Dance of Death

by John Case

  Seventeen

  IT WAS A test.

  If, like Nietzsche’s superman, Wilson was (as he believed) “beyond good and evil,” then any remnants of “conscience” he might have were artifacts – the detritus of his own evolution. Static.

  If he thought about it, he could probably work out an equation for it. A formula for the moral equivalent of the signal-to-noise ratio.

  The idea, of course, was to shed his conscience as if it were a snakeskin. Just walk right out of it and keep on going. If anyone came after him, they’d see it in the grass, a ribbon of scales – and they’d wonder: Was Wilson nearby? Was he hunting?

  It was important to Wilson – essential, really – that he should be comfortable with the violence inside him. And so, the boy …

  His eyes rolled back as Wilson approached, cigarette lighter in hand. He stood in front of the kid for what seemed like a long time, waiting for him to look up from the ground. That was a part of it – having the strength to look his victim in the eye, embracing his fear, while accepting the injustice that was about to take place.

  The boy must have sensed this as well, because he kept his eyes on the ground for what seemed like a long time. When, finally, he shook himself from what seemed like a waking swoon, and looked up, Wilson met his gaze for an instant, then spun the lighter’s little wheel and lit him up.

  The kid came alive in a rush, darting this way and that, engulfed in flames and trailing a veil of acrid black smoke. Militiamen leaped out of his way, laughing, as if they were playing a game of blind-man’s bluff. Every so often one of the soldiers would spin him around with a kick in the ass or a tug on the tire. But the game didn’t last long. It was over in thirty seconds. Though Wilson couldn’t be sure, it seemed to him that the boy had a heart attack. One minute he was running around, making noises, and the next …

  There was a sort of clumsy pirouette that ended with the boy sinking to his knees, clawing at the tread. Then he stiffened, and that was that. Like a tree, he toppled sideways, and lay in the dirt, smoking.

  By then, Wilson himself was breathing hard, as if he were the one who’d been running around. Which was funny, because he hadn’t actually done anything. Just spun a little wheel, and pressed it to the boy’s chest.

  He searched his heart for what he felt and, to his surprise, found that there was nothing there. The kid was dead, that’s all.

  Shit happens.

  But that was yesterday, and now Wilson had his own problems.

  Commander Ibrahim had arranged for a technical to take him to the Ugandan border, near Fort Portal. There, an armored car would be waiting to drive him to Kampala. From the Ugandan capital, he could catch a plane to London, and before he knew it, he’d be in Antwerp.

  Wilson declined the offer. Entering Uganda from the Congo in an armored car would attract too much attention, he said. He told the militiaman that he and Hakim had discussed it in Baalbek. And they’d decided that he should go to Bunia. Hakim’s friends would arrange for a boat. He’d cross Lake Albert at night, avoiding the Customs’ police and soldiers. In Uganda, Wilson and his party would travel by motorcycle along bush roads to the main highway, and from there to Kampala. Zero and Khalid would be with him all the way, providing a measure of security.

  Ibrahim was skeptical, but in the end, it wasn’t his problem. He had his guns. Wilson could do what he pleased.

  “Is there a bank in Bunia?” Wilson asked.

  “Of course,” Ibrahim replied.

  Wilson thanked him. “I’ll need a safe-deposit box until the boat leaves.”

  “No problem.”

  In reality, of course, there was no boat, nor were there any “friends.” Bunia was simply Plan B, a way for Wilson to rid himself of Ibrahim while finding a buyer for the diamonds he could no longer sell in Antwerp.

  Because whoever was sending messages from Bobojon’s computer was undoubtedly holding Hakim as well. If Wilson showed up at De Witte Lelie Hotel, he’d probably be “renditioned.” The moment he walked in, the CIA, FBI – whoever it was – would take him down. They’d stab him with a needle and that would be that. He’d wake up with a hood on his head, chained to a seat in Terrorist Class on his way to a prison that didn’t exist.

  Thus, Plan B.

  The capital of the Congo’s most dangerous province, Bunia was the African equivalent of Deadwood. A swarming dystopia, ripe with garbage, sewage, and disease, the city was a crumbling slum of three hundred thousand people – many of whom were starving, sick, and desperate. Not far from Lake Albert, it was a little piece of hell in an otherwise heavenly setting.

