Stone of Kings

by Gerard Helferich

  It’s been said, “As with baked Alaska, the surprising thing is that jadeite exists at all.” And the conditions that produce it are rare on earth, accounting for the mineral’s scarcity. These prerequisites occur only where an ocean plate slides beneath a continental plate—but most subduction zones don’t include jade, which means that other factors must also come into play, although they aren’t well understood. It may be, for instance, that not only does the ocean plate have to dive under the continental plate, but that both need to slide horizontally past each other at the same time. One place where these conditions are met is Burma, where the India and Asia plates come together; another is in the Western Hemisphere, where the North American and Caribbean plates are in contact—central Guatemala.

  Back in Antigua after his trip to Washington, Jay Ridinger wrote to Mary Lou Johnson at the Villa Santa Monica in San Miguel.

  But she was in Mississippi, where the family owned an old plantation outside Natchez. Called Sligo, after the county in Ireland, the property had been purchased by Mary Lou’s great-grandfather, George W. Armstrong, in 1917. Armstrong had been born in 1866 in Texas and had made a fortune there, in oil, banking, steel, and cattle. When he’d gone to Natchez to deliver some mules to the Army, he’d been enthralled with the place and had bought Sligo; later, he added more than thirty other plantations nearby, bringing his holdings to forty thousand acres. Sligo’s antebellum house had burned in 1925, and Armstrong had died in 1954; parcels had been sold off, and by the 1970s the property was reduced to three thousand acres. But there were still a caretaker’s cottage, a log cabin, and a hunting lodge. This last was a low, rustic building with a huge stone fireplace, where the family gathered for vacations and holidays. A reunion was planned for Thanksgiving, and Mary Lou Johnson had already left.

  When Betty Kempe arrived at Sligo, she carried Jay Ridinger’s letter. He’d amassed a library of books and articles, he wrote Mary Lou, and was learning all he could about Mesoamerican jade. He related his visit to the Library of Congress and told her that, with the Foshag monograph as his guide, he was going to find jade in Guatemala. Then the extraordinary proposition: Would she come and be his partner?

  Johnson was stunned. As Ridinger knew, she’d wanted to live in Antigua from the moment she’d seen it. And of course she would relish the chance to resolve an archaeological mystery that had stood for centuries. As she thought back over the good times she’d had with Jay and Marilyn and the girls in Mexico, she had to admit that she’d been attracted by Ridinger’s distinguished voice and his romantic, child-like enthusiasm. He’d written earlier to tell her about Marilyn’s death and the move to Guatemala, and not least, she admired his fearlessness and his ability to reinvent himself time and again; now he’d left everything familiar and, with three young daughters, was starting fresh in a country where he’d never been and knew no one, didn’t even speak the language.

  But she respected Jay Ridinger too much to see him make a fool of himself. So she wrote back, repeating what her archaeology professors had taught her at La Universidad de las Américas: He was wasting his time; there were no jade deposits in Guatemala.

  Jay Ridinger wrote again. Not only was there jade there, but he’d met a Belgian expat named Jean Deveaux, who’d already discovered a supply of the stone—in the Motagua Valley, just where Foshag said it would be. Instead of being disappointed that someone had beaten him to the bonanza, Ridinger was gripped by entrepreneurial fervor. Deveaux had the jade and an idea, but not the money or management expertise to exploit them. So he and Ridinger had agreed to a partnership: The Belgian would provide the raw material, Jay would buy the carving equipment and cut it into manageable pieces, and they would sell the jade on the international market.

  Now Johnson was alarmed. Anyone who said there was jade in Guatemala was trying to cheat him, she wrote Ridinger. She’d seen the same thing in Mexico, where naïve gringos would buy what they thought were the lost silver mines of the conquistadors. Don’t do it, she warned.

  Ridinger wrote back with a proposal of his own: If she would come to Guatemala, she could examine the Belgian’s samples and read everything Jay had collected on Mesoamerican jade. If, after that, she still believed he were wasting his time, not only would he stop soliciting her help, he’d give up the project himself.

