The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Chapter 15

Muscat, looking at the sea.

I wanted to sell diamonds, knew that there were buyers out there, a market just waiting to buy.

I went into the darknet.

There were eighty-seven different replies to my ad, when I checked into the forum.

Of these, fifty-one were time-wasting nonsense, ranging from the insulting through to the patently false. That left thirty-six contacts that were suitable for consideration.

I dismissed the bottom ten and the top ten offers at once. One offer, for two million dollars, stank of idiot insurance company or security service, and the next best, at $1.8 million, came with the words: You can trust us to protect your anonymity.

I trusted no one, and no one worth my time would assume anything else from me.

I turned my attention to more convincing offers, ranging from $650,000 to $900,000 in various currencies. Two offered payment in bitcoin, which held some appeal, but one required me to ship the diamonds to South Africa; a risk I was unwilling to take.

Of the offers remaining on the table, I chose the four most likely: one offering bitcoin, one offering exchange in whichever city I desired, one which requested delivery to India, and a last asking me if I was interested in payment through a casino in Macau.

Macau fell out of the running when the buyer asked for a preliminary meeting on a private yacht off the coast of Tunisia. The bitcoin buyer dropped out when I pushed for logistic details. Between India and wherever-you-wanted, I went for the lazier option.

These goods have historical value, wrote wherever-you-wanted, running by the handle of mugurski71. I am employed by a collector. Where would you like to meet?

Two days scouting in Muscat.

The ideal location: somewhere public, to minimise the odds of being robbed. Somewhere discreet, so we could inspect each other’s goods in privacy. Somewhere away from CCTV, but with access to transport and escape. I chose the Muttrah souk. Once, it could have been a place of piss-stinking alleys and thieves, of blackened corners and dead ends, tumbling goods and smoke; of fantastical dreams that played on the minds of poets and painters from the West, filling their senses with incense. Now it was a tourist trap for shoppers who still mistook “shiny” for “antique”; carefully cleaned floors and concrete. Where were the exotic baths of naked ladies who haunted the works of Ingres and Matisse, where the djinn of Arabian Nights, the mystic otherworldliness of Al Aaraaf? Why, they were priced out by the housing market, and though the stalls were sagging with goods, bartering could barely scrape you a 10 per cent discount, even if you were American and the starting price was exorbitant.

I drifted through stalls hanging with silk and cashmere, some more genuine than others. I inspected necklaces of gold, and necklaces of nearly gold, and fat bangles of not-gold-at-all laid out in gleaming brightness, trays packed so tightly together in the stall that the vendor had to stand stick-straight in the tiny gap between his wares. I idled between great brown sacks of saffron and turmeric, cloves and cinnamon; trays of dates, baths of olives, ceilings hung with glass lamps whose shells were pricked out with stars and moons. I clattered between copper cooking pans and shimmied round mannequins decked out in abayas of black and blue. One vendor held out a curved knife sheathed in a case embedded with jewels and hollered in English, “You, you, pretty lady, American, yes, the best, the best, I sell the best!”

Another caught me looking at a little orange teapot on a table of bric-a-brac everythings and exclaimed, “For your husband!” while across the tight passage, an old man with a white beard said nothing as I examined a chess set carved from veined soapstone, until at last he raised his head before my contemplation and declared softly, “You should only buy if you play.”

“You’re right,” I replied. “Of course.”

I choose my spot, plenty of people, plenty of cover, no security cameras in sight; a café selling shisha and tea, where you could duck behind the privacy of damask sheets and lattice frames of rosewood, nefarious deals to make.

I returned to the hotel room. Proof of funds from mugurski71 was waiting on my computer.

So was a new message.

Under usual circumstances, a message from a stranger is something I ignore. Loneliness has led to many mistakes in my life. I closed the computer and ignored it.

Two hours later, checking to see if mugurski71 had offered anything more:

I considered the message for a while, walked round the room, opened the window to listen to the sea, then went back to the keyboard.

I walked away from the computer again, idled round my room, drank cold water, grabbed my toes and stretched until my ears buzzed, sat down again.

Byron14 was waiting, patient on the other end of the line.

That was all.