  The diamonds Commander Ibrahim had turned over in exchange for the arms – more than three pounds of preselected “rough,” ranging in size from three to five carats – were concealed in a beautifully carved ironwood head, hollowed out for the purpose. There were 7,263 carats, and every one of them was of gemstone quality. Commander Ibrahim guaranteed it, and Wilson took the militiaman at his word. And why not? Ibrahim and Hakim were in business together, while Belov and Wilson were merely their agents. The business was as bloody as it was lucrative, and it was built on trust. If you asked either man why he trusted the other, he would talk about Allah, and the cause they shared. He would invoke the Umma of Muslim solidarity, and allude to a decade of secret operations in which the two of them had been engaged. But in the end, both men knew that their trust was held together by something even stronger than Islam. It was held together by one man’s gun and the other man’s knife, and by each man’s certain knowledge that the other could reach out and touch him, wherever he might be.

  So if Ibrahim said the diamonds were good, the diamonds were good.

  Even so, Wilson had done a bit of reading, and he’d learned that the diamond industry was an interesting one. Among other things, it was the quintessential cartel.

  For more than a century, the price of gem-grade diamonds has been controlled by the South African DeBeers company and its partners. The firm accomplished this by creating a vertically integrated monopoly that enabled it to limit the supply of diamonds. It was able to do this because DeBeers owned all or part of nearly every diamond mine in the world. Those gems that it did not produce it bought through a subsidiary, the so-called Diamond Corporation.

  In this way, the market was cornered.

  Each year, some 250 “sight-Holders” were invited to London by the Central Selling Organization, or CSO. This, too, was a DeBeers creation, candidly referred to by Israeli diamond buyers as “The Syndicate.”

  In London, sight-Holders were permitted to buy presorted parcels of diamonds at fixed prices, usually $42,500 each. The parcels could not be examined until after they were purchased, and so were something of a pig in a poke. If a sight-Holder didn’t like what he got, he was free to reject a parcel. But if he did that, he’d soon be out of business. No further invitations would be forthcoming from the CSO.

  So the sight-Holders accepted what they’d been given, trusting DeBeers in much the same way that Wilson trusted Commander Ibrahim.

  After buying their parcels, sight-Holders would resell them to wholesalers on the diamond exchanges of Antwerp, Amsterdam, New York, and Ramat Gan (Israel). Meanwhile, an artificial scarcity was maintained by the Diamond Corporation, which bought surplus diamonds wherever they might be found. These diamonds were stored by the kilo in London vaults, or left in the ground to be mined at a later date (if ever).

  Conflict diamonds were the wild cards in the game. These were gems mined by the supernaturally violent rebel militias in Sierra Leone, Angola, and the Congo. Wrested from jungle riverbeds by de facto slaves earning sixty cents a day, “blood diamonds” made their way to the world’s exchanges by irregular routes, without the intervention of the Syndicate.

  Because these conflict diamonds fueled wars throughout West Africa, while undermining the price of diamonds sold by the CSO, DeBeers worked to establish protocols that would ensure that “legitimate diamonds” came with a certificate of origi
n.

  There was an ironic symmetry in this, Wilson thought. End-user certificates were forged or bought to enable the sale of arms to third parties like Commander Ibrahim, whose militia presided over a slave colony charged with mining diamonds in the jungle. Why, then, shouldn’t the diamonds require a certificate of their own, one that rinsed the blood from the stones by creating a phony paper trail all the way from Africa to the bride’s ring finger?

  Though blood diamonds were no different from others, except in the violence of their provenance, they were sold at a discount to their counterparts from South Africa, Australia, and Siberia. According to Hakim, Wilson’s diamonds would fetch about four million dollars, about half of what they’d bring if DeBeers was marketing them.

  The only problem, now that Hakim was hanging upside down in the hold of an aircraft carrier, was finding a buyer. With June 22 looming closer and closer, Wilson had no time to lose.

  *

  They got into Bunia a little after noon, pulling up in front of the heavily sandbagged Banque Zaïroise du Commerce Extérieur. While Zero and Khalid waited outside, Wilson went in to meet the manager.

