“It happens every time,” said the woman next to me, chewing busily on sunflower seeds as we sat on our bags outside the customs shed. She spat the kernels to one side, and grinned a broad-toothed grin. “You’re lucky; your country is rich. No one cares what rich people do. Hey, want to hear something funny?”
Sure, why not.
She grinned a dental-disaster of a grin and in heavily accented English intoned, “Do dolphins ever do anything by accident? No! They do it on porpoise!” and laughed until the tears rolled down her face.
The bus zig-zagged through the mountains, a nowhere land of empty roads before the Omani border, where we presented our luggage for search. No one bothered to open the pot of sun lotion in which the diamonds were carefully stashed; the drug dogs found nothing interesting as they snuffled along the line. Omani immigration was housed in a faux-Arabian palace, which owed more of its architecture to Disney than Sinan Pasha.
“You alone?” asked the inspector.
“Yes.”
“Married?”
“No.”
“You got someone to stay with?”
“Yes.”
“But you’re not married?”
“No.”
His lips puckered a little in distaste, but though I was a single woman, I was travelling on a public bus and thus, finding no satisfactory diplomatic reason to reject me, he gave me the visa.
On the road everything was yellow.
For a while I counted cars; then I counted shrubs, then there was neither of either to count and I stared at dust and wondered how many grains of sand blew into the sea every year, and whether you could build a pyramid from them. The coast of Oman had been dug and sown with hardy dark green trees and thin, drooping beige fields, but the dust crept across every porch of every nowhere town that hugged the road.
Words, when I think of Muscat:
• Welcoming — racks of meat, smiles at every door, the words “you must meet my mother” are spoken in genuine joy.
• Hot — the sea breeze seems to bounce off the land, the dry blast from the desert scorching your back.
• Divided — not so much a city as a series of towns, joined together by clogged roads over sharp hills.
• Unified — every street must conform to a certain style, every office obey strict architectural laws.
• Old and new — ancient tapestries below; air conditioning above. Bare feet, covered head. Arabesque windows, domed roofs, a place both charming and absurd.
Street names in Muscat were almost non-existent. The hotel I checked into gave its address as “4th building after the statue of the ship on the left-hand side facing the sea”, before swelling into broader strokes of area and district.
I sat on a balcony looking out across the ocean, and drank Turkish coffee, the heavy grains rubbing against my teeth. It wasn’t my first choice of hotel, but this wasn’t Dubai; not all places would accept an unmarried woman, travelling by herself.
In this bubble of quiet sheltered from the world, I turned on the TV and watched the news. The robbery in Dubai ran only as a background story on a few channels, the police confident of speedy success in their investigations. Details were sparse; even the internet seemed to be hushed on the matter. Only one snippet was of any interest — an interview with a man by the name of Rafe Pereyra-Conroy (Prometheus CEO), who turned direct to camera and said: “We personally feel this assault upon our friends and generous hosts, and will do everything in our power to help bring the perpetrator to justice.”
I studied his face, and saw nothing remarkable in it. Turned the TV off.
In the bathroom sink, I washed sun cream off the diamonds, then laid them out on a white sheet, wrote the date and time on a piece of paper next to them, took a photo of the whole, and went about selling my stolen goods.
In an internet café in Muscat, I plugged my laptop into the Ethernet connection in the wall, loaded the photo of diamonds onto my computer, and posted the image onto an ad run through Tor.
For sale: Chrysalis diamonds, est. value $2.2 million. All offers in excess of $450,000 considered.
I signed myself _why, and this job done, closed my laptop again, slipped it in my bag, and went in search of company.
Chapter 14
Fencing a stolen object is more important than the theft.
DVD players, watches, phones, family heirlooms, odd bits of gold and silver — a pawnbroker will handle it, at a poor rate. In Florida, a judge ruled that pawnshops need not return stolen goods without having a chance to be heard in civil suit. Crime rose, so did the number of pawnshops.
“Is there a link between poverty, crime and pawnshops?” asked a journalist from Miami, sent to cover the story as part of a series on declining America.
“Ma’am,” replied the local sheriff, “do you shit when you eat?”
In the UK, such a remark would have been a sackable offence. Speaking your mind in public, let alone speaking with reference to bodily functions, is not a thing done by the Ruling Classes. In the US, such brisk imagery is reassuring; almost as reassuring as seeing a sheriff with an AK-47 driving through your neighbourhood. Assuming, of course, that your neighbourhood is middle class and white.
“Do you shit when you eat?” chuckled an NYU professor who I bribed with chow mein and a night of Elgar in exchange for his knowledge of criminology. “Is shit made of complex biocarbons? Is nature a wonder, is the human body understood? Is society? Are people? Are gross over-simplifications of entrenched socio-economic problems exactly what’s wrong with this polarised country? Hell yes!” He cackled gleefully at this revelation, and scooped up another load of noodles. “You know why the experts don’t have an easy answer? Because a fucking expert’s the guy who knows how complicated the fucking questions are.”
Later — when he’d sobered up — I asked him the things I really wanted to know. Organised crime. Interpol. Law and digital footprints; everything a budding criminology student might want to ask. And why not tell me? He knew my face; no criminal would have dared been so bold.
How do you sell stolen diamonds?
“You hand it off to the courier,” explained an ex-Croatian safebreaker-turned-lawman, his expertise hired out to police forces, universities and, so he whispered as we sat by the Adriatic Sea, “some of the spies, but never the Russians or the Jews, never, I swear on my mother’s life”.
I had bought his knowledge for €5,000 and a bottle of champagne, and now he threw the drink back as the sun set at our backs and the humid sky filled with diffused pink. “I wouldn’t want to be the courier. He never knows what he’s walking into — the cops aren’t the problem, it’s the guys on the other end of the deal, I mean, they could be anyone, anyone; but it’s the courier who takes that risk, thank God, you hear stories. Show me a nice guy, and put a ten-carat diamond in front of him and I’ll show you a monster, like that.” A snap of his fingers, a gulp of champagne, sunlight through the glass. “You know what the difference is between a professional thief and an amateur one?”
No. I did not.
“A pro knows when to walk away. The deal’s too good; the safe’s too tough; the pigs too loud. Fine. Cut your losses. It’s only fucking money, you know what I mean?”
And if the deal goes through?
“You get paid. Maybe 5 to 10 per cent if you’re lucky. Best I ever got: 20 per cent of the diamond’s value, and that was unique, a one-off, never happens. But the guy who’s got it now, the fence, he’s gotta shift the product. So he sends it to India, or Africa, maybe. Mozambique; maybe Zimbabwe? They have this thing down there, this Kimberley process, it’s supposed to protect people who mine diamonds and that shit, but what it does is it produces paperwork. So you cut the diamonds, once, twice, maybe ten, twenty times, depending on what you’re going for. And you get a nice new certificate while you’re out there saying that this stone is authenticated shiny and clean, and you ship it off to America or China or Brazil, and you sell it on, worth less than it was before but you know, that’s the cost of doing business.”