The Diamond Smugglers (Vintage Classics) by Fleming Ian

Author:Fleming, Ian [Fleming, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781448182060
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-04-03T16:00:00+00:00

5

ENTER MR. ORFORD

THE LEVANTER WENT on blowing, and Blaize and I spent a whole day in my room at the Minzah, reading through what I had written and correcting it. I still hadn’t got a picture of a straightforward smuggling operation out of a diamond mine, and I asked Blaize a lot of questions about mine security and the various ways of dodging it.

It seemed to me that stealing diamonds from the mine face or the Sort House was no different from any other form of robbery, and in other circumstances the robber takes his booty to a fence who buys his goods and passes them on at a profit. I couldn’t get a similar picture of the IDB machinery. Where did the smugglers find a market for their stones? From what Blaize had told me Kimberley and Johannesburg were riddled with police spies and informers, and it seemed to me that a smuggler had very little chance of getting rid of his stones without being caught.

From the notes I made that morning the whole process became a little clearer, particularly because of the entry on the stage of Mr. Henry Orford (that is not his real name), who I expect – though Blaize had no evidence of this – is not the only man in this business.

‘Obviously,’ said Blaize, ‘the first place to stop smuggling is at the mines themselves. At most of the mines this should be easy – at the Kimberley mines, for instance, but in places like Sierra Leone, where the whole country is littered with diamonds, mine security is almost impossible.’

‘Supposing I was a European worker. What exactly would happen to me when I went on leave from a place like Consolidated Diamond Mines?’

‘You’d be taken by the company bus to the X-ray department and shown into a fine waiting-room with plenty of magazines to read. Your luggage would be put on a conveyor belt that would carry it very slowly into a dark room and under an X-ray scanner with a man sitting above it at some levers to control the speed of the conveyor and stop it.

‘He’d be looking down straight through your suitcase. He’d see the scissors and the zip-fasteners and the cufflinks, and all the other metal things in your bag. He’d recognize every black shape at once.

‘If there was one he didn’t recognize, you’d be asked what it was – perhaps asked to show it or open it. All very polite, like a very refined Customs examination. Then you’d be called through into another room – men into one and women into another – and you’d be X-rayed yourself, with particular attention to your head and your stomach and your feet. If the radiographer saw a black speck, in your stomach for instance, he might tell the mine manager and then you’d be put in hospital and very politely but thoroughly purged. On the other hand, the scanner might just make a mark on a diagram of the human body – everybody has one with his file – and wait till you went on leave again.

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