  Mary Lou told her mother about this latest offer. Betty Kempe was still as taken with Jay Ridinger as she’d been that first day in the Villa Santa Monica, when he’d called her “pretty lady.”

  “He’s so handsome and charming,” Betty told her. “What do you have to lose?”

  Mary Lou knew what her mother really meant: Careful, or some other woman will snap him up.

  “If you like him so much,” Mary Lou told Betty, “why don’t you go to Guatemala?”

  FIVE

  Aventurine

  From the air, Guatemala was a brooding landscape of gently pointed hills jutting from an ash-colored mist. Closer to the capital, the peaks grew sharper and greener, before ceding to hives of flat-roofed houses. When the plane tipped its wings over the city, great ravines came into view, with more ramshackle houses clinging doggedly.

  At the western end of the capital lay the ancient Maya metropolis of Kaminaljuyu. The place had already been abandoned by the time the Spanish arrived, and in the centuries to come most of the site had been sacrificed to the expansion of Guatemala City. Now only a few grass-strewn mounds remained. But the ancient city (investigated by, among others, Jay Ridinger’s neighbor Ed Shook) had once claimed more than two square miles. Straddling a major north-south trade route, it had been inhabited for nearly three thousand years, and beginning about 600 B.C., had dominated the southern highlands for almost a millennium. As one measure of their wealth and power, the kings of Kaminaljuyu had gone to their graves surrounded by carved jade jewelry, masks, and headdresses.

  It was February 13, 1974. Mary Lou Johnson had chosen the date because it was her parents’ wedding anniversary. She knew there were no jade mines in Guatemala, but still she’d come. And as the plane touched down, she was thinking how happy she was to be there.

  At the immigration kiosk, she handed her documents to the uniformed official, then glanced up at the second-floor gallery. Standing behind the glass was Jay Ridinger. He waved, then said something to the man beside him.

  When she exited the tiny airport, Ridinger was waiting. He gave her a hug and introduced her to his friend Tommy. Tommy was a pilot, he said; Ridinger knew Mary Lou loved flying, had taken lessons but had never gotten her license. Jay lifted her suitcase into the Dodge Travco, then climbed into the driver’s side. Mary Lou took the swivel seat next to him.

  They got on the highway to Antigua. Concrete quickly gave way to pine forest, and as Ridinger guided the motor home over the rising, twisting road, Johnson couldn’t decide which he resembled more, a tour guide or a deputy from the chamber of commerce. Guatemala was wonderful, he told her. Antigua couldn’t be more beautiful. The people were lovely, the culture amazing. He was making friends. The girls were making friends. Everything was perfect. He was so happy she’d told him to come.

  He needn’t have worked so hard. Mary Lou Johnson had been looking for an excuse to come back to Antigua ever since she’d seen the city two years before. And as she watched Ridinger’s confident grip on the steering wheel and listened to his resonant tones, she had to admit another reason for her enthusiasm.

  Outside Antigua, the highway crested a hill and became a tortuous, nerve-testing plunge; then, just as abruptly, it deposited the Travco on a dead-flat city street. Jay Ridinger was still renting the Colonial house on the north side of town. His parents were visiting from Indiana, he told Mary Lou, but he’d kept a room free for her. Or if she’d prefer, another friend of his, Bill, would be happy to put her up in his larger house just two doors away. No, she said, she’d rather stay at Jay’s.

  Ridinger introduced he
r to his parents. His father, the retired Inland Steel executive, was tall like Jay, with a quiet manner. His mother, once brilliant and opinionated, was drifting into Alzheimer’s disease. The next day was St. Valentine’s, and when they gathered for dinner that night, Jay had the same gift waiting for all three daughters, his mother, and Mary Lou—a little gold treasure chest filled with raw emeralds.