  Mr. Bizwa was an East Indian gentleman in his late forties. He sat behind an ornately carved Empire desk, beneath a portrait of the president, Joseph Kabila. Greeting Wilson with a firm handshake, he gestured to a chair and asked how he could be of help.

  “I need a safe-deposit box,” Wilson told him. “For this!” He produced the ironwood head, swaddled in cloth, and set it on the desk.

  “May I look?” Bizwa asked. Wilson nodded, and the bank manager unwrapped the sculpture.

  “I think it’s probably pretty valuable,” Wilson said.

  Bizwa frowned. “Well,” he said, “it’s certainly … very nice.”

  “I bought it in Uganda,” Wilson told him. “Helluva good deal.”

  There was a weak smile from Bizwa as he folded his hands, and tried to look helpful.

  “I figured, since I’m in the neighborhood, I’d come over here. See what I can see.” He winked.

  Bizwa looked puzzled. “You mean, diamonds?”

  “Bingo!”

  “Well, you’ve come to the right place.”

  “That’s what I’m told.”

  “But you’re not in the diamond business yourself?” Bizwa asked.

  Wilson shook his head. “No, I’m a coffee buyer.”

  Bizwa snorted with laughter. “You came to Bunia to buy coffee?”

  “No, no,” Wilson said. “Like I said, this is just a side trip.”

  “I see,” Bizwa replied, though he clearly didn’t. Wilson glanced over his shoulder, then leaned forward. In a whispery voice, he confided, “I was hoping you could help me out. I’ll want to buy a diamond. On account of I’m getting married,” Wilson explained.

  “How nice!”

  “So I was thinking … three, maybe four carats, rough. They say the rough diamonds, when they’re cut, lose half their size. So that would be, what? One and a half to two carats.”

  “Mmmmnnn.”

  “You think it’s doable?”

  Bizwa nodded. “Yes. Quite doable.”

  “But illegal, n’est-ce pas?”

  The banker smiled. “Well, I don’t think you’ll have any difficulties. To begin with, there aren’t any police. Just traffic people who haven’t been paid for a long time.”

  “What about the UN? I saw –”

  “Uruguayans, Bangladeshis … they have a pretty full plate. And then, of course, what you’re suggesting … it’s what people do here.”

  “Is it? Tell me about that. What do they do?”

  “They buy and sell diamonds. It’s the entire economy.”

  “Ah!” Wilson pretended to think about that. Then, he said, “So you could recommend someone! A diamond salesman?”

  Bizwa gave him a hapless look. “Well, of course, but … they’re everywhere. Every taxi driver has a diamond to sell, or knows someone who does. Every militiaman, every – The thing is, it can be a bit dangerous. They could take advantage of you.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Wilson told him. “I could be taken to the cleaners!”

  “My best advice would be to stick with the dealers who have shops. They’re Lebanese, mostly. And having a shop means they’ll be there the next day. The cabdriver might not.”

  “And they’re Lebanese, you said?”

  Bizwa shrugged. “Almost all of them. There’s a Chinese gentleman, but I wouldn’t recommend that you do business with him.”

  “Why not?”

  Bizwa looked uncomfortable. “Well, he’s more of a wholesaler, and …” Bizwa made a face.

  “What?” Wilson insisted.

  “He has a reputation,” Bizwa said.

  “I see.”

  They sat without speaking for a moment, listening to the whir and click of the ceiling fan.

  “Well, I’m sure you’ll find something,” Bizwa told him.

  “Thanks. And one more thing … can you recommend a hotel?”

  Bizwa winced. “The only real hotels are closed, I’m afraid. But I’m sure there’s room at the Château.”

  “Château?”

  “Lubumbashi House. It was the governor’s mansion, once, I wouldn’t call it a ‘mansion,’ really. It’s more of a bungalow. A large bungalow.”

  “What happened to the governor?”

  Bizwa frowned. “Passed away.”

  “I’m sorry. Must have gotten sick, huh?”

  Bizwa shook his head. “No, I wouldn’t say he was sick. Healthy as an ox, actually.”

