“Better,” said Peggy, grinning. Outside a light breeze gently ruffled the leaves on the olive trees in the courtyard. In the distance they could hear the arthritic creaking of the old stone windmill that had once generated electricity for the neighborhood.
“Better?” Holliday said.
“Harald Sigurdsson,” said Rafi.
“A Viking? The one who became Harald Hardrada, Harald the Hard Man? This is starting to get silly, guys.”
“Harald Sigurdsson was, among other things, the head of the eastern emperor’s Varangian Guard in Constantinople. He also led the Varangians into battle in North Africa, Syria, Palestine and Sicily gathering booty. While he was in Alexandria raping and pillaging he heard rumors about the lost legion and sent one of his best men, Ragnar Skull Splitter, to lead a crew up the Nile looking for them.”
“When was this?”
“A.D. ten thirty-nine. About three hundred years before Roche-Guillaume.”
“So what happened to Ragnar Skull Splitter, or should I ask?”
“He disappeared, just like the lost legion.”
“So where is this going exactly?”
“Ragnar Skull Splitter took a scholar much like Roche-Guillaume with him to record the story of the journey. His name was Abdul al-Rahman, a high-ranking slave from Constantinople with a yen for travel and adventure. He was also useful as an interpreter. He also had his own artist to record what he saw, a court eunuch named Barakah. An eleventh-century version of Peg here.”
Peggy gave her husband a solid swat on the arm. “I ain’t no eunuch, sweet lips.”
“And they went looking for King Solomon’s Mines, right?” Holliday asked.
“Not only did they look for them; they found them. Ragnar died of blackwater fever on the journey home but Abdul al-Rahman survived and made it as far as Ethiopia. While Roche-Guillaume was at Lake Tana he found al-Rahman’s chronicle of the journey at an obscure island on the lake. He copied the parchments, which were buried with him.”
Holliday shrugged. “Who’s to say Roche-Guillaume didn’t make it all up, a pleasant fiction? A Homeric epic. Where’s the proof?”
Rafi got up from the table and went to the old Victorian buffet where the Shabbat candles burned. He took out an old, deeply carved wooden box and set it gently down in the center of the table. The carvings appeared to be Viking runes.
“Open it,” said Rafi.
Holliday lifted the simple lid of the dark wood box. Nestled inside was a piece of quartz about the size of a roughly heart-shaped golf ball. Threaded around one end of the stone was a thick, buttery vein of what appeared to be gold.
“That was in Roche-Guillaume’s tomb,” said Rafi. “If the thugs at the Central Revolutionary Investigation Department in Addis Ababa knew I’d smuggled it out they’d probably arrest me.”
“For a bit of gold in a quartz matrix?” Holliday said.
“It’s not quartz,” replied Rafi. “It’s a six-hundred-and-sixty-four-carat flawless diamond. VVSI, I think they call it. I asked a friend who knows about such things. According to him it’s the tenth-largest diamond in the world. Fair market value is about twenty million dollars. The historical value is incalculable.”
“And this supposedly came from King Solomon’s Mines?” Holliday said, staring at the immense stone.
“According to al-Rahman’s chronicle that Roche-Guillaume copied there’s a mountain of stones just like it. Tons.”
“Where exactly?”
“That’s the problem,” said Rafi. “As far as I can figure out the mines are located in what is now the Kukuanaland district of the Central African Republic.”
“Oh, dear,” said Holliday. “General Solomon Kolingba.”
“Kolingba the cannibal,” added Peggy, eating the last piece of lemon chicken. “The only African dictator with his own set of Ginsu knives for chopping up his enemies.”
2
Dr. Oliver Gash drove the black-and-yellow-striped Land Rover down the dusty dirt road from Bangui at seventy miles an hour, the air-conditioning going full blast and Little Richard screaming out “Rip It Up” on the eight-speaker Bose. Since crossing the border into what had once been known as the Kukuanaland district of the Central African Republic and which was now known as the Independent Democratic Republic of Kukuanaland, Dr. Gash hadn’t seen another vehicle on the road. Every village he drove through seemed deserted, every roadside stall shuttered and dark.
The young black man behind the wheel wasn’t surprised. In fact, the apparent emptiness made him smile. It was a demonstration of fear, and fear, as he well knew, was power. The bumblebee-striped Land Rover had the Kolingba royal crest on the doors, and news traveled fast in the new Kukuanaland about anything and anyone to do with General Solomon Bokassa Sesesse Kolingba.
Dr. Gash was the minister of the interior in the Independent Democratic Republic of Kukuanaland, as well as the young country’s minister of revenue and secretary of state and director of foreign affairs. Oliver Gash was not the name the man behind the wheel had been born with; nor was he a doctor of any kind. Gash had once been Olivier Hakizimana Gashabi of Rwanda and had left that country with his older sister, Eliane, during the genocide of 1994, traveling across the Democratic Republic of Congo to eventually settle in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic.
Three years after their arrival in Bangui, Olivier’s sister had been chosen from an online catalog as a contract e-mail bride by an American named Arthur Andrew Hartman, who lived in Baltimore. Nineteen-year-old Eliane had agreed to the marriage only on the condition that Hartman formally adopt her eleven-year-old brother.
Hartman was in no position to refuse Eliane’s proposition. As an acne-scarred, introverted, sexually problematic, onetime Section 8 discharge from the United States Army for an unspecified “condition,” and an ex-postal worker now on psychiatric disability, Arthur Andrew Hartman had little or no opportunity for meaningful contact with members of the opposite sex and was far too paranoid about contracting a sexually transmitted disease to purchase relief from his lonely predicament.
Three years later Arthur Andrew Hartman was found with his pants around his ankles, his genitals mutilated and his throat slit in an alley behind a shopping center in the Gardenville district of Baltimore. For a brief period Hartman’s fifteen-year-old adopted son was suspected in the killing of his “father” but there wasn’t enough evidence to prove the case, and the Baltimore state prosecutor’s office declined to go forward. The successful murder of his despised and adopted father was Olivier Gashabi’s first foray into the world of crime. It was not his last.
Eliane used her share of Hartman’s postal life insurance policy and the money from the quick sale of his house on Asbury Avenue to purchase half interest in a mani-pedi salon. Olivier Gashabi, his name now legally changed to Oliver Gash, invested the fee paid by his sister for murdering Hartman into two kilograms of cocaine. That was in 2001. Ten years later Eliane Gashabi owned four mani-pedi salons outright and her brother had increased his original investment a hundredfold. He had also developed a number of serious enemies within the state prosecutor’s office, the Baltimore Police Department and the extensive criminal network that ran between Washington, D.C., Baltimore and New York City. The twenty-five-year-old criminal entrepreneur was suddenly consumed by a passion to seek out his roots, and, traveling on his perfectly valid United States passport, he returned to the Central African Republic.
Criminal enterprise in Bangui was already controlled by a number of tribally centered gangs that enforced their rule with machetes, so Gashabi-Gash decided to travel into his own heart of darkness and went up-country by steamer on the Kottu River to the Kukuanaland town of Fourandao.
Fourandao had once been a French colonial town best known for its cocoa and tobacco plantations, both crops controlled by the old Portuguese family that had given the town its name. The town, a collection of one-and two-story mud-brick buildings with corrugated iron roofs, sprawled untidily along the banks of the Kottu for half a mile or so, and straggled into the surrounding jungle toward the distant Bakouma hills that marked the border with Sudan and Chad.