'A' for Argonaut by Michael J. Stedman Read Free Book Online Page A

she first picked through his roughs and negotiated for rock-bottom prices. During their four years of dealing, she had earned his respect.
    Sometimes she would come in with her own rough stones to sell; more often, she was looking to buy cut and finished stones. It never mattered to either of them which side of the trade they were on.
    She had proven her worth with skills he had never before witnessed. Shortly after he first met her, she was scanning a bunch of stones with a 10X triplet loupe when a troop of Zimbabwean U.N. soldiers came into his shop.
    When the soldiers threw a bag of cut stones on the counter, demanding a bid, Faisal turned to Amber. He didn’t want to make the decision himself.
    “I have to have my appraiser look them over before I can give you a quote,” he told the uniformed captain in charge of the contingent.
    Amber held the largest of the stones to the light.
    “These things look like gall stones passed by a fucking pancreatic baboon. Full of feathers, knots, grains, needles, pinpoints, clouds, and cracks. Browner than shit.”
    She told Faisal the stones, in addition to their dirty quality, had all been octahedral, eight-sided crystals. That meant they had to be scanned and bruted, cut and polished as brilliant cuts with added facets to mask the problems. By the time the cutting was finished, there would not be enough gemstone left with which to bother. While the color could be bleached out, on top of all the other problems there would be no way to profit on the buy.
    “There you go,” Faisal shrugged to the Captain.
    As the soldiers filed out the door, Amber assessed them.
    “Dickwads.”
    She always picked the very finest stones, even if he had misrepresented their quality according to the International Gemological Institute’s four C’s guideline: carats, color, clarity, and cut. Not only could she distinguish cuts between Asschers, Antique Cushions, and Old European cuts, she could count the number and describe the shape of the facets in the blink of her eye. Using only her naked reading vision, holding the diamond girdle-to-girdle in her tweezers, away from her face and up to the light, she could pick out even a VS1 flawed stone, with inclusions that only a trained grader could see and then only under 10X magnification. Her knowledge went beyond appraisals. It was beyond his imagination how she could tell, more often than not, where the gem was mined and where, in the case of finished stones, they had been cut and polished; she knew the intricacies of how important diamond pricing was to the world economy, how it had historically propped governments from Russia to Great Britain and the U.S.
    She regaled Faisal with stories. He reveled in them.
    She told him the history back to 1482 when Diogo Cao, a Portuguese naval explorer, paved the watery route that opened the slave trade in Muanda at the mouth of the Congo and about the founding of the original diamond cartel in 1871 that gave the British Empire the money muscle it needed to colonize East Africa. She knew how Henry Morton Stanley’s famous, and theatrically orchestrated, Anglo-American expedition set off that same year to find Dr. Livingston, and how the expedition with 356 heavily-armed men and families, looting and claim-staking, left behind a trail of hundreds of dead, innocent, and primitively-equipped native defenders in their wake. Amber also knew about King Leopold II of Belgium’s barbarous rule and how he used the Democratic Republic of Congo as his personal fiefdom.
    She was a walking library and a breathing gemological laboratory. He thought her to be the most brilliant person he had ever known, a fountain of African lore. Of course she was. She had been drilled from the crib on the struggle for the People’s Liberation and how that struggle had been conjoined with the intricacy of the diamond markets in Africa. She was her father’s daughter and he had been force-trained by the best, China’s military spy