  Over the next few days, Johnson pored through the dozens of books and articles Ridinger had collected. Some, on the Maya and the Olmecs, she’d already known from her archaeology studies. Others, about oriental jade, were handsome but beside the point. And some of the journal articles, on geology and petrology, didn’t mean much more to her than they had to him. She was especially intrigued by Foshag’s Mineralogical Studies on Guatemalan Jade, which linked serpentinite and jade and painted a fat treasure-map x over the Sierra de las Minas. At the end, she had to allow that her professors at La Universidad de las Américas may have been wrong; there might be deposits of jade in Guatemala after all. As she worked through the stack of publications, Mary Lou Johnson weighed her choices: She could go back to her mother’s house in San Miguel, or despite her misgivings, she could remain in Antigua, “the most beautiful city in the most beautiful country in the world,” with Jay Ridinger. She told him she’d stay.

  In April, a friend of Ridinger named Jerry Leech came to Guatemala for a visit. With an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago, Leech had been finance director at Hull House and had served on the boards of some not-for-profit housing companies in which Ridinger was involved. The two men had also been next-door neighbors in Chicago. Their wives had been best friends, and Angela Ridinger had babysat for Jerry Jr. While the Ridingers toured in their Dodge Travco before Marilyn died, Leech had taken care of their business in Chicago, paying bills, collecting rents, forwarding mail. In Antigua, Ridinger introduced him to Jean Deveaux and invited his friend to become general manager of their new jade venture. For Leech, the offer came at a good time. He’d just been through a divorce, and like Ridinger, he welcomed the challenge of a new country, a new language, and a whole new industry on which to test his business skills. He went back to Chicago to settle his affairs.

  When his friend Bill decided to leave Guatemala, Ridinger rented the larger house, a one-story building with a big patio in the center and another out back, to accommodate the business. Machinery to cut, grind, drill, and polish jade arrived from the States, and Ridinger set it up in the garage, the equipment’s metal edges gleaming against the whitewashed walls. On a lot next door, he began constructing his factory, laying a tile floor and raising a translucent plastic roof. In June, Jerry Leech came to Antigua to stay. Jean Deveaux delivered his first load of stone, which they piled in the back patio.

  Mary Lou Johnson still distrusted Ridinger’s partner. Slender, with a shock of white hair, an aquiline nose, and pointed chin, Jean Deveaux appeared modest of ambition, grandfatherly of mien. Arriving in Guatemala after the Second World War, he’d been dabbling in jade for years, but to Johnson the elderly Belgian seemed an unlikely discoverer of the lost jade mines of the Maya. And though he exuded European culture and charm, she suspected his business dealings had a sharpness to equal his facial features. When Ridinger showed her a sample of Deveaux’s green stone, she turned it over in her hand and saw how its crystals glinted in the light. “So this is jade,” she said.

  At a poker game, Jay Ridinger met another American expat, Bob Terzuola. Dark, heavily built with prominent brown eyes, Terzuola was running an agricultural program for USAID. But like many people in Guatemala, he’d become enamored of jade and he had taught himself to carve small pieces by hand. He’d also discovered a pre-Columbian worksite near the Motagua, just a couple of miles from Robert Leslie’s tomato field.

  Actually, the site had been discovered by Terzuola’s now ex-wife, Gail. The couple had been driving up the Atlantic Highway, which runs from Guatemala City to Puerto Barrios on the eastern coast, when she asked him to stop so she could relieve herself. Around the ninety-three-kilometer marker, he pulled over beside a field of rolling hills. When she came back to the car, she showed him some rock fragments and said, “Bob, this looks like jade.” And so it was—a call of nature had led them to a major workshop more than a thousand years old, now known as the Terzuola Site, where tools; fragments of obsidian, jade, and other types of stone; and sherds of pottery have been recovered.

  Ridinger brought Terzuola by the workshop and showed him the pile of the Belgian’s stone. Terzuola picked up a piece.

  “What makes you think this is jade?” he asked.

  Mary Lou Johnson was sitting at a long wooden table, a pile of stone chips to one side. In front of her was a flask of a yellowish, sweet-smelling liquid called bromoform. This particular bromoform was nearly three times heavier than water, heavier even than most minerals, and jade’s great weight made it one of the few rocks that would sink in it.

  Johnson took a chip from the heap on her worktable and dropped it into the bromoform. It floated. Retrieving the stone with a pair of tweezers, she set it to the side. Then she dropped another chip into the flask. It floated too. She fished it out and put it with the first.

