The caller was well-spoken, lucid and confident, although pitching a deal that was not linked to my business. I could have stopped it there.
Something in me was curious. I sussed early that this was an attempt at a scam, but how exactly did it work? At this point I should concede that this was not the same – and certainly less dangerous – than taking apart an alarm clock to see how it works. However, at the time I was in my late twenties, so I probably had a different attitude to risk.
The deal was a transaction involving emeralds and I had to meet my contacts in the parking area of an apartment block on Somerset Road in Green Point (a suburb of Cape Town). The leader of the group, a clean-cut, young Zimbabwean man, explained that they had access to emeralds and a buyer, but they needed a cash deposit to facilitate the transaction. This was where I came into the picture.
Whether from novelty or shadiness, adrenaline was rushing through my body. I couldn’t walk away just yet.
He handed me a clear plastic bag containing large green objects, supposedly uncut emeralds. Wrapped up, it was the size of a pre-inflation Mars bar, which he gave me to show to the buyer. He knew his game, the ‘emeralds’ felt substantial in my pocket. Had I been that way inclined, I would already be imagining the fortune I’d be making from the deal.
They drove with me to Strand Street, opposite the Cape Sun hotel. Business deals are generally done inside the hotel, but anyway. They waited at a little distance on the pavement when the buyer arrived as I stayed in my parked car.
A middle-aged, slightly overweight man got into the passenger seat. If his suit didn’t already paint him as being on the wrong side of fortune, the strong smell of stale alcohol certainly did. From an almost empty faux leather briefcase, he pulled an old-school torch with attached magnifying glass for reading. He wasn’t even trying to look like a real professional (not to mention the choice of venue for the meeting).
He made a show of inspecting ‘the stones’ before offering me a large amount of money for them.
All that remained was for me to withdraw cash to secure their release in preparation for the transaction. I just never got around to getting the cash. No surprises there.
The obvious rush of excitement was one level of what I got from the adventure. What has stayed with me was the smell of the ‘buyer’. Viscerally, my response was spontaneous and immediate.
My aversion to the smell – or men smelling this way – is one that I can possibly tie to my first conscious exposure to it, when I was about three or four years old. My brother and I were taken on a joy ride on a river by a group of men on a speed boat. Alcohol had been part of their day’s activities, as so often happens when men get onto boats for recreation.
The spin on the water was at the request of my mother, who was friendly with the boat owner. It wasn’t the fun experience she had in mind for me. I was terrified by the high-speed twists and turns, eventually begging to be taken back to my mother on the shore. To this day, I feel uncomfortable on boats.
I have reason to believe that I was regularly exposed to the same boozy smell, under non-ideal circumstances, up to the age of about 16 months.
The adventure I thought I’d signed up for triggered a journey back into the deepest recesses of my childhood. This time, there was nothing threatening about the man who smelled that way. So inept was his attempt at deception that it was almost comical. The look in his eyes, the sag in his skin, the desperation of this little ploy, told the tragic story of a man beaten down by the life choices he would not escape.
The memory of the Mars bar of emeralds and the man who pretended that he would buy them is one I’ve carried with me for 30 years. I’ve occasionally told the exciting adventure version of the story. This is the first time that I’m joining the dots with my scared little boy recollections, and in that, to borrow from the lyrics of The Gambler, “I found [a gem] that I could keep.”