  Wilson nodded thoughtfully. “But this hotel … it’s safe, right? I mean, for someone like me?”

  Bizwa pursed his lips. “Yes, I think so. Journalists seem to like it. Visiting NGOs, government people – there’s quite a bar scene.” He smiled. “A safe-deposit box might be a good idea.”

  Lubumbashi House was a rambling bungalow whose stucco walls were filigreed by not-so-long-ago gun battles. A graceful shambles, the villa sat in ruined gardens, surrounded by an eight-foot wall whose gray surface danced with lizards. At the side of the house was an empty swimming pool with a crater in the deep end.

  “What happened to the pool?” Wilson asked as he filled out a registration form for himself and his companions, paying for the first night in cash.

  The manager, a tired-looking Belgian with alcohol on his breath, shrugged. “Mortar attack. Two years ago.”

  “Anyone killed?”

  The manager shook his head. “Not in the pool,” he said, and handed Wilson a pair of keys. “No sheets or towels, I’m afraid. Maybe tomorrow. If you’d like a complimentary drink …?” He gestured to an adjacent room.

  Wilson thanked him. Zero and Khalid demurred. They wanted to see their room.

  The “bar” was actually a sort of living room, with couches and easy chairs scattered across polished wood floors. Ceiling fans turned slowly overhead, driven by a generator rattling in the garden. Besides himself and the waiter, who doubled as a bartender, Wilson was alone in the room with a burly Portuguese who might have been sixty years old.

  “Frank d’Anconia.”

  “Da Rosa. Jair da Rosa.”

  Wilson dropped into a leather club chair, and signaled the waiter. “Gin and tonic,” he said. “And whatever my friend’s drinking.”

  Da Rosa smiled. “Merci.”

  “And what do you do, Mr. da Rosa?” Wilson asked.

  “Me? I organize. I am an organizer of outcomes.”

  Wilson looked puzzled. “What sort of outcomes?”

  “Military ones.”

  Wilson laughed. “And how’s business?”

  “Good! It’s always good in Africa, though I think, maybe not so good as last year or the year before.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  The mercenary made a gesture, as if to say, C’est la vie. “I have hopes. These things turn around. They always turn around.”

  The waiter arrived with a tray, holding
two gin and tonics. The Portuguese raised his glass in a silent toast, revealing a small tattoo between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. Three blue dots that formed a triangle. “Chin-chin!”

  Wilson took a sip. “So, business was better … before?”

  Da Rosa’s cheeks inflated for a moment. He blew a little puff of air across the coffee table between them. “Business was great,” da Rosa replied. “There was an African World War.”

  The expression was new to Wilson, and he must have shown it.

  “Nine nations, twenty militias, four million dead,” da Rosa explained.

  “Four million?!”

  Da Rosa made a rocking motion with his right hand. “A hundred thousand, this way or that.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “Blacks,” he said, as if that explained everything. “And it wasn’t all at once. It took four or five years, so I think, perhaps, you missed it. But yes, four million. It was really something.”

  Wilson didn’t know what to say. Sipped his drink.

  “And you?” da Rosa asked. “What about you? You’re a tourist? An opera singer? What?”

  Wilson chuckled. He was unsure how much to say, and decided to stick to the story he’d given at the bank. “I’m a coffee buyer.”

  Da Rosa pursed his lips, and nodded. “Interesting business. Arabica or robusta?”

  Wilson blinked.

  Da Rosa laughed. “Diamonds, then.”

  Wilson shrugged.

  “Buying or selling?” da Rosa asked.

  He thought about it. “I guess that depends. Are you in the market?”

  Da Rosa snorted. “No! Too dangerous. But you should visit Lahoud – Elie Lahoud. He’ll give you a good price and, if you mention my name, maybe there’s something in it for me. Who knows?”

  “Lahoud … he’s Lebanese?”

  “They’re all Lebanese,” da Rosa assured him.

  Wilson frowned. He wanted to avoid the Lebanese, some of whom might have crossed paths with Hakim and his friends. The last thing he needed was Zero and Khalid chatting with their countrymen. The less they knew, the better. In fact … “Someone said there’s a Chinaman.”