  From its weight and appearance, Bob Terzuola had suspected that most of Deveaux’s stone wasn’t jade, but a type of quartz called aventurine. So he’d introduced Ridinger and Johnson to his good friend Josh Rosenfeld, a freelance geologist working for International Nickel and other companies. In his late thirties, Rosenfeld was lanky, with dark hair and beard, glasses, and an accent worthy of his Bronx upbringing. He’d explained to Ridinger and Johnson how to use the bromoform. You had to be careful not to inhale it or to get it on your skin, he’d warned, because despite the syrupy aroma, it was a poison and a carcinogen.

  Picking another piece from the pile, Johnson dropped it into the bromoform. This one sank. She eyed the chip, as though waiting for it to spring back to the surface. Well, that didn’t prove it was jade, she reminded herself. Even if a stone sank in the heavy liquid, Rosenfeld had said, more tests would be necessary to confirm its makeup.

  In the end, fewer than half the chips had sunk in the bromoform. By then, Johnson had tested so many pieces that she felt she could predict whether one would float even before releasing it, which was supposed to be impossible. She began to wonder if she had a special affinity for jade, like the Chinese women who were said to wade through a river and identify jade pebbles with their feet.

  Rosenfeld cut some thin slices of the rocks and studied them under a petrographic microscope, exposing them to polarized light to reveal their crystalline structure. Afterward, he told the Ridingers that only about 10 percent of Deveaux’s stone might be jade; the rest was a mix of aventurine, serpentinite, and other rocks. The next step would be to ship the promising specimens to a laboratory in the States for an x-ray diffraction study. At the lab, the sample would be bombarded with powerful short-wave x-rays; then instruments would record the pattern the waves made as they ricocheted off. Each mineral produces a distinctive diffraction pattern, depending on its crystal structure, chemical composition, and other properties. So by comparing the pattern made by an unknown sample to a library of patterns made by known minerals, technicians could determine whether the rocks were jade or a worthless imposter.

  The Ridingers mailed samples to three different labs and waited for a nervous few weeks. Then the assays came back: Though much of his stone was aventurine quartz, the grandfatherly Belgian had also managed to find jade. Mary Lou Johnson was dumbfounded by the news. Jay Ridinger was ecstatic that his investment seemed about to pay a dividend.

  Then, with Deveaux and Terzuola advising, Johnson and Ridinger began to experiment with the carving equipment. Their first task was simple, to slice the jade and polish it into samples they could show to foreign buyers. There was certain to be a vast worldwide demand for Guatemalan jade, Ridinger explained to Mary Lou, and tons could be shipped to places
such as New York and London. But the partners would begin in jade’s ancient homeland, China, where they would drive Burmese jade from the market and establish (in reverse) the Asian-American trade route that had been postulated for so long.

  On October 12, Columbus Day, Johnson and Ridinger left for Hong Kong with their assays and their samples, blocks of polished jade the size of a pack of cigarettes. Neither had ever been to the great commercial center, which the British had seized more than a century earlier to force their goods (especially opium) into the Chinese market. Hoping their own, more modest trade initiative would meet with a warmer response, Johnson and Ridinger began their round of appointments. The first was in a nondescript office in Kowloon, the peninsula extending into the harbor north of Hong Kong Island. The young, abrupt Chinese man mentioned that he’d received their sample in the mail. When they told him they hadn’t sent any samples, he took a letter off his desk, signed by Jean Deveaux. He was pleased to enclose genuine jade from Guatemala, the Belgian had written, in anticipation of his partner’s visit. But when the Chinese had tested the specimen, it had assayed as aventurine quartz.

  There had been a mistake, Ridinger assured him. They’d had some aventurine mixed in with their samples, but they had jade, as well. He took the assay certificates from his briefcase, but the buyer refused to look at them. In any event, he was interested only in imperial green jade, he said.

  The meetings had gone no better at the next half dozen manufacturers. Finally, one company agreed to purchase some white jade, but at a price so low that it would barely cover Ridinger and Johnson’s travel expenses, never mind the cost of acquiring the stone, cutting it into blocks, and shipping it to China.