. There were monthly and annual summaries, and from these it wasn’t hard to get an overall picture of the business. On paper, at least, the place was just creeping along, turning a bare profit one month, losing money the next.
The books confirmed Eduardo’s explanation that the mine wasn’t making money because of bad luck in finding diamonds. We were simply moving too many tons of dirt per carat. That was it in a nutshell.
It would have been okay if I hadn’t suspected he was cheating me.
By the same token, I didn’t know if Eduardo was stealing enough to make the mine significantly less profitable. It was almost a given that Eduardo and Cross would skim a bit as a perk for working in a war zone. And that I should overlook it. And it was a given that Eduardo could skim a little without Cross knowing about it, but if he was taking out diamonds in a large enough quantity to affect the profitability of the mine, Cross would have to be in on it with him.
Heat of Passion Page 15
